The Children's Book (56 page)

They were troubled, as intelligent girls at the time were troubled, by the question of whether their need for knowledge and work in the world would in some sense denature them. Women worked, they knew, as milliners and typewriters, housekeepers and skivvies. They worked because they had no means, or were not pretty or rich enough to attract a man. The spectre of imaginary nuns haunted them. If Griselda did manage to be admitted to Newnham College, in Cambridge, would it be like entering a nunnery, an all-female community, mutually supporting intellectual desire and ambition which the world at large still saw as unnatural, and frequently as threatening? Griselda’s quiet love for Toby reassured her on this front also—she had ordinary womanly feelings, she was not a freak, or a withdrawn contemplative. She just wanted to be able to
think
.

Dorothy was sterner—she had to be—the path she had chosen was still into hostile country, even though there were now a respectable number of qualified women doctors in the world, and a new women’s hospital. The life of the mind, and the truly useful life of medicine, would doom her, too, to the inhabiting of an all-female community. Women doctors treated only women, and worked with other women doctors. One side of her nature would have to be denied, in order for her to become the professional person she meant to be. It was not so for males. Men doctors married, and their wives supported their surgeries, and comforted them when they were tired. In low moments, late at night, Dorothy asked herself if she was some kind of monster. But she went on, at least partly because she could not imagine confining her life to frills, furbelows, teacups, gossip. If women only, better the operating theatre than the sewing-circle. But it wasn’t easy.

Charles’s secret, his political opinions, caused him paradoxically to live in the frivolous, parasitic way those opinions condemned. He didn’t want to commit himself to university, and kept telling his father he needed time to work out what he really wanted to do and be. He went on European cultural journeys, frequently to Germany, since he was, after all, half-German. He talked Joachim Susskind into accompanying
him for tours of six or eight weeks—thus putting a great strain on Dorothy’s instruction and disrupting her planned progress. Susskind was originally from Munich, and liked to go back there and talk anarchism and other forms of disorder—sexual, theatrical, religious—in the Café Stefanie, and in the Wirthaus zum Hirsch in Schwabing. Charles/ Karl was introduced to a psychoanalyst, wild Otto Gross, and the social anarchist Gustav Landauer. He went to satirical cabarets, which he did not follow, because his German was not idiomatic enough, and his local political knowledge was nonexistent. But he loved the smoke-filled air and the smoke-stained ceilings and the air of serious, witty wickedness and idealism. He would have liked to be a writer or a painter, but was not sure he could write or paint. He bought a sketch-pad and drew some secret cows and naked women, both of which were so wooden that he tore them up. Munich was full of serious, laughing women, painting in the open air. He loitered behind them, and watched their wrists turn as they put the strokes of paint on the canvas. He said to Joachim that he would like to stay long enough to take lessons in art or design. Joachim said complacently that München was a cauldron of creativity.

Prosper Cain was troubled by his responsibility for his motherless daughter, who was becoming a young woman. He feared she was in love, and he feared the love was hopeless. Before Julian went to Cambridge, he and Florence had been very close, reading the same books, taking walks together, arguing about the nature of things. Now Julian was at King’s he had moved into the penumbra of the secret society, the Apostles, and was being watched by young men like Morgan Forster, to see whether he would be a suitable embryo, to be propagated and “born” as a member, on the sacred hearthrug. The sponsor of an embryo was, in the occult language, his “father.” The members of the Society were Reality: everything else was merely Phenomenal. An older student, Gerald Matthiessen, a brilliant Classic, had taken an interest in Julian, with a view to potential fatherhood. He had invited him to breakfast, and taken him on long walks across the Fens. They had discussed Plato, the Aesthetic movement, the nature of virtue, the nature of love. They mocked each other, intently, like sparring partners in a gymnasium. Julian had at first thought that his own penchant for irony, his belief in the dangers of seriousness, would put off Gerald, the passionate thinker, the moralist. Gerald was handsome, in the way Julian himself would have been handsome—fine, narrow, dark, slightly evasive, even sly. Julian’s ideal lover was still someone blond and outdoor and innocent: Tom Wellwood. He was aware that Gerald was interested in him. Many of their conversations turned on male love, and the sublimation of base desires.
Tamen usque recurret
, murmured Gerald, one night over port. Julian, feeling like a girl, looked down at the cheese and grapes on his plate, and smiled a secretive smile. He rather thought he was putting up with the motes of sexuality in the light from the windows, the sensuality breathed like cigarette smoke and thinning out into the general air, just in order to be able to talk so intensely. But then again, maybe it was becoming his natural atmosphere. He invited Gerald to stay in the South Kensington house—“you will find the quarters cramped, but we have courtyards and staircases and secret cupboards to dream about.”

•  •  •

Prosper Cain was a connoisseur but not a university man. He had spent his life in the army, which was also a male enclave, and he knew the value of intense comradeliness, even though he knew nothing at all about the Apostles. He also, with deep alarm, saw that Florence was studying the male couple wistfully, was standing outside the
pas de deux
wanting to be let in. She could not fall in love with Julian. Nothing more natural than that she should fall in love with Julian’s other self, totally eligible, totally at home in the world she had grown up in. Simply because she was female, Florence was the creature Prosper Cain loved most in the world. He loved his son very nearly as much, except for the extra slight rage of protectiveness. He was offended to see his poised Florence with an expression of anxiety, or wistfulness, or looking lost and left out. He talked amiably to Gerald about majolica and putti, about Palissy and dried frogs and toads, and wanted to stab him in the heart for ignoring his daughter. For Gerald did not see Florence, except as a generic girl. He also did not see Imogen Fludd.

Imogen was doing good work as a jewellery designer. The small scale, the precision, the concentration suited her. She made some delightful asymmetrical silver pendants, decorated with drooping threads of tiny pearls like water-drops on spider-webs, and some elegant horn combs, to wear in the hair, inlaid with slivers of ebony, mother-of-pearl, and enamelled copper, one of which she gave to Florence. The art students liked her, but she was intimate with none of them, and did not appear to expect to be. She went only occasionally back to Purchase House, never alone, with Geraint, or—once or twice—with Florence. She had her mother’s long neck and large eyes, and might have been beautiful if she had been more animated. In 1901 she was already twenty-two. At Easter she presented Prosper with a little jewelled egg she had been working on in secret, midnight-blue outside, pure milky white inside, studded with little moons and stars and crescents made of fine slivers of gold and pearl. Inside the egg was a gold charm in the shape of a phoenix, with crimson eyes and flaming crest. When she handed it to him, the blood flared up her neck and cheeks. “I owe you
so much,”
she said, in an almost-whisper. Cain put his arms round her, and felt the liveliness of her spine and the soft weight of her breasts. She needed a husband, he thought. She needed love, and a life of her own.

He conceived the romantic idea of giving a dance—a dance for Florence and also for Imogen. He would have given it on Midsummer Eve, but he wanted to invite the Todefright Wellwoods, and it would not do
to clash with their annual festivities. So he decided on May 24th, the birthday of the late Queen, which fell on a Friday. He discussed the matter with Olive Wellwood, when she was visiting the Museum and checking gold and silver treasures. It was hard for him, he told Olive, to bring up a motherless daughter as he should. His Florence was eighteen, and should be thinking about things like “coming out,” he supposed, though she also talked about following Julian to Cambridge. He had the idea of giving a supper and dance—not too formal—in the Museum itself. He thought a small orchestra—the Regiment could make one up—could play in the tea-room in the evening. It would be very pleasant to see the young people dancing amongst the ceramic work of the students, and between the Minton pillars. And the Morris Green Dining-Room could be used as a kind of retirement room, where guests might sit and chat, or eat sorbets.

Olive was enthusiastic. It would be wonderfully romantic, she said. Like the dancing princesses in the hidden palace under the lake—it would have the pleasure of being secret and impossible. The Museum was impossible, in many ways, at present, said Major Cain. It was full of dust from the huge building works, it was not peaceful, as the hammers crashed and the drills howled. But in the evenings the tea-room was quiet and the dust had settled. He was in need of a fairy godmother to help organise everything. He did not think his company sergeants would understand romantic dances for young ladies. He wondered…

Olive Wellwood, like very many women who have risen from the lower classes, felt a primitive terror, a gulf opening at her feet, when asked to deal with social complexities she had never learned. She could not do it, she saw immediately, she would betray herself again and again. And yet, the delight of working with Major Cain, of being confided in, of exchanging confidences. Her mind whirled, frantically in her head, like a rat in a cage. She could give socialist, unconventional parties in her own garden. She made her own rules, and Humphry could carry off anything. But something semi-military, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is quite another matter. She said

“You know, I think you would do best to consult Katharina Well-wood, my sister-in-law. She wants so much to give parties and buy dresses for Griselda, and Griselda retreats into books, and says she wants to study at university. Griselda and Dorothy are quite naughty. They won’t join in. But
here
—she would be in her element—it is just what she most wants—”

Katharina was delighted. She discussed catering and flowers with Prosper. She recommended dressmakers and shoe shops. Griselda submitted to being measured for a new, grown-up party dress. Dorothy was to have her first real evening dress and Florence her first grown-up dance dress. They were like princesses in fairytales who had been given magic walnuts or acorns, which they cracked, and out floated beauty.

Florence’s dress was white lace over dark pink silk, with a silk rose in the low neck, and elbow-length lace sleeves. Griselda’s was made of Liberty silk, in grass-green strewn with floating white and gold flowers, lilies of the valley, pale primroses, bluebells.

Prosper Cain would have liked to give Imogen Fludd a ball dress—an elegant, modern, shapely ball dress. But he felt it would not be proper. He deputed Florence to ask her what she would wear. He had invited Benedict Fludd, Seraphita and Pomona to come to the party, and had found lodgings for them in a house near the Museum, with a retired sergeant-major and his wife. Florence repeated that Imogen had said that Purchase House was full of stunning embroidered silks and linens, all baled up and folded away. She suggested they both go down to the Marshes, find something possible, and bring it back to be refashioned by Katharina’s dressmaker into something less mediaeval and more up-to-date. What about Pomona? Florence asked Imogen. “She will just have to wear what Mama puts on her,” said Imogen. “She’s very pretty, whatever she’s wearing. She doesn’t seem to notice things like that.”

When they went to Purchase House, things were more than usually chaotic. Elsie was nowhere to be seen, and Benedict and Philip had just lost a whole firing of porcelain bowls. Seraphita was limp and pale, and Pomona scorched some grilled fish and boiled vegetables.

Imogen took Florence into a closed room, where dusty leather trunks full of folded materials and barely worn dresses were piled on top of each other. Pomona crept after them, and stood, large-eyed, half-in half-out of the room. Florence noticed that the sisters seemed to have nothing to say to each other. Imogen, resourceful and deliberate, turned over garments, shook out folds. She found what she was looking for—a dark green and ribbed silk, embroidered with pink and white daisies. It was shaped like a mediaeval gown, with a high waist and a little train. “We can do something with that,” she said. “And it will look good in the Green Dining-Room with the Burne-Jones panels and the Morris paper. It will blend in.”

It was Florence who asked Pomona what she would wear, if they could help…

Pomona replied flatly that her mother spent her life sewing, it was what she did, she would put together something, as she had done before. Her face was lovely, her voice was vanishing. Florence asked, where was Elsie?

“She went away to have a baby. She’s coming back, it’s all arranged.”

She did not invite questions. Florence asked lightly whether Pomona, too, would come and study at the Art School, and noticed that the question distressed both sisters, in different ways. A look went between them. Pomona said she thought not, she was needed here, in Purchase House. She looked down at the dusty floorboards. Imogen said they must go, they must go back to London, now.

In the train, on the way back, she said suddenly to Florence “I’d be happy if I never had to go back there again.”

“Why?” asked Florence, lightly.

“I can’t bear to be so
odd
and so hopeless. It’s a place without hope. Well, the pots are hopeful, when the kiln doesn’t melt down. But—but—I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you and your father.”