The Children's Book

11

In November 1895 Olive Wellwood was great with child. She sat at her desk in her usual flowing robes, which still concealed her condition from visitors and small children, and tried to write. She found it hard to write when she was “expecting;” the stranger inside seemed to suck at her energy and confuse the rhythm of sentences in her blood and brain. Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare’s rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet. She never got used to owning these things, never saw them simply as household stuff. They were still less real than the ash pits of Goldthorpe. They still had the quality Aladdin’s palace must have had for him and the princess, when the genie erected it out of nothing. She kept trying to write a story with the title “Safe as Houses,” which would be ironic, because houses were not safe, like the Three Little Pigs’ foolish constructions of straw and wattle, or the house in the Bible builded upon sand. Houses were builded upon money, and Humphry had quarrelled with his rich brother, and abandoned his solid job amongst the ingots in the Bank in Threadneedle Street. Her ever-inventive mind played like light over Banks and turf banks, straw, sand, wattle and square-cut quarried stone, but the story would not come, it was not ready, and she was not ready to inhabit her fear of dispossession.

She loved Todefright as much as she loved any living being, including Humphry and Tom. When she thought of it, it had always two aspects, its carved and crafted presence, doors, windows, chimneys, stairs, and the world she had constructed in, through and under it, the imagined, interpenetrating world, with its secret doors into tunnels, and caverns, the otherworld under the green fairy hill. She imagined her home standing on terrifying strata of underground rocks and ores—flint and clay, coal and schist, basalt and grit, through which snaked rivers and branching tributaries of cold water and gleaming ores—liquid silver and gold—she always imagined them liquid, like quicksilver though she knew they were not.

All writers perhaps have talismanic phrases which represent to them the force, the intrinsic nature of writing. Olive’s was from the ballad tale of True Thomas, who had been taken under the hill by the Queen of Elfland.

For forty days and forty nights

He wade thro red blude to the knee,

And he saw neither sun nor moon,

But heard the roaring of the sea.

She wanted to write that—the wading through blood—the absence of sun and moon, and the roaring of the sea—but she had never done so, for her tales, though they were getting darker and stranger, were meant to be for children. There was a proliferation of Christian stories at that time, about the exemplary deaths of little children, looking upwards to the skipping little angels in the fluffy clouds of heaven. But there was nothing like red blood to the knee. She thought briefly about the coming birth, the blood that would flood, the pain that would gripe, the possibility that the emerging stranger on the flood of blood would be mottled, waxy and inert, a tight-lidded doll, like Rosy. She knew about amniotic fluid—the unborn creature did not really float in blood—but blood went to it, her blood, down a livid rope that could give life, or could strangle. These things were not spoken of, or written about. They were therefore more real, and more unreal, intensely, simultaneously.

She needed to keep writing. Todefright’s continuance depended on it. Humphry had sold several articles, on the Randlords, on poverty in the East End, on the desirability of the public ownership of all land. He was giving courses of lectures in Manchester and Tunbridge Wells and Whitechapel, one of them with Toby Youlgreave on Shakespeare’s England, one on local government and one on the history of Britain. He was happy, but he was earning much less than his salary at the Bank. And he was away for days and weeks together. Olive imagined young women staring at him from hard chairs in municipal halls, as she and Violet had stared. She was of two minds about this. She did not like to be touched, when pregnant, and felt practically that there was something to be said for Humphry being distracted. But there was always the risk of a little more than distraction, a public scandal, a wavering of his love, a threat to the safe house.

• • •

When she had no ideas for stories, she turned, half-reluctantly, to the secret tales that belonged to Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis and Hedda, rewriting bits of them in easier, public forms, rounded-off and simplified. There was no stated understanding that the secret and private should be inviolate. Tales are tales, Olive told herself, endlessly retold and reforming themselves, like severed worms, or branching rivers of water and metal. The children’s tales contained things taken from other storytellers—her own True Thomas met the Queen of Elfland in her skirt of grass-green silk, and a sinister Mole in Dorothy’s world of shape-shifting animals owed much to Olive’s own excited childhood fear of Andersen’s “Thumbelina.” There were passages she wrote and rewrote, sometimes changing them radically, sometimes hardly altering a word. One of the beginnings of “Tom Underground” had been written some time after the original beginning, which had been the meeting with the Elfland Queen. Maybe she could use it to make a saleable tale and Tom would grimace, and she would say it was not the same tale, and would confide in him, woman to man, about the terrors of the Cash Flow.

She took up her pen and began writing, on a new sheet. Blood flowed from heart to head, and into the happy fingertips, bypassing the greedy inner sleeper. She would begin with the baby. Sometimes the baby in the tale was a royal prince, and sometimes a sturdy son of a miner. Today, she settled for the prince.

There was once a baby prince, much longed for and much loved, who, perhaps because he was so slow to arrive in the waiting palace, was believed by everyone to be flawlessly beautiful and wonderfully clever. He had a pleasant disposition, though he could easily have been spoiled, and was good at amusing himself when left alone, which of course was rare, except at night. There was a guard outside his night-nursery, for the usual malign fairy had said that something would be stolen from him. His name was Lancelin, Olive wrote, and crossed it out and wrote it again as she could not think of anything better, or different.

• • •

At night, Lancelin’s nursery transformed itself (as most nurseries do), into a cavern of shadows. Shadows are mysterious things. They are real and unreal, they have colour and no colour. When the moon shone in through the stone windows she lit up certain things, partially. Lancelin had a rattle in the form of a horned and bearded godling below whose waist a line of carved goatskin became a mother-of-pearl handle, which Lancelin clasped. The godling’s arms were outstretched and at his fingertips dangled strings of little bells—gold and silver like metal bubbles, and in the moonlight these became quite other metals, moonmetals, glinting and slaty. Lancelin liked to hold up the manikin and twist him to and fro in the cold light, and the little bells rang out, and Lancelin saw the shadow of his own arm, on the four walls, with the shadow of the toy in its insubstantial fingers. He would make this other self bigger and smaller, longer and shorter, against the white quilt, or wavering over the rails of his crib. He could make a thicker, darker figure, drawing all the dark into itself, squat on the counterpane. Or an elongated, ash-grey, gesticulating demon, holding the room in its arms. It was eyeless, mouthless, sliced into strips by the bars of the cot. He could multiply himself and wave his hands to his shadow hands, which waved back.

There were other shadows in the night-nursery, with which the fearless baby often offered to play. Shadows lurking in dark hollows between pieces of furniture which could be imagined—if you twisted your head so the moonlight caught on a gilt drawer-knob—to have shining eyes in the dark. Or there were tall, still forms who stood in corners and could be seen, and seen through.

You may think it is unusual for a boy not to be frightened of shadows. We all see dangerous faces in knots of wood in wardrobe doors, and witches in the shadows of branches on the ceiling, waving in the wind, stretching out long grasping fingers.

But he was not frightened, which makes what occurred all the more shocking.

Something moved in the dark of the corner of the room, by the skirting board. Lancelin watched it and laughed, but he could not change its shape by moving his head and after a bit it began to move forwards and he saw that the dark was solid. It was sleek and it was shining, it had colourless dark fur that reflected the moonlight. It had small pale feet with sharp claws, and a quivering snout, with whiskers. And a long pale hairless tail, that thumped and slithered behind it. Its eyes had little crimson centres, that glowed.

It came on, and on, and Lancelin prepared to welcome it. He liked new friends. It stood up on its haunches, and made a little leap between the bars of his crib, and squatted at his feet. Lancelin made a questioning noise. The creature opened its mouth, showing rows of needle-sharp yellow-white teeth. It lowered its head and began to bite and to rip. It was ripping away, not at the pretty white quilt with its embroidered flowers, but at the invisible seams where Lancelin’s shadow touched the soles of his feet, and the tips of his fingers. He could have touched the soft fur of its busy head, but he was afraid of the sharp teeth, and afraid of the scissoring sound they made. It paid no attention to Lancelin himself. When it had worked its way all round the shadow, it rolled it up, with little kneading and rolling movements of its paws, into a tiny bundle. Then it took up the bundle and jumped softly out of the crib and into the dark. Lancelin raised his arm in the moonlight. It cast no grey shape, anywhere. It was as though he himself was not there.

• • •

Here Olive came to the point where she had stopped the last time, and could not think what might happen next. She needed neat narrative, as opposed to the endless flow of Tom’s underground river. The baby could not follow the rat into the dark. What would the king and queen and court make of a child without a shadow? She vaguely remembered that there were existing fairytales about lost shadows. Why was it frightening to have no second self, to cast no shade? She saw vaguely that she had made the baby so smiling and self-confident because that was an image of shadowless singularity. He might become one of those protected beings who weren’t allowed out because they were vulnerable—like Sleeping Beauty, who must not see spindles, like the Buddha, protected from disease and death. He lived in perpetual noonday, which was intolerable. He would have to go down the rathole, no two ways to it, he would have to go into the world of shadows and retrieve his own. She imagined a kingdom of rats with human shadows, mocking a questing infant. A Helper was needed—a dog, a cat, a worm (no, though it was subtle and subterranean), a magic snake, maybe, snakes ate rats …

She could not think what to write next. And at that precise moment—a relief, and a terror to writers—she heard the wheels of the station-fly on the gravel. Humphry was back. She wrote a sentence

“At first the king, queen and courtiers noted only that Lancelin was even more beautiful, sunny and smiling than they remembered. And then this singularity of grace began to be alarming.”

Always leave writing in medias res was a rule she had learned. She put away her writing pad, and went downstairs to greet her errant husband. As often happened, Violet had got there first, was helping with his overcoat, had taken possession of his bookbag and umbrella. He kissed Olive, and made a joke about her girth, which did not please her.

He went into his own study, to look at his letters. There was a considerable heap of them, some a week or two old, some arrived yesterday. Olive sat in a rush-backed chair in the corner of his study. She was disinclined to go back to her interrupted work, and mildly resentful of the interruption.

Humphry read the letters, smiling to himself. He put them back in the envelopes—except the bills. Then he came to one, out of which a press cutting fell. Humphry read, and was frozen. Olive asked what was the matter, and Humphry handed her the cutting.

“Slit throat at train terminus. Financier found dead.” For a moment, Olive thought Basil had killed himself—Humphry’s violent reaction suggested something as grave as that. It was not Basil—it was “Frederick Oliver Heath (38) a member of the Stock Exchange who had been unable to sleep for the past 3 weeks owing to trouble caused by heavy monetary losses” …

Olive said “Did you know him?”

“No, but I know he was in trouble with Kaffirs. I know several things that most people don’t yet know. I am sure—I have always been sure—that Basil is too deep in Barnato’s muck except that ‘muck’ is too solid a word, it’s murk, a murky cloud of obfuscation and prestidigitation and rope tricks and promises never meant to be kept. Basil won’t have sold, partly because he won’t want to admit I might have been right—I know Basil. I must telegraph him. I’ll take the pony-trap. Forgive me, my dear, when I’ve only just come in …”

Humphry was both genuinely distressed, and taking energy and pleasure from the drama. He strode out, calling to Violet to get the man to harness the pony, to fetch his coat…

Olive sat in Humphry’s study, and pondered the useful words, muck and murk. Rats were mucky and murky. Briefly her mind revisited, and shied away from, Peter’s and Petey’s tales of rats in mines, eating candles, and the men’s snap. She began to tidy Humphry’s papers, and cast an eye over the letter he had been smiling to himself over. It began

“My Very Dear.”

She looked at the signature. “Your (no longer a maid!) Marian.” I am not a fool, Olive said to herself. It is much more sensible not to read this, which is not addressed to me. She read it.

My Very Dear

You have been gone for so short a time, and yet already everything, the whole world, is quite another place, emptier and fuller. I truly do not know who I was, or how I lived, before I first saw and heard you. The woman I now am came into being as you spoke about the lovely equality of the bantering lovers in Much Ado About Nothing, about how a man and a woman can love, and not know they love, and how very rarely lovers in plays and stories are at ease with each other. I thought I would teach my students that wisdom, and did not see, until too late (blessedly too late), how my deepest desire was to be at ease in that way with you, you your very self. If I fought your ideas in public it was only in search of that ease where anything may be said. And when you said other things—when I felt myself personally valued and for the first time (however illusorily, however guardedly) to be beautiful and desired—I became your slave, and will remain your slave. Though I cannot imagine you wanting to play master, you are a friend first, and a lover second, and I, I am shining with joy.

I wrote as far as this, yesterday, my darling. I did not say I was feeling unwell, while you were here, for I wanted not to waste one moment of our secret and precarious time. But I was unwell, and now I know the cause, the most natural of all, and truly a matter of rejoicing, for me at least. I am to be a Mother. I ask for nothing—no help, no advice—I am an independent woman, and trust to remain so. If all goes well, and if we can continue to be at ease with each other in these new circumstances, I should like my child to know his father in some way—though never to ask for any material thing. Oh, my Very Dear, of course I am afraid, but I am also resourceful, and will put no burden on you, believe me—only a prayer that, if it can conveniently happen, we may continue to see each other.

Your (no longer a maid!) Marian

Olive refolded this document, and said Damn, several times. This was bad, very bad. This was a woman who was somebody, not a frivolous bit of skirt. This was a person not unlike Olive, to whom Humphry was real, and who was, as she said, at ease with him, which must mean that he, in turn, was at ease with her. Some sort of teacher, who had heard him talk on Shakespeare. Someone to whom he indubitably owed something, despite her disclaimers and his financial position. “Damn,” said Olive again, beginning to be angry, stoking an inner flame. “Damn and damn.” She was quite sincerely worried about the predicament in which this strange woman found herself. Humphry must of course offer help, it was his duty. She knew only too well the special feeling he gave of being comfortable and at ease with women—it was what she loved in him, herself. She thought it went with one kind of promiscuous love-making, rarer than the Don Juan with his sequential conquests, the man who found women truly interesting. If Humphry had come home at that moment, she would have embraced him, perhaps, and smiled ruefully, and made sure of her own charm and her own central place in his affections—which she had never, really, had cause to doubt. But Humphry did not come home, and Olive’s mood veered into grievance. She began, almost vindictively, to read the other letters on the desk, and discovered two rejected articles. “A very clever analysis, but so opinionated that I can’t quite see it as an expression of the beliefs of our journal.” “Very interesting, as always, but I am afraid we have no room for articles of such limited appeal to the general public.” Olive felt threatened—she should be earning money with her little prince and her sinister fat rat, not standing here waiting to discuss peccadilloes, or worse. Todefright was threatened. Olive said Damn.

• • •

By the time Humphry came in, she was like a humming top, spinning with wrath. He was followed by Violet, gathering up his coat and hat.

“I have sent a telegram,” he said. “I think I must go and see Basil, I am absolutely certain I know dangerous things he does not know. I’ll wait for an answer to my telegram and then set off. This will have far-reaching and terrible consequences, if Barnato’s nets are unravelling—and I know it is not if, it is when—”

“You can go and see Marian,” said Olive.

“Don’t be silly, she’s in Manchester,” said Humphry, preoccupied with gold mines and brothers.

He saw what he had been led to betray, and took in his wife, and the dissipated heap of letters. He smiled his foxy, intent smile, interested in Olive’s reaction.

“Touché,” he said. “You of all women should know better than to read private papers. It’s not serious, you know that. Nothing to do with you and me, which is why you shouldn’t stoop to reading private papers.”

He put out a hand to caress her, and Olive slapped it down.

“It is to do with me, it is deeply to do with me, we shall lose Todefright unless we earn some money, and don’t do things which create more dependent mouths. I work and work, I have to keep Todefright going by myself, and I am sick and anxious and should be resting—”

“Money,” said Humphry. “Money, or sex relations, which comes first, which is more certain to cause arguments and harm marriages? An interesting problem.”

“It isn’t an interesting problem, it’s my life—” cried Olive. Up to that point, it had not been clear to either of them whether a monstrous row was going to happen, or could be avoided. Now it was clear that it was to happen, it had to be gone through with. Olive clasped her hands round the unborn infant, and began to shout, like an operatic fishwife. Humphry could have tried to calm, or apologise—in any case he had to abandon his attitude of detached amusement and calm certainty. He was never defensive. When threatened, he attacked. “Listen to yourself,” he said. “How can a grown-up woman make such a racket? I thought you had become a civilised being, but no such thing, you rant like a skivvy, like a washerwoman—”

There were various shapes the rows took, various cycles of reproach and counter-reproach, various sabre-slashes at the whole fabric of the marriage. This row was long, and bad.

Tom and Dorothy and Phyllis stood on the stairs, listening, ready to scurry up to the bedrooms before they were caught. They heard the sentences they always heard.

“I have always tried to love all your children equally, you cannot say I have not. It has not been easy, though you may think it has. You do not thank me.”

“I might say the same. You cannot claim I distinguish your children from my own. All of them have their place, equally, equally, you must admit that.”

Dorothy put her face in her hands. She was the one interested in the human body. She had a clear idea of how children came into the world. It was easy not to know who your father was. It was much harder not to know who your mother was, though it could happen, Griselda had suggested ways in which society women slid changelings into families. Some village families had complicated structures where grandmothers, mothers, aunts and elder sisters were indistinguishable, where children grew up supposing their mother was their sister, and their grandmother their mother. People had babies at ages hardly older than she herself now was, this she knew. But here, who, how? Violet liked to say she was their “real mother” but as far as Dorothy could work out, she liked to say this precisely because she was not, she offered free mother-love from the position of not-mother, of maiden aunt. You could see who was somebody’s mother, you could see the unborn child growing.

It was odd, it was certainly odd, that there was a family habit of sending everyone away before the arrival of new babies. She hadn’t been at home at the moment of anyone’s birth. She had been with Griselda, or on holiday at the seaside with friendly families. Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.

• • •

Tom did not think clearly. He felt his world was threatened, and his world was Todefright, woven through and through with the light from the woods and lawns, summer and winter, golden and frosty, and also woven through and through with the web of his mother’s stories, stories whose enamelled colours and inky shadows, hidden doors and flying beasts made the real Todefright seem briefly like a whited, plaster-cast sort of a place, a model of a home merely, which propped up the constant shape-shifting of the otherworld, whose entrance was underground. He didn’t—he couldn’t—even begin to imagine Olive not his mother, and it did not occur to him to try. And Humphry was Humphry, who had always been there. What he feared was that everything might turn out to be cardboard and plaster of Paris, though he feared this in the depth of his gut and behind his eyes. He could not have put it into words.

Phyllis did not hear all the words of the shouting parents. She watched Tom and Dorothy, for a clue to how to react. They were upset. Why? They were excited. By what? As usual, she was left out, too stupid, too innocent. She pulled at Tom’s arm—he was kinder than Dorothy—to ask “What is it, what is it?” a meaningless question that went unanswered. Dorothy said “We’d better scarper, we’ll get found out,” and began to tiptoe, rapidly, up the stairs. As she did so, silence fell inside the study. They had never stooped to peering through keyholes, and so did not see Humphry and Olive, entwined, her heavy womb pressed against his trousers, her head burrowing into his shoulder, his hand stroking and stroking her descending hair, a small smile on his sharp mouth.

The next day, Humphry ordered the yard-boy to bring the dog cart early, and drive him to the station. Olive appeared, fully dressed, in coat and hat, long before her usual time of rising. She said she intended to visit Prosper Cain. She needed to resurrect her museum adventure story. John Lane the publisher was interested in it. Humphry smiled, and helped her up, and they drove off together, chatting amiably. Humphry fully understood that it was necessary for Olive to reestablish the balance between them, by visiting a man who clearly admired her. He understood, more ruefully, that her financial anxieties, and the sense that the household depended on her writings, and her fear that these were threatened by the coming birth, were real concerns, even if she was half-teasing him with her independence and importance.

Tom and Dorothy and Phyllis watched them go.

“ That seems to be more or less patched up,” said Dorothy. “Is it, is it?” said Phyllis, and got no answer.

“If he makes it up with Uncle Basil, I shall certainly get sent away to school,” said Tom.

“You might like it,” said Dorothy, who knew Tom was appalled at the idea of sleeping and eating with hundreds of what she thought of, and was sure he did, as savage boys.

“I might not,” said Tom, digging her in the ribs. “Let’s go to the Tree House.”

Its secret enclosure was calming and energising, even in wet late autumn, even in the beginning of winter. It was easier to find, now the leaves were fallen, but still protected by clumps of natural-looking bracken, pushing into crannies, and by the low sweep of the evergreen branches. Phyllis walked, as usual, three steps behind the others. None of them spoke. Part of Tom’s mind was watching a supernatural horse, in the next coppice, with a cloaked rider. Dorothy examined gateposts on which a gamekeeper had pinned rows of stiff little corpses, bedraggled crows, and stretched stoats, and the small, pathetic shrunken velvet of moles. It was unfortunate for Olive, who had no idea of this, that Dorothy associated her “own” story of the anthropomorphised furry creatures in and under the woods and meadows, with these slaughtered pests and predators. Dorothy carried a leather satchel, into which she pushed carefully unpinned specimens, who could be dissected and examined. She didn’t ask herself if Olive knew she didn’t like “her” story. She was taciturn by nature, and observed drily to herself that Olive was so excited by her own inventions that she hardly needed a response from the designated audience. Dorothy wasn’t a very reading child, though she was very bright, and read fluently. She had one book which she carried in a pocket because it amused her darkly. It had been sent to Olive to review in The English Illustrated Magazine, along with a heap of children’s tales and fairy stories, although it was no such thing. It was called Mother Nature’s Little Book of Bedtime Rhymes, and was by Herbert K. Methley. It contained prancing, jaunty little rhymes about creatures which, if anthropomorphised at all, must appear evil in that human guise. The spider and the praying mantis, crunching up the living, nutritious limbs of their mates. The cuckoo, that great deceiver, laying her camouflaged egg (Nature was so helpful, the blotches were indistinguishable from the willow-warbler’s own eggs) and flying off to sing in the branches, whilst her industrious skinny offspring, with its blind, fleshy head, evicted the little warblers, one by one, and grew into a monster that dwarfed the nest. The ichneumon fly, laying its exquisite eggs under the skin of grubs, who were walking larders, slowly sucked dry. Dorothy had showed it to Tom, who waved it away. He was not a boy who pulled the legs and wings off things. Dorothy said

“It’s a good book because that’s how the world really is. And it makes it funny, which is clever.”

“What is it, how is the world, what do you mean?” asked Phyllis, and got no answer.