by A. S. Byatt
The Lady Roseace and Culvert, Turdus Cantor and Narcisse were all looking out over the meadows and the plain when the keen-eyed Narcisse detected a movement amongst the trees at the rim of the bowl of the valley. From that height what emerged from the dark woody shadows appeared at first to be a slow worm attended by dancing ants, but as it made its slow way across the meadows it could be seen to be a series of covered carts and carriages, attended by pricking outriders, and as it came still nearer, all could see that there were three great covered wagons, each drawn by two bullocks, and, as they came nearer still, that the bullocks were fantastically decked with garlands and the tips of their horns were gilded. A cry went up from the courtyards below, “The children, the children are coming,” and the company waited to glimpse them from above as they paced towards the gatehouse, before hurrying down flight after flight of staircases to greet them in the inner fastness where their journey ended.
From above, no one could be seen in the swaying wagons, save their drivers, all of whom were cowled in heavy hooded cloaks, and carried stubby whips with long lashes, such as were usual in that country to urge on the blundering slow creatures. And indeed the labouring white flanks were blooded here and there, were scored by encouraging strokes, which appeared to have no effect on the steady, deliberate pace of the flower-decked beasts. There was trouble enough getting these ungainly vehicles through the passages to the centre, if it was the centre, of the Tower, and strange stifled sounds, pitiful lowings and nervous bellowings reached the ears of the company before the carts finally emerged into the dark courtyard.
And then the joyful moment, so eagerly awaited, was there. From every side, the coverings of the carts were pushed back, rolled up, burst open, and the small faces and the soft hair, the bright eyes and the tender fists of the children were seen. Some were sleepy, stretching their little limbs to rouse from the abandonment of sleep. Some were alert and mischievous, smiling eagerly at the adventures to be undertaken. Some were more timid, hanging their heads bashfully, flickering their silky lashes on their plump cheeks. Some were whimpering—there are always some who whimper in any group of children; no group of children, however generally cheerful and playful, but has some little whimperers among them—but these were quickly silenced in the general excitement as the children were welcomed and lifted down from the sides of the wagons on to the flagstones of their new abode. They were handed from loving arms to loving arms, they were softly kissed and their little clothes tenderly set to rights, and there was much laughter and general cheerfulness in the shadow of the high roofs.
The drivers too of the wagons were urged to come down from their perches and join the throng. This they did, pushing back their hoods from their dusty faces, coiling the lashes of their whips and tucking them away. The first was an old friend of all, Merkurius, lithe and muscular, with a fine face like a knife and a quizzical smile that quivered the gutstrings of Cynthia and Coelia. There was great rejoicing at the safe arrival of Merkurius, for rumours had been rife that he had been cut off by troops, that he had been taken naked as he made love to a whore in a city brothel, that he had died on the scaffold as a secret substitute for his great friend Armin, that he had drowned in an attempt to swim across a river in full spate. The fantasies of the company had been most fearfully exercised by all these contradictory reports. The sensitive, Narcisse as well as Cynthia and Coelia, had undergone drowning and decapitation, naked apprehension and coitus interruptus, the chase, the flight, the whipping branches, the strangling thickets. Indeed the only consolation for these sensitive souls had been the plethoric variety of these narrations, which could not all be true, so might all be false, as they were now joyfully proved to be.
The second driver had a round red face like a burning flower, and jet-black cropped hair like one a week or two away from escaping from prison or the army. It was only when this personage threw back the cloak with a rich, round peal of laughter that it could be seen that the cloak concealed a billowy female body, that this jovial gaol-bird was the Lady Paeony, heroine of many amorous adventures, and of more anecdotes of intrigue, false and true. Culvert and Roseace hastened to embrace this solid person, who gave her whip a last crack in the courtyard and declared that all her little charges had been golden-good and deserved sweetmeats, that they had been quiet as mice as they passed the pickets, and sung as sweetly as larks, to her great delectation, as they crossed the mountain meadows, and that she loved them all, she could crush them in her arms for love and happiness.
And now the third driver came forward, and pushed back his cowl slowly and deliberately and revealed a grizzled head and a grizzled beard, and a leathery skin wrinkling round pale-blue eyes. There was a hush in the courtyard, and a thrill of whispering ran through the company, for no one knew him, and all enquired of others, if they did, or had seen him before.
And the Lady Roseace said, quick as a flash and unthinking, “This man smells of blood.”
And the man took a step or two forward, fingering his whip and perhaps smiling a little amongst his beard, and perhaps not—different impressions were formed by different persons.
“Who are you?” said Culvert.
“You know me well enough, by name at least, and some of you by more than name,” said the man. “To my sorrow,” he added, but not in a sorrowful tone.
“If it were not impossible,” said Fabian thoughtfully, “I should say your name was Grim, that you are Colonel Grim of the National Army.”
“I have been Colonel in the National Army,” said Grim, “and Colonel in the Royal Army before that, and a professional soldier all my life. And now I am here, and wish to join you, if you will have me.”
At this acknowledgement, a great murmuring and even hissing began amongst the people gathered round the carts, and several people repeated what Roseace had said, “This man smells of blood.”
And Colonel Grim stood there easily amongst them all, looking from faces of hatred to faces of fear, and said, “That I smell of blood is true. I smell myself daily and the smell disgusts me. I have had enough of blood. The gutters of the city are running with blood, there are flecks of blood in the loaves of bread, blood feeds the roots of the apple trees where stinking dead men hang among the apples. You may not believe me now, but a killer by trade who has had enough of blood is a good founding member for a community based on kindness and freedom, as yours is to be.”
“How can that be?” cried Coelia. “We know what you have done, we have heard the stories, the tortures, the punishments, the killing, the killing—how can such a creature be a fit companion for the gentle and the harmonious?”
“We should rather kill him,” cried a young man, “we should put him to the sword for the sufferings of our families and our friends; we should cement our social bonds with his foul blood.”
Colonel Grim said, “A man of blood can smell bloodthirstiness in any household, any society, any family. It is my business to smell bloodthirstiness. I am a wolf who can detect a rogue sheepdog, Monsieur Culvert. I am an instrument of control and have been an instrument of terror, and I can tell you much of the nature of control, and terror, and control by terror, which you do not now think you need to know. But it is what all men need to know, you will find, even if you expel or kill me. I bear the mark of Cain in your household, Monsieur Culvert. I have red hands, and most of you, all of you it may be, have not. But Cain was marked so that the children of Adam should not harm him. A man is not only the history of his deeds, I suppose, according to your philosophy, if not to that of my previous masters. You owe it to me to see how I can live peaceably.”
“I do not understand how you have come here,” said Culvert, frowning.
“I persuaded Merkurius and the Lady Paeony that I was another, that I was your old friend Vertumnus, who died, I am sad to have to tell you, in the oubliettes of the Tower. I had forged letters from yourself with which I convinced them. You must not blame them, sir. I am a sufficiently clever man.”
“He will brin
g the national armies in his train,” said Mavis.
“And how should that be?” asked Grim. “And why should I come, thus openly and alone, saying who I am, and leaving my fate to you, if the armies were following in secret. No, if I wished, I could have had the armies here to greet you. But I did not wish—your hopes are mine, my good friends—I hope you will be my good friends. The armies will not bother you here, and I am no longer Colonel Grim, but plain Grim, grey and grizzled and making a new start in the evening of his days, if you will have me.”
“Turn him away,” said the Lady Roseace, wrinkling her nostrils.
But Culvert said, “What he says is just. He may stay, until any of us detect him casting any baleful influence on our family. For all men are capable of change and redemption, as he says, though he must be watched, to see whether he says so with guile, or with honest intention.”
So they all went into the citadel together, discussing the day’s events.
II
Frederica reads to Leo. Inside his green and white room, which was Nigel’s room, with its Beatrix Potter frieze, she sits on the edge of his fluffy eiderdown and reads to him about the Hobbit, setting out on his adventure. The curtains are drawn against the dark; they are lit by a bedside lamp inside a creamy glass shade, a creamy light.
“At first they passed through hobbit-lands,” Frederica tells him, “a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn.”
“A bit frightening,” says Leo.
“A bit, yes,” says Frederica, who believes there is pleasure in fear.
“Only a bit,” says Leo.
“It gets more frightening later. More exciting.”
“Go on reading.”
“It was after tea-time; it was pouring with rain, and had been all day; his hood was dripping into his eyes, his cloak was full of water; the pony was tired and stumbled on stones; the others were too grumpy to talk.”
“Poor pony. We don’t let Sooty get too tired, do we? We look after him. He doesn’t mind a bit of rain, Auntie Olive says. He’s a tough little thing, Auntie Olive says.” “Yes, he is. Very tough. Shall I go on?”
“Go on.”
“ ‘I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing,’ thought Bilbo. It was not the last time that he wished that!”
Leo rubs his eyes. He pushes his little fists into his eye-sockets and winds them energetically, so that Frederica’s own eyeballs wince sympathetically.
“Be careful, Leo. You’ll hurt your eyes.”
“I won’t. Those are my eyes. I don’t hurt them. They itch.”
“You’re sleepy.”
“I’m not. Go on reading.”
“Still the dwarves jogged on,” says Frederica, “never turning round or taking any notice of the Hobbit.” Leo has settled into his bed: his head is in the hollow of his pillow, his cheek on his hand. She looks at him with appalled love. She knows every hair on his head, every inch of his body, every word, she thinks, of his vocabulary, even though he is constantly proving her wrong. And he has ruined her life, she thinks, for inside the new docile Frederica the old Frederica still has her histrionic passion-fits. I would walk out tomorrow if it were not for Leo, she tells herself hundreds of times each day, with contempt and puzzlement. She looks at his red hair, such a beautiful red, richer than hers, with the shine of those chestnuts he gathered with Hugh Pink. He is a very male child. He has strong shoulders and an aggressive jut to his chin. She is surprised by her passion for his small body as she was surprised by her passion for his father’s, which it will no doubt grow to resemble; she thinks of Leo always as his father’s child. She loves to see him straddle Sooty, his small legs at odds with the heavy straps and buckles and irons of the stirrups, his head, in its black velvet helmet, too important for his body, like a beetle, like a goblin. But Leo on Sooty is his father’s son, in his father’s world, where she doesn’t belong, and isn’t welcome. Nor does she want to belong or be welcome, she tells herself, with her usual mixture of honesty and fury, she has made a terrible mistake. Her voice goes on peacefully, dry and lively, telling about dwarves and wizard, Hobbit and trolls, things going bump in the dark, terror and mayhem, and Leo shudders agreeably. Inside her head she goes over and over what she has done, how she could have done it, how it cannot be undone, how she can live. Only connect, she thinks contemptuously, only connect, the prose and the passion, the beast and the monk. It can’t be done and isn’t worth doing, she thinks on a long repetitive whine, she has been here so often before. She thinks of Mr. Wilcox in Howards End, thinks of him with hatred, that stuffed man, that painted scarecrow. Margaret Schlegel was a fool in ways Forster had no idea of, because he wasn’t a woman, because he supposed connecting was desirable, because he had no idea what it meant.
“ ‘Dawn take you all and be stone to you!’ said a voice that sounded like William’s. But it wasn’t. For just at that moment the light came over the hill, and there was a mighty twitter in the branches. William never spoke for he stood turned to stone as he stooped—”
The door opens. Mother and son look up, and there is the man, the father, his return, as usual, unannounced. The sleepy boy is awake in a flash and sits up to be embraced. Nigel Reiver hugs his son and puts his arm round his wife. His cheek is cold from the outdoors—he has come straight up, he is even a little breathless, he is eager to see his family. He is a dark man in a dark suit, a soft armour, with the blue shadow of a dark beard on his solid cheek.
“Don’t stop,” he says. “Go on reading, I’ll listen, it’s my absolutely favourite book, The Hobbit.”
“It’s a bit frightening,” says Leo. “Only a bit. Mummy says it gets more exciting than this, even more.”
“Oh, it does,” says the dark man, stretching himself on the bed beside his son, both heads on the pillow, looking up at Frederica, perched on the edge with the book.
He has nothing at all to do with Mr. Wilcox.
There is something to do with sex, which he is good at, and which Forster perhaps wanted Mr. Wilcox to be good at, but couldn’t quite imagine, couldn’t give life to.
The two pairs of dark eyes watch Frederica.
The room is full of slumberous warmth and watchful sharpness.
“And there they stand to this day, all alone, unless the birds perch on them; for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again. That is what had happened to Bert and Tom and William.”
“I meant to stop there, it’s a good stopping place, and Leo was nearly asleep, weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t, I was waiting for my Daddy to come.”
“No you weren’t. We didn’t know he was coming.”
“I did. I knew in my bones he would come this evening, I knew and I was right. Go on reading.”
“Go on,” says the man, lying on his back like a knight on a tombstone, his shiny dark shoes overhanging the bedfoot. So she goes on, for they are all happy, to the discovery of the treasure in the cave, and the end of the chapter.
“Have you been a good boy?” asks Nigel. “What has happened while I was away?”
“A man came to see Mummy, he was a very nice man with a funny name, his name was Pink, he found us in the woods and we asked him to tea.”
“That was nice,” says Nigel smoothly. He kisses his son good night, and Frederica kisses him, and the light is put out, and the little boy stirs his blankets into a containin
g nest.
Pippy Mammott has made supper for them to eat by the fire. She has made supper Nigel likes, shepherd’s pie and baked apples with honey and raisins. She does not eat with Nigel and Frederica, but she does come in and out whilst they eat, offering second helpings, which Nigel accepts, refilling wineglasses, solicitously asking them to be careful of the apples, which are piping hot—“As they should be,” says Nigel, detaining her to be congratulated on both pie and apples. He and Frederica sit in large armchairs each side of the wood fire, and Pippy Mammott stands between them with her back to the flames, warming her bottom. She tells him what Leo has been doing and saying, how well he is learning to ride Sooty, what a dauntless little boy he is, how they had an unexpected visitor, a friend of Frederica’s apparently passing by quite accidentally on a walking tour.
“That was nice,” says Nigel, smoothly, again. When Pippy has gone away with the trolley and the debris of the meal, he says, as Frederica is expecting him to say, “Who is this Hugh Pink?”
“An old friend from Cambridge. He writes poetry. Rather good poetry, I think. He was in Madrid for a year or two, and now he’s back.”
“You didn’t say he was coming.”
“I didn’t know. He was on a walking holiday. Leo and I happened to bump into him, we gave him tea—it was Leo who invited him to tea—not me—”