The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Your (no longer a maid!) Marian

  Olive refolded this document, and said Damn, several times. This was bad, very bad. This was a woman who was somebody, not a frivolous bit of skirt. This was a person not unlike Olive, to whom Humphry was real, and who was, as she said, at ease with him, which must mean that he, in turn, was at ease with her. Some sort of teacher, who had heard him talk on Shakespeare. Someone to whom he indubitably owed something, despite her disclaimers and his financial position. “Damn,” said Olive again, beginning to be angry, stoking an inner flame. “Damn and damn.” She was quite sincerely worried about the predicament in which this strange woman found herself. Humphry must of course offer help, it was his duty. She knew only too well the special feeling he gave of being comfortable and at ease with women—it was what she loved in him, herself. She thought it went with one kind of promiscuous love-making, rarer than the Don Juan with his sequential conquests, the man who found women truly interesting. If Humphry had come home at that moment, she would have embraced him, perhaps, and smiled ruefully, and made sure of her own charm and her own central place in his affections—which she had never, really, had cause to doubt. But Humphry did not come home, and Olive’s mood veered into grievance. She began, almost vindictively, to read the other letters on the desk, and discovered two rejected articles. “A very clever analysis, but so opinionated that I can’t quite see it as an expression of the beliefs of our journal.” “Very interesting, as always, but I am afraid we have no room for articles of such limited appeal to the general public.” Olive felt threatened—she should be earning money with her little prince and her sinister fat rat, not standing here waiting to discuss peccadilloes, or worse. Todefright was threatened. Olive said Damn.

  • • •

  By the time Humphry came in, she was like a humming top, spinning with wrath. He was followed by Violet, gathering up his coat and hat.

  “I have sent a telegram,” he said. “I think I must go and see Basil, I am absolutely certain I know dangerous things he does not know. I’ll wait for an answer to my telegram and then set off. This will have far-reaching and terrible consequences, if Barnato’s nets are unravelling—and I know it is not if, it is when—”

  “You can go and see Marian,” said Olive.

  “Don’t be silly, she’s in Manchester,” said Humphry, preoccupied with gold mines and brothers.

  He saw what he had been led to betray, and took in his wife, and the dissipated heap of letters. He smiled his foxy, intent smile, interested in Olive’s reaction.

  “Touché,” he said. “You of all women should know better than to read private papers. It’s not serious, you know that. Nothing to do with you and me, which is why you shouldn’t stoop to reading private papers.”

  He put out a hand to caress her, and Olive slapped it down.

  “It is to do with me, it is deeply to do with me, we shall lose Todefright unless we earn some money, and don’t do things which create more dependent mouths. I work and work, I have to keep Todefright going by myself, and I am sick and anxious and should be resting—”

  “Money,” said Humphry. “Money, or sex relations, which comes first, which is more certain to cause arguments and harm marriages? An interesting problem.”

  “It isn’t an interesting problem, it’s my life—” cried Olive. Up to that point, it had not been clear to either of them whether a monstrous row was going to happen, or could be avoided. Now it was clear that it was to happen, it had to be gone through with. Olive clasped her hands round the unborn infant, and began to shout, like an operatic fishwife. Humphry could have tried to calm, or apologise—in any case he had to abandon his attitude of detached amusement and calm certainty. He was never defensive. When threatened, he attacked. “Listen to yourself,” he said. “How can a grown-up woman make such a racket? I thought you had become a civilised being, but no such thing, you rant like a skivvy, like a washerwoman—”

  There were various shapes the rows took, various cycles of reproach and counter-reproach, various sabre-slashes at the whole fabric of the marriage. This row was long, and bad.

  Tom and Dorothy and Phyllis stood on the stairs, listening, ready to scurry up to the bedrooms before they were caught. They heard the sentences they always heard.

  “I have always tried to love all your children equally, you cannot say I have not. It has not been easy, though you may think it has. You do not thank me.”

  “I might say the same. You cannot claim I distinguish your children from my own. All of them have their place, equally, equally, you must admit that.”

  Dorothy put her face in her hands. She was the one interested in the human body. She had a clear idea of how children came into the world. It was easy not to know who your father was. It was much harder not to know who your mother was, though it could happen, Griselda had suggested ways in which society women slid changelings into families. Some village families had complicated structures where grandmothers, mothers, aunts and elder sisters were indistinguishable, where children grew up supposing their mother was their sister, and their grandmother their mother. People had babies at ages hardly older than she herself now was, this she knew. But here, who, how? Violet liked to say she was their “real mother” but as far as Dorothy could work out, she liked to say this precisely because she was not, she offered free mother-love from the position of not-mother, of maiden aunt. You could see who was somebody’s mother, you could see the unborn child growing.

  It was odd, it was certainly odd, that there was a family habit of sending everyone away before the arrival of new babies. She hadn’t been at home at the moment of anyone’s birth. She had been with Griselda, or on holiday at the seaside with friendly families. Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.

  • • •

  Tom did not think clearly. He felt his world was threatened, and his world was Todefright, woven through and through with the light from the woods and lawns, summer and winter, golden and frosty, and also woven through and through with the web of his mother’s stories, stories whose enamelled colours and inky shadows, hidden doors and flying beasts made the real Todefright seem briefly like a whited, plaster-cast sort of a place, a model of a home merely, which propped up the constant shape-shifting of the otherworld, whose entrance was underground. He didn’t—he couldn’t—even begin to imagine Olive not his mother, and it did not occur to him to try. And Humphry was Humphry, who had always been there. What he feared was that everything might turn out to be cardboard and plaster of Paris, though he feared this in the depth of his gut and behind his eyes. He could not have put it into words.

  Phyllis did not hear all the words of the shouting parents. She watched Tom and Dorothy, for a clue to how to react. They were upset. Why? They were excited. By what? As usual, she was left out, too stupid, too innocent. She pulled at Tom’s arm—he was kinder than Dorothy—to ask “What is it, what is it?” a meaningless question that went unanswered. Dorothy said “We’d better scarper, we’ll get found out,” and began to tiptoe, rapidly, up the stairs. As she did so, silence fell inside the study. They had never stooped to peering through keyholes, and so did not see Humphry and Olive, entwined, her heavy womb pressed against his trousers, her head burrowing into his shoulder, his hand stroking and stroking her descending hair, a small smile on his sharp mouth.

  The next day, Humphry ordered the yard-boy to bring the dog cart early, and drive him to the station. Olive appeared, fully dressed, in coat and hat, long before her usual time of rising. She said she intended to visit Prosper Cain. She needed to resurrect her museum adventure story. John Lane the publisher was interested in it. Humphry smiled, and helped her up, and they drove off together, chatting amiably. Humphry fully understood that it was necessary for Olive
to reestablish the balance between them, by visiting a man who clearly admired her. He understood, more ruefully, that her financial anxieties, and the sense that the household depended on her writings, and her fear that these were threatened by the coming birth, were real concerns, even if she was half-teasing him with her independence and importance.

  Tom and Dorothy and Phyllis watched them go.

  “ That seems to be more or less patched up,” said Dorothy. “Is it, is it?” said Phyllis, and got no answer.

  “If he makes it up with Uncle Basil, I shall certainly get sent away to school,” said Tom.

  “You might like it,” said Dorothy, who knew Tom was appalled at the idea of sleeping and eating with hundreds of what she thought of, and was sure he did, as savage boys.

  “I might not,” said Tom, digging her in the ribs. “Let’s go to the Tree House.”

  Its secret enclosure was calming and energising, even in wet late autumn, even in the beginning of winter. It was easier to find, now the leaves were fallen, but still protected by clumps of natural-looking bracken, pushing into crannies, and by the low sweep of the evergreen branches. Phyllis walked, as usual, three steps behind the others. None of them spoke. Part of Tom’s mind was watching a supernatural horse, in the next coppice, with a cloaked rider. Dorothy examined gateposts on which a gamekeeper had pinned rows of stiff little corpses, bedraggled crows, and stretched stoats, and the small, pathetic shrunken velvet of moles. It was unfortunate for Olive, who had no idea of this, that Dorothy associated her “own” story of the anthropomorphised furry creatures in and under the woods and meadows, with these slaughtered pests and predators. Dorothy carried a leather satchel, into which she pushed carefully unpinned specimens, who could be dissected and examined. She didn’t ask herself if Olive knew she didn’t like “her” story. She was taciturn by nature, and observed drily to herself that Olive was so excited by her own inventions that she hardly needed a response from the designated audience. Dorothy wasn’t a very reading child, though she was very bright, and read fluently. She had one book which she carried in a pocket because it amused her darkly. It had been sent to Olive to review in The English Illustrated Magazine, along with a heap of children’s tales and fairy stories, although it was no such thing. It was called Mother Nature’s Little Book of Bedtime Rhymes, and was by Herbert K. Methley. It contained prancing, jaunty little rhymes about creatures which, if anthropomorphised at all, must appear evil in that human guise. The spider and the praying mantis, crunching up the living, nutritious limbs of their mates. The cuckoo, that great deceiver, laying her camouflaged egg (Nature was so helpful, the blotches were indistinguishable from the willow-warbler’s own eggs) and flying off to sing in the branches, whilst her industrious skinny offspring, with its blind, fleshy head, evicted the little warblers, one by one, and grew into a monster that dwarfed the nest. The ichneumon fly, laying its exquisite eggs under the skin of grubs, who were walking larders, slowly sucked dry. Dorothy had showed it to Tom, who waved it away. He was not a boy who pulled the legs and wings off things. Dorothy said

  “It’s a good book because that’s how the world really is. And it makes it funny, which is clever.”

  “What is it, how is the world, what do you mean?” asked Phyllis, and got no answer.

  12

  Prosper Cain was happy to be distracted, by Olive Wellwood, from the problems of the Museum. Various papers and magazines were on the attack, criticising the circulating exhibitions, expressing shock at the imprudent purchase of fakes, including the Palissy platter, and most of all complaining that the art education of the British had “idiotically and inexplicably become vested in the hands of soldiers.” The Museum was nothing more than an almshouse for the army. The present Director, Professor Middleton, was not a soldier, but a reclusive scholar from Cambridge, who was greatly ill at ease with Major-General Sir John Donnelly, head of the Department of Science and Art, and was also persecuted by the irascible aesthete James Weale, keeper of the Art Library. The atmosphere was sour, and Prosper Cain spent much of his time shuttling between incompatible people with unacceptable proposals. He had no one in whom to confide, and felt lonely. It was pleasant to be greeted by Mrs. Wellwood’s warm smile of admiring respect, to be asked for anecdotes and practical information that were easy and pleasant to impart. He noticed her condition, under her swinging Liberty dress. In some curious way it allowed him, safely, to recognise that she attracted him. She was like a lovely carving or painting, though he could hardly say so. She fixed her liquid dark eyes on him, and he relaxed, and smiled back. He asked how the tale of the child detectives was progressing. She said that the construction of a detective story was interesting.

  “You know, Major, a story, especially a mystery story, is all topsyturvy. It works backwards, like tunnels of mirrors. The end is the cause of the beginning, so to speak. I need my resourceful children to find hidden things, and therefore I need to know who hid them, and where, and why. But really they were hidden in order to be found.”

  Prosper Cain said he hadn’t thought of it that way. He asked if her own children helped her to write about child characters. He was not sure he knew how young people thought or felt, despite having two of his own.

  Olive dropped her voice, and leaned towards him.

  “You know, it’s a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child’s surprise at the world.”

  “You write from your own inner child? I don’t know if my own still exists. Military life and museums do not encourage spontaneity.”

  “I will share a secret with you. I don’t really like making up imaginary children. I get most frightfully bored by their little disputes and their innocence. I think the persisting child in myself inhabits Elfland—not pretty gauzy Fairyland but a more dangerous and wilder place altogether. I like watching invisible beings and strange creatures who creep into the real world from elsewhere, so to speak. I would like to write the Morte d’Arthur or ‘Goblin Market,’ not The Adventure of the Hidden Casket. But readers have an insatiable desire for these clever little persons who detect and have comic adventures. So I try to oblige them.”

  She laughed. She said she was talking too much about herself, she was sorry, she would go back to her list of questions. Prosper Cain said he liked to hear about herself. Indeed, he said, he found her work—and her—fascinating. He hoped she would continue to treat him as a friend, and talk to him freely. “Most of my conversations,” said Prosper Cain, “are dull, formal and difficult.”

  Olive said she could not believe that, and if it was really so, it was a pity, and should be remedied.

  What they would next have said remained uncertain, as they were interrupted by Florence, who had found Geraint Fludd wandering in the South Court, all by himself. She had invited him to tea. He had said he had indeed hoped to come across her, there was something he was trying to get up the courage to ask her father…

  Tea was called for, and brought. Olive studied Geraint. He was fifteen, two years older than Florence, who was demurely dressed as a young lady, in a serge skirt and a striped shirt, and looked older than she was. Geraint was dressed shabbily in worn breeches and a Norfolk jacket. His wrists were outside his cuffs. His skin was tanned like a gipsy, Olive thought, and he had dark red cheeks amongst the tan, and an elegant mouth. His hair was very curly and all over the place—a kind of Pan figure, Olive thought, a wild boy disguised as a real, ordinary boy, who would be interesting to insert into a story. He was both ill at ease and full of determination, she saw, watching him frown, watching him watch Major Cain over the rim of his cup. He did not know how to say what he had come to say, Olive saw, and Florence also saw. Florence said “Geraint has something he wishes to ask you, Papa. He came on purpose.”

  “Ask away,” said Prosper, full of an unusual benign goodwill, pleased by Olive’s presence and also by the interruption—and therefore the safe prolongation—of their intimate m
oment.

  “It’s hard,” said Geraint. He meant to ask Major Cain to help to sell his father’s work, to help to get the pottery on its feet again. But he could not plead, and should not betray the family’s appalling poverty—not least because that would be self-defeating. Major Cain would think very ill of him if he did that.

  Olive watched him seeking inside himself for the right words. She was already turning him into one of her detecting children—that sense of adult responsibility in a child was a useful emotion to study. Also the blush, and the reticence. She said

  “I believe you have—or your family has—been able to help the lost boy I met when I first came here—the runaway boy Julian and my Tom pursued in the cellarage? How is he doing? His drawings were delightful. Is he still with you?”

  “Yes, he is. Yes, that’s partly why I’ve come. He’s been helping my father—working with my father—and they’ve got the kiln going and made a lot of ware that my father seems really pleased with. I wanted to ask you—to ask you—if you would come and look at what they are making.” He hesitated. “My family isn’t practical. It must be the most unpractical family in the country, I sometimes think. Nobody thinks—”