The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Dobbin decided that the only thing to do was to ask Geraint. Geraint was talking to Julian and Florence Cain about boarding school and lessons at home. Geraint would have liked to be at Eton or Marlowe, he thought, but was coached in Latin and History by Frank Mallett, and shared a maths tutor with the sons of the local squire. He was not pleased to be interrupted by Dobbin, earnestly asking about Philip.

  “Go and ask Mama,” he said.

  Dobbin looked depressed. Both of them knew she would give no answer. Florence said she had seen Philip’s drawings, which were amazingly good. Geraint said if he was that good, they were not doing him a kindness to bury him in the marshes with no one to talk to. Florence said he had been sleeping in a tomb in the basement. Florence’s interest roused Geraint. He said that he thought his father might be pleased to think about Philip if Florence’s father were to recommend him—send a letter or something. So Prosper Cain was consulted, and he spoke to Seraphita, who smiled pacifically and said she was sure it would all turn out well.

  7

  Humphry left on Monday morning to resign his post at the Bank of England. He was full of nervous excitement. He told Olive, who was resting in bed, that he would speak to the Secretary and ask for his resignation to take place immediately. He said he should miss the Old Lady. He thought he might stay in Town and see a few people. He would go to the Yellow Book evening in the Cromwell Road, and have a word with Harland. He would call on Henley at the New Review, and drop in at the Economist. And perhaps take the train to Manchester and talk to the Sunday Chronicle. Olive remarked mildly that at some point he would need to settle and actually write something. And added that she hoped Oscar’s arrest with a yellow book under his arm had not finished the magazine.

  “It was only a French novel. Not Harland’s Yellow Book.”

  “Nevertheless, they had their windows smashed by a nasty crowd.”

  Humphry in his city suit bent and kissed his wife. She was never responsive in the early days of pregnancy, another reason for taking a trip elsewhere. He said he would get breakfast sent up.

  “And send Tom, if you see him.”

  “Of course.”

  In the hall Violet held out his overcoat and his hat, with his briefcase. He wondered if Violet knew Olive was expecting. He knew remarkably little about what the sisters knew about each other. He said “Look after the house, Vi.”

  “You may be sure I shall.”

  Tom came up with the breakfast, which Ada had put on a tray. Olive said, as she always said, “Come to my arms my beamish boy,” and they both laughed. Tom put the tray on the bedside table, and bent into Olive’s embrace. She was flushed. Her hair was a dark pool against the pillows. In earlier days Tom had snuggled into bed with her, and she had told stories of the inch-high warriors who marched through the counterpane’s hills and valleys. Later, both he and Dorothy had been invited to curl one at each side, but Dorothy was gawky and the whole thing became less cosy. He had for some time been too big to get into the bed. But he sat on the edge, and patted the unseen limbs under the covers, and said he was sorry she didn’t feel well. She smiled, and said it would pass. She thought she would have a working-in-bed day. Perhaps he would fetch the story books? She had had a few new ideas. Tom kissed her again, slid off the bed and went downstairs.

  The story books were kept in a glass-faced cabinet in Olive’s study. Each child had a book, and each child had his or her own story. It had begun, of course, with Tom, whose story was the longest. Each story was written in its own book, hand-decorated with stuck-on scraps and coloured patterns. Tom’s was inky-blue-black, covered with ferns and brackens, some real, dried and pressed, some cut out of gold and silver paper. Dorothy’s was forest-green, covered with nursery scraps of small creatures, hedgehogs, rabbits, mice, blue-tits and frogs. Phyllis’s was rose-pink and lacy, with scraps of gauzy-winged fairies in florid dresses, sweet-peas and bluebells, daisies and pansies. Hedda’s was striped in purple, green and white, with silhouettes of witches and dragons. Florian’s book was only little, a nice warm red, with Father Christmas and a yule log.

  The project had begun with Tom’s discovery, in his story, of a door into a magic world that appeared and disappeared. The imaginary door was in a real place, in a Todefright cellar full of coal and cobwebs. It was a small, silver trap-door, that would take a child, but not an adult, and it could be seen only by the light of the full moon. It led into an underground world full of tunnels, passages, mines, and strange folk and creatures, benign, maleficent and indifferent. It turned out that Tom’s hero, who was sometimes called Tom and sometimes Lancelin, was on an apparently endless quest to find his shadow, which had been stolen by a Rat, when he was in his cradle.

  This tale had been so successful, that Olive had invented other doors, in the fabric of their daily reality, for the other children. Dorothy’s alter ego, a stalwart child called Peggy, had found a wooden door, with iron bolts, in the root system of the apple tree in the orchard. This proved to be a way into a strange country populated by half-beasts, people and creatures who could change their skins and sizes, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, so that you might find that you were a human child one moment, and a hedgehog the next, hiding in dead leaves. There were wolves in this land, and wild boars. Phyllis’s character, a princess who had been changed for a little servant girl, found a crack in a teapot she was being made to wash, in the middle of a picture of a pretty glade, in which ladies danced, with flutes and tambourines. You could make yourself small enough to slip through the crack by chewing a certain kind of Chinese tealeaf, known as gunpowder, which came in hard little pellets and unrolled into leaf shapes in hot water. In Phyllis’s story there were princes and princesses all waiting in castles, frozen or sleeping, for the redeemer to find the clue, and release them. Hedda’s way in was inside the grandfather clock in the dining-hall. You could see the gateway whilst the clock was striking midnight. It led to a world of witches, wizards, woods, cellars and potions, with children roosting in cages like chickens in need of setting free, and wondrous contests in shape-shifting between magical dwarfs and wizards, black ladies and blue gnomes. Florian’s story had hardly begun. It was possible his door was in the chimney, where he claimed to have seen a hefty scarlet figure with a sack. It was also possible that he would grow out of that, and make another world. In the interim, his story was peopled by his stuffed toys, a bear called Furry, a white cat called Snowy, and a stripy knitted snake called Ringary. In the world through the portal they were figures of power, sleek and glossy, Bear, Cat and Snake.

  Tom looked into his book. The story had advanced a page or two. A group of seekers were descending a dark tunnel—they were the shadow-less hero, a gold lizard the size of a terrier with garnet eyes, and a transparent, jellylike formless being who poured along the ground and constantly changed shape. A new figure had appeared, who ran in front of them, leaving soft footprints in the dust. There was some question as to whether it was the lost shadow, who had taken on substance. Or it might be another seeker, a friend or an enemy or simply a stranger, in the dark.

  The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless. They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit onto the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning. There were tributary plots, that joined the mainstream again, further on, further in. Olive plundered the children’s stories sometimes, for publishable situations, or people, or settings, but everyone understood that the magic persisted because it was hidden, because it was a shared secret.

  All of them, from Florian to Olive herself, walked about the house and garden, the shrubbery and the orchard, the stables and the wood, with an awareness that things had invisible as well as visible forms, including the solid kitchen and nursery walls, which concealed stone towers and silken bowers. They knew that rabbit warrens opened into underground lanes to the land of the dead, and that spider-webs could become fetters as strong as steel, and that myriads of transpare
nt creatures danced at the edge of the meadows, and hung and chattered like bats in the branches, only just invisible, only just inaudible. Any juice of any fruit or flower might be the lotion that, squeezed on eyelids, touched to tongue or ears, would give the watcher or listener a way in, a power of inhuman sensing. Any bent twig might be a message or a sign. The seen and the unseen world were interlocked and superimposed. You could trip out of one and into the other at any moment.

  Tom delivered the heap of books to his mother in her nest of quilt and counterpane. She asked him if he had peeped. Of course, said Tom, of course he had peeped.

  “Who do you think is running in front of them?”

  They made the plot between them, some of the time.

  “A lost boy. A boy who fell in by accident, down one of the shafts?”

  Olive considered. “Friend or enemy?”

  Tom was not sure. He said he thought the intruder was not sure. He could turn out to be either. He still thought he could get out quickly, Tom told his mother, he hadn’t learned how hard it was to get out.

  “I’ll work on it,” said Olive. “Now go and do your Latin.”

  Olive was sometimes frightened by the relentlessly busy inventiveness of her brain. It was good and consoling that it earned money, real bankable cheques in real envelopes. That anchored it in the real world. And the real world sprouted stories wherever she looked at it. Benedict Fludd’s watery pot on the turn of the stair, for instance. She looked casually at the translucent tadpoles and had invented a whole water-world of swimming water-nymphs threatened by a huge water-snake, or maybe by that old terror, Jenny Greenteeth, lurking in the weeds and sifting them with her crooked fingers, before she reached the landing.

  Yesterday’s events had also transmuted themselves into story-matter, almost as fast as they had happened. She had watched Anselm Stern’s version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale with glee—her response to any performance, any work of art, was the desire to make another, to make her own. She was in that world, watching, not in flat dailiness. The gliding movement of the puppets, the glitter of the limelight on their silk organza dresses, the half-visible strings, like spider-silk, had transmuted into other figures in other lights in her head, almost before they had performed their own sequence of movements. Suppose a puppet managed to free itself and come to life, and strut and nod amongst clumsy humans, with their thick, fleshy fingers? It wouldn’t be like Pinocchio; the creature would have no desire to be a “real child,” just a desire for independent life. For a moment, at the terrible point when Olimpia disintegrated into a whirl of severed limbs, Olive had done Anselm Stern the justice of simply responding to his art, of feeling simple shock. But then she was away again. Supposing a puppet become a real creature met a doll who refused to be real, who was inert, waxy, complacent? There were dolls who somehow had souls—or characters, or personalities anyway—and there were dolls who resolutely refused to come into being, who simpered and sat like suet. Dorothy didn’t like dolls. Phyllis had a whole cot full of both kinds, the living and the lifeless. Suppose the newly freed puppet walked into a nursery and was attacked by a flannelly array of simulacra—of course, she had got this idea from Olimpia, in the first place, how clever Hoffmann was—you could make a truly eerie tale for children, but you must be careful, she knew, not to overstep some limit of the bearable. She often came close to overstepping it. Indeed, her success as a children’s writer had begun with The Shrubbery, which did come very close to the impermissible, indeed, according to some percipient critics, crossed the boundary. But children liked to glimpse the unbearable, in manageable doses. She herself had had a book, as a child, Hans Andersen’s Tales. Her mother had read to her, “The Princess and the Pea,” “Thumbelina.” She had been filled with horror for the inch-high girl, in the care of the stupid kindly mouse, who was promised to a stout, blind, black Mole who would take her underground to bourgeois comfort where she would never again see the light of day. It was probable, Olive thought, that the whole complicated wanderings of Tom underground had started with her own childish fear of Thumbelina’s mole-tunnel.

  She spread honey on her toast, and sipped her tea. Tom had put a little posy of wild flowers on the breakfast tray, heartsease and bluebells, and a few fronds of fern. She felt a movement of nausea as she bit into the toast, which the sugar of the honey alleviated. An unbidden image of the unborn child inside her came into her mind, something coiled in a caul and attached, like a puppet, by a long thread to her own life. She tried very hard to feel neither hope nor fear for the unborn. If she thought of them, it was more in terms of the waxy stillborn, with their closed faces, than in terms of a potential Tom or Hedda. She feared for them, and their presence disturbed her peace. Also, she cared for them, she took care. She bit into the honey and butter and bread, nourishing herself and the blind life she had not exactly invited to settle in her. She turned her mind to the shadowy fugitive underground.

  Olive Grimwith was a miner’s daughter. Her father, Peter Grimwith, had been a buttie, hacking away at the coal-face in his stall, under the very ground she walked over, to get to school, or the Goldthorpe shop. Her mother was Lucy, who had been born Lucy Appledore, a draper’s daughter, in Leeds. Lucy was a small, thin, exhausted creature, who hoped to be a schoolteacher, and knew things like the meaning of the name Lucy, which was “light.” There were five children, Edward, Olive, Petey, Violet and Dora, who had been an unexpected baby, and had died with her mother, of pneumonia, when Olive was twelve. Edward and Petey had both gone down the mine at the age of fourteen. Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The woman never arrived, and the parcel was never opened. The weather was grey and the air was turbulent. When Olive Wellwood found her mind heading in that direction, she was able to move imaginary points on an imaginary rail and shunt her mind away from “there” and back to Todefright, with its penumbra of wild woods and flying elementals.

  Olive Grimwith persisted in Olive Wellwood, not least because of the steady presence of Violet Grimwith, who had been little at the time of the disasters, and nevertheless felt the pull of roots, wanted to remember things, would say suddenly “Do you remember bread and dripping on Sunday? Do you remember greasing pit boots?”

  It was Olive who, when she could not avoid it, could remember Peter and Petey, Lucy and Dora. Or so Olive thought.

  The storyteller was not Lucy, who taught them their letters, and tried to teach them manners. It was Peter, who came home for his tea, his clothes stiff and black with coal dust, his eyes and lips red in his coal-black face, his fingernails broken and engrained with jet. He took Olive on his knee, after his bath, and told her tales of the world underground. He told her about the living creatures down there, the soft-nosed ponies who trundled tubs of coal along the tunnels, the mice and rats who whisked in and out of the ponies’ nosebags, ate the miners’ snap and chewed their candles, if they were not careful. He told her about the bright yellow canaries, trembling and hopping in their cages. They were a living alarm-system. If they suddenly fell dead, it was a signal of the approach of one of the invisible terrors, choke damp, white damp, fire damp. These were gases released from the deep slumber of the coal by the hammers and pickaxes of the miners, or by the collapse of a section of pit-props. For the coal, Peter Grimwith told his daughter, had once been living forests—forests of ferns as high as trees and brackens as fat as barrels and curling things that were scaly like snake
s. And they were sunk and compacted into ancient mud. You could find the ghost of a leaf, millions of years old, or the form of a thirty-foot dragonfly, or the footprint of a monstrous lizard. Most wonderful was the idea that their vegetable death had only been suspended. The three damps were the exhalations of the gases of their interrupted decay. He told her the names of the dead plants which now smouldered and flared in their kitchen grate. Lepidodendron, sigillaria. He told her the scientific names of the gases that were the “damps.” Carbon dioxide, which smothered you fast. Carbon monoxide, which crept up on you, peacefully so to speak, smelling of violets and other sweet flowers. And methane, “which is what comes out of the back end of cows, Olive,” which was the fire damp. There were tales that rats sneaking off with smouldering candles had sparked huge explosions. “Perhaps you could put a match to a cow, Olive,” said Peter, and Lucy said “Hold your tongue, that’s not a nice thing to tell a girl.”

  There were stories too of invisible inhabitants of the mines—beings known as knockers who could be heard tapping, a creature called Blue-cap, who was clothed in a flaring light-blue flame, and sometimes helped to push the tubs, a mischievous bogle-thing, called Cutty Soams, who delighted in cutting the soams, or traces, by which the ponies and the workers pulled the tubs and trams. You did well to put out a ha’penny for them, if you knew they were there. His tales of kobolds were as practical and as vivid as his tales of rats and canaries.

  He brought home in his pocket, from time to time, a coal with a fernleaf apparently incised in it. And twice he brought one of the “coal-balls” for which the Gullfoss mine was famous. A coal-ball is a preserved knot of once-living things, compacted together, leaves, stems, twigs, seed-pods, flowers and sometimes even seeds, millions of years old. Olive Wellwood still had these petrified lumps, but she showed them to no one.