The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “No. I like learning new things. I mean that.”

  They both smiled. Julian saw the smile, and was irritated. He went to ask pale Griselda for a dance, but everyone had decided that she was the most beautiful of the young women, and students and teachers were clustered about her. So he wandered, in an accidental-looking way, after Tom, who was retreating out of the Refreshment Room into the Green Dining-Room. Tom was headed towards his mother, who was sitting in her chair tapping her toe to the music, every inch of her resenting her reduction to a sedentary dowager.

  Tom liked the Green Dining-Room. It reminded him of his vision of sleeping Lancelot, an unreal world more real than stiff collars and shiny shoes.

  “I can see you want to dance,” said Tom to Olive. “I can see your toes moving. Come and dance with me, like we do at midsummer.”

  “You must go and dance with the girls, my dear,” said Olive. “That’s what we’re here for, for you to dance with the girls. I’ll dance with you when you’ve taken a turn with two of those pretty creatures, not before.”

  Julian joined them.

  “I can ask you to dance, Mrs. Wellwood. I’m a kind of host, you can’t say no to me. Come and dance. Tom is quite right. I know you would like to dance.”

  “Go along, Tom,” said Olive, standing up, arranging her skirt and purse, giving her hand to Julian. “Ask a girl.”

  Olive and Julian progressed in an elegant way, pleased with the way their steps matched. Olive said

  “I’m dancing with you because I’m at my wits’ end about Tom. Is that dreadful?”

  Julian thought it would only be dreadful if they were dancing, man and woman, as a couple, which they were not. He had a half-philosophical idea about the nature and the importance of formal dancing, in terms of that idea about who was, and who wasn’t, a couple, a man and a woman. He thought about Jane Austen. “Whom are you going to dance with?” said Mr. Knightley to Emma. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma. Julian thought that was a perfect moment. And would never—not dancing—happen to him. He said

  “I know what you mean about Tom. He doesn’t know what he wants.”

  At that moment Tom danced jauntily past them, flashing a mild smile at his mother. He had found a partner who was indeed a young woman. She was also his sister.

  Olive said “You care about him, I can see. I can’t tell if he is too contented, or somehow so discontented he’s just floating. Nothing we suggest seems to—interest him. He doesn’t take us seriously. He’s the most evasive person I know, for all his attentiveness and charm.”

  “I know,” said Julian. “I know.”

  Olive’s hand patted his shoulder.

  “Do try to make him take things seriously.”

  “I have enough trouble doing that, myself.”

  Tom told Dorothy that she had suddenly become a young lady. She looked very pretty, he said. Different.

  “That’s not very gallant.”

  “I don’t have to be gallant to you. And anyway, you know what I mean, you’re just being difficult. You’re turning into a woman.”

  Dorothy, determinedly medical, considered she had been a woman, willy-nilly, since her monthly Curse began. She had been proud of the bloodstains, and also, despite her academic anatomical interest, dismayed by the speed of the changes in her body. She was also niggled by the fact that it was Violet, not Olive, who had taken upon herself to explain this momentous event—about which Dorothy, of course, was already informed, through reading books. She thought, as she and Tom stumbled more or less companionably across the tiles, that Tom probably knew nothing at all about the Curse. She was right. But she had not stopped to think about Tom’s own reaction to puberty, which had tossed him about on waves of emotion, and rather disgusted him. He said, out of The Golden Age,

  “You’re turning into a Grown-up. Is it nice?”

  “You’re older than me. You should know.”

  “Girls grow up quicker. They say. I’m not sure it is nice.”

  The conversation was odd, rather formal, because they were in formal clothes, stepping formal patterns, between majolica pillars, to sentimental rhythms. Dorothy saw that Tom had chosen a daft moment to try to talk to her about something important. His hair was a shining mess. It was not parted and slicked down, like Julian’s hair, and Gerald’s and Charles’s, and Geraint’s, even though Geraint’s bush showed signs of rebellion. She gave a twitch to the waist of her shapely dress. She was thinking of an answer when the music stopped. Charles, who had put his name in her little starry book, came to claim her. She said to Tom

  “Do go and ask Pomona to dance. Nobody seems to, and she looks desolate. It would be a kind act.”

  Tom went over to Pomona, who was drooping a little, in a beautifully embroidered, less than perfectly tailored gown, white with a deep border of apple boughs, and embroidered strips of apple-blossom round waist, neck and sleeves.

  Charles asked Dorothy if she was having a good time. He told her she looked quite the thing. He danced well—his mother had seen to that—and Dorothy followed, and they twirled cheerfully.

  “What are you thinking?” Charles asked, after five minutes.

  “Do you want the real answer?”

  “I always do. There’s no sense in telling fibs. What are you thinking?”

  “If I tell you, you must tell me.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I was thinking about how I can’t do quadratic equations, and how I never shall be able to, if you keep taking Mr. Susskind off to Germany on cultural trips just when I almost can. And I shall never matriculate, and never be a doctor.”

  “What a very unromantic thought. There must be other tutors.”

  “Well, this one knows what it is I don’t understand.”

  A slow silence.

  “You didn’t tell me what you are thinking?”

  “Oddly, dear cousin, I was thinking in a sort of way about the same thing. I was thinking how nice it is in Munich, and about going secretly to cabarets which would give my mater a fit if she knew. You see, I am being honest.”

  “Now we are at least talking to each other. What’s good about the cabarets?”

  Charles said they were very avant-garde. And smoky. And that the police sometimes invaded them. He said he needed Joachim Susskind to do simultaneous translation.

  “Ah,” said Dorothy, between fury and amusement, “but you don’t need him as I need him. Dog in a manger.”

  Pomona’s little hand was chilly in Tom’s, and didn’t heat up. He felt sorry for her, which was good for him. She didn’t speak. He was looking into her mass of hair, which had embroidered flowers pinned into it. He said it must be wonderful to live in a magical place like the Denge Marsh.

  In some ways it was, Pomona agreed.

  Perhaps she was a bit lonely without Imogen, he ploughed on.

  It wasn’t really Imogen, Pomona said in a small voice. It wasn’t very nice now Elsie had gone away.

  Tom didn’t know about this. He asked where Elsie had gone, and was told, in a kind of gentle hiss, that she had gone to have a baby, and was coming back when it was all over, but that nobody was very cheerful because of this, neither Mama, nor Philip, nor Papa of course either.

  There was another silence while Tom dredged up a reply. He was not going to ask about the baby, that was not what he would do. He repeated that the place was magical, and heard the banality in his own voice.

  Pomona said

  “From outside it is. I feel we’re under a spell. You know, behind one of those thickets in stories. We trail out to the orchard and back to the kitchen. And up to bed, and out to the orchard, and back to the kitchen. We sew. That’s part of the spell. We have to sew things or something dreadful will happen.”

  If Dorothy had said all this, it would have been a joke. But Pomona’s voice was amiably monotonous.

  “Well, I suppose you could go to College, like Imogen, couldn’t you?”

  “And sew things? I don’t think s
o. I don’t think I’d be let go to College. Are you going to College?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Tom said evasively.

  They trotted on, dancing neither well nor badly. Tom said

  “There must be other things, besides sewing.”

  “Pots,” said Pomona. “There are pots.”

  Something in Tom evaded remarking stupidly that maybe she would get out and be married. He felt she was not all there, but then, there were moments when he felt he was not all there himself. Maybe, like him, she was somewhere else. He would have liked to get away from her, and this made him sorry for her, so he asked for another dance.

  Gerald was enjoying the dance, against his expectations. He actually liked the physical exercise of dancing, which he had learned very thoroughly as a little boy in weekend dancing classes. There was no call to dance in King’s College. He looked at the young women to work out which would be pleasurable to dance with, from this point of view. The best dancer was Griselda Wellwood, who moved elegantly, almost like a perfect mechanical doll. But her little book—decorated with lilies of the valley—was crowded. He booked what he could, and went back to Florence Cain. She had more space, having refused to give Geraint as many dances as he wanted. She was, in Gerald’s view, the second-best dancer, less perfect in her movements, but also less mechanical, and, he discovered after stepping out with both young ladies, more responsive to his leading, readier to follow him in inventing variations on the steps. She annoyed him, at first, by what he saw as a tedious attempt to make conversation that would interest him. She discussed dancing in Jane Austen, she went on to Shakespeare and Dante. It took him quite some time, between the creation of steps-on-the-spot and sudden swirls, to realise that she was talking perfectly good sense—even wittily—about Shakespeare and Dante, even if a supper dance was the wrong place. He answered with amusement, and twirled her again. Both Prosper and Julian observed her flush of delight with irritation, bordering on fury. They were too far away to see that her knees were trembling, and only she knew what was going on inside her, under her flowing skirt, as she swayed in time to the music.

  There was a late arrival, when the dancing had been interrupted for supper. The young went to collect their plates and glasses in the Grill-Room, and came back to the Centre Refreshment Room to eat in groups at the tiny, but heavy, tables, made of ornamental ironwork with small grey marble slabs, encased in more ironwork. In the Refreshment Corridor were plaster bas-reliefs, depicting abstract craftsmen—Industrial Science and Industrial Art—and real humans. Arkwright inventing the loom, Palissy taking baked pots from a furnace. Tom pointed these out to Pomona, to whom he had somehow become permanently attached. She shuddered when she saw Palissy, and said “That’s Palissy. You see, I can’t get away from weaving and pots.” Tom knew nothing about Palissy, and observed that he looked benign. Pomona said he might well have been, if you were interested in pots.

  Geraint had managed to secure Florence for supper, since Gerald had insinuated himself into that place in Griselda’s little book. Geraint deciphered the inscription on the porcelain painting on the Grill-Room buffet, and read it out in a funny voice.

  “May-Day, May-Day, the Blithe May-Day, the Merrie, Merrie Month of May.”

  The Victorians were earnest, even about being merry, said the Edwardian young man. Florence laughed. But she felt a kind of loyalty to the ambition of the Museum, because of her father.

  The late arrival was August Steyning, who went to join the elders in the Green Dining-Room, where waiters were serving supper on Minton plates. He was given a chair next to Olive. The table centre-piece was a large, glowing lustre bowl by Benedict Fludd, depicting that odd moment in the Rheingold when Freya is up to her neck in gold loot, the golden apples are turning grey and papery, and the two giants stretch out huge hands to take the young goddess. Fludd’s depiction of the heaped treasure, in ceramic, was masterly—goblets, bracelets, glinting crowns, trickling coins and the shape of a young woman underneath the heap, hinted suggestively. On the other side of the bowl lurked, not Wotan struggling with the ring, but Loge, holding a very lively golden apple in a cloak of flame.

  August Steyning was rehearsing The Smart Set, a drawing-room comedy by J. M. Barrie, with an edge of pain and irony. Olive asked him how it was going.

  “The actors are good. It has a pretty pace. It is not without meaning, even though too much of it turns on undelivered letters and impertinent servants. But—dear Mrs. Wellwood, dear Olive—it isn’t what I want to be doing. It’s bread-and-butter work, and I do it to the best of my ability. But if I could have my way, all the tasteful furniture which makes the stage like an airless mirror of daily life would be whisked lightly up—sofas like flying elephants, tables galloping into the wings like wild ponies—and we should see through the looking glass into the world of dream and story. The stage doesn’t have to reproduce drawing rooms with false balconies and unreal windows. We can put anything on the stage now, daemons, dragons, Worms, sly Elves, slow trolls, malign silkies, even the Brollachan and Nuckelavee. Instead of which I have actresses quarrelling over the waists of tea-gowns and freshly made egg-and-cress sandwiches every rehearsal.”

  “We all went to see Bluebell in Fairyland, with Seymour Hicks,” said Olive. “The children loved it. The songs were pretty.”

  “But it wasn’t fey, or uncanny, now was it? It was prettily whimsical, very English. The Germans know that otherworld creatures aren’t pretty little misses with wings and flower hats. They know that things lurk in dark woods and deep caves. Things we need to remember. Look at that, Olive. The bowl. I long to pick it up, but I dare not for it would certainly slip through my fingers and I should be cursed by the wraiths of Victoria and Albert, and a very lively Major Cain. The man—Fludd—is a genius. He takes the great—perhaps the only—Gesamtkunstwerk of our time and produces a version in a chilly, still world—that went through the fire all flowing with elements and elementals, and fused into colour and form—a regular-shaped bowl holding passion. Look at Loge’s wicked laughter. Please turn the bowl carefully, Major Cain, so that Olive may see Loge. See how the golden apples shimmer and fade, and the light is fiery and lucid and golden as the bowl turns. We need mystery.”

  “Your rehearsal has upset you.”

  “It has. This mysterious room restores my good nature. The eternal hounds, pursuing the eternal deer, under the dark eternal forest boughs. Those glooming Burne-Jones wodewomen. Prosper, your quails’ eggs are dainty and delicious, and your champagne is a chilly fountain of youth.”

  “Why don’t you put on such a play, yourself?” asked Prosper Cain.

  “Because I haven’t the imagination and can’t write. I need a mythmaker. You, Olive, you could do it. You could write me an Otherworld. You have the true sense of what is beyond window and mirror alike.”

  After supper, they danced quadrilles. The elders mingled with the young. It was both more stately and more frivolous, more playful, than the waltzes and polkas. Olive and Steyning danced with Tom and Pomona: Humphry led out Katharina, and made a square with Dorothy and Charles. Prosper and Seraphita danced with Florence and Geraint.

  Afterwards, as the evening drew to a close, fathers danced with daughters. Basil Wellwood claimed Griselda, clasped her firmly, whisked her round and round, and said he was proud of her, and she had made her mother very happy. Prosper danced with Florence, lightly, and said he hoped she had enjoyed her ball. She said she loved dancing and had danced every dance, and the Museum had been transfigured. Then he danced with Imogen, whose father was absent. She gave a little sigh, and settled into his arms as though she was comfortable there. She said he was a magician, who had conjured up a palace, which was, for her, an unexpected flight of fancy. She reported to him, as a daughter might, that Henry Wilson, from Jewellery, had danced with her twice, and had complimented her on her silver-work. “He said I understood both pennywort and silver,” she said. “I am in hope of being able to earn my living.” She rested her head brief
ly against his shoulder and he resisted the temptation to stroke her hair. Instead, he asked her whether she thought he should try and persuade her father to send Pomona to the Royal College, in her footsteps.

  “She looks a little forlorn,” he said.

  “I sometimes think she would give anything never to see another work of art again,” said Imogen. “But that isn’t to say she does want anything in particular. She doesn’t talk to me. She doesn’t talk to anyone. She tries to talk to Philip but that isn’t easy. I wish you could help her,” she said, sounding not entirely sincere, “but I truly don’t see how. She’s been dancing, at least, some of the time.”

  “I wish your father had come.”

  “I don’t.” She opened her mouth to say something further, and closed it again. Her hands tightened on his shoulder. He held her with military firmness, and they turned a corner.

  Dorothy was dancing with Humphry. Humphry was possibly the best dancer in the room. He said to her “Let me lead,” and she let him lead, and they began to move as though they were a single creature, swaying and tripping, making tiny chasing and concentrated steps, floating dreamily. His hand was hot and strong in the small of her back: both halves of her body, above and below his hand, moved as he dictated. He went fast—she had the sensation she had when she was a little girl, on roundabouts and helter-skelters. He said

  “Well, you’ve been having a good time, young woman.”

  “I have.”

  “Your dress shows you off. A great success.”

  He held her very close. They waltzed towards one of the great, full-length mirrors in the room, framed as though it were a door, in cast-iron painted as trompe-l’oeil sepia-brown marble. The mirrors were angled to give the illusion that the room was infinite, that you could step around an invisible corner into another shining space. It was clear that it was a mirror partly because a Greek or Roman nymph stood on a fat marble pillar with her back to it. She was modestly clutching, in her front, a sculpted flow of drapery, that covered her thighs, but not her bared breasts over which her hands were defensively clasped in an ancient, conventional pose. At the back, oddly, she was entirely naked. Her shoulder blades, fine waist, and rounded buttocks were exposed to the mirror, though not to the room. She distracted Dorothy, as her father whirled her towards the glass. She saw her own pale little face, staring dreamily over his strong shoulder, and her own small, female hand on his arm. She saw her unaccustomed high knot of hair, and the sleek, foxy red of her father. And then, as she turned, she looked back at the mirror, and saw the midnight-blue dress, and her bare back and shoulders, and the powerful hand planted on her waist, on the unaccustomed whalebone strips that shaped her.