The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  He showed Philip soft-paste porcelain vases, with copper flambé glazes, and spindle-shaped, or pillar-shaped, vases, painted on biscuit, one with peonies, one with bellwort. Philip took notes and copied the bellwort into his sketch-book. There were all sorts of new uses of metallic glazes, making surfaces like a shot silk, or silk brocade—he mimed admiration of this, and Philippe said in French that these were fiendishly difficult, which Philip understood. There was also a very good attempt at the secret Chinese red—“Chinese,” said Philip. “Oui, chinois,” said Philippe. And crackleware in silver and gold. It was all very dressy, Philip thought.

  And then Philippe brought out from a hidden corner some quite different pieces, the earlier and famous Gien reproductions of Renaissance Italian majolica, and Philip fell in love. He loved the colours—sandy yellow-gold and indigo-blue and a sage-green glowing on a black ground, or delicate on a white glaze. He loved the creatures who were entwined and climbing and gesturing on the surfaces, horned Pans with high pointed ears and pointed beards, whose shaggy hips below the waist ran into formal foliage, blue, gold and green. He liked the formal spiralling fronds of golden apple boughs and fine threaded tendrils and trumpets. There were lithe golden boys with wicked grins and blue dragons with fish-tailed children—not fat putti, laughing yellow-gold boys—and fauns, and dolphins, all swiftly done, all bright and glowing. He was put in mind of his sheaf of drawings of the Gloucester Candlestick, with the men and monkeys and dragons, and had the glimmering of an idea of a way he could make new patterns of his own, combining both on the branches of an eternal tree with space for everyone. He asked Philippe for time to draw one or two. “Arabesques,” said Philippe. He drew for Philip an image of a different clock, decorated with these creatures, and showed him the very interesting design on the base of this—a Greek wave-fret, a wild-strawberry hanging.

  They took a cup of coffee in a small café and communicated by drawing, taking turns—Philip drew the patterns on his Dungeness tiles, the Old Man’s Beard and the fennel, and Philippe drew more creatures, and bowls with handles like dragons and harpies entwined with rinceaux. Philip drew Fludd’s tadpoles but couldn’t think how to explain Fludd. So he drew a master-potter at a wheel, and an apprentice with a broom, and identified himself as the apprentice, and with much pointing explained that he was going to find Fludd—he mimed snoring—and bring him to the stand. Philippe had black hair, and a very clean-cut, pointed face. “I’ll be back,” said Philip. “Au revoir, donc,” said Philippe.

  23

  Tom sat in the sombre library of the British Pavilion, in the late afternoon, when it was closed to the public. Guests of the Special Keeper of Precious Metals at the Victoria and Albert Museum were allowed in. Tom could imagine himself in the seventeenth century, surrounded by leather books and glowing tapestries of the Quest of the Grail. In front of him was Burne-Jones’s painting of Lancelot’s dream at the Grail chapel. The clearing in the forest was desolate and moonlit. The light was pale moony-gold, shining on the rump of the tethered horse, and the faces of the sleeping knight and watching angel. The knight was half-recumbent, his elegant mailed feet crossed like an effigy, his young, fine face expressing not rest, but absolute exhaustion. His shield was propped in a twisted, leafless bush: the moon glinted on his long sword and the helmet on the ground by his feet. The expression on the angel’s concerned little white face was almost one of terror or horror. Thorns grew round the foot of the chapel wall. Tom was deeply moved by all this. He wanted to go home. He took the latest instalment of Underground out of his bookbag, and wrote a letter.

  My dearest Mother,

  Thank you for sending the unwrapping of the Silf. It is one of the best things you have done, I think, very exciting and disturbing. I hope we shall see a lot more of the Silf—is it a “she” or an “it”—you seem undecided. I think you are quite right about the spelling. Silf is much more mysterious than sylph, and gets rid of all sorts of airy-fairy associations.

  I am having a very good time here, seeing lots and lots of amazing things, some entertaining, some instructive, some beautiful too. I have been up the Eiffel Tower and on the Great Wheel and have ventured into the new Underground Railway, the Métro, which has gates like the gates of fairyland. Everything is driven by electricity—it all hums and buzzes—and there are forests of lights twinkling and glittering everywhere. I don’t know if it is more like Vanity Fair or Camelot or even at times Pandemonium. I am not very good at living in all this noise, I really am not, I think often of a quiet walk on the Downs in the early morning, with the dew on the turf and the sun rising. I really do wish you were here. You would make more of all this enchantment and artifice than I can. It is like that story you wrote of the palace inside the palace inside the palace. You could make stories out of almost everything.

  Julian is very good to me, and I hope we are really friends. But he is so sophisticated and so—I can’t find a word—sardonic? Not quite—you will know what I mean—that I’m never quite at ease with him, and daren’t say what I feel, in case he thinks it’s silly. Major Cain has been wonderfully kind, and explains the art objects to us. You would love to see the jewellery. Mr. Fludd is a bit mysterious—he seems to stay in bed a lot—Philip looks after him, I suppose. We hope to see someone called Loïe Fuller dance. I think there is all sorts of food for your imagination here. As for me, sometimes I really enjoy things like moving pavements, and sherbet in little glasses, and the Russian diorama. But sometimes—mostly I think—I do want to be at home and sit in the garden with lemonade, and read about the Silf.

  Your loving son

  Tom.

  Prosper Cain came to the modest hotel where Benedict Fludd and Philip were staying. He found Philip, who said that Benedict Fludd was still in bed and had said he was not to be disturbed. Cain said he was to be disturbed, and immediately. He was to visit the Lalique stand, and he was to lunch with Siegfried Bing in the Pavillon Bleu, as he knew very well. Philip said drily that he did not think he dared disturb Fludd.

  “I dare,” said Major Cain. He considered Philip. “How are you finding the Exposition?”

  Philip detailed his visits to the ceramics exhibitions, and pulled out his sketch-book to show Major Cain the monstrous clock.

  “Have you seen anything except the pots, Philip?”

  “I’m finding my way around them, sir. I made a French friend at the Gien place. He doesn’t speak English. He’s a decorator.”

  “You should be having fun and broadening your mind. Have you seen the jewellery? Have you seen the Bing Pavilion?”

  “No.”

  “Benedict should be showing you things. I wanted to show some of the dealers here some of your work. You could come and draw for them. I might need you, if Fludd’s out of form.”

  • • •

  Benedict Fludd was under a wine-stained sheet, with his head entangled in a serpentine French bolster. “Get out,” he said to Cain.

  “I won’t. You are lunching with Bing, as you very well know. Get up. You owe it to Philip Warren, to show these folk his work, as well as to yourself. Bing is interested in your pond bowl. Very interested. Get up. In the army we had very nasty ways of making people get up. Get up and get washed. Horrible man.”

  Everyone, therefore, gathered at the Lalique stand. It was yet another imaginary dwelling, with pleated gauze hangings. Shining white moiré bats swooped in a highly arched window, and there was a screen, sinister, delicate, lovely, made of five naked bronze women, with huge, skeletal wings like the bronze veins of moths, hanging below and beside them. The most prominent exhibit was a large ornament, in the form of a turquoise woman’s bust rising out of the mouth of a long, long dragonfly, its narrowing gold body studded with shimmering blue and green jewels at regular intervals, diminishing to a tiny sharp gilt fork at the base. The woman’s head was crowned with an ornament which was a helm, or a split scarab, or the insect eyes of the metamorphosing being. From her shoulders hung what were at once stiff, spreading sleev
es, and the realistic wings of the dragonfly, made in the new, transparent, unbacked enamel, veined in gold, studded with roundels of turquoise and crystals. The beast had huge dragonlike claws, stretching either side of the womanhead, on gold muscular arms. Round this piece were lesser jewels in the shapes of insects and flowers. Philip asked Fludd if he knew how the transparent enamel was done. He said to him “Look” at a brooch made of two completely realistic stag-beetles, their heads locked, the pitted horny roughness of their wing-cases perfectly reproduced.

  “Hmn,” said Fludd. “Another French wizard who moulds from life, I imagine. Like Palissy.”

  Fludd was coming to life. He took out an eye-glass and peered at the tiny tourmaline eggs which crusted the rumps of the insects, at the blood-red stone they clutched between them.

  Julian pointed out to Tom that the heart-shaped form of another jewel with two dragonflies conjoined was in fact an exact reproduction of copulation. So it was, said Tom, with a naturalist’s interest.

  “I meant to surprise you,” said Olive Wellwood, floating up to them under a creamy hat clustered with butterflies and silken bees. “Now be surprised, my darling. I couldn’t resist, after your lovely letter—”

  She was accompanied by Humphry, looking casually elegant, and August Steyning, wearing moth-grey and a peacock-blue cravat.

  There were exclamations and kisses. Olive was lovely and excitable, with a hectic flush on her face. She was carrying a rose-coloured silk parasol, which, out of doors, made her shadowed face dark rose in pale rose. Tom had a feeling he immediately remembered, though he had never learned to expect it. Olive in the flesh, Olive perfumed with attar of roses, was not the secret sharer of the otherworld, to whom he wrote letters. That was a kind of second self, who wrote him and inhabited his dreams. This was a lively, sociable woman in creamy broderie anglaise, over whose fingers Prosper Cain was gallantly bowing his head.

  “How pleasant to see you, dear Mrs. Wellwood. Just the right setting, among the peacocks and damselflies. I did not know you intended to visit the Exposition.”

  “I did not know myself. It was an impromptu decision, prompted by a letter from Tom—now I am speaking nonsense, impromptu can’t be prompted—a letter describing all the enticements and enchantments so that I was irresistibly drawn to them. And we discovered that August Steyning had already planned a visit, so we attached ourselves to him. You must tell us everything, you must show us all the beautiful things …”

  She is overdoing it, thought Tom. What he could not know was that Olive’s coming was the effect of a move by Herbert Methley, who had insistently and even fiercely tried to coerce her into performing a sexual thing she found disgusting. She had blushed like fire. Tears had started from her eyes. She had no idea whether Methley was a monstrous pervert, or whether she herself was—as he accused her of being—naïve and cold, not to understand, not to respond. She suddenly couldn’t stand the smell of him, struggled out of his arms, and out of the hired bed, and thought blindly “I have got to get away.” She was so pleased to see Prosper Cain, whose admiration for her was old-fashioned and gallant.

  And Tom, of course, she was pleased to see Tom, Tom loved her more than anyone did.

  Prosper Cain was buying jewellery. He liked buying small pieces, and was looking for the perfect gift to take home for Florence. He had bought her one of Lalique’s horn combs, with carved sycamore seeds, and was hesitating over an unusual anemone brooch, in which the lovely flower was denuded of all its petals but one, made of pink enamel, set amongst twining ivory roots, through which strange faces peered. But perhaps you didn’t give an image of fall and decay, however beautiful, to a young girl? He found a pliqué-à-jour enamelled poppy—“like a thin, clear bubble of blood” as Browning said of the wild tulips—and bought it to pin on his daughter’s dark hair. He then examined another, paler piece, which combined transparent enamelled honesty seed-cases with a sumptuous thistle, made of enamelled silver and frosted glass. Olive, who was touching the jewels with a gloved fingertip, holding a snake-bracelet against her wrist to admire it, suddenly wondered if the second piece might be an offering designed for herself. It had a soft, fairytale gleam. Cain watched its wrapping, and put it, with the poppy, in his pocket. He thought he might give it to Imogen Fludd, if that would not embarrass her. She had become interested in jewellery design—the small scale, the precise craft, the rigour and delicacy of it suited her temperament. But London was full of ladies doing bits of enamelwork and stringing beads. If jewellery was to be her means of independence she must do it well, very well.

  It was a mistake to try to visit the Grand Palais in a large group. There were thousands of paintings in the Décennale, which showed work from the last ten years of the century, from all the exhibiting countries. August Steyning said in a forthright way that they should all proceed at their own pace and follow their own interests until it was time for lunch, when they should forgather—“for a reason”—in front of Jean Weber’s painting Les Fantoches. They strolled in ones and twos—Steyning, Cain and Olive, Tom and Julian, Charles and Joachim Susskind, Fludd and Philip. Philip was oppressed by the size and weight and insistent dark meaning ofmuch ofthe work. He was appalled by vast paintings of clumped dead and dying naked humans, strewn with snakes and surveyed by tiny winged angels. In one painting, entitled Towards the Abyss, a woman in modern dress, with huge batwings and a windblown bonnet, strode forward against the wind, followed by a crawling crowd of nudes, geriatric and bearded, female and glaring, all in extremis, some already expiring. Philip timidly asked Fludd what it meant.

  “Dunno,” said Fludd. “She might be Woman, but she is not very taking, looks like a mad governess. She might be Capitalism but she looks like a miserable vampire. Or the Church, she might be. Or syphilis. Very French, she is. I prefer pots. They don’t have to be weighed down with meaning. They are what they are, earth and chemistry.”

  Julian, by now an eager student of Art Nouveau and the artists of the Secession, hurried Tom away to look at Klimt, whose delicious Lady in Pink shone palely out, and whose ambitious allegory of Philosophy glittered with elegance. Joachim Susskind and Charles were arrested by Rochegrosse’s The Race for Happiness, a mad conical heap of humans in frock-coats, evening gowns and workmen’s striped jumpers, who climbed up and over each other, so that a bunch of desperate arms, black-sleeved, or silk-gloved, protruded like stakes into the sky, against a background of chimneys. Susskind said it was impressive as an image of capitalism. He thought for some time, and then said that maybe a very expensive painting that must have taken years of work wasn’t the best instrument to bring about a just society.

  There was more naked female flesh in Les Fantoches where they met. It showed what looked like an artist’s garret with a long couch in the mansard corner. The light from the six glass squares of the window illuminated the naked body of a woman who lay diagonally across most of the canvas. Her head lay at an awkward angle. Her arms were open, and bent, with pathetically clenched fists. Her hair was dark, her eyes were closed, her expression might have been a pout or a scowl. Her legs were splayed, her tiny slit visible, though there was no pubic hair. One foot rested awkwardly on an embroidered cushion on the floor, one was equally awkwardly clinging to the embroidered cover of the couch. She looked both very uncomfortable and completely inert, her flesh like putty. Behind her sat a bearded, handsome man, his face intent on a delicate doll, or puppet, whose waist was circled by his two hands—the two seemed to be conversing. The rest of the painting was peopled with dolls, or puppets, shining out of the gloom—a Javanese figure, a Byzantine queen, erect and tiny and full of presence, a floating Rapunzel in the foreground, all long hair and huge wistful eyes. A jointed doll with no sex lay face down at an angle to the naked woman’s knees. A kind of Punchinello was draped over the man’s knee. The Punchinello had the peculiar lifelessness of unanimated cloth, which is different from inert female flesh.

  When August Steyning arrived, they saw why he had picked th
is painting. He was accompanied by the puppetmaster from Munich, who had performed at the Midsummer party. Anselm Stern was soberly dressed in a black frock-coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. With him, thin and wiry, wearing a beret and a pale blue cravat, was a young man who was obviously his son, and was introduced as Wolfgang. They were neither of them tall: both had large dark eyes and sharp noses and mouths. Humphry asked Steyning and Stern to explain the painting, please.

  “We can’t agree on anything. Is she alive, is she dead? Is he ignoring the flesh for art and if so is he culpable or to be admired? Could he animate the dead woman if he gave her the attention he’s giving the pretty doll? She looks damnably uncomfortable, as though she’ll skid off that couch any minute.”

  Steyning laughed.

  “It’s about the borders between the real and the imagined. And the imagined has more life than the real—much more—but it is the artist who gives the figures life.”

  Olive said it was a pity more women didn’t paint allegories about the imagination. This woman was like clay in a stocking.

  Everyone looked at Anselm Stern.

  “What one gives to one’s art,” he said, in slightly uncertain English, “is taken away out of the life, this is so. One gives the energy to the figures. It is one’s own energy, but also kinetic. Who is more real to me, the figures in the box in my head or the figures on the streets?”

  “You could see this artist as a vampire,” said Steyning provocatively. “He has sucked the life out of that poor girl and is giving it to wooden limbs and painted faces.”

  “He has a good face,” said Stern, smiling slightly.

  Philip pulled at Fludd’s sleeve and pointed out in a whisper that the draped Punchinello was the reverse image of the draped human woman.

  “The message is,” said Stern, “that art is more lifely than life but not always the artist pays.”