The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Much had been done, much that was valuable, by those who had gone out amongst the starving and the derelict and had reported on crowded rooms in unsanitary buildings, dead and dying crowded together, the sickness of sweat-shop and lucifer workers. He read out a description of the appalling, rapid descent into penury and death of a good worker who injured his back.

  He said that compared to individual witness and individual feelings, the compiling of statistics might seem dry. But those stirred not only the imagination but the reason, and the will to act. Statistics was a human science. It had begun, he rather thought, with Durkheim, noticing that the number of suicides in Paris did not vary from year to year. All of them different human creatures, all of them grim decisions taken that life was no longer bearable. The causes might be poverty, lost love, failure at business, humiliation or sickness. But the figure was the same.

  In the case of poverty the compilation of figures touched the imagination in a way individual cases could not. The hero of this study was Charles Booth who had interviewed everybody—registrars, school attendance officers, School Board visitors, census-takers—and had produced, beginning in 1892, seventeen volumes of reports on the nature and extent of poverty in London. He had mapped it street by street, colouring the streets according to the data, and had come to the conclusion that a million people, over 30 per cent of the population of London, had not the wherewithal to subsist or continue living. This figure revealed an unjust society as individual descriptions alone could not. It was a prerequisite for putting forward constitutional and legal changes—the introduction of a pension for the aged in place of the foul and degrading Workhouse, the suggestion of minimum legal wages, and maximum hours of work, of help for the unemployed that was rationally administered and not a function of charitable impulses amongst the better-off.

  Charles/Karl listened dubiously. He had been moving amongst those who believed that only a revolution of the underdogs would bring about any change in the gruesome system. Everyone bothered about the poor. His parents’ friends truly held the belief that the undeserving poor should be sequestered in concentration camps and reformed, reconstructed or even—in the case of imbeciles and madmen—charitably put to death. In his college in Cambridge lunches were given for working-men, some of whom were crusty, some of whom were boys with sidelong glances under long lashes, some of whom were auto-didacts, socialists, or would-be poets. He did not feel he had got to know any of these selected and collected examples. He did not know what to say to them. He did not speak their language though he could communicate with intense small groups of German anarchists. He thought he might discuss the LSE with Humphry. The glamour of statistics had touched him.

  Gerald kept making remarks to Julian over the top of Florence’s hat, as though she was not there. He said once, with a sardonic smile,

  “He who would do good must do it in minute particulars.”

  Julian drawled back “Not clear, my dear chap. Are you referring to particular people, or minute particular figures?”

  Florence said “William Blake was mad, you know,” but neither of them appeared to have heard her, and perhaps it was not a clever remark.

  They gathered after the lecture, the three Kingsmen easy in each other’s company, analysing good points, dismissing bad ones. Personal relationships, said Gerald, were the root of every virtue, couldn’t be done without, a man could not spend his life on reducing other men to figures without damage. Florence said we are not all monads, and nobody answered. Charles/Karl said society did exist, it was not only a mass of individuals. Classes existed. And male and female said Florence, crossly. Indeed, said Julian politely. Geraint, who had joined them, said that new women’s groups for agitating were very interesting. Gerald took the conversation back to human friendship.

  He was embarrassing Julian, not because he was insulting Julian’s sister, but because Julian no longer loved him, and was not ready to admit that, precisely because of the intensity of the Apostolic faith in friendship as a supreme value. Julian no longer wanted to kiss, or indeed even to touch, Gerald, who had—as often happens—become much more eager to touch, to hold, to grasp Julian as Julian withdrew. Julian had begun to think Gerald was clever and silly, and did not want to know he thought that, it was inconvenient, their group was so comfortable, their walks so companionable, Cambridge and the English countryside so lovely.

  Geraint moved round the group to Florence’s side. He said “I wish you had been able to persuade Imogen to go back home for a few days.” So did she, said Florence, repressively.

  Geraint said she was looking beautiful. She broke off her intent frown to smile weakly at him, which encouraged him. He did not feel at home with the theoretical Kingsmen. Also he half-despised them for their lack of acquaintance with “real life” which he thought he knew better. He asked Florence her opinion of Humphry’s talk and she said it did seem to suggest things that could really be done, and that it was absurd for the middle classes to live in fear, as they did, of the dirty and desperate armies in the sinks of their towns.

  At this point, inopportunely, Elsie Warren approached them. She nodded to Florence, and asked Geraint, without urgency, if he had seen his father. Geraint had not.

  “He’s not at home. At least I think not. He’s not at meals. Mind you, he often isn’t.”

  “Probably recovering from his lecture,” said Geraint. “A very small quantity of society makes him a recluse for days.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Elsie. “Your mother isn’t bothered.”

  “We shall need him at the end of the camp—for the firing.”

  “I think he’ll come. He’ll want to oversee it.”

  Geraint turned away from her rather abruptly, and asked Florence if he could walk her back to Rye. He expected her to say no, but she said yes. This was partly to claim independence from Julian and Gerald, and partly because she thought Geraint might have something to say about Imogen. But it was partly also that his feelings for her—his steadfastness and patience—were comforting. He was as much out of a men’s world as the Cambridge men, but in his men’s world, men liked women, women interested them.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said. “Something is going on, that’s odd.”

  “I always like talking to you. About anything at all.”

  “I don’t know about this—”

  “Try me,” said Geraint.

  “It’s Papa,” said Florence.

  They began to walk away, towards Rye.

  Charles/Karl was left with Elsie Warren.

  “You don’t recognise me, do you?” she said. “I’m out of place. You’ve met me at Purchase House, carrying dishes and clearing up. We’ve not been introduced, so to speak.”

  He could not place her accent, which was not local, but he could tell that it was working-class. He considered her. She had made the best of herself, he thought. She had a pale grey high-necked shirt, with tight cuffs, and a swinging skirt in a dark grey cotton. She had a bright red belt, round a shapely waist, and a straw hat with a bright red ribbon and a dashing bunch of stitched anemones, red and purple and blue. He did not know what to say to her, or indeed, how to speak to her. He was also aware that she knew this, and was amused by it. Amusement was not a reaction he had expected.

  “Did you enjoy the talk, then?” she said.

  “It was of great interest. I am trying to decide whether to study these matters—statistics, poverty—at the London School of Economics.”

  “Or?”

  “What you mean, or?”

  “If you don’t do that, what will you do?”

  He could not say, be a good anarchist and foment a revolution. He blushed. “I might go to Germany.”

  “Might you? Nice to have a choice. I should like such a choice.”

  He looked at her and she looked back, intently. They saw each other clearly. She went on

  “Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don’t come into it, much, for me. I do wha
t I must.” Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn’t.

  “I imagine you don’t talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects.”

  “You are being unfair,” said Charles/Karl. “You are mocking me.”

  “We can do that, at least, if we dare.”

  “Miss Warren,” said Charles/Karl, “I wish you would not talk as though you were a group, or a class, or a committee. I should like to be talking to you as a person.”

  “Can you?”

  “Why should I not?”

  “For every reason. I am both working-class and not respectable. I am a Fallen Woman. I have a daughter. You don’t want to be talking to me as if I were a person, Mr. Wellwood.”

  This information, far from shocking him, excited him. In Munich the goddess, Fanny zu Reventlow, was the mother of a lovely child with no known father. Desire should be free, they said in Schwabing, and Charles/Karl listened, and desired in the abstract, and agreed in principle. He could not—not now—discuss Fanny zu Reventlow with this pugnacious person with a narrow waist, in a red belt.

  “Do you talk to everyone like this, Miss Warren?”

  “No. I don’t. Only to well-meaning persons like you.”

  “I should like—” said Charles/Karl. He would like, he realised, to undo the belt, and several of the buttons, and slap her and kiss her. He was astounded. He was also gratified to find such a spontaneous reaction in himself.

  “What would you like?” asked Elsie, in a way that almost persuaded him she had read his secret mind.

  “I should like to get to know you. I should like you to stop treating me as a representative of a class, and allow me to talk to you. I should like to be permitted to walk you home, if you are going home.”

  “I am. You can come, if you want. I really should be looking for Mr. Fludd, but if he don’t want to be found, he won’t be. He is a secret man.”

  They set off together. Motion made them easy with each other. He said “Do you think a man and a woman can be good friends, Miss Warren?”

  “Elsie, why don’t you. I suppose you call Philip, Philip.”

  “Karl.”

  “I thought it was Charles. Karl for Karl Marx?”

  “You know a great deal.”

  “I have friends—women friends—who are teaching me. I hope to become a teacher myself. I do not fancy cleaning and carting for ever. And, in answer to your question, I think yes, a man and a woman can be good friends. But it isn’t easy for them, being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then, there’s the problem of men and women being different sexes. You are not to laugh. It is a problem.”

  “I know that. What I do think—”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think if they are good friends—then whatever else they are—or are not—is better.”

  They went on walking. He said

  “You will only laugh if I say you can be just as trapped in a house in Portman Square, and a public school and a university, as in the kitchen.”

  “Yes, I will. I will laugh heartily. I will listen, Karl, and I will laugh and laugh.”

  “I never talk to anyone as you talk to me.”

  “I shall teach you, Mr. Deprived-Rich-Man. I may even introduce you to my very little, very clever daughter.”

  She looked into his face to see if she had gone too far, had lost him.

  “I should like that,” said Charles/Karl.

  Herbert Methley leaned confidentially out over the lectern. He told his audience that he was a workingman. He worked hard as a gardener on a smallholding in this county, the Garden of England, and he worked also at his desk, describing life in that Garden. But the fruits of his labours had been taken from him by the police in their boots and helmets, and had been cast into a fiery furnace, and consumed. He had been told that what he had written was shameful. But it was the men in gowns and helmets who had real cause to be ashamed.

  He was a stringy sunburned man, with a crimson silk neckerchief round his prominent Adam’s apple. He had that habit good lecturers have of letting his eye rove over the audience, looking for listening faces, or expressions of boredom. He saw Griselda and Dorothy with Tom and the two Germans, near the front. At the back, at the side, Julian and Gerald sat together. Florence was not with them. She was with Geraint, towards the front, in the centre. There was a row of older, judiciously composed women, Marian, Phoebe, Patty Dace, towards the back. Also near the back was Elsie Warren. Charles/Karl had seen that the seat next to her was empty, and had sat in it. She was sitting very upright, with her arms folded round her chest. Phyllis came in late, and sat down just behind Leon. Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin were there. Methley acknowledged them with a nod, before embarking on his attack on the clergy.

  Where did the concept of shame come from? he asked. Our fellow creatures in the garden of earth do not know shame, though we persuade ourselves sometimes to feel it for them, to our shame. Shame began, we are told, in the Original Garden, when the innocent man and woman saw that they were naked, and were ashamed. What caused this? The wily serpent caused it, by making them eat the forbidden fruit, which he told them was the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, said Herbert Methley, insinuating that good and evil originated in those parts of the body that the shamed human beings now felt they must cover. Yet why should this be so? Are good and evil not much more— infinitely more—to be found in cruelty, in humiliation of others, in selfishness, in abuse of power, in theft—I could go on in this way, said Herbert Methley—for the rest of this little talk. Good and evil do not reside in human flesh, in which we should rejoice, about which we should not—neither men nor women—feel shame. Every day in this camp the young folk come out and perform graceful, and strenuous, and delightful bodily movements. He smiled, imagining them.

  Gerald whispered to Julian, with the grave naughtiness of the Apostles, “I think he emits some kind of musk. From under his armpits. He has well-developed armpits, you can see.”

  “Hush,” said Julian.

  The lecturer developed the Garden metaphor. He passed on to Blake and the Garden of Love, in which a Chapel was built, with

  Thou shalt not, writ over the door

  So I turned to the Garden of Love

  That so many sweet flowers bore

  And I saw it was filled with graves

  And tomb-stones where flowers should be

  And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds

  And binding with briars my joys and desires.

  He said much of the distorting shamefastness of the world we lived in was the historical consequence of the centuries of celibate priesthood. He looked at Frank Mallett, who looked blandly back.

  The novel had suffered. In England it was written to be read aloud round the fireside of a married vicar or curate, with his wife gravely listening. In France the priests took charge of the women and children, and novels were written for the separate—and often salacious—male readers.

  It was not possible in a novel to describe most of the world as it really was.

  It should be. We need honest novels much more than we need moralising tracts.

  His own novel Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl had been about a modern man of the woods, a Wodwose, who had loved a woman as men do love women.

  He believed, he said, in a pagan unity of nature. We are all one life which began long before there were any gardens, or any men in black gowns. Our feelings developed subtly, over millions of years, from the feelings and stirrings of jelly in the marshes, of slow, cold-blooded reptiles in hot swamps, of beings who clambered in trees that were now coal. It was possible, he said, to make a strenuous attempt to rediscover the strong, primal joy in being. One must go back to the roots of things. He quoted Marvell

  My vegetable love should grow

  Vaster than Empires, and more slow—

  Gerald said “That’s rich. Is he doing it on purpose?”<
br />
  “Oh, I think so. Do be quiet.”

  Elsie’s arms were still tightly clutched around her. Her mouth was set firm. Charles/Karl wanted to pull her fingers, to unwind her, and knew he must not.

  Herbert Methley’s eye wandered over the upturned faces like a bumble-bee over a flowerbed. He had a skill the younger men had not developed. He could tell which of the women were, as he put it to himself, in need, potential wild girls. Dorothy’s dark face was judging him and made him uncomfortable. Griselda, blonde and peaceful, was weighing up the arguments—there was something alive there, and the face was lovely, but not in need. Phyllis was prim and pretty and undeveloped. He did not look at Elsie, though he had glimpsed the red belt. The agitated one, the one who breathed fast, and shifted in her seat, and looked about her for something, was Florence Cain. He took note of her.

  After he had finished, some people left rapidly. Others came to talk to him. Frank Mallett said

  “You have not given enough attention to the remarkable persistence of shamefastness. Men must need it very much if it is so tenacious.”

  “A good point.”

  “Marvell also said

  ‘How happy was that Garden State

  When Man there walked without a mate.’ ”

  “Indeed. There is a time for mutual love, and a time for solitude. I myself am solitary and celibate when pursuing my calling.”

  Out of the side of his eye he saw Florence leaving with Geraint. There would be another time. Or another woman.

  Florence and Geraint walked along a footpath by the Military Canal. Dragonflies skimmed the water. Moorhens paddled, and a rat slid out of a hole and swam busily away. The sun was still bright, though going down. Footsteps hurried after them. Geraint turned, irritably. It was Frank Mallett.