The Children's Book (48 page)

Some of them had Imogen’s long face and drooping shoulders: some of them were plump Pomona. The males were faceless fantasms. Elsie crunched towards them over the destruction of other versions, and saw that the wavering arms and legs, the open mouths and clutching hands were not all the same age, went back years, into childishness. There were so many, Elsie thought they resembled a coral reef, thrusting out stony thickets underwater. It was hard for Elsie to look at them, in the state of bodily need which already possessed her. Something inside her own body responded to the opening up, the penetration, the visual shock of these. But under the sexual response, and stronger, was terror. Not terror, exactly, of what the girls had been made to do, or maybe only imagined as doing. Terror of the ferocious energy that had made so many, so many, compelled by a need she did not want to imagine. She backed away. She had the presence of mind to take off her hated shoes and wrap them in her apron to be brushed clean of traces. She did not think that the maker of this display would take kindly to any hint or trace of her own discovery of it.

She did not know if she would have told Philip, if he had been there. She had a strong need to tell no one, as if silence would unmake the shelves, and the gleaming white things, and the dusty light. It had the opposite effect. She was haunted. When Pomona returned from the tea-party, Elsie’s unwilling brain undressed her cream-skinned body, opened her legs, so that when Pomona next stroked Elsie’s arm, Elsie, for the first time, slapped away her hand, said sharply, “Don’t!” and turned away from Pomona’s face, where distress flickered and calmed itself.

At the August Bank Holiday weekend Geraint came home to see his mother and sister. Basil Wellwood took him into Kent in his new Daimler. He had formed a godfatherly affection for “young Gerry” as he was now known, which Gerry reciprocated, asking intelligent questions about mines, bonds, and markets, which Charles had never done. Geraint was now working as a clerk in Wildvogel & Quick’s currency department. He had lodgings in Lambeth, and strode daily across London Bridge in a crowd of black-clothed men, hurrying and intent, like army ants, or a tidal stream like the grim river beneath. It was a huge change for a ragged boy, “dragged up” aesthetically in an impoverished marsh. He preened himself in his new clothes, signs of a total metamorphosis, a grub become a dragonfly. He found the hum and murmur and heat and scent of the human crush the most alarming thing but he was resolute that he must not only get used to it, but learn to like it. He was amiable to other clerks, and learned to join in japes, and outings, where to be enthusiastic, where to hold back. He was canny, deliberately rather than instinctively canny. His handwriting was precise and beautiful—he had inherited something of his father’s eye. He discovered he had a facility for accurate calculation, and took intense pleasure in it. It was of no use in a dusty old house in a dismal marsh.

He was frequently bored to exhaustion, but never yawned. There were things to learn. He looked around to learn them. He was going to have a country house, and servants, and champagne, and—much more vaguely—an elegant wife in fashionable gowns. He had a double vision of the City and the Stock Exchange. He loved its conformity, its narrowness, its pure drive to money-making. He learned to love its dun air, in which floated a fine haze of soot and grit, an air which was thick, like the sediment on dusty windows, a colouring at once a respectable
toning-down, and a kind of vanishing, like the drab breast feathers of dunnocks scurrying under hedges. And it came to him vaguely that what was at the centre of it all was both a thing, and a symbolic key or clue to all other things, the gold that lay quietly in sovereign pieces and stacked ingots in the vaults of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the strong-rooms of Wildvogel & Quick. For the figures he scribed and arranged in his elegant ink columns, the telegrams and the bankers’ drafts, were also symbols of things, whose solidity delighted his imagination. Things like bicycle-wheels, dynamos, thick cement, bolts of silk and bales of wool and pyramids of dusky bright carpets, tin-lined cases of tea and sacks of coffee beans, trawlers, steamships, typewriters, wines and sugar, coal and salt, gases in carboys, oil in flasks and barrels, spices sealed in lead caskets. It was all full of a curiously lively dust, which drifted and rose and fell. Dust from the cinders of thousands of chimneys, mixed with a sediment of spice and sugar, mixed again with the imagined glimmer of gold dust.

Once these things had been held in huge vaulted warehouses along the Docks, but this was changing, as Basil explained to him. The warehouses were becoming echoing empty sarcophagi, through the influence of telegrams and steamships. The Baltic Exchange, Basil told Gerry, received three telegrams every minute. Each could result in the dispatching of a ship which would take only a week or so from the States and only four or five weeks from Australia and the Orient. The great holding-merchants must change their ways or die out.

Geraint saw the turning globe in his mind’s eye, with its vast red Imperial patches, its shifting frontiers, criss-crossed by the invisible threads of the telegrams and the visible furrows of the great iron ships forging steadily through flying foam and mirror-calm seas.

In the Daimler, on the bright Bank Holiday Saturday, Basil Well-wood talked about gold. Gold was needed to fight the war in South Africa, which Humphry had written against, describing it as a war in the interests of the London gold market, the bullion reserve, and the speculators. Basil was unsettled, because the Chancellor had chosen that day, at the beginning of the Bank Holiday weekend, when the Stock Exchange was closed and the city was empty, to announce a War Loan designed to replenish the depleted stocks of gold coins and bullion held by the Bank of England. Investors were disadvantaged. Trains would not run on time because of the holiday and time was vital at this delicate point. It was unfairly done. Geraint nodded agreement. He mentioned
the South American mines—Camp Rind, Crickle Creek—where venture corporations were looking to replace the supplies which had thinned with the closing of many South African mines since the outbreak of war.

He was handling correspondence about these matters. His work was more interesting than it might have been, because four of the clerks from Wildvogel & Quick had marched away with the City Imperial Volunteers. Such patriotic young men had, of course, been promised that their posts would be kept open for them. There had been a most unpleasant incident when the
Daily Mail
had accused another German bank of telling two such clerks that they would have to leave. The paper had not named the bankers, but the City knew they were Kahn and Herzfelder, and Maurice Herzfelder had been closed in on, jostled, baited, brought down and kicked about his body and face by angry inhabitants of the Kaffir Circus. No one had been brought to book. The Stock Exchange was a place of anarchic gathering crowds, with wild emotions. Gerry had been in place on May 18th when the Relief of Mafeking was announced. Everyone marched and howled and sang, waving flags and blowing trumpets and singing anthems, accompanied by coaching horns. Gerry too, marched and sang. “Rule Britannia,” “God Save the Queen.” His mind was hooked into the communal mind. It was new to him, he had never known anything like it.

The Bank Holiday weather was golden. Basil and Gerry sat behind the chauffeur and looked out benignly at hopfields and cornfields. When they came to the Wellwood country house, Basil, in an excess of friendliness, invited his young clerk in for a glass of sherry, and then ordered the chauffeur to take the young man and his bag through the country roads to Purchase House. It would be a fine surprise, for his family, to see him turn up in an automobile. They would not be expecting that. Geraint was a little worried because he was not sure they were expecting him at all—he had meant to surprise them. He was agitated in his mind about what to do about the chauffeur—would the man expect a tip, should he be invited in, how would he negotiate this? They wheeled and chugged out of the Garden of England and into the Marsh, and drove up the long drive to Purchase House. No one stirred. They came into the stable-yard, which was empty and full of heat, like a vat. Nobody came out to meet them. Geraint said he could perhaps find a
beer to refresh the chauffeur, who refused politely (he had his own beer in his lunch basket, he wanted to get back to his own family, he was aware of Geraint’s social predicament, and only residually interested in showing off the automobile to the inhabitants, if any appeared, of Purchase House). Geraint stood in the yard with his bag, and watched the chauffeur crank up the engine and reverse out of the yard, with a series of spluttering and petroleum farts.

Elsie Warren came out of the dairy-studio just in time to see the high back of the car disappear between the trees. She greeted Geraint civilly, and expressed the right amount of surprise, both at his appearance, and at his conveyance. She said she had seen one or two in Rye, they were quite startling. She said she would make him up a bed, and that his mother was taking a nap, as she usually did in the afternoon. She did not know where Pomona was. She might have gone out with a bicycle. Was he hungry?

He was very hungry. Elsie produced, in a very short time, an excellent lobster salad and some fresh brown bread. “There’s a fisher-boy,” she said, “who brings me a lobster or a crab now and then as an excuse to hang around.”

Geraint looked at her with mild curiosity. So she had a follower? He saw her see what he thought—she smoothed down her skirt over her hips, self-consciously. He saw that she had become extremely pretty, that her figure was just as it should be, and her face full of life. He observed her observing his observations. They both decided to say nothing. He looked at her reconfigured arts and crafts garments. They did not hang perfectly. He remembered shouting at Prosper Cain that no one had seen fit to pay Philip. He did not know if Philip was now paid—he was at least being taken on an educational trip to Paris, so Imogen and Florence had told him, when he called in at the Museum. He wondered if Elsie was paid. He thought if he didn’t find out, no one would. Someone—the invisible fisher-boy?—would be after Elsie Warren, would want to take her away, make love to her, make a wife and mother of her. This would be both right and very inconvenient. He thought he must talk to Elsie.

Pomona came in and rushed into his arms, kissing and hugging him. He told her, as he had not told Elsie, that she was becoming a beautiful young woman, and she tossed her mass of pale hair and cast down her eyes. Imogen had asked him to look out for Pomona. She herself was taking a course in jewellery, and making drawings of designs for small
silver and enamel pendants. She seemed calm, which made Geraint aware that in earlier days she had not seemed calm, only dulled, or dimmed. She said she worried about Pomona, who would have, she said obscurely, to “bear everything” now that both she and Geraint were gone. Geraint had looked anxiously across at Florence Cain, who was pouring tea. He was a little in awe of Florence, who was seventeen, two years younger than he was, one year younger than Pomona, and a good four years younger than Imogen, but seemed wiser and more assured than any of them. He thought Florence was beautiful, like an Italian painting of a saint. He thought she was “just right,” without analysing her dress, or the way she managed a tea-tray. Imogen said “Don’t mind Florence, she’s a friend,” and it was Geraint, not Florence, who blushed as their eyes met. He remembered Florence as he took in Pomona, bundling herself into his embrace, stroking his face. Her eyes were wet. Geraint said

“Have you been all right, Pommy? Are you missing us? Do you have plans?”

Seraphita came sleepily downstairs at this point, and was duly astonished to see her changed son, in his new linen jacket. She asked vaguely if Elsie had “seen to” him, and he said Elsie had. Elsie began, briskly, to clear up the salad plates. Seraphita sat majestically and smiled. Pomona said “Tell us about… tell us about…” but could not think what question to ask about a life of which she knew nothing.

“I came in an automobile,” said Gerry. “Mr. Wellwood sent the chauffeur to bring me here. He is very considerate to me.”

He was never going to be able to tell these two about bullion and loans, about telegrams and dust.

The holiday ticked on, in a sunlit haze. Geraint got in some good solitary walks across the Marsh, and some bicycle rides with Pomona. Elsie produced delicious dishes of fried sprats and dressed crab and potato salad with mustard. Herbert and Phoebe Methley called, and were given tea, and asked all the questions about life in the City which his family had not asked. He described the hurrying march of men over London Bridge, the hurly-burly in the Stock Exchange, the celebration of the Relief of Mafeking. Herbert Methley said it was generally believed that Money was soulless, but this was not so. Mammon was a great spiritual power, and perturbed both angels and demons. Mammon
was conducting this horrific killing in the Veld. Gold had made the war, and gold kept it in motion. This disquisition annoyed Geraint. He knew gold was a kind of living force, but the personification weakened and sentimentalised it, which he sensed, without being able to put it precisely into words. He saw gold in his mind’s eye, bright ingots, a hot flood from a crucible. He wanted no moth-eaten demon. Pomona said “We had no idea it was all so exciting. We thought it was dull and—and mechanical.” So it is, said Geraint. Dull, mechanical and exciting. Elsie whisked past with fresh scones she had made, and a pot of excellent gooseberry jam.

He liked breathing the air of the Marsh, he felt stronger in his body; but he was not unhappy when the time came to leave. Before that, he had his little talk with Elsie. He asked her to step into the orchard, he wanted to talk to her. They paced between the trees. “Do you need anything?” asked Geraint. “You seem to perform small miracles with loaves and fishes—I feel I do need to ask, have you enough—enough money—to manage? My mother is not practical.”

Elsie surprised him. She sat down on a grassy hump and stretched out her legs. She took off her bulky sandals.