The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “But, I—”

  “Just be happy. I can see you are.”

  “I—”

  “I said, we needn’t discuss it.”

  • • •

  She also did not wish to discuss it with her fiancé, Geraint Fludd. Geraint came often, running administrative errands between Purchase House, to which its owner had not returned, The Silver Nutmeg and the V and A. He had managed to become a Member of the Stock Exchange during a brief period of easy admission in November 1904, before the rules were tightened. On New Year’s Eve, in 1905, he came to dine with the Cains, and was received by Florence.

  “I’ve brought you something,” he said. He handed her a small box, wrapped in cherry-coloured paper, with a silver bow. Inside was a pretty ring, the work of Imogen’s jewellery master Henry Wilson, with amethyst and moonstone forget-me-nots set in woven silver leaves.

  “The silver is my own,” he said. “I bought it in a warehouse, in the City. I bought the stones, too, from a mining man I know. I hope you’ll wear it. I hope it is the right size. I asked Imogen.”

  Florence was startled. It was a very pretty ring. Not what she would have expected from Geraint. Though she could not see why she should not have expected it. She said

  “The engagement isn’t announced…”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “How could I not like it? It’s delightful. Only …”

  “I’d be happy if you wore it on the other hand.”

  Florence said “I’ve decided to study at Cambridge, at Newnham College. I’ve sent in an application.”

  This was a lie.

  “I’m glad,” said Geraint. “I think—I think you would be happy there. For a time. I do believe in women studying and working. I could come to the College and take you out.” He was a good man, Florence thought, and she was taking advantage of him. She thought shrewdly that women were tempted to think less well of men they could hurt, if they chose to. She thought: if I felt about Geraint what Imogen feels about Papa, I should put my arms round him and weep. She drew the pretty ring slowly onto the finger of her right hand. It fitted perfectly. Geraint, with courtesy and care, took hold of the hand, and kissed it. Then he kissed her smooth cheek. The vision flashed through his mind of a knot of legs and buttocks on the dishevelled bed of Miss Louise, whom he had lately visited, despite thinking he ought not to. Could Florence ever come to behave like that? He thought how odd the huge, smoky gap was between what you were thinking and what you were doing. He decided to keep hold of the hand, but then Prosper and Imogen came into the room. They had clasped hands, themselves, and brushed a kiss, at the foot of the stairs. Imogen said “Oh, the lovely ring—”

  Florence would have liked to kill someone, but did not know whom.

  In 1905 Dorothy began to do practical work in the London School of Medicine for Women. The students went on ward visits and began to dissect the dead. Dorothy was well liked by the other women, but she kept herself to herself and made no close friends, returning to the Skinners’ house to study in the evenings, and visiting Griselda, or Florence, at the weekends. In September of that year both Griselda and Florence became freshers at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Dorothy felt doubly lonely, because those two were now such good friends, and because they were no longer in London. Griselda was to study Languages, and Florence had opted for History.

  In the autumn Dorothy felt, unusually for her, dispirited and low. She enjoyed the Anatomy, but was fazed by the patience, and terror, and occasional bliss of the women in the gynaecological wards. The Hospital for Women made things comfortable for patients: they had pretty curtains, and stoneware vases of flowers, and brightly coloured bedspreads. The women’s bodies were used. Dorothy’s was not. It was covered in a long skirt—the female students, like the nurses, had to wear skirts with braided hems, long enough for their ankles not to be seen if they bent over a patient. Over the long skirt was a flowing overall. Their hair was tightly coiled on the tops of their heads, or in the napes of their necks.

  Quite suddenly and farcically, she fell in love. She fell in love with a demonstrator, Dr. Barty, during a dissection class. He was showing her the human heart, and how to extract it from the cavity where it lay and no longer beat. There was a smell—a stink—of formaldehyde. The room was ventilated by a small opening in the end wall, with a gas jet burning to draw up the heated air. The hospital was a converted house—the space was cramped and full of women, twenty living, one dead, soft and leathery. Dr. Barty asked Dorothy to make the cuts to extract the organ, a cross-shaped cut in the pericardium, then, with a larger scalpel, slices through the six blood vessels going into the heart, and the two that went out. Dr. Barty—a muscular, youngish man, in a green buttoned overall and a surgical cap—congratulated Dorothy on the precision of her work. He told her to take out the heart, and place it in the tray for another student to continue. Dorothy put her hands round the heart, and tugged. She looked up at the bearded, severely smiling Dr. Barty, and saw him. It was as though time stopped, as though she stood there for ever with another woman’s heart in her hands. She saw every lively hair of his black brows, and the wonderful greens and greys of his irises, and the dark tunnels of his pupils, opened on her. She saw the chiselled look of his lips, in the fronds of his rich beard, reddish-black, curling softly. His teeth were white and even. She must have been studying him for weeks, quite as much as the inanimate fingers and toes, tarsals and metatarsals he exposed to her.

  Her helplessness made her furious. She took in a deep breath of tainted air and fell unconscious to the ground: the dead heart rolled damply beside her.

  It was not unusual for the women to faint. Dorothy, however, had never fainted before. They carried her out, and fanned her, and practised hands held a beaker of water for her to sip. She came brusquely to consciousness, and insisted on returning to the class, though she took no further active part. She watched Dr. Barty, who was kind to her. He was one of the doctors who went out of his way to be kind to, and to encourage, the women. He was said to take a particular interest in slender Miss Lythegoe, whose work was better than Dorothy’s, whose demeanour was grave.

  Dorothy went back to Gower Street and crept up the narrow stairs as though she had no strength. She did not want this visitation. Her life had a direction, which did not include desiring or swooning over Dr. Barty. They all looked at him a little soppily, she had thought, and now she had caught it, like a bacillus.

  She began to weep. She could not stop. After a time, Leslie Skinner tapped on her door. (Etta was out at a meeting.) He said

  “Are you unwell, Dorothy?”

  “I must be. I’m sorry.” She sobbed.

  Leslie Skinner came in and sat beside her. He said he had thought for some time she was overdoing it. She was burning herself up. She should take a rest. She should perhaps take a week or two off and go home to the country, out of the foul London air. Dorothy sobbed and shook. Skinner petted her shoulder. When she closed her eyes, Dr. Barty’s face rose in the hollow of her head, full of life and smiling mysteriously. Leslie Skinner read aloud to her, from an article by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, in the Encyclopaedia Medica. Anderson was, Dorothy thought, maybe the greatest woman who had lived. She had so neatly, so persistently, so patiently, so successfully fought to be a doctor, a woman doctor, when there were none. The Hospital was her creation. She was also a married woman, but Dorothy did not think many women could be both wife and doctor.

  “In health, the nervous force is sufficient for all the ordinary demands made upon it. We work and get tired, we sleep and eat and are again as new beings ready for another day’s work. After some months of continuous work we are tired in a different way; the night’s rest, and the weekly day of rest, do not suffice; we need a change of scene—and a complete rest. With these we renew our force and are presently again ready to enjoy work.”

  The Skinners’ doctor, when consulted, reinforced this message. He said he did not consider Miss Wellwood to be overtaxed or uns
uited to study. He did consider her to be in need of a rest. She should go to the country, and read, and walk, and let her strength flow back. Dorothy’s nerves were jangling and her head ached. She did not want to go back to Todefright—it was a form of defeat. But she went.

  Violet Grimwith was sent to fetch her home. She helped her pack, and asked no questions. As they sat in the train, rattling out of Charing Cross, going south, out of the smoke, Dorothy, whose eyes were closed to preclude conversation, tried to think scientifically about Love. It was an affliction of the nervous system. It bore some relation to the aura that was said to precede epileptic fits. It was not self-induced. It was like a blow to the brain. It could be recovered from.

  It was horribly undignified.

  Was it the same as sexual desire, which she did not think she had felt? Can sexual desire be experienced in the abstract, almost? She didn’t want to grab Dr. Barty, or to be grabbed by him.

  He had got into her mind, and invaded it.

  That was because Dr. Anderson was right, fatigue did strange things to you.

  • • •

  Todefright was no longer a house overrun by children. Hedda, now fifteen, and Florian, now thirteen, had been sent to Bedales School, where they learned farming, swimming, physics, chemistry and thinking for themselves. Robin and Harry (eleven and nine) were both weekly boarders at a preparatory school in Tunbridge Wells. Tom and Phyllis were the odd children who had not left the nest. Phyllis had been assimilated into Violet’s housekeeping. She made cakes for Fabian picnics, and lace collars for bring-and-buy sales. She was now nineteen, and passively pretty. Tom was twenty-three. He wore his bright hair long, and his clothes were shabby and shapeless. He was pleased to see Dorothy, who put her head for a moment on his shoulder. He smelt of horse-tack, and fur, and brambles, with a note of wild garlic. He said, now they could go for walks, the leaves in the woods were turning.

  Humphry was not there, and Olive was writing. Her children recognised the rhythm of Olive’s writing—in the early stages of the story, it could be juggled, put aside, boxed and coxed with tea-parties and excursions. Then there were intense periods when she forgot to eat, and worked into the night. Tom said to Dorothy that he was glad to see her because Olive was sunken, an old childhood word for late preoccupation. He did not ask Dorothy how she was, or how she came to be there. She thought, even last year, he might have asked.

  Olive did not ask either. She kissed her eldest daughter, and said vaguely how nice it would be for Dorothy to be able to get out in the country, which was what Leslie Skinner said she needed. She said “I shan’t be very good company, I’m sunk in a very complicated play, which seems to change every day.” When Dorothy had been at home for a couple of days, Olive came down to lunch, and said that she and Dorothy must have “a little talk.” Dorothy did not want to talk, but felt it was right that talk should have been offered.

  It turned out that the talk concerned Tom. Could Dorothy find out what Tom thought he would do with his life? He had taken to earning bits of money as a beater, or helping out in stables, or harvesting, or hedging. She didn’t know what he wanted. Did Dorothy?

  Dorothy wanted Dr. Barty, though distance was fortunately making his dark face more abstract, more diagrammatic. She had no intention of telling her mother about Dr. Barty. She said, deliberately flatly,

  “Maybe that’s all he wants, just to potter.” She asked, woman to woman, with a malice she didn’t know she felt,

  “Does he get on your nerves?”

  “I worry about him,” said Olive, with dignity. “I’d like him to have a purpose.”

  “I see,” said Dorothy, still flatly. The little talk seemed to have ground to a halt.

  Dorothy went into the woods, to the Tree House, with Tom. He loped along the paths, so fast she could hardly keep up with him. He showed her things, as he had when they were little—where the badgers were, where a hawk had nested, where there was a little crop of fungi that weren’t supposed to grow in Britain at all. Magic toadstools, said Tom, with an irony that was hard to interpret.

  They came to the Tree House. It was still wonderfully disguised with brushwood and bracken and ferns. Tom had cared for it—alone, she supposed. He let her in, and made a little fire in the stove, and ceremoniously made her some tea from blackberry leaves he had dried himself. He said

  “I sleep here, as often as not.” There was a blanket-bed, on a heap of dry bracken. “I like the sounds. The trees. The creatures. The creakings. The wind, coming and going. Sometimes, Dorothy, I wake up and think I’m not there.”

  “Frightening?”

  “No. I like it. I’d like to be able to vanish into the hedge, like one of those things you can’t see, if they don’t move. The hedge sparrows. Moths. I’d like to be speckled and freckled like a moth. I try to write about moths, but I’m no good, I think.”

  “Can I see?”

  “No.”

  “I fainted,” said Dorothy. “I came home because I fainted. In an anatomy class. Holding a heart.”

  “Don’t. I feel sick. You’re all right now.” It was a statement, not a question. Dorothy sipped the leafy brew. She said “Have you ever been in love, Tom?”

  He wrinkled his brow. His brows, Dorothy thought, were fair and innocent. What was it that wasn’t there?

  Tom said “Once I was in love, for about a month, I think. With a vixen.”

  He saw her look of puzzlement, and said

  “Oh, a real vixen. A young one, very graceful, covered with soft red fur, with a thick brush, and a creamy white chest. She knew I watched her every day. She showed herself to me, all the graceful things she did, curving this way and that. They seem to smile, foxes. I thought I was her, and she was me. I don’t know what she thought. She stopped coming, when she had cubs. I’m not telling you very well. It was love, that was what it was.”

  There was a silence. It was impossible to introduce Dr. Barty. Tom said

  “I read a story about trees that walked. Sometimes, lying here, I think the trees are moving in on the Tree House, taking it in—”

  Dorothy was suddenly very irritated with Tom. She said, “I think it’s time to go back, now.”

  “But we’ve only just come.”

  “I’ve been here long enough. I’m not well. I want to go back.”

  She didn’t sleep well. She walked at night, in the moonlit rooms, not needing a candle, looking for something to nibble, or something to read. One night in the hall, she heard someone else, skirt rustling, slippers sliding. She stood still in a dark corner, shrunk into shadow.

  It was Olive, in her flower-spread robe, gliding towards the cupboard where the family tales were kept. She was carrying one large manuscript book; she unlocked the cupboard and replaced it. Then she went away again, not having noticed Dorothy.

  Dorothy was the one who had taken little interest in her “own” story, about the metamorphosing hedgehogs and the uncanny root-cavity-dwellers. She wondered for the first time if Olive was still spinning particular tales for particular children. She opened the story-cabinet. There were books for Robin and Harry. Florian’s was now quite fat. The one Olive had been carrying was Tom’s—his story now occupied a series of books, taking up a whole shelf, dwarfing the others. Dorothy hesitated a moment, and then took out the Dorothy book, with the fairies and woodland creatures on its cover. She had no imagination of what it felt like to be a writer and spin stories. She assumed her own story would have petered out, somehow, long ago.

  She turned to the last page.

  • • •

  So Peggy went on her travels, and saw many strange and wonderful sights, snow-covered mountains, and sunny southern meadows. She met Interesting strangers, and rode on shining, smoking trains. She thought at bed-time of the other, secret world in the roots of the Tree, of its inhabitants who spoke with strange voices, hissing or chuntering, squeaking or whispering. She thought of the strangers she had helped when they were caught on thorns, or hurt by cold iron, the Gre
y Child and the Brown Boy, with their glancing, inhuman eyes. They had helped her, too. They had found things that were lost. They had sung to her. When she thought of them, they grew thinner, more transparent in her mind’s eye, wisps and tattered fragments. But they were there, and she knew they were there, always.

  When she finally came back, she wore a long skirt with a braided hem which brushed on the grass, leaving a trail in the dew, when she hurried out to the Tree. It seemed older, with more cracks and knobs. She knelt down and looked into the hollow, and it was full of the kind of undisturbed dust that had not been there before, for there had been busy brooms to sweep it. She turned over the heaped leaves in the hole where she had always found the hedgehog-coat, which shrank her when she fingered it, so that she could slip inside it. It was there. It was stiff and dusty. She bent over, and lifted it out and saw that it was not—it was and was not—her hedgehog-coat. It was a hedgehog, a real hedgehog, long dead and dried to leather. On its nose were dried drops of blood, and its bright little eyes were lidded.

  Nothing more.

  So she walked back along the path, in her long, heavy skirt, and the breeze through the trees was cold and aimless, the light was simply scattered and lit nothing in particular, and no birds sang.

  • • •

  Dorothy put the book back, as though it had stung her. Psychology was not her gift; she had set her will to being practical. She did not want to think about the feeling behind this coda. Her mind became full of an uninvited ghost of Dr. Barty. She started to cry. She was ashamed. She hurried back to her bedroom, and lay down, and wept. There was nothing for her here.