The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

• • •

  They sat on their wooden stump stools, in the hidden interior crackling with brown bracken. Tom poured lemonade from a bottle into a mixed collection of enamelled mugs, blue, white and black. He said, a little lordly,

  “Well, what is it?”

  Hedda suddenly did not know how to begin. Once it was out in the open, it would start to act amongst them. At the moment, it was only eating at her.

  “I’ve found something out.”

  “You’re always finding things out. You shouldn’t snoop.”

  “This is an important thing. It changes everything.”

  Tom had a vision of bankruptcy. Dorothy had a vision of her father leaving for good, perhaps joining Mrs. Oakeshott. Phyllis sat even more still than she had been. She had a great capacity for not moving, somewhere between composure and inertia.

  “Spit it out,” said Tom. “Now you’ve started, you’d better get on with it.”

  “I saw. I heard. He goes into Aunt Violet’s bedroom late at night, and stays. I’ve seen him before. You can hear them. You can tell what they’re doing.”

  “You don’t know if you haven’t seen them,” said Dorothy.

  “They make cuddling noises.” She blurted out “He calls her, little flower. And she called him Booby.”

  This revelation upset everyone, and made them all angry. They were angry with Hedda for making them know this, rather than with Humphry and Violet for what they did and said.

  “Last night she was crying a lot. She said she was sure about something, and that she hadn’t been wrong before. She said she wished she could die. She said she was frightened.”

  “Well?” said Tom, his imagination recoiling. Hedda looked at Dorothy, who was going to be medical. Hedda’s brow was creased with pain and rage.

  “She was saying,” said Hedda, “that she was going to have a baby, that’s what she was saying. And she said—she’d had babies before—she said—I heard—some of us are really hers. Children of my body she said.”

  The melodrama of the phrase felt improbable to Tom and Dorothy, just as the word “Booby” had done. But once it was said it was in the world. Their irritation with Hedda increased.

  “So?” said Tom, with a little spirit. If there was one thing in the world he was sure of, it was that he was his mother’s son. “I don’t see what you think we can do.”

  “If we aren’t—who we think we are—it might be good to know.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Phyllis, flatly. “What good would it do? We are still the same people, in the same house, with the same family.”

  Dorothy’s thoughts were whirring. She didn’t look like Tom, she had always felt only precariously attached to the group life. Different. All children felt “different,” she had always supposed. She felt that she had always irritated Olive. She had thought that was perhaps because Olive loved Tom too completely to have enough love left over for her. But maybe …

  The story Olive wrote for her rose up in her mind’s eye. It was about shape-changers, scuttling, bustling little people who hung up animal skins on the hooks in the kitchen, and then put them on, and became half-hedgehogs, to go out into the bushes and ditches.

  Violet was a scuttling, bustling little person, whose nature was domestic, like the aproned hedgehog-women in the underground kitchens of Dorothy’s tale.

  Dorothy wanted not to be imaginative. She wanted to measure chemicals and mend limbs and organs. But her imagination was just and fierce. If anyone was Violet’s child, she herself probably was.

  She did not say any of this to anyone. She said to Hedda

  “I could shake you till your teeth rattled.”

  “I don’t know why you’re all so cross with me. You should be cross at them.”

  Some sort of deep prohibition prevented all four of them from making any effort to imagine the emotions, the predicament, the delights and terrors, of Booby and little flower. Their minds were busy with rearranging the family patterns in their heads, like chessboards which suddenly lacked a bishop and had too many knights, or where the queen ran amok in zigzags.

  Knowledge is power, but not if it is only partial knowledge and the knower is a dependent child, already perturbed by a changing body, squalling emotions, the sense of the outside world looming outside the garden wall, waiting to be entered. Knowledge is also fear.

  Tom dealt with Hedda’s revelation by absconding on a long walk, stomping along the Downs, carrying his bedding on his back. Walking fast is a good way of channelling all sorts of emotions: fear, desire, panic.

  Phyllis rearranged everything in her chest of drawers and her little desk. She mended a torn apron. Violet said she would have done that, and Phyllis said she knew, but she could do it herself.

  Hedda thought bluntly that more knowledge would reduce the menace of the knowledge they had. She listened to every sentence the adults said to each other, and decided that, since they had been so deceived, she did after all have a right to read people’s letters, when the opportunity presented itself.

  Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick film, a coloured oilcloth, spread over a cauldron of vapours which shaped and reshaped themselves into shadowy forms, embracing, threatening, glaring.

  She looked at Violet. She had always reproached herself for not liking Violet. Violet was pernickety and small-minded, Violet was the female fate she meant to avoid by having a profession in the world. She had, she now saw, slightly despised Violet for minding another woman’s children. That must be revised. Violet had once said to her that they, Violet and Dorothy, had “the same eyes” and she had wanted to say, no they didn’t, and had had to admit that they did. Dorothy took to looking furtively at Violet, which made Violet shrug as though a mosquito was buzzing. Dorothy still could not manage to like Violet, and was only abstractly sorry for her.

  She stopped reading her fairytale, in its leaf-green notebook. It was only added to occasionally when the mood took Olive to think about wild things and little people. It was not like Underground, whose tale flowed compulsively on through the tunnels and corridors. After a time, wryly and crossly, Dorothy realised that Olive had not noticed that she was not reading it. It confirmed her cynical perception that Olive wrote for Olive, and was most complete in the act of reading and writing herself.

  There were secrets also covered over in Purchase House, though perhaps there the covering was more frayed and threadbare than in Todefright. Philip had come back from Paris full of new knowledge about how his body worked, and new fears that he might have caught madness and death from his tutor. He was lucky. His body remained healthy and was only tormented by the dull ache, and the feverish greed, to do it again. He was edgy and wary with Benedict Fludd, who went into what was for him a good-humoured flurry of inventiveness, and needed constant assistance. He felt distant from Elsie, the stay-at-home in the kitchen. He did not notice her new shoes, or the red belt. He found it much—much—harder to be phlegmatic when Pomona sleepwalked and made her way into his bedroom. He did not particularly desire Pomona—there was something marbly, or even soapy, about her firm young flesh. But he desired someone so much that Pomona’s slippery, sleepy embraces became a torment.

  Elsie’s mind had been full of the modelled jars and obscene nymphs. But for a long time she did not show them to Philip. At first she was afraid of Fludd, who might notice that the key had been moved and used, or might suddenly appear and catch her, looking, in flagrante delicto, but in the spring of 1901, on a day when Fludd had gone up to London to see Prosper Cain and Geraint, when Seraphita and Pomona were out to tea with Miss Dace in Winchelsea, she said to Philip that she had something to show him, and something to tell him.

  She fetched the key. They stood in the cobwebby shadow of the locked pantry and stared at the whitely glimmering forms, the breasts, the vulvas, the chaste flower-shaped containers that, seen
from another angle, were swollen female bellies. Philip, like Tom and Dorothy with Hedda, felt embarrassed and irritated by the revelation. It would have been more seemly, he vaguely felt, for Elsie to pretend to have seen nothing. He said “Well?” meaning “So what?” but it didn’t ring true. Professional curiosity overcame both his sexual stirring and his distaste. He picked up one or two vases, turned over a reclining girl-child and found a swollen, almost man-size, clitoris. He remembered Fludd’s fingers on Rodin’s creatures.

  “It’s them,” said Elsie. “He makes pots about them. It isn’t right.”

  “Of course it isn’t. But they might not know. It isn’t our business. We should lock it up.”

  “I think they know. But I don’t know what they think about it. Perhaps he—”

  Perhaps he puts himself inside them, she wanted to say, and couldn’t, but Philip heard the meaning of the silence.

  “It isn’t our problem. You shouldn’t be thinking about such things.”

  “I have something to tell you. I’m going to have to go away. You’ll have to do without me.”

  Philip turned to her, still holding the girl-on-her-stomach. He stammered. Had she got a job? Was she thinking of getting married?

  No, said Elsie. She was going to have a baby. She would be cast out. If you looked at—all this—it would be unfair to turn her out, but that was what would happen. She would have, she said, in a steely way, to find one of those places for Fallen Women that the do-gooders talked about. She needed Philip to help her to do that.

  Philip tried to say that someone must be responsible, and ask who he was. Fludd, Geraint, the fisher-boy?

  “I’m not saying any more, and you won’t make me. Just help me to go away, without a lot of scenes and shouting. I can’t abide to be told off and shouted at. I can’t and won’t abide it.”

  She was terribly on edge. Philip put the china girl down and put his arm round his sister.

  “I’ll think of something,” he said, rather hopelessly. He didn’t know how he could or would, or what he would think of. But, in the event, he did.

  He felt he could talk better to a man, and decided on Frank Mallett. He walked over to Puxty and said he needed to talk to the vicar in private.

  Frank Mallett was not a judging man. His own temptations, made so much more comfortable by the sturdy openmindedness of Edward Carpenter, made him generous to the differing temptations of others. He listened to Philip, who was both worried and censorious, and remarked mildly that a person was about to come into the world in difficult circumstances, and needed the best possible start. It would be a good thing, he said, if it could all be managed without too much blame or punishment. Gently, said Frank Mallett. Did Philip know who the father was? Was marriage possible or desirable, was there likely to be any support, moral or financial?

  “She won’t say,” said Philip. “She’s hard as a rock. She’s not going to say. So I don’t think she’s getting married, and I don’t think she’s expecting help.”

  “Don’t take it too hard yourself,” said the vicar. “I don’t know how the family at Purchase House could manage without your sister. I can’t see any help in appealing to them—they’d be baffled, merely. In different ways.”

  “They don’t pay her a penny. It isn’t really right, but they’ve made a good sort of—well, not a home—place to be, for the pair of us.”

  “I think,” said Frank Mallett, “I shall consult the good ladies of Romney Marsh. But I shall consult them privately. I shall not put the case to the Home for Fallen Women, or the charitable trusts. No, I shall invite the imaginative ones to tea. Miss Dace, I think, who is practical and generous. Mrs. Oakeshott, who knows what it is to bring up a single child. And maybe Mrs. Methley, who has become a friend of Miss Dace, and is anxious for employment. I shall ask for their help.”

  “I don’t want them to lay into Elsie or talk down to her. Even if she’s been daft.”

  “I think with the best will in the world you won’t avoid a little talking-down. You could even argue it would be deserved. But I think they’ll find practical steps to take.”

  Frank’s tea-party—to which he invited neither Philip nor Elsie—went well. It produced some interesting insights into the feelings of the three ladies. They were brisk, and they were practical, and they were kindly disposed. Miss Dace knew of a nursing home which would look after the young woman when the time came. She said that she and the Sister in charge of the Forget-me-not Home had together arranged several successful adoptions, quite quietly. Marian Oakeshott remarked mildly that it was always possible that Elsie would want to keep the child. Though she needed to be able to keep her job, if possible, and her board and lodging.

  Phoebe Methley had said little. She said suddenly, with passion, “It is a terrible thing to separate a mother from her children—from her child. We are fighting the injustices of the law on this—we should be careful not simply to grasp at a young woman’s child and take it away.” She paused. “Love,” she said. “Love. Romantic sweeping-away, and loss of self. The trouble with the sex instinct is its power. It deranges you and makes you mad. But true love—true steady love—is what a woman feels for the child in her arms, for the sight of its head, bobbing on the lawn outside the window. You can’t take that from her, without being very sure you’re doing the right thing.”

  Miss Dace put her head on one side, and smiled, dryly, but with friendship. Marian Oakeshott said

  “Of course I agree. Of course I know—”

  She looked at Phoebe Methley. Both women thought they knew who was the father of Elsie’s child.

  “We are all friends here,” said Phoebe. “It must be clear that I feel this personally. I have three children in Yorkshire whom I had to leave because—because of my great love for Herbert. There is not a day—not an hour—when I do not feel their absence and distance as a perpetual pain. I may never see them again. I envy you your Robin,” she said to Marian, “whenever I see him. I admire you so greatly for what you have been able to do—to have your son, and to work, and to be independent.”

  “It occurs to me,” said Marian, “that I myself may be the solution. Elsie Warren may wish never to see this unborn child again. I do not know her state of mind. But I employ a young woman to mind Robin, who could easily undertake the care of another child, whilst its mother worked—and then the child could return to its mother for weekends and holidays—”

  “Someone,” said Frank, “would need to talk to the people at Purchase House. They cannot do without either Philip or Elsie. They should, in my view, be paying both of them good wages for everything they do. They could be talked into seeing their own best interests, as well as their charitable duty—”

  “If—if the father of the child is not in that family,” said Miss Dace, blushing.

  “He is not,” said Phoebe Methley. “I am certain of that.” She too was blushing. Frank handed round a plate of shortbread. He said

  “First, we must put this—this very satisfactory and generous plan—to Elsie. Then, one of us must talk to Mrs. Fludd. I am never quite sure that she really hears what I say, or remembers it. Who shall we send?”

  The three good fairies looked at each other. Which of them could be most calm, most reasonable, most pragmatic?

  • • •

  In the end they decided they would all three speak to Elsie, and deputed Frank to ask Philip to bring her to Miss Dace’s little house. They were enjoying each other’s company—each felt—in the discussion of this intimate problem, that they had discovered new, real, friends.

  Elsie came into Miss Dace’s drawing-room and stood to attention, looking angry. She was wearing her hat, and one of Imogen’s loose mediaeval gowns, neatly darned and patched. Miss Dace begged her to sit down, and gave her a cup of tea, some cubes of sugar, a slice of fruitcake. They had agreed that they must not frighten the young woman with moral lectures. She sipped her tea, and drew her head back, like, Marian Oakeshott thought, a frightened snake ready to
strike. Miss Dace spoke. It was her drawing-room.

  “We know about your problem, Elsie, your predicament, and we haven’t asked you here to lecture you, but to tell you how we intend to help you. I myself know a respectable—and kindly, very kindly—lady who will help with—with the birth of the child.”

  “We don’t know,” said Marian Oakeshott, “what you will want to do when the child is born. I should like to say that—if you so wish, if you want to… if you like… I would be happy to ask Tabitha to take on its care so that you could continue to work for Mrs. Fludd and to be with your brother.”

  Elsie was silent, her head still back. Marian said

  “Then you could come to the child, or he could come to you, in your time off—you would not be separated.” Elsie said nothing.

  Phoebe Methley said “We propose to speak on your behalf to Mrs. Fludd, and make the arrangements clear and satisfactory.” Elsie said slowly

  “There’s been a deal of talking about me behind my back.”

  “You are in a situation,” said Marian, “where that inevitably happens. We are truly trying to help.”

  “I came to your meeting about women. I suppose I’m a single woman, and a Fallen Woman.” She paused. She said, looking pale, “I really don’t feel very well. I don’t know as I can go on, anyway, hauling buckets and hanging over stoves.”

  “I shall ask my good doctor to examine you,” said Miss Dace. “He will tell you what you may and may not do, in your condition, and give you tonics to help you, things like that.”

  “I am grateful,” Elsie said slowly and flatly. “It’s more than I could hope for.”

  “But—” said Marian Oakeshott, “there is a but in your voice. You may speak freely to us, we should prefer it.”

  “I never meant to go into Service, ma’am. What I do not want is to slave in someone else’s kitchen and wash their clothes for the rest of my life. I didn’t and don’t want that. And now it seems my only way forward. I thought it was temporary, till Philip got to know his craft and got well known, as he will, and has the help here he needs. My mother was a paintress—she was a good paintress, the most delicate with her brushes of any in the studio—she died of it, of the chemicals in the air. She wasn’t a skivvy, she wasn’t a scullery-maid, she was an artist. You care about women’s work, I’ve heard you talk. All of you. So I’ll admit to you, I don’t have Philip’s talent. He has a right to expect to be an artist. I don’t. But that don’t mean I want to be a skivvy.”