by A. S. Byatt
Geraint looked desperately round the room. Prosper, Olive, and Florence were all looking at him with courteous encouragement.
“Nobody thinks, sir, about how to sell anything, or get anyone to come and look at what’s been made. My mother and sisters are very artistic.” Despite himself a note of pure contempt crept into this adjective. “We had that man Dobbin, you know, who was at the Midsummer party and the puppet show—he wanted to help my father, and he wanted to set up some sort of school, or community in Purchase Hall—there’s plenty of room, it could work. But he couldn’t help my father—he hasn’t the aptitude, they said—and my father kept getting angry, and Dobbin went to live with the vicar. But he said you said my father has genius, and that the Museum has some of his work and I thought—I thought you might understand what should be done next. Or anyway come and look at the new work. My father really likes Philip—I’ve never seen him work like this before.”
He hesitated. He blushed again. Olive thoughthis blush wasdelightful.
“The thing is—nobody has even thought of paying Philip. It isn’t really right. I seem to be the only one who thinks about these things— who will buy the pots, where the—the clay, and the chemicals—and—and our food,” he said in a rush, “will come from.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, very red indeed now, wishing already that he hadn’t mentioned the food.
Prosper Cain looked appropriately serious. Florence cut a piece of cake for Geraint.
“I shall come to Rye. I shall bring Florence and Julian, who has a holiday, and I shall come to see this new work, and think what may best be done. Your father is indeed a genius, and is indeed impractical, like many great men. Should I write to him, or simply appear?”
“Write,” said Geraint, “in a general sort of way. Don’t say I came.”
“Of course not. I shall come next weekend, which is Julian’s holiday. It will all appear quite casual.”
“May I come?” said Olive impulsively. “I should dearly like to see the new work, too. I may be able to help. Or Humphry may, he knows all sorts of financial people. I could bring Tom and Dorothy, it will be a pleasant excursion …”
Prosper said he would be very happy if she came. Geraint thought of saying that large numbers of visitors might have a bad effect on his father, and then thought he had achieved all he could have hoped, and should let things be. Olive read his mind in his face.
“I don’t think we should all necessarily bother your father, not all at once. We will linger in the background and see if we can be helpful. And look at the sea, it will be wonderful to see the sea again.”
Geraint smiled at her. She smiled back. “And you? What do you mean to do with your life? Are you artistic?”
“Good Lord, no,” said Geraint, with excessive vehemence. “It got left out of me altogether, anyone would think I was a changeling. I’m clumsy with my hands, and my family say I have no taste.”
“So what do you hope to do, then?”
“What I want,” said Geraint, relaxing after his huge effort, “what I want, is to make a lot of money and be comfortable. I’d like to be in a bank, or something. I don’t know where to start.”
“You start by asking my husband,” said Olive, who loved giving people things. “He gave up his bank position, but he knows exactly how to set about finding one. When you are quite sure that is what you want.”
“Oh, I am. I think and think about it. I am quite sure.”
13
The Cains and the Todefright Wellwoods came to Rye, and stayed in the Mermaid Inn. The weather, which had been stormy and chilly, was suddenly bright, clear, and even warm. St. Martin’s Summer, said Benedict Fludd, who was invited to lunch in a private room in the Mermaid, with Seraphita and his children. There is often a false summer in the third week of November, a pleasant enough delusion. Prosper had made military arrangements. He had ordered a roast goose, with onion sauce, and heaped roast potatoes and buttered carrots, to be followed by a huge apple pie with thick cream. They had come by train; the Todefright party included Tom and Dorothy; Violet remained in charge of the lower half of the family. After lunch, Prosper had explained to Florence, all the young folk would go for a ramble—maybe along the beach at Dymchurch, since the weather was so mild and tempting. He needed to talk to his old friend, and he needed to do it quietly. The Fludds were hungry: the food was plentiful and comforting. Geraint talked to Julian, who was sitting opposite Tom, at the youthful end of the table, studying his face. Dorothy talked to Florence, about schooling. Florence was going to Harley Street College in the next academic year. Dorothy did not know what would become of her though she did know that Tom was to be crammed for entrance to various schools.
Seraphita, Imogen and Pomona smiled serenely. Fludd spoke about St. Martin, St. Martin of Tours, that was, who had been a Roman soldier and given his cloak to a beggar. He was often depicted with a globe of fire, or with a goose, since they flew over round about his feast. There was a good window in St. Martin’s Church at Puxty, which used the glass very effectively in the ball of fire.
Philip had not been included in the party, and had not expected to be. He had taken some bread and cheese and set out in the strangely unseasonal weather on a long ramble. He walked to his favourite Marsh church, the diminutive, brick-built church of St. Thomas Becket, near Fairfield. Philip thought of this church as his own particular church; he knew little about Thomas Becket, and did not know that the church was built on Becket lands. He had never seen a church so isolated. It stood amongst water-meadows, stretching flat and far, on which for miles the fat sheep busily cropped the salty grass. There was no road leading to it, and from it no village, no high road could be seen, only the marshes and the weather. The marshes often flooded in the winter, and then the church appeared to float mysteriously on sheets of floodwater, reflected in the dark-bright surface on calm days, blustered and beaten by howling winds and spray on stormy ones. Philip made his way from tuft to tuft of the marsh grass, for it was sodden underfoot and water welled up between tussocks. When he got to the church, he looked around at the endless sky, the flat horizon, the apparently endless sheep-studded meadows, and felt peaceful. He didn’t think exactly in language. He noticed things. The dabbing movement of a duck. The awkwardly beautiful, almost crippled look of the trailing legs of a flapping heron. Fish squirming in mud. Patterns made by the wind.
He sat for a long time on a stone in the churchyard, not even thinking. Time was so slow, there was no reason ever to stand up, or to move on.
A figure appeared on the Fairfield path, at the limit of vision. A woman in silhouette, in a skirt, with her hair bound in a scarf, and what looked like a small suitcase in her hand. She stopped to lean on a gate, and then walked a little way, and then sank to the ground, like a kind of hummock, and stayed down. Philip stood up, and set off across the marsh, feeling that this other person, who now shared the emptiness with him, was both an intruder and perhaps in need of help.
It took him some time to reach her. During his striding, leaping, occasionally bogged approach, she did not stir.
She appeared to have fainted or died. She had crumpled quite compact, her body in a ball, her face on her outstretched hand, the cardboard suitcase on the wet dust, within reach. Philip knelt down. He did not want her to be dead. He took her shoulder, and turned her face slightly towards him. The face was grimy, the lips slightly cracked, the eyes closed. Her nostrils and lips trembled: she was breathing. A breeze tugged at the edges of her gipsy-scarf, which was more animated than she was. She was wearing a felted coat, bunched over a grey skirt. Her ankles were swollen, and her shoes cracked and dusty. She had walked a long way.
Philip squatted beside her amongst the wayside grass, and took her hand, which seemed the politest thing to do. He bent over, and said in her ear, gently,
“Can I help?” and then, “How do you feel?”
She trembled a little and stirred, and opened her eyes, briefly, staring out past Philip’s occluded head at the sunl
ight. What she said, however, was his name.
“Philip Warren.”
Philip stiffened.
“I’m looking for Philip Warren,” she said. “I keep getting lost.”
Philip pushed back the scarf and the hair from her face, rearranged her features in his mind’s eye and saw she was his sister Elsie. Elsie, a year older than Philip, was the sister he loved, had found it hardest to leave. He said
“Elsie. It’s me. I am Philip.”
“I can’t see your face because of the sun. I got lost. I walked and walked and walked, and there were no people or places. What are you doing out here?”
Philip felt briefly very annoyed.
“What are you doing is the question. Can you sit up?”
He pulled at her, no longer with respect, but with the intimacy of family. She sat up, and smoothed her skirts, stretching her horrible feet in front of her. She had always been, as far as was possible, fastidious about her person and clothing.
“Mum died,” said Elsie. “I came to tell you.”
“No one wrote.”
“You don’t put any addresses on your postcards, do you? Probably you don’t want to be bothered. But I thought you ought to know Mum died. Auntie Jessie took the others, except Nellie, who’s gone into Service. I didn’t think I could last, I didn’t think I could see the year out in a house with Auntie Jessie.”
“What did she die of?”
“Lead poisoning. That’s what was always coming, and it came. She asked for you. A lot. She wanted me to give you her brushes and the Minton cup, and I’ve got them in that suitcase. I said I’d find you. She knew I couldn’t abide to be with Auntie Jessie. And I have found you, though not where I’d have expected.”
She spoke with a kind of determined vehemence, her voice thick with dust and thirst. She said
“You ought not to have …”
She began suddenly to weep, hot little tears bursting out through her eyelids, spattering on her grey cheeks.
Philip was partly trying, and partly refusing, to think about his mother. He half saw her, thin and stooping, and crossly shut the picture out.
Elsie heard the next question.
“The postcards said Romney Marsh, and Winchelsea. I walked to Winchelsea, and someone said if I was looking for potters there was a madman out at somewhere called Purchase. So I set off walking there, and got lost, as you see.”
“You’d better come back wi’ me. Can you walk?”
“I was walking.”
“Aye, and you fell over, I saw you. Can you get on your feet?”
“I shall have to.”
It took a long time, a rather painful time, to walk back to Purchase House. Elsie leant on Philip, briefly from time to time, and then limped on, erect and full of will. She was a thin, wiry girl, with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and a set mouth, not sulky, but ungiving. That was new, the hardness of her look.
Philip was ashamed of his most powerful feeling. This was that he had lost something—and he was not thinking of his mother. He was thinking of his solitude. He had, through sheer willpower, broken free of the Five Towns, and come to an unlikely place where no one knew who he was, or what he felt, and all that mattered was that he was good at doing what he had always known he must do, making pots with his hands. If he had a sister—who would spread her disparaging opinions, or just as embarrassing, her loving opinions, of him, amongst these people who helped him, but weren’t interested in his self or soul—he would have lost something, he thought. Then he thought at last, as he trudged along the lane, between hedges now, of his poor mother, who had always lost almost everything, except the skill at painting that had killed her, and the brood of children who might die, or become horribly ill, and were too many for her small wage to feed, so that they grew thin and grey-skinned like Elsie. Who had a will, he said to himself, thinking furiously as he didn’t often think. Elsie had a will, and it looked quite as strong as his own.
He thought also, no one paid him any money, he had nothing to give Elsie, he was going to have to beg on her behalf. It was a bad business.
• • •
When they arrived back at Purchase House, they were both shocked to find the kitchen full of people. The whole lunch party was there, Prosper Cain and Humphry Wellwood, Benedict and Seraphita, Olive. The young people had gone on a beach ramble, and were back with things collected from the shore, shells and seaweeds, razors and angels, crab-claws and carapaces, bladderwrack and leathery bladed fronds, bronzed or bleached. Arthur Dobbin and Frank Mallett were there, having been invited to tea though not to lunch. Seraphita had bestirred herself to make some insipid tea, which she served in a variety of faience cups and saucers, no two the same. Imogen had made a cake, which had sunk towards the centre, and crumbled on the plates. Everyone was standing round the kitchen table, peering at it, so that the two Warrens, coming quietly in through the door, saw only bent backs and heard the murmur of voices. Elsie thought, erroneously, her head swimming, that Philip had become part of fashionable society. They were perceived by Pomona, who hurried towards them, crying “Here he is, here he is,” and stroking Philip’s arm. Everyone turned round. The party surveyed the two Warrens.
Benedict Fludd said “Ah, there you are. We are looking at your handiwork. At what you have made.”
Philip said “Excuse me, this is my sister Elsie, from Burslem. She come to look for me. She walked. All the way from Burslem.”
The gathering took stock of Elsie. Elsie was intimidated by Olive’s hat, which was black and ample, decorated with scarlet bows and fruit. Olive said “Extraordinary.” Seraphita said “Really?” Frank Mallett observed that the young woman looked ready to faint with exhaustion and should be given a chair, and some tea, perhaps, or a glass of water. Dobbin brought a chair which he set down near the back door. Elsie collapsed onto it. Everyone went on staring. Seraphita absently poured a cup of tea, which Dobbin gave to Elsie. Elsie handed it back to him: she was shaking too much to hold on to it genteelly.
It was somehow clear that Seraphita had no idea of what to do, and did not propose to do anything.
That left Olive, who was a grown woman, and Frank Mallett, who was a clergyman. He consulted Olive, and it was agreed that Miss Warren should be found a place to rest, and perhaps some temporary fresh clothing. Olive bent over Elsie and said it was very odd to be present at the discovery of two runaways in one family. She was thinking what a good story it would make, the girl who had walked across half England to find her brother. She smiled at Elsie, absently, studying her intently. Elsie said later to Philip that there was something witchy about the woman with the hat. Somewhere under the gratified storyteller in Olive stirred a memory of her own flight from indigence in the north. Philip had no intention of telling the assembled gathering that his mother was dead, so Olive had no clue that Elsie was, in some ways, close to her own younger self. But she sensed it, she sensed something, of which she would not speak.
A display had been arranged—it was Geraint’s idea—of some of the new vessels, and one or two different layouts of Philip’s newly designed tiles. Fludd called Philip over to talk to Prosper Cain about the glazes, and about how he had chosen the designs, the Dungeness flora, seakale and bladderwrack, crane-flies and fennel. Prosper spoke knowledgeably about the glazes, and admired the steely blue-green, and the rich red, with surprising pinky-white wings in it. Humphry said—as it was hoped he would say—that a fortune could be made, if these were properly marketed. He had been to the Martin Brothers’ showroom in Brownlow Street. Something like that might help. Geraint said “There are lots of little shops in Rye showing all sorts of crafts. There could be a better shop, for better work.” Humphry said Geraint had the right ideas—was he a potter? No, said Geraint, no, he should like to work in a bank, or some such place, he was interested in that sort of life. Humphry smiled. He had just become reconciled with his brother Basil, who had, after all, heeded his warnings about Barnato’s bank and the Kaffir shares, and was indeed
, as his friends were ruined, or committed suicide, prepared to show gratitude to Humphry, and had offered to pay all Tom’s fees at public school. Humphry told Geraint that he should ask advice of his brother the banker. He would take him to see him, when they were both in Town. Basil would advise, might even find a suitable position, in due course. Geraint flushed, and thanked him.
Tom had told Julian that he was to take the exam for Marlowe next summer. He said it had looked as though he might not go there, lately, but now they were looking for tutors, or tutorial colleges. He wasn’t sure that was what he wanted, at all. Julian looked at Tom, and thought he was the most beautiful boy he had ever seen. Marlowe would love him. He was not sure Tom would love Marlowe. He thought he, Julian, could easily, easily fall in love with Tom. All he said was, noncommittally, that Marlowe wasn’t too bad, as schools went. Not too bad, really.
Prosper Cain said that the pots were the work of a master, and a master working at the height of his powers. He admired a peacocky platter with scattered gold and silver fruit all over it, and said he would certainly like to have it, for the Museum if he could bear to part with it, for himself, in all events. Olive picked up a small red vessel—part pot, part sculpture, which was a curled black demon, tailed and stubby-horned, holding a flame-coloured, incurving cup which was at once a fire and a cauldron. “This I must have,” said Olive to Benedict Fludd. “He has the most wicked face, he means mischief.”
“The luck of the firing,” said Fludd. “There’s one over there whose face doesn’t come through the glaze. You have a good eye.” He bent gallantly over her hand. He told Philip to wrap it, but Olive was reluctant to let it go, turning it in her hand, near the window.
Frank Mallett had asked Imogen to find something, perhaps, for Elsie Warren to wear, since she was so dusty. And maybe some water? he said, wondering why exactly the Purchase women were so languid and inept. Imogen did as she was asked, and Elsie appeared timidly in the doorway in a trailing black skirt and a kind of woven overblouse with orange and brown chrysanthemums. Neither of these garments fitted her. Imogen had not thought of pins, or needles. Elsie still had her cracked and dusty shoes, and still wore her dusty scarf, which she had refused to relinquish, because she knew her hair was horrible. Frank said he hoped she was comfortable. She stared defensively round the room, and then hitched up her skirt, and began to clear away the used cups and plates. She found the scullery, and the sink. The company went on talking. Elsie came back and asked Philip in an undertone about hot water and dishcloths. She had found something to do, and understood that there was a need for it. Frank Mallett smiled at her, and thanked her, since no one else appeared to think of doing so. Prosper Cain and Humphry were talking to Benedict Fludd about showrooms and students. Julian was talking to Tom. Dorothy found Philip, and said she liked his work. She said that it was amazing that his sister had found him. How was his mother?
