The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  He had hoped that his inconvenient need for new women would slacken with his muscles. Women his age were no longer desirable, why should he be? And yet, he was. He kept testing it—women lecturers at summer schools, youngish ladies in bookshops, Fabians, socialists, he excited them, and through them, himself. He visited Marian Oakeshott from time to time, and played with her Robin and young Ann, before catching her round the waist and complimenting her on her fine figure and lively intelligence. Her Robin was the spitting image of his other Robin, at Todefright. He felt everyone must notice this, but no one said anything. Marian did not love him, now, he knew. But he sometimes persuaded her into bed, because she had a need, which tormented her, for certain things he had taught her. “I hate you,” she would say, clutching him, and he would murmur cheerfully, as he pumped, “Better hatred than indifference. At least we are alive.” And she would laugh drily.

  He had frightened himself by clutching at Dorothy. He did love Dorothy. He had always loved Dorothy, always knowing she was not his. And it was not that he loved, in her, the same things he loved in Olive for she was not darkly passionate but stubbornly practical, somehow wise in her independence. He was tortured by the rift he had caused. (He relieved the torture by seducing a female student from the LSE after a meeting on women’s rights.) He watched her behaviour, when she came home. She spoke to him in public, drily, practically, much as she always had. He wondered whether she would ever allow him to speak to her in private again. Then, one day, she came to him, in his study—it was the summer of 1902, and she had sat some of her exams for matriculation, and was preparing others for the end of the year. The tutors were organising a reading party in a cottage in the New Forest, a romantic cottage, in a clearing in the trees, with a river running past. Dorothy said she was going, with Tom and Griselda and Charles, to read there—and Julian and Florence would come, and Geraint and maybe the Fludd girls. She said

  “And my father is coming to stay with August Steyning, and his sons are coming with him, and I think it would be fun to invite them to the camp. Wolfgang and Leon, that is.”

  Humphry dared not ask any questions. He murmured, awkwardly, “That’s good, that’s good.” Then, lightly, “What do they know?”

  “As much as they need to know. We don’t really talk about it. But I like them. Very much. And they like me.”

  “Well, that’s good. No harm done?”

  Dorothy hesitated. Both of them remembered the urgently fumbling hands, the blood. Humphry wanted to say, please don’t set one mad moment against a lifetime—well, your lifetime—of love. He stared at the floor. Dorothy said, judiciously,

  “Not no harm, no. But it is all right. You are my father, that’s a fact.”

  It was a warning, as well as a concession.

  “I do love you,” said Humphry, entering the forbidden ground. And Dorothy was able to say, lightly, practically, apparently easily, “I love you too. Always did.”

  Humphry put his arms briefly round her, and kissed the top of her head, as he had done when she was a little girl. And she kissed the side of his beard, lightly, lightly, as she had done as a little girl.

  During these years Prosper Cain was preoccupied with the slowly rising, dangerous, dust-clouded new building, draped in a network of scaffolding, muffled, and mysterious. Under the scaffolding domes, pinnacles and a central crowned tower came into being. Inside the building there was dissension between those concerned primarily with the beauty of the objects to be displayed, and those concerned with their utility as teaching aids for craftsmen. There was a movement on the Continent to construct or reconstruct rooms and settings—panelled, or with stone pillars and lancet windows, in which beds, tables, chairs, carpets and ceramics could be seen as the museum designers imagined their makers might have seen them. In Munich the Bavarian National Museum was newly built to show—on its façade—every period and style of architecture—and inside rooms with ceilings, floors and pillars expressly designed to show off a collection of church furnishings, or a lady’s boudoir. Photographs of these splendours were published in 1901, and the Emperor of Prussia expressed approval and delight.

  Prosper Cain had failed to save the strange and lovely furniture, bought by one of the jurors at the Paris Exhibition and donated to the Museum. It had been banished to Bethnal Green, and South Kensington had been sneered at as a “pathological museum for design disease” by those favouring order and logic. In 1904 Major Cain travelled with the Director, Sir Casper Purdon Clarke, and Arthur Skinner, who was to succeed Clarke, to the opening of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin: they went also to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, and Cain went on to Munich, where the display impressed him. They went in 1901 to the opening in Paris, in the Louvre, of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and saw that the display mixed “order and connection to facilitate study” with “sufficient variety to give the feeling of life: thus a piece of tapestry is seen, as it should be, over a bed, a chest or a seat, not placed in a line between an earlier and a later specimen.” This was what Prosper Cain would have wished to achieve. But it was not to be. The Museum’s fate was to be decided by a civil servant from the Board of Education, Robert Morant, who had tutored the royal family in Siam, and taught the poor in Toynbee Hall, before setting South Kensington in order. He believed that it was the duty of the curators to make an educational order—spoon after spoon, banister next to banister, dishes in rows and carpets side by side. He simply demoted Skinner—who died fifteen months later, in 1911 at the age of fifty, of a broken heart. Prosper Cain had admired Skinner and had shared his views. He kept his own post but felt detached from the new order. All this was still to come. Major Cain plotted and planned and projected in the first seven years of the new century. It ate up his life, but he took pleasure in it.

  His children delighted and worried him. Julian seemed to have settled for the life of a scholar, for want of an urgent vocation. Florence, who had been so forthright and practical as a girl, became, he said to himself, “moony” as she grew into womanhood. He was distressed by her ability to cling on to a hopeless—indeed, he considered it an unreal—passion for a man who was not what she thought he was. He thought he should perhaps speak to her, but was profoundly shy, when it came to speaking of the heart. She would not listen to him if he did speak, and what could he decorously say? He assumed—he needed to assume—that Julian would grow out of what he, as an army man, saw as a normal phase of passionate male friendship. But the other—this Gerald—he knew in his bones would not. But you can’t say that to a young girl. He considered appealing to Imogen Fludd but she, too, could not be decently approached on this subject.

  He had his worries about her, also. In 1902 she was twenty-three and becoming an accomplished silversmith. He liked to watch her work.

  The new Professor of Design, W. R. Lethaby, and Henry Wilson, the expert in silverwork and jewellery, newly arrived from the Art-workers Guild, had introduced new ways of working. The artists sat at French jewellers’ benches, which were made of beech and had semicircular holes cut, like a flower, under which hung leather sheepskins to catch every shred and filing of precious metals as they fell. Each worker had his or her own blow-pipe, and tall Imogen sat there patiently, her hair coiled behind her head, tending the sharp blue flame, making long silver wires for filigree work, beating silver plates finer and finer. She worked in soft stones—turquoise, opals. She used a delicate bow, an ash rod strung with iron wire, to slice opals, which had to be done very very slowly and precisely. Prosper Cain liked to look at her calm face as she concentrated. She wore an indigo-blue overall, full length, and tucked her long legs under the sheepskin. At first he had thought her inexpressive and slow, but he thought now that she was a masked woman, that underneath was another kind of creature, fierce, precise, determined, capable of beauty. He was surprised that none of the male students seemed to have discovered these qualities. They paid her little attention. Other women students were vivacious or sultry. Imogen Fludd was—as her teachers recognis
ed—an artist, and committed to her art. But Prosper Cain felt she should have life, too. Her douceur was unnatural.

  There had been talk of Pomona joining Imogen at the Royal College. She had come up to London, looking flustered and pink, and had taken the exams. She had failed. Neither her father’s reputation, nor her sister’s excellent progress, nor Prosper Cain’s interest in her could disguise the fact that she had no talent, the examiners said, that the work was both childlike and childish. She seemed rather relieved, than not, when the decision was broken to her, and went back to Lydd. It was Imogen whose eyes were red-rimmed at supper that evening, but she said nothing.

  33

  The New Forest camp took place in the peaceful summer of 1902, when the war in South Africa had ended. There was a cottage in a clearing, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a parlour, made of old, red, crumbling bricks. Its windows were unevenly glazed and slightly opaque. It had a garden, full of plants that love shade and were half-wild—foxgloves and mints, sweet woodruff and forget-me-nots. It had a rough lawn which turned into sandy earth, which ran down to a bathing place in the river, a deep pool, half sunlit, half mysteriously green under branches. Someone had built a rickety wooden pier, which extended over the water, and could be dived and fished from. You could also dive from a woody bank on the dark side (it was deeper there), crushing sorrel and campion between your toes as you arched up and out.

  Toby Youlgreave and Joachim Susskind inhabited the bedrooms, and unpacked boxes of books onto makeshift bookcases constructed of bricks and planks. They came early, by train to Ashurst and then in a dog cart, carrying the heavy things, tents and kettles, cooking pots and jars of jam. Tom was already there. He had walked across the Downs and leapt out of the fringe of wood, to help with the unloading. Another dog cart brought Dorothy, Griselda and Phyllis. Hedda had been told she was too little, which at twelve she thought she was not. She had had one of her rages, which were beginning to worry her parents, and had deliberately broken a fruit dish made by Philip Warren. Phyllis, at sixteen, was going to cook. She had brought an apron. Florence Cain also arrived in a trap from the station. Julian had suggested she come along—he was coming with Charles/Karl from Cambridge, the next day. And Prosper Cain had asked whether they could not include Imogen. Florence had demurred—the invitation had been to her. Julian, when approached, asked Toby, who said “Why not?” So Imogen had come.

  Toby and Joachim and Tom put up tents. There were four of these, two for males, two for females, erected, stretched and pinned down. The girls gathered armfuls of bracken to put under the blanket bags they unpacked. Julian was walking from the station with Charles/Karl on the following day, and hoped to meet up with Gerry who was catching the same train. Florence had written, lightly, to Julian, that he ought to bring Gerald with him, Gerald would enjoy it. Julian had already that summer joined Gerald at an Apostolic reading party in the Tyrol, which had strenuously discussed truth, friendship, moral obligation, ideal beauty, the working classes and other, naughtier things. Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation.

  Dorothy and Griselda set off with cannikins to walk through the woods to the farm for milk. Imogen asked if she could go with them—she was always somehow in the position of asking, mildly, if she could join in—she was not, spontaneously, invited. Florence stayed in the camp watching Phyllis shelling peas and making jellies. She was listening. She was listening for Julian, Gerry, Charles/Karl and Gerald as though she was in suspended animation until they arrived.

  Love—fantastic, unrequited love—distorts and tweaks time into terrible shapes. Through the uneven window-panes Tom and Toby seemed grotesque, their bodies changing shape, fatter and thicker, stretched like elastic. Imaginary Gerald, in Florence’s mind, was precise and radiant and perfectly shaped. Several times every minute she imagined him sauntering through the wood, crossing the lawn, smiling his shy smile of pleasure at seeing her waiting for him. Her skin pricked at the sight of the fantom. She willed him to come.

  “Here they are,” called Phyllis, running out in an apron. They strode in—Gerry first, then Charles/Karl, and Julian lazily last. Gerald had not come. Florence knew immediately that she had always known he would not come—probably Julian had not even asked him, knowing that he would find their company childish, after his fine friends. And if she had always known he would not come, what had she been doing to herself, imagining? She was hot with shame, and turned crossly away when Geraint strode across to her—“like a puppy” she thought meanly—and said he was so glad she was there.

  Later that day, the Germans came, Wolfgang and Leon, with green hats and sticks, having walked from Nutcracker Cottage with packs on their backs. They sang together—Wandervogel songs, songs from the Winterreise and the Ring. Like Imogen, they were outsiders—they had not shared a childhood. They made the young women self-conscious, and sang to them, and they all joined in.

  Afterwards, they all said that they must remember this time, they must never forget what it was to be young, and alive. The sun shone down. The air was golden, and blue, and dark dark green and fragrant under the trees. They walked miles, one day, in a long string of purposeful, purposeless, striding bodies, and the next day they sat in the camp, and sang in German and in English, read aloud to and with each other, read silently lying in grass, or under the stars and moon. They bathed naked in the cool water, by day and by night, the girls behind the cover of the patch of yellow flags, the boys leaping from the high bank. They saw each other’s bodies with the kind of milky curiosity—there would be time enough, they thought and knew, time was infinite and elastic. They laughed at the zebra stripes and chevrons where they had browned beyond cuffs and inside shirt-necks. They all stared at Tom. Tom leaped, and pranced, and hurled himself wildly in curtains of water-drops, stirring up mud and pondweed, trailing leaves and cresses like a savage embellishment. Tom was baked golden-brown all over. His hair was bleached and his body was like gilded branches. He must, Dorothy thought, have spent hours and hours getting sunburned at the Tree House, or somewhere else. They all laughed at him, and he laughed back, and then set off again, running, walking, leaping, diving, in perpetual motion.

  They read plays—Comus, with Griselda as the Lady, Julian as Comus and Gerry as the Attendant Spirit, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Wolfgang as Oberon, Florence as Titania, Imogen as Hippolyta and Charles, Griselda, Dorothy and Geraint as the confused lovers. Tom was Puck. Toby Youlgreave read Sir Philip Sidney and Malory, Joachim Susskind and the Sterns read poems by Schiller and Goethe, Julian read Marvell’s “Garden” and Tom read Tennyson. Julian had learned conversations with Toby Youlgreave about Philip Sidney. Sidney had written what Julian believed was his favourite sentence—certainly his favourite this year. “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden …” He said he had been looking for a thesis subject, in case he decided to apply for a Fellowship at King’s, and he rather thought there might be something there. “English pastoral, in poetry and painting—” Pastoral was always at another time, in another place. Even the green pool and the long walk, over the Downs, would not become pastoral until they were past. And yet, the sun shone on them, and the leaves and the water and the grass shone with its reflections.

  • • •

  Memory, too, can smooth nastiness and horrors into gilded patterns. A horsefly bit Julian on the buttock, and the place swelled and burned and pricked. Phyllis burned an apple crumble, and they all said they liked its caramel taste, but left it on their plates—it was too cindery. And another night, there were uncooked sausages. Sage Dorothy got badly sunburned, even though she wore a hat. Her crimson face puffed and glistened around her eyes. Cool Griselda had hay fever. Her mouth tasted of tin and dishwashing water, her pretty nose streamed and streamed, her throat swelle
d and constricted her breathing, her small stock of handkerchiefs was soaked and smelly, and had to be washed and rewashed and pinned down with big stones to dry in the steady sunlight. Charles/Karl tore a fingernail and bled all over his better shirt. Phyllis had acne. Florence and the Germans remained smooth-skinned and intact, browning slowly.

  After the partly cooked sausages, they all had loose bowels, which is embarrassing when you are sleeping in rows in a tent, and there is only one earth closet, attached to the cottage. They had two quiet days after that, and made meek jokes about what had not been entirely funny. But their bodies were resilient. They were young.

  The two heroes of this camp were Wolfgang Stern and Tom. They made friends. Leon and Charles/Karl sat and discussed utopia with Joachim Susskind, but Wolfgang charmed everyone, male and female. Dorothy, very sensibly, had drawn Wolfgang aside, and had said, flatly, “I have said nothing to Tom.”

  “No?” said Wolfgang.

  “He wouldn’t understand,” said Dorothy, defensively. “He would change. I don’t want that.”