The Children's Book

  A woman on a plinth can see over a hedge she is designed to protrude above. There in the lane behind the yew hedge, their heads bent together, were Humphry, in his royal robes and hose, his red hair artificially whitened by August, and Marian Oakeshott, in a pretty dress with forget-me-not sprigs on cream. She was brushing the white powdering from his hair off the velvet shoulders of his cloak. It was a very wifely gesture. When she had brushed it away, she patted his arm, in an even more wifely way. Rage gripped the statue, who nevertheless must remain motionless. Rather deliberately, she thought of Herbert Methley’s investigating fingers. Involuntarily she remembered the ludicrous and alarming cows. She was her own woman.

  At the moonlit garden party to celebrate the success of the play, Olive stood with Humphry in a circle of admirers which included Marian Oakeshott. Everyone praised Olive’s impassivity and stillness as the statue. Mrs. Oakeshott commented intelligently on the brilliant verse-speaking of Hermione’s passionate self-defence in Act I. She was even able to quote felicities of stress. Olive was confused by this and turned gladly to Herbert Methley, who made several remarks about the character of Hermione as Woman, and spoke of how few of Shakespeare’s female characters were women, since they were mostly to be played by young boys who were better at young girls. He had always wondered how a boy could create Cleopatra. He would like to see Mrs. Wellwood undertake Cleopatra. He kissed her hand, and held on to it too long.

  And so Olive found herself in a bed with Herbert Methley. It was a bed in an inn called the Smugglers’ Rest, on a bit of coast looking out at the Channel. It was a bed that sagged, and seemed likely to creak, in a bedroom with an uneven wooden floor and an ill-fitting window, with a crocheted curtain with fish on it. The inn was run by a somewhat unctuous and over-friendly fat woman, who had fed the lovers on plates of shellfish and day-old bread and butter. Methley said he took a room there from time to time when he needed to be alone for inspiration. Olive thought “be alone” meant “not be with Phoebe” since otherwise he was reasonably solitary on his smallholding. It had taken a surprising amount of fixing to be together here. Lies had had to be told. Olive had set off on the London train to see a publisher and had got off at the next stop, which was why she was rather formally dressed, with a large hat, and gloves.

  It would have been better if they could have fallen impulsively into each other’s arms in a hayloft, but that was impractical, they thought, surrounded by art students and miscellaneous children. Methley had repeated, with gratifying urgency, “You must come to me, you must come, it is meant to be.” And he had his arrangements, pat, when he came to propose them, with an ease which Olive felt it better not to question. Over lunch, with a certain bitterness and jealousy he had criticised August Steyning’s “bloodless” theories of impersonal acting. Bloodless and soulless, said Herbert Methley. There is too little passion in the world for it to be removed from the stage, where it should flourish, without hindrance. Olive felt it was all embarrassing, to be sitting eating oysters, and discussing Kleist and marionettes, looking into the eyes of an intended lover. It was all too deliberate, and not spontaneous. She thought there were women who would have enjoyed this aspect of things—but she was not one. She thought about how to say she had made a mistake, and must go home, and could not frame the voice or the sentence. So she ate her strawberry tart with cream, and followed Herbert Methley up the narrow wooden stairs.

  Inside the bedroom, he bent to lock the door, and lifted his hands to remove her hat. She stood awkwardly, like a statue. He said

  “You are thinking you have made a mistake, and should go home. You are embarrassed to be committing adultery out of a kind of revengefulness. You feel this is all mechanical, not passionate. I can read your thoughts, you see, I know you.” Olive laughed, murmured “A palpable hit,” and relaxed a few muscles.

  “I am a writer, I know what people are thinking. I put my mind into their bodies. I love your body, and you will love mine. This is—as sex always is, my dear—both ludicrously comic, and passionately important. We shall know each other, as the Bible says. What could be more amazing?”

  He was taking off his clothes as he spoke, and folding them, and putting them on a chair. Olive looked sidelong at his body. It was not pale with red extremities, like Humphry’s. It was a kind of tanned yellow-brown, all over, owing to the naked sunbathing. She gave a snort of laughter. Bodies are ludicrous, she thought, he is very clever to say so.

  “ ‘To teach thee, I am naked first. Why then

  What need’st thou have more covering than a man …,’ ”

  he said. She could not place the quotation. He undid her belt and began on her buttons.

  “All the same,” she said, finding her voice, “you are right, I do think this may be a mistake, I am embarrassed.”

  “Of course you do, and of course you are,” he said, removing her dress and beginning on her underwear. “But I mean to make you forget all those thoughts, soon, very soon now.”

  And she plunged naked into the bed, with her hair pinned up, so that he should not scrutinise the slacknesses and scarring of her skin.

  He talked a lot, during the sexual act. Humphry didn’t, Humphry was silent and manful and lordly. Methley was intimate, curled round her, she thought, like a snake, like a salamander, murmuring in her ear “Is it better like this? Is it better here—or here—? Is this not delicious …?”

  Her body liked what he was doing—most of the time, and he noticed so quickly when it didn’t, he changed tack, he corrected himself. She looked at his “thing” which was narrow and brownish, unlike Humphry’s thick one. She must not think about Humphry.

  “Don’t think, stop thinking,” said Herbert Methley in her ear, “now is the time to stop thinking, my dear, my darling,” and she did stop thinking, and came to a quivering climax such as she had never before known, with a full-throated cry, which she felt must be audible all over the inn.

  “I told you, I know you, we fit together,” said the voice in her ear, and she saw that it could be hard to forgo a second experience like this, and yet she was, yet she was—not ashamed—embarrassed—by the difference of it all, and her own involuntary motions.

  • • •

  When Olive was disturbed, she wrote. She wrote as she might dream, finding the meaning, or abandoning the images, later. She wrote to get back into that other, better world. When she was back in Todefright, after The Winter’s Tale and the Smugglers’ Rest, she wrote a long description of a passage in which the travelling company came upon a tall, swathed object, a pillar or a prisoner, something, she wrote, like a plaster sculpture, wound in dripping bandages, which were hardening into a permanent form. It was greyish-white, a more than life-size cocoon. The young prince advanced on it fearlessly, as he always did. He was warned by Gathorn. “Don’t touch it. Those are the webs she weaves, and they are poisonous.” The prince approached, in the dark passage, with his little lamp, and caught the glitter of living eyes in the woven hollow eyes that spoke, though the mouth was covered and the lips only a soft mound. “It’s alive, we must free it,” said the brave boy to the good goblin.

  Here she was briefly foiled by her own ingenuity. How could he unwind her, if her bindings were poisonous? He did it with his magic blade, which hissed where it came into contact with the liquid, and chipped away at the bits that had solidified. She could see it now. The bindings lay in writhing little strips, and solid stuff like clay or porcelain, like broken fingernails. When all the wrappings were removed, she stepped out of her shroud, a white-haired woman with a bent head, and hunched shoulders, who looked for a moment too old and exhausted to survive her release. She stumbled forward, and the young hero caught her in his arms, and steadied her, and suddenly found that she was a youthful fairy, her snowy hair full of unearthly life and light, her emerald eyes glittering with magic. And then again, she was old, white-lipped, her skin drawn over her bones.

  She told him she was a powerful fairy, who had gone Under the Hill to help
those whose shadows had been stolen, and had been snared by the dark Weaving Queen down there, and bound in dead shadow-matter, sucked dry of life by the Weavers. If there had been enough to cover her eyes, she would have become as they were. But she still had a little power, in her look.

  Olive stopped, dissatisfied. The image was a good image, but the Underground story was not the right place for it. And the presence of this—apparently adult—fairy seemed to her to weaken, not to strengthen, the conflict between the white Queen of Elfland and the dark Queen of the Abyss. She had somehow been unable to put in female characters who were not those two. They would not come to life, boy readers would find them sissy, they messed up the thread of the narrative.

  Nevertheless the idea of the good creature bound in dead shadow-matter was too good to lose.

  So she rewrote the passage, taking away the height and age and beauty of the fairy, and substituting an air spirit, fine-limbed, with hair like pale gold sunlight (and no visible sex, she referred to it as an it). She was fascinated by the Paracelsian earth spirits—sylphs, gnomes, undines and salamanders. But as she had begun consciously to craft Underground, she had taken to excising any words or images that too easily made short-cuts to classical mythology and aroused all sorts of lazy, facile responses she didn’t want her readers to make. She wanted her readers—Tom first, but she was very vaguely thinking of others—to see her air creature, as she had invented it. She made its hair spiky, as though the wind was in it, transparent as ice, but warm with sunlight. She gave it veins and sinews with blue of the sky and gold of the sun coiling in them. Its bones too were transparent. Its eyes? Uncanny yellow-gold eyes, with a black sunspot in the centre. She thought about it, and wondered, if she called it a Silf, whether getting rid of the Greek y and ph would steer away the classical associations. Silf was close to Elf, an English word, softened.

  The Silf neither staggered with helpless age, nor lay like a ripe woman in the boy’s arms. It danced about like a marsh light, celebrating its freedom, and warned the Company of unexpected dangers lurking in the next passages. It said that if it were Tom, it would go back whilst it could, and thought he could subsist perfectly happily without his shadow, in a perpetual noonday. It said “Maybe your Shadow won’t want to come up to the air. Maybe it will want to stay with the gnomes and salamanders.” Tom said “My shadow is mine.”

  “Maybe it no longer thinks so,” the Silf said, and Olive wondered wildly what were the implications of that remark, which she had inserted on an impulse from nowhere.

  20

  At the turn of the century, the young were about to be adults, or some of them were, and the elders looked at the young, with their fresh skins and new graces and awkwardnesses with a mixture of tenderness, fear and desire. The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.

  Prosper Cain’s family appeared to be unproblematic, indeed hopeful. Julian went to Cambridge in December 1899 and took the entrance exam for King’s College, where he was awarded a scholarship. He would start in the autumn of 1900. Florence was studying for Cambridge higher certificates in several subjects, and was talking of studying languages at Newnham College. The newly named Victoria and Albert Museum was in a turmoil of building and a turmoil of reorganisation; arguments raged between those who saw the museum as a “collection of curios,” and those who saw its primary task as the academic education of craftsmen and teachers. The Royal College of Art, which had replaced the National Training School, of which Walter Crane had been Principal in 1898–9, was now ruled by a Council of Art, four experts from the Art Workers Guild, full of Arts and Crafts idealism. W. R. Lethaby became the first Professor of Design at the college, and the course was energetically rearranged for “Art Teachers of both sexes,” “designers,” and “Art Workmen.” There was a Matron for Women Students since there was no woman teacher, and a large body of young ladies.

  Prosper Cain had been watching Imogen Fludd. He could not, he told himself, stand the sight of her mooning around Purchase House looking something between a draggled goosegirl and an incarcerated princess. By 1900 she was twenty-one, or thereabouts, and had neither husband, nor profession, nor sensible life at home. But she did, he thought, have a delicate but real artistic talent. He was sure she should get out of Benedict Fludd’s aura, and the miasma of Seraphita’s inactivity, and learn to do something. He spoke to Walter Crane, who admired Benedict Fludd’s pots, and was well aware of the vagaries of his temperament. Prospective students had to take a rigorous series of exams in architecture (twelve hours for a drawing of a small architectural object); a six-hour modelling exam of—say—in charcoal the mouth of Michelangelo’s David; drawing (a life drawing of the head, hand and foot); ornament and design—a drawing from memory of a piece of foliage, such as oak, ash or lime; and lettering by hand of a given sentence. Prosper Cain did not know whether Imogen had skills enough—or courage enough—to enter these public competitions. He persuaded Crane to allow her to attend the college classes as an amateur observer. They would see how she developed. There could be a polite fiction that she was “visiting” the Keeper of Precious Metals.

  Cain went down to Lydd in the late autumn of 1899 and put this idea to Imogen, whom he took for a walk along the beach, having rather firmly and rudely rejected Seraphita’s hints that Pomona would like to come too. This gave him a ridiculous feeling that he was behaving like a suitor, when in fact his feelings were quasi-paternal. Imogen wore a long hooded cloak, held together with two beaten silver clasps which he thought were very ugly. The hood would not stay over her head, and the whole garment blew and flapped in the wind coming off the sea. When the hood was down, her hair blew about too. It was caught up in theory, by a plaited strand which held it in a mane behind her head, but the whole thing, he thought, was a dreadful mess. She should see a hairdresser. She should have a hat with some style to it. She looked downwards, with cast-down lashes, at her serviceable but very worn boots, and reached, with hands draped in fingerless lacy mittens, to hold down the blown bits of her clothing. She had, he thought, a very sweet face, an innocent face, that should not have had the quality of lifelessness he perceived in it.

  “I wanted to catch you by yourself, which has proved difficult. I have an idea I should like to put to you.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Please, hear me out, before you refuse me.” That sounded very like a suitor. She went on looking down.

  He put his plan to her. He explained that after the period of apprenticeship, and learning the ropes, she could take the entrance exam, and become a craftswoman, or a teacher, as she chose.

  “Why?” she said. “Why are you doing this for me?”

  “I don’t like waste. And you have talent.”

  “There are all sorts of reasons,” she said into the wind and the spray, “why this can’t happen. It can’t.”

  “Would you like it, if it could?”

  She bowed her head. The hood flopped forward.

  “I shall speak to your father. Today.”

  “You can’t. I mustn’t… they need me, Mother and Father, Pomona …”

  “And what do you need? Your brother hasn’t felt he must stay here.”

  Geraint had indeed taken himself off to the counting rooms and telegrams of the City of London, where he was rapidly becoming successful in Basil Wellwood’s bank.

  “I believe I have some influence with your father. I shall convince him you will be safe, for I shall invite you to stay with myself and Florence, whilst you learn the ways of the college. How can he object?”

  “You don’t understand—” said Imogen, dully. He stopped, and took her by the shoulders, and looked into her face.

  “No, I don’t understand everything. But I believe I understand enough to put a case to your father.”

  And then, suddenly, she flung herself into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. He could not hear what she was s
aying, nervously and rapidly, into his jacket, but he held her, and patted her back, and felt her sob between his hands.

  He approached Benedict Fludd himself with an anxiety he concealed completely. He went to see Fludd in his study—the room that had once been a scullery, and was now full of drying pots and drawing pads, in the midst of which was a Morris & Co. Sussex armchair, in which Fludd was sitting. He said

  “I have something I want to say to you—a proposal I want to put you. About Imogen.”

  Again, that lurking, parodic sense of being a suitor.

  “What about Imogen?” said Fludd, ungraciously. Prosper Cain said that he had been impressed by Imogen’s talent, and explained his plan for her immediate fortune.

  “She’s very well where she is,” said Fludd.

  “She’s lonely and unemployed,” said Cain.

  “Her family needs her, I need her.”

  “You have Philip Warren and the inestimable Elsie. You have your wife and Pomona. I think it is time to give Imogen her freedom.”

  “Ha! You think I imprison her.”

  “No. But I think it is time for her to leave.”

  “You are an interfering pompous military bastard. And you know, none better, that there’s no money to pay for her keep in the filthy city.”

  “I propose that she lives with me as a visitor until—as I believe she can and should—she wins a scholarship to the Royal College. And then she will be enabled to earn her own keep. If she doesn’t marry. She doesn’t meet many young men, here.”

  “You believe I don’t know what my duty is? And her duty is to care for her parents.”

  “Not now, not yet, however you look at it. Old friend, you are behaving like a tyrannical father in a story. I know you better than that. I know you love your daughter—”