The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “Just after Easter… I don’t recall exactly. Well before …”

  “Yes.” She asked about the nausea. She asked about sleep. And weight. She asked Florence to lie back, with a towel under her, on the pretty bedspread, and she felt her belly, with confident, firm, gentle fingertips, inside and out. Florence shivered. She said

  “It bleeds. But it is only the—the periphery, so to speak.”

  “You got torn,” said Dorothy, whose experience did not stretch to the defloration of young women. Florence, accepting Dorothy’s authority, said “It was only once, in fact, just the once. There was so much—mess—it didn’t occur to me that I might—”

  “I think you are past the early stage when women often miscarry. I think there is no doubt about this. I think you should tell Geraint.”

  “It wasn’t Geraint. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Griselda and Dorothy looked at each other across the recumbent Florence. They were both thinking that Geraint, nevertheless—who loved Florence … They felt queasy. Florence rearranged her clothes and sat up. She said grimly

  “I shall have to go away from here. Immediately, I think. You are saying—there isn’t any way of—of losing this.”

  Dorothy hesitated. She said, half-way between agitated friend and calm doctor, “There’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t be horribly dangerous. I think you should go through with it. And then decide what to do…”

  “I shall have to go and see Papa. I am horribly afraid of what will happen then. I had better start packing, now.”

  Griselda said “No, don’t do that, don’t. I can pack, with the bedders, later, when you know where … I can happily do that. I’ll make us all some cocoa. Settle your stomach with pasteurised milk and sugar.”

  They sat, companionably, and put more coal, and some wood Florence had collected, on the fire.

  “I was always in two minds about this place,” said Florence. “I thought it was a fortress of irredeemable innocence—and experience was outside, and was all shiny and tempting. Now I’d give anything to be able to stay here, and learn to think clearly. Which I obviously don’t. I followed my feelings and they were bad, and worse, they were silly. So the angel will close the gates and wave me goodbye with her sword. I think it’s a female angel, in a women’s college.

  “Griselda, I have a huge favour to ask of you.”

  “Ask,” said Griselda.

  “Will you come with me to face Papa? I am afraid of someone—Papa, me—saying something unforgivable, or doing something silly … mad…”

  “Are you sure?” said Griselda.

  “I think so. Would you anyway come to London, and see how I feel there?”

  The two young women stood in Prosper Cain’s study, amongst the fake Palissys and under a fake Lorenzo Lotto Annunciation. Prosper sat behind his desk and said it was a pleasant surprise to see them. He could see that whatever it was was not pleasant. He thought Florence must be in money trouble. He asked them to sit down. The room was small—he had to stay behind his desk, like a judge.

  Florence said “I asked Griselda to come because I need—I need this talk to stay—to stay formal—I need you to think.”

  “It sounds very dreadful,” said Prosper, lightly.

  “It is,” said Florence. “I’m afraid I’m pregnant.” Prosper’s face tightened into a mask. Florence had never seen it like this, though his soldiers had, once or twice. He said “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Not exactly. I dared not. I asked Dorothy. She’s passed all her exams … in that area…”

  “Well,” said Prosper Cain. “He must marry you. Now, immediately. If he’s worried about money, I must help.”

  “It’s not Geraint,” said Florence. She added, miserably, “I must send his ring back. I should have done that already. I feel—I feel—”

  “In that case,” said Prosper, “who?”

  He was a soldier. He knew how to kill people, and he wanted to kill. Florence saw yet another face she had never seen. Her own face tightened into a mask, not unlike his.

  “I don’t want you to know. It was only once. I don’t want… the person … to know. I was very silly.” She flinched. Her father, who had never done so, looked as though he was about to hit her. She watched him decide not to. Griselda, watching both of them, thought their hard faces were like masks in a Greek tragedy. Prosper gave a kind of gasp.

  “I need to think. Let me think.”

  Things raced through his mind like hunted animals in a dark wood. He would stand by Florence. For most of his life she was the creature he had most loved and delighted in. This caused him to think of Imogen, and the expected child. He knew, without putting it into words, that the inconvenient child was there in some way because of the loved and welcomed child. He could not, therefore, think of—yes, of killing—this child who was, or would be, the grandchild of his Giulia. He thought: I must take her in, and face—expect her, expect them to face—the opprobrium, and worse. He thought, and then, almost in a whisper, said

  “I must leave the Museum, and take a house in the country, somewhere quiet, where we can all—”

  “You can’t do that,” said Florence. “I can’t bear it if you do that. I’d rather be dead.”

  She said “What we must arrange, is for me to go away somewhere—until—and find someone to take—the …”

  She could not say, child. Prosper’s imagination chewed at the unmanageable facts. How could his daughter ever now be in his house, with his new wife and his new child? He did not want her to give away her child—it was his flesh and blood, and did not deserve to be pushed into the dark. He was at a loss. His new mask was that of an old man, indecisive.

  Griselda said “Perhaps Florence could go abroad—to Italy, say—as a young widow maybe—to a clinic, until the birth—and then decide what to do? It is too hard to decide now what to do. But it does seem clear Florence should go away. People are always going away to clinics—Frances Darwin spent two years in one when she had a breakdown when her mother died. My brother is always going to Ascona where there is a whole colony of artists and philosophers who believe in free love and wouldn’t ask questions. There is a new clinic there. It’s a beautiful place. Mountains, Lake Maggiore, Italian farms. Florence might be peaceful there.”

  Prosper and Florence sat still and silent, as though exhausted. Florence said

  “I’m sorry. You can’t know how sorry …”

  Imogen Cain chose this moment to tap at the door and come in, her waist already thicker under a loose dress. She took in the stricken faces and her smile died.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  “No,” said Florence. “Don’t. You will have to know, so you may as well stay. I’m expecting a child. We are making plans for me to leave the country.”

  Imogen went white. She put her hand to her belly, protectively, opened her mouth to speak, closed it and began to weep, completely silently, huge tears falling heavily down her face and into her collar.

  “My dear—” said Prosper, standing up.

  “This is my fault,” said Imogen, not dramatically, but flatly, as though it was incontrovertible.

  “No—” said Florence. “It is me who has been stupid and me who should be punished. I did it, you didn’t. And I—I should say—I haven’t been very nice to you, lately. I’ve been unpleasant. I know it. I’m sorry. But you can’t say you’re responsible for what I do. I am. I shall go abroad.”

  Imogen went on weeping. Florence stared, stony. Griselda said to Prosper “I could ask my brother about that clinic. He says the place is an earthly paradise.”

  “I can’t stay here,” said Florence. “At all. Now. I must go away now.”

  Griselda said Florence could come with her, if Major Cain agreed. Prosper was standing, still behind his desk, like a stag brought to bay by three hunting nymphs. He came out, now, took out his handkerchief, and wiped his wife’s wet fa
ce. Then he turned to his daughter.

  “You will allow me to accompany you—on the journey. You will need…”

  Much depended on her answer to this question. She gave a little sobbing sound, but did not weep, only relaxed her tense muscles ever so little.

  “Thank you. That will make a great difference.”

  Prosper said to Griselda that he was grateful for her presence. She said she would make sure all Florence’s things were properly packed in Cambridge and sent back to the Museum. She would take care of the glass. She said to Florence

  “I’ll visit you, in the vacations. You won’t be quite on your own.”

  “What shall I do if Charles comes … and sees …”

  “Well, he won’t be disapproving. He’s an ex-anarchist. And he can be told not to talk, which he’s actually good at, he’s spent his life not telling people things …”

  Father and daughter travelled slowly, and mostly in silence, across Europe to the southern foothills of the Alps, to the town of Locarno and the village of Ascona. Prosper Cain was baffled and neither as precise nor as competent as he usually was. One night, in a hotel in Paris, Florence heard, or imagined she heard, muffled sobs from the hotel room next to hers. Having made enquiries about the clinic at Monte Verita, Major Cain had discovered that it was new, and austere, giving courses of sunbathing, mud-baths, water and a strictly vegetarian diet, with no eggs, milk or salt. He liked the idea of sunbathing—as a soldier he had made sure his men exercised outdoors, whatever the weather. But he was not sure that a woman expecting a child should deprive herself of milk, or nourishing beef teas. When they reached Locarno, Florence became Signora Colombino, her mother’s maiden name. A cottage was rented on the mountain slope, looking out over a meadow; a manservant was engaged, with a pony-carriage, and a string of young women were interviewed as housekeeper-companions. Florence and her father agreed that the best was a powerful, smiling girl called Amalia Fontana. Prosper visited the new clinic, and found a doctor, who agreed to care for the young Englishwoman, who had lost her husband who must never be mentioned. I have got into a second-rate novel, Prosper told himself in a moment of grim humour, and added that second-rate novels sprouted out of repeated real disasters. His daughter was monosyllabic, acquiescent and heavy-footed, although her pregnancy was not yet visible. When he tried to comfort her, anything he could say appeared to be a reproach.

  “I wanted you to have everything,” he said once. “I wanted you to go to University, and be a free woman.”

  “You see what has happened,” said Florence, with a grim little smile, and then flung her arms round him. “No one could have cared for me better,” she said. “We have all been very happy.”

  But this genuine cry of love was also made bitter by their sense—both of them in very different ways—that the coming of Imogen had broken the circle, and left the ends flying. And the time came when he must go, precisely back to Imogen and her unborn child. He said “I’ll come back, soon. I’ll write. I think Griselda will come, in the vacation. You must tell me everything—”

  “This is all my fault, you know, not yours,” said Florence. Prosper looked weary.

  “Some of it is certainly your fault. But I did not pay attention.”

  “I shall read and read and plan a thesis,” said Florence, who had brought boxes of history books.

  They dined late, by candlelight, the first night in Ascona. Prosper looked across the table at his daughter, and handed her a small box.

  “I always meant you to have this,” he said. “It is your mother’s wedding ring. You will need to wear a ring.”

  The ring was slender, and gold, with finely worked clasped hands. Florence tried it: it fitted exactly.

  “You are very like her,” said her father. “Here, in Italy, you look Italian.”

  He began to say something clumsy and heartfelt about the ring protecting, or bringing luck. And then he remembered how Giulia had died, and would have taken it back, if he could. Florence turned it in the creamy light, and it shone.

  “I shall take care of it,” she said. “You have been so good to me, when I have been so wilful and bad.”

  But she did not read. The lethargy of pregnancy came over her, and she sat on her little terrace, staring out at the mountain, doing little. People came past. Respectable, black-shrouded Italian peasants, driving goats, or sheep. Strange nature-worshippers, bearded, smiling, spectacled, with walnut skins and bare shanks over homemade sandals under vaguely biblical tunics. Women in broidered robes with flowers in their hair. Travelling musicians, with lutes. Rapid purposeful priests. Fat curates. She could not understand much of Amalia’s accent, and came to see that the young woman had put on an Italian, over her patois, in which she could say simple, and necessary things, but could not make conversation.

  She went up to the clinic, at first in a pony-trap and then on foot, where she spent days purifying herself with vegetable juice, and water, and lying in the sun in a linen gown, on a long, slatted daybed. The doctor had kind hands, and told her she should abstain from meat and preferably from any animal matter. He saw how it was with her, and, she thought, judged her harshly. Depression set in, as how should it not? And then, she met an unlikely saviour.

  There were people in the clinic who were neither doctors, nor patients, nor servants, but appeared to be helping out, in exchange for psychiatric or medical help. Florence’s doctor had asked if she felt she would be helped by psychiatry, and she had, more robustly than she felt, rejected the offer. Her autonomy was dreadfully threatened—by Methley, by the thing growing inside her, by her dependence. She didn’t want to talk or be talked to. She was a soldier’s daughter. She stiffened her shoulders. She felt she was dissolving into jelly, but did not mean anyone to see.

  One of the helpers had a huge mop of tangled golden hair, like a lion or a dandelion, a reasonable beard he trimmed from time to time, and a mild, blue-eyed, slightly vacant expression. He wore a kind of white clinical gown, and sandals. He arranged cushions to prop Florence’s back, and got them in the right place. He noticed when she needed to vomit, and he noticed when her stomach was settled, and brought her vegetable soup, which could have done with some butter and salt, but was palatable.

  “Not so sick this week,” he pronounced, in English. “It will be better from now on.”

  Another day, he said to her, “You are lonely.” If he had asked, she would have denied it. But he stated. “You need bread,” he said. “You are hungry.”

  He was always right. His name, he told her, was Gabriel Goldwasser. He was Austrian. “I was training to be a psychoanalyst,” he said. “And now?”

  A smile lurked in his beard.

  “I am recovering from training to be a psychoanalyst.”

  They became friends. Cautiously, courteously, they became friends. “Here, you should be honoured,” he said to her. “The sun-worshippers in the village, they want to return to an ancient matriarchy. Away with the bearded Fathers who are the root of all evil.”

  “I do not belong here,” said Florence. “My mother was Italian, but she died, when I was born.”

  She was briefly silent, thinking of death in childbirth. Gabriel Gold-wasser answered the unspoken thought.

  “The doctors here are good doctors,” he said. “It is a good clinic. You are in good hands. Where, then, do you belong?”

  “In a museum.”

  “You are young, not old.”

  “No, I mean it literally. I grew up in a museum. My father is a Keeper. He knows about gold and silver.”

  “An alchemist,” said Gabriel Goldwasser. “So you will go back there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Florence, and faltered. Prosper’s strategic planning had not yet extended beyond the birth. “I don’t know,” she said again, turned her face away, and began to cry. “I think I can’t,” she said.

  Gabriel Goldwasser looked into the distance. Florence lay with her face in her pillow. He put a light hand, lightly, on her shoulder, an
d said nothing.

  She asked him, once, when they had been talking about the study of history, what he had meant, when he said he was recovering from training to be a psychoanalyst. He hesitated. He said

  “You must understand. I need not to think, not to talk, about myself.”

  “Have you done something dreadful?” asked Florence, lightly, but with a genuine apprehension.

  “I have done nothing, that is my problem.” He smiled, mildly. “My parents were—are—psychoanalysts. In Vienna. They sent me to the Burgholzli in Switzerland, to talk to Herr Dr. Jung. They thought it was an essential part of living, to be psychoanalysed. I earned my bread there, as I do here, helping. I was telling my dreams to Dr. Jung and also to Dr. Otto Gross, who was telling his dreams to Dr. Jung and hearing Dr. Jung’s dreams in return. They were angels wrestling, you must understand.” He paused.

  “I dreamed the wrong dreams.”

  “Wrong in what way?”

  “I think they were—timid dreams, is that a word?”

  “It is a good word.”

  “Quiet dreams, like a cow dreaming of grass, or a squirrel of nuts. They were judged as inadequate dreams. And by listening to my silly dreams, bit by bit, those two changed my dreams. I dreamed I was stepping down stone tunnels to hidden caves, full of dragons and lions and snakes. I dreamed of the seven-branched candle—which I also did in my timid dreams, I am a Jew, the candle to me means a meal with my family—though my family had been dreamed into flesh-eating monsters and petrified women to please those two.”

  “You are making me laugh, but it isn’t funny.”

  “No man has a right to dictate another man’s inner life—the furniture inside his skull. They made me into someone else. An acolyte—you say acolyte?—good—of a new ancient religion. We were all dreaming the same dreams, because they were the dreams that excited Herr Jung and Herr Gross.

  “They had invented me, do you see?”

  “I do.”

  “They had made me into a—into an unpleasant sculpture, or painting. I was trapped in my artificial dreams, and couldn’t get out. And then, I got out. I have to admit—you must not mock me, Frau Colombino—it was a dream which showed me the way out.”