The Children's Book

10

The old dairy was a good shape for a pottery studio. The kiln was separated, in a room that had been a scullery; its chimney protruded through the slate roof. The dairy had slate shelves, with drawers under them, and various cupboards in the wall, as well as an inner larder, where once butter and whey had cooled, and now the pots were left to become leather-hard, or to wait for a glaze to dry. The windows were small and deep-set. There were two, and a wheel stood underneath each of them, one a large wheel with a treadle motor, one a simple hand-turned wheel, with a milking stool and bucket beside it. There were little stained-glass roundels set in the windows. One showed a maned and horned sea serpent on cobalt waves, and one a white sailing sloop, skimming or foundering, it was not clear which. Pinned to the door was a life-size coloured drawing of a Renaissance man, in doublet, hose and gown, all a dark crimson, and a flat velvet cap. He stood beside a large urn.

Philip, very cautiously, set about ordering things. He swept up the debris, and made a neat heap of the reusable parts of the exploded kiln. He was tactful: he knew what things he could rearrange, and what he might need permission to touch. There were drawers containing tangles of metals, used for experimental glazes, which he left as they were. The new clay he put in bins, in a kind of coal-shed, pointed out by Fludd, who at first stood in the doorway, poised and watchful, to see what Philip would do. Philip wiped the wheels, and found cloths to cover the slurry. Fludd said “Well, we might take a look at the kiln. We need to take care with the mortar. The last was too coarse. It exploded here and there, and marked the pots.” Philip nodded. He knew about explosions. He even offered advice as they rebuilt the firing-holes and the spy-holes for the pyrometric cones. He went up on the roof—Fludd held the ladder—and repaired the chimney, where it came through the slates. From up there across the yard, he saw the fat-necked shape of what he did not know was an oast-house. He came down again and asked Fludd what it was. It was too fat to be a kiln, he said, though at first, when he saw them in the countryside, he had thought they were bottle kilns. Fludd explained about the hop-growing, hop-picking and brewing in Kent. He fired his kiln, he said, with spent hop-poles, which were plentiful and easy to get. Philip said he thought you could make a whacking big kiln in one of those. Fludd said “We might. You’d have to make some pots yourself.” Philip grinned with pleasure, and Fludd grinned back.

Over the next weeks, cautiously, the two of them made pots. At first Philip simply did apprentice-work. He wedged the clay, a process akin to kneading bread, which battered every air bubble and water drop out of the solid mass. Otherwise, as Philip knew very well, a duck-egg bubble could expand, and burst, in the firing, causing large or small explosions, which could lose the whole kiln-full. The clay was mostly local. There was clay dug from Rye Hill, which was a strong red, and clay dug in the marshes, which was sandier. Fludd pointed out one sackful—reddish—and remarked drily that that was the clay to which we all returned, and had been excavated from the graveyard, which had a particularly rich layer of it. He looked at Philip to see what he thought, and Philip grinned again. It was, as Fludd said, good strong clay.

Fludd did import, by train, a pale, creamy clay from Dorset, which he used to make pouring slip, or engobe, and mixed with the red clay to lighten it. Philip learned to pound and sieve this clay, and mix it in water. He learned to revolve clays in the bladed pug-mill which stood where the butter-churn had been. He learned to mix clay bodies and later to mix glazes. Like most potters, Fludd was secretive about the recipes for both these things. He had leather-backed ledgers, locked in a drawer, written in a code, based on Anglo-Saxon runes and Greek lettering, which Philip could not read. He did not use conventional weights, but had his own spheres of dried clay, numbered from one to eight. Philip mixed tin glazes and lead glazes, and was given mugs of milk to counteract the poison in the lead. He mixed antimony and manganese and cobalt. There was a substance called pin-dust, made of the copper powder left over from the manufacture of pins, which made green glazes.

There came a day when Fludd invited him to sit at the wheel and throw a pot. Fludd centred the ball of clay for him, and Philip put his wet square hands on it, and depressed the centre. Brown clay ran over his fingers as though they were becoming clay, smooth and homogeneous, or as though they were clay becoming flesh, with living knuckles and pads. The clay under his hands rose and grew into a thin cylindrical wall, higher and higher, as though it had its own will. It whirled evenly round, lined with the movement of the fingers—up, up, and then suddenly it flapped and staggered, and form slumped into formlessness. Philip was breathless and laughing. Fludd laughed too, and showed him how to finish the rim, how to recognise the form to which the clay aspired. He said that many master craftsmen never threw a pot, but confined themselves to the decoration. Philip said, how can they not want to know the feel of the clay. Fludd said, Philip had potter’s hands. He took Philip’s place, and threw a tall crane-necked jar, a wide deep dish, a useful beaker, a squat jug with a ludicrous lip. Philip tried all these, and after a time succeeded more often than not. He kept laughing, soundlessly. Fludd smiled, benign. His bad temper seemed quite gone. He gave Philip a fat sketch-pad, and said in his ear, as he circled and smoothed the wet earth, that he must feel free to come in and model whenever he wished to.

Philip did not quite trust the genial mood that had come over the artist. He did not presume. He had noticed—without having analysed—the perpetual quality of watchful fear, or at least anxiety, in the curiously inert female members of the family. He had noticed Geraint’s scornful wildness, and whatever lay under it, though he could not have told anyone that he had noticed. Fludd appeared, even in a good mood, to have no small talk. The family, very unlike the Todefright gaggle, seemed to expect to eat in near-silence, and disperse after meals. On one occasion Fludd announced that Philip must have more clothes, so that those he was wearing could be washed. He seemed to assume that his vague request would be carried out. In fact, a parcel of clothes was put together—but it was put together by Dobbin and Frank Mallett, some things from both of them, some from members of the parish, fishermen’s socks and a jacket, workingmen’s shirts, blue and grey. Another working smock, so that Tom Wellwood’s could be washed. Philip found Pomona, sitting on the terrace in front of the house, altering cuffs and replacing buttons for him. He protested. She said “You can believe it’s a change from embroidering crocus and daisies.” Her voice was breathy and too quiet. Philip said he could sew, and Pomona said, be quiet, and let me measure this against you. Imogen came out through the door with glasses of barley water, and said to Philip “If you can help him—so that work is done, and things are made—and sold—we shall all be greatly in your debt.” Philip said he hoped there would—reasonably soon—be enough for a trial firing.

Fludd and Philip were taciturn, in different ways, and for some weeks they discussed only the weight of clay, or the best place to dry a platter, or the colour of glazes, or why Philip’s pots had gone wrong. Fludd did not think to ask his apprentice about his past life, or his family, and Philip volunteered nothing. Philip himself rarely asked questions, and only after some time asked about the figure in the drawing pinned on the door. He said he thought he might have seen it, in South Kensington, was that possible? Fludd said indeed it was. This was the figure of Palissy, the great French potter, from the Kensington Valhalla in the South Court. Ah yes, said Philip. I saw a dish—with toads and snakes—in Major Cain’s house. He said it was a fake. Fludd said that the Museum had made a horrible error, buying a modern imitation of a Palissy dish, worth at most £10 os od, for thousands of pounds. He added that it was a mistake easily made—the fakes resembled Palissy ware quite astoundingly accurately. Was Philip interested in the potter? Oh yes, said Philip, who was interested in pots.

Fludd began to tell Philip the heroic life history of Bernard Palissy. He told it in vivid, intense instalments, to the rhythm of the wheel, or the slap and thud of the wedging, or the scratch and slush of the sieving. It felt almost like an initiation rite—this was the exemplary tale of what it was to be a true worker with clay, a complete artist. Fludd’s voice was deep, and he left gaps between his sentences, as he meditated on what he was saying. Philip meditated too. He was learning.

He learned that Palissy had been, like Benedict Fludd, an inhabitant of salt marshes, a workingman who painted portraits and had also learned to paint on glass. He was poor and ambitious, and one day someone showed him “an earthen cup, made in Italy, turned and enamelled with so much beauty” that he had been driven to learn how to do such work—“regardless of the fact that I had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for the enamels, as a man gropes in the dark.”

Fludd stopped, and said “Something like that happened to me. It’s not reasonable, how a choice is made, of this or that craft, this or that life. In my case it was an Italian majolica plate, gold and indigo, covered with arabesques, and a kind of shadow in light—”

Philip said “I saw your watery pot at Todefright. I was looking already of course, I grew up, with the clay, but I saw that pot.”

It was the most personal thing he had ever said. Fludd, who was painting a jar with a stripped goose-plume dipped in manganese, looked up and smiled straight at Philip, seeing the serious square face.

“It’s a form of madness,” he said. “Palissy was a madman, and in my book supremely sane, and you’ll come to see—if you stay here—that I too am a madman. When the wind’s in the wrong quarter, I’m driven the wrong way. So to speak. You’ll see, I’m telling you in advance. A good gale in the right direction—and some solid earth—and I’m driven to be a perfectionist.”

He told how from seeing the one cup, Palissy had narrowed and intensified his search for perfection to the discovery of a pure white enamel to put on earthenware. He had a wife, and many children, and lived in poverty, for years upon years, experimenting with mixtures of metals and tinctures he’d learned from glass on hundreds and hundreds of shards of pot, which he took to local potters, or glaziers, to be fired. And he failed, and failed. Fludd gave a bark of laughter, and observed that failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements, he said. Any one of the old four—earth, air, fire, water—can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter—months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln. “It’s purifying fire and demonic fire,” he said to Philip, who took in every word and nodded gravely. “Very dangerous, very simple, very elemental—”

Palissy had given up his search, for a time, and turned his attention to other things—the nature of salt, or salts, the way plants used salts, the way plants used manure, and the way it was connected to salts—and the construction of artificial salt marshes—“on earths which are tenacious, clammy, or viscid, like those of which are made pots, bricks and tiles.”

He loved the earth, said Benedict Fludd. He worked with the earth and he loved it. He got his hands dirty, and improved his mind.

Another day, he told the heroic story of the initial discovery of the white glaze. He enacted Palissy’s four-hour wait at a glass furnace for the three hundred broken pieces of clay, each numbered and covered with a different chemical mixture. The furnace is opened. One of the shards has a melted compound on it, and is taken out, dark and glowing. Palissy watched it cool. His thoughts were black. But as the black shard cooled it whitened—“white and polished”—a white enamel—“singularly beautiful.” Palissy is a new creature, reborn. The glaze contained tin, lead, iron, antimony, manganese and copper.

Palissy ground a quantity of it—he tells no one the proportions, of course—coats a kiln-full of vessels, relights his own kiln and tries to raise it to the heat of the glassmaker’s kilns. He works for six days and nights, heaping in faggots, and the enamel will not melt or fuse. “He lost the first firing,” said Fludd. “He went out and bought new pots, and reground his glaze, and relit his furnace, and laboured another six days and nights. In the end, he had to feed his furnace with his own floorboards, and smash up his kitchen table. And still the firing failed, and he was thought of as a mad alchemist or forger, and reduced to extreme poverty. He worked for another eight years, built a new kiln, and lost a whole firing of delicately glazed pieces because the mortar had been full of flints which splintered, and spattered his pots.”

“But in the end,” said Philip. “In the end, he found the enamel, and made the pots.”

“He worked for kings and queens, he designed a Paradise Garden, and an impregnable fortress. He hated alchemists—he knew they were looking for something simply mythical. He liked to watch plants grow, and speculate about how hot springs, and fresh-water springs, rise in the bowels of the earth. He had a theory of earthquakes, which wasn’t unreasonable—he was thinking cleverly about earth, air, fire and water moving mountains—”

“What happened to him?”

“He was a Protestant. He didn’t accept the doctrines of the Church, and he wouldn’t compromise his beliefs. They put him in prison, and condemned him to death for heresy. He should have been burned to death for refusing—in his own words—to bow down to images of clay. He died in the Bastille, tough as ever. He was seventy-nine. I will lend you Professor Morley’s book, you can read it in there.”

Philip said he was afraid that would be no use. His reading was not up to it. He added, reddening, “It’s not up to much, to tell the truth. I can make out simple words, that’s all.”

“That won’t do,” said Fludd. “That’s no good. Imogen shall teach you to read.”

“Oh no—”

“Oh yes. She hasn’t enough to do. You won’t get far if you can’t read. And you’d like to read about Palissy.”

• • •

Docile Imogen agreed to give Philip daily lessons in reading. She said she had never taught, and did not know how to teach, but would do her best. She sat with him at a garden table in the orchard, or in the kitchen if the wind was blowing in from the Channel. She wore the same two or three lumpy linen dresses, with uneven necklines and embroidered lilies and irises, on whose petals Philip could feel the tiny spheres of blood from pricked fingers. He noticed—he was young and male—that she had a strong and well-proportioned body under the sacklike folds. He thought with the tips of his potter’s fingers about the contours of her breasts, which were round and full. He did not notice any female atmosphere around her—no scent in the hair, no hint of the smell of her skin, no hidden damp, breathing—and he was too young to know how odd this absence was. He did think, as she sat with her head of heavy hair bent over the pages, that she resembled some of the ceramic madonnas in the Museum. Sweetly calm. That was not quite an accurate way of putting it.

For the first two lessons she wrote words on a paper pad in flowing calligraphy. Words like “apple” and “bread,” words like “house,” “studio” and “garden.” She then decided Philip would do better with joined-up stories, and brought out a handsome book of fairytales, illustrated with line drawings by various artists, including Burne-Jones and Benedict Fludd. The stories were an eclectic collection from the Grimms and Andersen, from Perrault and the poets, including Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” The illustrations calmed Philip’s sense that he was being asked to read something babyish. This was the world of the Dream scenes enacted at Todefright. He was experimenting with modelling clay snakes and dragons to make handles for pots and he was impressed by Fludd’s wicked imps. He read “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” “The Princess in the Glass Mountain” and “The Princess on the Pea,” “The Little Tailor” and “The Constant Tin Soldier,” and finally “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Snow Queen.” He practised writing—which he was good at, since he was already precise with pen and pencil. He practised drawing imaginary persons, following the flowing lines of Burne-Jones’s garments and hair.

This was not quite what he had wanted. This wasn’t his style. Fludd had illustrated “The Snow Queen.” His Queen had a long, sharp face and a sad smile in a whirlwind of snowflakes over a lake of ribbed ice. She was attended by deformed imps, and tiny Kai was curled at her feet, like a sleeping snail. The pattern of lines was mesmerising and frightening. Philip wanted to learn from it, and do something different.

The stories—for better or worse, for insight or danger—gave him ways of describing the people around him. Imogen was the Sleeping Beauty, she had pricked her finger and was sleepwalking. He alternated this image with a half-dream image of her as a figure half-baked, fried in biscuit, not yet glazed or coloured, a pale first attempt at a living creature. Geraint—who was at home as little as possible—was some version of the Ashlad, careering about the outside world looking for his fortune. Pomona was all the Cinderella daughters in the hearths, woebegone and unregarded. She had come to his bed twice more, and frightened him terribly. What could he do, if she woke and found herself there?

Imogen never touched him, even accidentally. Pomona pulled at him constantly, fingering his smock, his clay-covered hands, standing behind him at table and ruffling his hair. No one commented on this behaviour, and Philip put a lot of energy into pretending it was not happening.

He made two more dangerous analogies, more or less simultaneously. In his daily work he was slowly making order in Fludd’s storerooms, arranging crocks and sacks, sweeping and mopping. When he could write fluently he would label everything, he told himself. The pottery had colonised much of the servants’ quarter of the manor house—which didn’t matter, because there were no servants, only an old woman who came in from the Marsh and cleaned, slow and creaking, and her daughter, who helped out with the laundry. Philip found a pantry that was locked. He asked Fludd if there was a key, and Fludd replied curtly, no, there was not. Philip remembered this when he read “Bluebeard.” He noticed for himself that people in stories always did what they were told not to do, and went where they were told not to go. He couldn’t see why, and had no intention of trespassing. But, perhaps because of Bluebeard, he thought the pantry was odd.

One day, putting his book together in the kitchen where he had been reading, he saw Seraphita coming in from one of her rare excursions outside.

She came with little skimming steps across the grass and across the gravel path, very slow, very rhythmic. Unlike her daughters, she paid a lot of attention to her dress. She wore white muslin decorated with violets, and a violet shawl. The muslin flowed from a high yoke: she was uncorseted, with a simple violet sash. Her gleaming hair was coiled on her head, and pinned with silk violets. She looked straight ahead, dreamy and distracted, her mouth composed in a pretty, unchanging half-smile. Philip thought it was as though she was skating on unseasonal ice—or rolling along on invisible balls or wheels. She came in through the door and progressed past him, still smiling fixedly, acknowledging his presence with an inclination of her long neck so transient that he wondered if he had imagined it. She reminded him of something. He remembered what it was. It was the puppet Olimpia, from the brilliant performance of Anselm Stern, Olimpia who was an automaton—a puppet playing a puppet, where the other characters had been lifelike.

He did not know what ladies did—he supposed they called on each other, went to parties, went shopping, went riding, played tennis. Not Seraphita. She walked, sat in her chair and stared pleasantly forwards till lunch, stitched a little, operated a loom a little, waited a little more, and arrived at supper-time. He thought she passed whole days without speaking. When he read about the Lady of Shalott, who was under a curse, and saw the world only in a mirror, he thought of Seraphita Fludd, and her large, glaucous, luminous eyes. But the Lady was awash with desire and discontent. The Lady rushed across a room and opened a window. Mrs. Fludd rushed nowhere.

Another peculiarity of the family was that they all went for walks in the countryside, but no two went together.

Geraint associated with gangs of young men on the marshes. These local youths, when Philip encountered them, tended to avoid him, or, if they were in groups, to gather and mock at a distance. Geraint made no attempt at all to introduce Philip to the boys he knew, and indeed barely spoke to him. Fludd went out for whole days, wrapped in a caped oilskin, carrying a gnarled walking-stick and wearing a brimmed hat pulled down over his brow. He never invited Philip to join him. Imogen went into Lydd, and occasionally, by bicycle, into Rye or Winchelsea, to buy food and sewing things. Sometimes Pomona went with her. They did not invite Philip—not, he thought, because they did not want him, but because it did not occur to them. He waited a few weeks until his writing had improved, and then wrote a careful letter home. He waited a little longer, and asked Dobbin, who had called in, about posting it. Dobbin explained about the post office in Lydd, and gave Philip a postage stamp. He asked Philip if he would like to walk with him to Lydd—or borrow a bicycle from the Fludds. Imogen said of course he could borrow hers. Dobbin asked if Philip had seen much of the countryside and Philip said he had not left Purchase House. “Not seen the sea?” said Dobbin.

“No,” said Philip. He said “I don’t exactly have working hours, or wages … So I keep doing what I can.”

Dobbin said Philip must walk with him and the vicar to see the sea. He could not be wanted all the time in the studio, encouraging though his work was. Dobbin asked Seraphita, who said she was sure Philip should go out now and then, they should ask Mr. Fludd. Fludd, when asked, said of course Philip should see the sea. He was a canny boy. He would know when he could go. And when he could not, of course, he would know that too.

So he walked, with Frank Mallett and Dobbin, to the seaside village of Dymchurch. Dymchurch has a seawall to keep back the ever-encroaching stormy salt water, and the seawall has to be climbed in order to see, or get to, the beach. The three went up the narrow steps, and Frank and Dobbin watched benignly to see their artistic protégé from the Midlands take his first look at the sea. It was a still, sunny day, and waves wrinkled in peacefully, one after the other, and soaked into the sand. Philip felt the mass of the water in his bones, and was changed, but found nothing to say, and stood there looking stolid. Frank and Dobbin waited. Philip said, after a time, that it was big. They agreed. He remarked on the salt smell, and the sound of the gulls screaming. It was a very long time, he felt, since he had been expected to say what he did or felt, as opposed to simply doing or feeling. He knew he needed to make acquaintance with the sea on his own, by himself. Children were paddling in the edge of the water. He wondered what it felt like, but his body shrank from it. Frank and Dobbin walked with him along the beach, and he got better at making the required exclamations of interest and amazement. He picked up a piece of seaweed, interested in its texture and little bursting cushions of water. He picked up some fragile pink shells and a razor shell. Frank and Dobbin were delighted. They walked him back into the village, bought him a good lunch in the Ship Inn, and told him tales of smugglers, in whom he was less interested than in the texture of the sea-surface and the seaweed. It was Frank Mallett who asked if he had a sketch-pad and pencils. Philip said no, he had used up the one he had had in South Kensington. Mr. Fludd had given him one and he had used that too. Frank bought him a new one in the general store in Lydd—the paper was not very good, it was greyish and too porous, but it was paper. They took him home.

On the way back to the vicarage at Puxty Frank Mallett asked Dobbin if he felt worried about Philip’s position at Purchase House. He seemed to be doing a lot of work, for no reward, said Frank. No one thought of providing things for him, personal necessities. Dobbin said that Fludd liked Philip. He thought for a moment, and then said he thought maybe Philip was the only person Fludd liked. He said he hoped Philip could make things workmanlike enough for the pottery to earn some money. And then he could have wages. They must just keep an eye on his welfare.

In the studio Philip told Fludd he had been to see the sea. He said he hoped to go again. Fludd said, why not, and that Philip should go to Dungeness, Dungeness would interest him.

Philip made his way to Dungeness, on foot, one hot day when the broom was shining gold and the seakale was covered with spherical seeds, turning from pale green to bone. Dungeness is bleak and rich, the longest shingle stretch in the world, swept by winds from the sea, westerlies and easterlies. It is inhabited—boats are drawn up on the pinkish bleached pebble banks, and there are strange, soot-black wooden huts, in which fishermen live, and round which lobster pots, anchors, broken oars, nets, accumulate. You walk out, over the stony surface, which is in fact full of strange life, plants and creatures, which prosper and suffer in extremes of weather. At the end of the promontory pebbles are banked high above a shingle beach which is constantly sucked back into the dark wake, churned and thrown up elsewhere. Between the pebbles, ochre-pink, seakales sprout with fantastic fringes of frills or leaves that are purple or rich green or blue-green. Philip saw viper’s bugloss, spiky blue and sinister (maybe only because of its name) which he knew from meadows in Staffordshire, but which here seemed bluer and livelier. He saw cotton lavender, and scarlet poppies and clumps of pink valerian. All this was both bright and provisional: in winter it all disappeared as though it had never been.

Philip walked almost ceremoniously along the shingle towards the bank of pebbles at the edge of the land. The first time he came—he came many times—he was eager to reach the water edge, and only took in the human clutter and the tenacious vegetables with sidelong glances. He met no one. It was his adventure, and felt like his place. When he came to the end, he scrambled up the bank with the pebbles rattling and rushing below him, pulling him down with them, so that he went up slowly and with effort. There was the sea, to be seen from the unstable summit. He stood under a sunny sky and saw that it was dark and deep, with patches of wind, and contrary currents, pulling this way and that, and the waves coming in, and in, and shifting and grinding the stones. He thought it would be good to see it in a storm, if he could stand up. He was at the edge of England. He thought about edges, and limits, and he thought about Palissy, studying salt water, and fresh water, springs and runnels on the earth. He hadn’t ever considered the fact that the earth was round, that he stood on the curved surface of a ball. Here seeing the horizon, feeling the precariousness of his standpoint, he suddenly had a vision of the thing—a huge ball, flying, and covered mostly with this water endlessly in motion, but held to the surface as it hurtled through the atmosphere, and in its dark depths, blue, green, brown, black, it covered other colder earth, and sand and stone, to which the light never reached, where perhaps things lived in the dark and plunged and ate each other, he didn’t know, maybe no one knew. The round earth, with hills and valleys of earth, under the liquid surface. It was pleasant, and frightening, to be alive in the sun.

He sat down on the pebbles, which were warm, and ate the bread and cheese and apple he had brought. He thought he must take a stone back with him. It is an ancient instinct to take a stone from a stony place, to look at it, to give it a form and a life that connect the human being to the mass of inhuman stones. He kept picking them up, and discarding them, charmed by a dark stain, or a vein that glittered, or a hole bored through. He held them, and looked at them, put them down and lost them, gathered up others. The one he finally chose—almost irritably by now, feeling anxious about the huge accumulated bank of rejects—was egg-shaped, with white lines on it, and narrow little bore-holes that didn’t come all the way through. Hiding places for tiny creatures, sand-spiders or hair-thin worms.

He spent time drawing things—the leaves of the seakale, a ghostly crab-shell, a piece of bleached driftwood, just for the pleasure of looking and learning. Now and then he looked furtively at the water, to see if it had changed—it always had. He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

He returned often, and extended his exploration also across the Marsh, discovering the Norman churches perched in sheets of marshy water, kept from foundering by dykes and ditches. Once he saw, from the height of the pebble bank, on a windy day, the bent figure of Benedict Fludd, struggling along at the water’s edge, shuffling his feet amongst the stones, gripping his hat. He appeared to be shouting at the sea. Philip did not hail him, and did not mention later that he had seen him.

He drew, and drew, and drew.

He went to Benedict Fludd, when his sketch-book was full, and showed him designs he had made from his drawings, which he thought might perhaps be worked into tiles. He had an idea for a series. An allover pattern of seakale leaves, and one of tangled seaweed, with keylike forms and plump bladders. A very delicate, lacy pattern, formalised one day when he had seen, outside the lonely church of St. Thomas Becket in Fairfield, that the dykes and the marsh grass were completely infested with crane-flies, long-winged, angular-legged, fragile.

He made a geometric web of their touching bodies. He made another with the pale little balls of the seakale seeds on their separate stalks, and one with fronds of fennel. He got interested in a principle of design that used the underlying geometrical structure of the natural forms to make a new formalised geometry. He marked them out as best he could with soft pencil on greyish furry paper. He said to Fludd that he knew something about pricking out paper designs which could be used to repeat patterns in biscuit, before glazing. But he didn’t know how to make glazes. He knew about pin-dust, which made pea-green, and various things that could be done with manganese. But he didn’t know how to get that grey-blue-green of the thicker kales. Or the ghost-colour of the crane-flies, which, he said daringly, it would be good to trace over cobalt colours, or maybe a sort of marshy green?

Fludd said he had an eye. He said his paper was rubbish, and was ruining his designs. Philip said it was all he had. Fludd opened a cupboard and thrust several sketch-pads into Philip’s hands, and a box of variegated pens and pencils. He said he thought they might make the tiles. They could try out glazes.

When they had a batch ready for firing, they reloaded the kiln, and sat up all night, feeding it with driftwood and sawn hop-poles. Geraint offered to help, which was unusual. He liked the drama of the cavern of flame and was interested in the product. The firing and the cooling were surprisingly successful. The kiln produced a row of tiles, blue, gold, green and scarlet, with the Dungeness patterns in webs of grey and charcoal and burnt umber over the colours, and another row, in a creamy glaze, with the patterns in crimson and blue and coppery-green. Philip was entranced. Pomona said they were very pretty. Geraint asked if they could make more—a lot more? “It’s not too hard,” said Fludd.

“You could sell them. Supply them. To architects and people. They’d make lovely hearths. It could be a steady income.”

Geraint was only fifteen, but he was in a perpetual anxiety, bordering on rage, about the absence of a steady income. He mentioned the tiles to Frank Mallett when he went for his history lesson. He asked Frank if he knew anyone who might need tiles to decorate a house, or a church. He said that if only there was a place to show the tiles—in Rye, in Winchelsea, in London, how did he know? But he knew it must be possible to find a way. My father is so impractical, said Geraint. He’s an artist, he doesn’t make things people can buy. But these tiles Philip has made look very nice and can be repeated, they say, over and over. Papa says they are very original. They may be, I don’t know. But I do know people will like them. Only how will they see them?

Frank and Dobbin discussed the matter with Geraint over luncheon. It was Dobbin who had the bright idea of enlisting Miss Dace. She would know people who might be prepared to display a few tiles—very elegantly—in a bay window, or in the window of an art shop, or even a shop that sold fashions. In the end, they might make their own window. Maybe even a London showroom. Dobbin thought back to the Todefright midsummer. He said that Prosper Cain had been there, from South Kensington. He himself had seen Benedict Fludd’s work in the Museum, a wonderful vase, and a kind of dish. Maybe Major Cain might help? When he first came to Purchase House himself, he had hoped to be able to suggest a community there—like Edward Carpenter’s, but different, centred on the art of ceramics. If all went well, he said, delicately skirting the question of Fludd’s problematic temperament, might not Major Cain send funding, and students who would assist, and provide knowledge about buyers for a new range of ceramic work?

Geraint said it all depended on Philip Warren, whether it would last, this time. He had got the kiln going, and designed the tiles.

Dobbin said he was sure Philip would stay, if there was work for him.

And food, said Geraint, and even a living wage. Nobody seems to have thought about that. My family thinks it is vulgar to think about money, they think it is too low a thing for them to attend to—but I know there isn’t any. There really isn’t any. They can’t buy clay, and they’re in debt to the farmer for milk and eggs, and I have to charm the shopkeepers in the most disgusting way to have tea, or coffee, or meat. He brightened. “We might offer the butcher some of the tiles, for his display, in exchange for meat. I am not a vegetarian by choice. I like meat.”