The Children's Book

19

The summer school took place. Humphry put on The Winter’s Tale, with himself as Leontes, Toby as Polixenes, and Geraint and Florence as Florizel and Perdita.

Herbert Methley talked to Olive about sex. He sat next to her during rehearsals, when neither of them was needed. He took her for walks, along the rivulet, past the church, into the Marsh. His talk was at once theoretical and fleshly. Much of it was about what women desired. He said that until recently it had suited men to suppose that women felt little or no desire, were pure creatures or milch cows, that men treated as property. The ten commandments listed wives along with ox, ass, field, maidservant or manservant as things neither to be taken nor to be desired. Adulterous women were beheaded, in Semitic cultures, but not adulterous men. And yet, as a good student of Darwin, he believed that sexual desire was instilled in human beings—like other animals—by the needs of the species to propagate itself. Elsie Warren, trim and fine-waisted, in a linen hat, came rapidly towards them with a basket over her arm. Did Olive suppose, Herbert Methley asked her, that such a young woman—he studied her figure very intently as she went past, smiling politely at them—felt none of the stirrings young men felt at her age? It was very improbable. Olive herself, he said, drawing her hand through his arm, was both a wise woman, and like himself, a student of human nature. What did she think?

“I am mostly a student of inhuman nature—imaginary nature,” said Olive, evading. “I tell fairytales to children. The prince always marries the princess. Or the daft young man gets the princess because of his good nature and because he is the third son. Or the prince becomes a roe deer, or a swine, and has to be disenchanted by the clever princess. I don’t know what it has to do with what you call the needs of the species. All the tales stop off with marriage, or perhaps foretell a large number of progeny, undefined.”

They were going past a fenced field with a herd of cream-coloured cows, heavy, muddy, staring cows. In a corner, under an elm tree, one female cow was busily mounting another, making the movements a bull would make, although unequipped, and provoking—they both noticed—a quiver of response (or irritation) in the strained area under the lower cow’s tail.

“Does not that prove my point?” said Herbert Methley. “The poor things are deprived of the presence of a bull—who would in nature be there, guarding his harem and snorting defiance at other bulls. Yet they feel a need…”

Olive felt a blush mounting from her bosom to her face.

“I hope I have not shocked you. I did not mean to shock you.”

“I think you did. But I am not shocked. And I take your point. Scientifically, your example—look, she has got down, and sauntered away—is evidence for what you say it is.”

“When we can prevent the unfortunate consequences of following our instincts to what John Donne called the one true end of love—our society will be different, and we shall be transfigured.”

“By sexual freedom? Instincts are one thing. Donne uses the word, love.”

“Is not desire always love, whilst it exists? Whatever it may become. I sometimes think, there are as many ways of loving women, as there are women. And I sometimes think, if women were honest, there are as many ways of loving men as there are men.”

“Ah, but a good student of human nature needs also to study indifference, and even revulsion and distaste. For these also are instincts.”

Methley thought for a moment or two about his remark, and then attacked directly.

“I hope I inspire none of those in you?”

He laughed, not quite easily.

“Don’t be foolish,” said Olive. “We are not talking about ourselves. And we are good friends, which is yet another relation between men and women, hard to manage and rare to find.”

When she got back to the inn where they were staying, she found herself shrugging her whole body with a mix of emotions. Of course such talk aroused some kind of—yes, sexual—pricklings in her. It had to. She knew what desire was, and what its satisfaction was. But she had no idea whether she desired Herbert Methley. The presence of his body aroused her own in some way, but it was not clear to her that what it aroused wasn’t indifference, revulsion and distaste. He was not lovely to look at, as Humphry was. Though he had a kind of dreadful energy which is always—how did she know these things?—stirring, like a huge octopus quivering through water, or flailing on a slab and slipping back into the sea.

What was very certain was that she had had none of these thoughts at Elsie Warren’s age. They were a grown woman’s thoughts.

Benedict Fludd held classes in clay modelling in what had been the grand coach-house. Elsie had cleaned its little row of spider-webbed windows and Philip had brought tubs and buckets of clay and slip. There was a serious group of five young women from the Royal College, whose previous experience of ceramics had been painting tiles, and one or two young men also. Then there were locals who wanted to try their hands—Patty Dace, Arthur Dobbin, a schoolmaster from Lydd, and the new schoolmistress-to-be from Puxty, a young widow called Mrs. Oakeshott. Mrs. Oakeshott had come from the North, to make a new beginning, she said, after the tragic death of her young husband in a railway accident. She was accompanied by her small son, Robin, who would start school at Puxty in September, with the few Marsh children who attended—the whole school, from five to eleven, was only fourteen children. Frank Mallett, who was on the local education committee, had been delighted to find Mrs. Oakeshott, and was already afraid she would find the harsh weather and the loneliness unbearable. She had excellent qualifications and a mild wit. Her son had come with her to Purchase, accompanied by a kind of nursemaid, twig-limbed, diminutive, frizzy-haired, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, called Tabitha. Mrs. Oakeshott had a thick, coiled plait of strawberry-blonde hair, golden, creamy, rose-tinged. She had a fine face, square in shape, placid but watchful, and a delightful smile, when she smiled. She wore glasses, which she tended to mislay, and which were returned to her by the young men, and by Dobbin, when they found them in clumps of grass in the orchard, or lying amongst the drying pots in the studios. She was good at modelling.

Fludd had prevailed on Elsie to sit for the classes, although she sat there running over in her mind what should be fetched from the farm and the market for the next meal. No one dared contradict Benedict Fludd, in case he should cease to be amiable and become moody or irascible. He was teaching them to model a head. No one was modelling Elsie below the neck. They were trying to render her flying hair, and sharp mouth, and wide eyes. Mrs. Oakeshott’s effort was much the best. She had got the angle of the jaw and the neck right. The brows over the empty eyes were promising and lively.

Little Tabitha wandered about with the child, Robin, and came upon Violet Grimwith in the orchard, reading aloud to the assembled smaller Wellwoods, Florian, Robin and Harry. Hedda, rather sulky, was with this group but not of it. She was reading a book, lying on her stomach in the grass, thinking this was not enough for her, not enough, she would go mad with boredom.

Tabitha crept up to the very edge of the audience. Violet looked up. “Come and sit with us, if you like, why don’t you? What is the little boy called?”

“Robin. I look after him for his mum.” She was older than Hedda, but smaller. Violet said “Well, bring him into the circle, to listen to the story. We’re reading At the Back of the North Wind. Do you know that?”

“No, mam.”

“I do,” said Robin Oakeshott. He sat down, next to Robin Well-wood. “I like it. Go on reading.”

Violet gave him a measuring glance, and went on reading.

Mrs. Oakeshott offered her services to help with the play. She gave Imogen Fludd a hand with the costumes, and turned out to be deft with bits of glitter-braid, and abundant pleats for the pregnant Hermione. Olive liked her. Everyone liked her. It would have been hard not to.

Olive came upon Mrs. Oakeshott, in the place behind the yew hedge, where they waited to go on and off, adjusting the clasp of Humphry’s regal cloak. She saw Humphry’s hand, in the nape of Mrs. Oakeshott’s neck, his clever fingers feeling for tension, and relieving it, as he did for Olive herself. She stepped back.

“All the same, Marian,” said Humphry. “However sensible you are—we are—the whole idea is simply foolish. I wish you would go home.”

Marian Oakeshott rested her head—intimately—on Humphry’s shoulder.

“It is hard,” she said. And then, “I do love you, I do love you so very steadily, so very much, my dear, however hopelessly it must be.”

And Humphry said “Oh well, I love you too, that can’t be altered. But it can’t be, and you know it, you have always known it.”

And Marian Oakeshott put up her arms, and drew down Humphry’s head, and kissed him, and he gave a kind of groan, and grasped her, and kissed her back. Olive saw the crown of hair tremble and sway. She thought of marching forwards, and retreated.

Hedda lay in the long grass, with her skirt rucked up above her knickers, and her lengthening brown legs stretched out. She was fortunate not to have hay fever, as Phyllis did. She was not exactly reading The Golden Age. I am a snake in the grass, she thought, a secret snake. Violet was sitting on the roughly mown grass in the orchard, at some distance, in a low wicker armchair, sewing. Hedda spent a lot of time spying on Violet, as a revenge for the fact that Violet spied on her, going through her private drawers and notebooks. Hedda, like Phyllis, was perpetually agitated by being left out of the group of older children, Tom and Dorothy, Charles and Griselda, and now Geraint. But whereas Phyllis was plaintive, Hedda was enraged. She was the traitor in all tales of chivalry and in myths. She was Vivien, she was Morgan Le Fay, she was Loki. She despised the cow-eyed and the gentle, Elaine the lily maid, faithful Psyche, Baldur’s weeping wife, Nanna. She was a detective, who saw through appearances. No one was as nice as they seemed, was her rule of judging characters. She was the darkest of the children, with long black hair and very solid black brows, drawn in a frown more often than not, and long, black lashes which in themselves were beautiful, especially when she was asleep. She had no one to talk to about her investigations. Phyllis was an idiot. Florian was a baby. She had had hopes of Pomona, but Pomona was an idiot, too, of the same kind as Phyllis. Dorothy was who she hated, because she was older, and in the way, and got things Hedda didn’t get. And because she had Griselda, and they were together, and Hedda had no one. But Dorothy didn’t know what Hedda knew, or partly knew. She had even wondered about Tabitha as a sort of friend—it was odd that she, at ten, was certainly a young child, whereas Tabitha, at twelve, was supposed to be in charge of Robin Oakeshott, and was a sort of nursemaid. She saw that Tabitha’s simple manner was put on. Tabitha had her own thoughts, which she kept to herself. Hedda did not know what those thoughts were, and she saw Tabitha didn’t want her to know. Tabitha was acting, and could not afford a crack in the surface.

Olive came through the orchard, running, clutching her skirts. She pulled up a chair near Violet, and leaned forward, and hissed to her in a desperate whisper. Hedda could hear perfectly from where she was, and kept very still.

“I’ve just discovered something frightful, Vi. I don’t know what to do.”

She was all atremble.

“Tell me,” said Violet. Violet liked being told things, Hedda knew. “That woman—that Mrs. Oakeshott—who is no Mrs. anyone—she is the same woman—she is Maid Marian.”

“That was fairly clear from the outset,” said Violet. “What?”

“That was what I thought, myself. What has upset you?”

“She kissed him. He kissed her. I saw.”

“That was stupid of you. Better not see. She’s going away to be the schoolmistress at Puxty. What are you thinking of doing?”

“I am not made of stone, Violet, though you may think so. I have violent feelings. I feel—very angry, very—I can’t stand the mess. I can’t work if there’s a mess. You know that. I can’t afford to get agitated, I need to work.”

“Well then, you must not get agitated. You are the goose who lays the golden eggs on which we all depend. Including, I imagine, Mistress Maid Marian. You’ll be better off if you leave her to go earn her living at Puxty. You don’t need any more dependants.”

“He kissed her.”

“Well, you know what he is and what he does. He won’t leave us, all the same, you can feel safe on that count. Mistress Marian is the victim, not you, you goose.”

“But I saw—”

“Well, take good care to see no more. You’ve had practice. Kiss someone yourself, there are those who would enjoy that, and you know it.”

There was something going on, Hedda sensed, that she did not understand, over and beyond what she did understand. Olive gave a little laugh.

“Mr. Methley has been lecturing me on the nature of women.”

“He’s another who can’t keep his hands to himself.”

“You’ve noticed that?”

“There’s not much I don’t notice,” said Violet, with quick satisfaction. That was it, Hedda thought, she has to know everything, or she feels—smaller, lesser—

“So you think I should just go on—as though nothing—as though I’d noticed nothing—”

“Isn’t that one of your great accomplishments?”

“Oh, you are hard on me.”

“Rather the opposite,” said Violet.

That first summer school was ad hoc and haphazard, from start to finish. Later schools took up deliberately a pattern that developed casually and at odd moments, in that first year, where one event—a lecture, a drawing class, a poetry reading, the Play above all—became connected to the others, so that Toby Youlgreave gave a lecture on Italian tales of abandoned babies who were returned as beautiful girls, whilst the textile and embroidery group were put to designing floral prints and weaves for the black and white wintry first act, and the spring festival of the second, where Perdita scattered flowers. August Steyning came over to help with stage effects—notably Olive-Hermione, as statue—and stayed to instruct the young Fludds and Wellwoods in theatre and costume design. He took from The Winter’s Tale what fitted his version of the theory that marionettes were more profound in their presentation of human passion than clumsy or self-obsessed human actors. He instructed Florence in how to dance “like a wave of the sea,” bending her body with his own hands, inducing a paralysis of self-consciousness and then, inexplicably, a new freedom of flowing movement. Florence said, flicking her wrists and ankles,

“What have you done? I feel as though my hands and feet don’t belong to me.”

“Good,” said August Steyning. “Now, again, skip, skip, glide, make a full moon of your arms, let your fingers hold it—it is cold to the touch—so—”

Florence felt she was made of quicksilver.

Prosper Cain came when he could, when the business of the Museum allowed it. He gave a talk on the craft of art, and the art of craft, and of how—even in painting and sculpture—the two were inseparable. You needed design, and you needed basic physics and chemistry, or your paint would not dry under its varnish and your clay would not hold its glaze. And you needed also something—a sharpness of vision—which couldn’t be taught, but could not be acquired, in his view, without incessant practice.

He went to a class where several students—professionals and amateurs—were designing The Winter’s Tale series of alternating squares, tiles as it were, on stitched or printed fabric. Seraphita Fludd was ostensibly teaching this class, sitting at one end of the barn, and saying “very nice, very acceptable,” to whatever was brought up for her to look at. Cain wandered, with Olive Wellwood, behind the chairs and easels, offering comments. His own children had produced very pleasing, very faintly parodic, floral forms, Florence’s Dutch, Julian’s a version of Sèvres porcelain. “Very nice,” said Prosper Cain to his son. “Very competent, you mean,” said Julian. “I can do this with one hand behind my back. It’s a mockery. I don’t have any of that sharpness of vision you were extolling this morning. It’s not real, as I know you know.”

“I wonder what it needs to become real?” said Prosper, accepting Julian’s evaluation of his own work.

“I don’t think art should be personal,” said Julian. “In fact, I think it shouldn’t be. And yet, what is wrong with my very nice roses, is that they’re nothing to do with me. They don’t need me, and I don’t need them.”

When they were out of earshot, Olive said to Prosper that he was fortunate to be able to talk to his children with such ease, to put them at ease, she meant to say—she wanted to say, how very well he had succeeded at bringing them up—at being—

“Both parents,” said Prosper. “Male and female, both. It hasn’t been easy. Soldiers are very male, by nature. Except that they need female skills, like sewing and polishing, for they live separately from women. In that sense, they are like the boys to whom Dr. Badley is diligently teaching needlework and cookery at Bedales. A concept that, as a soldier, I find attractive. Camps, and needlework for boys. And theatre. Come and look at Miss Fludd’s work. It interests me.”

There she sat, Imogen Fludd, in her imperfectly hand-sewn garments, that lacked both art and craft. She had designed one black and white square, and one small group of spring flowers. The black and white was frost-flowers on a window-pane, their petals outlined with meticulous strings of minuscule dots, a laciness that owed something to Beardsley’s work for the Yellow Book and the Savoy, though Prosper Cain could not imagine this dumb girl understanding Beardsley’s sly, sexual forms. The lips and clefts of her frost-flowers were surely innocent? Her spring flowers were in vanishing pastel colours, a hint of rose, a shadow of primrose, a blue stain like the vein in her pale wrist. They were trying to retreat back into the plane of the paper, they were blushing mildly to be present at all. He was about to say something anodyne and pass on when the shapes pulled together in his head, and he saw that she had, in a helpless way, exactly that sharp vision that Julian had rightly renounced. He said

“These could be good, you know. Why do your flowers lurk in the centre of the paper? As though they were going down a funnel. You should do what Mr. Morris always insisted on, extend the vegetable forms to the edges of the square so that they can grow beyond it—”

“I can’t.”

She didn’t look up, her face was heavy.

“Well, then,” said Prosper, on an impulse. “Define their limits. May I?”

She handed him her charcoal and her pencils.

He enclosed the frost-flowers in squared panes. And then he drew a circle round the spring flowers, almost as though they were on a plate, or inside the rim of a basket. It was surprising how the confinement brought them to life. He laughed.

“They needed to feel safe,” he said.

“They needed to feel safe,” she repeated.

He said

“Have you other work I can see?”

She handed him a portfolio. He found a series of drawings of little coloured fishes, springing and curling, blue and yellow and red.

“I was trying to illustrate The Arabian Nights,” she said. “The talking fishes. It’s got no shape, like everything I do.”

Prosper enclosed the fishes in an extempore frying pan, with two handles, bringing them to life in the same curious way.

“Not,” he said, “that you can now say they are safer. But they are livelier. They have a purpose, if it is only to get out of the frying pan.”

“Into the fire?” said Imogen doubtfully.

“Have you thought of enrolling at the Royal College?” Prosper said. “You have talent. You could learn a craft—”

“I don’t know,” said Imogen.

“You should think. I will talk to your father.”

He saw her think of begging him not to do so, and then deciding to say nothing.

When they had left the class, Olive asked him why he had encouraged Imogen Fludd, and not his own children. Who were, she said, clearly much more accomplished.

“Accomplished, oh yes,” said Prosper Cain. “But that girl has what you have, my friend—she knows the shapes of things, as you know the shape of tales. Look at her work. One artist should recognise another.”

“I am not an artist. I earn my living by storytelling.”

“That is nonsense, dear lady, and you know it.”

So they came slowly to the performance of the play, and the end of the summer school. The theatre was the wild garden at the side of Purchase House, which had once been a formal garden, and had unkempt hedges which had once been clipped yew, and were now bearded and tufted and invaded by brambles and Old Man’s Beard. Steyning commandeered some students and helpers, including Dobbin and Frank Mallett, to make papier-mâché statuary on wire frames, which in the winter scenes were stark and in the summer scenes were garlanded with silk flowers and real flowers, mixed. He had brought footlights, with limelight, which altered the shadows on these forms, making them bald and sinister, or bright and clear. There was a goat-horned herm, with shaggy thighs, and a naked girl with falling hair, seen from the back. There were two squatting, cross-legged little fauns who grinned at the stage-corners in the harvest scene, and were absent in the Sicilian sculpted palace. Then there was Hermione’s plinth. He was exigent about this object—he wanted the woman-statue higher than the cast and the audience, with the moon, which was full, silver and shadowy behind her. He wanted both stone mother and fleshly daughter to be chastely clothed in endless swirling pleats of white cloth, and exhausted Olive by rearranging both her standing place and her complicated garment over and over again. He pointed out that by moonlight, with her back to the moon, and a veil cast over her, she would glow in the shadows, the shape of the dark bushes and her mysterious cowled head against the moon would be magical. And she must move, when she stepped down, like an automaton. As though the force of gravity, not her own will, lifted each foot, bent each knee, held her arms in place. “I don’t know what to do with my arms.”

“Practically, you will need to hold on to the pleats, whilst you’re up there, or they’ll come out. Your right arm across your breast, to hold the veil down at your left shoulder. The left arm around the waist to hold the cloth in so it doesn’t swirl away when you move. You need white rings on your fingers, ivory or moonstone, I’ll see what I can find.”

Olive was not very good at gliding like an automaton, and became irritated by the constant repetition.

“You are related to the stone man in Don Giovanni, you are a sister of Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea … Think of the stone music—”

“I am a woman of a certain age, who has borne a number of children,” said Olive drily.

“You are a fine figure of a woman,” said Steyning, who was still thinking in terms of sculpture.

So there she stood, on the first night, with the moon behind her, making shadows in her wound garments, which she clutched, pale-knuckled. She was surprised how very difficult it was to keep still, for so long. She thought about her body, under all its unaccustomed white sheeting—like a dressmaker’s dummy, she thought, something vague and muffled. She was ageing. She was pleated across her stomach as well as over her shoulders. She was still in her time. Prosper Cain admired her. Herbert Methley desired her. Humphry wanted her, but she was cross with Humphry. She had cheered herself somewhat, going over Humphry’s conversation with Maid Marian, by remembering that it was quite clear from what he said that he had not known either that Marian was the new schoolmistress at Puxty, or that she was coming to the summer school. It would go by, she thought, as other things had gone by. She made what she hoped was an invisible adjustment to her stance, as her ankles were both numb and strained.

A woman on a plinth can see over a hedge she is designed to protrude above. There in the lane behind the yew hedge, their heads bent together, were Humphry, in his royal robes and hose, his red hair artificially whitened by August, and Marian Oakeshott, in a pretty dress with forget-me-not sprigs on cream. She was brushing the white powdering from his hair off the velvet shoulders of his cloak. It was a very wifely gesture. When she had brushed it away, she patted his arm, in an even more wifely way. Rage gripped the statue, who nevertheless must remain motionless. Rather deliberately, she thought of Herbert Methley’s investigating fingers. Involuntarily she remembered the ludicrous and alarming cows. She was her own woman.

At the moonlit garden party to celebrate the success of the play, Olive stood with Humphry in a circle of admirers which included Marian Oakeshott. Everyone praised Olive’s impassivity and stillness as the statue. Mrs. Oakeshott commented intelligently on the brilliant verse-speaking of Hermione’s passionate self-defence in Act I. She was even able to quote felicities of stress. Olive was confused by this and turned gladly to Herbert Methley, who made several remarks about the character of Hermione as Woman, and spoke of how few of Shakespeare’s female characters were women, since they were mostly to be played by young boys who were better at young girls. He had always wondered how a boy could create Cleopatra. He would like to see Mrs. Wellwood undertake Cleopatra. He kissed her hand, and held on to it too long.

And so Olive found herself in a bed with Herbert Methley. It was a bed in an inn called the Smugglers’ Rest, on a bit of coast looking out at the Channel. It was a bed that sagged, and seemed likely to creak, in a bedroom with an uneven wooden floor and an ill-fitting window, with a crocheted curtain with fish on it. The inn was run by a somewhat unctuous and over-friendly fat woman, who had fed the lovers on plates of shellfish and day-old bread and butter. Methley said he took a room there from time to time when he needed to be alone for inspiration. Olive thought “be alone” meant “not be with Phoebe” since otherwise he was reasonably solitary on his smallholding. It had taken a surprising amount of fixing to be together here. Lies had had to be told. Olive had set off on the London train to see a publisher and had got off at the next stop, which was why she was rather formally dressed, with a large hat, and gloves.

It would have been better if they could have fallen impulsively into each other’s arms in a hayloft, but that was impractical, they thought, surrounded by art students and miscellaneous children. Methley had repeated, with gratifying urgency, “You must come to me, you must come, it is meant to be.” And he had his arrangements, pat, when he came to propose them, with an ease which Olive felt it better not to question. Over lunch, with a certain bitterness and jealousy he had criticised August Steyning’s “bloodless” theories of impersonal acting. Bloodless and soulless, said Herbert Methley. There is too little passion in the world for it to be removed from the stage, where it should flourish, without hindrance. Olive felt it was all embarrassing, to be sitting eating oysters, and discussing Kleist and marionettes, looking into the eyes of an intended lover. It was all too deliberate, and not spontaneous. She thought there were women who would have enjoyed this aspect of things—but she was not one. She thought about how to say she had made a mistake, and must go home, and could not frame the voice or the sentence. So she ate her strawberry tart with cream, and followed Herbert Methley up the narrow wooden stairs.

Inside the bedroom, he bent to lock the door, and lifted his hands to remove her hat. She stood awkwardly, like a statue. He said

“You are thinking you have made a mistake, and should go home. You are embarrassed to be committing adultery out of a kind of revengefulness. You feel this is all mechanical, not passionate. I can read your thoughts, you see, I know you.” Olive laughed, murmured “A palpable hit,” and relaxed a few muscles.

“I am a writer, I know what people are thinking. I put my mind into their bodies. I love your body, and you will love mine. This is—as sex always is, my dear—both ludicrously comic, and passionately important. We shall know each other, as the Bible says. What could be more amazing?”

He was taking off his clothes as he spoke, and folding them, and putting them on a chair. Olive looked sidelong at his body. It was not pale with red extremities, like Humphry’s. It was a kind of tanned yellow-brown, all over, owing to the naked sunbathing. She gave a snort of laughter. Bodies are ludicrous, she thought, he is very clever to say so.

“ ‘To teach thee, I am naked first. Why then

What need’st thou have more covering than a man …,’ ”

he said. She could not place the quotation. He undid her belt and began on her buttons.

“All the same,” she said, finding her voice, “you are right, I do think this may be a mistake, I am embarrassed.”

“Of course you do, and of course you are,” he said, removing her dress and beginning on her underwear. “But I mean to make you forget all those thoughts, soon, very soon now.”

And she plunged naked into the bed, with her hair pinned up, so that he should not scrutinise the slacknesses and scarring of her skin.

He talked a lot, during the sexual act. Humphry didn’t, Humphry was silent and manful and lordly. Methley was intimate, curled round her, she thought, like a snake, like a salamander, murmuring in her ear “Is it better like this? Is it better here—or here—? Is this not delicious …?”

Her body liked what he was doing—most of the time, and he noticed so quickly when it didn’t, he changed tack, he corrected himself. She looked at his “thing” which was narrow and brownish, unlike Humphry’s thick one. She must not think about Humphry.

“Don’t think, stop thinking,” said Herbert Methley in her ear, “now is the time to stop thinking, my dear, my darling,” and she did stop thinking, and came to a quivering climax such as she had never before known, with a full-throated cry, which she felt must be audible all over the inn.

“I told you, I know you, we fit together,” said the voice in her ear, and she saw that it could be hard to forgo a second experience like this, and yet she was, yet she was—not ashamed—embarrassed—by the difference of it all, and her own involuntary motions.

• • •

When Olive was disturbed, she wrote. She wrote as she might dream, finding the meaning, or abandoning the images, later. She wrote to get back into that other, better world. When she was back in Todefright, after The Winter’s Tale and the Smugglers’ Rest, she wrote a long description of a passage in which the travelling company came upon a tall, swathed object, a pillar or a prisoner, something, she wrote, like a plaster sculpture, wound in dripping bandages, which were hardening into a permanent form. It was greyish-white, a more than life-size cocoon. The young prince advanced on it fearlessly, as he always did. He was warned by Gathorn. “Don’t touch it. Those are the webs she weaves, and they are poisonous.” The prince approached, in the dark passage, with his little lamp, and caught the glitter of living eyes in the woven hollow eyes that spoke, though the mouth was covered and the lips only a soft mound. “It’s alive, we must free it,” said the brave boy to the good goblin.

Here she was briefly foiled by her own ingenuity. How could he unwind her, if her bindings were poisonous? He did it with his magic blade, which hissed where it came into contact with the liquid, and chipped away at the bits that had solidified. She could see it now. The bindings lay in writhing little strips, and solid stuff like clay or porcelain, like broken fingernails. When all the wrappings were removed, she stepped out of her shroud, a white-haired woman with a bent head, and hunched shoulders, who looked for a moment too old and exhausted to survive her release. She stumbled forward, and the young hero caught her in his arms, and steadied her, and suddenly found that she was a youthful fairy, her snowy hair full of unearthly life and light, her emerald eyes glittering with magic. And then again, she was old, white-lipped, her skin drawn over her bones.

She told him she was a powerful fairy, who had gone Under the Hill to help those whose shadows had been stolen, and had been snared by the dark Weaving Queen down there, and bound in dead shadow-matter, sucked dry of life by the Weavers. If there had been enough to cover her eyes, she would have become as they were. But she still had a little power, in her look.

Olive stopped, dissatisfied. The image was a good image, but the Underground story was not the right place for it. And the presence of this—apparently adult—fairy seemed to her to weaken, not to strengthen, the conflict between the white Queen of Elfland and the dark Queen of the Abyss. She had somehow been unable to put in female characters who were not those two. They would not come to life, boy readers would find them sissy, they messed up the thread of the narrative.

Nevertheless the idea of the good creature bound in dead shadow-matter was too good to lose.

So she rewrote the passage, taking away the height and age and beauty of the fairy, and substituting an air spirit, fine-limbed, with hair like pale gold sunlight (and no visible sex, she referred to it as an it). She was fascinated by the Paracelsian earth spirits—sylphs, gnomes, undines and salamanders. But as she had begun consciously to craft Underground, she had taken to excising any words or images that too easily made short-cuts to classical mythology and aroused all sorts of lazy, facile responses she didn’t want her readers to make. She wanted her readers—Tom first, but she was very vaguely thinking of others—to see her air creature, as she had invented it. She made its hair spiky, as though the wind was in it, transparent as ice, but warm with sunlight. She gave it veins and sinews with blue of the sky and gold of the sun coiling in them. Its bones too were transparent. Its eyes? Uncanny yellow-gold eyes, with a black sunspot in the centre. She thought about it, and wondered, if she called it a Silf, whether getting rid of the Greek y and ph would steer away the classical associations. Silf was close to Elf, an English word, softened.

The Silf neither staggered with helpless age, nor lay like a ripe woman in the boy’s arms. It danced about like a marsh light, celebrating its freedom, and warned the Company of unexpected dangers lurking in the next passages. It said that if it were Tom, it would go back whilst it could, and thought he could subsist perfectly happily without his shadow, in a perpetual noonday. It said “Maybe your Shadow won’t want to come up to the air. Maybe it will want to stay with the gnomes and salamanders.” Tom said “My shadow is mine.”

“Maybe it no longer thinks so,” the Silf said, and Olive wondered wildly what were the implications of that remark, which she had inserted on an impulse from nowhere.