The Children's Book (60 page)

Griselda was thinking furiously. “Would you consider telling Charles?”

“He isn’t my cousin either,” said Dorothy, with a brittle cackle of laughter.

“No—but—he keeps going on these cultural trips to Germany with Joachim Susskind. He goes to Munich, where he—Herr Stern—is. Do you think—just possibly—
we
could go, too? With Charles, and Herr Susskind, and maybe even with—with—Toby—do you think a
grown-up brother and two tutors would be chaperone enough? Charles is good at secrets. He has lots. He does all sorts of secret things with Joachim Susskind who looks so respectable and gentle. He gets up to all sorts of things—revolutionary things, avant-garde art things—the parents would
die
if they knew. We could both go. I could speak German and study there. And if the tutors went, you could go on working for your exams. I’m sure they have classes in Munich we could go to. And you could think about seeing him—Herr Stern—your father. I liked him. I liked him very much. He’s gentle.”

Dorothy sprang out of the bed and flung her arms round Griselda. They hugged each other. Griselda considered the bloodstains on the nightdress.

“That was a
voluminous
nosebleed. Buckets of blood. You must have had a frightful shock.”

“I did.”

“Are you all right now?”

“I’m all right as long as I keep
doing something
. I shall have to lurk here, for a bit.
I’m not going back to Todefright.”

“Won’t your parents be upset? Will they let you go to Munich?”

“I need to make them frightened of what I will do if they don’t. Tell everybody. Run away altogether. Kill myself. Waste away. Shout and shout at them. They wouldn’t like any of those. Which do you think?”

“I think you should lurk here and be stormy and intimidating. Whereas
I
shall be persuasive and charming, and say if I can go and study in Munich for a bit, I will let them give a sumptuous ball for me when I get back.”

“I don’t think I shall ever enjoy another ball.”

“Well, if I fix this for you, you’ll have to promise me to come to that one. As moral support. We shall have to
tell
Charles or he’ll never agree. But if we do tell him, I think he might, because he does love secrets and subversive things.”

Elsie’s child was born in an attic in Dymchurch, from which you could see the sea. It belonged to a semi-retired midwife, who was a friend of Patty Dace. The labour was long and terrible, and the bruised child—a very small child—was slapped and shaken into a quavering howl, just as the dawn rose over the Channel.

“It’s a girl,” said Mrs. Ball. “She’s little, but she’ll live.” Elsie swam in and out of consciousness, like a mermaid in the sea.

“Do you want to see her?” asked Mrs. Ball, who had attended births where the mother turned away a grim, resolute face, and would not look. Elsie swam. Elsie floated. She heard a voice say

“Give me her. Let me see.”

Mrs. Ball put the bundle in the crib, and raised Elsie’s pillow, on the cast-iron bed.

“You must stay awake then, you mustn’t drop her.” The sea poured in and retreated. “Give me her.”

The baby was swaddled in a piece of towelling, like a peg doll. Mrs. Ball put her in Elsie’s arms. She had a creased little face, like an ancient wise monkey. She opened a tiny mouth, and mewed. Hair, of an indeterminate colour, was plastered to her head. She opened dark, dark eyes under bruised lids, and blinked, and then stared, letting light flow over them.

“Oh” said Elsie, catching her breath. Her breasts swelled and hurt. She said

“Her name’s Ann.”

“Did you think she might be a girl? Did you have a name ready?”

“No.” Elsie gave a kind of sobbing laugh. “I can see her name’s Ann. She’s so small, it’s a small name.”

“She’ll grow.”

“I want to see all of her.”

Mrs. Ball unwrapped the little body. Elsie touched the raw-looking feet, considered the swollen sex, put out a finger for the wavering hands to grip, and was gripped.

“Ann,” said Elsie, shifting her painful body so that she could rest the nodding head on her shoulder. “Hey, Ann. Stay with me.”

Mrs. Ball, who tried not to be sentimental, and failed, felt tears in her eyes, and a choke in her throat. It was not the first time, and would not be the last.

Philip came to see Ann. The whole business of her birth and begetting had shamed him, somehow. He felt sullen, and put out, and deeper than that, afraid of something that concerned him dreadfully and was out of his control.

“Her name’s Ann,” Elsie told him. Mother and child were clutching each other, Ann’s face pushed into Elsie’s breast.

“Just Ann?”

“Just Ann.”

“It suits her. She looks—she looks all right.”

“You’re her uncle.”

“I know that. You’ll keep her.”

“I don’t seem to have no choice. I thought I might. I didn’t know what I’d feel. I had an idea of turning me head away, you know. And then I saw she was mine.”

She said “They’re unbelievable, those ladies, they sorted it all, just like they said at the meeting about the women of the future, they said single women should be looked after, and they’re looking after me. And Ann.”

“Turn her face this way a bit. I want to draw her. She’s got your brow.”

Neither of them mentioned anyone else she might resemble.

Phoebe Methley came to see Ann, bringing a bunch of wild flowers for Elsie, and a blue vase to put them in. She also brought apples, and two little baby dresses, and a bonnet. She perched on the end of the bed, and watched Philip’s pencil move on his sketch-pad.

She sniffed, and got out her handkerchief.

“I’m sorry, it’s silly, I always cry when I see newborns.”

“Her name’s Ann.”

“You’ll keep her?”

“I couldn’t give her up, I couldn’t.” A silence. “If it wasn’t for you, and the other ladies, I w’d a had to. I can’t ever tell you… ” Both women were weeping.

Phoebe Methley had a fairly clear idea about who was Ann’s father, and could not, for some time, bring herself to look closely at her face.
She had had, she now understood, a romantic hope that Elsie would want nothing to do with Ann, that she herself might
have to
offer this child a home, in a house where her own unmentionable children would never come. This act might entail a generosity of which she would not be capable, she knew also. She said

“Anything you need…”

“You are too good to me.”

“Women must work together,” said Phoebe, with a healthy asperity. That evening she said to her husband “Elsie Warren has given birth to a daughter.”

They were sitting at the dinner table. She served him a stew of haricot beans, simmered with onions and pork rind, and a spoon or two of molasses, and a trace of mustard, flavoured also with rosemary from their garden, and sprinkled with chopped parsley and chives. It was a slow-cooked, thoughtful dish. Herbert Methley sniffed it, and said that it was good. More than good, ambrosial, said Herbert Methley, not meeting his wife’s eye.

“I went to see them. Her name’s Ann. She’s a very sweet, tiny little thing.”

Herbert Methley did not like to talk of children, anyone’s children. He said he had, today, made enormous progress with his new novel, it had finally settled into shape, and was flowing along like water in a river-bed.

Phoebe went on, sternly and bravely.

“We formed a little feminist committee of fairy godmothers to make sure Ann will be well looked after. I wondered if we might even have her here, a little—only now and then, you understand—Marian Oakeshott has offered to ask Tabitha to help—”

Herbert Methley stared distractedly out of the window. He said he thought this new novel might be his best—his best yet—might make their fortune—if he could have time and silence and absence of distractions to write it at its current speed, while the spirit moved him. He said he had a good title.

“Do you, Herbert? What is it?”

“It is to be called
Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl.”

“Mr. Woodhouse from
Emma
, Herbert?”

“No, my love, though the connotation is present, and you have perceptively noted it. It is spelt, in this case, Wodehouse. There is a figure—a kind of Green Man, a kind of Wild Man of the Woods—who
is known as Wodwose. I discovered, to my great delight, that country people still talk about Wodwoses but call them Wodehouses. It is to be the tale of a timid man who retreats to a cottage in the woods to live naturally—a man who at that stage temperamentally resembles Mr. Woodhouse from
Emma
—who coddles himself with woolly comforters and embrocations—and meets the Wild Girl who is living freely in the depth of the forest—”

“You said it was a wood.”

“It is an English wood that
symbolically
takes on the properties of the deeper Forest—where he learns to walk free and naked in Nature—”

“What is she like, the Wild Girl?”

“I haven’t wholly invented her. She has your eyes, of course. I cannot invent a—a beloved woman—who does not have your eyes. But she is hard for to tame. Yes.”

“And how does it end?”

“I don’t know that, yet, either. Wonderfully, I think. But, it may be, with a wonderful disaster. I need to find it out, I need to follow my instincts. Which is why I need
particular
peace and quiet in the next few months—such as you have always protected for me, my darling.”

In June, a party consisting of Toby Youlgreave, Joachim Susskind, Karl Wellwood, Griselda Wellwood, and Dorothy Wellwood, set out by boat and railway for Munich.

Most of the persuasive talking had been done by Griselda. A child who has been brought up in a partly public space, surrounded by servants directly and indirectly concerned with the controlling and ordering of her own life, a child who has not been brought up in intimate contact with either of her parents, and who has been accustomed to meet them in formalised, public spaces, has had to learn to keep her own counsel, to create a private space for private projects, inside her own head and body. Many upper-class girls did not learn that, and went dolllike from nursery to dance floor to white lace in church and the unexpected fleshy horrors or delights of the bridal bedroom. If Griselda was not a doll, even though she had often been dressed as a doll, it was, in fact, because her father and mother loved her, with however much reticence, as a human being. She knew this—as indeed Charles/Karl also knew it in his own case—and now exploited it, with some cunning, on Dorothy’s behalf. She did not know what it was that had so shocked her
cousin—it was something appalling in the
way
she had been casually told about her parentage, Griselda surmised. But she loved Dorothy, and Dorothy was shocked. So Griselda went to Katharina, and confided in her. What she confided was a series of half-truths and serious fibs about Dorothy’s unhappiness at home, about the lack of seriousness with which her flighty parents approached her steadfast ambition to be a doctor. Delicately, Griselda accused her mother of favouring Charles/Karl
—he
could command the attention of a tutor, and by travelling with this tutor as his companion, deprive Dorothy of lessons she needed. Dorothy was nervously depressed. She, Griselda, was restless. Why should they not, with each other for company, go with Charles and Joachim Susskind to Munich and perfect their German—

“You will not,” interposed Katharina from Hamburg, “learn classical German in Bavaria—”

“Herr Susskind speaks classical German. And he has an aunt, Mama, who has a
pension
and gives classes in mathematics and biology to young ladies—mathematical genius runs in Herr Susskind’s family—she is called Frau Carlotta Susskind—and we could stay in her
pension
and see the artworks, and study, and it would take Dorothy out of herself—I can’t bear to see her so unhappy.”

“Her unhappiness is very sudden.”

“No, it isn’t, Mama. She is very strong, and she hides things well. I can confide in
you
, she has given me permission—”

Katharina sometimes thought that Griselda and Dorothy were almost unhealthily bound up in each other. Griselda saw that thought pass across her thin face, though it was not articulated.

“And when we come back—you will give a dance, and I will be serious about coming out, and
after that
you will allow me to study in Cambridge if I still want to—”

Katharina kissed Griselda. She said

“There is something I don’t know—”

“There is always something girls don’t tell. But it isn’t an
important
thing,” said Griselda, lying splendidly. And Katharina smiled, and agreed to the journey.

Dorothy had formed the violent intention of never returning to Todefright. She would become an exile. She would go to Bavaria, where she had no particular wish to go, to find a father whom she did not particularly wish to see. But she was a practical being, and understood that she could not get away without going back. Clothes must be
packed. Money must be discussed. Studies must be arranged. She asked Griselda to come with her. Together they were less approachable, less open to blackmail, or emotional invasion. She dreaded being in the same house as Humphry, and assumed he dreaded confronting her. Olive, too, had shifted in her inner landscape. She had done something, felt something, which had been kept a secret, which changed hugely who she
was
for Dorothy, in ways Dorothy had not yet worked out.

She stayed a few days in Portman Square, pretending to be ill. She did not say much more to Charles and Griselda than she already had. Any wrong things said, could only make things more dangerous, more precarious.

She dreamed about both her fathers. Her dreams were hectic. She dreamed of Humphry, walking towards her, smiling under his foxy moustache, across the meadow at Todefright. In the dream he stood in the sun, and opened his arms, and lifted her up to kiss her, as he had done when she was a child, and in the dream she understood she had made a terrible mistake—she could not remember what it was—but her father was holding her safe and all would be well. Then she woke up, and remembered.