The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  The younger boys, Florian, Robin and Harry, now sixteen, fourteen, and thirteen, were grouped beyond Violet, washed and brushed.

  Tom leaned his chin on the velvet rim of the box and stared out. The box was in the upper air of the dome, which was rich midnight-blue and star-studded. Gilded angels with silver trumpets sailed across it. There was a huge chandelier, a waterfall of crystal droplets, containing and scattering brightness. Tom looked out into emptiness, paradoxically crowded, with gargoyles under the boxes, and dreamy cherubs sitting above the curtained stage, which was a deeper emptiness.

  Hedda said “You always feel as though you ought to jump, don’t you?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Violet.

  Hedda insisted. “It sort of pulls you, to fall into it.”

  “You’re making me feel sick,” said Phyllis, smiling. Tom put his head further into the cradle of his arms.

  The orchestra arrived, and shifted and shuffled and made the usual discordant scraping and peeping tuning noises. Then they played. The music had light-footed dances in it, and whirlwinds scattering leaves, and a kind of dark, downward sucking drift from the clarinets and bassoons. The curtains with their floating bats and spiders drew back, and revealed a walled garden in the sun, on which an artificial sun shone brightly and evenly, across which a man-size rat scampered and danced to flute and drum music, carrying in its teeth, which were sharp and glittering, a limp smoky-grey web, which it spread out, using its forepaws, to reveal an elongated human shape, uniformly ash-grey, lifeless. And it rolled it up and jumped out, over the wall.

  And the shadowless boy came into the garden. He sat on a bench, and played a recorder. He sang a ballad. He was a woman. Tom was disgusted. She wore doublet and hose, and had shapely legs. She had a cropped cap of silver and gold hair. She had red lips and polished fingernails. She moved her hips like a boy but they were women’s hips. Another boy—a real one—came into the garden, and they played, and talked and the second boy said “Look at my shadow,” and threw it across the lawn. And then Tom, its name was Tom, discovered it was single and had no shadow.

  The story wound on. Tom knew, and didn’t know, the story. His skin crawled. The Elf Queen came—she too had no shadow—and talked to Tom. The scene changed. It was a bare heath, with a crack which was a door in a wall of rock which was the backcloth. Red light poured blood from the wings. The orchestra played bloody sounds. Tom remembered Loïe Fuller in Paris. He refused grimly to suspend disbelief. The woman-Tom was up to the knees in the bloodlight, and staggered dramatically.

  Tom cradled his head in his hands. Phyllis tapped him reproachfully on the shoulder. “You’ve got to look,” she hissed. “I am looking,” Tom mumbled. The dark cavern swallowed the woman-Tom. Cardboard, Tom thought, and lantern-slides, and smoke puffed with bellows. He did not think it out, but knew he was undergoing a trial or test. He must not for one moment, not for one second, believe. The test was not to be taken in by glamour, by illusion. The Tom-thing found something like a stalactite or stalagmite, a white pillar in the dark, which whispered incomprehensibly, to muted drumming from the orchestra in the rhythm of a heartbeat. The boy-woman and the person personating the Gathorn found a crack in the pillar and pulled. The stage was full of billowing white scarves. Flutes and piccolos shrilled. The Silf came out of her wrappings, whiter than white, with outstanding white hair. She danced, spikily. Her face was white, like her hair. Again Tom put his head in his arms and again Phyllis tapped on him. Violet said “Sit up properly, Tom.” Tom shrugged and sat up. Violet was now permanently stiff with disapproval, or something darker. She talked to him as though he was ten years younger than he was.

  The interval came and the audience applauded vigorously and there was a buzz of talk. Hedda said “It’s brilliantly atmospheric. The puppets are so clever. It’s sinister, don’t you think, Tom?”

  Tom excused himself, and blundered out in the direction of the lavatory. He stood in an anonymous line of males, and went in and pissed into the porcelain and tried not to think, which he had trained himself to do, or not to do.

  He went back to the box. He was both not-thinking, and not-believing. Something had been taken from him, certainly, but in these lights, against this backcloth, it was something fabricated and trivial, which it made no sense to mourn.

  The end came. Light, and silken ferns in multifarious transparent greens and golds, flowed out of the coal-ball.

  The audience, in the same way, erupted into cries of approval and hands beating hands.

  “You ought to clap, Tom,” said Phyllis, clapping prettily.

  Tom clapped, so that she would stop talking. They could see into the box where Olive was. People were applauding and pointing. She came with August Steyning, to the rim of their space, and inclined her head to the calling and clapping.

  Tom thought, we are all shut up in these boxes and we can’t get out.

  He knew he was prohibited from thinking about his mother. He was shut in a box, and there was nothing he could do.

  “Must get out,” said Tom. “Air. Need air.” He pushed his golden chair back, found the door in the red throat of the box-trap, and stumbled out.

  So that when Olive came with Humphry, to be kissed and congratulated by her children, Tom was not there. She was dazed with success; her hair was coming loose, she had to put it up, again and again. She had not looked into the cupboard in her mind when she had locked away any anxiety about Tom Wellwood and Tom Underground. It would work out. Things worked out. Violet said “I trust you are happy” and Olive then looked round her children, kissed them all, and said to her sister, lightly, “Where’s Tom?”

  “He went out to get some air, he said.”

  “It is very hot,” said Olive. “I hope he enjoyed the play.”

  “Everybody did,” said Violet. “And so they should.”

  Olive was given a large bouquet of red roses, lilies and stephanotis, in a silver holder, the size you have to cradle in your arms, which made the control of her hair even harder. She was wearing a black stiff silk skirt, embroidered with gold flowers, and a silver shirt, with a ruffled neck. Humphry had given her a double row of amber beads. It was a present for the First Night. There were insects trapped in some of the beads: one was a lace-winged fly, millions of years old, which had left traces, in the hard translucent bead, of its struggle to escape the oozing sap. Humphry had said “I thought it was appropriate. I couldn’t give you a coal-ball.” Olive kissed him. “I love you, Humph,” she said. “We have come a long way from the Dream in Hackney.” “A long way and no way,” said Humphry, and kissed her again.

  People came to praise. James Barrie, saying he was moved, and Bernard Shaw, saying she had managed to please the multitude with intelligence, which was hard to do, and H. G. Wells, who called the play an allegory, which caused Olive to frown. Fabians came, and the Portman Square Wellwoods, though Griselda and Julian Cain were not there, were coming with a party from Cambridge the following weekend. Prosper Cain was absent: his wife was near her time, and unwell, they were told.

  Olive said “Where’s Tom?”

  “He kept dozing off,” said Hedda, remorseless.

  “Not really dozing,” said Phyllis. “More resting his head.”

  “Where is he?”

  “You know he doesn’t like crowds,” said Violet. “He’ll turn up.”

  There was a party. There was champagne, and high excited laughter. People asked the Germans how they did it and were told it was an old German art made new. People embraced the Germans and embraced Olive, again and again. Her beads were tangled in her flowers, and her hair came right down, and Humphry said she was the White Queen, removed the flowers, and found a theatrical make-up person to put up the hair again, with a red rose knitted into it. Steyning was criticising the timing of some of the lighting. Olive said

  “Has anyone seen Tom?”

  No one had. Violet repeated that he didn’t like crowds, and would turn up.

  Tom put on hi
s overcoat and slipped out of the theatre, where the enthusiastic audience was spilling out into the lighted Strand. He began to walk. He walked along the Strand and down Whitehall, and came to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge. He walked on to the bridge, and stopped for a moment, leaning his head on his elbows, and squinted down at the river, which was high and on the turn, black, glinting, moving fast. He remembered Hedda, in the theatre, saying one was always tempted to throw oneself over, or outwards. He looked at the black surface—he didn’t know how long. Then he moved on, over the bridge, and turned south. He walked along well-lit streets, and shady ones. Now and then an electric tram passed him, making a groaning sound and full of yellow light, but he did not think of boarding one. It did not matter where he went. All that mattered was to move, to be on the move, to use his body and not his mind. He wove erratically across the south of London. He found himself crossing the flat expanse of Clapham Common, with its ponds sullen in the meagre light, and its trees black. You knew you were out of London when the bark of the elm trees ceased to be thick with soot. London was a creature that grew busily and decayed busily: terraces and houses went up and came down. Cranes stood skeletal against the glow of the streetlights; there were huts in the road for the diggers of drains and of channels for cables. The air was nasty in his lungs. He went on, and came to Dulwich Village, which was pretty, though encroached upon by the tentacles of the city. He headed for Penge, avoiding Croy-don. He did not have a plan. He meant to get out of the dirt, and the noise, and the dense population, and head for the North Downs where he knew where he was. At this point, he thought he was heading for Todefright, and home. Where else should he go? He went fast, in a long, loping, even stride. I am, he thought to himself, an expert in not thinking.

  • • •

  Olive and Humphry read the reviews over breakfast in London. They were ecstatic. The Times pointed out that like Peter Pan, Tom Underground had used old theatrical forms—the pantomime, the ballet—in new ways. Peter Pan was a children’s play with hidden depths revealing hidden truths about childhood and motherhood. Tom Underground was for grown-ups, although its form was that of old fairytales, the places “Under the Hill,” combined with images taken from Wagner’s black dwarves and from contemporary coal-mining. This play had the magic of Peter Pan combined with something dark and Germanic, the bright black intentness and craziness of the world of the puppet and the marionette. The reviewer even quoted Kleist’s essay on the superiority of the marionette and its pure gestures. Something of that had been experienced that evening by a bewitched audience.

  “You are a heroine,” said Humphry, and kissed her.

  “I wonder what happened to Tom.”

  “He’s always going off on his own. He doesn’t like crowds. He’ll surface.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  They went back to Todefright, by train.

  Tom had reached the edge of the city, at dawn. He saw the stars, as he saw the edge of the London pall of smoke, and passed beyond it, and saw the sun come up, over the North Downs, as he began to climb. He knew the drovers’ paths, and the wooded abandoned roads of the Downs and the Weald. He stopped beside a horse trough, and filled his hands, and drank. The water was very cold: it was early in the year, but there was no frost, and the ground was dry, not clagged with mud. He was on the road home. It would take him a day or so to come there. He bought a lump of bread in a shop near Badgers Mount.

  A woman journalist had come from The Lady to interview Olive. She wrote about Todefright in the winter sunshine.

  She lives in the perfect house for a writer at once so enchanting and so down to earth. I suggested to her that there was something witchy about the name Todefright and she immediately put me right. Todefright comes from the amphibian and an old Kentish word for “meadow.” No death or spectres! And it is such a mellow pleasant house, with bright, unusual pots and plates, with hand-crafted modern wooden furniture that looks centuries old. There is a pleasant lawn for children to play on, which borders a satisfactorily mysterious wood. Mrs. Wellwood has seven children, ranging from young men and women to schoolboys, all of whom have been the privileged first listeners and readers for Mrs. Wellwood’s spellbinding tales! The house is full of their presence—bats and balls, models and exercise books, no question of these children being banished to a nursery, seen and not heard.

  We discussed her wonderful inventions, the Silf and the Gathorn, and the splendid acting of Miss Brettle and Master Thornton in those parts. Had she enjoyed the challenge of working with nonhuman actors, with life-size figures and tiny marionettes? She spoke enthusiastically of Mr. Steyning’s innovative lighting, and the skills of the Stern family from Munich.

  The interviewer did not want to leave the charming house. Violet gave her coffee, and Humphry drove her to the station. “Where do you think Tom is, Vi?”

  “He’s walking about somewhere. That’s what he does.”

  “That woman wanted to talk to him.”

  “That’s probably why he’s not here. He’s not so unworldly that he doesn’t think of lying low, at the moment.”

  Tom had suddenly come to a temporary stop. He had found a barn, at the edge of a coppice, in stubble fields, and had come in and found heaped logs and bales of straw. So he lay spread-eagled on the straw, and heard the mice scampering and the rooks cawing in the wood.

  He went into a dreamless sleep and woke not knowing quite where he was, or why. A man with a grey-and-white woolly beard and a squashed hat was looking at him, gloomily.

  “I’m sorry,” said Tom. He found it was odd to hear his voice. “I haven’t done any harm.”

  “I wasn’t about to say you had.”

  “I’ll be on my way.”

  “And where is that?”

  They went out onto the downside, and looked up at the skyline. “Over there, I think. Todefright.”

  “Over there. Aye. Take the track by the woody bits and bear right, and you’ll come to the road, with luck. Are you hungry?”

  “A bit,” said Tom. He had meant to tire himself out, and was pleased at how slowly he thought, and how his hunger seemed not to be part of him. The old man offered him an apple, a red and yellow and juicy apple, which Tom bit into. The old man then offered him a broken-off piece of pasty, containing mostly vegetables, a bit of turnip, some carrots, some onion.

  They went out onto the track in the bright light, and Tom set out again, over the chalky track and the short grass of the downland, up towards the skyline.

  The easy way home was to join the main road which skirted Biggin Hill and ran south to Westerham. He stood on a ridge, with the cold wind in his hair, and looked about him.

  Then he turned left, not right, towards Downe, and then he continued to go east into the heart of the North Downs.

  He meant to exhaust himself. His body was something he observed, loping along, muscles pulling and ripping.

  He thought, As for my head, there has never been much in my head, not really.

  Full of an unreal world, he thought, maybe a question of a mile further on. A creature tried to materialise in his head, a boy-woman with a gilded cap of hair, shapely legs in black tights, an improbable Sherwood Green doublet with an elegant wide leather belt, with a silver buckle. He fought back. He imagined it bleeding, covered with blood. He tried to stop imagining.

  He did this by concentrating on his steady feet, and this caused him to stumble.

  He saw a hawk overhead, and that made him briefly happy. He didn’t ask himself where he was going. It didn’t matter. He was not going home. The Downs were empty and he was empty. He was possessed by energy and even thought of running.

  Olive sent a letter to Dorothy. She persuaded Florian to cycle to the railway station to make sure it went quickly.

  I wonder if you have seen Tom? He went out of the theatre after the play—everyone was talking, he doesn’t like crowds. It seemed quite natural he should slip away but it’s now three days and he hasn’t come home.
I remember when he disappeared before, you found him in a sort of hiding-place you had in the woods. Do you think he could be there? When can you come home? It has been very exciting here, with all the commotion about the play, but I’m worried about Tom. I hope your work is going well.

  She sat and chewed her pen. She wrote

  I should say, and haven’t said, how much I admire your determination and hard work. You said you got it from me. I should like to be able to believe that.

  She sat a little longer. She stared out of the window, at the quiet lawn.

  She wanted to say why she was so worried about Tom. Dorothy was the only person who knew Tom. But she could not tell Dorothy that she had not told Tom the whole truth about the play. He had nodded and closed his face when he saw the title of the play on the programmes and then on the posters, but he had come along quite quietly to the opening.

  He was doing what he always did with difficulties, persuading himself they didn’t exist if he didn’t name them. She knew him, he was her beloved son. It was she who had named Tom Underground.

  It was only a fairy story.

  It wasn’t.

  • • •

  Dorothy answered.

  I don’t think Tom can be in the Tree House, in fact I know he can’t, because he took me there and showed me, the gamekeeper had cut it down and made it into logs. He didn’t seem upset, but then, he never does.

  I haven’t seen the play yet. We got the tickets you sent, and I was going at the weekend with Griselda and Charles and Julian Cain and a medical friend of mine. But perhaps I had better come home instead. What do you think?

  Olive answered. “Please come home. There is still no sign of Tom. Violet says it is a storm in a teacup but then she would say that.”