by A. S. Byatt
The year 1881 was a year of beginnings. A number of idealist, millenarian projects and groups were founded. There were the Democratic Federation, the Society for Psychical Research, the Theosophical Society, the Anti-Vivisection movement. All were designed to change and reinvent human nature. The younger Wellwoods looked into them all and joined some. Toby Youlgreave, who was almost part of their small family, immediately joined the Theosophists, and took his friends with him. All three also attended the early meetings of the Democratic Federation, which was mostly attended by German and Austrian socialists and anarchists, some disgruntled English workingmen and some university idealists. William Morris defended the Austrian dissident Johannes Most, who wrote what Morris described as a song of triumph at the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Most went into a British prison, and Hyndman demonstrated in public. Basil begged Humphry not to involve himself.
In October 1882 Edward Pease founded the Fellowship of the New Life, and the younger Wellwoods went to its meetings. They discussed, there and at the Democratic Federation, organisation of unemployed labour, the feeding of board schoolchildren, nationalisation of mines and railways, the construction, by public bodies, of homes fit for the People.
In the winter of 1882, in Christmas week, Peter came down with croup, and died. In the same week, Thomas Wellwood was born.
In 1883 Olive Wellwood was seriously ill. Violet managed the little house. Karl Marx died. Attempts were made to explode local government offices, The Times newspaper and underground railways full of people coming from exhibitions in South Kensington. Basil took Humphry to his club, and told him very firmly that anarchism simply would not do. A Bank of England officer could not be seen hobnobbing with anarchists.
Humphry responded by taking his wife—to give her a change of air, he told Katharina—to Munich, where they had various secretive meetings with freethinkers and socialists. They visited the Alte Pinakothek, and were present at the opening of the Löwenbräukeller, complete with napkins and tablecloths, and the music of four military bands. Olive recovered sufficiently to dance at Fasching. Tom was left behind with Violet for the first, but not the last, time.
In 1884 the Fabian Society branched out of the Fellowship of the New Life. Humphry and Olive—now restored to a pale loveliness—joined. So did Toby, though his attendance was irregular. Olive knitted through the meetings, head bowed, clicking her needles.
Dorothy was born in the late autumn of 1884. Phyllis was born in the spring of 1886. In 1888 a girl was stillborn.
In 1887 Olive wrote some stories for children, and sold them to various magazines. These were conventional tales of children suffering hardship—an orphan rescued by a nabob, miners’ children fending off starvation, a sickly child restored by a talking parrot.
Hedda was born in 1890 and Florian in 1892.
In 1889 Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book appeared. Tales for children suddenly included real magic, myths, invented worlds and creatures. Olive’s early tales had been grimly sweet and unassuming. The coming—or return—of the fairytale opened some trapdoor in her imagination. Her writing became compulsive, fluent and daring. She took ideas from Toby’s ethnological books. She invented dangerous hidden elfin and dwarfish folks. She wrote Elfinia and the Forest Beasts, The Sandals of the Salamander, The Queen of the Ice Caverns, The Hidden Knife-Box People, The Boring Borehole, and The Shrubbery, or the Boy Who Vanished, which made her name, and earned her a considerable sum of money. She was now writing small books, and longer ones, as well as magazine stories.
The younger Wellwoods decided to move to the country, bought Todefright in a dilapidated state, renovated it, and settled there at the time of Florian’s birth, at midsummer 1892. In 1893 another girl was born and lived for a week.
It was in that year that Humphry Wellwood also began writing for the Press. He wrote a few articles for the Economist, under his own name. He also began a series of anonymous reports on dubious financial dealings, published in a satirical weekly called Midas. His pseudonym was The March Hare. He wrote about the Kaffir Circus and the activities of the Randlords, who dealt in South African gold. He took an interest in the new Westralian mines, some of which were as fictitious as Olive’s imagined Borehole. The Wellwood children played games in which they chased gnomes and great Worms through Jumpers Deep, Nourse Deep, Glen Deep, Rose Deep, Village Deep and Goldenhuis Deep, or through Bayley’s Reward, Bird-in-Hand, Empress of Coolgar-die, Faith, Hit or Miss, Just in Time, King Solomon’s, Nil Desperandum and The World’s Treasure. Tom had clear imaginations of many of these places. Rose Deep was glittering caverns of rosy quartz, with flushed rivers winding into the mountains. Nil Desperandum was black and slippery with sullen fires in hidden crevices, and funnels opening to the sky. He knew you could see the stars by daylight from the depths of mines, and tried to imagine how this would look in reality. Would the sky that held the visible stars be blue, or black, and why?
Basil Wellwood made money in the Kaffir Boom. He made suggestions for small investments to Humphry, who instead invested early, on principle, in bicycle shares. Upon the flotation of the Dunlop Tyre Company, Humphry suddenly found himself more than financially comfortable. He engaged a maths tutor, with a view to entering Tom for Eton. Toby was helping with the classics.
There was champagne at the 1895 Midsummer Party.
4
The Wellwoods’ Midsummer was a slightly movable feast. Humphry explained to Philip that midsummer day—that is, the longest day of the solar year—is in fact June 21st. But the European Feast of St. John is the evening of June 23rd leading to St. John’s Day on June 24th and that also is called Midsummer. “In practice,” said Humphry, who believed in talking to the young as though they were fellow men, “in practice, we have been somewhat eclectic with our own celebrations, choosing true midsummer, or St. John’s day, depending on the convenient day of the week for holding a party. Today is Friday 21st which is true midsummer, although midsummer eve was yesterday, and we shall be embarking on the declining days at dawn on Saturday, though still in advance of Europe… Saturday is full moon, so we will celebrate—if we are lucky with the weather—by the light of a waxing gibbous moon. ‘Gibbous’ is a good word,” said Humphry, who was a word-savourer. Philip had been alarmed at the number of words flying round the table that he had never before encountered. But he now had a mental image of a waxing gibbous disc, and his ever-active mind’s eye began to decorate a large bowl with waning gibbous, waxing gibbous, and truly circular discs. It could be interesting. Silver and gold on dark cobalt.
“Friday is a good day for friends to join us,” said Olive. “They are all gathering here for the weekend away from the city. We shall keep you very busy with preparations, Philip.”
“Good,” said Philip.
The household, family, staff and Philip, was set to frenzied work. Olive and Humphry had both already completed their writing stints, around dawn, before breakfast. The kitchen was full of smells of cooking, and no one was to have anything for lunch except bread and cheese, for the stove, and most of the crockery, were pre-empted. Philip was assigned to help with the decoration of the garden and orchard. He helped set up trestle tables on the lawn near the house, and then to arrange little cosy, or conspiratorial, groups of chairs in picturesque places. All chairs were requisitioned—wicker chairs, deckchairs, schoolroom chairs, the nursery rocking chair, cane and metal garden chairs. They were placed in arbours, in the clearing at the centre of the shrubbery, even in the orchard. Then the lanterns were swung from branches, and half-concealed in clumps of tall grasses and decorative thistles in the herbaceous borders. Philip was sent with Phyllis to hang lanterns in the orchard. It was an unkempt, raggedy place with moss and lichens on the twisted branches of old fruit-trees, and brambles snaking in from the wild and in places smothering everything. Some of the trees had odd structures in them made from planks and bits of rope. These were good places for illuminations, Phyllis said. She attached lanterns to ropes and sent Philip climbin
g up to the platforms. “These are old tree houses,” said Phyllis. “From when we were little. Even Hedda can get into these. We’ve got a much better one—out in the forest. But it’s a secret,” she added, doubtfully. Philip was picking up hard windfall apples. Phyllis told him to watch for wasps. “You get all sorts of worms in them, popping their little black heads out at you. It’s a horrible idea, biting into something wriggly—”
They wandered into the orchard. Phyllis pointed.
“These two trees are the magic trees from the story. The golden apple and the silver pear. You can only see the gold and silver in certain lights, you have to believe. These two are the centre. Their branches touch the ground, and their heads are in the sky. And all this—stuff—the bryony and the wild roses—grows over them to make them lovely—”
They were old, neglected, beautiful trees. Philip looked at the shapes of the snarling of their branches and wished he had a pencil. Phyllis took his hand and pulled him forward.
“This is where Rosy lies. See this circle of white stones. Rosy is under these, under the apple and the pear.”
A kitten, a bird?
“We bring her flowers on her birthday. We pour out libations of apple juice for her. We don’t forget her. We will never forget her.”
Her voice was solemn, and creamy with warmth.
“She lived for a week, just one little week, that was all she lived. She had the most perfect little fingers and toes. Now she sleeps here.”
She bent her head reverently. Philip, without putting it into words, detected play-acting. He wondered unkindly if Phyllis even thought about what was really under the white stones, amongst the roots. He said vaguely and falsely
“That’s good.”
He threw several of the hard little apples into the bramble patch. Then he hung a lantern with a crescent moon and a black bird-shadow in the branches of the pear tree, over the white stones.
Phyllis took his hand. She pushed her little body against his side. He had the sense that her flesh had always been clean and pleasant, and that, by contrast, his own never had. This was a feeling, again not in words. He pulled away.
After the decoration of the garden, and the bread and cheese lunch, the business of dressing-up began. Violet dressed the children—including Philip—in the schoolroom whilst Humphry and Olive went to put on their robes, which were a gesture towards “their” play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not rigidly Elizabethan, not yet Athenian, but more flowing Arts and Crafts silks and linens, silver and gold, flowery and floating.
There was a large painted chest in the schoolroom, an imitation of a Renaissance marriage-chest, with woodland scenes of dark glades, pale ladies, hounds and a white stag painted on the sides. This was the dressing-up chest, and it was unusually well stocked with silken shifts, frilled shirts, embroidered shawls, fillets for veils and coronets for princes.
“It helps,” Violet said to Philip, “to have a dressmaker as an auntie, who can turn a toga into a ball dress and back, or magic silk flowers out of old stockings. I think we should dress Hedda as Peaseblossom. Here is a lovely pink and violet shift.”
Hedda had her arms deep in the silks, rummaging.
“I want to be a witch,” she said.
“I told you, dear,” said Violet. “Hallowe’en’s for witches. Midsummer is for fairies. With pretty wings, organdie, look.”
“I want to be a witch,” Hedda repeated. Her small face was an angry frown.
Olive had come in with a sparkling buckle she needed Violet to stitch to a sash. She ruffled Hedda’s hair.
“She can be a witch if she likes,” she said easily. “We want them to be comfortable, don’t we, so they can run about and have fun. Have you found witch clothes, darling? Here’s my old black shawl with a lovely fringe and a fiery dragon on it. And here’s Phyllis’s old black dancing-tunic—if you just put a few stitches, Vi, so she doesn’t spring apart. And here’s a glass beetle-brooch, just the thing. And Philip will make you a hat with black paper. Not too big, Philip, so it stays on—”
“And a broomstick,” said Hedda.
“You must ask in the kitchen for the loan of a besom.”
Violet’s face had a mutinous look, not unlike Hedda’s, but she did as she was asked, or told, and the little girl was soon spinning in a whirl of black batwings and floating fringe. Violet did up the unresisting Florian in yellow and green, with a scalloped jerkin, as Mustardseed. He had a pointed felt cap, which he kept patting uncertainly. Phyllis accepted the rejected Peaseblossom, and was lovingly hung with silk gauze, mauve, rose and ivory; she had a silver cloak, like folded dragonfly-wings, and a wreath of silk flowers on her hair.
Dorothy was Moth, in a grey velvet tunic with a cloak with painted eyes. Violet tried vainly to persuade her to wear wired antennae.
Tom had to be Puck. He went barefoot in brown tights and a leaf-coloured jerkin. He too rejected a headdress and said he would put twigs in his own hair. Phyllis said Puck didn’t wear glasses. Tom said “This one does. Or he’ll fall into the pond and get trapped in brambles.”
They came to the question of Philip. He said he couldn’t dress up, he would feel silly. No one wanted to suggest he should be a rude mechanical. It would be insensitive. Tom said “Can’t you put on a sort of toga and be one of the Athenians?”
Philip did not know A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was totally baffled by the costume selection. He said he didn’t think he could wear a toga. He was not, in fact, sure what a toga was.
“I don’t like to be looked at,” he said, strangled. All the children, even those who were prancing about flaunting their disguises, understood the need not to be looked at. Dorothy had an idea, and took down the butcher-blue painting smock Tom wore for crafts lessons.
“You could go as an artist. You might wear this anyway, to make pots and things.”
The smock had a high neck, full sleeves, deep pockets. It was a coverall. It was in many ways less of a disguise than the borrowed clothes he had on. Philip looked down at his legs.
“You could go barefoot,” said Dorothy. “We do.”
“You could just stay as you are,” said Tom.
Philip put on the smock. He felt comfortable. He allowed Violet to change his boots for sandals. Everyone who was not barefoot wore sandals.
“Now you can run and jump,” said Dorothy.
His feet under the straps were whitish but not white. He felt a moment’s pleasure at the idea of running and jumping.
• • •
The guests began to arrive in the midafternoon. They came at intervals, from far and near, in carriages, pony-traps, station flies, on foot, and, in one case, on a tandem tricycle.
Humphry and Olive stood on the steps to receive them. They were dressed as Oberon and Titania. Humphry had a silk jerkin embroidered with Florentine arabesques, black breeches and a voluminous velvet cloak, swinging at a daring angle from a silken cord across his shoulder. He looked absurd and beautiful. And amused. Olive wore pleated olive silk over pleated white linen, with a gauze overcloak, veined like insect wings. Her hair was dressed with honeysuckle and roses. She looked warm and wild. Violet, beside her, wore a dress stitched with ivy-leaves on satin, and held her head girlishly on one side, heavy with silk ivy and white feathers. The children were running around. They would be called to order when other children arrived.
The firstcomers—they had only to walk across the meadow from their farm cottage—were the Russian anarchists. Vasily Tartarinov had escaped from St. Petersburg in 1885. He gave lectures on Russian society, and received generous assistance (including the cottage) from English socialists. He had two sets of clothes, his working smock and the dress suit in which he gave his lectures. He had come in the dress suit. He was a dramatic figure, inordinately tall and thin with a long pointed white beard like a wizard. His wife, Elena, wore the better of her two dresses, which was brown poplin with black braid and black buttons. Her hair was scraped back. They had made no concession to fancy dress.
The children, Andrei and Dmitri, both around Phyllis’s age, wore their usual aprons, red and blue. They mostly pretended they could not speak English.
The tricycle rolled in, vigorously pedalled by Leslie and Etta Skinner, fellow Fabians. Skinner worked on human statistics and heredity at University College, London. He had sleek black hair, white skin and blue eyes. Etta Skinner was older than Leslie. They had met in the Men and Women’s Club, at the college, in the 1880s. They had discussed the Woman Question, birth control, animal passion and the sexual instincts. Skinner was very serious and had a beautiful voice. He aroused a great deal of animal passion in colleagues and students. The Wellwoods agreed he had married Etta to protect himself from frenzied maenads. Etta was a dedicated Theosophist, attended gatherings on esoteric and astral matters in Albemarle Street, lectured on vegetarianism, and taught reading, writing and arithmetic to the London poor. She had a round face, tight lips and pepper and salt hair with a fuzz of broken ends. She looked as though she had once been expectant and greedy, but had learned better. She was distantly related to the Darwins, the Wedgwoods and the Galtons, which, Humphry pointed out, must have been attractive to a specialist in heredity. But the Skinners, married for ten years, had no children. Humphry said it was odd that people interested in ancestry often were not ancestors. Olive replied that she didn’t like Etta’s clothes, which were home-dyed and sacklike. The usual dress appeared, in an unsteady plum colour, as she divested herself of her cycling skirt and veil.
