The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Neither of them mentioned anyone else she might resemble.

  Phoebe Methley came to see Ann, bringing a bunch of wild flowers for Elsie, and a blue vase to put them in. She also brought apples, and two little baby dresses, and a bonnet. She perched on the end of the bed, and watched Philip’s pencil move on his sketch-pad.

  She sniffed, and got out her handkerchief.

  “I’m sorry, it’s silly, I always cry when I see newborns.”

  “Her name’s Ann.”

  “You’ll keep her?”

  “I couldn’t give her up, I couldn’t.” A silence. “If it wasn’t for you, and the other ladies, I w’d a had to. I can’t ever tell you… ” Both women were weeping.

  Phoebe Methley had a fairly clear idea about who was Ann’s father, and could not, for some time, bring herself to look closely at her face. She had had, she now understood, a romantic hope that Elsie would want nothing to do with Ann, that she herself might have to offer this child a home, in a house where her own unmentionable children would never come. This act might entail a generosity of which she would not be capable, she knew also. She said

  “Anything you need…”

  “You are too good to me.”

  “Women must work together,” said Phoebe, with a healthy asperity. That evening she said to her husband “Elsie Warren has given birth to a daughter.”

  They were sitting at the dinner table. She served him a stew of haricot beans, simmered with onions and pork rind, and a spoon or two of molasses, and a trace of mustard, flavoured also with rosemary from their garden, and sprinkled with chopped parsley and chives. It was a slow-cooked, thoughtful dish. Herbert Methley sniffed it, and said that it was good. More than good, ambrosial, said Herbert Methley, not meeting his wife’s eye.

  “I went to see them. Her name’s Ann. She’s a very sweet, tiny little thing.”

  Herbert Methley did not like to talk of children, anyone’s children. He said he had, today, made enormous progress with his new novel, it had finally settled into shape, and was flowing along like water in a river-bed.

  Phoebe went on, sternly and bravely.

  “We formed a little feminist committee of fairy godmothers to make sure Ann will be well looked after. I wondered if we might even have her here, a little—only now and then, you understand—Marian Oakeshott has offered to ask Tabitha to help—”

  Herbert Methley stared distractedly out of the window. He said he thought this new novel might be his best—his best yet—might make their fortune—if he could have time and silence and absence of distractions to write it at its current speed, while the spirit moved him. He said he had a good title.

  “Do you, Herbert? What is it?”

  “It is to be called Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl.”

  “Mr. Woodhouse from Emma, Herbert?”

  “No, my love, though the connotation is present, and you have perceptively noted it. It is spelt, in this case, Wodehouse. There is a figure—a kind of Green Man, a kind of Wild Man of the Woods—who is known as Wodwose. I discovered, to my great delight, that country people still talk about Wodwoses but call them Wodehouses. It is to be the tale of a timid man who retreats to a cottage in the woods to live naturally—a man who at that stage temperamentally resembles Mr. Woodhouse from Emma—who coddles himself with woolly comforters and embrocations—and meets the Wild Girl who is living freely in the depth of the forest—”

  “You said it was a wood.”

  “It is an English wood that symbolically takes on the properties of the deeper Forest—where he learns to walk free and naked in Nature—”

  “What is she like, the Wild Girl?”

  “I haven’t wholly invented her. She has your eyes, of course. I cannot invent a—a beloved woman—who does not have your eyes. But she is hard for to tame. Yes.”

  “And how does it end?”

  “I don’t know that, yet, either. Wonderfully, I think. But, it may be, with a wonderful disaster. I need to find it out, I need to follow my instincts. Which is why I need particular peace and quiet in the next few months—such as you have always protected for me, my darling.”

  In June, a party consisting of Toby Youlgreave, Joachim Susskind, Karl Wellwood, Griselda Wellwood, and Dorothy Wellwood, set out by boat and railway for Munich.

  Most of the persuasive talking had been done by Griselda. A child who has been brought up in a partly public space, surrounded by servants directly and indirectly concerned with the controlling and ordering of her own life, a child who has not been brought up in intimate contact with either of her parents, and who has been accustomed to meet them in formalised, public spaces, has had to learn to keep her own counsel, to create a private space for private projects, inside her own head and body. Many upper-class girls did not learn that, and went dolllike from nursery to dance floor to white lace in church and the unexpected fleshy horrors or delights of the bridal bedroom. If Griselda was not a doll, even though she had often been dressed as a doll, it was, in fact, because her father and mother loved her, with however much reticence, as a human being. She knew this—as indeed Charles/Karl also knew it in his own case—and now exploited it, with some cunning, on Dorothy’s behalf. She did not know what it was that had so shocked her cousin—it was something appalling in the way she had been casually told about her parentage, Griselda surmised. But she loved Dorothy, and Dorothy was shocked. So Griselda went to Katharina, and confided in her. What she confided was a series of half-truths and serious fibs about Dorothy’s unhappiness at home, about the lack of seriousness with which her flighty parents approached her steadfast ambition to be a doctor. Delicately, Griselda accused her mother of favouring Charles/Karl—he could command the attention of a tutor, and by travelling with this tutor as his companion, deprive Dorothy of lessons she needed. Dorothy was nervously depressed. She, Griselda, was restless. Why should they not, with each other for company, go with Charles and Joachim Susskind to Munich and perfect their German—

  “You will not,” interposed Katharina from Hamburg, “learn classical German in Bavaria—”

  “Herr Susskind speaks classical German. And he has an aunt, Mama, who has a pension and gives classes in mathematics and biology to young ladies—mathematical genius runs in Herr Susskind’s family—she is called Frau Carlotta Susskind—and we could stay in her pension and see the artworks, and study, and it would take Dorothy out of herself—I can’t bear to see her so unhappy.”

  “Her unhappiness is very sudden.”

  “No, it isn’t, Mama. She is very strong, and she hides things well. I can confide in you, she has given me permission—”

  Katharina sometimes thought that Griselda and Dorothy were almost unhealthily bound up in each other. Griselda saw that thought pass across her thin face, though it was not articulated.

  “And when we come back—you will give a dance, and I will be serious about coming out, and after that you will allow me to study in Cambridge if I still want to—”

  Katharina kissed Griselda. She said

  “There is something I don’t know—”

  “There is always something girls don’t tell. But it isn’t an important thing,” said Griselda, lying splendidly. And Katharina smiled, and agreed to the journey.

  Dorothy had formed the violent intention of never returning to Todefright. She would become an exile. She would go to Bavaria, where she had no particular wish to go, to find a father whom she did not particularly wish to see. But she was a practical being, and understood that she could not get away without going back. Clothes must be packed. Money must be discussed. Studies must be arranged. She asked Griselda to come with her. Together they were less approachable, less open to blackmail, or emotional invasion. She dreaded being in the same house as Humphry, and assumed he dreaded confronting her. Olive, too, had shifted in her inner landscape. She had done something, felt something, which had been kept a secret, which changed hugely who she was for Dorothy, in ways Dorothy had not yet worked out.

 
She stayed a few days in Portman Square, pretending to be ill. She did not say much more to Charles and Griselda than she already had. Any wrong things said, could only make things more dangerous, more precarious.

  She dreamed about both her fathers. Her dreams were hectic. She dreamed of Humphry, walking towards her, smiling under his foxy moustache, across the meadow at Todefright. In the dream he stood in the sun, and opened his arms, and lifted her up to kiss her, as he had done when she was a child, and in the dream she understood she had made a terrible mistake—she could not remember what it was—but her father was holding her safe and all would be well. Then she woke up, and remembered.

  Her dreams about Anselm Stern were more confused. She could not exactly remember what he had looked like, and in the dream confused him with his own marionettes, so that he advanced towards her swaying and gesticulating, with a fixed, silent, sinister smile. He was always black, as he had been when he came. He was a kind of spider. He floated towards her in many different, unknown rooms, and held out his arms with their fluid joints, to embrace her, and she wanted to run away, and knew she must not, and woke in a fright.

  In Todefright, everyone tried to behave well. Humphry and Olive greeted them in the hall, and Humphry, smiling too much, told Griselda she looked very pretty, and welcomed Dorothy without looking at her. Dorothy kissed Olive coldly. Olive could feel a turmoil of feeling, by which she was baffled. Dorothy was closed and cold, and she didn’t know why. This perturbed the writer as well as the mother—she liked to leave her world warm and smiling before she closed herself away with the typewriter.

  Over supper that night Griselda explained the Munich project. She was so keen on going herself—Charles was always going there—the tutors had agreed to come—and she so wanted Dorothy to come with her, it was a wonderful opportunity before she had to concentrate on all those terrible exams.

  Joachim Susskind’s aunt had a pension. Charles had been there.

  Olive thought secretly that she had not known Griselda was such a minx. Butter wouldn’t melt in her pale mouth. Something had happened. Money was short at that moment in the Wellwood house. Travel to Munich and accommodation and tuition for a daughter who could very well stay at home were inconvenient to find. Dorothy, naturally truthful, trying to find a lie, said in an unnatural voice of enthusiasm that she had never wanted anything so much as she now wanted to go to Munich with Griselda and Charles and the tutors. Mr. Youlgreave was coming too. Humphry, also sounding unnaturally enthusiastic, said that in that case, the money must be found. Tom said he couldn’t see why anyone wanted to travel.

  In their bedroom at night, Olive turned on Humphry and asked him what had happened.

  “You know you can’t find the money to send the girl to Munich, which is to say that I must. And I can’t work any faster. And we must do something about Tom. There’s something going on, that I don’t know about.”

  “I told her she isn’t my daughter. It slipped out. I’m sorry.”

  Olive stood in her dressing-gown and looked hard at him.

  “We don’t know that she isn’t.”

  “Yes we do. Be honest, Olive. We do.”

  “Why did you tell her? It wasn’t your right.”

  Humphry, crestfallen, stared at the carpet.

  Olive considered him. Reasons for his madness flickered across her mind and were rejected. The writer in her could have imagined a scene in which the secret had “slipped out.” The woman in her felt both threatened and enraged. The woman needed to keep calm, or the writer would be unable to work tomorrow. The woman was afraid of age and loss. Toby was abandoning his devotion to her to go jaunting off to Munich with two blossoming girls. She hadn’t heard from Herbert Methley for months. He had besieged her, and then had abruptly retreated. She looked coldly at Humphry who was sitting on the edge of the bed, with his arms folded round himself.

  “It all seems very odd to me,” she said, mildly enough. And added “It will do her good, to get away from here, for a time. She’s growing up.” She thought hard. “I shan’t speak to her, myself.”

  “No need,” said Humphry.

  Olive knew that there was a need, and that she had not got the required courage.

  On the day Dorothy left for the Continent, escorted by a debonair and smiling Toby Youlgreave, August Steyning came to tea with Olive. Humphry had shut himself in his study to write. Tom had vanished into the wood, as he did vanish. Violet was out with the little ones. Hedda was hanging around, when August Steyning’s trap came up the drive. She looked angry and resentful. Olive came out on the step to greet the visitor, and saw Hedda kicking gravel. Everyone seemed to be surly, Olive thought. She said

  “Go and find yourself something useful to do, Hedda. I’m sure you should be studying.”

  Steyning climbed down, and handed the reins to the stable boy. He took Olive’s hands.

  “I trust you have some time for me? I have sunk into a slough of despond, and need your strong hands to pull me out.” He saw Hedda. “Good afternoon, young lady.” He turned back to her mother. “I need you, my dear, I really need your help.” His voice was light and cool, his emphases almost mocking. Hedda shuffled her feet.

  “Hedda, do go away, I’ve already asked you to go away. I need to talk to Mr. Steyning and he needs to talk to me. Go and—go and read a book.”

  She said to Steyning that they would have tea on the lawn, and took his arm. They turned their backs on the glowering girl.

  “Do you remember,” Steyning asked Olive, “the appalling boredom of being that age? With nothing to do, and only oneself to think about? There are compensations to being older.”

  Olive sat in a basket chair and spread her skirts. She turned an eager face to her visitor, as he took his chair. Humphry was sulking, Methley had vanished, Toby was going to the station with Dorothy, laughing and insouciant. She flirted in a serious way with August Steyning, of whom she was slightly in awe. He was hidden a long way behind his quizzical smile and his narrow face. She thought he really liked her, but was not sure. She knew he liked to look at her, but did not think he felt desire, as Toby and Herbert Methley did. She did not know him well enough to know how he lived. She supposed he might, like the imprisoned Oscar, feel romantic love for young men. This was common in the theatre. She tried to be broadminded—she would have liked to be Bohemian—but felt in fact a squeamish distaste for the physical descriptions in the newspapers of the hotel rooms to which Oscar had taken his boys. She smiled at August Steyning who smiled back.

  The maid brought a tea-tray, and set up a table. She poured tea. August said it always did him good to be in that garden. It was a hive of energy. He could feel Olive’s mind, hovering and inventing in that garden, finding strange creatures in the shrubbery and drama in the bonfire. Did she remember their discussion of that fairy play? He wanted to suggest to her that she might write him a tale—a play—a real work of the imagination. Strange and wonderful, not pretty. Like the Austrians—like Hofmannsthal—or like the Ring of the Niebelung. He was so sick of tea-parties on the stage, and of cheeky servants, and soubrettes, and jeunes ingénues. He wanted to make people’s hair stand on end. Adventure, danger, dark and light.

  Olive drew him out and gave him sandwiches and iced biscuits. He talked about the mood in the world of the arts. Everyone, he said, was reading stories originally written for children—stories of magic, stories of quests, stories of half-humans who were still in touch with the ancient earth, of speaking beasts, and centaurs, Pan and Puck. He was quite sure she could write him a play along those lines—in that dreamworld that was more real than urban rattle—he wanted to do something delightful and complicated with mirrors, and lights, and wires … and shadows.

  Olive said, her voice dragging a little, that she was writing a tale about a boy—a Prince—who lost his Shadow, and went Underground in search of it.

  “How did he lose it?”

  “Oh, it was snipped off his feet in his cradle, by a monstrous rat, with sharp
yellow teeth, who rolled it up, and took it behind the skirting-board, and down horrible holes, underground, to the Queen of the shadows. His family—the King and Queen—try to keep him safe, in a walled garden—you know how these things always—but he meets the Queen of Elfland who needs his help, and carries him away on her white horse with bells—through seas of blood abune the knee, of course—to the opening of a mine-shaft. And he has to go in, and further in, and further in—and meets all sorts of strange creatures down there, some friendly, some evil, some indifferent… ”

  “Does he get it back?”

  “I haven’t got there yet. It’s an interminable story. I’m telling it for Tom. Each of my children,” she said, in the charming voice with which she had spoken to Miss Catchpole, “has his or her own story, in his or her own notebook. They were bedtime stories, but now the children are older—or some of them are—they’re a kind of game. I don’t know why I keep that going. Sometimes it feels a little silly. You know what you have said, about stories under the hills, of old things and inhuman things, and magic that used to run through everything and has now shrunk to odd little patches of magic woods and hummocks? Toby Youlgreave talks a great deal about the Brothers Grimm and their belief that fairytales were the old religion—the old inner life—of the German people? Well, I sometimes feel, stories are the inner life of this house. A kind of spinning of energy. I am this spinning fairy in the attic, I am Mother Goose quacking away what sounds like comforting chatter but is really—is really what holds it all together.” She gave a little laugh, and said “Well, it makes money, it does hold it all together.”

  30

  They arrived at the Pension Susskind, in Schwabing, which was managed by Joachim Susskind’s aunt, Carlotta. Katharina Wellwood, being German, imagined this place as a severe and upright dwelling, spotlessly clean, with dull and wholesome food served promptly at fixed hours. “Lotte” Susskind she saw in her mind’s eye as a tall figure in black, with a châtelaine at her waist, an impeccable white collar, and a shiny knot of greying hair. Olive imagined something more informal and rosy—her vision of Lotte Susskind wore a fresh apron over a large bosom, and baked sweetmeats for the lucky residents. In fact Joachim Susskind’s aunt was a young aunt, though she had two teenage daughters, Elli and Emmi. She was bony and angular, dressed in flowing blouses and sweeping skirts, with a mop of wild wiry hair, and a pointed, slightly witchy chin. The pension was a rambling building, with balconies and corridors joining structures which might once have been stables or dairies. Dorothy and Griselda had adjacent attics under the eaves, minimally furnished, with little wooden box-beds, plain wooden tables, muslin curtains and fat feather quilts. The walls were painted apple-green, and the woodwork was mustard-yellow. Dorothy wondered if this was usual in Germany. Griselda knew it was not. Charles had been here before, and was greeted by Lotte as a returning prodigal.