The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

“It’s interesting,” said Elsie. “It’s good to be needed, and watch the little ones light up when they grasp how to read. But I’m not satisfied. I don’t know that I’ll ever be satisfied.”

  “I don’t know why I so like to see that half-cross look on your face. It was the first thing I noticed about you, a kind of constructive discontent.”

  “Well, that’s not likely ever to change, I think.”

  “I don’t know …”

  Elsie got up abruptly, and began to wash the dishes. Charles/Karl took a cloth, and dried them. Ann wandered away, and fell into a doze on a sofa. They went out, and sat down again on the beach, by the porch, looking out over the beds of reeds and strips of shingle. He said

  “You are the only person in the world I feel quite comfortable with. Despite your being so prickly and unsatisfied.”

  “I like to be wi’ you, too. But we’re going nowhere. This is th’ end of the road. That track gets to the shingle bank and just ends.”

  “I should like to be able to see you much more—to be with you. You’re good for me.”

  “I’m good for no one but Ann. And the little ’uns at the school, I suppose. I’ve made one mistake, Mr.—Karl—and I’m not about to make any more.”

  “It wouldn’t be like that.”

  “You don’t know how ‘that’ was. I made my bed, I’ll lie in it. I’ve got good friends. You and me—this is an imaginary tea-party, like Ann giving you flowers and water. We come out of two different worlds, and they don’t mix.”

  “I don’t believe in all that.”

  “I think you do. You couldn’t ever take me home to your high-up family—don’t pretend to yourself, you couldn’t. We are no good to each other.”

  Charles/Karl answered this by putting his arms round her, and gripping fiercely. He had not known he was going to do this. Their heads came close. He said “I want you, I need you, I need you.”

  There were tears in her eyes. He wiped them away. He kissed her; they were both trembling; it was a careful, not a greedy, kiss.

  “You’ll do me no good. I must be respectable.”

  “Oh, my love, I know that. I do know.”

  Ann came out into the sunlight, and they drew apart before she saw them. Charles/Karl said he must be going. He said “I’ll come back, if I may?”

  “I can’t stop you passing by, on this road that goes nowhere—”

  “I’ll come back. Soon.”

  “Thank Mr. Wellwood for your book, Ann.” He rode away.

  41

  Herbert Methley came back to Cambridge at the beginning of the Easter Term. The Newnham Literature Society invited him to give an informal tea-time talk, in the tea-room in North Hall. He spoke about the changes that were taking place, and would take place, in women’s lives, as sensible politics prevailed. He did say that women had a right to fulfil all their needs, but he mentioned neither Free Love, nor Mr. Wells’s proposal for nurseries run by the State. He seemed, Florence thought, to be speaking particularly to her, responding to her interest, skating away from what didn’t interest her. She remembered the warm, lean grip of his hand in King’s. She considered his face and body. He was ugly, for certain. His neck was strained and muscular, round the Adam’s apple. There was too much of his mouth, but it was not slack, it was full of movement. His eyebrows danced, as he moved from pleasant to unpleasant themes. He pushed his hair back boyishly, but he was a man, not a boy. She remembered his grip, again. After the meeting, the women gathered round the writer and asked questions. Florence asked him if he thought marriage would disappear and he said he thought it would not: human beings, it appeared, needed a long-term nest and partners, like swans and some seabirds. But other creatures had developed other habits. He thought, looking round him at the students, that the idea of dress as a prison—unmanageable hats and trains, shoes you couldn’t walk on—indeed feet that were painfully crushed and broken, in China—all this might well be superseded. Young women now rode bicycles, which would have been unthinkable. He shook everyone’s hand before leaving. He held Florence’s for too long. His fingers played on hers.

  Back in her room Florence paced, unsatisfied, dissatisfied. She looked out into the garden at one or two women playing badminton against a grey sky—the flimsy shuttlecock seemed to be her flimsy life. There were aspects of Newnham that were like a prison. She was near tears.

  He tapped on the door. She opened it. She took in a huge breath.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I told them I was a friend of the family, a kind of uncle, and had left behind something I needed urgently—and so I found you. Let me in, and shut the door.” She let him in, and shut the door.

  He said “It was you I came back for, you I had lost and found. You feel it too, I’m sure of that.”

  She stood stock-still, and made a small sound, between a sob and a gasp.

  He took her in his arms, and kissed her, softly, not invasively. He touched her breast, under her shirt, softly, and then less softly. He stroked her haunch and she responded, involuntarily, pressing herself against him. He was all overcoat and buttons. He stood back, undid the buttons, and shrugged off the coat. He said

  “Now you canfeel what I want.”

  Florence didn’t speak. If she had spoken, it would have to have been to protest, and she was not protesting.

  “Buttons,” said Herbert Methley, “are a bore and a tease.”

  He undid some of Florence’s buttons on her shirt. Then he pressed his face into the bodice, under the blouse. His moustache prickled. So did Florence’s skin. He did not take off her skirt, but searched for her body, with his hands, through it. Her body became independent of her mind. It rose to meet him, it pushed against him.

  And then he said “I must go now. Remember, this is good, this is right, this is your right. Don’t have second thoughts, my beauty, when I’ve gone. I’ll write. I’ll think of a place where we can meet, and…”

  He left her, and she stood there, unbuttoned, unsatisfied, every nerve fizzing and hot, not knowing how to imagine what she had been made to want violently. She did up the buttons and thought, this is dangerous, I won’t get any further in, I won’t answer his letter. Little currents of anonymous desire ran all over her, and contradicted her mind.

  But when the letter came, amusing, tempting and urgent, Florence answered. It was mid-May, and sunny. She wanted a life of her own. So she went to lunch with Herbert Methley, unchaperoned and secretly, at a restaurant called Chez Tante Sophie, with a very curtained window in a passage in Soho. She wore a pretty green dress and a gay hat, with long ribbons. They ate whitebait, and poulet de Bresse, and crêpes Suzette, and drank rather a lot of white Burgundy. They talked about literature and about the Woman Question, and the agitation for the Vote. There was a novel to be written, said Herbert Methley, about a truly free woman, who was not a commodity, and chose her own life. Something in Florence was repelled by this—it was old-fashioned, in its daring, compared to the ideas of some of the Newnham women, who were sober about real difficulties. But she was resolutely kicking over the traces, so she smiled and smiled, and made an uncharacteristic girlish squeak of pleasure when they lit the brandy over the pancakes and it flared intensely blue.

  It turned out that they were to take coffee and cognac in a little private room Herbert Methley had reserved. “It will be an adventure,” he said obscurely, following Florence up a narrow, winding stair.

  The private room was furnished with a couch, and low coffee tables, a silk spread with an oriental look, embroidered with feather patterns, and candles in pretty china candlesticks. It had no window on the outside world. It had a perfumed smell. It was not a room Florence would have chosen to spend time in, but there were things she had to know, and do. She unpinned her hat, and laid it aside; she accepted a large cognac; she trembled. Herbert Methley stroked her, as a man would stroke a nervous filly. He drank a large glass of cognac himself. He made a joke about adventures with buttons, and divested himself, and then Flor
ence, of various garments. Florence wanted to know, but did not yet know what that meant. Herbert Methley, brown-skinned, bony, nervy, touched and touched her, and talked in her ear, not about love, but about desire, and need, and right. There were things he knew how to do that Florence had never imagined—places he brought into shivering excitement that had always been quiescent, or vaguely troubled. She drank more cognac, and thought, “I am being played upon, like a musical instrument.” This thought was strengthening. The player, or conjurer, removed more clothing, from both of them. Florence whispered that someone might come, and he said confidently that all was safe, all was prepared, all was provided for this purpose. Florence drank more cognac. Her hair slipped from its moorings. She was in her petticoat and bodice and her body was being stirred by a myriad small fingerprints.

  “Here is the place,” said Herbert Methley. He stroked and stroked without removing her drawers. Within them, Florence began to feel like a fountain unsealed, like a geyser rising. When he saw this, he did remove her drawers, and said “I must come in. You must let me in.”

  Florence’s head lay back on the cushions and the room went round and round like a waterwheel. He was much more in control of her body than she was. She felt him push, with his own body, against her private place, and then push hard, like a mining machine. She tore open, and convulsed, and cried out, and he made a low deflated moan, and everywhere was wet, with blood, and semen, mixed.

  “Damnation,” said Herbert Methley. “That was tight. You were a virgin.”

  “What did you think I was?” said Florence, sickly.

  “I didn’t think,” he said, having lost his self-assurance. “This is a terrible mess. I shall have to offer to pay for this—this bedcover thing. I suppose. I imagine they must expect this kind of thing from time to time. I wonder how much they will ask?”

  “There is some money in my purse,” said Florence, tightly. She thought she was going to be sick, because of the cognac, and she wanted desperately not to be sick, she wanted control of one end at least of her body. She wanted to go home. She gulped. She tried to stand up, and fell back again. Methley pulled aside a little curtain and discovered a washstand, and a ewer of water. He began, rather uselessly, to wipe the coverlet with a wet handkerchief. Florence managed to stand up, stagger to the washbowl, and mop her reddened flesh. Back to back, and awkwardly, they replaced their clothes, all except Florence’s drawers, which were impossible. She rolled them up and put them in the ewer. She rebuttoned her dress, and repinned her hat.

  She stood in the restaurant doorway so as not to have to see Methley negotiating payment for the damaged covers. She thought she might die, standing there, in public, waiting. She sensed that Methley did not know how to deal with the owners of the café to which he had so confidently brought her. He looked a fool, and she would never forgive him for that. She noted that he looked as though he had had to pay more than was comfortable for him.

  Outside, he hailed a cab, and had to ask her if she had money to pay for it to take her home.

  “Yes, I told you,” said Florence, in nausea and scorn. He ought to have offered to come with her, to see that she was all right, for she knew she was not, but by then she already hoped never to see or hear of him again.

  The cab-driver took her, half-fainting, back to the Museum. She walked into the little house, and up the stairs. Imogen was in the drawing room and expressed mild surprise at seeing her there, in mid-term. Florence said that she had suddenly felt she must get away from Cambridge for a couple of days. She did not feel very well. She would go to her room and rest. Imogen bent her head to her book, and Florence went, with difficulty, upstairs. The next day she went back to Newnham, and worked harder than usual.

  When she came back for the summer vacation, she found that Imogen had put aside her silverwork and begun to embroider—pink rosebuds and blue forget-me-nots, on nuns’-veiling fine wool. Florence watched her for some time in silence. Imogen looked dreamy, and plumper than before—a contented Pre-Raphaelite madonna …

  “What are you working on?”

  “A coverlet.”

  “It’s small.”

  “It’s to cover a small bed. I am expecting a baby.” She pushed the needle in and out, resolutely, and did not look up.

  “I am very happy for you,” said Florence, mechanically. “When are we to expect the happy event?”

  “At the turn of the year. Maybe even Christmas, which is a hard time to be born.”

  “How strange, “ said Florence.

  “Is it not? I feel very strange. Everything is hazy and I am sick.”

  Florence didn’t want to know. She had just understood that the child would be her half-sister, or brother. The idea was uncouth.

  “Please—” said Imogen, and could not finish her sentence.

  Florence said that she and Griselda had agreed to go back, more or less immediately, to Cambridge and keep the Long Vacation Term, which provided an opportunity for more intensive study. Imogen bent her head lower over her moving fingers.

  Prosper Cain was much exercised in his mind by events in the Museum, where the battle was still in progress over how to arrange and exhibit the whole collection. The Director, Arthur Skinner, was being, in Prosper’s view, brutally harried by the Civil Servants. Cain was sitting in his office, writing a memorandum, when Florence found him. He looked up reluctantly, frowning.

  “I am to congratulate you, I’m told,” said Florence.

  “Oh, yes. It is a very happy—” He couldn’t find a word.

  “You might have told me.”

  “I left it to Imogen. Woman to woman.”

  “You are my father,” said Florence. “She isn’t.”

  “Oh, my dear, please don’t be difficult. Please be happy.”

  “I shall try. I’m going to Cambridge tomorrow.”

  “Isn’t it the Long Vacation?”

  “Yes it is. I want to study. We are allowed to stay in College and study for some weeks. Griselda is coming.”

  Later, this conversation haunted Prosper Cain. He should have paid attention. Damn Robert Morant, and his browbeaten staff, and his lack of imagination and his interfering ways. Damn him. It was hard for him to imagine the unborn child. And now he had failed to imagine the grown child.

  In Cambridge, Florence said nothing to anyone, not even Griselda. She found it hard to work. She imagined the baby, fat and smiling, and she felt a kind of disgust, mixed for some reason with shame.

  She was tight-lipped and worked hard. She told Griselda, expressionless, about Imogen’s expectations, and Griselda said, enthusiastically, “Wonderful,” and reddened in the heavy silence that ensued. Florence felt sick, all the time. She worked through waves of nausea, which she accepted as a punishment for what she thought of as “that mess.” She read about battles and diplomacy, and her stomach lumped and lurched. One day, Griselda came into her room and found her vomiting into the wash basin.

  “Florence,” she said, “tell me what’s wrong. I think you should see a doctor.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’ve been like this for some time, now.”

  Florence sat down on the bed, retching a little. Her handsome face was white and silvered with sweat.

  “I think I may be—I may be—”

  Griselda’s imagination supplied the word. She said

  “We should write to Geraint. He ought to know. He could arrange things …”

  “It wasn’t Geraint. It was once only, and it was dreadful. It made me long for a quiet monkish life in this place, talking to books. Instead of which, if we are right, I shall be turned out of here, out of Cambridge …”

  “You should be looked at. You should see a doctor.”

  “Who? Not the College doctor. Not my father’s regimental doctor. I wish I was dead.”

  “Dorothy,” said Griselda. “She’s done all her midwifery and obstetrics, I know. She would look at you. She might know how to stop you being so sick. She might know—”<
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  She might know how to stop the pregnancy, they both thought, and didn’t say. How to get rid of it. They wrote a letter to Dorothy saying they urgently needed her advice, and went down to dinner, their hair smoothly knotted and shining behind their heads, one dark, one glistening gold and silver. They joined a spirited discussion of employment for women, of what work, if any, they should be excluded from.

  Dorothy came to visit. During the days the letter took to reach her, and her answer took to reach them, whatever was inside Florence went on growing, cell by dividing cell, on a string, in the dark.

  Dorothy came, and was given a guest room. Late at night, when even the most determined cocoa-drinker had turned in to sleep, the three young women gathered in Florence’s pretty room, with its “Lily and Pomegranate” curtains and bedspread. The light of the fire and the lamps flickered on the Venetian glass Florence collected, advised by her father. They had enjoyed shopping together, comparing vases and dishes, testing their eyes. Florence sat on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped in her lap. She was mute. Dorothy turned to Griselda, who said, hesitantly, “Florence thinks she is pregnant. We wanted you to—to tell her—if she’s right.”

  Dorothy had done her midwifery. She had probed other women with diagnostic fingers. She had seen a dead child finally ejected from an exhausted body. She had held a howling newborn in her two hands and looked—the first thing he saw—into his opening eyes. She was socially embarrassed by the idea of poking into the elegant Florence Cain.

  “You do know how to tell, Dorothy?” said Griselda.

  “Yes, I know. I’m a little embarrassed.”

  “We all are,” said Florence. “But since the situation is worse than embarrassment I think we should forget that bit of it. There’s only you I can trust to help me.”

  Dorothy took a deep breath.

  “Right. Questions first. And can Griselda get some boiled water, and if you have antiseptic to sterilise my hands …

  “How long, Florence, since you last had the Curse.”