The Children's Book (89 page)

“Has anyone seen Tom?”

No one had. Violet repeated that he didn’t like crowds, and would turn up.

Tom put on his overcoat and slipped out of the theatre, where the enthusiastic audience was spilling out into the lighted Strand. He began to walk. He walked along the Strand and down Whitehall, and came to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge. He walked on to the bridge, and stopped for a moment, leaning his head on his elbows, and squinted down at the river, which was high and on the turn, black, glinting, moving fast. He remembered Hedda, in the theatre, saying one was always tempted to throw oneself over, or outwards. He looked at the black surface—he didn’t know how long. Then he moved on, over the bridge, and turned south. He walked along well-lit streets, and shady ones. Now and then an electric tram passed him, making a groaning sound and full of yellow light, but he did not think of boarding one. It did not matter where he went. All that mattered was to move, to be on the move, to use his body and not his mind. He wove erratically across the south of London. He found himself crossing the flat expanse of Clapham Common, with its ponds sullen in the meagre light, and its trees black. You knew you were out of London when the bark of the elm trees ceased to be thick with soot. London was a creature that grew busily and decayed busily: terraces and houses went up and came down. Cranes stood skeletal against the glow of the streetlights; there were huts in the road for the diggers of drains and of channels for cables. The air was nasty in his lungs. He went on, and came to Dulwich Village, which was pretty, though encroached upon by the tentacles of the city. He headed for Penge, avoiding Croy-don. He did not have a plan. He meant to get out of the dirt, and the noise, and the dense population, and head for the North Downs where he knew where he was. At this point, he thought he was heading for Todefright, and home. Where else should he go? He went fast, in a long, loping, even stride. I am, he thought to himself, an expert in not thinking.

•  •  •

Olive and Humphry read the reviews over breakfast in London. They were ecstatic.
The Times
pointed out that like
Peter Pan, Tom Underground
had used old theatrical forms—the pantomime, the ballet—in new ways.
Peter Pan
was a children’s play with hidden depths revealing hidden truths about childhood and motherhood.
Tom Underground
was for grown-ups, although its form was that of old fairytales, the places “Under the Hill,” combined with images taken from Wagner’s black dwarves and from contemporary coal-mining. This play had the magic of
Peter Pan
combined with something dark and Germanic, the bright black intentness and craziness of the world of the puppet and the marionette. The reviewer even quoted Kleist’s essay on the superiority of the marionette and its pure gestures. Something of that had been experienced that evening by a bewitched audience.

“You are a heroine,” said Humphry, and kissed her.

“I wonder what happened to Tom.”

“He’s always going off on his own. He doesn’t like crowds. He’ll surface.”

“I think so, yes.”

They went back to Todefright, by train.

Tom had reached the edge of the city, at dawn. He saw the stars, as he saw the edge of the London pall of smoke, and passed beyond it, and saw the sun come up, over the North Downs, as he began to climb. He knew the drovers’ paths, and the wooded abandoned roads of the Downs and the Weald. He stopped beside a horse trough, and filled his hands, and drank. The water was very cold: it was early in the year, but there was no frost, and the ground was dry, not clagged with mud. He was on the road home. It would take him a day or so to come there. He bought a lump of bread in a shop near Badgers Mount.

A woman journalist had come from
The Lady
to interview Olive. She wrote about Todefright in the winter sunshine.

The interviewer did not want to leave the charming house. Violet gave her coffee, and Humphry drove her to the station. “Where do you think Tom is, Vi?”

“He’s walking about somewhere. That’s what he does.”

“That woman wanted to talk to him.”

“That’s probably why he’s not here. He’s not so unworldly that he doesn’t think of lying low, at the moment.”

Tom had suddenly come to a temporary stop. He had found a barn, at the edge of a coppice, in stubble fields, and had come in and found heaped logs and bales of straw. So he lay spread-eagled on the straw, and heard the mice scampering and the rooks cawing in the wood.

He went into a dreamless sleep and woke not knowing quite where he was, or why. A man with a grey-and-white woolly beard and a squashed hat was looking at him, gloomily.

“I’m sorry,” said Tom. He found it was odd to hear his voice. “I haven’t done any harm.”

“I wasn’t about to say you had.”

“I’ll be on my way.”

“And where is that?”

They went out onto the downside, and looked up at the skyline. “Over there, I think. Todefright.”

“Over there. Aye. Take the track by the woody bits and bear right, and you’ll come to the road, with luck. Are you hungry?”

“A bit,” said Tom. He had meant to tire himself out, and was pleased at how slowly he thought, and how his hunger seemed not to be part of him. The old man offered him an apple, a red and yellow and juicy apple, which Tom bit into. The old man then offered him a broken-off piece of pasty, containing mostly vegetables, a bit of turnip, some carrots, some onion.

They went out onto the track in the bright light, and Tom set out again, over the chalky track and the short grass of the downland, up towards the skyline.

The easy way home was to join the main road which skirted Biggin Hill and ran south to Westerham. He stood on a ridge, with the cold wind in his hair, and looked about him.

Then he turned left, not right, towards Downe, and then he continued to go east into the heart of the North Downs.

He meant to exhaust himself. His body was something he observed, loping along, muscles pulling and ripping.

He thought, As for my head, there has never been much in my head, not really.

Full of an unreal world, he thought, maybe a question of a mile further on. A creature tried to materialise in his head, a boy-woman with a gilded cap of hair, shapely legs in black tights, an improbable Sherwood Green doublet with an elegant wide leather belt, with a silver buckle. He fought back. He imagined it bleeding, covered with blood. He tried to stop imagining.

He did this by concentrating on his steady feet, and this caused him to stumble.

He saw a hawk overhead, and that made him briefly happy. He didn’t ask himself where he was going. It didn’t matter. He was not going home. The Downs were empty and he was empty. He was possessed by energy and even thought of running.

Olive sent a letter to Dorothy. She persuaded Florian to cycle to the railway station to make sure it went quickly.

She sat a little longer. She stared out of the window, at the quiet lawn.

She wanted to say
why
she was so worried about Tom. Dorothy was the only person who knew Tom. But she could not tell Dorothy that she had not told Tom the whole truth about the play. He had nodded and closed his face when he saw the title of the play on the programmes and then on the posters, but he had come along quite quietly to the opening.

He was doing what he always did with difficulties, persuading himself they didn’t exist if he didn’t name them. She knew him, he was her beloved son. It was
she
who had named
Tom Underground
.

It was only a fairy story.

It wasn’t.

Olive answered. “Please come home. There is still no sign of Tom. Violet says it is a storm in a teacup but then she would say that.”

She sealed the letter, and wrote several answers to letters from friends and the public about the originality of
Tom Underground
.

Tom had got onto the heights of the North Downs. He walked. He found himself crossing what he believed must be the London Road—he went across, looking neither to right nor to left, and saw a slow cart going south, and a sputtering, grinching motor car, with its heavily veiled and scarved passengers, going north. He came to a junction with a signpost, faded, and hard to puzzle out. It said he could go down Labour-in-Vain Road, to Labour-in-Vain. He liked the words, so set off along the track, to what was hardly a settlement. It took him a little further south, and then he went east again and found he had met up with the Pilgrim’s Way, the old path where the Canterbury Pilgrims had travelled to the shrine of the murdered Thomas à Becket. That pleased him too. He tramped north-east and then followed the Way along the Downs until he came to Charing Hill and Clearmount. The Way then ran along the south side of Frittenfield Woods, at the end of which he turned south-west, seeing a sign that said Digger Farm. From there he went towards Hothfield Common and Hothfield Bogs. This brought him to the railway that ran from Sevenoaks to Maidstone. He scrambled down the cutting, and stood for a moment on the line, between the shining tracks. He heard a train, coming from the north. He thought he could simply stand there, and let it. Then he found himself on the other
side, and waited to watch the engine, with its steam, and fiery grit and busy, clattering piston. He remembered all the talk about the end of Stepniak. He could.

He went on, crossing the Weald, south-west. Hothfield, common and bogs. Across the Great Stour river at a place called Ripper’s Cross. The Weald was made of intractable, heavy clay, and was still covered with a mixture of ancient oak woods and gnarled copses of ash and thorn. He had walked most of it, over the years. Indeed all he had ever done with his life was walk about in this ancient bit of England. The Pilgrim’s Way and the bogs reminded him of Bunyan, and the Slough of Despond. He had read that over and over, as a little boy, maybe once every two weeks, living the walking to heaven, not understanding a word of the theology. Walking over this earth was like being in an English story. He had read
Puck of Pook’s Hill
, which Mr. Kipling had sent with an admiring note to Olive. He had read the Dymchurch Flit, where all the Pharisees, the People of the Hills, streamed over the midnight beach to leave the country which no longer believed in them. He knew—it was the kind of thing he troubled himself to know—that Purchase House was not a religious reference to the redemption of sinners, but an old word for a meeting-place of pucceles, little Pucks. Or maybe, he thought, it was both, the English language works like that. It mixes things up. He was on a kind of pilgrimage through English mud, and English chalk, and ancient English woods.

He didn’t quite ask himself to where. He took signposts to places whose names he liked. He did now have in his head an image of a story. Not more than the skeleton of a story, a walker walking through England. The odd thing was, that he saw it (he always
saw
stories in his head) only in shades of cream, and white, and silver, a bleached, leached, blanched story, the colour of the skeletons of seaweeds, or indeed, of humans and beasts.

Hoad Wood, Bethersden, Pot Kiln, Further Quarter, Middle Quarter, Arcadia, Bugglesden, Children’s Farm, Knock Farm, Cherry Garden, Maiden Wood, Great Heron Wood, and then, suddenly, he was faced with a line of water he recognised was the Royal Military Canal, built to add to England’s defences against invasion by Napoleon. He was quite suddenly on the edge of the Walland Marsh. The canal ran East-West, inside deep banks. There were dragonflies, and long fat frogs. He walked east along it, crossing it and turning south on a road that ran to Peartree Farm, passing Newchard, down to Rookelands, Blackman-stone,
past St. Mary in the Marsh, and on to Old Honeychild. He was now in the marsh proper, criss-crossed by waterways. South-east of Honeychild he crossed the New Sewer. He went between Old Romney and New Romney, over earth that had been steadily thrown in by the workings of the sea, and made habitable for sheep by the digging of dykes. Galdesott, Kemps Hill, Birdskitchen. He skirted Lydd and the military camp with its rifle ranges and ordnance targets, set up on the bleak pebbled forelands. He found a way out of Lydd, across the Denge Marsh, past a place called Boulderwall. The surface of the earth was huge, flat, ripples and ridges of pebbled shingle, with strips of grey-green lichen clinging to the sides protected from the wind. He went across the shingle of the Denge Marsh, between the black wooden huts, the rusty boat machinery, the upturned, beached, fishing boats. He went past the Halfway Bush and the Open Pits, on which seabirds floated and called. He went on, out to the point of Dungeness, beyond the place where the single-track railway line simply ended in pebbles, below the coastguard’s hut.