by A. S. Byatt
“I am like a tree with birds in it. This is Philip, who has come to stay for a little while. Philip, the two big girls are Dorothy and Phyllis. This is my sister, Violet Grimwith, who makes everything work here—everything that does work, that is. This little demon is my clever Hedda, who cannot keep still. The one being bashful is Florian, who is three. Come out and say hello to Philip, Florian.”
Florian held on to Violet Grimwith’s skirts, and was distinctly heard to say, into the cloth, that Philip smelled bad. Violet picked him up, shook him, and kissed him. He kicked at her hips. Olive said
“Philip has left home, and come a long way. He needs a bath, and some clean clothes—and a bed made up in Birch Cottage, if Cathy could see to that. And Ada might perhaps fill a bath for him—go with Ada, Philip, first things first—and when you are refreshed, we will see about supper and plan-making.”
Violet Grimwith said she would look out something for Philip to wear. She thought he was too big to get into anything belonging to Tom. But there might be a shirt, in Humphry’s weekend drawer, and even maybe breeches …
Philip mutely followed Ada, who was the cook, into the servants’ part of the house, and then through the back, into the stable-yard and across to the guest cottage, which had a downstairs room with a sink and a pump, and an upstairs loft, reached by a ladder, where Cathy could be heard, thumping bedclothes. Philip stood awkwardly. Ada fetched a tin bath, two jugs of hot water, a jug of cold water, soap and a towel. Then she left him. He took off the top layer of his clothes, and tentatively mixed some of the hot and cold water in the bath. Then he took off the remaining protection of his underpants and singlet. He was not used to baths. He was used to a quick sluicing under a cold communal pump. He lifted a leg to straddle the rim of the bath. Violet Grimwith came in without knocking. Philip reached for the towel to cover himself, and stumbled with a splash into the water, barking his shin on the edge. He made a choked, wailing cry.
“You don’t need to mind me,” said Miss Grimwith. “Let me see that scrape. There’s nothing I haven’t seen. I’ve nursed all their little wounds, all their lives, I’m the one they turn to, when they need to, and so I hope will you, young man.”
Much to his alarm, she advanced on him, bearing the soap, and a cannikin of warm water, which without warning she poured over his thick hair, so that jets sprang into his eyes and over his shoulders.
“Shut your eyes,” she advised him. “Keep ’em tight shut, I’ll get to the roots of it, I will.”
She applied soap and water to his hair as she spoke, pommelling and twisting and then massaging the skin of his scalp, probing with thin fingers for the taut muscles in his neck and shoulders.
“Let go,” said the surprising woman. “We’ll have every cranny clean and lively, wait and see.”
She spoke to him as though he was a baby, or just possibly a fully grown and complicit man. Philip decided to keep his eyes shut, in every sense of shut. He tightened his sphincters, pushed his chin into his chest, and felt the fingers and palms slap and maul him. Under the water they came, accidentally or on purpose, briefly fluttering against what he thought of as his whistler.
“Muck of ages,” said the sharp voice. “Surprising how it accumulates, muck. Now you’re a nice pinky-pig-pink, not elephant-hide. You’ve got a fine thatch of hair, now the dust’s out, and the other stuff. You can open your eyes. I’ve wiped the soap off, it won’t sting.”
He didn’t want to open his eyes.
He was encouraged to dry himself whilst Violet Grimwith held up various garments against him, for size. He struggled, still damp, into some patched long-johns, and chose a plain dark-blue twill shirt out of the three presented to him. Tom’s breeches were too small. “I knew it, really,” said Violet. A pair, presumably belonging to the master of the house, in brown cord, sagged a little, but could be, as Violet suggested, hauled in with a thick belt. She produced a truss of needles and bobbins, told him to stand still, and took in a pleat on each side over his hips, sewing fast and precisely. “I know how young folk are, they are ashamed to look odd and hate things not fitting right. This is only makeshift, but it’ll hold for the duration. You’ll forget they’re too big, this way. One thing less to bother yourself about.” She put one hand on each of his hips and turned him round like a mannequin. She gave him a stout pair of new socks, but none of the shoes she had brought fitted, and he had to put on his old dirty boots—after she had given them a brush over. A tweed jacket with leather trim completed the outfit. She even gave him a clean handkerchief. And a pocket-comb, made from white bone, with which she tugged at his hair before inserting it into his jacket pocket. There was no mirror in Birch Cottage, so he couldn’t look at her handiwork. He wriggled; the underwear bothered him. Violet ran her fingers round inside his waistband, and straightened him. She rolled his old dirty clothes into a bundle. “I’m not stealing them, young man, they’ll come back darned and laundered.”
“Thank you, mam,” said Philip.
“If you want anything at all, I’m the one. Remember that. There’s a nightshirt on your bed, and a pot under it, and a toothbrush by the pump. I’ll give you matches and a candle when you come back. You’ll sleep deep in the good Kent air.”
Supper was ready in the dining-hall. The table was laid with pretty earthenware plates and mugs, glazed in yellow, with a border of black-eyed daisies. Robin and Florian had been put to bed, but Hedda, who was five, was still there, as they ate early. Olive summoned Philip to sit at her side, and said he was handsome. Humphry Wellwood nodded to him from the other end of the table. He was a tall, thin man, with a fox-red beard, neatly trimmed, pale blue eyes and a dark brown velvet jacket.
There was cauliflower soup, followed by a lamb stew, and a vegetable and pumpkin pie for the vegetarians (Olive, Violet, Phyllis and Hedda). Philip took two bowls of soup. Prosper Cain’s fruitcake was a long time away; he had two weeks of near-starvation and a lifetime of perpetual hunger to feed. He had supposed Mr. Wellwood, who worked in the Bank of England, would be like the factory owners in the Potteries, stiff, grand and condescending. But Humphry told the children what was clearly an instalment in a running tale of secret naughtiness amongst the bank clerks in the depths of the Bank, who kept tethered bull terriers attached to the legs of their desks, and divided sides of meat from Smithfield before going home for the weekend. Phyllis and Hedda shuddered dramatically. Humphry recounted a jape in which one young man had tied the laces of another man’s boots to his high desk-stool. Dorothy said that wasn’t really funny, and Humphry agreed immediately, saying with half-mock sadness that the poor young creatures were confined in the shadows with no outlet for their animal energies. They are like the Nibelungen, said Humphry, they go to the bullion-vaults to stare at the machines that weigh the gold sovereigns—like half-human creatures that swallow the good coins and spit out the light ones into copper vessels. Tom said they had seen an amazing candlestick which Major Cain had said might be made out of melted-down gold coins. With dragons on it, and little men, and monkeys. Philip had made some wondrous drawings of it. Everyone looked at Philip, who stared into his soup. Humphry said, as though he really meant it, that he should like to see the drawings. Violet said, don’t embarrass the poor lad, which embarrassed him.
From time to time, during the meal, Olive turned gracefully and impulsively towards Philip, and urged him to tell her all about himself. She elicited, slowly, the information that his dad was dead in a kiln accident, and that his mam worked at painting china. He had worked himself, carrying full saggars to the kilns. Yes, he had sisters, four. Brothers, asked Phyllis. Two, both dead, said Philip. And a sister, dead.
And he had felt he had to get away? said Olive. He must have been unhappy. The work must have been hard, and maybe people weren’t kind to him.
Philip thought of his mam, and found his eyes, to his horror, hot and wet.
Olive said he didn’t need to tell them, they understood. Everyone stared at him with warmth and sympathy. �
��It weren’t,” he said. “It weren’t…” His voice was unsteady.
“We shall see you have somewhere to live, and work to do,” said Olive, her voice full of gold.
Dorothy asked rather abruptly if Philip could ride a bicycle.
He said no, but he’d seen them, and thought they must be real exciting, and wished he could try one.
Dorothy said “We’ll show you tomorrow. We’ve got new ones. There’ll be time to show you, before the party. We can ride in the woods.”
She had a rather fierce little face, not pretty, and looked cross most of the time. He did not wonder why. Exhaustion was overcoming him. Olive asked him two or three more probing questions about the ill-treatment she was convinced he had undergone. He answered monosyllabically, spooning blancmange into his mouth. This time he was rescued by Violet, who said the boy was dead on his feet and she proposed to find him a candle and see him to his bed.
Violet said “You mustn’t mind my sister. She’s a storyteller. She’s making up stories for you. I don’t mean lies, I mean stories. It’s her way. She’s fitting you in.” Philip said
“She’s been—so very kind. You all have.”
“We have our beliefs,” said Violet. “About what the world should be like. And some of us have experience—like yours—of what it shouldn’t be.”
The moon was caught in the branches of the trees round the cottage. He was solaced by learning the lines of the network of twigs, which was both random and ordered. He didn’t point this out to Violet, but thanked her again, as he took his candle, and made his way into his cottage. He feared she might try to kiss him goodnight—he could not predict what these people would do—but she simply stood, and watched him take his candle up the ladder.
“Sleep tight,” she called.
“Thank you,” he said, yet again.
And then he was alone, with a brave candle, in a cottage. This was what he had wanted, or part of it. There was a nightshirt, laid out on the clean sheets of the wooden bed that was temporarily his. He looked out of the window, and there were the branches, lit by the moon on a dark blue, cloudless sky, with their fish-shaped leaves overlapping, and just trembling. He translated the shapes into a glaze, and puzzled over it briefly. It was too much. He wanted to cry out, or to weep, or, he understood, to touch his body—his body washed clean—as he had only ever been able to do furtively, in dirty places. He must not leave marks, that would be shameful. He finally contrived a safety-pad of the handkerchief he had been given or lent. He could rinse it, subsequently, under the pump.
He lay back, and took himself in hand, and worked himself into a rhythm of delight, and a soaring wet ecstasy.
Then he lay still, listening to the sounds in the silence. An owl called. Another owl answered. A big branch creaked. Things rustled. The pump below dripped in the stone sink. How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.
The next day, they prepared the Midsummer Party. Violet gave Philip a breakfast of eggs, toast and tea, and told him he was co-opted to make lanterns. The garden would be full of them. He was to go up to the schoolroom, where the lanterns were being made.
The imposing staircase took an interesting turn as it went up. In an alcove, at the turning, standing on an oak coffin stool was a jar. It was a large earthenware vessel, that bellied out and curved in again, to a tall neck with a fine lip. The glaze was silver-gold, with veilings of aquamarine. The light flowed round the surface, like clouds reflected in water. It was a watery pot. There was a vertical rhythm of rising stems, water-weeds, and a dashing horizontal rhythm of irregular clouds of black-brown wriggling commas, which turned out, inspected closely, to be lifelike tadpoles with translucent tails. The jar had several asymmetric handles which seemed to grow out of it like roots in water, but turned out to have the sly faces and flickering tails of water-snakes, green-spotted gold. It rested on four dark green feet, which were coiled, scaled lizards. Or minor dragons, lying with closed eyes and resting snouts.
This was what he had come to look for. His fingers moved inside its contours on an imaginary wheel. Its form clothed his sense of the shape of his body. He stood stock still and stared.
Olive Wellwood came up behind him and put an arm about his shoulder. She smelled of roses. Philip resisted shrugging. He disliked being touched. Especially at private times.
“It’s an amazing pot, don’t you think? We chose it for the pretty tadpoles—they go with our idea of Todefright. The little ones love to stroke them.”
Philip could not speak.
“Benedict Fludd made it. He works in Dungeness. He’s invited to the party, but he probably won’t come. His wife will. She’s called Seraphita, though she was born Sarah-Jane. The boy’s Geraint, and the girls are Imogen—she must be about your age—and Pomona. Pomona’s Tom’s age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name—so dangerous, don’t you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts. Pomona isn’t very appley—you’ll see—more a pale narcissus.”
Philip was interested only in the potter. He managed to mutter that the pot was extraordinary.
“He has religious fits, I’m told. They have to hide the pots, to prevent him smashing them. And he has anti-religious fits.”
Philip made a strangled, noncommittal sound. Olive ruffled his hair. He didn’t flinch. She led him up to the schoolroom.
“Schoolroom” to Philip meant a dark chapel annexe with long benches, and a heavy atmosphere of unwashed bodies, baffled thinking and prickling fear of the cane. Here, in a room full of light, with pimpernel chintz at the windows, everyone was at work in his or her own space. The girls wore bright aprons, like coloured butterflies, Dorothy butcher-blue, Phyllis deep rose, Hedda scarlet. Florian had a cowslip-yellow smock. The long, scrubbed table was covered with coloured papers, glue pots, paintbrushes, paintboxes, jars of water. Waste-paper baskets overflowed with crumpled, rejected efforts. Violet presided, helping with a snip here, a finger on a knot there.
Tom made room for Philip to sit next to him. “No,” said Phyllis, “next to me.”
Phyllis had hair the colour of butter, slick and shiny. Philip sat down next to her. She patted his arm, with a gesture that belonged to a child younger than she seemed to be. Or a gesture you might use to a pet, Philip thought unjustly. He remembered his sister Elsie, who had never had her own space in any room, and fought a constant battle with nits in her pale hair.
They showed him their lanterns. Tom’s had hunched crows on flame-colour. Phyllis had put simple florets, daisies and bluebells on grass-green. Dorothy had made a pattern of skeletal hands (not human, Philip thought, maybe rabbits) on violet. Hedda was slowly cutting out a silhouette of a witch on a broom. Phyllis said
“We told her that witches are for Hallowe’en not Midsummer. But she got good at Hallowe’en witches, she got the knack of the hat and bristles—”
“Witches don’t stop being, in midsummer,” said Hedda. “I like witches.”
“Help yourself to paper, Philip,” said Violet Grimwith, “and to scissors and paste and paint. We are all curious to see what you will do.”
He felt better the moment he had his hands on solid things. He took a large piece of paper and covered it with the pattern of tadpoles from the master pot, which he needed to remember. Then he made another with the long sly snake flickering round it, grass-green and gold on blue. Violet took these away to make into lanterns. Philip had another idea. He painted a dull red horizon, with shadowy grey forms rising high above it. There were squat cylindrical forms, and tall bottle-shaped forms, and shapes like hives and casques. There was a flowing festoon of flame and tongues of pewter-grey smoke from the summits, the skyline of Burslem, made elegant as a party lantern.
“What’s that, what’s that, then?” asked loud Hedda.
“That’s where I come from. Chimneys and bottle ovens, and furnace flames, and smoke.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Hedda.
“Aye, on a lantern,” said Philip. “In a sense it is beautiful, as it is. But horrible, too. You can’t breathe rightly.”
Dorothy took the lanterns and ranged them with the other finished ones. Phyllis said
“Tell us about that place. Tell us about your sisters. Tell us their names.”
She nestled closer to him, so he could feel the warmth and weight of her body, almost leaning on him, almost cuddling.
“They are Elsie and Nellie and Amelia and Hope,” said Philip reluctantly.
“And the dead ones? Our dead ones are Peter, who died just before Tom was born, so he’s fifteen, and Rosy, who was a dear little baby.”
“Be quiet, Phyllis,” said Tom. “He doesn’t want to know all that.”
Phyllis insisted, moving closer to Philip. “And your dead ones? What are their names?”
“Ned,” said Philip flatly. “And Robert Owen. And Rosy. Well, Mary-Rose.” He tried very hard to remember neither their faces nor their bodies.
Dorothy said “After lunch we’re going to take Philip out and teach him to ride a safety-bicycle.” She told Philip “We’ve all got one. They’ve got names, like the ponies. Mine’s called Mona-Bona-Grona, because she creaks. Tom’s is just the Steed.”
“And mine is Tiptoes,” said Phyllis. “Because my legs are almost too short.”
“It is the most wonderful sensation,” said Dorothy. “Most especially running away downhill. Have some more paper, make another, we have to hang them from all the trees in the shrubbery and the orchard.”
