The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  She sealed the letter, and wrote several answers to letters from friends and the public about the originality of Tom Underground.

  Tom had got onto the heights of the North Downs. He walked. He found himself crossing what he believed must be the London Road—he went across, looking neither to right nor to left, and saw a slow cart going south, and a sputtering, grinching motor car, with its heavily veiled and scarved passengers, going north. He came to a junction with a signpost, faded, and hard to puzzle out. It said he could go down Labour-in-Vain Road, to Labour-in-Vain. He liked the words, so set off along the track, to what was hardly a settlement. It took him a little further south, and then he went east again and found he had met up with the Pilgrim’s Way, the old path where the Canterbury Pilgrims had travelled to the shrine of the murdered Thomas à Becket. That pleased him too. He tramped north-east and then followed the Way along the Downs until he came to Charing Hill and Clearmount. The Way then ran along the south side of Frittenfield Woods, at the end of which he turned south-west, seeing a sign that said Digger Farm. From there he went towards Hothfield Common and Hothfield Bogs. This brought him to the railway that ran from Sevenoaks to Maidstone. He scrambled down the cutting, and stood for a moment on the line, between the shining tracks. He heard a train, coming from the north. He thought he could simply stand there, and let it. Then he found himself on the other side, and waited to watch the engine, with its steam, and fiery grit and busy, clattering piston. He remembered all the talk about the end of Stepniak. He could.

  He went on, crossing the Weald, south-west. Hothfield, common and bogs. Across the Great Stour river at a place called Ripper’s Cross. The Weald was made of intractable, heavy clay, and was still covered with a mixture of ancient oak woods and gnarled copses of ash and thorn. He had walked most of it, over the years. Indeed all he had ever done with his life was walk about in this ancient bit of England. The Pilgrim’s Way and the bogs reminded him of Bunyan, and the Slough of Despond. He had read that over and over, as a little boy, maybe once every two weeks, living the walking to heaven, not understanding a word of the theology. Walking over this earth was like being in an English story. He had read Puck of Pook’s Hill, which Mr. Kipling had sent with an admiring note to Olive. He had read the Dymchurch Flit, where all the Pharisees, the People of the Hills, streamed over the midnight beach to leave the country which no longer believed in them. He knew—it was the kind of thing he troubled himself to know—that Purchase House was not a religious reference to the redemption of sinners, but an old word for a meeting-place of pucceles, little Pucks. Or maybe, he thought, it was both, the English language works like that. It mixes things up. He was on a kind of pilgrimage through English mud, and English chalk, and ancient English woods.

  He didn’t quite ask himself to where. He took signposts to places whose names he liked. He did now have in his head an image of a story. Not more than the skeleton of a story, a walker walking through England. The odd thing was, that he saw it (he always saw stories in his head) only in shades of cream, and white, and silver, a bleached, leached, blanched story, the colour of the skeletons of seaweeds, or indeed, of humans and beasts.

  Hoad Wood, Bethersden, Pot Kiln, Further Quarter, Middle Quarter, Arcadia, Bugglesden, Children’s Farm, Knock Farm, Cherry Garden, Maiden Wood, Great Heron Wood, and then, suddenly, he was faced with a line of water he recognised was the Royal Military Canal, built to add to England’s defences against invasion by Napoleon. He was quite suddenly on the edge of the Walland Marsh. The canal ran East-West, inside deep banks. There were dragonflies, and long fat frogs. He walked east along it, crossing it and turning south on a road that ran to Peartree Farm, passing Newchard, down to Rookelands, Blackman-stone, past St. Mary in the Marsh, and on to Old Honeychild. He was now in the marsh proper, criss-crossed by waterways. South-east of Honeychild he crossed the New Sewer. He went between Old Romney and New Romney, over earth that had been steadily thrown in by the workings of the sea, and made habitable for sheep by the digging of dykes. Galdesott, Kemps Hill, Birdskitchen. He skirted Lydd and the military camp with its rifle ranges and ordnance targets, set up on the bleak pebbled forelands. He found a way out of Lydd, across the Denge Marsh, past a place called Boulderwall. The surface of the earth was huge, flat, ripples and ridges of pebbled shingle, with strips of grey-green lichen clinging to the sides protected from the wind. He went across the shingle of the Denge Marsh, between the black wooden huts, the rusty boat machinery, the upturned, beached, fishing boats. He went past the Halfway Bush and the Open Pits, on which seabirds floated and called. He went on, out to the point of Dungeness, beyond the place where the single-track railway line simply ended in pebbles, below the coastguard’s hut.

  You have to think about walking on pebbles. Every time you put your feet down, the pebbles impress themselves, hard and recalcitrant, through the soles of your shoes. They slide treacherously in front of you, to your side, you bow and recover yourself, you lean your body forward into the wind, which is usually fierce onto the shore, which takes your hair back over your head, which goes in and through the spiralling channels of your ears, feeling for your brain. Tom liked the pebbles. They were fragments of huge boulders from the cliffs at the edge of England, boulders which had been soft chalk and hard flint, and were now rounded by the water throwing them up and grinding them together. They are all the same, and none of them exactly the same, Tom thought, pleased with this idea, like human beings, innumerable as—was it innumerable as the stars, or innumerable as the sands, and where did it come from? It didn’t matter. This was a satisfactorily hard place. He went on, and climbed over the crest of a high ridge of the pebbles, and heard and saw the sea. This was the end of England. He had come to the end of England.

  It was late afternoon. He sat down, still in his theatre-going shoes and coat, both now dusty and clogged with clay. In his head, the white pilgrim sat down on a creamy couch of pebbles.

  What now? said Tom to the pilgrim, though he knew the answer.

  He would sit until the sun went down.

  He examined some pebbles. A broken one with a marbly sheen on its fragmented facet. A pale one that was almost perfectly round. One with a hole—these were, or once were, magic, you could see the unseen world through the hole. It was a lumpy stone, mottled grey with rust-coloured stains and pale, bald patches where the chalk still adhered. Inside the hole was fretted like a beehive, and also chalky. Tom picked it up and looked at the sea through the hole.

  The sea at Dungeness is not a placid sea. The pebbles shelve down and down, and the waters of the English Channel come whirling and whistling in, throwing up breakers, crowned with fine spray, that whip back and are sucked back through the pebbles they rattle. The water was noisy, the wind was noisy, the pebbles were noisy. Tom sat in the noise and stared at the waves—the tide was coming in—which were, like the pebbles, all like and unlike each other.

  Under the waves is a current like a whirlwind, that sucks and drives, round the point, out into the English Channel.

  Tom watched the sun go down, over the land towards Beachy Head, into the Channel.

  The stars were indeed innumerable, like sand, like pebbles.

  He had tried very hard to exhaust himself and stop thinking, and had not quite, not yet, succeeded.

  He did the next thing. He thought in an animal way, puzzled, about his overcoat and shoes. They would muddle it. They would drag. He took them off, and put the shoes on the coat. He didn’t know whether the tide would come in and take them. He didn’t mind what it did.

  He started walking again. He walked down the shingle and on, without hesitating, into the waves and the lashing wind, the flying froth and the sinewy down-draft. He was still walking, in his socks, on the pebbles, soaked to the skin, when he slipped, and the wave threw him into the current. He didn’t fight.

  45

  Dorothy and Griselda had both come to Todefright. Dorothy had told Griselda that Olive was anxious about Tom. She told her about the
Tree House, whose fate, irrationally, made Dorothy herself anxious about Tom. Griselda said they had been invited by Wolfgang to go backstage after the performance, and see the complicated machinery that worked the puppets and marionettes. There would be another time, said Griselda. Dorothy thought, not for the first time, that Griselda seemed to know more than she did herself about Wolfgang and his doings, although he was Dorothy’s brother. Half-brother, like Tom.

  When they got to Todefright, Olive was pacing the hall, backwards and forwards, like a shuttle in a loom. Be still, said Humphry, watching. Violet made tea for Griselda and Dorothy. Everybody in the house was on the move and watching from windows: Hedda perambulatory, Violet in the kitchen, Phyllis and the younger boys in the nursery. Griselda, in a fading voice, said to Olive that the reception of the play had been extraordinary.

  Olive said “What did you mean about the Tree House?”

  “When I was last here, I said, let’s go to the Tree House. He didn’t tell me it was all cut down. He just took me there. I thought—I thought it was unkind of him.” She paused. “But like him.”

  “Very like,” said Olive.

  Hedda said “There’s a motor car in the drive. There’s a driver, and another man, and a woman with one of those veils. They’re getting out. It looks like Maid Marian.”

  She had picked up this way of referring to Mrs. Oakeshott by snooping when she was younger. It was possible that she would not have used it, if she had been less anxious. Humphry gave her a dark look.

  The car turned out to belong to Basil Wellwood. The male passenger, unwrapped from his goggles and leather coat, was Charles/Karl. They came into the hall, and stood, mute. Marian Oakeshott said

  “I had hoped—to be able to speak to you in private.” She addressed this remark to Humphry. Olive said “We are all here—we are all here because. You can speak to all of us.”

  Violet took Marian’s driving coat, and Charles/Karl’s. Griselda looked at him with a bewildered frown.

  “I was just visiting—” he said, “when. Mrs. Oakeshott has something to tell you.”

  Violet said “Why don’t you all come in, and sit down?”

  Humphry said “Tell us, Marian, please.”

  Marian Oakeshott said that a light overcoat—a town overcoat—and a pair of shoes had been found on the shingle at Dungeness point. There was no name on them. They had not been in the water. The overcoat had been made by a tailor in Sevenoaks. In its pockets were thirteen acorns, a horse chestnut, and half a dozen pebbles from the shingle. And a programme of Tom Underground. Folded and folded, as small as it would go. The coastguard had these things. She needed to add that Elsie Warren’s daughter, Ann, had seen, from the window, someone walk past, in these clothes. She said he was a tall, fair, thin young man, who was walking, she said, these were her words, “too fast.” All this may mean nothing at all. She said, we all remember Benedict Fludd. She said “I shall never forgive myself if I have worried you unnecessarily.”

  “I am afraid there is little hope of that,” said Humphry.

  Violet said “I really do think we should all sit down.”

  Dorothy took hold of Olive—awkwardly, on the forearm—and led her into the drawing-room. A pretence was made of an ordinary tea-party, with cake, on a plate made by Philip Warren.

  Humphry said he would drive back to Dungeness with Marian and Charles/Karl, if Charles/Karl was agreeable.

  Olive said she would come too.

  Not on this journey, said Humphry.

  I can’t sit here, said Olive.

  You must, said Humphry. You must.

  It was not exactly like the drowning of Benedict Fludd. After two days, the body floated into a fishing-net near Dymchurch. Humphry, who had identified the coat and shoes and returned to Todefright, set out to go back to identify the thing. Olive tried to say she would come, and accepted meekly when Humphry told her she must not. When he came back again, he was white, and looked older.

  “Not recognisable,” he said to Dorothy. “Not—as a person.”

  I know, said Dorothy, who had studied death, but not her own dead.

  Dorothy stayed at Todefright. There was an inquest, and a funeral in St. Edburga’s Churchyard, conducted by Frank Mallett. Olive was subdued, and held on to Dorothy. There was a good, warm tea at the vicarage, and conversation, of a kind. Arthur Dobbin was about to congratulate Olive on the success of Tom Underground, which he hoped to see, when the name caught him short, and he did not pronounce it. Olive looked at him darkly, piercing. He saw she knew exactly what had gone through his mind. He said instead that this was a churchyard full of changing weather, and the poor woman—he thought of her as a poor woman—lost her glare, and smiled briefly. She did not say anything about Tom, from start to finish of the proceedings.

  Back in Todefright, she still clung to Dorothy. “You are the one who knows,” she said to her. Dorothy stayed on. For two or three days Olive did things she had always done. She answered letters. She thanked people for their good wishes. She stared out at the wintry garden, and the frosted tuft of pampas grass.

  Then, one day, Phyllis fell over Olive, unconscious at the foot of the stairs. She was carried up, and put to bed. She lay like a stone for another two days, and then tried to get up, and fell. She nestled back into the big bed, where she had sat with Tom and made up stories that wound along the counterpane.

  She allowed herself to think of him, briefly. And suddenly the room was full of every Tom that had ever been, the blond baby, the infant taking his first, hesitant steps, the little boy clutching her skirt, the besotted reader in too low a light, his brows pulled into a frown, the adolescent with his skin broken out, the young man walking, always walking or about to walk. They were all equally present because they were all gone.

  She remembered the tale she had told to herself of the young woman carrying the packet containing the deaths of Pete and Petey, the young woman walking endlessly in grim weather across the moors, with the unopened packet. There was no room in that packet, for this.

  She thought of the forest of coeval boys, all eternally present, crowding her room, and the old Olive thought idly, this is a story, there is a story in this.

  And then she saw that there was not. There would be no more stories, she thought, dramatically, uncertain whether this too was a story, or a full stop.

  She gave a great howl, and Dorothy came quickly. She gave her calming medicine that the doctor had left. She smoothed the pillows.

  Olive said “You won’t leave me? You will stay, now? You are the only one.”

  Dorothy gave a desperate little shrug, and closed her body in on itself. She said stiffly

  “I can’t stay. I must go back to my work. You know that.” Silence.

  “It isn’t true that I am the only one. There is Papa, and Aunt Violet, and Phyllis, who is much kinder than I am, and Hedda, who wants to help. They all care for you. I care for you, but you know I must do my work.”

  A long silence. Then Olive said “Close the curtains before you go.”

  Dorothy closed them. She kissed her mother, who did not respond. She went out, and closed the door. Olive lay in the dark, surrounded by a forest of sempiternal boys. They did not exactly see her, that was her hope. She tried to remember the woman with the package, walking… She had asked for the stone with a hole, and had it under her pillow.

  46

  There were births, also. Tom Underground opened on New Year’s Day 1909. Tom Wellwood was buried three weeks later. Imogen Cain’s labour began on the same day. It was long, and difficult. Nurses came, and a specialist obstetrician. A day of pain went past. The doctors brought chloroform, and Imogen struggled briefly under the mask. The small, pale girlchild was helped into the world with forceps, in a flood of blood, which was hard to staunch. She was a small child, frighteningly inert. The midwife cleaned, and slapped and shook her, and in the end she mewed and breathed. Imogen lay in her blood, white as alabaster. Prosper Cain, who had seen blood on the battl
efield, who had been called because of unnamed fears on the part of the specialist, turned white himself, and swallowed, and took a deep breath, and took her hand. Her fingers fluttered in his.

  Mother and child lay in a no man’s land between life and death. Imogen’s head was full of shadowy, greedy, threatening things. They showed her her tiny daughter, swaddled in a shawl, and she smiled, but was not strong enough to take her. Her hair was wet with sweat on her pillow. The nurse fed her water with a spoon.

  They had agreed to call the child Cordelia.

  Imogen was still in danger when Prosper should have set out for Ascona, to offer support to his lost daughter. He could not leave his wife. He asked Julian, who was at home, in order to work in the British Museum, if he would go out to Italy. He was a just man in great moral distress. Julian, having taken a distant look at his new sister, thought he would be hopeless and useless where birth and babies were concerned. He was writing an essay on the scarcely known painter Samuel Palmer, who had painted golden, English, paradisal pictures of apple trees, sheep and ripened corn under a harvest moon. It was a long way from all this mess and medical odours. He said, of course he would go. For the first time in his life he patted his father’s shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You must stay, of course. And I can do almost anything you could do, in Ascona.”

  • • •

  He arrived in Ascona to find Florence huge-bellied and somehow shining with complacency, which he had not expected. He said “I can’t kiss you, I can’t reach.” They laughed. It was sunny on the mountainside, even in February. They sat together in the shelter of the terrace, and Julian started to describe Imogen’s state, realised this was tactless, and cut himself off. Florence smiled. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Talk to me like a grown-up person. No one here really does that, except Gabriel.”