The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  He conceived the romantic idea of giving a dance—a dance for Florence and also for Imogen. He would have given it on Midsummer Eve, but he wanted to invite the Todefright Wellwoods, and it would not do to clash with their annual festivities. So he decided on May 24th, the birthday of the late Queen, which fell on a Friday. He discussed the matter with Olive Wellwood, when she was visiting the Museum and checking gold and silver treasures. It was hard for him, he told Olive, to bring up a motherless daughter as he should. His Florence was eighteen, and should be thinking about things like “coming out,” he supposed, though she also talked about following Julian to Cambridge. He had the idea of giving a supper and dance—not too formal—in the Museum itself. He thought a small orchestra—the Regiment could make one up—could play in the tea-room in the evening. It would be very pleasant to see the young people dancing amongst the ceramic work of the students, and between the Minton pillars. And the Morris Green Dining-Room could be used as a kind of retirement room, where guests might sit and chat, or eat sorbets.

  Olive was enthusiastic. It would be wonderfully romantic, she said. Like the dancing princesses in the hidden palace under the lake—it would have the pleasure of being secret and impossible. The Museum was impossible, in many ways, at present, said Major Cain. It was full of dust from the huge building works, it was not peaceful, as the hammers crashed and the drills howled. But in the evenings the tea-room was quiet and the dust had settled. He was in need of a fairy godmother to help organise everything. He did not think his company sergeants would understand romantic dances for young ladies. He wondered…

  Olive Wellwood, like very many women who have risen from the lower classes, felt a primitive terror, a gulf opening at her feet, when asked to deal with social complexities she had never learned. She could not do it, she saw immediately, she would betray herself again and again. And yet, the delight of working with Major Cain, of being confided in, of exchanging confidences. Her mind whirled, frantically in her head, like a rat in a cage. She could give socialist, unconventional parties in her own garden. She made her own rules, and Humphry could carry off anything. But something semi-military, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is quite another matter. She said

  “You know, I think you would do best to consult Katharina Well-wood, my sister-in-law. She wants so much to give parties and buy dresses for Griselda, and Griselda retreats into books, and says she wants to study at university. Griselda and Dorothy are quite naughty. They won’t join in. But here—she would be in her element—it is just what she most wants—”

  Katharina was delighted. She discussed catering and flowers with Prosper. She recommended dressmakers and shoe shops. Griselda submitted to being measured for a new, grown-up party dress. Dorothy was to have her first real evening dress and Florence her first grown-up dance dress. They were like princesses in fairytales who had been given magic walnuts or acorns, which they cracked, and out floated beauty.

  Florence’s dress was white lace over dark pink silk, with a silk rose in the low neck, and elbow-length lace sleeves. Griselda’s was made of Liberty silk, in grass-green strewn with floating white and gold flowers, lilies of the valley, pale primroses, bluebells.

  Prosper Cain would have liked to give Imogen Fludd a ball dress—an elegant, modern, shapely ball dress. But he felt it would not be proper. He deputed Florence to ask her what she would wear. He had invited Benedict Fludd, Seraphita and Pomona to come to the party, and had found lodgings for them in a house near the Museum, with a retired sergeant-major and his wife. Florence repeated that Imogen had said that Purchase House was full of stunning embroidered silks and linens, all baled up and folded away. She suggested they both go down to the Marshes, find something possible, and bring it back to be refashioned by Katharina’s dressmaker into something less mediaeval and more up-to-date. What about Pomona? Florence asked Imogen. “She will just have to wear what Mama puts on her,” said Imogen. “She’s very pretty, whatever she’s wearing. She doesn’t seem to notice things like that.”

  When they went to Purchase House, things were more than usually chaotic. Elsie was nowhere to be seen, and Benedict and Philip had just lost a whole firing of porcelain bowls. Seraphita was limp and pale, and Pomona scorched some grilled fish and boiled vegetables.

  Imogen took Florence into a closed room, where dusty leather trunks full of folded materials and barely worn dresses were piled on top of each other. Pomona crept after them, and stood, large-eyed, half-in half-out of the room. Florence noticed that the sisters seemed to have nothing to say to each other. Imogen, resourceful and deliberate, turned over garments, shook out folds. She found what she was looking for—a dark green and ribbed silk, embroidered with pink and white daisies. It was shaped like a mediaeval gown, with a high waist and a little train. “We can do something with that,” she said. “And it will look good in the Green Dining-Room with the Burne-Jones panels and the Morris paper. It will blend in.”

  It was Florence who asked Pomona what she would wear, if they could help…

  Pomona replied flatly that her mother spent her life sewing, it was what she did, she would put together something, as she had done before. Her face was lovely, her voice was vanishing. Florence asked, where was Elsie?

  “She went away to have a baby. She’s coming back, it’s all arranged.”

  She did not invite questions. Florence asked lightly whether Pomona, too, would come and study at the Art School, and noticed that the question distressed both sisters, in different ways. A look went between them. Pomona said she thought not, she was needed here, in Purchase House. She looked down at the dusty floorboards. Imogen said they must go, they must go back to London, now.

  In the train, on the way back, she said suddenly to Florence “I’d be happy if I never had to go back there again.”

  “Why?” asked Florence, lightly.

  “I can’t bear to be so odd and so hopeless. It’s a place without hope. Well, the pots are hopeful, when the kiln doesn’t melt down. But—but—I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you and your father.”

  Florence dared not ask what Imogen thought about Elsie’s baby, or whose it might be. She did not dare raise the question of what was to happen to Pomona, though she didn’t know why. They went back to South Kensington where a delicious dinner, and the secretive, grave young men awaited them.

  Violet said she would make Dorothy a dress. Humphry was told to bring ladies’ magazines from London, and Violet looked at the photographs and drawings. She said it wouldn’t suit Dorothy to wear a girlish colour—Dorothy was handsome, but not pretty. It should be deep rose, perhaps, or dark blue, maybe in shot taffeta with a glow in it. Dark blue like the midnight sky, said Violet, and insisted on taking Dorothy on an excursion to London, for if she was to have a grown-up dress she must have some sort of shaping bodice. Everything this year, in the magazines, was lacy. She had the idea of making a lacy jacket—not in bright white, in some silvery thread—with short sleeves and a collar that would stand up when Dorothy had put her hair up.

  Dorothy found the expedition, and the subsequent sessions of fitting and pinning, both stressful and alarming. Before Hedda’s revelations, she had found Violet’s proprietary motherliness rather sad, when she thought about it at all. Violet was a spinster aunt whose role was to free their mother for her creative work. It was natural that she should insist on her affection, perpetually require that they repay it, that they love her, that they should be grateful for her life, which she had given them.

  But now, Violet seemed, and felt, different. She moved around Dorothy’s hem on hands and knees, her mouth pressed tight over bristling pins, her thin hands tugging at Dorothy’s skirt, or tweaking and clasping her waist. Dorothy looked down into Violet’s tightly drawn scalp and the knob of her dark hair on her narrow neck. It was true, her body was more like Dorothy’s was going to be, than was Olive’s maternal amplitude. Dorothy, who was going to be a doctor, who had to keep telling herself she was going to be a doctor, since ev
eryone was paying half-attention, at best, to this fact, had made it her business to inform herself thoroughly about how babies were born. She had cut open dead pregnant rats, full of tiny, pink, blind, beanlike sleepers. She had looked at a midwifery textbook, with a fat, full-term baby curled in a diagrammatic womb, the crown of its head in the pelvic cavity, the umbilical cord floating and twining in the fluid. She had stopped short of imagining either such a creature inside herself, or herself blindly waiting to be ejected from Olive, down there. But now, as Violet fussed over her, and admired her, she involuntarily had a vision of a Dorothy-puppet—snug or stifled, which?—inside Violet’s lean stomach. She did not feel a flow of filial warmth. She felt repelled. She stood in her midnight silk, in its stiff rustle, and wondered what had happened to the baby Hedda had been so sure was on the way. Violet was as flat as a board. As she always had been. It would be nice if Hedda was lying, or had deceived herself, but Dorothy did not think so. Hedda believed what she said, and what she said was convincing. Either Violet had been wrong about her condition, or she had been trying to upset Humphry, or she had done something to get rid of this unwanted brother or sister. That seemed the most likely. And yet here she was, her mouth full of pins, skinny and sexless, making “mmn” noises of satisfaction over Dorothy’s waist, over the bodices that gave her, for the first time, pushed up and into shape, a pretty little bust.

  She ought to feel kind to Violet, indeed, indignant on her behalf. She did not. She was embarrassed and irritated to the depth of her soul.

  Violet said “You’re growing into a good-looking young lady after all, my love. You were scraggy as a little ’un but you are going to blossom after all. You must put your hair up, and I’ll make you some silk flowers to put in it. Or maybe moons and stars on some frothy bits of illusion. To go with the sky. How do you feel?”

  “Whatever you think.”

  “ I think you are going to be the belle of the ball. You must stand up straight and not slouch. You’ll surprise them all.”

  The note was—possessive? Fierce beyond what was needed? “What are you going to wear, yourself?”

  “Am I invited? I think I may not be. It is a supper dance for young things. I’m not the mother, even if I do a lot of the mothering.”

  The obvious irony hurt Dorothy, who did not know what to think or say.

  Dorothy had no one to talk to about what Hedda had said, or about what she felt about it. Tom had closed it out as though it had never happened. Phyllis was “too young”—younger sisters are always too young to be talked to. She had not discussed this matter with Griselda, with whom she discussed almost everything. She felt that anything she said, any speculation she voiced, even to Griselda, would immediately become hard fact, out in the world. And then she might need to do something, or at least begin to be something she hadn’t known she was.

  On the day of the supper dance, which the Wellwoods called the Ball, Prosper Cain persuaded the Museum, which was open until ten in the evening, to close the Refreshment Corridor early, so that the rooms could be decorated with flowers, and a dais built for his regimental music-players: a fiddle, a cello, a flute, an oboe, a clarinet and a horn. Food was prepared in the Grill-Room, and fragile gilt chairs were scattered around the Centre Refreshment Room. This had been designed to be washable, or possible to swill out, with the result that it was set out entirely in ceramic tiles. It was a light room, with huge arched windows, of light stained glass. There was a domed ceiling, supported by immense majolica pillars made by Minton, in peppermint-green and creamy white majolica, with dancing putti, supporting a crown of coat-hooks, at shoulder height. The floor was tiled in chocolate, the dado was faced with dark tiles, between maroon and umber, and the walls were tiled in yellow, green, white, with strips and stripes of complicated running designs, a text from Ecclesiastes, in cream pottery on a red-brown ground: “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his labour—XYZ.” Amorini cavorted and gambled along the dado. More decoration had been woven in, in more styles, than might seem possible. It was sumptuous and utilitarian, a cross between a fairy palace and a municipal dairy, with electric globes on gilded stems hanging from the ceiling.

  The Royal College of Art backed onto this corridor, and Prosper Cain had judiciously invited both teachers and students from the College to make up his numbers. They came to the Refreshment Rooms from various directions, the guests, some through the great golden doors, which were originally designed to be the entrance from the Cromwell Road, some having wandered through those courtyards and corridors that were still open. There was a sullen background noise of thumping and slicing, from closed-off areas where Aston Webb’s prizewinning quadrangles and courts were at last being constructed. Olive held on to Humphry’s arm, and said that what with the dust that inevitably flew about the floor from the workings, and the dust-sheets that were thrown over various displaced glass cases, like palls over coffins, you felt you had entered both the palace of the Sleeping Beauty and the tomb of Snow White. The visitors to the gallery looked at the young women in their dance dresses and velvet cloaks as though they were a wedding-party, or an irruption from some other world.

  In the dark, warm Grill-Room, with its blue and white tiles, and its ceramic panels of the Four Seasons, food was cooked and offered, patties of shrimp and trout, cups of consommé, confections of cherries and meringue and cream, a fruit punch shimmering and hissing icily in a great glass bowl, champagne with the bubbles wavering upwards in fine threads in misted, frosty glasses. In the Green Dining-Room the mothers and fathers could sit on more comfortable, Jacobean-style chairs.

  Other military officers were there, with their wives, and Basil and Katharina, who was elegant in a gown with a lace overdress over black silk, with roses at her waist, and a short train behind. Seraphita was there, without her husband, who was, she said, packing a kiln with Philip. She was wound in a reddish-brown, flowing garment which by accident or design matched the twelve figures by Burne-Jones, representing the months, or the signs of the Zodiac with the sun and moon, no one was sure. She looked as though she belonged inside the dark green wallpaper with its woven willow boughs and dotted cherries and plums. Olive, on the other hand, was dressed for the dancing in the pillared hall, in a simple dress in a rich fabric, a darker green than the Minton pillars, with borders of gold and silver braid.

  Prosper opened the dancing with Katharina and complimented her on Griselda’s beauty. Then he danced with Seraphita, who was taller than he was, and managed to be simultaneously graceful and ungainly, making exaggerated swoops, not on the beat. The young were clumped in separate clutches of males and females, talking distractedly and looking across the room. Julian and Gerald Matthiessen were there, leaning against the dado in a darkish corner. Prosper wandered past them, having returned Seraphita to the Green Dining-Room, and said he relied on his son to get the young people dancing. He went to speak to the orchestra, smart in their uniforms and shining buttons.

  Julian looked around the Refreshment Room, which he secretly rather liked, but knew Gerald despised for its cluttered detail and congeries of styles.

  “We shall have to dance. Who would you choose to dance with, out of all these beauties?”

  “I couldn’t ask him, alas,” said Gerald, sotto voce, barely indicating Tom, who was standing alone in his formal suit, his fair head bent over a group of amorini on a pillar. Julian was both pleased to have Tom’s beauty recognised, and briefly, ludicrously, jealous on his own behalf.

  “That’s his sister,” said Julian. “She’s changed. She was a tomboy.”

  “I shall ask your sister,” said Gerald. “Then we can talk about you. That will be easy.”

  “I hope you don’t,” said Julian. “I don’t know what she might say.”

  Gerald strolled over towards Florence, who was standing with Imogen and a few female art students. Geraint Fludd, from the other side of the room, was making his way towards her a great deal mo
re decisively. He had secured her hand by the time Gerald got there, to Florence’s distress, though she was able to write down a dance for Gerald later in the evening, in a pretty little book with a hand-painted cover, made by the Royal College calligraphy class, who had contributed a collection of these, all original, to the festivities. Geraint felt a sense of awe, and a rush of blood, as he put his hand in Florence’s, and took hold of her waist. Florence did not notice. She was wondering what, if anything, Gerald would have talked about. Julian told Gerald to ask Imogen Fludd. “The pater wants her to have a good time. She’s his protégée.”

  “I see.”

  “No you don’t. He’s a good officer. Cares for his men. Students count as men.”

  “These aren’t men,” said Gerald, with comic regret. He did as he was told, and asked for Imogen’s hand. For some time they sailed round the pillars in stately silence, occasionally getting out of step. Then Gerald asked her a few questions about silversmithing. It is a rule in Cambridge colleges that you do not talk professional shop on social occasions. Gerald thought it a foolish rule—he was a serious man, and did not really want to inhabit a world of clever banter. Imogen’s face lifted into life. She talked almost animatedly about the innovations of the new Professor Lethaby, who had abolished the miserable copying of ancient drawings of watercress, and had given the students new live, recalcitrant clumps of the vegetable to look at closely, and study the form. “And then,” said Imogen, “you really do understand how leaves grow on stems when it comes to formalising them in silver. I hope I’m not boring you?”