The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Charles was allowed to come because he was not very interested in tree houses—he was urban by nature—but suitably admiring of the constructive skills that had gone into the building. Tom had wondered whether Philip would like the house. He thought he might, since he had been found in a hidey-hole. But Philip had already gone to the marshes in the carriage with the Fludds and Dobbin. Tom had also wondered whether to show it to Julian. Julian might not see how special it was. And Dorothy might not like Julian’s dominating presence. It was altogether too early to have views about Julian.

  They sat down on the heather couches, which were covered with blankets, and Tom offered them all apples and toffees, from a store he kept in a box.

  “What did you mean,” Dorothy asked Charles, “when you said lots of people aren’t their parents’ children?”

  Griselda said that her friend Clementine Burt was always being teased because she didn’t look anything like her father, and then people pointed out that she did look very like Lady Agnes Blofeld, and her mother had said that was natural, because they had an ancestor in common. But her brother Martin had overheard their parents talking, and had told Clementine he was sure her father was Lord Blofeld. Charles elaborated. Lord Blofeld and Clementine’s mother had to have adjacent rooms at big country-house parties. It was well known by everyone. Dorothy asked if Clementine was very upset. Griselda said she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to talk about it. Dorothy was distracted by wondering whether Clementine was more Griselda’s friend than she was. Griselda added that Clementine had said she was sure she wasn’t the only one. Charles said Agnes Blofeld was quite put out, because Clementine was prettier and nicer than she was, the same sort of girl, but much more attractive. Tom did not like talk about whether people were attractive. He said, musing,

  “If you found out your parents weren’t your parents, would you be a different person?”

  “I think so,” said Griselda. Dorothy said it went back to what Auntie Violet had said, about your real mother being the one who took care of you and fed you and so on. She had always known that Violet believed, in some way, that she was their real mother. She saw why, but she did not think of herself, or want to think of herself, as Violet’s daughter.

  Griselda said that Clementine had heard her parents shouting at each other, and her mother weeping.

  Tom said everyone’s parents shouted at each other, didn’t they? Dorothy remembered being with Tom on the landing, overhearing a violent parental argument. “I have always looked after your children,” one had yelled, and the other had said, “And I may say the same.” Tom and Dorothy both knew that parents in rage referred to the children as “your children.” It was never pleasant for children to overhear such things, it could not be, they had become objects, bones of contention.

  Sometimes they played a game of “Who would you like for parents if you didn’t have your real ones?”

  You wouldn’t want to play that game if you were Clementine.

  Tom thought of his life, the woods, the garden, the books, the human voices, the presences of family in and out of the house, the wonderful movement from comfort to freedom and back.

  “We are a happy family,” he said, vaguely and gently. “Have a bull’s-eye? Or a pink fizz?”

  Charles asked Dorothy if she was really going to be a doctor, or was it just something she had said?

  “I just said it, and saw it was true.”

  “I should like to do something like that. I don’t know if I could face all the mess of people being sick, let alone having to carve them up. But I think one should try to do something to make things better. Your father understands that. Mine doesn’t.”

  THE SHRUBBERY

  HERE WAS ONCE A MOTHER, whose husband had gone on a long voyage, and had neither come back, nor sent any news, for a long time. Consequently, the family had fallen upon hard times, though they lived in a pleasant house in the country, with gardens and orchards. Mothers in stories, in general, are of two kinds. There are mothers who are warm, and devoted, and self-sacrificing, and resourceful and endlessly good-tempered and loving. Then there are the other kind, who are often not mothers, but only stepmothers, who are unkind, and proud, and love some children (their own) better than others, and treat children like kitchen-servants, and will not let them play, or dream. If you had to choose, the mother in this story is a good mother, not a bad stepmother. But she is not perfect, as real human beings are not perfect. She has so many children that they call her Mother Goose, or Old Shoe-Woman, when they are teasing. She does her very best for them. She darns their clothes and turns sheets sides-to-middle, and makes nourishing food out of inexpensive—no, let us say honestly—out of downright cheap things, carefully simmered, made tasty with herbs that cost nothing. She makes sure that those who go to school have waterproof shoes. She scrimps and saves so that each child has some little gift to open on his or her birthday or at Christmas. She has sat up all night sometimes, making a pretty blouse out of an old dress, or a furry toy out of an old jacket of her own, that has worn so bald that she cannot go out in it. And anyway she has nowhere to go to. She has no time for visiting, nor friends to visit.

  Most of her children were good-natured and helpful. They had their tasks—polishing spoons, fetching milk, watering the herb garden. The little ones ran about the kitchen and the yard like a flock of goslings and were of course often in the way, or underfoot. But there was one—neither the smallest nor the biggest, but perhaps the largest of the very little ones who were not yet at school—who caused trouble. His name was Perkin, but nobody used his name. They called him Pig. This nickname had a kindly origin. One of his sisters, peering into the cradle when he had newly appeared amongst them, had observed that he was shiny, like an “icky pinky pig.” And everyone had laughed, and ever so lovingly, they had called him Pinky Pig, when he was a plump baby, and just Pig, when he began to run about independently.

  I think we all know someone who has an embarrassing nickname that would have been better discarded or not thought up in the first place. Pig found his natural enough, when he was very little, and even had a toy piglet, made of pink flannel, from whom he would not be separated. He took an interest in pigs he met on walks, or on visits to farmyards. But as he got older, he noticed people using his name reproachfully or mockingly. “What a little pig,” they said, when he ate too fast. “What a grubby little pig,” they said when he got muddy, which he often did, because he liked playing in earth, uncovering roots, studying earthworms. So somewhere he began to think his name meant that he wasn’t liked, perhaps wasn’t loved.

  I am not saying that his nickname made him a naughty boy. Naughty boys are born every moment, and all mothers know that naughtiness is like curly hair, or blue eyes—it just happens. Pig was in fact a pretty boy, with yellow curls and bright blue eyes, sparkling with mischief. But he was most ingeniously naughty.

  He brought things into the house, and stored them in odd places. He made a nest of worms in the flour bin, and the worms suffocated, and the flour had to be thrown out. He fed a whole seed-cake to the birds on the lawn, and the children had to go without cake for tea. He got in amongst the canisters on the dresser and mixed lentils with tealeaves, mustard with sugar, peppercorns with raisins. “My own cooking,” he called this, and wailed most dolefully when Mother Goose spanked him, which she did to teach him a lesson, which he refused to learn. He came in from the garden covered with mud and made himself a nest amongst the clean laundry in the basket, where he fell asleep, looking innocent and charming, like the Babes in the Wood. All the clean bedclothes and towels and shirts had to be washed again and mangled again and dried again and ironed again. And then he fell over, carrying a jar of paintbrushes in water, and landed headfirst in the washed-again clothes and soaked them with painting-water. He hid things—he hid teaspoons in mouseholes, and buttons in drains, and scissors in the pickle-jar, and forgot where he had put them. His long-suffering mother—and she was long-suffering—said that having him in t
he house was like living with a boggart or a naughty imp. Once, when he cut up his new collar to make it look like lace, she called him a changeling. What was that? asked Pig. But he got no answer. He was always asking questions, that was another thing. What was the wind, and why was this beetle dead and this one wriggling, and who growed the grass, and who were the little people in the roots of the shrubbery, and why did pigs snuffle, and what tapped at his bedroom window at night and why did people have to sleep when they could be awake? He got no answers because his mother was exhausted, and because most of his questions were asked in a shrill voice when one of the other children was already talking and saying something sensible moreover, about school homework or holes in stockings.

  He liked collecting things. He had a bag of dead insects and a bag of special twigs and a bag of glass marbles, and a bag of personal pebbles, which were the collection he most loved. He knew them all, their knobs and smooth surfaces and rough places. Most of all he loved a piece of white limestone with a hole running through it, a self-bored stone he had found in the shrubbery. He would put it to his eye and say he could see things through it that were invisible. He said he saw little women trotting about on the draining board. He said he saw his mother’s hair full of spiders spinning long threads to make her a veil. He said he saw a mouse holding out a hank of gold thread on the ends of its tiny paws, for another mouse to wind into a golden ball.

  There came a day when Mother Goose was particularly tired, and particularly sad, for she had received a letter in the post, and thought it might be news of her husband, but found that it was after all a forgotten coal bill. She was making pastry, to make a big pie for the children’s supper, with a little meat eked out with a lot of vegetables and herbs. It happened that the only child in the kitchen was Pig, as all the others were at school, or running errands, or playing with friends, or taking naps if they were little. Pig was playing with his marbles and pebbles, by the fender in front of the range. Mother Goose was suspicious because he was so quiet. She knew she ought to be pleased that he was quietly playing, but she was unhappy, and she was right to be unhappy, of course. She sifted the flour and fat through her fingers, and heard a faint clicking sound. She said, without looking round, “What are you doing, little Pig?”

  “Playing at marbles,” said Pig. “The marble army is fighting the pebble army. The marbles is quicker and the pebbles is thicker.”

  “You mustn’t let them roll around the kitchen floor,” said Mother Goose. “It’s dangerous.”

  Pig didn’t reply. She was always saying things were dangerous, and no harm had ever come to him. When she turned back to her flour he sent out an advance party of marbles, the little green and rose ones he called “punies,” and they scattered satisfactorily round the hearth. The pebbles had to go after them. They made a solid formation in a square, and then, click, clack, crunch, they flew into the punies, and there was mayhem. Pig sent out a platoon of brown marbles, in support of the little ones, and the pebbles responded with a furious assault.

  Mother Goose turned round. She said “I told you not to let them roll on the floor,” and Pig was startled, and dropped the whole bag of marbles, which went every which way. He started to scramble away to hide behind the coal-scuttle, for he saw he would be smacked, and he ground his knee on a marble, which hurt, and caused him to see that it was a bit dangerous.

  Mother Goose came across the kitchen, intending to grab Pig by the ear and spank him. But she slipped on a rolling clutch of marbles and pebbles, and fell with a crash, knocking over the pastry-bowl as she fell. Her hair came unpinned and she hit her head on a table-leg and hurt her cheek and blacked her eye. Her hair was full of flour and her cheek was bloody, and she glared at Pig, she did glare. Pig decided she looked funny. It was better than deciding she looked frightening, though in fact she did look a bit like a wild witch. He laughed.

  “That’s enough,” said Mother Goose. She began to gather up the pebbles and marbles and throw them into the waste basket. Pig shouted “Don’t” and Mother Goose said

  “I have had enough of you. Go out into the shrubbery and don’t come back.”

  Pig felt that the whole kitchen was turning round and round like the coils of smoky glass inside the see-through glass of the big alm-marbles. He snatched at his self-bored stone—he couldn’t save any of the others—and scrambled to his feet, and ran out of the kitchen door. He pulled it shut after him as best he could—he wasn’t tall enough to reach the latch. And he stood for a few minutes in the yard, waiting to be called but he wasn’t. So he trotted round the side of the house, and across the garden into the shrubbery, which was a big shrubbery, and overgrown, with things that shouldn’t be there, the snaking brambles and clumps of nettles and wandering tresses of bryony, for Mother Goose had had to tell the gardener she couldn’t pay him. For a person as small as Pig, the shrubbery was the size of a forest. Or at least, not to exaggerate, of a dense little wood. It had mazy paths, and things were reaching out to infest them, and obscure them, and cover them over, pennywort which runs riot, and periwinkle, plants which are pretty but need a firm hand, and untidy trailing plants with sticky burrs.

  Pig didn’t usually go far into the shrubbery. He got his worms and his pebbles from the flowerbeds in front of the house. But he thought he would just show Mother Goose, so he marched in, and went on marching in.

  As he got further into the trees and bushes, and further away from the house, he had the feeling that the bushes, and the undergrowth, were getting bigger, and that he was getting smaller. He went a little more slowly—he didn’t really know exactly where he was, by now, for the shrubbery was laid out like a maze, and Pig was far too small to see over the top of anything. He might be going in a circle that would lead to the mouth of the first path he had entered, or he might be pressing further and further to a hidden centre. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the leaves were long on the other leaves and the gravel path, shadow on shadow, like a grey web over the green. At the same time all the things in the shrubbery appeared to be more solid, and more full of the deep greens and tawny browns of the things that grew there. He stopped to look at a holly. A holly is a living creature in any case but this holly seemed to him to be full of almost too much life, of a different kind. The shiny leaves almost seemed to be giving out a green light, and the few berries seemed to be redder and rounder and glossier than any berry he had ever seen before. And yet at the same time, they were caught in the thick net of almost solid shadows. Pig said to himself, I am not afraid, which meant, of course, that he was. He clutched his white stone tighter, as though it was a talisman. He saw a little clump of toadstools with silky fawn surfaces and the most lovely pleated frill of very pale flesh-colour whorled round above the pearly damp stems. He had the odd idea that he wanted to be the holly-berry, or the toadstool, not only to see. He went slower still—he had all the time in the world, he had been told never to come back—and felt time had stopped all around where he was.

  He came to a place where there was a little wooden bench in a diminutive clearing. The bench was covered with a very bright green slime that was growing on it. Pig sat down on it without even thinking of how the slime was going to stain his legs and his socks and trousers. It was suddenly quiet. There had been sounds of things in the undergrowth—a bird chirping like two pebbles rubbed together, and once a rustle of unseen feet in the leaf-mould. Now there was nothing. Pig put his stone to his eye, and looked through it at a tangle of brambles and ferns. Sitting on the ferns was a very small woman, a nut-brown woman with a brown skin, and long brown hair under a brown hat, and sharp brown eyes under bushy eyebrows. She was neither old nor young, and she was wrapped in a brown cloak, veined like a leaf. She had a neat litle basket, and was gathering something—Pig could not see what, it was too small. He sat very still, said nothing, and went on looking through his stone. After a moment or two, the woman closed the basket, climbed down off the fern fronds she had been sitting on, and walked away down the path. He
watched her go, until she came to a gnarled root of a thornbush; she ducked under it, and seemed to disappear into the earth.

  Pig stood up and trotted after her. He knelt down on the path, on his green-stained, mud-stained knees that would so have upset Mother Goose, and he looked under the root. There were a few fine white bones, from some long-dead fledgling, and a carpet of leaves, rotted to skeletons. No sign of any little woman, though there was a kind of mousehole, going in and down, under the tree. He looked in, and saw spiralling mud, and shadow. He put his self-bored stone to his eye, and put his eye to the hole and peered down.

  It was beautiful. It was a hall, with a bright gathering of people, some all earth-brown, like the woman he had followed, but some all gold with bright hair and yellow garments of a very old-fashioned kind, and some all silver, with moony-white hair and dresses with glancing lights in them. They were all very busy—some cooking at a bright hearth, some weaving on tiny elegant looms, some playing with tiny children the size of ants or beetles. The whole room was brown, with brown tables and brown velvet chairs and hangings, but there were gold and silver plates and cups on the tables, and little lamps burned in silver lampholders in crannies and on shelves.