The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “If you go on like this,” said Humphry “you’ll have them fighting over you.”

  He said “Perhaps it’s true, what they always say, don’t you think?” She had no idea what he meant.

  After the dance, the Todefright Wellwoods drove back to Portman Square, where they were staying with the London Wellwoods. Olive sat in the back of the carriage with Tom. Dorothy sat facing them, and put her head on her father’s shoulder. They didn’t speak much: they were sleepy and thoughtful.

  Katharina sent the young people to bed, with a maid carrying milk, iced biscuits, and a small oil lamp with an etched glass shade. Dorothy always had the same bedroom when she came to Portman Square. It was small, and high up, looking out at the back over gardens. It was decorated in Katharina’s taste, in a froth of white muslin, sprigged with pink. The bed was a nest inside prettily swathed curtains. There was a washstand, with bowl and jug decorated with pink rosebuds on a china-blue ground, but no writing desk. Another young woman might have found all this nostalgic femininity charming after the plainness and brightness of Todefright. Dorothy didn’t. But she didn’t mind it, or feel at a loss in it.

  She slipped out of her ball dress, and her petticoats—she didn’t need the maid to help, and told her so. Another maid would certainly be unhooking Griselda. She hung the midnight-blue dress neither carefully nor carelessly over a prettily upholstered dumpy chair, dropped her drawers on top of it and put on her plain, voluminous, white cotton nightdress, its bodice pleated by Violet. She thought she would read a little, before she turned out the light. She was trying to read fairytales in German to please Griselda. She was not a born linguist, and was ambivalent about fairytales.

  Someone knocked at the door. She thought it would be Griselda, come to talk over the ball, and rather wished she wouldn’t. But she said, come in. It was Griselda’s house and she loved Griselda.

  The door opened slowly and silently. It was not Griselda. It was Humphry, her father, in a silk dressing-gown covered with coiling Chinese dragons. He looked around for a chair—both the fat chair and the dressing-table chair were covered with abandoned female garments. He sat down beside his daughter, sinking into her flowery eiderdown, and said

  “I thought we might talk about things.”

  He was in an aura of whisky. Censorious Dorothy believed that both his wives—as she now thought of them—should do something to stop, or slow down, the whisky-drinking. She said

  “I’m tired.”

  He put an arm around her shoulder.

  “You are such a lovely girl. I never thought you were going to be so lovely. Queen of the Rosebud Garden of Girls. My Dorothy.” Dorothy stiffened.

  “There are things I ought to tell you. But I wanted so much to tell you—to tell you”—he stumbled—“how perfectly lovely—”

  He breathed hot whisky at her. She shrank back, and he gave her a clumsy push, which unbalanced her. She turned her face into the pillow, and muttered, in a child’s voice, “Go away. Please. Get off.”

  And then he put his hand, unequivocally, inside the white cotton folds and touched naked flesh. Dorothy ceased to be timid and confused, and became very angry.

  “Don’t do that. Or I’ll scream. Or ring the bell.”

  “I only want to play with you a bit. My darling.”

  His face wavered over hers. One hand worked inside her nightdress. One came over her mouth. Dorothy bit it. She bit with all her strength and she was strong. She bit the soft cushion below the thumb, and her mouth filled with blood. She shook the hand in her teeth like a mongoose with a snake.

  “Bitch,” said Humphry. He sat up. His hand was pouring blood on the white frilled bedclothes. He said “Have you got a hankie? We must stop this. That hurt.”

  “It was meant to. How dare you? Here’s a hankie. It’s far too small. Girls have stupid hankies. Go and get the hand towel. Then I’ll tear something up and make a bandage. I haven’t got much I can spare to tear up. Violet will be furious if I tear up this petticoat she spent so long on. You’ll have to put up with knickers.”

  This word caused her to begin to shake. She said, drawing deep, sobbing breaths,

  “You can’t go back with any of the stuff from this room, that belongs to the room, as opposed to belonging to me, or everyone will know. So it will have to be knickers. You could get to them. They’re in the drawer.”

  Her pillow was blood-spattered. So was the neck of her nightgown. Humphry said with a ghastly laugh

  “You’ve got blood on your teeth, like a stoat. And on your pretty lips.”

  “I shall have to say I had a nosebleed. You’ve got blood on your nice dressing-gown, too. Two nosebleeds in a night is a bit unlikely. You must cut yourself shaving.”

  She was trying to make a bandage strip from the knickers with an unsuitable pair of nail scissors.

  Humphry said, stumbling over the words,

  “Stop ordering me about.”

  “It’s either be businesslike or collapse and scream, and I think even you would prefer the former. You’re drunk. I need to think for you. As well as for me,” she added, in a swallowed sob. She was breathing either too much or too little air.

  Humphry said

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? You—you attacked me. I was there. It’s not a question of thinking.”

  “Yes it is. There are reasons. This is the wrong way to say it. I was always going to tell you. When the time came.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

  “What do you think you know?”

  “I’m Violet’s daughter. Someone—not me—has been listening into things.”

  “Well someone has been garbling ‘things.’ You’re not Violet’s child. Phyllis is. And Florian. You’re Olive’s daughter. But not mine.”

  Dorothy clutched the coverlet to her chest like the naked nymph in the ballroom.

  “What?”

  “You aren’t my daughter. So, you see, it wasn’t—this wasn’t—what you thought.”

  Dorothy sat like stone.

  “I didn’t mean to tell you this way. I do love you. Always have. Always will. My dear. Say something.”

  Dorothy said “Who is my father?”

  “You met him one midsummer. He’s a German from Munich. His name is Anselm Stern. The puppet-man. Things got out of hand at a carnival.

  “You can’t say it’s made any difference,” he added, foolishly. Dorothy said

  “You are being childish. You aren’t thinking. Of course it makes a difference. I am not who I thought I was. Nor, for that matter, is Phyllis. You have muddled us all up. All of you, you and both of them have made this muddle. You can’t just say it made no difference.”

  “I love you,” Humphry repeated, clutching his bandaged hand in his whole one.

  “Please go away,” Dorothy said with desperate dignity. “I need to think. I can’t think with you saying silly things to me.”

  “I handled it badly,” Humphry said, with drunken ruefulness.

  “You didn’t even handle it,” said Dorothy with scorn. “You just added a worse muddle to a monstrous muddle that already existed. Go away. Please. We have to sort out tomorrow.”

  “We can just go back to where we were, maybe …”

  “That’s childish. We can’t. Go away.”

  Humphry went.

  Dorothy sat on top of her bed, clasping her knees, thinking furiously. She was thinking in order not to feel, and her whole body was set and aching with the force of the thinking.

  She thought she would not go home—go back to Todefright.

  She tried to rearrange Olive in her mind, and failed.

  She thought she would not think about Humphry.

  She thought, slowly and reluctantly, that she was going to need to tell Griselda—something, she was not sure what, she would have to think of that. She had not told Griselda anything about Hedda’s discovery. She had wanted to go on as they were, cousins and friends
, and not let the evil creatures out of Hedda’s Pandora’s box.

  She decided she must pretend to be ill, and stay here, in Portman Square. She would explain the blood-spattered sheets by a gushing nosebleed. She would also tell Griselda to tell people—in confidence and untruthfully—that the Curse had come upon her early and with terrible pain, that she couldn’t bear to move.

  She was one of those beings who cannot bear uncertainty or indecision. She must act, she must make a plan of action. She must get away, she could not sit any longer in Todefright with horrible secrets bubbling up around her like hot geysers out of a lava-field.

  Where could she go, and how?

  Tom had run away. Running away was what children in stories did. There was no point in hurrying off to be a wild woman in the woods. She wanted to be a doctor. She tried to think of someone she could plausibly visit for a time.

  She was getting tired. She allowed her mind to touch, tentatively, at the image of Anselm Stern, her blood father.

  Incurably truthful, she remembered she had not much liked him, had been even a little afraid of him. Griselda had liked him, had talked German to him.

  She remembered a slim, black, bearded figure, a bit like a demon. Putting Death into Death’s own box.

  His English was no better than her own clumsy German. His puppets had made her uneasy.

  He was a kind of showman. Was he a serious person?

  She thought a bit harder. Did he know she was his daughter? Did he know he had a daughter?

  She felt, in a hot and angry way, that he should be made to know.

  She felt, in an exhausted, tearful way, that she needed to know who he was.

  Could she bring herself to tell Griselda?

  In the morning, she did not go down to breakfast. She huddled under her eiderdown, and said to the maid who brought her ewer of hot water that she felt ill, really ill, and would be glad if Griselda could be fetched. The maid said she would speak to Mrs. Wellwood—either Mrs. Wellwood—and Dorothy said, no, she would be grateful if Griselda could come. Quickly. There was no need to bother anyone else.

  Griselda came in, in a white shirt and green skirt, her hair knotted loosely on her neck.

  “What is it? Aren’t you well? What’s wrong? Do you need a doctor, or anything?”

  “No. I had a nosebleed. I’m sorry about the bedclothes. Something has happened, Grisel, something that changes all my life.”

  Griselda moved the midnight dress, and the petticoat, folding them neatly, and sat down on the stubby chair.

  “Tell.”

  “I almost can’t.”

  “We don’t have secrets from each other. Only from the world.”

  “This is a secret that a lot of people know, which is a secret about me, and was kept from me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “My father—that is—well—he told me, I am not his real daughter. He had drunk a bit too much, and it sort of slipped out. He hadn’t been planning to tell me.”

  Griselda’s pale face went white.

  “Did you believe him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say who your father was—is?”

  “Yes. He’s that German man with the puppet-show who came to the Midsummer party, when we were younger.” She thought. “I don’t know if he knows he’s my father. I can’t face asking my mother—anything—I just can’t. I can’t go home. I’ve got to think of a way to get away. You must help.”

  One tear rolled out of Griselda’s blue eye.

  “Grisel, you don’t have to cry.”

  “We aren’t cousins,” said Griselda. “If it’s true, we aren’t cousins.” Dorothy had not thought of that. They looked at each other.

  “We’re even more best friends,” said Dorothy. “Help me. Where can I go?”

  Griselda was thinking furiously. “Would you consider telling Charles?”

  “He isn’t my cousin either,” said Dorothy, with a brittle cackle of laughter.

  “No—but—he keeps going on these cultural trips to Germany with Joachim Susskind. He goes to Munich, where he—Herr Stern—is. Do you think—just possibly—we could go, too? With Charles, and Herr Susskind, and maybe even with—with—Toby—do you think a grown-up brother and two tutors would be chaperone enough? Charles is good at secrets. He has lots. He does all sorts of secret things with Joachim Susskind who looks so respectable and gentle. He gets up to all sorts of things—revolutionary things, avant-garde art things—the parents would die if they knew. We could both go. I could speak German and study there. And if the tutors went, you could go on working for your exams. I’m sure they have classes in Munich we could go to. And you could think about seeing him—Herr Stern—your father. I liked him. I liked him very much. He’s gentle.”

  Dorothy sprang out of the bed and flung her arms round Griselda. They hugged each other. Griselda considered the bloodstains on the nightdress.

  “That was a voluminous nosebleed. Buckets of blood. You must have had a frightful shock.”

  “I did.”

  “Are you all right now?”

  “I’m all right as long as I keep doing something. I shall have to lurk here, for a bit. I’m not going back to Todefright.”

  “Won’t your parents be upset? Will they let you go to Munich?”

  “I need to make them frightened of what I will do if they don’t. Tell everybody. Run away altogether. Kill myself. Waste away. Shout and shout at them. They wouldn’t like any of those. Which do you think?”

  “I think you should lurk here and be stormy and intimidating. Whereas I shall be persuasive and charming, and say if I can go and study in Munich for a bit, I will let them give a sumptuous ball for me when I get back.”

  “I don’t think I shall ever enjoy another ball.”

  “Well, if I fix this for you, you’ll have to promise me to come to that one. As moral support. We shall have to tell Charles or he’ll never agree. But if we do tell him, I think he might, because he does love secrets and subversive things.”

  29

  Elsie’s child was born in an attic in Dymchurch, from which you could see the sea. It belonged to a semi-retired midwife, who was a friend of Patty Dace. The labour was long and terrible, and the bruised child—a very small child—was slapped and shaken into a quavering howl, just as the dawn rose over the Channel.

  “It’s a girl,” said Mrs. Ball. “She’s little, but she’ll live.” Elsie swam in and out of consciousness, like a mermaid in the sea.

  “Do you want to see her?” asked Mrs. Ball, who had attended births where the mother turned away a grim, resolute face, and would not look. Elsie swam. Elsie floated. She heard a voice say

  “Give me her. Let me see.”

  Mrs. Ball put the bundle in the crib, and raised Elsie’s pillow, on the cast-iron bed.

  “You must stay awake then, you mustn’t drop her.” The sea poured in and retreated. “Give me her.”

  The baby was swaddled in a piece of towelling, like a peg doll. Mrs. Ball put her in Elsie’s arms. She had a creased little face, like an ancient wise monkey. She opened a tiny mouth, and mewed. Hair, of an indeterminate colour, was plastered to her head. She opened dark, dark eyes under bruised lids, and blinked, and then stared, letting light flow over them.

  “Oh” said Elsie, catching her breath. Her breasts swelled and hurt. She said

  “Her name’s Ann.”

  “Did you think she might be a girl? Did you have a name ready?”

  “No.” Elsie gave a kind of sobbing laugh. “I can see her name’s Ann. She’s so small, it’s a small name.”

  “She’ll grow.”

  “I want to see all of her.”

  Mrs. Ball unwrapped the little body. Elsie touched the raw-looking feet, considered the swollen sex, put out a finger for the wavering hands to grip, and was gripped.

  “Ann,” said Elsie, shifting her painful body so that she could rest the nodding head on her shoulder. “Hey, Ann. Stay with me.”

  Mrs.
Ball, who tried not to be sentimental, and failed, felt tears in her eyes, and a choke in her throat. It was not the first time, and would not be the last.

  Philip came to see Ann. The whole business of her birth and begetting had shamed him, somehow. He felt sullen, and put out, and deeper than that, afraid of something that concerned him dreadfully and was out of his control.

  “Her name’s Ann,” Elsie told him. Mother and child were clutching each other, Ann’s face pushed into Elsie’s breast.

  “Just Ann?”

  “Just Ann.”

  “It suits her. She looks—she looks all right.”

  “You’re her uncle.”

  “I know that. You’ll keep her.”

  “I don’t seem to have no choice. I thought I might. I didn’t know what I’d feel. I had an idea of turning me head away, you know. And then I saw she was mine.”

  She said “They’re unbelievable, those ladies, they sorted it all, just like they said at the meeting about the women of the future, they said single women should be looked after, and they’re looking after me. And Ann.”

  “Turn her face this way a bit. I want to draw her. She’s got your brow.”