The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

“So you arrange your brothers, to suit yourself, Schwesterchen.”

  “You are always laughing at me. You do understand, really.”

  “I shall be silent as night, and—I don’t know the word, it is not cunning, which I do know—taktvoll.”

  “Tactful.”

  Dorothy was somewhat apprehensive when she watched Wolfgang set out to charm Tom. They went on little rambles together and exchanged names of plants—Rittersporn, larkspur—the spur is in both. He charmed the young women, too, paying carefully casual compliments to Imogen, Griselda, Florence and even Phyllis, finding them little gifts, stones and bunches of flowers. Julian, who was the same age as Wolfgang, envied him his ease. He was able to swing on the gate between youth and man, innocence and experience, back and forth, easily, with his dark, sharp, alert smile, at once youthfully silly, and slyly almost sexual. “What do you like best about me?” he said to Griselda, with whom he conversed in an Anglo-German babble. “Oh, that’s easy. Your name.”

  “My name? But I was simply given that, it is not me.”

  “You were simply given your long legs and your face, for that matter,” said Griselda, resting her eyes on these excellent forms. “But you can’t hear Wolfgang in English. It’s terribly romantic. Wolf walk. Wolf pace. We don’t have names that mean dangerous animals.”

  “Am I dangerous?”

  “Oh yes.”

  But this was as far as flirting went, and he had much the same conversation with Florence, and with Imogen.

  They waited until the very end of the camp to hold the daring bathing party in which they all went naked into the pool. Wolfgang said it was a ceremony to ensure friendship would last, a kind of pagan total immersion. They invited the tutors to join them, but neither wanted to come. Julian knew that this was because their bodies were already less than perfect. They came shyly out of their tents and took hands, and danced on the lawn, white and gold Griselda with high mediaeval breasts, thickset Dorothy, willowy Imogen, the one who was trying to cover herself, and could not, because Florence, gleaming like porcelain, and chubby Phyllis were holding her hands. They circled a bit, singing “Greensleeves,” as they all knew the tune, and then the line peeled off, and one by one, resolute, laughing, looking furtively at each other, they ran, still holding hands, into the water, shrieking as it closed over their sexes, laughing as their hair tumbled under, and then chasing each other, swimming like ducks or fish. Wolfgang’s hand closed around Griselda’s breast and let go. Geraint managed to catch Florence, and hold her, before she wriggled away like an eel or a Rhine maiden. Tom leaped up out of the water, and somersaulted, and dived down in a curtain of mist and came up, and dived again.

  Julian sat on the little pier, his sex lolling between his thighs, and looked on. He thought, we are such fools. We cannot imagine we shall grow old, and we shall grow old, year by year, all this pretty—more than pretty—flesh will be damaged and diminished, one way or another. He put his chin in his hands, and from below the water Tom pulled him down by the ankles, and, laughing wildly, smeared him all over with mud.

  Time is cyclical. Time is linear. Time is biological—breasts change shape, mouths harden, hair loses a little gloss. Time is named in years and months. In 1903 they made an attempt to repeat the camp and its innocent pleasures, in the same tents, in the same garden, by the same deep pool. Dorothy was struggling with the Preliminary Scientific Examination. Tom, nearly twenty-one, had made a worse hash of his matriculation than in 1902, and knew it, though his tutors and family did not, for the marks were not yet public. He spent time avoiding questions about when he would go to university, and where. All this had added a studied evasiveness—still charming enough—to his carefree demeanour. Imogen had graduated, and needed to decide on the future. Florence was thinking about whether to study, what to study, where to study, and was in the interim reading and dreaming, in a generally accusing way, if these things can accuse. Gerald came less often to the Museum, but he still came, just enough, and talked intelligently to Florence, with easy good manners, just enough to prolong her torment. Julian had sat his Finals in Classics, and was also waiting for the results.

  Spirits were lowered, in the group as a whole. It was possible that the camp might have restored them, but in the event, they were overwhelmed by rain, in what turned out to be the wettest summer ever recorded. They lay in their tents, night after night, listening to the beating of the water, and the flailing of the branches, and the hissing of the wet leaves and the trickling of mud under their groundsheets, around their tent-pegs. They mostly moped. Tom proposed a mud-fight, but the others could work up no real enthusiasm. They were clammy and uncomfortable. Then one night the wind got up, and the guy-ropes tore loose and the tents slopped and slapped over the grass. They crawled, soaked, out from under. The tutors tried to light a fire in the cottage, but spirals of rain soughed in the chimney and it sputtered and went out. They made tracks gloomily towards the back door, huddled under sodden blankets. A figure went past them in the opposite direction, racing and whirling. It was Tom, half-visible through the ropes of driving rain. He ran along the jetty, and dived into the pond, and came up again, blowing water like a triton, his hair plastered to his face.

  “Come on,” he cried. The rain beat in polka dots around him, and vicious whip-lashes of wet wind stirred up the pond’s surface into crowns and ridges. “Come on,” cried Tom, but no one came, and although he splashed vigorously for some time, they all felt—including Tom—silly, and humiliated. The next day, they went home.

  Nineteen hundred and three was the year when the English King went to Paris with pomp, circumstance and amiability, to lay the foundations of the Entente Cordiale in 1904. In Germany the Social Democrats won an election and argued over the principle of wearing knee-breeches to pay an official call on Kaiser Wilhelm, who believed they were a gang of traitors. In 1903 H. G. Wells joined the Fabian Society with the intention of shaking it up. A lunatic penetrated the Bank of England and fired shots at the Secretary, Kenneth Grahame. Grahame left the Bank in 1908: the Bank seemed to think he was more interested in writing stories, and messing about in boats, than in the national economy. In Manchester Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union. She was, the editor of the Labour Leader told her daughter Sylvia, “no longer sweet and gentle.” Patty Dace was interested, but did not join. In London there was a Festival of the Music of Richard Strauss; Anselm Stern and his sons came over and accompanied Dorothy, Karl and Griselda to the performances. Griselda was excited by the music. Dorothy was not.

  Herbert Methley published Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl. This was a mystical, fleshly, atmospheric tale of the doomed passion between the solitary poet (“my name is a version of Wodwose, the Green Man, the Man of the Woods”) and an earthy, even muddy, child of nature in Romney Marsh. It was briefly successful and had some good reviews, before the police and the censors descended on the bookshops and burned their stock. Phoebe Methley said to Marian Oakeshott that she knew she should be very angry, and that censoring serious literary work was wrong—“but I am glad, I have to say, that people aren’t reading it and asking me questions. And that wild girl, in my view, resembles no one, living or dead, except the inner tremolo of Herbert’s strung-up sensibility—but I wouldn’t like to be anyone who thought it was based on her, even ever so slightly.”

  “Shall I read it?” asked Marian.

  “I’ll lend it to you. Wrapped in brown paper, wrapped in newspaper. Keep it in a drawer. You’ll find you don’t really want to read it in bed. Or so I imagine.”

  At the end of the year Dorothy had passed all parts of the Preliminary Exam except Physics, which she was to resit. Griselda had matriculated. Julian had his First—neither the best, nor the worst First, a gentlemanly First. Karl had passed Part I of the Maths Tripos. Tom had failed again. Philip was working on a new, silvery blue glaze.

  34

  When Geraint, or Gerry, Fludd left Purchase House he wanted, he thought to himself, deli
berately using the cliché, to shake its dust from his feet. His mind was full of images both mocking and distasteful. The holes in the long dirty carpets in the corridors. The vacancy in his mother’s large eyes. Pomona being skittish or girlish. Half-cooked fish (before Elsie came) and watery porridge. Clutter, as though the workshop was trying to infest the living space with drying knobs of clay and smears of engobe. He needed to get out, and he had got out. Now he was calmer, and had his own life, he began to feel he might have responsibilities.

  This feeling was inextricable from his need to continue to visit the Cains, which was easy for him to do, because his sister was there. But after some time he began to be really interested in Imogen’s future, as opposed to appearing to be so. She was good-looking, in an elongated, old-fashioned way, and her slow speech and gestures were less mannered, more natural. She appeared to have talent. She was worth helping. And if he helped her, intelligently, he would be helping those abandoned helpless ones in the Marshes. His father might be a genius but he was the exact opposite of a good businessman, even more a good salesman. He did not appear to want to part with anything he had made. And he might turn Philip Warren into a copy of himself. Geraint visited the Cains when Prosper came back from his visit to Berlin. He said he thought there should be a showplace somewhere in London, where Imogen’s work could be displayed and sold—and the work of the Purchase potters also, and possibly other selected artists who had been at the Royal College with Imogen. Somewhere perhaps in Holborn or Clerkenwell. It could combine a studio with the display—so Imogen, perhaps, and a potter, maybe—could be seen working, and could explain the work to interested visitors. He had talked to Basil Well-wood, and Katharina, and they were interested in investing in the project. And he himself could help with managing.

  Imogen said she had thought she should leave South Kensington and set up on her own. Major Cain said he hoped she would not—it was good for Florence to have her company—she should feel more than welcome to stay at least until this excellent idea had been put in place, and was running. Geraint looked at Florence, to see if she was happy. He did not think her expression was one of pleasure. Much of the smiling poised calm he had loved her for had vanished lately. But he still loved her, doggedly. He thought of her in the beds of the women he visited, and he remembered this now, as he looked at her, and flushed. “What do you think?” he asked her. She said it was a clever idea, and she wished she had a talent, as Imogen had.

  The showroom was set up in a street in Clerkenwell where other artisans already worked and showed. It had a plate-glass window and display shelves and cabinets (made by furniture students) in elegant modern Arts and Crafts forms. There was a counter which was more like a long hall table, also in pale wood, and behind the counter, a recessed space in which Imogen’s work table, with blow-pipe and leather bags, was set up, next to a wheel for a potter. Various young women from the college came and threw pots from time to time. Geraint brought in young men from the City and Basil Wellwood himself came, and bought large vases by Benedict Fludd, which Geraint had had transported from Lydd. There was argument over what to call the place. Geraint thought of “Kiln and Crucible,” which Florence said sounded industrial. Imogen, who had been working on some small silver, walnut-shaped boxes, said “Why not The Silver Nutmeg?” and that was agreed on. They made a strange tree, from bronze and silvery wire, about five feet high, which they stood in a large jardiniere, made at Purchase by Philip and Benedict, in a glaze shading from pale sea-green to deep indigo, painted around with a prancing dragon with fourteen legs, whose teeth closed on his own scaly tail. Imogen hung this tree with small gold and silver objects made by herself and other silversmiths and from the top branch she hung the Silver Nutmeg and Golden Pear, smooth and glowing.

  Geraint liked fixing things. He believed he was the prime mover behind the summer crafts camp in 1904. One idea led to another. If there was a camp in and around Purchase House—a camp where people could come and make things, and other people could come and learn, then the carpets might be replaced, and the furniture spruced up, and the house full of talk and work instead of female lethargy and retarded tocking clocks. It came into being in his mind—tents in the orchard, for men and for women—classes in the empty stables, painting, weaving, Imogen at a table in the harness room, surrounded by a circle of eager learners, classes at all levels from elementary to masters, in making pots … He thought about the studio in the dairy, and his father in the studio. He was a man of moods, Benedict Fludd, many of them evil, more of them morose, some of them manic. In one of his good moods—by which he meant manic—his son thought, he might be got to agree. There would then be the problem of the mood he might be in by the time the camp was set up. Geraint quailed. He went to talk to Prosper Cain who suggested that the summer camp should be set up elsewhere—they might ask Frank Mallett and Dobbin and Miss Dace if they could suggest a site—but it should be set up in reach of Purchase House, so that Fludd could perhaps give a lecture on his work—or a demonstration—and so could Imogen. It would be good for Pomona to have something happening—she must be given employment.

  The person who helped out—instigated by Dace, Mallett and Dobbin—was Herbert Methley. A neighbouring farmer had just died, and his widow was happy to let the run-down farm buildings to the proposed camp to make studios for classes. She would provide milk, bread, apples and cider. There was plenty of room in the meadows for tents, there was a farm pond even if there was no river, the bathing places of Dymchurch and Hythe were within reach. Methley proposed some lectures on the Art of Writing. Wood-carvers and landscape painters were suggested. Geraint went, with Prosper Cain, to Purchase House, where they ate a lamb pie, cooked by Elsie, and surreptitiously studied Benedict Fludd. They asked if he would, when the camp was in place, spare Philip to help with the pottery classes and perhaps even lend his kiln to fire the work of the pottery enthusiasts. Fludd said Philip was more than busy, and he did not propose to put his kiln in danger. But his mood was not savage. Geraint had spent a short lifetime calculating how savage his father’s mood might be. His lip muscles were relaxed. Geraint looked from his father to Prosper Cain. He thought: I do not love my father. I have never loved my father. I wish I had a different father—a man like Cain who protects people, a man like Basil Wellwood who understands that I’m clever and ambitious. Benedict Fludd had loved his daughters in some odd way. But he rarely acknowledged the existence of his son.

  “Imogen will be here,” Geraint said. “Imogen will be giving classes in silver-working. You really should make the effort to come to London and see The Silver Nutmeg. We sold two of your Janus vessels. It’s going well.”

  Fludd had been making two-faced vessels, benign and calm on one side, possessed by rage, or grief, or pain on the other. They were in dark ruddy earthenware, decorated with black, in the hair and beards. Geraint did not like them, but the cognoscenti appeared to.

  “Imogen does not come here. She has left us.”

  “She will be here for weeks in the summer, for the camp. I wish you felt able to join in. Everyone would want to see you and your work. You could even work with Imogen—to make some things …”

  Philip said he didn’t mind directing beginners on how to wedge clay and how to centre pots and so on. But what was needed was a talk by Benedict Fludd, about the whole history of working with clay, about Palissy and majolica, porcelain and slipware …

  “I might think about it. If the time was right—”

  “And people could come—not every day, but once or twice—to see where you work—” said Geraint.

  “I don’t want people prying or messing.”

  “Imogen and Philip will make sure they do neither.”

  Fludd said neither no nor yes to this, which was more than could be hoped for.

  The summer drew nearer. Geraint worked with those other organisers, Patty Dace, Frank Mallett, Arthur Dobbin and Marian Oakeshott, who said there should be someone to teach healthy exercises, and there should be
drama of some kind. There should be theatre classes. This plan, too, burgeoned. Geraint was despatched to speak to August Steyning, who said that he had a master puppet-maker staying with him, who might be induced—he and his son—into giving classes on puppets and marionettes. And he himself might put on a performance—he had always wanted to make a hybrid work, with marionettes and fallible human actors.

  And so it advanced, day by day. The Fabians and the Theosophists, the Anglicans and the craftsmen’s guilds put up notices and offered services of hammer and chisel, teapot and cake, stage and workshop, healthy drill and movement classes. The original campers were rather put out—there was a lack of intimacy, a lack of spontaneity, an absence of the pagan and the sun-worshipping. But Geraint said persuasively it wasn’t instead of the wild wood, it was as well as—it was an opportunity to create beautiful things and enjoy Nature, all at once. He started planning the day-to-day life of this so far shadowy world. They would build up to a climax, when Fludd would lecture, the play would be put on, and there would be an overnight firing in the bottle kiln, with everyone helping to carry wood, and midnight feasting.

  Imogen acquiesced in all these plans on her behalf, but made no suggestions, either for activities, or for organisation. Florence Cain said she had no handicraft talents of any kind, but would stay in a hotel and drop in on the campers from time to time. She didn’t want to be prancing about in gym slips and knickers, either, thank you. Geraint was briefly mortified—he had imagined her playing some unspecified role. He said Imogen would be disappointed. Florence said “I don’t think so. I really don’t.”

  A few days before the campers arrived, Prosper Cain went in a cab, one summer evening, to Clerkenwell, to collect Imogen Fludd and her tools. It was a very hot summer. The early evening light, though full of particles and floating debris, was gold in the grey. Prosper stood outside The Silver Nutmeg, and looked in. The tree shone with its perpetual fruit. The shelves were bright with precious metals and subtle glazes. Enamel work and threaded beads hung from ceramic branches on miniature ring-trees at either end of the long table. Between these trees was a pale mass, tawny hair, spread shoulders in a grey, Quakerish shirt. She had got tired of waiting—he was late, the streets were crowded—and had gone to sleep, he thought, looking with pleasure at the abandon of her limbs, usually so inhibited. He had done well, he thought—for the last time, as it turned out—to take her in, this companion for Florence, his motherless daughter.