by A. S. Byatt
“It was the Tree House. All our childhood.”
“Yes,” said Tom.
“I’m sorry,” said Dorothy, as though she had hacked at the walls herself.
“Not your fault,” said Tom. “There it is. Where shall we go now?”
Olive called Dorothy into her study, before the pony-cart took her back to the station.
“I wish you’d come home more often. I’m worried about Tom.”
The study had changed. It was full of odd dolls, and pâpiér-máché figures, and stage-sets in miniature, and puppets with strings perched on bookshelves. Anselm Stern’s work, thought Dorothy, piqued that her real parents appeared to be working together behind her back. She said
“What do you think is wrong with Tom?”
“I don’t know. He’s hostile to me. I can’t reach him.”
“Maybe you don’t try,” said Dorothy, and wished she had not. Olive put her head briefly in her hands. She said with a weary spite
“You certainly don’t. You never come home. I know you mean to save lives and work wonders, but you’re too busy to notice your family, or be kind to them.”
Dorothy picked up one of the puppets—a small grey, ratlike puppet, with a gold collar and stitched-in ruby-beaded eyes.
“And where do you think I learnt that?” she heard herself ask. “Look at you. Tom looks sick, and your room is full of all these stuffed dolls—”
“I’m writing a play. With August Steyning. We’ve just got the lease of the Elysium Theatre next year. There’s never been anything like it.”
“Well, I hope it’s a very successful play. I really do. But I think Tom is sick. And you’re his mother. Not me.”
“Ah, but he loves you, and trusts you, you were always so close.”
Dorothy set her teeth, and started to run over a list of all the small bones in the human skeleton, one by one, in her mind. Work. Work was what mattered. Olive’s work was hopelessly contaminated with play.
“Someone should make Tom grow up,” said Dorothy.
“He is grown up,” said Olive, and then, in a small voice “I know, I know.”
“I’ve got to go. I’ll miss my train.”
“Come back soon.”
“I’ll see how it fits in,” said Dorothy.
43
Olive dreamed that a theatre was a skull. She saw it loom in a foggy, sooty street, pristine white and smiling. There was nothing surprising in this shape. She floated in, somehow, between the teeth, and was in a dome full of bright flying things, birds and trapeze artists, angels and demons, fairies and buzzing insects. She was supposed to do something. Sort them, catch them, conduct them. They clustered round her head like the playing-cards in Alice, like a swarm of bees or wasps. She couldn’t see or breathe, and woke up. She wrote down the dream. She wrote “I see I have always thought of the theatre as the inside of a skull. A book can be held by a real person, in a train, at a desk, in a garden. A theatre is something unreal everyone is inside.” She was both entranced, and sometimes exasperated, by the exigencies of August Steyning. He had a skeleton of a theatrical performance to which things must be fitted. There needed to be curtains at the end of acts, there needed to be development, and a climax. “Your story is like an interminable worm,” he said to Olive. “We must chop it into segments and reconstitute it. We must see what theatrical machinery we have, and we must use it. There must be music.”
Anselm Stern said what was needed was music like Richard Strauss. No, no, said Steyning, something English and fairylike, something between “Greensleeves” and The Ring of the Nibelung. There was a young musician collecting English folk songs who would know what was wanted.
The play was to open with the shadowless boy meeting the Queen of the Elves—who would also have no shadow. The lighting was complicated. They argued over whether they should dramatise the Rat taking the shadow, and decided to save the Rat for a later encounter. Steyning named the boy Thomas—he was to evoke True Thomas, he was not a fairy prince, or a prince of any kind, said August Steyning, and Olive concurred. He would wade in blood, which could be done with red lighting, and the Queen would give him a silver apple branch, as a talisman, and as a source of imperishable food, as happened in Celtic myths. She would also give him a coal-ball which would protect him in his hour of need. It is a pity, said Steyning, that we can’t make the ferns and trees in the coal come magically to life again. He drew the back wall of the stage as he saw it—he drew it in charcoal, he rubbed in the coal dust to make his effects. The backcloth was a stratified black and grey series of ledges, going diagonally down. He discussed with Anselm Stern the possibilities of making animated creatures and tiny folk dance and run along the ledges. Stern said a puppetmaster could stand behind and move many, successively. They could appear and disappear. Steyning drew ferns and dragonflies with his charcoal, grey in grey. Olive said that the plants in the coalface did sometimes come to life—or death—they exhaled the gases of arrested decay. This was the horror called Choke Damp which killed quite suddenly. Dampf, yes, said Anselm. I know of that. And then, said Olive, there is White Damp, which is said to smell of sweet flowers—of violets—in fact it is carbon monoxide. And the third, and worst, is Fire Damp—which also comes from the decaying ancient vegetables—it comes seeping from the rocks or hissing out from fissures.
She stopped, remembering bad things.
Steyning was drawing. A demon made of flowers, a demon made of twisting ropes, a fiery devil with a flaming crown on a flaming mane. “I could make those,” said Wolfgang.
“There is the Fireman,” said Olive. “The miner in soaked white linen, who holds up a long rod with a candle, to burn off the Fire Damp.”
“It is like a ballet,” said Wolfgang.
“Life-size puppets,” said August. “And a real man, a dancer, in wet white linen—All the same, I should like the flowers to come to life.”
“There must be,” said August Steyning, “a heroine. At the beginning, you have the White Elf Queen, and at the end, the Queen of the Shadows—we need a female lead.” He considered Olive’s story as she had summarised it for him.
“You have this very good character—the Silf—who gets unwound from spider-webs and then doesn’t do much. I think in the play we’ll unwind her much earlier—almost immediately after Thomas enters the mine—and then she can go with him, as part of the Company. I like the Gathorn. I see him as a kind of underground Puck, or goodfellow? A trickster, but helpful. And I like the creamy salamander, which Anselm and Wolfgang can make so that it can run along the shelves and into holes in the tunnels. But we do need a female lead. A young woman. Can you write her in?”
She was a sylph, said Olive. One of the Paracelsian four elementals—sylphs in the air, gnomes in the earth, undines in water, salamanders in fire.
“The creamy salamander could glow with real light when danger is near,” said Wolfgang.
“She’d be terrified of going deeper,” said Olive, beginning to imagine. “She’d need to get back to the air.”
“Splendid. Work on her. Give her things to do. Make her quarrel with Thomas. Make her faint in the underground atmosphere.”
The end was easy to choreograph. Olive had never reached the end of the tale in Tom’s book, which was constructed to be endless. The end was the meeting with the Queen of the Shadows, spinning her complex spider-webs in the deepest pit. They had a long and satisfying argument about whether she could be played by the same actress, and decided against it. She would have an entourage of bats, and whiskery sharp-toothed gnomes, and rats. They had another satisfactory argument about whether the rats should be actors or marionettes and decided they should be both. Tom’s shadow would appear. He would be under the spell of the Shadow Queen and he would not want to go up to the air and be reattached to Tom. Olive said she could not see her way out of the narrative impasse, since the shadow was in fact in a better state running independently in the dark. Ah, said August, but that is where the Silf comes in. She d
escribes the upper air to him, and colours and grass and trees.
“There must be magic,” said Anselm Stern. “For the Finale. You can’t come to an ending on an argument.”
“This,” said August Steyning, “is where the coal-ball and the flowers come in. Can you, Herren Stern, make me a black knot of roots and leaves that can be made to burst open and let free an amazement of silk flowers and threads? And,” he said, getting carried away, “the coal-ball and the silver bough would emit light, light would be in the darkness.”
Wolfgang said that in Peter Pan they had wanted to use a large magnifying glass for the fairy in the glass and had failed. But he thought it could be done. The Peter Pan people had wanted to diminish a human being. He wanted to magnify a coal-ball. It was easier.
“In the light,” said August, “the dark queen’s face is a queasy grey-green, in the light.”
Olive was worrying about the shadow. She had an idea. He could make a bargain—like Persephone—and be allowed to return underground in the white snowy months. Among the roots, he would journey, said Anselm Stern. Myths have a habit of winding themselves round us. And the Silf would come to visit him, underground, among the black diamonds and the veins of ore.
August was drawing the Silf, a thin, fine thing with white hair standing up and blown about as if by the wind.
They had been inventing this world, in this way, for months. But, unlike Olive’s usual tale-telling, it needed to be made solid, it needed wings and flats, costumes and shoes, lighting and trap-doors and flying machines and wind machines and hiding-places for those who pulled the strings. August found money, and Olive persuaded Basil and Katharina Well-wood to invest. There came the day when they sat in the crimson velvet seats in the auditorium in the Elysium, and watched auditions, for Elven Queens, for rats and Gathorns, for the Silf and for Tom.
It was only at this point that Olive realised that August Steyning intended to cast a woman as Tom.
She was, in those days, slightly drunken, very tense with the excitement of collaboration. Writing stories, writing books, is fiercely solitary, even if done by housewives in snatched moments at the edge of the diningtable. She had come a very long way, from Goldthorpe in the Yorkshire coalfield to this gilt and velvet palace with the laughing and serious companions with whom she worked. She loved them all, and fought them fiercely when they appeared to misconstrue a narrative thread, or to take possession of her people and change them unacceptably. For she had lived with these shadows in that solitude, and had loved and hated and watched them do as they did, unconstrained.
She was not really a playwright. The auditions taught her that. A true playwright makes up people who can be inhabited by actors. A storyteller makes shadow people in the head, autonomous and complete.
The worst thing about the auditions—apart from the visceral shock of seeing Tom as a woman—was bad acting, wrong “interpretations.” Simpering misses making the sharp Silf sugary in dulcet tones. Gathorns who were neither lithe nor clever but playing for laughs and self-admiring. Queens of Shadows like society ladies, intoning. Rats who were too ratty, which was difficult, in principle. There was also the opposite problem—good actors, who twisted her people, the Elf Queen, the loblolly (who was only a voice attached to a jelly-serpent and lights).
But the worst thing was the women who auditioned for Thomas. Olive had tried to quarrel with August Steyning. If he was auditioning male juveniles for the Gathorn, why not for Tom?
Because of the pantomime tradition, said August Steyning. Olive appealed to the Germans. They said, shiftily, that the work appealed to many traditions, from Wagnerian opera to the puppet theatres. It had balletic elements and elements from the commedia dell’arte. They liked the idea of a central figure with a clear voice, neither broken nor childishly piping.
Olive was a woman who imagined male characters and male creatures. The travellers underground—Tom, the Gathorn, the salamander, the loblolly, were male, as Tom’s angrily detached shadow was male.
Steyning said a woman could better do the element of mask, of über-marionette, he wanted.
Olive needed to please Steyning.
The audition piece was the meeting between Thomas and the Gathorn. A series of variegated Puckish boys talked to a series of boyish women, interspersed with divas. Olive’s medium was words. She thought Lucy Fontaine might do, and imagined Gladys Carpenter as thickset. Sylvia Simon sounded hopeful, whereas Daisy Bremner and Glory Gayheart sounded girlish or unreal.
The women auditioned in skirts. Lucy Fontaine had a pleasant, clear voice and sizeable breasts and hips. Olive shut her eyes, and heard
“I’m lost, and I fear I shall never get out of here alive. I don’t know where I’m going, let alone how to get there. I have this small light, and a sketchy map.”
And the Gathorns. “It’s not so bad. I live here. You can delight in the dark, if you understand it. It’s full of unexpected riches.”
And the boys/women. “Who are you? How do you live down here?”
“You can see in the dark, if you get used to it. There are creatures down here who shine their own light. You need to meet a loblolly.”
“I’ve seen things glowing, or whisking along, in the distance.”
“The mine is full of spirits. Some kind, or fairly kind. Some are tricky. And some are downright nasty.”
“I didn’t ask to—to go on a quest. I just wanted to be in the fields.”
Stop, enough, Steyning would call at this point. Olive tried closing her eyes and simply hearing voices. She learned things. Her hero was more afraid, and less brave, than most heroes. Glory Gayheart, who was skinny enough, had a rich voice, a confident contralto. Lucy Fontaine got exactly the right mix of bleakness, light clarity, friendliness. “Zu viel Brust,” said Anselm Stern. Daisy Bremner was eager and girlish, Glory Gayheart was operatic, Sylvia Simon was scared and not good-looking, though Olive thought she knew what she was doing. Gladys Carpenter was tall and thin, with cropped white-blonde hair. Her face was bony. She had the luck of having by far the best Gathorn, a boy called Miles Martin, with a huge mouth which he curled into a variety of smiles and grins, a husky voice, a curly mop of hair and large eyes. He had worked out a crouching and skipping set of moves but when Gladys spoke, he listened, and she spoke to him. Olive shut her eyes again. The voice was sexless and silver. It was brave and full of the fear of the dark. She opened her eyes. This upright girl had crept into the skin of the boy she had imagined.
“I fear I shall never get out of here alive.”
Matter-of-fact, dignified, desperate.
“She’ll do,” said August. “The only one without too much expressiveness.”
They rehearsed. The Sterns worked on the puppets, the marionettes, the salamander, the loblolly, the coal-ball. Steyning designed and redesigned the sets. He rehearsed the masked groups—White Damp, Choke Damp, Fire Damp, the Fireman in white linen with rod and candle, rats, bats, shadows, spiders. New scenes were written to make more happen. The Silf—a girl of nineteen who looked fourteen and was called Doris Almond—was wound and unwound with cobwebs. They changed the material the cobwebs were made from, to something that shone, a little, and caught the light. The turntable that rose from under the stage broke and ground to an unbalanced halt. It was mended. Puppets were discarded as too small, or ineffective. Wolfgang Stern designed and redesigned the coal-ball. A curtain was made, painted with black ferns, black dragonflies, black monstrous millipedes. Programmes were printed. The play opened. Steyning had given it a title: Tom Underground. Olive had not told Tom, either that they had adapted his story, or that they had taken his name. She had not thought about Tom whilst the work was going on. Names impose themselves on writers, and will not be changed, and come to be facts in nature, like stones, like plants, that are what they are. Only another writer, Olive thought, now it came to telling Tom Wellwood about the play, would believe her if she said that, about names. It was possible Tom would be pleased that his name was at the cen
tre.
Steyning sent out invitations to the first performance. They were elegantly printed, with a silver bough and a coal-ball. “Olive Wellwood, August Steyning and the Management of the Elysium Theatre invite you to Tom Underground, a new form of theatrical drama.”
Tom opened his at breakfast. Olive was watching him. He read it out, to Violet, Florian, Hedda, Harry and Robin, all of whom had similar envelopes. Humphry was away, in Manchester, but would be back for the First Night. Olive knew she should say—should already have said—something.
Violet said “So the hero’s called Tom. That’s nice, Tom.”
“Yes,” said Tom, “that’s nice.” His voice was unemphasised, toneless, not, Olive thought desperately, unlike Gladys Carpenter. He said
“I wasn’t asked. Or told.”
Violet said “It was saved up for a nice surprise.”
Hedda said “Lots of people are called Tom. It’s a common name.”
“What’s it about?” asked Robin.
Violet said “That’s saved up for a nice surprise, too.”
44
The First Night was New Year’s Day 1909.
Humphry and Olive were in the box of Mr. Rosenthal, the impresario, with his wife, Zelda, Sir Laurence Porteous, a theatrical knight, and some Liberal politicians. The Sterns were behind the scenes, directing, deploying and manipulating the life-size puppets, the stringed marionettes, the loblolly and the salamander. Steyning was in the box with the Wellwoods, unusually fidgety. He felt that only he could get the lighting precisely perfect—the flood of blood, the White Damp, the Fire Damp, the brilliance surging out of the coal-ball. He was next to Olive, and at one point gripped her silver sleeve, and then muttered an apology.
The Wellwood children, with Violet, had a box of their own. Dorothy had not come. Tom was not in evening dress, but he was cleaned up, and had a clean shirt and an acceptable jacket. He was between Phyllis, in a golden caramel-coloured dress, made by Violet, and Hedda, in sea-green silk with a lace collar. Violet sat the other side of Phyllis. She wore black, trimmed with mauve, and a cameo brooch at her neck. She had set her pretty gilt chair back into the shadows.
