The Children's Book (11 page)

The March Hare had played elegantly with that giveaway blush. Humphry made the mistake of quoting Bunyan in the argument with Basil. This reminded both of them of The March Hare’s accusations. But Humphry quoted further into
Pilgrim’s Progress
, passages not in the
Domino
attack. Barnato led people into rashness and loss, said Humphry. “Whether they fell into the pit by looking over the brink thereof, or whether they went down to dig, or whether they were smothered in the bottom by the damps that commonly arrive, of these things I am not certain …” People perish like Mr. By-Ends, said Humphry.

Basil said “You know your text very well.”

“We all know the
Pilgrim’s Progress
, from childhood. And you must know it is apt.”

“We do not all have it at our fingertips, to quote in libellous articles, to which we dare not put our name.”

The accusation had been made. Humphry could neither bluster, nor deny.

“You cannot deny the argument has weight? That the warnings in it need to be heard?”

“A man should not do one kind of work by day, and stir up mud by night, to stick on his colleagues. And to harm his family,” Basil added.

Humphry sneered. He did not feel like sneering—he felt he was himself on the brink of a pit. But the form of the quarrel required him to sneer.

“You cannot have been so foolish as to implicate yourself—or your family—in any of Barnato’s gambles?”

“You do not know what you are talking about. You purvey malicious chatter which can
do real harm—”

“I do what my conscience leads me to do.”

“Your conscience is a will o’ the wisp, leading into a bog,” said Basil, rather cleverly, twisting the metaphor his way.

Violet said “Let us talk about something else. Let us make peace.”

Basil said “I think I cannot stay in this gathering any longer. Come, Katharina. It is time to leave.”

Katharina said “Very well.” She was conscious that it was hard to sweep out when your spare clothes were in your host’s bedroom. She said to Charles

“Fetch Griselda.”

“She’ll not be happy,” said Charles,
sotto voce
.

Dorothy and Griselda were fetched back from the orchard. Katharina told Griselda they were going home. “Why?”

“Never mind. We are going home. Put on your cloak, please.”

Griselda stood in her party dress, white, like a pillar of salt. She had not a defiant nature. But she had not a compliant nature, either. Tears brimmed in her eyes. She swayed. Dorothy said

“We have been looking forward to midsummer for ever. We have not had the fire, or the music, or the dancing. How can we have them without Griselda and Charles? How can we have the music without Charles? Their beds are made up…”

Basil said to his wife “I really cannot stay.”

“Perhaps we might leave the children with their cousins. It is a time that they have been looking forward…”

“As you wish. I simply do not want to stay.”

“Then we will go,” said Katharina, signalling to her maid, putting out her hands to Olive, who had come to see what was happening. She did not feel she could apologise for Basil, indeed, she felt he was justified, but she had no wish to ruin the party. Violet appeared at her side, murmuring sensible things about the later return of the children. The carriage came and was loaded. No one went to wave goodbye. Humphry went and refilled his glass, drained it, and refilled it again. He was full of an electric sense that everything was at risk. For the moment, there was the party. He called for music.

Dorothy said to Griselda

“The
first
thing is to find you a dressing-up dress, like ours.”

Griselda was still white and stricken. Violet took her hand to lead her into the nursery. Violet instructed Philip and Phyllis to light the lanterns.

Griselda stood in the nursery and undid the buttons on the pink dress. She stepped out of it, and it subsided, Miss Muffet reduced to a tuffet. She ought to put it on a hanger. She left it where it lay.

Violet said that the Rhine-maiden dress was the thing. It would look pretty on Griselda.

This was an old evening dress of Olive’s, cut down by Violet, and securely stitched into a girl-sized fancy dress. It was sea-green pleated
silk over a grass-green underskirt, with a gilded girdle. Violet adjusted it. Griselda put up her hands and undid the tight coils of her hair. Violet brushed it out over her shoulders. Griselda had eyes which would normally be called grey, or hazel, which became, when she was dressed in green, suddenly emerald. Dorothy said “You look lovely.” Griselda wriggled. “I can move, at least.”

When she rejoined the party, everyone clapped. Humphry took another glass of champagne and proposed a toast to Greensleeves. Violet said it was the Rhine-maiden dress, and Anselm Stern began suddenly to sing a version of the opening music of
Rheingold
, bowing over Griselda’s hand. He had a clear, high voice.

They danced. The music was a trio: Charles on the fiddle, Geraint on the flute, Tom on a mixture of a small drum and a penny whistle. They played “Greensleeves” for Griselda, and “O du lieber Augustin” for August Steyning and Anselm Stern. It was a developing tradition that the old danced with the young. Humphry whirled Dorothy, her small squarish feet racing to keep time, whilst Prosper Cain revolved calmly with Florence. Olive danced with Julian, who was neat and graceful. August Steyning led out Imogen Fludd, and then danced with her stately mother. Humphry released Dorothy, who was breathless, at the request of Leslie Skinner, who handled her as though she was breakable and hopped over tufts in an odd way. Anselm Stern danced with Griselda, humming to himself, capering like his own puppet prince. The Tartarinovs danced together, moving like one whirligig. Anselm Stern bowed to Dorothy, who backed away, and said she did not want to dance any more.

Violet Grimwith insisted that Philip dance with her. He flushed crimson in the lantern light, and shambled to and fro, staring at his feet, until she released him, and took her turn with Humphry. He backed away into the shrubbery, where he found Dorothy, sitting on a bench in the near-darkness, in a kind of nook in the hedge. Both of them were in search of solitude and felt constrained to be polite. Dorothy said, with Fabian truthfulness, that you could have too much dancing. Philip agreed, with a kind of snort.

They sat in silence. Dorothy said

“No one asked you what you wanted to be.”

“Just as well, probably.”

“I said I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t know I did, until I said it, that was what was odd. Because I do.”

Dorothy believed that if you told someone something truthfully, and honestly, you were giving them something, a kind of respect. Philip said

“Can women be doctors?”

“There are some. It’s hard, I think, to get the training.” She paused. “People don’t think women should work.”

Philip wanted to say “My mum works, she has to.” It wasn’t the right thing to say. He said “My mum works, she has to.”

Dorothy gave him her attention.

“And you? What
do
you want? Why did you run away?”

He said, sounding cross because he was desperate, “I want to make
something
. A real pot.” He always saw it in the singular. “It might seem odd, like, to run away from the Potteries, to make a pot. But I had to.”

“I think you will find a way,” said Dorothy, serious in the dark. “I hope we can help.”

“Everyone has been very kind.”

“That isn’t the
point.”

There was a silence. They were aware of each other’s unspoken thoughts, the form of Dorothy’s apprehensiveness about her newly discovered ambition, and what it might do to her life, the inarticulate shape of Philip’s need. It grew darker. They stood up at the same time, and went out of the shrubbery, back to the dancers.

August Steyning and Anselm Stern had relieved the musicians so that they could dance. Steyning took the flute, and Stern the fiddle. They improvised waltzes and Bavarian folk dances. Geraint, daring, asked Florence Cain to dance, and they took a few tentative steps, treading on each other’s toes, before Humphry swept her off, and signalled to the players to go faster. He held Florence very close, his hot dry hand hard in the small of her back. She felt him controlling and teaching her body rhythms she hadn’t known she knew, swaying and intricate, her face held on his embroidered chest. Her feet were suddenly skilful, as though she was one of Herr Stern’s puppets. She caught her breath. Violet applauded. Olive came circling past, dancing with Tom, as they had danced in the nursery, holding both hands at arm’s-length, swooping round, and round, and round, Tom’s feet scampering on the periphery,
Olive smiling and rotating in the centre, so that when they stopped the whole sky went on hissing in a circle, the planets and constellations, the great wheeling moon, the whipping branches of the trees, the blurry flame of all the lanterns.

After the dancing, when they were all breathless, came the now almost traditional tableaux from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. August Steyning produced the ass’s head said to have been worn by Beerbohm Tree, and Toby Youlgreave reenacted Bottom’s enchanted sleep, lying on the rising mound that led to the shrubbery, whilst Dorothy, Phyllis and Florian hovered as Peaseblossom, Moth and Mustardseed. Toby was not in fancy dress apart from the papier-mâché and horse-hair mask he was inside. He lay in Olive’s lap, his modern legs in flannels looking both thick and vulnerable. Olive stroked the mask. Toby could feel her heartbeat, somewhere lower in her body. He snuggled up to her, as a child might, empowered by the drama, remembering with regret the earlier performances, in which he had been in a torment of erotic pricking and pulsing. Just there, under the skirt, was the desired place. His hot cheeks were on it. Or not on it, on a smoothly lined boot with ears, which encased his head. He sang damply into it. “The finch, the sparrow and the lark, the plain-song cuckoo grey—” She was trembling a little. She stroked his mask. She stroked his living shoulder-flesh. Humphry advanced in his cloak, and squeezed juice on her eyelids, and she started dramatically away. The enchantment was over. Oberon had won, and claimed the changeling boy.

The other passage they always acted was the end of the play, the blessing of the house. Tom stood at the entrance to the shrubbery, and began

He spoke lightly, clearly, in time. Everyone was still.

Philip was caught in the common stillness. The lion roared and the wolf howled in his unaccustomed head. Glamour was sprinkled over humans and bushes, and for the first time he saw house and garden as their makers saw them, with love. It was both wild and tame. Magic flickered inside the hedged and walled circumference. Humphry and Olive, fairy king and fairy queen, spoke the golden speeches of blessing on married men and women, on children born and unborn. (Olive had begun to suspect she was pregnant again.) The watchers had contented faces.

Hedda came running in her witch dress. She cried “Fire! Fire!” portentous and gleeful. The audience streamed back towards the lawn.

Philip’s lantern, with its painted flames and smoke, and elegant, sinister forms, had been given a place of honour in a herbaceous border, standing on an uneven terra-cotta pillar. As its candle burned down, it had wavered and flared. Then it had fallen into the surrounding vegetation, which was a mixture of ferns, brackens, fennels and poppies, both the great silky Shirley poppies and self-sown wild ones. It was a very English piece of semi-wildness, at the centre of which was a huge alien clump of pampas-grass, including last year’s growth, which was dry and burned fiercely, with a crackle. Poppies shrivelled in the heat. There was a smell of roasting fennel. Sparks rose against the curtain of the dark, and tiny floating tissues of blackened leaves and seeds. Violet said she would go for a bucket, but Olive said, no, it wouldn’t spread, and it was a magical midsummer bonfire, like the ones made by Stone Age people and mediaeval witches on the Downs.

When it died down, they should leap over the ashes. It was a real Midsummer bale fire, a propitious sign. Lovers should leap together over the ashes. Burned branches—or stems—should be saved. Toby Youlgreave could tell them all about bale fires.

They stood round her, watching the flames catch, hearing the sap hiss in the stems. She smiled recklessly at Prosper Cain, August Steyning, Leslie Skinner, Tartarinov. She said to Toby “There is even fernseed, look.”

Fernseed, Toby said, was almost too tiny to be seen. It had the power of making you invisible, if gathered at midsummer. You need to gather it with a forked hazel bough, over a pewter plate. It is said to be fiery in colour, and folklorists think it is the seeds of the burning light of the sun. There is a German story of the hunter who shot at the sun on midsummer day, and collected three hot drops of blood on a white cloth, and this became fernseed. It is said to reveal buried treasure if you throw it in the air. One of the most potent charms there are.

The fire diminished, and became a glow amidst floating grey leaf-ash.

“We must jump,” said Olive, charming and beckoning. She took Tom’s hand, pulled him forward, ran and leaped with him, laughing, beating the dying sparks from her skirts. Humphry took Griselda’s hand, and they jumped together. Soon everyone was running and jumping, anarchists and Etonians, the tall playwright swinging the diminutive Hedda by the waist.

Someone was singing. It was Anselm Stern, leaning against an elder, clear and reedy, Loge’s song of the fruit of eternal youth,

It was magical. Everyone agreed, it was magical.

The Wellwoods disrobed in a lamplit bedroom, the curtains open to the moon and the starry sky. They bickered, in a customary way. Humphry stood in his velvet breeches and embroidered jerkin, leaning against the bedpost, looking at his wife, divested of her wings and robes, standing in bodice and bloomers, still with the honeysuckle and roses in her hair.