The Children's Book (38 page)

“I wonder what it needs to become real?” said Prosper, accepting Julian’s evaluation of his own work.

“I don’t think art should be personal,” said Julian. “In fact, I think it shouldn’t be. And yet, what is wrong with my very nice roses, is that they’re nothing to do with me. They don’t need me, and I don’t need them.”

When they were out of earshot, Olive said to Prosper that he was fortunate to be able to talk to his children with such ease, to put them at ease, she meant to say—she wanted to say, how very well he had succeeded at bringing them up—at being—

“Both parents,” said Prosper. “Male and female, both. It hasn’t been easy. Soldiers are very male, by nature. Except that they need female skills, like sewing and polishing, for they live separately from women. In that sense, they are like the boys to whom Dr. Badley is diligently
teaching needlework and cookery at Bedales. A concept that, as a soldier, I find attractive. Camps, and needlework for boys. And theatre. Come and look at Miss Fludd’s work. It interests me.”

There she sat, Imogen Fludd, in her imperfectly hand-sewn garments, that lacked both art and craft. She had designed one black and white square, and one small group of spring flowers. The black and white was frost-flowers on a window-pane, their petals outlined with meticulous strings of minuscule dots, a laciness that owed something to Beardsley’s work for the
Yellow Book
and the
Savoy
, though Prosper Cain could not imagine this dumb girl understanding Beardsley’s sly, sexual forms. The lips and clefts of her frost-flowers were surely innocent? Her spring flowers were in vanishing pastel colours, a hint of rose, a shadow of primrose, a blue stain like the vein in her pale wrist. They were trying to retreat back into the plane of the paper, they were blushing mildly to be present at all. He was about to say something anodyne and pass on when the shapes pulled together in his head, and he saw that she had, in a helpless way, exactly that sharp vision that Julian had rightly renounced. He said

“These could be good, you know. Why do your flowers lurk in the centre of the paper? As though they were going down a funnel. You should do what Mr. Morris always insisted on, extend the vegetable forms to the edges of the square so that they can grow beyond it—”

“I can’t.”

She didn’t look up, her face was heavy.

“Well, then,” said Prosper, on an impulse. “Define their limits. May I?”

She handed him her charcoal and her pencils.

He enclosed the frost-flowers in squared panes. And then he drew a circle round the spring flowers, almost as though they were on a plate, or inside the rim of a basket. It was surprising how the confinement brought them to life. He laughed.

“They needed to feel safe,” he said.

“They needed to feel safe,” she repeated.

He said

“Have you other work I can see?”

She handed him a portfolio. He found a series of drawings of little coloured fishes, springing and curling, blue and yellow and red.

“I was trying to illustrate
The Arabian Nights,”
she said. “The talking fishes. It’s got no shape, like everything I do.”

Prosper enclosed the fishes in an extempore frying pan, with two handles, bringing them to life in the same curious way.

“Not,” he said, “that you can now say they are safer. But they are livelier. They have a purpose, if it is only to get out of the frying pan.”

“Into the fire?” said Imogen doubtfully.

“Have you thought of enrolling at the Royal College?” Prosper said. “You have talent. You could learn a craft—”

“I don’t know,” said Imogen.

“You should think. I will talk to your father.”

He saw her think of begging him not to do so, and then deciding to say nothing.

When they had left the class, Olive asked him why he had encouraged Imogen Fludd, and not his own children. Who were, she said, clearly much more accomplished.

“Accomplished, oh yes,” said Prosper Cain. “But that girl has what you have, my friend—she knows the shapes of things, as you know the shape of tales. Look at her work. One artist should recognise another.”

“I am not an artist. I earn my living by storytelling.”

“That is nonsense, dear lady, and you know it.”

So they came slowly to the performance of the play, and the end of the summer school. The theatre was the wild garden at the side of Purchase House, which had once been a formal garden, and had unkempt hedges which had once been clipped yew, and were now bearded and tufted and invaded by brambles and Old Man’s Beard. Steyning commandeered some students and helpers, including Dobbin and Frank Mallett, to make papier-mâché statuary on wire frames, which in the winter scenes were stark and in the summer scenes were garlanded with silk flowers and real flowers, mixed. He had brought footlights, with limelight, which altered the shadows on these forms, making them bald and sinister, or bright and clear. There was a goat-horned herm, with shaggy thighs, and a naked girl with falling hair, seen from the back. There were two squatting, cross-legged little fauns who grinned at the
stage-corners in the harvest scene, and were absent in the Sicilian sculpted palace. Then there was Hermione’s plinth. He was exigent about this object—he wanted the woman-statue higher than the cast and the audience, with the moon, which was full, silver and shadowy behind her. He wanted both stone mother and fleshly daughter to be chastely clothed in endless swirling pleats of white cloth, and exhausted Olive by rearranging both her standing place and her complicated garment over and over again. He pointed out that by moonlight, with her back to the moon, and a veil cast over her, she would glow in the shadows, the shape of the dark bushes and her mysterious cowled head against the moon would be magical. And she must move, when she stepped down, like an automaton. As though the force of gravity, not her own will, lifted each foot, bent each knee, held her arms in place. “I don’t know what to do with my arms.”

“Practically, you will need to hold on to the pleats, whilst you’re up there, or they’ll come out. Your right arm across your breast, to hold the veil down at your left shoulder. The left arm around the waist to hold the cloth in so it doesn’t swirl away when you move. You need white rings on your fingers, ivory or moonstone, I’ll see what I can find.”

Olive was not very good at gliding like an automaton, and became irritated by the constant repetition.

“You are related to the stone man in
Don Giovanni
, you are a sister of Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea … Think of the stone music—”

“I am a woman of a certain age, who has borne a number of children,” said Olive drily.

“You are a fine figure of a woman,” said Steyning, who was still thinking in terms of sculpture.

So there she stood, on the first night, with the moon behind her, making shadows in her wound garments, which she clutched, pale-knuckled. She was surprised how very difficult it was to keep still, for so long. She thought about her body, under all its unaccustomed white sheeting—like a dressmaker’s dummy, she thought, something vague and muffled. She was ageing. She was pleated across her stomach as well as over her shoulders. She was still in her time. Prosper Cain admired her. Herbert Methley desired her. Humphry wanted her, but she was cross with Humphry. She had cheered herself somewhat, going over Humphry’s conversation with Maid Marian, by remembering that it was quite clear
from what he said that he had not known either that Marian was the new schoolmistress at Puxty, or that she was coming to the summer school. It would go by, she thought, as other things had gone by. She made what she hoped was an invisible adjustment to her stance, as her ankles were both numb and strained.

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.