The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  He went into the shop. The pretty brass bell over the door trilled, and Imogen started. She did not lift her head. Prosper stepped across the room and touched her shoulder. He said he was sorry he was late, and did she need help, getting things together?

  She raised her face to him. It was, briefly, the face of a madwoman, staring, puffed up, blotched with crimson stains. Her eyes were wet, and her face was wet, and even the collar of her shirt was damp. She caught her breath, heaving, and tried to say she was sorry.

  “My dear—” said Prosper. He took two steps backwards, drew up the only other chair in the room, and sat down beside her. What was the matter? What had so distressed her?

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t…”

  She wept. Prosper offered his own perfectly folded handkerchief. “What can you not do?” he asked.

  “I can’t go there. I can’t go back there.” She paused and sobbed, and was more explicit.

  “I can’t sleep in that house. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

  Prosper Cain did not ask why she could not. He drew back from the answer, which he thought it was better for her not to give. He said

  “Then you must not. We will make other arrangements.”

  Imogen murmured desperate liquid things about Geraint—and betraying Pomona—and dirt, dirt on the carpets, dirt in the kitchen. She began to wave her hands, agitatedly, and Major Cain caught them, and held them down, wet and hot, in his own.

  “It must be possible for you to join the other young women, in the encampment? Or to remain with Florence and me in a comfortable hotel?”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I don’t need to know. You are part of my family. I care for you. I shall take care of you.”

  “There is no reason. No need, not—not—not really.”

  “There is clearly a need if you are reduced to this state. Perhaps we should say you are ill, and cannot attend this summer school at all? Maybe we should take a holiday.”

  “Don’t. I must stop this nonsense.”

  “You will soon be independent. Your work is good, as you know.

  You will be able to earn a living, and, I hope, find someone to love, and a home of your own, where you will be safe.”

  This caused renewed, quieter tears. Then Imogen said

  “I must go away, now. But not back to that house. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I hope you will let me look after you, until you have found,” he repeated his earlier phrase, “someone to love, to care for you—”

  “I do love someone,” said Imogen. Her eyes were closed. There was an infinitesimal silence of decision: “I love you.” The silence went on. “So I must go away.”

  They sat still, side by side. Then Imogen put out her arms and cast herself from her chair into Prosper Cain’s chair, her face against his, her body leaning into his.

  His arms closed automatically around her, to save their balance. So long, so very long, without women, even though his small house felt full of them. He kissed her hair. He held her, and tried to stay stiff as a ramrod, which he found he was in a perfectly double sense.

  “It isn’t possible,” he said, very gently. “For every reason we can think of. It is an impossible thing, in this world. It must be forgotten.”

  “I know that. So I must go away. And instead, everything is conspiring to send me back into that house—”

  He found he felt violently that she should not go back into that house. He said

  “I will take care of everything. Dry your eyes, and tidy your hair, and let us go home.”

  He did not know what he would do. But he imagined he would think of something, as he always did.

  He found it hard to go to sleep, that night. He looked at himself in the mirror. A sable, silvered moustache elegantly clipped, a lined face, steady eyes, the right side of fifty, but not for much longer. And a young woman—a lovely young woman—had fallen into his arms and said she loved him. He stroked his moustache, and stood to attention. She was probably right, she should go away, but who would look after her, if he did not? He had made her happy, when she had been unhappy and at a loss. He was not her father. She had a father, of whom she was afraid. She loved him, he was sensible enough to see (he told himself) because she was afraid of her father. That could be described as a tangle, or a muddle. He was good at cutting through tangles, and smoothing muddles, in the army, in the Museum. But they were not his own tangles or muddles. He had had enough of self-scrutiny, and got ready for bed in his military cot. Who dares, wins, he said to himself drowsily, without knowing what he meant. He couldn’t, he thought, ask Florence about this, as he had asked her about everything else. Damn that self-satisfied young animal, Gerald Matthiesen.

  Cold water, he said to himself. Clean cold water, pour on it.

  He had one of those terrible dreams in which things will not fit. In it, he found himself, as he frequently did, supervising the movement of furniture in the Museum, furniture swathed in dust sheets, shrouded and bound about and about. There was a large crew of beetlelike workers shifting an object, first in one direction, then in another. They were trying to get it through a door into the Crypt, and it was too large, it would not go. “You will scrape it,” said Prosper in the dream, “you careless fools, try some other way.”

  Then he was back with the removal men, all boys, who were now struggling to move the piece of furniture round a sharp angle on a narrow staircase where it would not fit. They were carrying it down; it was suspended over the narrow banister. He said “Can’t you see it won’t go?” “Then us mun tek it up, see,” said one of the men or boys, in the voice of a thick corporal whose life Prosper Cain had once saved when the lad made a silly error with a firing mechanism. He had gripped his wrist, and the boy had thought of aiming a blow at him and had thought better of it. In the dream, Prosper Cain was pleased to see Simms. He said “Use your head, Simms, it won’t go up there, it’s too big by far.”

  “You told us, sir, it mun go up,” said Simms, and gave an almighty heave, which broke the bands on the shrouding, and caused it to flap to earth over the banisters.

  The object was a huge, beautifully carved, ebony bed, fit for a sultan. “And all his harem,” said Prosper’s mind, as the beetle-men rammed the monstrosity into what he saw was his own wall, toile de jouy and all. The staircase began to disintegrate under the weight.

  “You’ll bring the house down,” said Prosper to Simms, and, perhaps fortunately, woke up.

  35

  The presence of the Sterns, father and sons, in Nutcracker Cottage should have agitated—and to a certain extent, did agitate—Olive Well-wood. She had a sense, when she thought about it, which she tried not to do, that everything unseen in her household had shifted its invisible place. Things had always been behind thick, felted, invisible curtains, or closed into heavy, locked, invisible boxes. She herself had hung the curtains, held the keys to the boxes, made sure that the knowable was kept from the unknown, in the minds of her children, most of all. And now she knew that grey, invisible cats had crept from their bags and were dancing and spitting on stair-corners, that curtains had been shaken, lifted, peeped behind by curious eyes, and her rooms were full of visible and invisible dust and strange smells. She was rather pleased with all these metaphors and began to plan a story in which the gentle and innocent inhabitants of a house became aware that a dark, invisible, dangerous house stood on exactly the same plot of land, and was interwoven, interleaved with their own. Like thoughts which had to stay in the head taking on an independent life, becoming solid objects, to be negotiated.

  She knew very well that Dorothy had gone to Munich to see Anselm Stern. She knew that Humphry knew that, and supposed, but had not been told, that he had spoken about this to Dorothy. She waited for either Humphry or Dorothy—or Violet, in whom Humphry might have confided—to say something to her, and none of them did. Dorothy went on just as normal—except that it was not, and could not be, as normal. She had become,
her mother thought, disagreeable and domineering about this medical training of which she did speak, a great deal, in an accusing voice, or so Olive understood it. Humphry placated their daughter.

  She did not think Tom knew any more than she did. He had most innocently made great friends with the unacknowledged German brothers. He was uneasy, yes, but this was because he felt people thinking he himself ought to be, or do, something.

  A metaphor for herself came into her mind, which was the equivalent of her metaphor for Dorothy. Dorothy she perceived as a doorless, windowless hut, encountered by a lost soul in a deep forest in need of shelter. The quester prowled around and around, and the blind brick walls emitted no light or sound, and there was no way in.

  Sometimes she moved the brick tower to a distant place on the plain. Surrounded—her mind worked busily—by the dried-up skeletons of those who had seen it as a refuge and arrived thirsty and starving.

  Opposite it, on the plain, stood a building which was made of hard porcelain, which had once had the shape of a capacious wardrobe, and was now carapace, in which a living creature was enclosed, or self-enclosed, had perhaps excreted the shell, which had graded colours and ridges and frills, as a whelk might, or a monstrous hermit-crab.

  There were things—many things—she did not wish to know, was appalled to think of knowing.

  The porcelain was light, lighter than air. The wind took it over quicksands. The porcelain was painted with eyes, but they did not see as a peacock’s tail does not see, or a moth’s wing.

  If she stopped spinning, the thing would sink.

  Another part of the problem was Anselm Stern. When he had first come to England, she had treated him gracefully as an acquaintance, and he had accepted her lead. There was a sense in which he was no more than an acquaintance. They had met in masks, amidst music, in an unreal world where everything is permitted, which seemed more real than the real world, which was always happening to Olive, whether at Todefright, or in Munich, or anywhere, almost, except the Yorkshire coalfield. But now, he too had acquired a lacquered surface, like the faces of his puppets, with their single, fixed expressions to which the lights and shadows added meanings. She had seen him look at Dorothy—quick, quick, think of a story about someone who had a child they never knew they had—stolen away by a witch—would they recognise each other if no one told them, or pass unacknowledged in the street? It was a good story, but it made her profoundly unhappy to see the two smiling secretively at each other. She thought of a story of a puppeteer for whom all human creatures had strings to pull and batons to direct. That was a good story too, but its impulse was unjust. The damned couple were happy. They did not intend her to share the happiness.

  There was a kind of relief, and a kind of anguish, to her, to understand that all principal actors intended to maintain this state of affairs.

  She was surprised when August Steyning asked her to collaborate on a kind of pageant or play to be worked on during the arts and crafts camp. He had an idea for a play about magic that would use human actors and puppets—puppets moreover, of two kinds, both life-size, with a dark human moving them, and glittering small marionettes, with their own stage. He had in mind one of Olive’s magical tales. Something like The Shrubbery, the human boy entering the land of the Little People, which could be represented by marionettes.

  Mrs. Wellwood sat and stared at her teacup; she looked at Anselm Stern, to see what he thought, and he was looking out of the window, with a carved, motionless face, inscrutable. She liked August Steyning. She felt safe with him—he liked her work, there was no human mess or muddle.

  “Mr. Stern?” she said, lightly, lightly.

  “I think this idea of August is a very good idea. We might make a new art. An art of two worlds.”

  “I am so happy to be included,” she said sincerely, sounding insincere, because she was in two worlds.

  August Steyning, English and urbane, poured tea.

  One advantage of putting on a play—or performance—at a summer camp is that it is possible to use a huge cast, and a large crew of wardrobe and props workers, without paying them. Indeed, Steyning said to Olive, they pay you. They sat down with Anselm Stern and Wolfgang at the dinner table in Nutcracker Cottage and elaborated a plan. Steyning’s first idea had been to use the tale of the stolen child—or possibly of the stolen wet-nurse—who is spirited into the Fairy Hill, and needs to be rescued. This, he explained, would mean that you could “see into the hill” if the marionette theatre could be—a closed, curtained world—in the midst of the human theatre. Anselm Stern said that they might use those versions of the universal Cinderella story—Catskin, Allerleirauh—in which the princess, fleeing her father, finds a prince, only to have him spirited away by a witch, at the ends of the earth and put into a magic sleep of forgetfulness. He had always been particularly drawn to those tales of a resourceful heroine covering the earth in her search, asking guidance of the sun, the moon, the stars, the winds. Wolfgang said he was interested in making life-size masks and puppets. He had had an idea of making a whole audience of great dolls and scarecrows, who would be there at the beginning, and sit quite still, and then suddenly—dangerously—join in the action. Besiege the fortress, maybe. Maybe be invoked by the many-furred girl. Olive said

  “There is something in my mind. A search for a real house in a magic world. A search for a magic house in a real world. Two worlds, inside each other.”

  “The Wizard of Oz,” said Steyning.

  “Humphry says that is an allegory about Bimetallism and the Gold Standard, with its road of gold ingots and its silver shoes.”

  “It has a little wizard in a huge machine,” said Stern. “Which is good for marionettes, or other puppets.”

  “The fortress is like the Dark Tower in Sir Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” said Olive. “A lightless block.”

  “There is a lot one can do with lighting,” said Steyning. “Even in a barn, without a conflagration.”

  “These small pieces of tales are like a kaleidoscope,” said Stern. “Without end to be reshaped, differently ordered.”

  It was an odd play. It grew like a vegetable from its story-seeds, and the metaphors in Olive’s mind. The early days of the camp were spent on construction and reconstruction. Marian Oakeshott appeared and took charge of an army of wardrobe workers, who brought old clothes and new bales, and cut, and stitched, and decorated. Wolfgang had a workshop for life-size puppets and mask-construction, in which he involved Tom, who was full of inventiveness. The workshop was in an old barn where bales of straw still stood about, and Tom began to make a strawman. This creature turned out not to be benign, like the one in The Wizard of Oz, but vacant, swollen and menacing. He had a huge boll of a head, with black tunnel-eyes and a mouth stitched with string, jaggedly. This head lolled and revolved above a larger-than-life-size bale of a body, with swivelling dropsical legs, and short, useless arms, no more than fringes of sticks at the shoulders. Wolfgang said it was full of horror, and should be one of the enemies met on the way. I’ll act it, said Tom. It can burn up. It should burn up, said Steyning, admiring it, but we can’t risk it, not in a barn full of children and dolls.

  “Blasebalg,” said Anselm Stern. “I do not know the English.”

  “Bellows,” said Steyning. “Of course. Straws in the wind. A small tourbillon, leaving nothing.”

  “And I shall be a Wolf-man,” said Wolfgang. “Someone has brought a coat of fur and a fox with some paws, and I was going to use them for Allerleirauh, but I shall make me a wire Beast, with a hot red tongue and a how-do-you-say, zuckender Schwantz, and great tearing nails.”

  “Twitching tail. Claws,” said Steyning.

  “Ja, claws. I shall be killed with a sword.”

  “Our heroine doesn’t have a sword. She is a girl, not a woman.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she has been promised to my sister Hedda, and because my sister Dorothy will have nothing to do with it.”

  “Cold iron,” s
aid Steyning. “Those who go out against the Good People, or the Pharisees, must go armed with cold iron. She takes a kitchen knife.”

  “I wouldn’t like to face Hedda with a kitchen knife,” said Tom.

  Olive thought the final adversary should be a metal man, a machine-man. A suit of armour, said Steyning. Tom remembered the night-black rider in Gareth and Lynette. He recited, and Olive joined in

  High on a night-black horse, in night-black arms

  With white breast-bone and barren ribs of Death

  And crowned with fleshless laughter—

  Wolfgang liked that. A helmet which was a skull, a skeleton which was a carapace. Ah, said Tom, but there is a twist. Inside there is a blooming boy. With a bright fresh face. Nothing bad. A part for Robin, said Olive. Florian can be the stolen changeling. Leon can move the Death figure, said Wolfgang. He’s no good at making, but he is good moving.

  Geraint enjoyed planning, he enjoyed finding the right person for a job, he was, in his City form, as good at compromise and consultation, as in his Marsh form of sulky boy he had been inept and sulky. He met an army quartermaster from Lydd in a pub near Old Romney, and arranged to borrow a number of tents and some cooking equipment, which amazed everyone. He drew up an agenda, a timetable. Gymnastic exercises and dance movements after breakfast. Excursions to churches. Classes in embroidery, silversmithing, ceramics, theatre design, acting. A lecture at the end of most afternoons before the evening meal.