The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Geraint gave away the bride. Miss Dace struck some chords on the piano, and Imogen Fludd laid down the stone hot-water bottle she had been clutching, picked up her sheaf of hothouse lilies and walked through the church. She was wearing shimmering silvery velvet, very plain, with a high white fur collar, and big white fur cuffs. Florence turned to stare at her as she went to meet Major Cain. Florence had been thinking of Imogen with bad words. Sly. Insinuating. ’umble. She thought her face would show false modesty, maybe, or irrepressible triumph, but she had to acknowledge—she was just—that what she saw was pure happiness, touched with fear. That Prosper loved Imogen, Florence acknowledged with some bitterness. She now acknowledged, also, that Imogen loved Prosper. She looked like the white wax of a candle, lit by a golden flame.

  After the ceremony, Frank Mallett gave everyone hot drinks, or glasses of sherry, in front of his dancing fire. His housekeeper replenished the ladies’ stoneware hand-warmers with kettles of hot water. Rugs were wound round them, and they all drove back to the Mermaid in Rye, where Prosper had ordered a wedding breakfast. There was a blazing wood fire in the hearth there, too. As the evening closed in, ruddy light flickered over the pale faces, and lit the grey silks and satins. The food was plentiful—soles with shrimps, smoked and roasted salt-marsh loin of lamb, elegant custards, an iced cake, which the bridegroom cut precisely with his sword. Geraint made a neat little speech, and said that he and Florence hoped—as soon as feasible—to tie further knots in the relationships of the families. Prosper replied, briskly, warmly, and then raised a glass to the absent Benedict Fludd. He wished, he said, that his old friend could have been there to share their happiness. He wished, of course, that his friend would return—as he had done before—from a journey. In the meantime—or, if necessary, in the long term—he himself was now part of the family, and would hope to take on some of the practical burdens of the work, and the house. The wind rushed and eddied up the cobbled street. The flames swirled in the hearth, and Philip stared into them. Seraphita stood up, and said, in a surprisingly strong voice that she would like—personally—to express her thanks to Major Cain, now her second son—and to say how much comfort the wedding had brought her, in this trying time. Florence, who might have looked at Geraint, who was looking at her intently, was still studying Imogen. The firelight ran up the folds of her dress, and made a blush on that palely ecstatic, unblushing face. I shall never be so happy, Florence thought. She could not bear—the thought made her sick—to imagine her father taking Imogen in his arms, alone in the black-beamed bedroom. Everything was going up in flames. Exultant, and dangerous.

  Philip Warren had it in mind to make a memorial to Benedict Fludd. He had been included in talks between Geraint and Prosper about the future of Purchase pottery and sales through The Silver Nutmeg. He had felt the subsiding of hope or expectation in himself as the bottle kiln cooled slowly after the firing. He had waited alone, until the saggars were ready to be unpacked. Then he unpacked them, slowly. The firing had been almost wholly successful. Some small pieces of student work had crumbled, and one of his own seaweed bowls, to which he had been particularly attached, lay in shards. But generally the treasure gleamed and glistened. Pomona had crept quietly to his side and asked to be allowed to help to take out and arrange the ware. She seemed, he thought without considering the matter, less determinedly childish. She had tied up her hair. She said

  “Do you think he’s dead, Philip?”

  “I don’t know. He has gone off, before.”

  “I feel he’s dead. I think I would know inside me if he wasn’t.”

  “I know what you mean. I feel that, too. He’s somehow gone.” She went on lining up slightly unbalanced amateur goblets. She said “Things will be different.”

  Philip had just begun on what might turn out to be Benedict Fludd’s last warm pots, cooling under his fingers. A two-faced drinking mug leered at him. An elegant dragon spread its gold wings in an inky sky.

  “You’ll be wanting to study, maybe,” he said to Pomona.

  “I have no talents,” she said.

  The projected memorial was a globe-shaped pot, large and simple. It was to be layered, like the round earth, with fire beating up from its depths, with coal over the fire, with fossil forms in the coal, with dark sea-blue flowing over the coal, and over the sea, on an inky sky, with a moon in it, a tracery of white foam which should be both wild and formal in its movements, somehow Japanese. He could see it clearly in his mind’s eye. It was fiendishly hard to conceive—all those glazes, welded together, the necessity for the difficult red to be simultaneously both bloody and fiery. He made drawings of lizards and dragonflies and snails, coiled in the jet-black coal. Sometimes he thought the moon should be full, and sometimes a hair-thin crescent, barely scratched in.

  He thought—he was not much given to studying people’s feelings—that Seraphita was relieved and released by her husband’s death. She went out, spontaneously, to call on neighbours, to take tea with Phoebe Methley, who was kind to her. He was less sure about Pomona. She seemed both more ordinary, and stunned.

  Then, one night, in the small hours he woke to hear footsteps in the corridor outside his room. He waited, irritably, for her to turn his doorhandle, but the steps went past. They were hurried, and measured. He thought of returning to sleep, and knew he must not. So he pulled on a coat, and went down the stairs. He heard her unlock the kitchen door. And go out into the yard. He imagined her casting herself into the Military Canal. But she went into what he now thought of as his studio. There was a full moon. He lurked by the window, and heard a scratching, and a scraping. He was possessed by terror that she meant to break things. He crept up, and peered in. She was on the other side of the room, unlocking the forbidden pantry. He had not known she knew about it, let alone knowing where the key was hidden.

  She came out with a white vase in the shape of a naked girl. She moved dreamily, mechanically, but he was now not sure she was sleepwalking. He followed, at a safe distance—they were both barefoot—into the garden. She flowed on, into the orchard. She sat down at the root of an apple tree, and took out a sharp trowel, from a space in its roots.

  “I know you’re there,” she said. “Don’t say anything. Just help.”

  He stepped forward, out of the shadows. She handed him the creature—lovely, with coiling hair, open lips in an ecstatic face, and underneath it an explicitly modelled vulva, spread wide, under its furry roof, with its delicate rounded lips. Pomona said

  “I can’t smash them. I can put them away. Under the trees.”

  “I could put them away for you.”

  “They aren’t yours. I shall do it. One by one by one. When they are all—under—then—”

  Philip found himself stroking the cold pot, out of a desire not to offer false comfort to the girl. He knelt beside her and took the trowel, and excavated. She brought out a piece of old linen, wrapped the image, and tucked it, neither kindly nor unkindly, into the cavity. Philip held out his hand to help her to her feet, and feared she would fling herself into his arms. But she held off.

  39

  On the day of Prosper Cain’s wedding, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in St. Martin’s Lane. It was late: it should have opened on the 22nd, and had been delayed by the failure of some of the complex machinery for its special effects. There was to have been a “living fairy” reduced to pygmy size by a giant lens. There was to have been an eagle which descended on the pirate Smee, and seized him by the pants to carry him across the auditorium. At the very last moment a mechanical lift collapsed, and with it racks of scenery. Much that was to become familiar—the Mermaids’ Lagoon, the Little House in the Treetops—was not yet constructed. And there were scenes, on that first night, that were later excised. It had all been kept a darkly veiled secret. That reconvened first night audience—an adult audience, at an evening performance—had no idea what it was about to see. And then the curtain rose on an enclosed nurs
ery, with little beds with soft bedspreads and a wonderful frieze of wild animals high on the walls, elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers, kangaroos. And a large black and white dog, woken from sleep by a striking clock, rose to turn down the bedclothes and run the bath.

  Both August Steyning and Olive Wellwood knew James Barrie, and were part of that first audience. Their party filled a whole row: Olive, Humphry, Violet, Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Hedda, Griselda. The light flared in the fake fire. The three children, two boys and a girl, all played by young women, pranced in pyjamas and played at being grown-ups, producing children like rabbits out of hats, having clearly no idea at all where children came from. The audience laughed comfortably. The parents, dressed for the evening, like the audience out in front of them, argued about the dog, Nana, who was deceived by Mr. Darling into drinking nasty medicine, and then chained up. The night lights went out. The crowing boy, who was Nina Boucicault, another woman, flew in at the unbarred window, in search of his/her shadow.

  Olive Wellwood’s reaction to theatre was always to want to write—now, immediately, to get into the other world, which Barrie had cleverly named the Never Never Land. It was neither the trundling dog, nor the charming children, that caught her imagination. It was Peter’s sheared shadow, held up by the Darling parents before being rolled up and put in a drawer. It was dark, floating lightly, not quite transparent, a solid theatrical illusion. When Wendy sewed it on, and he danced, and it became a thing cast by stage lighting climbing the walls and gesturing wildly, she was entranced.

  The amazing tale wound on. The children flew. The greasy-locked pirate waved his evil hook. The Lost Boys demonstrated their total ignorance of what mothers, or fathers, or homes, or kisses, might be. Dauntlessly, they sunk their knives into pirates. There was a moment of tension when the darting light who was the fairy began to die in the medicine glass, and had to be revived by the clapping of those who believed in fairies. The orchestra had been instructed to clap, if no one else did. But timidly, then vociferously, then ecstatically, that audience of grown-ups applauded, offered its belief in fairies. Olive looked along the row of her party to see who was clapping. Steyning yes, languidly, politely. Dorothy and Griselda, somewhere between enthusiasm and good manners. Phyllis, wholeheartedly, eyes bright. Humphry, ironically. Violet, snappishly. She herself, irritated and moved. Hedda, intently.

  Not Tom. You would have wagered that Tom would clap hardest.

  The penultimate scene was the testing of the Beautiful Mothers, by Wendy. The Nursery filled with a bevy of fashionably dressed women, who were allowed to claim the Lost Boys if they responded sensitively to a flushed face, or a hurt wrist, or kissed their long-lost child gently, and not too loudly. Wendy dismissed several of these fine ladies, in a queenly manner. Steyning spoke to Olive behind his hand. “This will have to go.” Olive smiled discreetly and nodded. Steyning said “It’s part pantomime, part play. It’s the play that is original, not the pantomime.” “Hush,” said the fashionable lady in front of him, intent on the marshalling of the Beautiful Mothers.

  After the wild applause, and the buzz of discussion, Olive said to Tom

  “Did you enjoy that?”

  “No,” said Tom, who was in a kind of agony. “Why not?”

  Tom muttered something in which the only audible word was “cardboard.” Then he said “He doesn’t know anything about boys, or making things up.”

  August Steyning said “You are saying it’s a play for grown-ups who don’t want to grow up?”

  “Am I?” said Tom. He said “It’s make-believe make-believe make-believe. Anyone can see all those boys are girls.”

  His body squirmed inside his respectable suit. Tom said “It’s not like Alice in Wonderland. That’s a real other place. This is just wires and strings and disguises.”

  “You have a Puritan soul,” said Steyning. “I think you will find, that whilst everything you say is true, this piece will have a long life and people will suspend their disbelief, very happily.”

  In the New Year of 1905, on a frosty evening, Humphry and Olive went to dine with August Steyning at Nutcracker Cottage. The room was candlelit. A log fire was burning in the inglenook. It had been hard to light, and everything was veiled with smoke and smelled of smoke. Steyning gave them comforting winter food—a winter soup of dried peas and ham, roast pheasant, stuffed with a piece of fillet steak, Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, glazed with marsala sauce. The only other guest was Toby Youlgreave.

  They discussed Peter Pan. Toby had seen it, and was enthusiastic. Nothing like it had been done before. He supposed the young Well-woods had enjoyed it. Especially Tom.

  “Tom hated it,” said Olive, sadly. “I thought he’d like it. He always liked the stories more than any of the others did. But it seemed to make him angry. He said it was make-believe and cardboard. He didn’t like the women playing boys.”

  “He refused entirely to suspend disbelief,” said Steyning. “It was odd, and almost alarming.”

  Toby asked how old Tom was now. Olive said she thought he was twenty-two: Toby said that his history of failing exams, or failing to be fit to sit exams, was perplexing, given his intelligence. Humphry said maybe they should think of some other course. He could not do nothing for ever. Dorothy was only twenty and had passed her Highers, and the Preliminary Scientific Exam, and begun her medical studies. She was lodging with the Skinners in Gower Street. Phyllis was the home-loving daughter. He did not know himself what Tom did with his time. He was out of doors, for much of most days. Olive said doubtfully that he had said from time to time that he meant to be a writer. Humphry asked irritably whether she had ever seen any writing he had done. No, she said. No, she had not. He thought it was private.

  “You can’t make a living out of private writing,” said Humphry. Toby said Tom was a Wanderer. He meant that he had a vision of Tom as an inhabitant of woods and downs, something out of Hudson and Jef-feries. Steyning said drily that maybe he disliked Peter Pan because he recognised something. Olive said indignantly no, it was not that, she was sure it was not that, he found the play simply unappealing.

  Steyning said that Tom had seemed to enjoy being occupied with the puppet play in the summer. He had made some good lay figures. Maybe the theatre would suit him.

  Olive looked into the candle-flame, and across at Steyning’s long, pale, regular face, lit, with dark shadows, from beneath. For most of Tom’s life she believed she had known in her body—as though held to the boy by a myriad spider-threads—exactly where he was, how he felt, what he needed. He had been part of her, part of her had gone running with him, she had felt his sleep after he was tucked up. Or so she thought she had felt. Lately, she had found herself using, and then rapidly rejecting, the word “coarsened” in her thoughts of Tom. He was bristly. He was sulky. He was automatically argumentative. He did not seem to read her needs, as before he always had. She thought she would be glad if he found something to do, and stopped, as she almost put it to herself, lurkingin the bushes.

  August Steyning said Peter Pan had renewed his interest in writing a different kind of magical play. Peter Pan had used children’s make-believe—”slapstick” said August Steyning. It had drawn on the English pantomime, which was a connivance between actors and director and audience. He stopped for a moment and did it justice. “Not that it doesn’t get under your skin, and infest your mind. It does. In ways I think that odd little person who wrote it can’t conceive. He is both sweetly innocent and positively uncanny about mummies and daddies—and what are we to make of the identity of the daddy in the dog-kennel and the evil Hook? Who would have thought of casting the same actor? It’s a work of genius, but the genius is twisted like a corkscrew.”

  He said “I want to stage a fairy play that shall be closer to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk than to pantomime. We made a beginning in the Denge Marsh Camp. What is needed is new versions—but only versions—of the old, deep tales that are twisted into our souls. The dark Palace under the Hill, the guest, the li
ghts dancing on the marsh. We could use stage machinery, yes—not to lift sweetly pretty girl-boys in pyjamas—but to make dames blanches float, and bats and lizard-dragons cluster on rocks and branches. I know things about lighting—and shadows—no one else in this country knows. There are Germans doing clever things with masks and puppets that would entrance an audience of children and disturb an audience of grown-ups, rightly deployed.”

  “If Gesamtkunstwerk,” said Humphry, “will you not need singers?”

  “It will not be an opera. It will have unearthly music. I envisage hidden flutes and concealed drums and tambourines. And wailing voices, singing in the wind.”

  He said “I am relying on you, dear Olive, to write me such a tale.”

  “It would be hard—”

  “But you could do it.”

  “I have an idea …”

  “Yes?”

  “But I need to think about it. I promise I will think.”

  Florence Cain tried hard not to be depressed by the new, extravagant happiness in the Kensington home. She had watched, with Imogen, the new double bed on its way up the narrow staircase. It was a festive bed with a bedhead carved with cherubs, not the catafalque of Prosper’s dream. It embarrassed Florence, though she tried hard to prevent it. They could not keep their hands off each other, Prosper Cain and his new wife, though they tried to do so, when Florence was present. She felt aggrieved—she was de trop in her own house, for reasons nothing to do with her own conduct. Imogen had tried, once, to open a discussion. “I can see it must be strange for you, now, now that I’m …” Florence snapped. “Of course it’s strange. It doesn’t matter. We needn’t speak of it.”