The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Close on their heels came Toby Youlgreave, also on a bicycle. He had a tiny weekend cottage in the woods. He and Etta began a discussion of folk customs at midsummer.

  Prosper Cain came from Iwade House in a carriage, with Julian, and his daughter, Florence. They wore fancy dress. Prosper was disguised as Prospero in a sumptuous black robe covered with signs of the zodiac. He carried a long staff, made of a narwhal tusk, with a pommel stuck with moonstones and peridots. Julian was Prince Ferdinand, in theatrical black and silver. Florence, who was twelve, was very prettily dressed as Miranda, in a flowing sea-coloured shift, with her dark hair flowing, and a necklace of pearls. Julian and Tom eyed each other cautiously. They had shared an adventure, but were not sure they wanted to be friends. Olive came smiling forward and Prosper kissed her hand. He said in her ear

  “I borrowed this fantastic object from the collection, dear lady, but tell no one.”

  “I don’t know whether to believe you.” He was still holding her hand. “No one ever does. I encourage uncertainty.” Julian caught sight of Philip in the smock. “I didn’t recognise you.”

  Philip shifted from foot to foot. Tom said “He’s made topping lanterns. Come and see.”

  They went off, and Florence followed.

  The Dungeness party were in a kind of brake; the ladies had brought their party dresses in wicker baskets, because they had come a long way. Benedict Fludd, as Olive had predicted, had not come. Seraphita, in the days when she was a Stunner from Margate called Sarah-Jane Stubbs, had been painted by Burne-Jones and Rossetti. Now in her forties she still had the fine bones, the knot of black hair, the huge brow, the wide-spaced green eyes and calm mouth of the paintings, but her body was heavier and her expression less mildly beneficent. She was travelling in a loose Liberty robe, but had brought a grander one, with a confection of veiling to throw round her head and shoulders. Her children were Imogen, a child of sixteen embarrassed by breasts, Geraint, a little older than Tom, who had inherited his mother’s eyes and hair, and Pomona, who was Tom’s age, had flowing chestnut-coloured hair and had brought a home-woven gown, embroidered with crocus, daffodils and bluebells. Both girls had also brought beaded and embroidered Juliet caps. Geraint had a kind of handwoven smock, not unlike Philip’s.

  The Fludds were accompanied by a solemn young man whose name was Arthur Dobbin. Dobbin saw himself as Benedict Fludd’s apprentice. He hoped to found a commune of craftsmen in the salt marshes round Rye. He was smallish, and plump, with slicked hair and an anxious, determined look. He would have liked to come dressed as Oberon, or Sir Galahad, and he knew it would not do. He was dressed in the knitted Jaeger woollen garments, popularised by G. B. Shaw, which were a little sweaty in flaming June.

  Dorothy was waiting for the next carriage. So was Humphry, who drew in a breath as it pulled up smartly in front of the house. The other Wellwoods were here. They had driven over from Vetchey Manor, their country house. They were soberly dressed in travelling costumes, and had bandboxes with them. Basil and Katharina sat looking forwards; their son and daughter, Charles and Griselda, sat behind the driver, looking back.

  Dorothy was waiting for Cousin Griselda. Cousin Griselda came into her mind when she had to use the word “love” which she tended to be careful with. Griselda was the same age as Dorothy, and was closer to Dorothy than her sister Phyllis. Dorothy, a realist, rather thought she did not love Phyllis, though she knew she ought to. Perhaps because of this she loved Griselda—whom she did not see very often—a little more emphatically. Dorothy was sometimes afraid that she had started out with a smaller capability for love than most people. Phyllis loved everything—Mother, Father, Auntie Violet, Hedda, Florian and Robin, Ada and Cathy, the ponies, the fluffy kitten, dead Rosy in the orchard, the Todefright toads. Dorothy had varying feelings for most of these people, some of them loving. But she did love Griselda, she had fixed on Griselda to love.

  Frieda, Katharina’s lady’s-maid, had the seat beside the driver. She came down to oversee the unloading of the bandboxes.

  Basil Wellwood was shorter and more muscular than his younger brother. He wore a well-cut pale grey suit, which he did not intend to change, and had a diamond ring and a multiple watchchain of complicated links. He did not quite suppress a frown when he saw Humphry’s bright garments which he thought were absurd. He complimented Humphry on the hot sunlight, as though Humphry had found someone to procure it, which Humphry in turn found absurd.

  Charles, aged fourteen and preparing for the Eton scholarship exams, resembled both brothers, with red-gold hair, sandy lashes and strong features. He too wore a suit, with a cravat with a pearl tiepin.

  Katharina was thin and pale, her head on its slender neck dwarfed by a hat with dove-wings on its rim, and a closely tied spotted veil. Her hair was between faded grey and mouse-blonde. She had large, mixed-coloured eyes in slightly ravaged sockets of bruised skin, finely wrinkled and folded.

  Griselda was very thin, with fine silver-blonde hair, plaited round her head, like a true Mädchen, Humphry thought. She wore a mushroom-coloured travelling costume. Her mouth was thin and unsmiling. She was tall, and did not look strong. Dorothy ran to greet her.

  They went inside, to change their clothes. Phyllis, attaching herself to Dorothy and Griselda, said

  “Have you got a lovely costume, Cousin Grisel?”

  “You are all in fancy dress.”

  “It’s midsummer,” said Dorothy. “We always are. Aren’t you?”

  “I am not. I have got my new party dress. You will see.”

  The dressing took time. There were endless laces and buttons. When mother and daughter emerged from Olive’s bedroom they were lovely to look at and completely out of place. Katharina was in mauve and white shot silk moiré and Valenciennes lace with huge leg-of-mutton puffs above the elbow. She wore kid gloves and had a confection of lace and fresh rosebuds, like a giant pincushion, on her head. Griselda was in shell-pink satin, with a lace yoke, decorated with all sorts of little darker pink bows, around her puffed sleeves, around her hem. Phyllis said it was lovely. Dorothy said “It might get dirty if we go in the orchard.”

  Griselda said “It’s completely inappropriate. Charles calls it Little Bo-Peep.”

  “You do look like a china doll,” said Dorothy, “one in a fairy story, standing on a shelf, that’s loved hopelessly by a tin soldier or a presumptuous mouse.”

  “It would not be remarkable in Portman Square,” said Griselda, quite flatly. “I shall just have to endure.”

  A pony-trap arrived, which appeared at first sight to be carrying a troupe of ghosts and ghouls, white-faced and staring. The driver was Augustus Steyning, who lived in Nutcracker Cottage on the edge of the Downs. He stepped down on long long legs, pointing elegant toes like a dancer. He had a small silver beard, and an elegant moustache, and thick, well-cut silver hair. He was wearing a country suit, but turned out to be also dressed as Prospero, having brought a cabbalistic hooded gown and a knobby walnut staff. He was a theatre director and occasional playwright, whose best-known works were productions of Peer Gynt and The Tempest, although he had written a historical drama about Cromwell and Charles I. His ideas were advanced. He was interested in the new German drama and in German tales and imaginings. (His house, though it had nut trees in its garden, was not named out of English whimsy so much as for Hoffmann’s sinister tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King.) His trap was full of large theatrical masks.

  “I brought an ass’s head, my dears—Midsummer is incomplete without one and this one had the distinction of having been worn by Beerbohm Tree himself. We may take turns to disappear inside it and be metamorphosed. And I brought these delicious disguises from Venice—here are Pierrot and Columbine, here is a vulture who is really a plague doctor keeping away from bubos, here is a black enchantress with sequins. Here is the Sun, with flaming rim, and here is the Moon, with cloudy mountains and silver tears …”

  He turned to Olive.

  “I took the liberty o
f bringing my guest. He is driving himself, as he needs space. He is just behind me—”

  A shadow of irritation passed over Olive’s face. It was her party. She was the giver. And then the second trap arrived, with one man, and an inanimate company—in this case hidden in black boxes and brass-hasped cases.

  “He is an old friend of yours, I believe—” said August Steyning. (He liked to call himself August, in honour of the clowns.) “I hope I did well.” He had noticed Olive’s little grimace.

  Olive looked at the newcomer, hesitated and then swept forward with outstretched hands.

  “Welcome to our house. What an unexpected delight—”

  The stranger stepped down. He was small, thin and dark, clothed in black drainpipe trousers and a long black jacket, and a black felt hat with jay feathers in the band. He had a theatrical pointed beard and groomed moustache. His feet did not crunch on the gravel. He bowed briefly over Olive’s hand.

  “This is indeed an old friend, whom we met in Munich. Major Cain, let me introduce Herr Anselm Stern, who is an artist of a most unusual kind. Herr Stern, this is Mr. Wellwood, my brother-in-law, and Katharina Wellwood…”

  She did not introduce the children.

  Cathy was instructed to help Herr Stern with his boxes. Hedda touched them, and asked what was in them.

  “You shall see in good time,” said August Steyning. “With your mother’s permission, we hope to show you.”

  Herr Stern, supervising the stowing of the boxes, suddenly found his voice, and said, in halting English,

  “I have brought a gift for the little girls.”

  He looked uncertainly from Dorothy to the befrilled Griselda to pretty Phyllis, to the small black witch with the beetle-brooch. “The box with the red string,” Herr Stern told Cathy. “Please.”

  “What can it be?” said Phyllis.

  “Open it, please,” said Anselm Stern.

  It was in parchmentlike paper, and the size of a shoe-box. Violet cut the string, Phyllis undid the paper. Hedda darted forward and took the lid from the box inside, which was very like a shoe-box if not a shoebox. She peeped in.

  “There is a shoe,” she said.

  Violet lifted it out.

  It was a very large shoe made of stitched leather, dark russet-red, with a large tongue and a big steel buckle with a sharp spike.

  Inside were what Dorothy at first took for mice. She took a step back.

  “They are babies,” said Phyllis uncertainly.

  The shoe was crammed full with little stuffed dolls, each with a round head, and staring beady eyes.

  They wore either small lederhosen, or small enveloping aprons. Phyllis laughed uneasily. The dolls stared out. Hedda said

  “It’s the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Only there’s no Woman, the children are on their own in there.”

  She grabbed the shoe and held it to her chest. The other girls felt relief.

  “It is a most original toy,” said Violet. “You like it?” said Herr Stern to Hedda. “It’s a bit scary. I like scary things.”

  August Steyning explained that Anselm Stern was a puppetmaster. He performed enchantments with glove puppets, and with marionettes. As a surprise gift for the queen of fairytale, he said, bowing to Olive, they hoped to perform a version of Cinderella for the guests. The cast were safely enclosed in the black japanned boxes they saw. And if the curtain-raiser pleased them, he hoped they would all come next day to Nutcracker Cottage to see something more elaborate. “I say we shall perform,” he explained, “because Anselm has been instructing me in the mystery of the marionettes. I am to be Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I shall animate the Ugly Sisters.”

  Olive smiled. Humphry invited them all to refreshments.

  “First, food and drink. Then the performance. Then further refreshment and dancing. We have talented musicians—Geraint on the flute, Charles with the fiddle, and Tom, who does what he can with a tin whistle.”

  They gathered on the lawn. Steyning, just returned from meeting Anselm Stern, had brought shocking news from London. The Liberal government had unexpectedly fallen. A routine vote on the army estimates, the supply of small arms, had unexpectedly become a Vote of Confidence. Lord Rosebery had resigned, and Lord Salisbury was now Prime Minister, until an election could be held, in the autumn.

  Prosper Cain said this change might affect the Museum badly. It was still waiting for Sir Aston Webb’s winning plans for the new front and courtyard to become solid things. “We are a builders’ yard,” he complained. “This can at best delay things further.”

  Basil Wellwood saw no one with whom he could discuss the effect of the events on the Stock Exchange. He thought he was amongst a curious clutch of people, all tinsel and fake gilding.

  Leslie Skinner spoke in an undertone. He believed Lord Rosebery’s name had been mentioned in the sad events surrounding the recent trials. It had been rumoured that the sad death of Lord Queensberry’s eldest son—not Lord Alfred Douglas, but Lord Drumlanrig—had been not a shooting accident but an act of self-destruction, designed—they did say—to protect Lord Rosebery’s good name? And there had been concerns about this during Mr. Wilde’s unsuccessful libel suit against Lord Queensberry? Skinner had a look of pure academic enquiry. His grave face expressed a desire for precise knowledge.

  Violet Grimwith made a clucking sound and gathered together those children who were listening, leading them away to taste fruit cup. Julian and Tom did not follow. Julian beckoned to Tom, and they sauntered in hearing distance behind a trestle table, sampling tartlets. It was less than a month since Wilde’s third court appearance, his second trial for indecency, after a first jury had failed to agree. Everyone discussed it endlessly. Julian, like his schoolfellows, had read the press reports. He wanted to hear. Leslie Skinner said to August Steyning that he believed he had been in court.

  “I was,” said Steyning. “I was indeed. The poor man stood in need of a friendly audience. I was compelled to bear witness. It was a true tragic fall. With uncanny aspects. Did you hear the story of the palm-reader’s predictions?”

  No, they all said, though Humphry at least knew the tale very well.

  Steyning told them, holding out his own long, pale, exquisite hands, one after the other, in illustration.

  “It was at a supper of Blanche Roosevelt. The chiromancer was in obscurity behind a curtain, and the guests thrust in their anonymous hands. The left hand, it appears, shows the destiny written in the stars, and the right hand shows what its owner will make of that destiny. Oscar’s left hand—they were much plumper than mine—showed huge, brilliant achievement and success. The right showed ruin—at a precise date. The left hand is the hand of a king, but the right that of a king who will send himself into exile. Oscar asked the precise date, was given it, and abruptly took his leave. The prophecy appears to be fulfilled.”

  Skinner asked Steyning’s impression of the trial.

  “He bore himself with dignity and stood like a sacrificed beast. He allowed himself to be trapped into witticism. He spoke bravely about the love that dare not speak its name. He was applauded. But it was no triumph. And his present state is desperate. They have removed his name from the theatres where his plays are performing—not for much longer, I suspect. It is said prison is killing him. He had some idea of treating it as a monastery, or Prospero’s study, but he sleeps on a board, has neither books, nor pen, nor ink, and is made to work the treadmill. His flesh is fallen into folds. He cannot sleep.”

  Humphry, who moved in the world of press gossip, remarked lightly that Lord Rosebery had been sick, very sick, for months, and had suddenly recovered at the end of May. Only for his government to fall, it appeared, today. He exchanged glances with Steyning and suddenly saw Tom and Julian.

  “You don’t need to stand around listening to political chatter. Go and arrange seats for the marionettes.”

  Tom and Julian wandered away across the lawn.

  “You are always told you don’t want to hear things precise
ly because you do,” said Julian.

  “Do you?” Tom asked.

  “They think we don’t know these things. They ought to know you learn in school, just by being a boy. You learn them along with Greek and cricket and rowing and drawing. And sniggering and poking and passing messages. They ought to know we know. They must have known themselves.”

  Tom did not know. He lived at home and was home-tutored, though Basil and Humphry were planning for him to do the Marlowe scholarship exams next spring. Basil had intervened when Humphry had spoken of sending Tom to the newfangled newly founded Bedales where boys mucked out farm animals and swam naked. Basil would help, he said, with his nephew’s fees. Tom was very bright, good at maths, good at languages. He did Latin and Greek with the anarchists, who liked teaching, and were grateful for the income. He did maths with a tutor, whose lessons would increase after the summer. Tom walked through lanes and meadows to his lessons. He lived wild, much of the time. He was not sure he wanted to know what Julian was talking about. He was not sure he wanted to be friends with Julian. He was often unsure what he wanted, and as a result, being amiable, he had many acquaintances and no close friends. He was thirteen, and still all boy, whereas Julian was fifteen, and could on occasion be a serious young man.

  Tom’s spectacles made him look owlish. His fine fair hair sprang all ways, and asked to be ruffled. His skin was young, unspotted, and golden brown with outdoor living. He had his mother’s eyes and long lashes. His cheekbones were high and wide, his mouth gentle. He was the sort of beautiful boy, quite unconscious of his beauty, who was much discussed and courted both in Julian’s prep school, and at Marlowe. Julian had asked himself whether Tom was pretty, or a possible object of passion, and had seen that, in theory, he certainly was. Pretty boys at school became rapidly self-conscious. Tom seemed unconcerned, and it lent him charm and distance. Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew—and he was knowing. Also he was constantly concerned by pustules, and the craters of past pustules. He was not sure whether Tom, despite being pretty, was not so simple that he was boring.