The Children's Book

15

In the New Year of 1896, Humphry went to Portman Square to take home his two eldest children. Phyllis, Hedda, Florian and Robin had been taken by Cathy the maid to visit her family on a farm near Rottingdean. Phyllis had looked plaintive, and sulked a little. She preferred being the youngest of the big children to being the eldest of the small children. Violet tried to suggest that the Basil Wellwoods might find room for her, it would do her good to be more independent, but nothing came of that. Dorothy was grim and tense during these discussions. She wanted to be with Griselda, and having Phyllis around was quite exactly not being with Griselda. Tom would rather have stayed at home; he did not have interests in common with Charles, who was a year older than him, but they did not quarrel, either.

It was decided that Humphry should approach his friend Leslie Skinner, who worked with Karl Pearson in the Department of Applied Mathematics at UCL, to find a good tutor to take both Charles and Tom, and coach them for the entrance exams of Eton and Marlowe. Toby Youlgreave had agreed to help them with history and literature. Tartarinov was doing well with Tom’s Latin, and Humphry was happy to suggest that he reciprocate his brother’s hospitality by offering space to Charles in which he could come and polish his classics. Basil and Katharina felt that what young women needed was accomplishments—music, manners, painting and drawing. They offered to invite Dorothy to share Griselda’s art lessons. Griselda had been reading The Mill on the Floss and had persuaded Dorothy to read it too. They sat in Griselda’s bedroom, indignant Maggie Tullivers, for whom maths and Latin and literature were not considered.

They all went to tea with Leslie and Etta Skinner, in their narrow parlour in Tavistock Square, to meet the maths tutor Leslie Skinner thought might do the job. They all went, because Humphry combined the tea with a visit to the British Museum, and he enjoyed Dorothy’s company on such outings. He took them to see Viking gold and the Elgin Marbles, and made them all shudder in front of the Egyptian coffins with dead men and women bandaged inside them.

The parlour had dark green Morris & Co. wallpaper, spangled with scarlet berries, and a Morris set of spindly Sussex settle and chairs, with rush seats. There were woven rugs on a dark floor, and high shelves of orderly books. The possible tutor was already present, a young German, from Munich, Dr. Joachim Susskind, in a threadbare suit, and wearing a red tie. Dr. Susskind had flowing, hay-coloured, dry hair, and a fine, waving moustache to go with it. His eyes were blue and mournful, not clear, glassy sky-blue like Dr. Skinner’s but a clouded, faded blue, the diluted blue of an almost-white Small Blue butterfly, Tom thought. He looked mild and harmless. Leslie Skinner presented him by saying that he was not only a first-class mathematician, but also a first-class teacher, which many mathematicians were not. Dr. Susskind smiled mildly. He said he should like to know whether Tom and Charles enjoyed mathematics? Yes, said Tom. No, said Charles. Dr. Susskind asked both of them, why? Tom said it wasn’t arithmetic he liked, he often got that wrong, it was the way things fitted together in geometry, the sense of finding it out. Charles said he didn’t like feeling a fool, which was the effect maths had on him. Leslie Skinner asked which subjects Charles did like, and Charles said, none, really, they didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.

“And what do you want to know?” asked Skinner, Socratic.

“Things about life. Why are the poor poor? What is wrong with us?”

Humphry laughed, and said he was afraid Charles would not get much information about poverty at Eton. Charles said he didn’t want to go there, but nobody cared what he thought. Skinner said it was always useful to be taught how to think, and Dr. Susskind said, almost inaudibly, looking at no one, that that was a good question to ask, a good question.

The two girls sat side by side, one dark, one pale gold, their long hair brushed out over their shoulders. Etta Skinner turned to them briskly and asked in a principled and slightly combative tone where they were to get their education. Leslie Skinner turned his blue look on Dorothy and gave her his complete attention.

“You are the young lady who is to be a doctor.”

Dorothy said she was.

“Then it is high time you were seriously studying science.”

“I know,” said Dorothy, incurring a sharp look of reproach from her father.

“Well, I do know,” she said, answering the look. It turned out that Etta had an answer to propose. She herself did some teaching at Queen’s College, in Harley Street, which gave classes to females of any age over twelve years, either to prepare them for a teaching career, or to improve their skills and knowledge if they were already teaching. Dorothy and Griselda might attend—part-time even—together. Griselda said she would go to science classes with Dorothy if Dorothy would go with her to classes in German and French. And Latin, said Leslie. They would need Latin if they were to think of university, as he hoped they would. UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters’ education as seriously as his sons’. Humphry said that Dorothy—and Griselda—were still only little girls. Hardly, said Skinner, smiling at the two serious young faces. Hardly. They would be young women any moment, he could see. His look made Dorothy feel unexpectedly heated, on her skin, and also inside her. She wriggled a little and sat straighter. Griselda said she didn’t think her parents saw any need for her to be educated. Skinner said, it should be enough that she wanted to be educated. Etta took Humphry’s arm, and said surely he could explain to his family how much it might mean, how much it should be a right… Griselda said Dorothy could stay with her, and they could go to the lessons together, if only the families agreed. Humphry said he would miss his girl, and Dorothy said he might not notice, he was so much away, now, himself.

Tom and Charles began immediately to go to University College to do maths with Dr. Susskind, who shared a poky little office in a mews behind the main building, with another statistician, who was collecting data on human heights, weights and ages. They went on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, and were given work to take home. They were measured themselves, as a statistic. Then, some weekends, they travelled to Todefright to work with Vasily Tartarinov, and to read with Toby Youlgreave in his cottage.

Tom liked the maths well enough, and tried not to think of the consequences of getting the Marlowe scholarship. He felt unreal in London, as though his flesh and blood were in abeyance, as though he was a simulacrum of a boy, floating along Gower Street with its prim houses, dodging cabs in Torrington Street. The maths, especially the geometry, intensified his sense of abstraction. He waited to be back in Todefright. He thought continuously of the woods and the Tree House. He read William Morris’s new book, The Well at the World’s End, and also The Wood Beyond the World, and News from Nowhere. Charles read these books, too, but they did not discuss them much, except to make a joke, when their homework was hard, of the fact that William Morris appeared to believe that boys could educate themselves as and when they chose, with no more chalky effort than they had put into learning language as babies. Joachim Susskind delighted in teaching Tom, for he was indeed quick, and instinctive, and did not need lengthy explanations.

Charles was slower and less apt. He was given extra lessons, in Dr. Susskind’s lodgings in a house just behind the Women’s Hospital, between Euston and St. Pancras. It was true that Susskind was a good enough teacher to see not only what Charles didn’t understand, but how and why he didn’t understand it. He explained, in his soft German voice, just what was blocking enlightenment. At first he didn’t talk to Charles about anything other than maths. Then, one day, he said

“You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that.”

“What I can’t see—what I really can’t see—is why everyone doesn’t ask themselves that, all the time. How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see—and get told what the Bible says about the poor—and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats—and eating huge beefsteaks—I can’t see it.”

“I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you.”

So Charles Wellwood read Prince Kropotkin’s Appeal to the Young, which called on young doctors, lawyers, artists, to consider how they would live and work in the light of the horrors of starvation, disease, and desperation in the world of the poor. Its prescriptions for the good life were vaguer than its fierce calling-up of the bad. It called on the young to organise, to struggle, to write and publish about oppression, to be socialists. It did not say how the desired revolution could be brought about. Charles went back to Dr. Susskind and asked if he had more such books. The two looked at each other, the German gentle and quietly excited, the English boy tense with abstract need, his face white, erupting on brow and cheeks, his eyes hungry.

He asked Susskind if he was a socialist. Susskind replied that he was an Anarchist. He believed the world would be better if all authority, all hierarchy, all institutions were abolished. There would come a revolution. After that, harmony, all giving to all and accommodating all.

Something in Charles was wary of the prophetic enthusiasm of this. If goodness were really easy and natural, how had authority ever come about? He had read News from Nowhere with a certain scepticism. He was not sure it was possible to return to mediaeval pastoral and abolish the machine. He was coming to believe that the Todefright Wellwoods were not real socialists, were not confronting the problem head-on. For one thing, their house was full of things made in small quantities by poor men for rich ones. He had heard his own father sneer at Morris & Co. for selling vastly expensive fabrics and tapestries with golden age and paradisal foliage on them. Somehow they slid away from the horrors they should be confronting.

He said as much, as best he could, to Susskind, who said how wise he was, that Mr. Morris himself had called himself a dreamer of dreams, born out of his due time. Peter Kropotkin believed in the printing-press. Maybe Charles would not believe this, but not far from where they were was just such a press, producing a monthly revolutionary paper called The Torch of Anarchy. It might interest Charles to know that the paper had been founded by three young people—still children really—from a famous poetic family, by Olive, Arthur and Helen Rossetti, when they were younger than Charles was now. The press had recently moved to a stable loft in Ossulston Street—but had produced powerful revolutionary literature from a room in the basement of Mr. William Rossetti’s house—a basement in which everything was painted blood-red, said Joachim Susskind, smiling over the absolute enthusiasm of the young Rossettis. He said, timidly, that he could give Charles some copies of this pamphlet, and even take him to see the press at work, if he felt he could go there. He himself helped out when he could. He loved mathematics as much as revolution, so he could not give up his college work. Statisticians and mathematicians would be welcome in the new order. Professor Pearson was not unsympathetic, though he inclined more to Karl Marx’s socialism than to Kropotkin’s anarchism. Indeed he had changed his name from Charles to Karl, to show his respect for the thinker.

Charles wanted to see the press. He wanted to see work being done, to change things. No one thought to question him at home, if he said he was going to visit Dr. Susskind. And so, one afternoon, the two of them set off for Ossulston Street.

Ossulston Street stank. The gutter ran with yellow horse-piss, and the road was almost solid with caked dung. Charles walked gingerly, trying to keep his shoes clean, and wondering whether clean shoes should be of any concern. The offices of The Torch of Anarchy were in a loft above a stable, behind the “jugs and bottles” door of a dingy public house, The Bay Tree. Joachim Susskind and Charles had to negotiate a kind of midden to get to the wooden stairs that led to the loft. As he went up, Charles suddenly remembered Humphry’s midsummer speech about the poor man who picked and ate undigested oats from stuff like this. This was what he ought to know about. He followed his tutor through a ramshackle door into a long wooden shedlike room, full of dust, floating in the air, thick on the heaps of literature and pamphlets which covered almost all the floor. There were strong smells in this dusty air—tobacco smoke and tobacco juice, human odours of thick sweat and excrement, a pervasive smell of sour milk, and another of rancid fat. And the smell of dog, though he could see no dog. There was also a smell of sour beer. A man in a greasy jacket was scoffing fried bread and bacon scraps from a newspaper on what appeared to be the plate of the printing press, at one end of the room. There were two or three little groups of people, none of whom appeared likely to be the young Rossettis. One group was talking fast and intently in Italian. One consisted of three people on a bench, against which leaned a hard placard. “The Day of the Beast Is Upon Us.” At one end of the room was a mattress, where someone—or more than one person—was snoring thickly under a heap of tattered cloth and a bundle of flags. Susskind said to the eating man that he had understood that Comrade Bartlett would be printing. He had brought his promised article on the German anti-socialist laws. He had brought a young man who was interested in anarchist ideas. Comrade Bartlett said his hand was too black with ink to shake the new Comrade by the hand, and asked his name. Charles said his name was Karl. He said he would like to help. Comrade Bartlett swept his meal off the press and began to ink it. Charles/Karl found himself worrying intensely about his clothes, at which the inhabitants of the loft appeared to be staring. His shirt was clean and starched, his jacket was pressed and expensive. He looked wrong and moreover he was going to get dirty, and be in trouble at home. He was saved by Joachim Susskind, who produced a workman’s apron from his bookbag and gave it to Charles, with a smile of complicit understanding.

Charles was not sure if he would go back to Ossulston Street, after that first visit. No one paid him much attention. He worked as hard as he could, and came away with a sheaf of leaflets and pamphlets to read. But he did go back, again and again in the early part of 1896, as much because he respected Joachim Susskind, as because he felt he was meeting the real working class. He was not sure that these people were the real working class. He was sure that Herr Susskind—who now addressed him as Karl—was concerned about the working class. And he liked The Torch, when he read it. He was given various issues, which were illustrated by moving drawings of despairing women, by Lucien Pissarro. It contained writings by Leo Tolstoi and Peter Kropotkin, commemorations of the martyrdom in 1887 of the Chicago Anarchists and a debate between Quaker pacifism and the advocates of violence and propaganda by the Deed. It advertised reprints of Morris’s Useful Work vs. Useless Toil and attacked the Prince of Wales for the size of his clothes bill. It also carried tales from The Arabian Nights, and German fairytales by Otto Erich Hartleben. Karl read the instructions on HOW TO HELP.

Take a Dozen copies of each issue of THE TORCH and try to sell or distribute them.

Leave copies of THE TORCH and other literature in railway carriages, waiting rooms, tram cars, refreshment houses and other places for the public to read.

Get newsagents to sell THE TORCH.

Turn up at meetings to support the speakers and assist with the literature.

He acquired a set of clothes for Ossulston Street, which he kept in Joachim Susskind’s rooms—some old leggings, a frayed jumper, a jacket from a pawn shop, a workingman’s cap, which he pulled over his eyes, enjoying the feeling both of disguise and of becoming some other person. All this was conducted most discreetly by the tutor and his pupil—they didn’t discuss, or plot, these refinements, they simply happened. They did discuss whether it would be “a good thing” for Karl to go out into Hyde Park, or anywhere else, to sell bundles of The Torch, and they decided that he could do so, if he kept away from places near Portman Square. Susskind and Karl wandered many London streets at times when Charles was thought to be doing homework, or joining in rambles, mildly discussing imprisonment and execution, and whether the planting of bombs was a duty or an act of irresponsibility. Those who had gone to the scaffold in Paris and Chicago were brave martyrs. They had had “no alternative” Susskind said, and Karl agreed. But they agreed also that they were not, themselves, natural killers. Susskind said, padding along Baker Street, that he should like to believe reasonable persuasion was enough.

One evening, at a meeting in Ossulston Street, to discuss this very issue of the requirement of a violent response to the violence of oppression, Karl had a shock. There were more people there than usual—some new Comrades had arrived, having been smuggled out of Russia. When they came in, Vasily Tartarinov came with them, wearing the suit he always wore to teach Latin and Greek to the boys. Charles/Karl sat in a dark corner with his cap pulled down. He did not know what his parents might do to him if they found out how he spent his time. He did know that Joachim Susskind would be treated as a traitor, and probably lose his job.

The meeting eddied about. Long speeches were made, and the man with the placard said that since the Day of Judgement was coming almost immediately there was little to be said for bothering to kill people. They would all soon be overwhelmed. A kettle of tea was provided, and poured into cracked and greasy cups. Tartarinov came past Karl. He said “Good evening,” formally and distantly. Karl looked up at him. Tartarinov winked, and refroze into formal strangeness.

At their next tutorial meeting Tartarinov greeted Tom and Charles as usual, and as usual, tartly, praised Tom’s translation at the expense of Charles’s. They were still working on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, where the hero, having broken off the golden bough, descends to the Underworld to interrogate his dead father. They had reached the passage where the Sibyl and Aeneas come to the vast elm, where false dreams hang from the branches like bats, and shadows of imagined monsters hiss and gnash their teeth. The Sibyl prevents Aeneas from turning his sword on the bodiless, flitting lives, their forms only transitory and vanishing. Tartarinov chanted the Latin in a lusty Russian accent.

et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas

admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae,

inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras …

Tom saw in his mind’s eye gradations of shadowy matter, thicker and thinner irreality, coiling like steam from a train or smoke from a chimney, but in the dark, under dark branches, cava sub imagine formae. Charles was annoyed by the enthusiasm of Tartarinov’s declamation. Charles saw nothing. Nothing was in his head. These things were unreal things, Gorgon, Harpy, Chimaera, things from childhood. No-things. He wanted another sign from Tartarinov, another wink for his secret self from the anarchist who had perhaps blood on his hands, who was far from his homeland because of his belief in his cause. But Tartarinov appeared to be truly obsessed with this old dead poetry in an old dead language. This man was double, Charles thought, a man with two faces and two minds, however whole-hearted he looked. And so was he, Charles/Karl, becoming double. His secret made him think of himself as invisible, a subtle being who thought his own thoughts and had his own purposes, whilst the outward boy said the banal things boys do say, about cricket and prep, about birds’ nests and punishments. This led him to wonder whether Tom was double, and if so, what was in the secret Tom. He thought perhaps Tom was not double. Tom appeared to take Tartarinov—and Charles himself—at face value, gently.

Once the idea of secret selves had begun to spread little roots in his mind, he began to look at everyone differently, half as a game, half as a dangerous piece of research. After the morning with Tartarinov he walked with Tom along the road past the woods and onto the Downs, where Toby Youlgreave had his cottage, which, he insisted, had once belonged to a swineherd. Toby was coaching the boys for the general essays they would have to write. It was a cold crisp winter day, with frost on the ground and snow in the air. They wore caps and mufflers and woollen gloves. Toby gave them mugs of tea, and toasted them crumpets at his inglenook hearth. The floor of his small sitting-room was populated by uneven pillars of stacked books, on some of which previous mugs of tea had stood, and butter had been smeared. He had set them an essay on “Dreams” and told them to take that word any way they liked— dreams, nightmares, daydreams, hopes for the future. He had said they would need to find vivid examples of whatever they chose. He made them read out what they had written, as though they were in a university tutorial. Tom read well, clearly, without expression, a little too fast. Charles paced himself, listening to his own argument. He liked to argue, even about dreams. Tom had chosen to write about real, night-time dreams, what they felt like, what they meant. Charles, who knew Tom would do that, had deliberately chosen the moral and political meaning of the word, the dream of justice, the dream of a future life, Utopia. Tom wrote about the sensation of dreaming, and distinguished between those dreams in which the dreamer is neither actor nor watcher but a kind of looker-on, like the voice of a storyteller in a story. Almost commenting, but not quite, because all the same you were sort of helpless, you couldn’t make decisions in dreams, but you did know you were in them, and that you would wake to the real world. Sometimes you tried to stay asleep, to see what would happen. Then there were the dreams you were really in and had the sensation that you couldn’t get out—dreams of being buried alive, or told you were to be hanged tomorrow (he had that one often) or dreams where you were being pursued, and the beast you thought was behind you turned out to have gone about and around, and was waiting for you at the end of the corridor. It was odd that the dreams you were completely inside were almost all bad dreams.

Not all, said Toby Youlgreave. You might dream—he hesitated delicately—that you were loved by someone—or that someone dead was living after all, it was all a mistake.

In that case, said Tom, waking would be as dreadful as dreaming the bad dreams.

Charles wondered if Toby’s secret was to do with love. With the sex instinct. He kept coming back to it, though that might be because he got so wound up in poetry all the time. There was an awful lot of love, and sex, in poetry. It made Charles’s skin prick, but he wasn’t sure he cared for it. Flather, he thought, using one of his nanny’s old words. Flather. Toby’s secret is some sort of flather.

His own essay had been a rather perverse, but certainly clever, demolition of the dream of the good life in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and the kind of communities associated with it, who wore hand-printed skirts and ate vegetables. He wrote that the dream of Heaven had always worried him because it was so boring—there was nothing to do—and the dreams of Heaven on Earth, going back to the land, living in vegetable gardens and little plots of flowers, with no machines to be seen anywhere, struck him as a sleepy refusal to look at real problems and make real plans about what to do. He quoted Morris against himself

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time

Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

He was indeed, wrote Charles/Karl censoriously, “the idle singer of an empty day.”

His anger stirred in his sentences, making them alternately blunt and incoherent. Toby Youlgreave set about benignly to sharpen and point them. He said these points were perhaps best not made in a scholarship exam for a very privileged school.

Toby waited for a comment—from Tom, not Charles—and Tom said, thoughtfully, that he feared that was what he was, a dreamer. Toby Youlgreave looked at the darkening cottage window in the late afternoon, and said, almost to himself, that that was what they all were, living so pleasantly, dreamers. Have some treacle tart, he said, mocking himself gently. I made it specially for you two. How do we get out of dreamland? Hic labor, hoc opus est, he said.

Tom took the entrance exams, that July, in a kind of dream. Olive was worried for him, but he was himself unworried: maths was maths, Latin was Latin, he knew what he had to do as he knew how to throw a cricket ball or steer a bicycle. He wrote an essay on Keats—“My Favourite Poet”—for Marlowe, and an essay on “The Characteristics of the English” for Eton. Marlowe accepted him: Eton rejected him: both schools accepted Charles. It was faintly disturbing to Tom to be rejected. He was not used to it. Charles’s parents decided he would go to Eton. They bought him a new bicycle. Charles slid away, in some anxiety, to consult Joachim Susskind. He said it had to be against his principles to go to Eton. Susskind, surprisingly, encouraged him to go ahead. The world was imperfect, he said. One boy could not change it by refusing to be educated. He should go to Eton and learn to argue, and observe the ruling classes at their most absolute, and consider how to thwart their purposes. We must be wise as serpents, he said, quoting Jesus Christ, who was, he claimed, the first Anarchist, and not adding the corollary, harmless as doves, because he was still thinking of the propaganda of the Deed, and whether or not it was right to strike symbolic blows. Susskind was excited by the banishment of the Anarchist groups from the Socialist Second International, meeting that summer in London. The Anarchists refused political action. Susskind was not sure where he stood on this, either. Bakunin had said Germans made bad anarchists because they wanted simultaneously to be Masters and Slaves. There was a German kind of orderliness to Susskind’s anarchism, at war with a German liking for carrying things to extremes.

Both Tom and Dorothy had been reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, published a year ago. Grahame had given the book to Humphry: they had once been colleagues in the Bank of England, where Grahame still worked—he was grander than Humphry had been, and was already promoted to Acting Secretary of the Bank. Like Humphry he wrote for the Yellow Book and like Humphry busied himself bringing culture to the East End. He had published a work called Pagan Papers in 1893, a tribute to the goat-god Pan, with a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley, which contained the stories of childhood which were continued in The Golden Age. Dorothy asked Tom if he thought going away to school would change him, like Edward in the book. Tom said, vaguely, of course things wouldn’t be the same, and suddenly, for the first time, focused his dreaming mind on what this new beginning was bringing to an end, on what he had done to himself by passing an exam. He was filled with fear and grief, which were impossible to impart to sharp Dorothy.

Olive, despite her preference for legend and fairytale, had herself published two books, that year, about imaginary children, written fast, and easily, and compulsively. Money had been needed because Humphry had had to “help out” with the confinement of Maid Marian in Manchester. He looked sidelong at Olive, before he asked for help, but he made no wild speeches of contrition, did not beat his breast, said, almost man to man, “She’s a good creature, you know. She’s got a good brain. She’s brave.” Olive said he should have thought of all that earlier, and Humphry said, with a kind of satyr-grin, that he had thought he had thought of it, but clearly not well enough. He was inviting Olive to grin with him. Much of his success as an errant husband lay in this whiskered grin of collusion—there were women out there whom, briefly, he couldn’t resist—but she, Olive, his wife, was the one he shared things with, the one to whom he spoke truthfully, from himself. She took a curious pleasure in the power of independence when she gave him a cheque to meet the Manchester bills. You did not so much mind being—conventionally—betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

Olive’s two stories were The Runaway and The Girl Who Walked a Long Way, and were based, in part, on the way Olive imagined the tale of Philip Warren and the tale of his sister Elsie. She had been able to use her own memories of escaping from the coalfield, and from the industrial smoke, to find oneself in the Garden of England amongst orchards full of apples, and gardens full of wholesome, clean vegetables. Her two characters were preadolescent children, escaping a cruel aunt and a drunken uncle. They settled, not in anywhere like Purchase, but in a farming community of orphan children and runaways like themselves. She had invented a kind of guru for this community, a Pied Piper who vaguely resembled Edward Carpenter in idealism and sandal-making. But she could not prevent this figure from being either domineering or sinister, and realised that this was because what children liked to read about was a world without adults, in which they themselves produced their food, and decided how to run things. So she replaced the Carpenter figure with a fourteen-year-old boy called Robin, who was camping in a derelict barn, and took in other fugitives. They called themselves the Outlaws, and learned how to pick mushrooms and berries, and entice runaway hens to lay eggs in their outhouse. She was rather pleased with this concept, and did not know whether to be annoyed or amused to find that Marian in Manchester had called her son Robin. She told Humphry that it was negligent—or invidious—of him to have two sons called Robin, and Humphry smiled his satyr-smile and said that only proved that he had little or nothing to do with Marian and her child, apart from making sure they had enough to live on. Olive didn’t point out that it was she who had made sure. They both knew that.

That summer, before Tom left home, they all went together, big children and tinies, and in-between Phyllis and Hedda, on a seaside holiday in a village called Selstrood, which had a wild beach that looked across the Channel to France, which was sometimes visible as a shadowy strip in the sky, and sometimes hidden in mist or cloud, and now and then a lit, creamy line of solid rock, just distinguishable from bright cloud and wavecrest. They took an old vicarage, furnished only with minimal wooden chairs and tables, and iron bedsteads, and they camped in the way the English like to camp. Tom and Dorothy, and Charles and Griselda who came with them, had workmanlike tents in the orchard. Violet hired a donkey cart, and drove the little ones along the quiet lanes. Olive wrote furiously. They had beach picnics, carrying hampers of delicious things through the sea-holly onto the washed sand. They swam. They visited Purchase House, of course, which was still shabby, but had a look of polish and darning and clean crockery, no doubt contrived by Elsie. Olive studied Philip and Elsie. Elsie noticed this, and Philip didn’t. He was learning his craft, and Benedict Fludd was still in a reasonable temper, and still producing work.

Other people came. Toby Youlgreave came, and lodged with Miss Dace in Winchelsea. He talked to Griselda about literature, and Charles confirmed his idea that Youlgreave’s secret other self was Olive Well-wood’s knight errant, or maybe something else. The Cain family came, and stayed in a comfortable inn, near Winchelsea. Prosper Cain was in need of rest and distraction. It was proving to be a horrible year at the Museum. The Director, Professor Middleton, had been found dead in June, with a laudanum bottle and a glass at his side. He was known to have taken laudanum regularly since he had had “brain fever” as an undergraduate, and a verdict of death by misadventure was returned. But most people, including Prosper, suspected that he had taken his life, in an excess of despair over battling scholars, soldiers and librarians. The campaign against the military presence in the Museum in the art newspapers had intensified: in July, at the time of Tom’s exams, the parliamentary debate on the Budget had produced scathing criticism of the management of the Museum, led by the socialist John Burns. Cain wanted to be able to forget all these things. He thought he might try to interest Benedict Fludd’s aimless daughters in finding places at the new Royal College of Art, formed from the old National Art Training School. Pomona was still just about a child, but Imogen was seventeen, and nobody seemed to care what happened to her. She didn’t talk to Julian, who was a year younger than she was, and in a mood for sauntering sardonically away on his own. Some of her embroidery was quite promising. Vapid, Prosper thought truthfully, but technically promising. He wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with Seraphita, and remembered the empty laudanum bottle.

• • •

There were many picnics on the beach, under umbrellas with bleached stripes, where Olive sat in a graceful swirl of muslin and a cotton sunhat, holding court, Prosper thought, as he became a courtier. He liked the free movement of the many Wellwoods, up and down the sand, in and out of the salt water, collecting things in nets and buckets, riding away on bicycles. He confided in Olive Wellwood as a figure of motherhood, but he knew that she knew that his eyes were on her waist, and the eager movements of her hands, and the curl of her haunch and thighs under her. He said he was afraid his Florence had too much gravitas to run freely with Dorothy and Griselda. She had been forced into grown-up seriousness before her time. Look at her now, sitting on a rock, staring out to sea like a mermaid. He did not know how to make it up to her. Olive asked, looking down at his solid fingers playing with the sand, if he had ever thought of remarrying—even perhaps for Florence’s sake? And Julian’s. Prosper said he had wondered if he should, but had never yet met any woman he could—take to in that way. Or if he had, he said, they were already spoken for. He knew there were things he could not discuss with Florence, that she might need to discuss with someone. Olive said she thought he did very well on his own; he was a percipient person. She said Julian was a young man, now, he had almost nothing of the little boy left in him. She did not like, she confessed, the thought of Tom going away to Marlowe. She did not believe Tom was as strong as Julian. “He is ludicrously innocent, I sometimes think,” she said confidingly. “Life will deal him blows. He has run wild, delightfully, but he will find it hard to adjust to discipline.”

So they talked on quietly, sharing things, in a rather pleasant electrical prickle of unactivated sex. It was like dancing. Olive enjoyed it. She had a right, she thought, considering Maid Marian. There needed to be balance, if balance was the word, latitude for latitude, excursion for excursion. Humphry’s vagaries meant she had a right to take pleasure in being admired, looked at, confided in.

Toby loved her too much. He waited, perpetually dumb, he didn’t know for what, and everyone could see it, she thought, and she herself had to be circumspect and watchful, for the truth was, she couldn’t do without Toby, she needed Toby to talk to about fairy mythology, about plots and tales. Every now and then she paid for conversation—she didn’t feel commercial, it was loving, as she loved Toby—with a silent, passionate embrace, mouth to mouth, skin to skin, her laughing face close to his bemused one. He had understood from the beginning that these encounters could only happen if no one spoke, and they were never referred to. He had been awkward at first, blushing, clumsy, but he had grown adept at clutching and letting go, at fierceness followed by lassitude and a kind of consequent indifference. She guided his fingers into hidden places, her body at first immobile and then quivering a little. She did not know what he thought of all this. It didn’t matter, as long as they were not discovered, and he did not become overexcited, indignant, or morose.

Toby had been lecturing in Winchelsea and Lydd, in the winter and spring, speaking about the Saxon fairy-faith, and the Paracelsian elementals. He had become a great friend of Patty Dace, Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin. The inner group of the Theosophists had held discussions of Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age in Miss Dace’s parlour. This group included Herbert and Phoebe Methley, who were resolutely outspoken about the fact that sex-love and its expression were natural and necessary to both sexes. If Patty or Frank or Dobbin directed a curious look at their bodies as they said these things—and these looks were almost inevitable—they stared back, amiable and unabashed.

Olive wanted to meet Methley, and commanded Toby to bring the Methleys to Sunday lunch in the vicarage. She wanted to meet Methley because, like Frank Mallett, she had been greatly perturbed by one of his stories. He had a book of inconsequential tales of the sighting of fairies, or people of the hills, or the kind folk (who were not kind). These tales were written in a pragmatic first person by a naturalist who saw and observed these creatures as other men observed rare bugs or birds. The introduction to this book pointed out, persuasively enough, that there were indeed more things in heaven and earth than humans could usually apprehend with their limited senses. We cannot see radio, or molecules. We can receive an electrical shock from an apparently inert wire. We see clouds form and unform—where is what made up that bulging grey muscle a minute ago, where now is the grey-blue veil of mist that hung over the marsh poplars? How can it be that our species so steadily and persistently and consistently reported sightings of the fair folk, and occasional dealings with them, if they do not exist? In the beginning of the Bible men talked and walked with God: then with Angels: then with invisible voices. Some humans—of whom I myself am one, wrote the narrator, whose name, he wrote, was Nathanael Carter—have the trick of vision that lets us see these people, which is perhaps no odder than knowing where a trout lies under the shelf of a stream, or where honey is hidden in a tree-trunk.

“Nathanael Carter” claimed to have seen the fair folk from early childhood, and to have thought nothing of it, as a boy, until a teacher reproved him for lying when he told what he had seen. So he did not tell, any more. He understood that he saw because he did not tell.

Olive had never supposed for one moment that fairies or spirits existed. She lived most intensely in an imagined world peopled by things and creatures that drew their energy and power from other human imaginings, centuries and centuries of them. But she didn’t suppose that these creatures were tangible—or alive and going about their purposes when she was not “making them up,” or watching them in her mind—did she? Did she? She read Methley’s tales and was half-convinced that the storyteller must indeed have seen what he said he had seen—it felt like sober fact, to read, and did not run into the usual groove of the fantasy-tale. Did he really know something she didn’t? Or was he simply an extraordinarily competent writer? Either way, she needed to meet him.

His creatures were not exactly pleasant. One story began

I came upon one of these folk when I was out with my butterfly-net on the moors. I saw a wriggle of grey flesh in the heather, and believed I had startled a young rabbit, and then my eyes came into the right frame to see the other, and he came clearly into my vision as though I were adjusting a binocular glass. He was sitting with crossed legs in a clump of gorse, and his flesh was silver-grey like an eft, but duller, like pewter. He must have been about two feet high, if standing. He was all the same colour—he had long, rather coarse, pewter-coloured hair, and pewter eyes in his cobweb-grey face. They weren’t human eyes—nor cats’ eyes neither, and didn’t resemble the eyes of any beast or fish I have ever seen. I don’t think he saw me. His bony mouth was pursed with effort, and his long sharp fingers were busy. He was skinning a fat slow-worm—which was still alive and writhing—with a triangular stony knife, chipped to the thinness of a leaf. He was quite naked. All the fair people I have seen have been quite naked, except for a female walking unobserved in Smithfield Market, who wore a skirt made from a single cloth, like a Malay, and a necklace of pearls.

Olive mentioned this tale to its author, who sat next to her at lunch. She asked him quite directly if he saw the things he described.

“They ring true, do they? I don’t think I could make them up. Sometimes I embroider a bit, or add a bit—but I must see them, to begin with. Don’t you? Your splendid stories are so full of authentic powers, I imagined…”

After the visit, Herbert and Phoebe Methley took to walking in the direction of the old vicarage, or joining the games of cricket and rounders on the beach. Methley wore cotton shirts and a floppy sunhat. His legs were long and brown and wiry. He was a good bowler—too good, he demolished the younger batsmen too quickly—and an indefatigable fielder. Olive sat with Phoebe, or with Prosper Cain, and watched them all run. Herbert and Phoebe went bathing with Toby and the children. Phoebe wore a bathing cap which made her face look gaunt, Olive thought, and a bathing dress with a bunched little skirt round her thin hips.

When Methley was alone with Olive he spoke to her with a different intentness. He consulted her about writing, about editors, about literature. What did she make of Bernard Shaw? Had the man a heart, when all was said and done? And Kenneth Grahame, did she succumb to his charm? Was it not all a little bloodless? He was a man who looked a woman in the eye and did not look away. What did she make of John Lane’s new magazine, The Savoy? He said he envied Olive the fullness and complexity of her life. The boys and girls and their different characters. He did not know how she could stretch her love so far—though he saw very clearly that she did so. He had no experience of it. They were sitting on the beach, picking at a dish of strawberries. Olive said that children connected you to the earth, and therefore weighed you down, a little. She felt, she said, like a farmyard hen, clucking. (Though it was Violet, at a little distance, who was wiping Florian’s sandy face after a fall, and sponging Robin where he had dirtied his pants.) Methley said the family must be of inestimable value when it came to writing tales for children. She wrote with such insight into the hopes and fears of childish minds. Olive said that she did not believe having children was necessarily helpful. It was enough to have been a child…

“I do not know,” said Methley. “I am childless, and sometimes, these days, I lose touch with the child I once was. Do you think there is an age when we become completely adult, Mrs. Wellwood, with no child left in us? When is that, do you think? I am not referring to second childhood that comes to all of us who don’t die early enough.”

His voice was dropped and very serious. He spoke to a thought Olive had had. She wrote for the child she had been, the child she was. In a kind of flurry she asked Methley whether he regretted having no children. The moment she had spoken she regretted the question. There were many reasons why marriages were childless. They were best left unmentioned.

He bent towards her.

“I have observed that there are childless marriages in which the unique pair are everything to each other, everything. They enact the absent children, they love the child in each other, they have a capacity for play and innocence which often—I have noticed—disappears from more fecund relations. Though they can also be—to use Blake’s term—experienced with each other, uninhibited by any watching presence …”

Olive could not think of a quick answer. Herbert Methley went on

“It is not quite true that my marriage is childless. I feel I can trust you, Mrs. Wellwood—like all good writers, you let your private self be seen in public, and I know you are wise and kind. I myself have no children. My wife has three daughters. She was the wife of—a vicar in Batley—happily married but unawakened. Living in a dream world of good deeds and pretty dresses. We met—she and I—and tried to deny for two years what had struck into us and struck us down. She was ill. I could not write. She had a mysterious fatigue, she could barely stand or walk. I went to tell her that I was leaving Batley—I thought of emigrating to Canada—and I took her hand—and we saw, together, as one, that I could not leave, not alone, not ever again. So she came with me, and we live happily here, and are, as I said, everything to each other. We do not tell most people of this. Her husband refuses to divorce her. Or to allow her to see her daughters—which may be as well—she has chosen another life, and any step back into the old one would be painful, very painful.”

Two or three days later, Herbert Methley came alone to the old vicarage. He found Olive in the orchard, sitting at a folding table, writing. She was wearing a simple straw hat and a loose, butcher-blue dress, not unlike her daughters’ aprons. He stood easily before her—his body was always at ease, even if his voice was not.

“Do not let me disturb you, dear Mrs. Wellwood. No one knows better than myself the horror—the vein-freezing unpleasantness—of having the flow of writing disrupted. I came merely to bring you a little present—here it is—I have taken the liberty of writing in it—it is possibly the best of my work—but you shall be the judge.”

He handed her a wrapped book, and went away. Olive was moved. Almost nobody knew how painful it was to have the inky thread of sentences snapped by others. He was a considerate man.

The book was Daughters of Men by Herbert Methley. Inside, he had written

“For Olive Wellwood, a wise woman and a gifted writer. From her good friend, Herbert Methley.”

Olive finished her writing stint, and began to read Daughters of Men as she rested in a hammock after lunch.

It was the tale of a young man in the provinces who liked women. It began by making the point that very few men admitted to liking women, in the plural. A good man should be in search of the One Woman who would partner his soul, but how was he to recognise her if he did not explore, compare, investigate what women were?

The first part of the novel detailed the hero’s relations with various young girls, classmates at school, girls who sang in the church choir, girls like solid dryads met when he was wandering through the woods in search of peace and quiet, girls who were quizzical behind haberdashery counters. His name was Roger Thomas. The descriptions of his relations with the girls were coded, but somehow the nature and variety of extensive sexual experiment was conveyed. There was enough description of skin and electricity, of hands grasping petticoats, of long young throats and the eye travelling downwards, or lovely young legs, going upwards from fine ankles. There was hair—curly black like blackberries, shiny brown like chestnuts, pale like flax. About halfway through the book Roger Thomas noticed a melancholy woman, a married woman, his elderly headmaster’s young, lovely wife. He felt her intelligent eyes on the back of his head. He began to fear her judgement of his innocent and less innocent flirtations. He was now working as an apprentice teacher. She and he sat side by side at her kitchen table, drawing up lists of exam results, making papers. One day she put up her hand, with the pen still in it, and traced the shape of his mouth with her fingers.

They became lovers. They lay tragically in each other’s arms on blankets in the woods, on the carpet in front of the little heater, with its red glow, in his rented room. They planned a clandestine weekend in a pub, and loved each other with abandon, grieving over each passing moment as they took delight in it. That was meant to be the passionate farewell to sin, but the story ended in the same way as Methley’s confided tale of his relations with Phoebe.

Olive thought it must be autobiographical. She thought Herbert Methley was very good at writing about flesh and its stirrings, and was surprised that the book had not been banned by the Lord Chamberlain, or seized by the police. She was interested in the way descriptions of sex incited sexual stirrings in a reader—in this case, herself. The word made flesh, she muttered to herself, half-amused, half-irritated. He had meant to do this to her, she knew it. But her response was confused by the image of Phoebe Methley, whose solid flesh and sensible face came between Olive the reader and her entry into the world of the book. She kept seeing Phoebe’s rather large knuckles, the beginnings of wrinkling on her neck, the slight sag of her stomach and breasts in her bathing suit.

What did Methley want her to feel? She thought about the relation between readers and writers. A writer made an incantation, calling the reader into the magic circle of the world of the book. With subtle words, a writer enticed a reader to feel his or her skin prickle, his or her lips open, his or her blood race. But a writer did this on condition that the reader was alone with printed paper and painted cover. What were you meant to feel—what was she meant to feel—when the originals of the evanescent paper persons were only too solidly present in flesh and bone and prosaic clothing? A gingery tweed jacket, a faded cotton skirt with lupins on it, and an elastic waist that clumped oddly?

Herbert Methley came and sat beside her on the beach a few days later. Tom, Charles and Geraint were swimming. The girls were walking barefoot at the edge of the sea, in their swimming costumes. Julian was reading a book. Methley said to Olive

“Did you read my book?”

“With great interest,” Olive said, substituting the word “interest” for the word “pleasure” at the last moment.

“You are a shrewd reader. You will see that parts of it are taken from life. More than is usual in my work. I wanted you to have read it, to know me.”

“Ah—” said Olive, looking down. He put his hand over her hand, on the sand. He gripped a little. She did not withdraw her hand.

“A love like that—a history of such—such pain, and such fulfilment—is a sacred history. It changes a man. Like Roger in the book, I used to take myself lightly, I was consumed with what I believe is normal widespread curiosity about the sex-feelings. But once a man has truly given himself—and sacrifices have been made—there can be no further question …”

Olive thought, rather sharply, I do not need warning off. She extracted her hand, and used it to rearrange her hair. It was probable, of course, that he was not warning her, but shoring up himself, against his own inclinations, which he seemed to be only too much aware of. She said, demurely, with a little smile, that what he said was very right, very honourable. She thought to herself that this kind of conversation was altogether more perturbing than Toby’s devotion, or Prosper’s courtesy. She would be glad when Humphry came back from wherever he had gone—he had said it was Leeds, but it could well be Manchester.

Olive Wellwood was thirty-eight. She came from a class where many, perhaps most, women did not live much beyond that age, where what was in women’s minds was diminishing strength and the looming of real death. Yet here she was in the magical Garden of England, with a good body, and a face that was, she thought, more interesting, more defined, yes indeed, more beautiful, than when she had been a green girl. And spider-webs of sexual attraction floated everywhere, and touched their skins, like dandelion seeds on white spiralling parasols, like ozone wafting in from the sea. It was still her time, she thought, looking out at the Channel and the children—and Toby who was leaping with them, and Violet camped with nanny and pram—and Prosper who was striding towards them in a smart panama hat. The children were children, blessed children, not yet formed. Though she saw that Herbert Methley had detached his attention from her, and was staring with a pleased expression at the gaggle of girls, pale, fine Griselda, brisk dark Dorothy, dreamy Pomona and inhibited Imogen, pretty Phyllis and composed Florence, the only one in whom could be seen a shadow of the woman she would be. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said to Methley, who gave her a sharp look, smiled conspiratorially, and agreed.

The boys were coming out of the water, onto the sand. They were like sealfolk, Olive thought. Sleek creatures of the deep, beaching themselves and taking human form. Shaggy Geraint and precise-gestured Charles, and behind them, riding in prone on a wave, then standing thigh-deep in the moving water, his hair streaked and streaming with it, Tom. He seemed reluctant to come out. He bent and stirred the surface of the water with his golden arms. He was the most graceful creature she had ever seen. It was noon. The sun was high and shone directly down on her golden boy, who was not reflected in the moving surface of the sea, which he had broken into shining particles, myriads of slanting glassy fragments, a mosaic of surfaces, as there were myriads of glittering water-drops catching the light and making rainbows along his shoulders and in his long hair. He had fine gold hairs all over his body, too, she saw. Fine gold hairs long enough to cling together and make dripping patterns on his chest and thighs. Olive saw—it was the effect of dandelion-plumes and ozone—that his thin rod (she had no familiar word for it) was half-upright along his stomach. She loved Tom. She could not keep him. Tom loved her—this was still her time, with him, too—but he would go away, and be changed.

She started making-up, in the other world. The queen in the clearing, on the horse with fifty silver bells and nine at every tett of its mane—whatever a tett was. The woman and the boy, in the clearing. A story. She smiled, at a safe distance now, and Herbert Methley wondered what she was smiling at, and misconstrued it, as was natural.

Dorothy went to the pottery workshop, to see how Philip was.

Philip was at the wheel, his wet hands inside the moving, growing clay wall of a pot. Dorothy stood in the doorway and watched him. She touched the tips of her own fingers with other fingers, trying to imagine, in her skin, how this work would feel. It was precise, and extraordinary. Philip came to the end of turning, finished his rim, smoothed the sides with a wooden baton, and lifted the bat from the wheel. He said to Dorothy “Hello, then,” without turning round. She hadn’t been sure he knew she was there. He said

“Would you like to make a pot?”

Dorothy said she would. Philip found a smock for her, and ceded his seat at the wheel. He took a ball of clay, and slapped it on the wheel, and centred it for her. “Now,” he said, “press down, so, with both hands—use your thumbs—and feel it come up.”

Dorothy pressed. The clay was wet and clammy and dead, and yet it had a motion of its own, a response, a kind of life. The wheel turned, the clay turned, Dorothy held her fingers steady inside the red-brown cylinder which rose, with narrowing walls, to the rhythm of the turning. Dorothy was delighted. And then, suddenly, something went wrong—the rhythm faltered, the clay walls frilled, slipped and collapsed inwards, and where there had been a tube there was a flailing blob. Dorothy turned to Philip to ask what she had done wrong. She was half-laughing, half-crying. Philip was laughing. He said “That always happens.” He took the lump in his hands to re-form it, and at that moment Elsie came in from the storeroom door, carrying something, unaware of Dorothy’s presence, holding it out to Philip.

“Look what I found. Did you ever see the like?”

Then she saw Dorothy, and blushed crimson. Dorothy wondered why she had alarmed her so—they knew each other, a little, not very well—and then began to understand what she was holding. Philip had understood immediately, and the blood was also rising in his face.

“It was in a box at the very back of a kind of gloryhole,” said Elsie.

It was white and shining. It was a larger-than-life, extremely detailed, evenly glazed model of an erect cock and balls, every wrinkle, every fold, every glabrous surface gleaming.

“I didn’t do it,” said Philip.

“I didn’t think you did,” said his sister. She said to Dorothy “I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure if she was on first-name terms with Dorothy or not.

Dorothy advanced, with her hands covered in wet slip.

“Can I have a look? I’m going to study anatomy. Do you think it’s for use in hospitals?”

“No,” said Philip. “I think—I think it’s a phallic Thing.”

He had learned that word from Benedict Fludd’s talk. Neither of the other two knew what it meant.

“Religious, sort of,” said Philip, half-embarrassed, half on the edge of hysterical laughter.

Dorothy took the phallus and brandished it. She said “It’s very big,” and also began to laugh uncontrollably. Elsie joined in the laughter.

“Do you think—do you think”—Dorothy asked—“it’s a self-portrait, so to speak?”

She had left brown clay fingerprints where she had clasped it.

“You’ll have to wash it,” she said to Elsie, and collapsed again into laughter.

“Give it me,” said Philip. “I’ll run it under the tap. And then Elsie shall put it quickly back where she found it.”

His fingers recognised just how well it had been made, how its maker’s fingers had felt it out, and followed its swelling veins.

When they had given up laughing, they did not know what to say to each other, and yet felt very close. Dorothy said she had better be off. She asked if Philip would give her another lesson. She asked Elsie, in a voice still thick with laughter, if Elsie made pots.

“Aye,” said Elsie. “Tiny little ’uns, when there’s no one watching. I like ’em thin and small.”

“You never told me that,” said Philip.

“You never asked,” said Elsie.