by A. S. Byatt
Olive Wellwood was the wife of Humphry Wellwood, who worked in the Bank of England, and was an active member of the Fabian Society. She was the author of a great many tales, for children and adults, and something of an authority on British Fairy Lore. She had come to see Major Cain because she had a project for a tale that would turn on an ancient treasure with magical properties. Prosper Cain said gallantly that he was delighted she had thought of him. She smiled, and said that the most exciting thing about her small success with her books was that she felt able to disturb people as important and as busy as he was. It was something she could never have expected. She said his room was like a cavern from the Arabian Nights, and that she could barely resist getting up and looking at all the wondrous things he had collected. Not much Arabian stuff, actually, said Prosper. It was not his field. He had served in the East, but his interests were European. He was afraid she would find no scholarly order in his personal things. He didn’t believe that a room needed to be set slavishly in one style—most particularly not when the room was, so to speak, a room within the multifarious rooms of the Museum, as the smallest eggshell might be in a Fabergé nest. You could set an Iznik jar very well next to a Venetian goblet and a lustre bowl by Mr. de Morgan, and they would all show to advantage.
“I hang my walls with mediaeval Flemish needlework, next to the small tapestry my friend Morris wove for me at Merton Abbey—greedy birds and crimson berries. Do look at the very satisfactory strength of the twist of the leaves. He never lacks energy.”
“And these?” enquired Mrs. Wellwood. She stood up impulsively, and ran a grey-gloved finger along a shelf of incongruous objects with no apparent relation to each other, aesthetic or historical.
“Those, dear lady, are, as it were, my touchstone collection of fakes. These are not mediaeval spoons, though they were offered to me as such. This nautilus is not a Cellini, though William Beckford was led to believe it was, and paid a small fortune for it. These baubles are not the Crown Jewels, but skilful glass replicas of some of them, which were exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851.”
“And this?”
Mrs. Wellwood’s soft finger ran lightly over a platter containing very lively images, in pottery, of a small toad, a curled snake, a few beetles, some moss and ferns, and a black crayfish.
“I’ve never seen anything so lifelike. Every little wart and wrinkle.”
“You may or may not know that the Museum came to grief through the very expensive purchase of a dish—not this one—by Bernard Palissy. Who is immortalised in mosaic in the Kensington Valhalla. It was subsequently realised to our embarrassment to have been made—as this one was—as an honest replica by a modern French pottery. Sold as souvenirs. It is in fact—without incontestable artists’ marks—very hard to distinguish a fake Palissy—or a copy, I should say—from the seventeenth-century thing itself.”
“And yet,” said Mrs. Wellwood, quick on the uptake, “the detail, the precision. It looks unusually difficult.”
“It is said, and I believe it to be true, that the ceramic creatures are built round real creatures—real toads, eels, beetles.”
“Dead, I do hope.”
“Mummified, it is to be hoped. But we do not know precisely. Maybe there is a tale to be told?”
“The prince who became a toad and was imprisoned in a dish? How he would hate watching the banquets. There is a half-stone prince in the Arabian Nights, who has always troubled me. I must think.”
She smiled, catlike and content.
“But you were consulting me about gold and silver treasures?”
Humphry Wellwood had said “Go and ask the Old Pirate. He’ll know. He knows all about hiding places and secret transactions. He haunts markets and antiquaries, and pays pennies, so we are told, for ancestral heirlooms that get onto street stalls after revolutions.”
“I want something that’s always been missing—with a story attached to it, naturally—and that can be made to have magic properties, an amulet, a mirror that shows the past and the future, that kind of thing. You can see my imagination is banal, and I need your precise knowledge.”
“Oddly,” said Prosper Cain, “there aren’t so many gold and silver treasures that are very ancient—and that’s for a very good reason. If you were a Viking lord, or a Tartar chief—or even the Holy Roman Emperor—your gold and silver things were part of your treasury, and always—from the point of view of the artist and the storyteller—in danger of being melted down, for barter, or soldiers’ wages, or quick transport and hiding. The Church had its sacred vessels—”
“I don’t want a grail or a monstrance, or that sort of thing.”
“No, you want something with a personal mana. I see what you need.”
“Not a ring. There are so many tales about rings.”
Prosper Cain laughed aloud, a sharp bark of a laugh.
“You are exacting. What about the tale of the Stoke Prior Treasure—silver vessels buried for safety during the Civil War, unearthed in our own day by a boy hunting rabbits? Or there is the romantic tale of the Eltenberg Reliquary, which was purchased for the Museum by J. C. Robinson in 1861. It came from the collection of Prince Soltikoff—who had bought it with about four thousand mediaeval objects from a Frenchman after the 1848 revolution.
“It was hidden in a chimney after Napoleon’s invasion by the last canoness of Eltenberg, Princess Salm-Reiffenstadt. And from the chimney somehow it reached a canon in Emmerich who sold it to a dealer in Aachen—Jacob Cohen of Anhalt—who called one day on Prince Florentin of Salm-Salm and offered him one small walrus-ivory figure. And when Prince Florentin bought that, Cohen returned, with another and another and another—and in the end the reliquary chest itself, black with smoke and reeking of tobacco. Now, Prince Florentin’s son, Prince Felix, persuaded him to sell the pieces to a dealer in Cologne, and there, we believe, clever modern fakes were substituted for some pieces—the Journey of the Magi, the Virgin and Child with St. Joseph, and some of the Prophets. Very clever fakes. We have them. This is a true story, and we are convinced the original pieces are squirrelled away somewhere. Would this not make a great tale, the tracking and restoration of the pieces? Your characters could go on the trail of the artisan who made the fakes …”
Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.
“I should need to change it a great deal.”
The scholar and expert in fakes looked briefly displeased.
“It is so strong as it is,” she explained. “It has no need of my imagination.”
“I should have thought it calls upon all our imaginations, the fate of those lost works of art and craft…”
“I am intrigued by your toads and snakes.”
“For a tale of witchcraft? As familiars?”
At this point the door opened, and Julian led Philip Warren in, followed by Tom, who closed it.
“Excuse me, Father. We thought you should know. We found—him—hiding away in the Museum stores. In the crypt. I’d been keeping an eye on him and we tracked him down. He was living down there.”
Everyone looked at the dirty boy as though, Olive thought, he had risen out of the earth. His shoes had left marks on the carpet.
“What were you doing?” Prosper Cain asked him. He didn’t answer. Tom went to his mother, who ruffled his hair. He offered her the story.
“He makes drawings of the things in the cases. At night he sleeps all alone in the shrine of an old dead saint, where the bones used to be. Amongst gargoyles and angels. In the dark.”
“That’s brave,” said Olive, turning the dark eyes to Philip. “You must have been afraid.”
“Not really,” said Philip, stolidly.
He had no intention of saying what he really felt. This was that if you have slept on one mattress, end to end with five other children—a mattress moreover on which two br
others and a sister had died, neither easily nor peacefully, with nowhere to remove them to—a few old bones weren’t going to worry you. All his life he had had a steady craving for solitude, hardly even named, but never relaxing. He had no idea if other people felt this. On the whole it appeared they did not. In the Museum crypt, in the dark and dust, briefly, this craving had been for the first time satisfied. He was in a dangerous and explosive state of mind.
“Where are you from, young man?” asked Prosper Cain. “I need the whys and the hows. Why are you here, and how did you get into a locked space?”
“I come from Burslem. I work in t’Potteries.” A long pause. “I run off, that’s it, I ran away.” His face was stolid. “Your parents work in the Potteries?”
“Me dad’s dead. He were a saggar-maker. Me mum works in th’ paint shop. All of us work there, one way or another. I loaded kilns.”
“You were unhappy,” said Olive.
Philip considered his inner state. He said “Yes.”
“People were hard on you.”
“They had to be. It weren’t that. I wanted. I wanted to make something…”
“You wanted to make something of your life, of yourself,” Olive prompted. “That’s natural.”
It may have been natural, but it was not what Philip meant. He repeated
“I wanted to make something…”
His mind’s eye saw an unformed mass of liquescent mud. He looked around, like a baited bear, and saw the flaming de Morgan lustre bowl on the mantelshelf. He opened his mouth to comment on the glaze and decided against it.
Tom said “Won’t you show us your drawings?” He said to his mother “He used to show the lady students, they liked them, they gave him bread…”
Philip undid his satchel and brought out his sketch-book. There was the Candlestick with its coiling dragons and poised, wide-eyed little men. Sketch after sketch, all the intricacies of the writhing and biting and stabbing. Tom said
“That’s the little man I liked, the elderly one with the thin hair and the sad look.”
Prosper Cain turned the pages. Stone angels, Korean gold ornaments for a crown, a Palissy dish in all its ruggedness, one of the two definitely authentic specimens.
“What are these?” he asked, turning more pages.
“Those are just my own ideas.”
“For what?”
“Well, I thought salt-glazed stoneware. Or mebbe earthenware, that page. I were drawing the metal to get the feel of it. I don’t know metal. I know clay. I know a bit about clay.”
“You have a fine eye,” said Prosper Cain. “A very fine eye. You were using the Collection as it is intended to be used, to study design.”
Tom drew a sigh of relief. The story was to have a good ending.
“Would you like to study in the Art School?”
“I dunno. I want to make something…”
He was suddenly at the end of his resources, and began to sway. Prosper Cain was still studying the drawings, and said, without looking up,
“You must be hungry. Ring for Rosie, Julian, and tell her to bring fresh tea.”
“I am always hungry,” said Philip, suddenly loudly, with twice the force of his earlier remarks. He had not meant it to be funny, but because he was truly about to be fed, they all took it as a joke, and laughed merrily together.
“Sit down, boy. This isn’t an interrogation.”
Philip looked doubtfully at the flame and peacock silk cushions.
“They’ll clean. You look all in. Sit down.”
• • •
Rosie, the parlourmaid, made several journeys up the narrow stairs, bringing trays with porcelain cups and saucers, a cakestand with a solid block of fruitcake, a platter of various kinds of sandwich, delicately designed both to appeal to a lady and to nourish growing boys (cucumber slivers in some, wedges of potted meat in others). Then she brought a dish of tartlets, a teapot, a teakettle, a cream jug. She was a wiry small person in starched cap and apron, about as old as Philip and Julian. She set everything out on occasional tables, put the kettle on the hearth, bobbed at Major Cain and went downstairs again. Prosper Cain asked Mrs. Wellwood to pour. He was amused to see Philip raise his cup to his eye to study the shepherdesses on flowered meadows around it.
“Minton porcelain, Sèvres-style,” Prosper said. “An abomination in the eyes of William Morris, but I have a weakness for ornament…”
Philip put the cup down on the table at his elbow, and did not answer. His mouth was full of sandwich. He was trying to eat daintily, and he was horribly hungry, he was ravenous. He tried to chew slowly. He gulped. They all watched him benignly. He chewed, and blushed under the dirt. He was close to tears. They were aliens. His mother painted the borders of cups like these, with fine brushes, day after day, proud of her repetitive faultlessness. Olive Wellwood, smelling of roses, stood over him, handing him slabs of fruitcake. He ate two, though he thought it was probably impolite. But the starch and the sugar did their work. His unnatural tension and wariness gave way to pure fatigue.
“And now?” said Prosper Cain. “What shall we do with this young man? Where shall he sleep tonight, and what should he do with himself?”
Tom was put in mind of David Copperfield’s arrival at Betsey Trot-wood’s house. A boy. Coming to a real home, out of dirt and danger. He was about to echo Mr. Dick—give him a bath—and managed not to. It would have been most insulting.
Olive Wellwood turned the question to Philip
“What do you want to do?”
“Work,” said Philip. It was an easy answer and it was largely right.
“Not to go back?”
“No.”
“I think—if Major Cain agrees—you should come home now, with me and Tom, for the weekend. I imagine he has no thought of prosecuting you for trespass. This weekend is Midsummer Eve, and we are having a midsummer party at our house in the country. We are a large family, and friendly, and one more or less makes no difference.” She turned to Prosper Cain.
“And I hope that you too will come over to Andreden from Iwade, for midsummer magic, and bring Julian, and Florence too, to join the young folk.”
Prosper Cain bent over her hand, mentally cancelled a card party and said he would—they all would—be delighted. Tom looked at their captured boy, to see if he was pleased, but he was staring at his feet. Tom was not entirely sure about Julian coming to his party. He found him intimidating. It would be good to have Philip, if he would consent to enjoy himself. He thought of adding his voice to his mother’s, and was embarrassed, and did not.
2
They took the train to Andreden, in the Kentish Weald, and took a fly at the station. Philip sat opposite Tom and his mother, who leaned against each other. Philip’s eyes kept closing, but Olive was explaining things to him, to which he knew he should attend. Andred was the old British name for the forest. Andreden meant a swine pasture in the forest. Their house was called Todefright. In fact they had changed it from Todsfrith, but the change was etymologically sound. Fryth, in the old language of the Weald, was a word for scrubland on the edge of a forest. The local Kentish word for that was “fright.” They supposed Tod meant toad. Philip asked stolidly, were there any toads, then? Lots, said Tom. Big fat ones. Spawn in the duckpond. Frogs too, and newts, and tiddlers.
They drove between hawthorn and hazel hedges, along curling lanes between overhanging woods of beech, and birch, and yew. Philip had felt the shift in the air as the train pulled out of the London pall. You could see the edge of the darkness. It was not as bad as the thick dark air full of hot grit and melted chemicals that poured from the tall chimneys and bottle ovens in Burslem. His lungs felt nervous and overdilated. Olive and Tom did not take the fresh air for granted. They exclaimed ritually about how good it was to get out of the dirt. Philip felt dirt was engrained in him.
Todefright was an old Kentish farmhouse, built of stone and timber. It had meadows and a river before it, woods rising uphill behind it, and a wide
view to the high edge of the Weald across the river. The house had been tactfully extended and modernised by Lethaby, in the Arts and Crafts style, respecting (and also creating) odd-shaped windows and eaves, twisting stairs, nooks, crannies and exposed roof-beams. The front door, solid oak, opened into a modern version of a mediaeval hall, with settles and alcoves, a large hand-crafted dining-table, and a long dresser, shining with lustreware. Beyond this were a (small) panelled library, which was also Olive’s study, and a billiard-room, which was Humphry’s, when he was at home. There were many outhouses—kitchens, sculleries, guest cottages, stables with haylofts, inhabited by scratching hens and nesting swallows. A wide, turning staircase rose out of the hall to the upper floors.
A large number of people, adults and children, came running and strolling to welcome Olive and Tom. Philip took them in. A short, dark-haired woman in a loose mulberry-coloured dress, printed with brilliant nasturtiums, was carrying a baby—maybe a year old—whom she handed to Olive to be kissed and hugged, even before Olive had taken off her coat. Two servants, one motherly, one girlish, stood by to take the coats. Two young ladies in identical indigo aprons, long hair falling over their shoulders, one dark, one tawny, younger than Philip, younger than Tom, but not by much. A little girl in a robin-red apron, who shoved past the others, and grabbed Olive’s skirts. A little boy, with blond curls, and a Fauntleroy lace collar, who clung to the mulberry lady’s skirts, and hid his face in them. Olive buried her nose in the neck of the baby, Robin, who was reaching for her poppies and hat-pin.
