The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Fuller’s dances depended on two things—furling, unfurling, billowing lengths of cloth, and electric lighting, in magic lanterns covered by different coloured gelatines. Her body was half-glimpsed through coils transparent, translucent, opaque. She deployed her veiling with the aid of supporting batons. They saw “The Flight of the Butterflies,” and “Radium,” an iridescent shimmering confection dedicated to Pierre and Marie Curie. They saw, finally, the Fire Dance, in which the dancer was lit from below, through a lantern using an intense scarlet light. The moving silks became a stream of volcanic magma, they became the rising flames of a burning pyre, they became the oven of a holocaust. “The Ride of the Valkyries” sang out, and the woman gyrated in a cocoon of fire—like red clay, like white marble luridly lit, smiling in the conflagration, stepping through the fires of hell-mouth incandescent and unconsumed. They were all entranced. Julian wondered if it was vulgar, and then got lost in the silk fringes. Tom was happy with that happiness that comes from being shut in the unreal box of the theatre. Olive was reminded of the uncanny feeling she had had as Hermione, wound in marble folds of grave-cloth or wedding dress. She remembered the flowing marble hair of Rodin’s Danaïde, and felt that everything was of a piece, that the dancer, and the carved woman, and the glassy lit surface of the river outside with its threaded slivers of emerald, opal, amethyst, peridot, hissing and crackling with electricity, electricity, a river of life, a river of death, were all one. It made her want to write, as things delightful and things threatening, both, made her want to write.

  When they were safely back in Todefright, Humphry sat down to write an article on Exhibitions and the Arts of War and Peace.

  Olive wrote a tale in which, at night, the silky ladies and resplendent peacocks, the manikins and marble men and maidens, the puppets and the glimmering butterflies and dragonflies and fishes in the tapestries, came to life and held their own market of magical goods in the shadowy spaces and the sumptuous uninhabited chambers of the Bing Pavilion.

  24

  The hot summer days were long in the Marsh. In the absence of Benedict Fludd and Philip there was less for Elsie to do, and Seraphita and Pomona did nothing anyway. Sometimes they sat in the orchard with their embroidery. Elsie cleared up, and shopped, and did sewing of her own. She had reached an age where every surface of her skin was taut with the need to be touched and used, and all she had to occupy her was a dusty old house and two mildly crazy women dressed in flowing floral gowns. She herself was also dressed in clothes constructed from altered hand-downs, covered with faded golden lilies and birds and pomegranates. What she wanted was a sleek, dark, businesslike skirt and a fresh white shirt with a collar, that would show off her narrow waist. She had no money, and did not know how to ask for any, for she knew there was very little in the household to cover the bread and milk and vegetables. She also had a problem with handed-down shoes, none of which fitted her exactly. She had red rubbed places on what she knew were pretty feet, scraped heels and bruised toe-joints. She tended to walk around in basketlike sandals that were too big, but didn’t hurt. More than anything she admitted to herself that she wanted, she wanted new shoes, her own shoes. Shoes that wouldn’t destroy her feet. More than anything, in fact, she wanted to be made love to, to have hands gripping her waist and stroking her lovely hair. She burned, but it was no use repining, or even admitting to herself that she burned. She set about remedying what little she could, taking dressmaking shears to the Morris & Co. fabrics, and converting the loose aesthetic robes to neatly shaped skirts, with darts and seams. She had seen in a shop window in Rye a soft, dark wine-red leather belt, with an arrow-shaped clasp at the front, that she desired passionately, as a substitute for hands, as a provocation to eyes.

  Seraphita said nothing about the skirts. She stared vaguely, like a china doll, or a garden goddess, Elsie thought. The house now had few secrets from Elsie. She knew where Seraphita hid bottles, brown bottles of stout, little blue bottles of laudanum, amongst her wool-baskets and hairbrushes. She never touched or moved these bottles; she thought, indeed, of offering help with procuring them, but Seraphita had a trick of not hearing anything that was said, and must have had a satisfactory system already in place, though she never looked awake enough to contrive one.

  Elsie knew she ought to be sorry for Pomona. The girl liked to follow her around, never offering to help with the housework, though sweetly admiring of Elsie’s achievements, such a delicious soup, such a pretty flower arrangement, such clean windows as there had never been, the sun had never come in so brightly. Pomona did touch Elsie. She stroked her, timidly, when Elsie sat down to sew, she asked if Elsie was happy. She said “We aren’t very lively here, now Imogen is gone,” and Elsie replied tartly that there was plenty of work to be getting on with. Somebody ought to be educating the girl, taking her out to meet possible husbands or teaching her a trade, Elsie thought, not very sympathetically. She wished Pomona would keep her distance. She preferred sitting alone to sew. She was making a not-bad, reasonably sober skirt, covered with willow boughs.

  She went, when she could, into the potters’ studio. The balls of clay were damp-wrapped, the buckets of slip were tempting, and she ran her fingers through them, just to get the feel back. She took some clay—it wasn’t stealing, it could be squeezed back to nothing—and made several tiny figures, figures of women, sitting with their arms round their knees, or standing proudly naked, balanced on elegant legs.

  She was curious about the locked pantry. She told herself that she had cleaned everywhere else, and should clean there, but knew that it was really the ancient challenge of the one locked door. The drawing of Bernard Palissy from the Kensington Valhalla was nailed to the locked door, one corner, she noticed, covering the keyhole. Without exactly setting about it, she looked for unattributable keys, telling herself at the same time that if the pantry held a secret, the key might be somewhere else altogether. Then, one day, standing precariously on a stool to reach a high shelf, she picked up a grim salt-jar, in the shape of a griffon with a threatening beak and lifted crest, and heard a metallic rattle. The jar was pushed back in the shadows. Elsie retrieved it, and brought it to earth. She tipped and the creature disgorged a fine iron key. Elsie put the key into the pocket of her apron, and smiled to herself, catlike. She replaced the jar. And then she waited. She waited two days, until Frank Mallett invited Seraphita and Pomona to a summer picnic at the Puxty vicarage. When she had the house to herself, she took out the tacks that held Palissy in place, and uncovered the lock. The key slid in easily, and turned easily, as though oiled. The pantry was indeed a pantry. A stone shelf ran round three of its walls, above and behind which were other shelves, rising to the low whitewashed ceiling. There was a small barred window, with a wire net to keep out flies, covered with dust.

  On the shelves were pots. Elsie had expected something secret and different. One or two were largish plump jars, but most were small, and glimmered white in the shadows, white-glazed china, unglazed biscuit. When Elsie went nearer to make them out better her feet crunched on broken shards, as though someone had dropped, or thrown, a whole carpet of fragments to the ground.

  The pots were obscene chimaeras, half vessels, half human. They had a purity and clarity of line, and were contorted into every shape of human sexual display and congress. Slender girls clutched and displayed vaselike, intricate modellings of their own lower lips and canals. They lay on their backs, thrusting their pelvises up to be viewed. They sat in mute despair on the lips of towering jars, clutching their nipples defensively, their long hair falling over their cast-down faces. There were also clinical anatomical models—always elegant, always precise and economical, of the male and female sexual organs, separate and conjoined. There were pairs of figures, in strenuous possible and impossible embraces, gentle and terrible.

  Some of them had Imogen’s long face and drooping shoulders: some of them were plump Pomona. The males were faceless fantasms. Elsie crunched towards them over the destruction of other v
ersions, and saw that the wavering arms and legs, the open mouths and clutching hands were not all the same age, went back years, into childishness. There were so many, Elsie thought they resembled a coral reef, thrusting out stony thickets underwater. It was hard for Elsie to look at them, in the state of bodily need which already possessed her. Something inside her own body responded to the opening up, the penetration, the visual shock of these. But under the sexual response, and stronger, was terror. Not terror, exactly, of what the girls had been made to do, or maybe only imagined as doing. Terror of the ferocious energy that had made so many, so many, compelled by a need she did not want to imagine. She backed away. She had the presence of mind to take off her hated shoes and wrap them in her apron to be brushed clean of traces. She did not think that the maker of this display would take kindly to any hint or trace of her own discovery of it.

  She did not know if she would have told Philip, if he had been there. She had a strong need to tell no one, as if silence would unmake the shelves, and the gleaming white things, and the dusty light. It had the opposite effect. She was haunted. When Pomona returned from the tea-party, Elsie’s unwilling brain undressed her cream-skinned body, opened her legs, so that when Pomona next stroked Elsie’s arm, Elsie, for the first time, slapped away her hand, said sharply, “Don’t!” and turned away from Pomona’s face, where distress flickered and calmed itself.

  At the August Bank Holiday weekend Geraint came home to see his mother and sister. Basil Wellwood took him into Kent in his new Daimler. He had formed a godfatherly affection for “young Gerry” as he was now known, which Gerry reciprocated, asking intelligent questions about mines, bonds, and markets, which Charles had never done. Geraint was now working as a clerk in Wildvogel & Quick’s currency department. He had lodgings in Lambeth, and strode daily across London Bridge in a crowd of black-clothed men, hurrying and intent, like army ants, or a tidal stream like the grim river beneath. It was a huge change for a ragged boy, “dragged up” aesthetically in an impoverished marsh. He preened himself in his new clothes, signs of a total metamorphosis, a grub become a dragonfly. He found the hum and murmur and heat and scent of the human crush the most alarming thing but he was resolute that he must not only get used to it, but learn to like it. He was amiable to other clerks, and learned to join in japes, and outings, where to be enthusiastic, where to hold back. He was canny, deliberately rather than instinctively canny. His handwriting was precise and beautiful—he had inherited something of his father’s eye. He discovered he had a facility for accurate calculation, and took intense pleasure in it. It was of no use in a dusty old house in a dismal marsh.

  He was frequently bored to exhaustion, but never yawned. There were things to learn. He looked around to learn them. He was going to have a country house, and servants, and champagne, and—much more vaguely—an elegant wife in fashionable gowns. He had a double vision of the City and the Stock Exchange. He loved its conformity, its narrowness, its pure drive to money-making. He learned to love its dun air, in which floated a fine haze of soot and grit, an air which was thick, like the sediment on dusty windows, a colouring at once a respectable toning-down, and a kind of vanishing, like the drab breast feathers of dunnocks scurrying under hedges. And it came to him vaguely that what was at the centre of it all was both a thing, and a symbolic key or clue to all other things, the gold that lay quietly in sovereign pieces and stacked ingots in the vaults of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the strong-rooms of Wildvogel & Quick. For the figures he scribed and arranged in his elegant ink columns, the telegrams and the bankers’ drafts, were also symbols of things, whose solidity delighted his imagination. Things like bicycle-wheels, dynamos, thick cement, bolts of silk and bales of wool and pyramids of dusky bright carpets, tin-lined cases of tea and sacks of coffee beans, trawlers, steamships, typewriters, wines and sugar, coal and salt, gases in carboys, oil in flasks and barrels, spices sealed in lead caskets. It was all full of a curiously lively dust, which drifted and rose and fell. Dust from the cinders of thousands of chimneys, mixed with a sediment of spice and sugar, mixed again with the imagined glimmer of gold dust.

  Once these things had been held in huge vaulted warehouses along the Docks, but this was changing, as Basil explained to him. The warehouses were becoming echoing empty sarcophagi, through the influence of telegrams and steamships. The Baltic Exchange, Basil told Gerry, received three telegrams every minute. Each could result in the dispatching of a ship which would take only a week or so from the States and only four or five weeks from Australia and the Orient. The great holding-merchants must change their ways or die out.

  Geraint saw the turning globe in his mind’s eye, with its vast red Imperial patches, its shifting frontiers, criss-crossed by the invisible threads of the telegrams and the visible furrows of the great iron ships forging steadily through flying foam and mirror-calm seas.

  In the Daimler, on the bright Bank Holiday Saturday, Basil Well-wood talked about gold. Gold was needed to fight the war in South Africa, which Humphry had written against, describing it as a war in the interests of the London gold market, the bullion reserve, and the speculators. Basil was unsettled, because the Chancellor had chosen that day, at the beginning of the Bank Holiday weekend, when the Stock Exchange was closed and the city was empty, to announce a War Loan designed to replenish the depleted stocks of gold coins and bullion held by the Bank of England. Investors were disadvantaged. Trains would not run on time because of the holiday and time was vital at this delicate point. It was unfairly done. Geraint nodded agreement. He mentioned the South American mines—Camp Rind, Crickle Creek—where venture corporations were looking to replace the supplies which had thinned with the closing of many South African mines since the outbreak of war.

  He was handling correspondence about these matters. His work was more interesting than it might have been, because four of the clerks from Wildvogel & Quick had marched away with the City Imperial Volunteers. Such patriotic young men had, of course, been promised that their posts would be kept open for them. There had been a most unpleasant incident when the Daily Mail had accused another German bank of telling two such clerks that they would have to leave. The paper had not named the bankers, but the City knew they were Kahn and Herzfelder, and Maurice Herzfelder had been closed in on, jostled, baited, brought down and kicked about his body and face by angry inhabitants of the Kaffir Circus. No one had been brought to book. The Stock Exchange was a place of anarchic gathering crowds, with wild emotions. Gerry had been in place on May 18th when the Relief of Mafeking was announced. Everyone marched and howled and sang, waving flags and blowing trumpets and singing anthems, accompanied by coaching horns. Gerry too, marched and sang. “Rule Britannia,” “God Save the Queen.” His mind was hooked into the communal mind. It was new to him, he had never known anything like it.

  The Bank Holiday weather was golden. Basil and Gerry sat behind the chauffeur and looked out benignly at hopfields and cornfields. When they came to the Wellwood country house, Basil, in an excess of friendliness, invited his young clerk in for a glass of sherry, and then ordered the chauffeur to take the young man and his bag through the country roads to Purchase House. It would be a fine surprise, for his family, to see him turn up in an automobile. They would not be expecting that. Geraint was a little worried because he was not sure they were expecting him at all—he had meant to surprise them. He was agitated in his mind about what to do about the chauffeur—would the man expect a tip, should he be invited in, how would he negotiate this? They wheeled and chugged out of the Garden of England and into the Marsh, and drove up the long drive to Purchase House. No one stirred. They came into the stable-yard, which was empty and full of heat, like a vat. Nobody came out to meet them. Geraint said he could perhaps find a beer to refresh the chauffeur, who refused politely (he had his own beer in his lunch basket, he wanted to get back to his own family, he was aware of Geraint’s social predicament, and only residually interested in showing off the automobile to the inhabitan
ts, if any appeared, of Purchase House). Geraint stood in the yard with his bag, and watched the chauffeur crank up the engine and reverse out of the yard, with a series of spluttering and petroleum farts.

  Elsie Warren came out of the dairy-studio just in time to see the high back of the car disappear between the trees. She greeted Geraint civilly, and expressed the right amount of surprise, both at his appearance, and at his conveyance. She said she had seen one or two in Rye, they were quite startling. She said she would make him up a bed, and that his mother was taking a nap, as she usually did in the afternoon. She did not know where Pomona was. She might have gone out with a bicycle. Was he hungry?

  He was very hungry. Elsie produced, in a very short time, an excellent lobster salad and some fresh brown bread. “There’s a fisher-boy,” she said, “who brings me a lobster or a crab now and then as an excuse to hang around.”

  Geraint looked at her with mild curiosity. So she had a follower? He saw her see what he thought—she smoothed down her skirt over her hips, self-consciously. He saw that she had become extremely pretty, that her figure was just as it should be, and her face full of life. He observed her observing his observations. They both decided to say nothing. He looked at her reconfigured arts and crafts garments. They did not hang perfectly. He remembered shouting at Prosper Cain that no one had seen fit to pay Philip. He did not know if Philip was now paid—he was at least being taken on an educational trip to Paris, so Imogen and Florence had told him, when he called in at the Museum. He wondered if Elsie was paid. He thought if he didn’t find out, no one would. Someone—the invisible fisher-boy?—would be after Elsie Warren, would want to take her away, make love to her, make a wife and mother of her. This would be both right and very inconvenient. He thought he must talk to Elsie.