The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “I don’t understand, about this Gabriel.”

  “He’s a good man. In an odd way.”

  Julian supposed odd meant queer, in a Cambridge sense, but when Gabriel came to eat with them, he saw no sign of it. He was both monkishly detached from the world, and observant, for the sake of kindness. Too good to be true, Julian tried to think, but couldn’t keep it up, as they talked about socialism, about psychoanalysis, about literature. They were learnedly discussing Heinrich von Ofterdingen when Florence gave a low cry. Then she gave a gasp. Gabriel was immediately out of his chair.

  “It begins? May I?”

  Cautiously, without deranging her dress, he felt the rippling muscles. Julian was both repelled and moved. He wanted to go a long way away and he wanted his sister—his dear sister—not to hurt.

  “Ah!” she said in another gasp and cry.

  “Mr. Julian,” said Gabriel. “Two doors down is a pony-trap. Knock and ask the owner to come.”

  “Quickly,” said Florence, red with pressure.

  “Do not worry,” said Gabriel Goldwasser. “A first child is always slow. You may find it easier to walk up and down. Have you things packed?”

  She had not. They called Amalia, who packed a bag with nightdress and toilet things. Florence walked up and down. She said, between contractions, “How do you know what to do, Gabriel?”

  “I am a trained doctor. From a good hospital. I have the sense to observe the—midwives, is it? I have seen all this before.”

  Florence gave a muffled scream. “I hope it is slow.”

  “If it is very slow, you will hope the opposite.”

  Julian returned with the trap. They all three got in, behind the driver. The horse set off up the mountain, straining its muscles. Florence’s muscles conducted their own purposeful, involuntary dance.

  • • •

  It was not slow. The child was not born in the pony-trap, nor yet in the wheelchair in the clinic corridor. But she arrived, on a great crest of pain, with a loud, defiant wail, barely an hour later. Julian was not there, but Gabriel was. There was a nurse, whose observations he translated, and commented on.

  “She says you have good muscles.”

  “I—have not—thought about—these muscles.”

  Florence had lived with the fear that “the child,” when it arrived, would resemble Herbert Methley, and she would hate it. The nurse cleaned it, and Gabriel gave it to its mother.

  “A daughter,” he said, waiting to see if she was pleased. The child had a shock of dark hair—like Florence’s own, like Julian’s Italian hair. It had large dark eyes which it appeared to fix on Florence. And a character. There she was, all shocked with rushing into the world, and she pushed with her head, impatient for something. Years later, thinking it all over, Florence admitted to herself that she had recognised in the daughter a kind of excessive primitive energy she had responded to in the father. And responded to in the daughter. She took her, triumphant, into her arms, and kissed her hair. Julian came into the room.

  “Meet Julia Perdita Goldwasser,” said Florence, laughing a little wildly. Julian bent courteously and kissed the small new hand as it clutched its shawl.

  “I do not know,” said Florence to Gabriel, “what I should have done without you. In every way.”

  “It was destiny,” said Gabriel Goldwasser.

  He said later, to Julian, over a glass of apple juice, “She was not afraid. Most women are afraid. Or become afraid.”

  “She was lucky?”

  “Oh yes. She will think of it as virtue, but mostly it is luck. Salut!”

  “Salut!”

  In June 1909 King Edward VII opened Sir Aston Webb’s new buildings for the Victoria and Albert Museum. He opened them with a golden key, with a stem of steel damascened with gold. The long white buildings, which had emerged slowly from their wrappings of tarpaulin, and thickets of scaffolding, were judged to be rhythmic and lovely, were compared to symphonies and chorales. The opening was attended by a glistening crowd of courtiers and dignitaries. The Webbs were there, and Alma-Tadema, with Balfour, Churchill and the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. The workers who had made the building were there, in smart suits, with bowler hats or top hats; they read an Address, composed by themselves, at the monarch’s personal request. The choir from the Royal College of Music, perched high in an arch, sang Dowland’s piercing “Awake, sweet love” and the Irish Guards played in the background. Prosper Cain was among the party, elegant in his uniform.

  He was, like many of his colleagues and many amongst the public, disappointed by the uniform whiteness and looming austerity of the inside of the new buildings. The Keeper of the Wallace Collection, Claude Phillips, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he was “overwhelmed by the vastness, the coldness, the nakedness” of the new halls. The interior still resembled a warehouse, or a public hospital. Prosper Cain had been present when the then Director, Arthur Banks Skinner, had been harshly and suddenly demoted in a public meeting, called to announce a new Director, Cecil Harcourt Smith. Skinner was aesthetic. The new regime was orderly and utilitarian. The civil servant in charge, Sir Robert Morant, was a failed candidate for Holy Orders, who had tutored the royal children in Siam. Objects in the museum were displayed by the succession of materials: glass with glass, steel with steel, cloth with cloth, like with like, so that the craftsman might study the development of his skill, and the historian the changes over time. Claude Phillips wrote that the soul had gone, that beauty had vanished. The newspapers made grumbling comparisons with the imaginative arrangements in German museums, in Berlin, and Munich. Prosper agreed with them, and was distressed by Skinner’s quiet, humiliated grief. He was detaching himself from his work, involuntarily and half unconscious of it.

  He had had to move house, and was now in a pretty Arts and Crafts town house in Chelsea, with more space—not for his random collection of objects, but for nurses, nurseries, and vociferous babies. Frau Goldwasser had returned, with the energetic Julia in her arms, to find she had an airy bedroom, with a delicious French wallpaper and pretty electric lights. Prosper and Imogen had discussed things, and decided that one nurse and one nursery would do for two babies. The room was most beautifully decorated by the ladies from the Glasgow School of Art. There was a frieze of flying, ephemeral creatures, and white tables and chairs of a severe yet delightful modern design.

  Cordelia was six months old and Julia five. It is an age when a baby can sit up, but not an age when it takes much notice of another baby. They had a nanny and a nursemaid. Florence had breast-fed her baby at first. Imogen had not been able to do so.

  Florence, with her laughing child, saw what she could always have seen, if she had cared, that Imogen was afraid of her. Cordelia was a quiet, watchful little mite, tentative even when she reached for a rattle. Julia crowed and bounced, and had brief fits of roaring rage. Florence found herself encouraging Cordelia to play, and then talking naturally to Imogen. Prosper Cain smiled wryly under his moustache.

  Florence could not, of course, return to Newnham College. She went to see Leslie Skinner, and started attending lectures, and classes in History, at University College. Dorothy was still with the Skinners. Florence discovered that Dorothy was now an MD and qualified to practise as a doctor. She was continuing her studies: she wanted to qualify as a surgeon. She was working in the Women’s Hospital. She invited Florence, with Griselda, who was a postgraduate student at Cambridge, to her graduation ceremony that summer. She said her mother was ill, and would not be able to come. This proved to be so. Dorothy looked serious in her gown and cap. Griselda and Florence wore frivolous dresses and sunny hats.

  Olive took to her bed, most of the time, much of the time in the dark. She was not writing. She was depleting Humphry’s stocks of whisky. Her hair straggled on the pillows, turning grey, a rather glossy, metallic grey. Humphry sat with her, and opened the curtains, and told her she had six other children, who needed her. Olive replied curtly that they frightened her. Once, when
she had drunk a great deal of whisky, she said “If you know that you can kill a child—”

  “You have killed no one. Don’t be absurd.”

  Olive shrank back into the pillows. “You don’t know.”

  “Tell me—”

  Humphry did not really want to hear. She said “You don’t really want to hear.”

  • • •

  In the autumn of 1909 August Steyning drove over in his new motor car to see Olive. She usually stirred herself when he came, and sat at the tea-table, staring around as though she did not recognise the room. She listened to his account of the continuing success of Tom Underground, and when asked about cuts in the narrative, or changes in the cast, said “Do as you will.”

  Violet, coming in with cream cakes on a plate said “Ah” and fell forward, crashing to the ground with her face in the cream, on top of one of Philip Warren’s early Dungeness plates, decorated with seaweeds and umbellifers. The plate smashed. Steyning tried to help Violet, but she did not move and was not breathing. Her cynical sharp face was red and twisted. She was quite dead. She was turned over, and wiped clean. A servant was sent for a doctor. Olive said

  “Poor Vi. Not that it’s not a good way to go, when your time comes. But I had no idea hers had. She did not complain. Though it is doubtful I would have heard, if she had.”

  This event also was not a story.

  After Violet’s funeral, Humphry asked Phyllis into his office and gave her a box, containing Violet’s few pieces of jewellery: a jet necklace, a cameo, a small ring, with a polished bluejohn stone, which Phyllis put on. Humphry watched her in silence. He did not know what to say. Phyllis said

  “You don’t need to tell me. I know. She was my real mother. Hedda found out. She likes finding things out. I don’t think I do. Nobody asked me.”

  Humphry said “I’m sorry.”

  Phyllis said “I think you should be. But it’s too late, isn’t it. I can look after the house, now.”

  Her pretty face was like a china doll. She said

  “I’d be glad if you’d sack Alma, and get a new kitchenmaid. She doesn’t like me, and won’t do anything I tell her.”

  She said “Nobody asked her what she felt, when she was alive. Even I didn’t, because of knowing what I’d not been told.”

  Humphry said, almost grumpily, “I asked her. I may have been at fault, but I did—care for her.”

  “Yes. Well. It’s too late, now. For everything.”

  • • •

  Alma was sacked, and replaced by Tilly, who appreciated the finer points of Phyllis’s household-management.

  Olive went back into her bedroom.

  Humphry went to Manchester.

  Life—for the living—went on. Leached of much of its colour, still where it had been full of movement.

  Phyllis tended Olive. She could have said, and didn’t, that she knew Olive didn’t like her. Olive could not be sacked. But she could be made to be grateful for kindnesses she did not want. Phyllis persisted.

  47

  In February 1910 Richard Strauss’s Elektra was put on in Covent Garden. It is a drama of fated royal families stirring violently in bloody passion, matricide and revenge. Elektra took hatred to her bosom as a bridegroom, “hollow-eyed, breathing a viperous breath.” The English critics were divided. The Times said the opera was “unsurpassed for sheer hideousness in the whole of operatic literature.” Shaw diagnosed anti-German hysteria. He said Elektra was “the highest achievement of the highest art.” “If the case against the fools and their money-changers who are trying to drive us into war with Germany consists in the single word, Beethoven, today I should say with equal confidence, Strauss.”

  The English were reading novels about the invasion of England, and the invaders were Germans, men in steel helmets who bit into the globular world with iron teeth. There was the legendary William Le Queux, whose tales were serialised by Lord Northcliffe in the Daily Mail and hugely increased its circulation. He began with The Great War in England in 1897 which was published in 1894. In those nineteenth-century days the hypothetical invaders were French: they were driven back, with the help of Germany, when they besieged London.

  In 1906 Le Queux wrote the Invasion of 1910, a futuristic tale of a German invasion of England’s green and pleasant land. The places of German landings, and German battles with the English, were changed, before publication, to suit the readership of the Daily Mail, to the places where Lord Northcliffe had most readers, who would feel the most poignant frisson of armchair terror. Among Le Queux’s innumerable other works was Spies of the Kaiser, published in 1909, a mock-factual series of descriptions of infiltrating Germans and dangerous new weapons. The Secret of the Silent Submarine. The Secret of Our New Gun. The German Plot against England. The Secret of the British Aeroplane. These plots were foiled by a “patriot to his core,” a pipe-smoking barrister, with excellent taste in furnishings. There were emotive illustrations, depicting, for instance, the “execution of von Beilstein” standing blindfold in the Horse Guards Parade, facing an execution squad of guardsmen in bearskin hats, a white-surpliced priest, and two solemn English policemen.

  • • •

  The Kaiser himself sat in his study on a stool in the shape of a horse’s saddle and wrote letters to his family, his uncle Edward, his cousin Nicholas in Russia, making and proposing many different treaties, against many different enemies. In September 1908, in concert with Colonel Stuart-Wortley, he had written in the Daily Telegraph on German—British relations. German diplomats toned down the passages about how unpopular Britain was in Germany.

  The article claimed that William’s “large stock of patience is giving out… You English are mad, mad as March hares … my heart is set upon peace.” He claimed that he had sent his grandmother tips about how to win the Boer War and ended

  Germany is a young and growing Empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas.

  This article pleased no one. The English press were “sceptical, critical and grudging.” The Japanese were upset by the shrill remarks about the fleets in distant oceans. The Germans were furious with their Emperor; there was a political crisis, the Kaiser made a confused speech when honouring Graf Zeppelin with the Black Eagle for his airship, and there were calls for his abdication. He went away to go hunting in yellow leather boots, and gold spurs, wearing a cross of his own design—a combination of the Order of St. John and of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. He went to a fox cull with Max Furstenberg and killed 84 of the 134 slaughtered foxes. In the evening he was resplendent, with the Order of the Garter below his knee, the ribbon of the Order of the Black Eagle across his chest, and round his neck the Spanish Golden Fleece. He had signed a letter to the English First Lord of the Admiralty about naval competition between Germany and England “by one who is proud to wear the British naval uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, which was conferred on him by the late Queen of blessed memory.”

  In May 1910 the Kaiser’s uncle, Edward the Caresser, died. He lay in state in Westminster Hall, and Wilhelm, in another splendid uniform, doffing his plumed helmet, stood by the bier, holding the hand of his cousin George. He went back to Windsor, the old family home, “where I played as a child, tarried as a youth and later as a man and a ruler enjoyed the hospitality of Her Late Highness, the Great Queen.” The English cheered him in the streets. He went home, and spoke in Konigsberg of divine right.

  “I see Myself as an instrument of the Lord. Without regard for the views or opinions of the day I go My way, which means the whole and sole well-being and peaceful development of our fatherland.”

  That winter he added a decoration of real dead birds to the hat he wore to shoot, along with the high, shining yellow boots, and the gold spurs.

  In August that year, Griselda Wellwood was work
ing as a research student at Newnham, like Julian Cain, whose study of pastoral was spreading pleasantly, but unconstructively, into Latin, Greek, German, Italian and the possibility of Norwegian, without acquiring order or shapeliness. He earned some money by supervising undergraduates, who liked him. Griselda did not have any teaching, but attended classes with Jane Harrison. She was working steadily on the folktale, starting out from the Grimms. In their work both Julian and Griselda found much overlapping and repetition: motifs of death and grief and springtime and ripeness: motifs of flesh-eating and punishment and exoneration and the triumph of beauty and virtue. Both of them had moods in which the Cambridge weather—the chill winter winds blowing in from the Steppes, the luscious summers with boats and willows and perfect lawns and May Balls—seemed like an enchantment, a spider-web from which they needed to break free in order to taste and touch reality.

  They spent time together: they attended some of the same lectures and had coffee afterwards. They attended the Cambridge Fabian Society. They discussed their states of mind. Julian made self-mocking mutterings about wanting to join the army, or make money in the City. Griselda laughed at him and said he had put himself into the story of the parting of the ways, or the story of the choosing of the caskets, gold, silver and lead. He went on making notes on Andrew Marvell, who had written so little and so well. He was improving his Latin. It was much harder to discuss either Griselda’s alternative lives, or what story she was in. You could not—not if you were a man, a young man—ask her if she had rejected marriage to devote herself to scholarship. It was hard for a man and a woman to be friends with no underthought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. Julian was nevertheless in love with Griselda. She was as intelligent as any Fellow of King’s—though he thought she did not know it—he was in love with her mind as it followed clues through labyrinths. Love is, among many other things, a response to energy, and Griselda’s mind was precise and energetic.