by A. S. Byatt
“What did you dream?”
Florence turned her body, and its burden, on one side, and gave him her whole attention.
“I dreamed I was in a studio full of light. I was surrounded by canvases perfectly painted. They were all very pale. White on white, with minimal shadows, in full light. Vast paintings, of a cup with its saucer and a silver spoon, on an endless white starched cloth, with folds in it. Or white flowers in a white jar on a white ground—in a white window with white curtains—”
“As though you were dead and had gone to heaven.”
“Do you think? I didn’t. I analysed it for myself. It said to me—like a commandment—consider the surfaces. Care for the surfaces. Don’t dig under.”
“Did you? Can you?”
“It can be done. All that white paint was a surface—a visible skin, laid on a surface. I went out and saw the lake. I looked at the light on the surface. Something said to me, if you can see the surface well, you are in a right relation to the world in which it is.”
“But the lake has depths. Trees have insides. So does the earth.”
“We can know that, yes. But I know I must live by staying on the surface. Like those flies that walk on water. Like a painted flower on a plate.”
“So you gave up being analysed?”
“Everyone said it would be very dangerous, but I insisted. Then there was a lot of trouble with Dr. Gross, and Herr Jung was preoccupied, and my parents sent me here to come to my senses, which I thought I had done, myself, quite adequately.”
He laughed, and Florence laughed with him.
“You should found a school of painting,” she said. “Or of philosophy.”
“I think more, of rigorous contemplation. I should like to be a Buddhist. I do paint, but I cannot paint the surfaces I see. Living on the surface is hard, Frau Colombino.”
Florence suddenly thought that her own surfaces were not the truth about her and the creature growing inside her. She looked away, and began to weep. He said
“I did not mean to distress you. Rather the opposite.”
“I am in a state of permanent distress. It is tedious.”
“You are not naturally a… superficial person. But as an exercise, it is good. Look at the wind on the surface of the meadow, and how all the surfaces of all the grasses turn in the light…”
It was absurd, and yet, when she turned her gaze on the meadow, it was somewhere between a wonder and relief. She looked at the surface of the juice in her glass tumbler, and how it appeared to be suspended between the walls, an oval ruddy-gold coin. She looked at the sun on Gabriel Goldwasser’s hair and beard. She had sensed him as an incomplete person, not in the real world, and talked to him for that reason, because there was no threat in him. Now she saw how deliberate was this absence of threat.
On another occasion she said to him “I can’t live like you.”
“I think not, no, that is so,” he said, calmly.
One bright day, some weeks later, he said “Forgive me, but I think I have a superficial answer to a superficial part of your problem.”
“My problem?”
“I think you are an unmarried lady, expecting a child, and you cannot take your child back to your own country, because of social disgrace—for you, and for your esteemed alchemical father.”
“That is so. If I tell you the whole silly—the whole mad—story, you will despise me. I have almost decided I must give away this—this child—without even looking at it. Immediately. But that is a hard thing to contemplate.”
“You will harm yourself if you do so. As well as the child. Has it no father?”
Florence’s face, which for the last weeks had been grave and somewhat vacant, puckered into tearful rage, which was then mastered.
“I dislike him. It’s weaker than hatred, it’s pure dislike. Do you understand? I made a very foolish mistake. It is horrid, the whole thing is horrid.”
“But your father cares for you.”
“He has a young wife. The same age—as me. She is expecting a child. They are very happy. Or they were, until I made my mistake. I have ruined their happiness and my own.”
“These children will be born and will have their own lives. They are not ruined. But human children are helpless. They must be cared for until they can stand on their feet. I sound sententious. But you have forgotten this.”
Florence was silent. Gabriel said
“I think you would be better if you had a husband?”
“I can’t. I have to face that, too. No one will…” She said “I was engaged to be married. I sent the ring back.”
Gabriel Goldwasser’s silences provoked truth-telling.
“I didn’t love him. I always knew that. I’ve ruined his happiness, too.”
“Only if he allows that. You are not a Fate, Frau Colombino, but a young woman who has made one or two mistakes. If you had a husband, you could go back to your museum, with your child—”
“I don’t know that I want to go back—”
“Or make a life somewhere. I want to suggest—to propose myself, as a suitable Austrian husband.”
“But you—”
“I know it is odd. I am proposing myself because I am living on the surface. I shan’t want to marry in the way people marry—for—passion, or for—social reasons. My best hope is to continue living lightly, on the surface. But I should like to give you—a viable identity.”
Something appalling happened to Florence. She had a vision of Gabriel Goldwasser, like the angel he was named for, walking on the surface of the lake, scattering brightness from his sunny hair. She saw that she ought not to marry him, not because he did not love her, but because she might come to love him. And he was queer, and had secrets, which he was not looking into.
“What would you do,” she said, on a dangerous impulse, “if I married you, and then came to love you?”
“I do not think that would happen,” he said. “You are too intelligent. You know we love each other, in an—unusual?—way, and that that is all. It is a good reason for marrying. I need to help you.”
Florence began to weep. Gabriel stroked her hair. The child inside stretched its frog-fingers and its stick-legs, and put a fine thumb into its unfinished ghost-mouth, and sucked.
Prosper Cain came back to Ascona, and Florence explained Gabriel’s plan.
“I could be Frau Goldwasser. I could come home.”
“And what would Herr Goldwasser gain from this? Does he need money?”
“No, no, he needs nothing, that is why I trust him. He says he needs to live on the surface. He is a kind of monk, Papa, he is quixotic.”
“Don Quixote was anything but a monk.”
“Don’t mix me up. You always do. I know it sounds mad, but I do believe it may work. What did you think would happen to this child? I shan’t lie on these sunbeds and drink juice for ever.”
“I imagined it would be given away. No, Florence, don’t, don’t be angry. I thought you must decide. I thought that was what you would decide.”
“I could not give away the child, Papa, and come home and see you and Imogen dandling one. How could I do that? This way, I can—I can plan my life—”
Prosper Cain met Gabriel Goldwasser and took to him. It was hard for him not to, though the soldier was trim and upright, and the Austrian was shaggy and bearlike. Prosper prided himself on being able to judge character: here was an honest man, who proposed a viable solution to the problem that tormented him. Frau Goldwasser and her child could return to South Kensington, and Prosper could protect them. He organised. The marriage could not take place in the Catholic village; he found a Swiss Protestant church in an Alpine valley and took rooms in the White Rose Inn. There was a wedding-party, of a kind. Griselda was visiting Florence, accompanied by Charles/Karl, Joachim Susskind and Wolfgang and Leon Stern. Of these, only Griselda knew Florence’s secret: the others believed she was suffering from nervous prostration owing to the pressure of work in Cambridge. Florence had a cream
-coloured linen coat and skirt, over a rose-pink silk shirt, and a linen hat with a severe ribbon in a blushing pink. The bridegroom was unrecognisable in an old-fashioned frock-coat and complicated grey silk necktie. Joachim was best man, and Griselda attended the bride. At the last moment it was discovered that there was no ring for this wedding. Florence gave her mother’s ring to Gabriel, who gave it to Joachim, who remarked how elegant it was. They were married by a stolid pastor. Prosper gave his daughter to Gabriel, who put Prosper’s ring back on Florence’s finger and kissed her. Griselda wept. They all dined companionably in the White Rose. Griselda talked to Gabriel Goldwasser in German. His descriptions of the clinic, and the psychiatrists, made her laugh, with an uneasy pleasure. What was Florence doing? What was happening?
Nothing was happening, said Florence. Gabriel was helping out. She was now a respectable married lady.
There were many things Griselda could have said in reply, and she suppressed them all. Florence was relaxed and smiling: she had not relaxed or smiled since Dorothy had examined her. Griselda wanted to know what Gabriel Goldwasser really felt. Perhaps he was secretly in love with Florence? He appeared to be mildly friendly. Helpful. Smiling. Wolfgang Stern said patients often fell in love with their nurses. But the nurses were usually women.
42
In October 1908 the Ledbetter Gallery in St. James’s Street, Piccadilly, put on an exhibition of the ceramics of Philip Warren. Philip had been working like Vulcan all summer; idea after idea had risen to the surface of his mind, and taken shape under his fingers. Successive firings were successful. Prosper and Imogen, visiting, went into the studio that had been Benedict Fludd’s, and saw the work. Imogen said it needed a bigger space than The Silver Nutmeg, and Prosper said that Philip could be thought the equal of his master. He came back with Marcus Ledbetter, the owner of the gallery, who said this work must be seen.
Everyone was invited to the opening. Everyone included the warring factions in the Victoria and Albert, and also included the Todefright family, the Purchase House family, the Portman Square Wellwoods, August Steyning, Leslie and Etta Skinner and Elsie. Philip said to Imogen that he was sure Elsie would be too shy to accept her invitation but it was only right that she should be asked. He asked the ladies from Winchelsea and Dungeness, too. Elsie made herself a dress from a remnant of blue-black grosgrain, and a lace collar she found in a shop in Rye, which was old, and complex, and looked as though it was worth twenty times what she paid for it. She put one new blue silk rose on a plain hat and looked elegant. When she came into the gallery, which was hung with white silk and had black lacquered stands and shelves, Philip did not, for a gap of time, recognise her as his sister, and thought she looked unusually interesting. He was about, when he had come to his senses, to tell her this, but found she had turned aside to talk to Charles/Karl Wellwood. They were laughing together. Geraint Fludd was in attendance on his mother, who was looking fragile but beautiful. Griselda and Imogen both looked at him with curiosity and pity to see how he was taking what must have been a mysterious and sudden rejection. He was most elegantly dressed, and was drinking rather a lot of champagne. He must be doing rather well in the City.
Even Dorothy Wellwood was there. Her mother, handsome in dark red velvet, said to her
“There is Tom, lurking again in a corner. Do go and make him talk to people. He used to be so charming.”
Dorothy thought of a retort, and then thought she did, after all, want to talk to Tom. He had a sweetly uncertain look about him. He was drinking champagne as though it was lemonade.
“Come and look at the pots, Tom. This is all your doing. If you hadn’t found Philip, when he was hiding in the Museum, none of this would have happened.”
Tom said he supposed Philip would have found a way. Philip knew what he wanted.
They walked round, looking at the work.
There were various clusters of pots. The central exhibit was a group of vessels—bowls, jars, tall bottle shapes, with formally abstract glazes, many of them with a dull hot red like molten lava at the base, bursting into a sooty black layer on top of which raged a kind of thin sea of sullen blue with a formal crest of white foaming shapes rearing and falling. Other pieces had intricately random glazes that raced and climbed and plunged and scattered like forces driving in the glassy curls of wild sea water. There were greens and greys and silvers like needles of rushing air in dark depths. Dorothy turned to speak to Tom, and found that he had disappeared, and the presence at her shoulder was Philip.
“These are for Fludd,” said Philip. “In memory of. Some of them are his shapes.”
“Yes,” said Dorothy.
“The ones over here are my own.”
The second group was glazed gold, or silver, or lustre shot with both. The pots were covered with a lattice of climbing and creeping half-human creatures, not the little demons of the Gloucester Candlestick, not the tiny satyrs of the Gien majolica, but busy figures—some bright blue with frog-fingers, some black, some creamy-white, with white manes tossing—unlike anything Dorothy had seen.
“Pots are still,” said Philip.
“Nothing keeps still on your pots.”
“I make things keep still. That don’t, naturally, keep still. Sea water. Things in the earth. You need to hold the pots to see how it works.”
He reached over and picked up a round golden jar, covered with silver and soot-black imps.
“Here. Hold that.”
“I’m afraid to drop it.”
“Nonsense. You’ve got good hands. Remember?”
Dorothy stood with the pot in her hands, which held the cool light weight of the shell. The moment it was between her fingers, she felt it three-dimensional. It was a completely different thing if you measured it with your skin instead of your eyes. Its weight—and the empty air inside it—were part of it. Dorothy closed her eyes, to see how that changed the shape. Someone said “Excuse me, sir, madam, you must put that back, it is not allowed to touch the exhibits.” A small man was pulling at Philip’s sleeve.
“I can touch them if I like,” said Philip. “They’re mine. I made them.”
“Please, sir. Put it back. Madam, please.”
He had blond hair plastered to a red-hot head. He said “You have to understand, everyone wants to pick them up, the pots ask for it, and if you start…”
Philip laughed. “Put it back, Dorothy. He’s made his point.” He said to the attendant “This lady is studying to be a surgeon. She’s got steady hands.”
“Yes, sir. Even so—”
Dorothy returned to the pot to its stand.
Charles/Karl said to Elsie “We could go out and eat dinner.”
“And how would I get back?”
“Back to where?”
“Me and Philip are in a hotel in Kensington.”
“I can take you back.”
“I can’t. You can see that. I have to have dinner with Philip, and the—the other people.”
Charles/Karl said “I could cadge an invitation. Then we could—”
“All this is no good, and you know it.”
But he cadged his invitation, and managed to sit next to her, and they both felt hot, and too much alive, and desperate.
Julian was in love with Griselda. He had not known for very long that this was the case. He liked keeping it quiet, a secret even from the beloved, unlike the simmering male gossip and endless speculation at King’s. He was keeping it quiet, too, because he detected no signs that his love was reciprocated. Griselda enjoyed his company, because he knew a lot, and understood her if she said things that would puzzle most people. But she was too cosy with him. There was no quickened consciousness. He discussed Philip’s work with her.
“These are turbulent pots. Seething pots. Storms in teacups and vases. Creatures running through everything like maggots in cheese. Stately vessels with storms raging on them.”
“You get things right. You are very clever.”
“I wish I could make things
, instead of being clever about other people’s things. I remember finding Philip when he was a filthy ragamuffin hiding in a tomb in a basement. I only wanted to stop him trespassing.”
Griselda laughed.
“And now they’ve bought that big bowl with a flood on it, and that tall jug with the creatures climbing, for the Museum.”
“That’s a good story.”
“Rags to riches.”
“Well, to works of art, anyway—”
Dorothy went back to Todefright for the weekend. She got up early, and found Tom eating bread and butter.
“Let’s go out for a walk,” she said. “It’s a bright day.”
Tom nodded. “If you like.”
“We could go to the Tree House.”
“If you like.”
They walked through the woods under turning leaves, yellow and yellow-green, lifeless as green leaves, not yet crisp and brilliant as russet or scarlet leaves. Now and then, one dropped through the branches, resting on a twig, falling a bit further, eddying aimlessly, reaching the mulch under their feet. Dorothy tried to talk to Tom. She did not talk to him about her work, because she sensed a determined lack of interest in it. She talked about the pots, and about Hedda’s school exams, and about Violet’s problems with the bones in her ankles, which she had not known about, and thought must be more serious than anyone appeared to realise. Tom said almost nothing. He pointed out pheasants, and a rabbit. The wood smelt of rich, incipient rottenness. They turned a corner, to where the Tree House used to stand, camouflaged and secret.
“It’s gone,” said Dorothy. The neat heaps of chopped-down wood were still there.
“Yes,” said Tom.
For a moment she thought he had done this himself, in an excess of depression or madness.
He said “It was the gamekeeper. He had no right, it is public land, not part of his coppices.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
Tom said, meekly and meanly, “I didn’t think you’d be interested. Not really. Not much.”
