The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “That fellow, Methley, is an ass.”

  “He doesn’t write about the real world, that’s for sure.” She looked at her plate. “He takes people in, though.” She said “Mrs. Methley, she was very good to me, along with Mrs. Oakeshott and Miss Dace. Women who might have been prim and nasty. They saved me, really.”

  Charles/Karl said “All sorts of things are changing.” He wanted to say something personal and reassuring about her past disaster, but did not know what. He saw she knew that. The soup came, and bread, on little plates painted with flying storks and rising storks and feathery reeds. Charles/Karl asked if there was wine, and was brought a short wine-list and ordered a bottle of white Burgundy. Elsie said

  “Minton. The storks. My mum—my mother—used to paint the storks. We got one or two seconds. They weren’t her favourite. Japanese-style, she said they were, and the storks were for long life. For babies, she said, in England, and she had too many of those.” She paused. “She died of white lead. She were an artist, was an artist, if she could have had the opportunity. Philip got it from her. She died o’ white lead and too many children. We had a daft song.”

  “Yes?” said Charles/Karl.

  “Seven in a bed and one of ’em dead” said Elsie on a sort of rush. “Philip and me made it up. There was nowhere to—to put me brother when he died, so he had to stay there, wi’ all of us coughing and like to go as well.”

  She said “I’m sorry.”

  “What for? I want you to talk to me. Tell me things.”

  “They’re not nice things for this good meal on these pretty plates. It brought it back. You’ve been good to me, like Mrs. Methley and Mrs. Oakeshott. I’m grateful.”

  “You are saying that,” said Charles/Karl, “to emphasise—to act—the class difference between you and me. Which we ought to forget.”

  “There’s real cream in the soup. Just the right amount. That’s an art, too. We can’t forget the difference.”

  His mind was full of a picture of seven—dirty—people, crammed coughing into one bed, and one of them dead. He saw Elsie, wielding her soup-spoon, neatly. It was a strong face, indrawn with self-control, alert with curiosity. It was alien, partly because of the class difference, because of what she had lived, and what he had not lived. He said

  “I love you, when you look cross like that, and set your shoulders.”

  The firm face quivered. “Don’t make me cry. It would be embarrassing. I should embarrass you.”

  There was a silence. The lamb came and was eaten, whilst they talked of the summer school lectures and Elsie said Mr. Shaw could imitate anyone’s accent and then iron it out. She talked about Shakespeare. She talked about Rosalind and Viola, dressed as men, having to take charge of things, full of hope. She asked Charles/Karl “How did he know?” and said there was no other man who wrote so well about women, so you believed he knew them from inside, so to speak.

  “And then, there’s Lady Macbeth, who suddenly says she has given suck to a baby. That’s the only mention. She don’t—doesn’t—seem like a woman who has a baby and she only mentions it to say she’d tear it away from its feeding. It’s terrifying. He meant it to be.”

  They analysed Cordelia, and Goneril and Regan, and enjoyed their talk. The plum tart had a delicious custard. Cream, again, said Elsie, good rich cream. Thickened with eggs and cream, not just cornflour.

  There was no one in the world whose company gave him such pleasure. But he could not say, he was at ease with her. He could not say, he felt “right” or “at home” with her. He didn’t. And then he thought, that was part of it, that drew him to her.

  They went up to the bedroom. Charles/Karl said it was a pity about the midges. Elsie began to take off her clothes, in a practical sort of way, finding coat-hangers, aligning shoes under the bed, as though she was alone in the room. She hung her skirt, and blouse, and went, in her petticoat, to clean her teeth, still looking practical. He loved her muscles, as she bent to untie shoes or stretched to hang her skirt. She brushed her teeth fiercely. She said “Don’t just stand.”

  So he too began to undress, shoes, woollen socks, breeches, jacket. His feet were long and white. They looked unused. He brushed his own teeth. He brushed his hair, for no good reason, and Elsie laughed. So he walked over to her and began to undo her bodice, with slightly tremulous fingers. She put her fingers over his and helped him. All their fingers were electric. She stepped out of her petticoat, and out of her bodice and stood there in her drawers.

  “What the butler saw,” said Elsie Warren.

  Her breasts were carved, like a goddess, he thought, and her nipples were brown, chestnut brown.

  She turned, and bent, and lifted the cover, and slid into the bed. The cover was white cotton embroidered with white rosebuds and roses.

  Charles/Karl took off both his rational vest and his Jaeger underpants. He thought, this sort of thing happens in most lives and always differently. He felt a little drunk, but was not.

  He got into the bed, beside her, and did not know what to do, partly because he did not know what she wanted. Beside him, she slid out of her drawers and moved close to him. She stroked him, and he grabbed at her, and she wriggled and laughed, and took hold of him, and guided him—like this, just like this, said Elsie Warren. And she took his hand, and guided it down, between the curls and twists of their underhair, and then he, or it, or they knew what to do, and found a rhythm, and he said, on a caught breath, “Oh, are you happy now?” and she said “Yes. More now. Oh yes.”

  Breakfast was happy and sad. There were already things between them that they were not saying, not discussing, deliberately not thinking. He did not think about seeing that fine face over breakfast for the rest of his life, nor did he think of sleeping nightly with his hand on those carved breasts or between the lean, strong legs. He did say, they could find a place for another night, and she did say “I mustn’t stay away from Ann, Ann needs me.”

  • • •

  Walking across the gravel path to the cab, after paying the bill, he thought confusedly that he could now never marry, because he could not imagine wanting another woman. He had made decisions that had made… muddle … for everyone.

  48

  In 1911 King George V was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 22nd in the middle of the longest hottest summer the country had known. The King took a measure of 98° Fahrenheit on his greenhouse thermometer. Neo-Pagans slid naked into cool pools in Grantchester, under hanging boughs, and hid giggling in the undergrowth, watching punts pass, full of tourists and dons. The royal yacht Hohenzollern carried the Kaiser and his family to the Coronation. Queen Mary wore a hat with cream roses and delicate feathers. In July the Kaiser sent the new German gunboat, Panther, to Agadir and was accused by the French and the English of interfering in French colonial affairs.

  The Webbs, the driving force of the Fabian Society, had absented themselves from heat, gaiety and tension together, and had parted for Canada on a tour that was to take them a year. Work at the National Committee diminished in intensity. This was partly because the poor, the workers and their dependants, were stirring with discontent, dissatisfaction, determination and even rage, all over the country. There had been miners’ strikes and railwaymen’s strikes, strikes of woollen and worsted workers in Yorkshire and of cotton spinners in Lancashire, strikes by the Card and Blowing Room Operatives’ Association. In that hot summer there was a wave of action beginning with seamen’s and firemen’s strikes in Poole and Hull two days before the Coronation. Then the dock workers joined the seamen and firemen. Agreements were reached, threats of military action were made, new demands arose amongst the workers. In August, there was a strike of the Transport Workers, who were joined by the lightermen, the stevedores, the carters, the tugboatmen, the crane porters, the coal bunkerers and the sailing bargemen. The Port of London came to a stop. Vegetables rotted and butter went rancid in casks. Frozen meat from Argentina, New Zealand and the USA went foul, green and noisome as the refri
geration ships gave up work, powerless. Starvation threatened. At this point the women of Bermondsey, led by Mary Macarthur, suddenly left their work and ran into the streets, shouting and singing. It was spontaneous: they did not have one overwhelming grievance; they had discovered that their lives were intolerable and the world they lived in unacceptable and unjust.

  Commentators saw this human ferment of wrath and energy as an expression of a natural force, like a fire, like a hurricane, or as Mr. Ramsay MacDonald put it mildly, like the stirrings of spring.

  “The Labour world responded to the call to strike in the same eager, spontaneous way as nature responds to the call of springtime. One felt as though some magical allurement had seized upon the people.” A conservative writer, Fabian Ware, commenting on the new syndicalism in the union members and the socialists, a French import that implied the will to cause a revolution, said that this set of beliefs was “an assertion of instinct against reason.”

  Ben Tillett, the workers’ indefatigable and charismatic leader, wrote

  “Class war is the most brutal of wars and the most pitiless. Capitalism is capitalism as a tiger is a tiger and both are savage and pitiless towards the weak.”

  Charles/Karl, reading William Trotter on the herd instinct in hu-mans, observed the marching, famished, furious men and their starving families with anxiety, and a feeling of human uselessness. Trotter was interested in groups, in “the aggressive gregariousness of the wolf and the dog, the protective gregariousness of the sheep and the ox, and differing from both these, we have the more complex social structures of the bee and the ant, which we may call socialised gregariousness.”

  But Trotter believed, and Charles/Karl understood him, that human beings had constructed a social structure no longer directly subject to evolutionary pressures and checks. Man was a creature who made beliefs and myths about the world, and morals, and treated them as things, not as words and thoughts:

  We see man today, instead of the frank and courageous recognition of his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny, unclouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe towards his moral code, and a belief, no less firm, that his traditions, laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of reality. Living as he does in a world where outside his race no allowances are made for infirmity, and where figments, however beautiful, never become facts, it needs but little imagination to see how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of Nature’s failures, ignominiously to be swept from her work-table to make way for another venture of her tireless curiosity and patience.

  Charles/Karl was losing his belief in Beatrice Webb’s Individualist State. He found it perilously easy to hate the whole of his own class—his mind was full of visions of over-bred chows and borzois, Cochin fowl with useless feet and nattering voices. He saw the Coronation in Trot-terian terms as a confection of human-invented unrealities, a small man in a foolish hat, in a building made to house a non-existent human deity, surrounded by fawning creatures who could barely move in their dragging garments. To believe in the Empire as a truth was to join in the fiction of calling an evolutionary fact—tooth, claw, cringing and triumphalism—by a solemn and poetic name.

  And in the East End the crowds marched like one creature, stirring its huge length out of the sloth, or subjection, or lack of knowledge of its own power, that had kept it down.

  But there was no place there for him. He couldn’t dance, and he couldn’t march, or not with any sense of common purpose, and abolishing the Poor Law was not going to undo Trotter’s argument.

  The Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, went on August 17th to meet representatives of the railwaymen’s unions. He offered them a Royal Commission on their grievances. He spoke from the height of his position. The alternative to the long deliberations of a Royal Commission appeared to be the use of force against the workers. They went away, consulted, and came back. They refused, flatly, to accept the Commission or to return to work. Mr. Asquith was distinctly heard, as he walked out of the room, to say “Then your blood be upon your own head.” Winston Churchill despatched troops to stand by for trouble with the miners. Tension and boiling indignation persisted.

  In the autumn of 1911 Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, in its entirety, was performed at Covent Garden. Bloomsbury had seats, and the Fabian Nursery had seats: Rupert Brooke and James Strachey and the lovely daughters of Sir Sidney Olivier juggled tickets and sat in rows together. The black elves tapped their hammers in violent rhythms in Nibelheim, one-eyed Wotan and Loge the trickster, the fire god, descended to the underworld and tricked its king out of his gold ring of power, and his helmet of invisibility. Fire rose and shimmered around Brunnhilde the Valkyrie sleeping on her rock, and Brynhild Olivier applauded. Wotan had mutilated the World Ash to make laws and treaties for his dispensation, which, all too human, slowly foundered in its own inanity and inadequate beliefs about good and evil. Human beings were either corrupt, or deluded, or victims, although the Rhine and the music—and indeed the flames of fire—rippled and sang.

  Griselda Wellwood went with Julian, Charles/Karl, Wolfgang and Florence. Griselda was interested in what she thought were Wagner’s own adaptations of the myths in the Edda and the Nibelungenlied. She told Julian that there was no source for the cutting-down of the World Ash to set fire to the World and Valhalla. It was Wagner’s own invention, his addition to the story. Julian said the singing made him feel impotent. Charles/Karl, still interested in groups and instinct, said an audience was a different animal from a man reading on his own. An audience—if the work was good—was a creature. Like a dragon, said Griselda. You can lull dragons with music. Julian said a dissatisfied audience was a creature too, its emotions were common, it worked itself up. Wolfgang said, be quiet, pay attention, the music begins again. And the dangerous sound hung in tantalising strands, and answered itself, and grew stronger, and wove itself together.

  Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, wrote in her journal in 1906: “I have not one woman friend who knows or cares about politics—they love the personal aspect, the prestige, the Cabinet-making.” She had written: “Women are d—d stupid really, and only have instinct, which after all animals have. They have no size or reason—very little humour, hardly any sense of honour or truth, no sort or sense of proportion, merely blind powers of personal devotion and all the animal qualities of the more heroic sort.” She despised and feared the suffrage agitators, who spat at her at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and in 1908 threw stones through her windows in Downing Street, making her fear for her infant son.

  “I nearly vomited with terror that he should wake and scream. Why should my life be burdened by these worthless, vicious, cruel women? They say men would not be so seriously dealt with, what lies they tell! Men would be horsewhipped on every street corner.”

  She had great faith in her own feminine authority and intuition. In late 1910 she made an appeal to Lloyd George during the election campaign. It was a silly letter, sublimely unaware of its own silliness.

  I am sure you are as generous as you are impulsive. I am going to make a political appeal to you. I say political against personal for, if you do not respond to my appeal, I shall be very unhappy, but not affronted. Don’t when you speak on platforms arouse what is low and sordid and violent in your audience; it hurts those members of it that are fighting these elections with the noblest desire to see fair play; men animated by no desire to punch anyone’s head; men of disinterested emotion able to pity and heal their fellow men, whether it be a lord or a sweep. I expect the cool-blooded class hatred shown for some years in the corporate councils of the House of Lords has driven you into saying that lords are high like cheese etc. etc. etc.

  If your speeches only hurt and alienated lords, it would not perhaps
so much matter—but they hurt and offend not only the King and men of high estate, but quite poor men, Liberals of all sorts—they lose us votes …

  Lloyd George replied with steel irony

  … I have undertaken in spite of a racking cold to address a dozen meetings before the election is over. If you would only convey to the Whips your emphatic belief that my speeches are doing harm to the cause you will render the party a service and incidentally confer on me a great favour…

  In November 1911 Lloyd George mischievously announced that he had torpedoed the Conciliation Bill, which would have given the Vote to a limited number of women. Instead there was to be a Bill on Manhood Suffrage Reform. The women, both the militant suffragettes and the calm and reasonable suffragists, were appalled.

  In February Emmeline Pankhurst stated: “The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in politics.” Women had discomfited the daily life of the nation, as it had been, with increasing wit and venom. “Votes for Women” was burned into the greens of golf courses and written in scarlet greasepaint on the Prime Minister’s blotting pad. Respectable black-garbed ladies, under respectable black hats, produced from comfortable, large, respectable handbags claw hammers and large stones, and walked steadily down the great shopping streets of cities, rhythmically crashing down the plate-glass windows. Miss Christabel Pankhurst, in various disguises, pink straw hat, blue sunglasses, evaded the one hundred hunting detectives to the tune of the “d___d elusive Christabel.” She finally slid away to Paris, from

  where she directed the increasingly extravagant acts of outrage, and took her small, pretty dog for walks in the Park. Her mother was, as she frequently was, suffering in prison.

  In March Mr. Asquith, the silver-tongued, spoke in the House about the coal-miners’ strike which was paralysing the country. He appealed to the miners and to the members of Parliament. He broke down in tears.