The Children's Book

24

The hot summer days were long in the Marsh. In the absence of Benedict Fludd and Philip there was less for Elsie to do, and Seraphita and Pomona did nothing anyway. Sometimes they sat in the orchard with their embroidery. Elsie cleared up, and shopped, and did sewing of her own. She had reached an age where every surface of her skin was taut with the need to be touched and used, and all she had to occupy her was a dusty old house and two mildly crazy women dressed in flowing floral gowns. She herself was also dressed in clothes constructed from altered hand-downs, covered with faded golden lilies and birds and pomegranates. What she wanted was a sleek, dark, businesslike skirt and a fresh white shirt with a collar, that would show off her narrow waist. She had no money, and did not know how to ask for any, for she knew there was very little in the household to cover the bread and milk and vegetables. She also had a problem with handed-down shoes, none of which fitted her exactly. She had red rubbed places on what she knew were pretty feet, scraped heels and bruised toe-joints. She tended to walk around in basketlike sandals that were too big, but didn’t hurt. More than anything she admitted to herself that she wanted, she wanted new shoes, her own shoes. Shoes that wouldn’t destroy her feet. More than anything, in fact, she wanted to be made love to, to have hands gripping her waist and stroking her lovely hair. She burned, but it was no use repining, or even admitting to herself that she burned. She set about remedying what little she could, taking dressmaking shears to the Morris & Co. fabrics, and converting the loose aesthetic robes to neatly shaped skirts, with darts and seams. She had seen in a shop window in Rye a soft, dark wine-red leather belt, with an arrow-shaped clasp at the front, that she desired passionately, as a substitute for hands, as a provocation to eyes.

Seraphita said nothing about the skirts. She stared vaguely, like a china doll, or a garden goddess, Elsie thought. The house now had few secrets from Elsie. She knew where Seraphita hid bottles, brown bottles of stout, little blue bottles of laudanum, amongst her wool-baskets and hairbrushes. She never touched or moved these bottles; she thought, indeed, of offering help with procuring them, but Seraphita had a trick of not hearing anything that was said, and must have had a satisfactory system already in place, though she never looked awake enough to contrive one.

Elsie knew she ought to be sorry for Pomona. The girl liked to follow her around, never offering to help with the housework, though sweetly admiring of Elsie’s achievements, such a delicious soup, such a pretty flower arrangement, such clean windows as there had never been, the sun had never come in so brightly. Pomona did touch Elsie. She stroked her, timidly, when Elsie sat down to sew, she asked if Elsie was happy. She said “We aren’t very lively here, now Imogen is gone,” and Elsie replied tartly that there was plenty of work to be getting on with. Somebody ought to be educating the girl, taking her out to meet possible husbands or teaching her a trade, Elsie thought, not very sympathetically. She wished Pomona would keep her distance. She preferred sitting alone to sew. She was making a not-bad, reasonably sober skirt, covered with willow boughs.

She went, when she could, into the potters’ studio. The balls of clay were damp-wrapped, the buckets of slip were tempting, and she ran her fingers through them, just to get the feel back. She took some clay—it wasn’t stealing, it could be squeezed back to nothing—and made several tiny figures, figures of women, sitting with their arms round their knees, or standing proudly naked, balanced on elegant legs.

She was curious about the locked pantry. She told herself that she had cleaned everywhere else, and should clean there, but knew that it was really the ancient challenge of the one locked door. The drawing of Bernard Palissy from the Kensington Valhalla was nailed to the locked door, one corner, she noticed, covering the keyhole. Without exactly setting about it, she looked for unattributable keys, telling herself at the same time that if the pantry held a secret, the key might be somewhere else altogether. Then, one day, standing precariously on a stool to reach a high shelf, she picked up a grim salt-jar, in the shape of a griffon with a threatening beak and lifted crest, and heard a metallic rattle. The jar was pushed back in the shadows. Elsie retrieved it, and brought it to earth. She tipped and the creature disgorged a fine iron key. Elsie put the key into the pocket of her apron, and smiled to herself, catlike. She replaced the jar. And then she waited. She waited two days, until Frank Mallett invited Seraphita and Pomona to a summer picnic at the Puxty vicarage. When she had the house to herself, she took out the tacks that held Palissy in place, and uncovered the lock. The key slid in easily, and turned easily, as though oiled. The pantry was indeed a pantry. A stone shelf ran round three of its walls, above and behind which were other shelves, rising to the low whitewashed ceiling. There was a small barred window, with a wire net to keep out flies, covered with dust.

On the shelves were pots. Elsie had expected something secret and different. One or two were largish plump jars, but most were small, and glimmered white in the shadows, white-glazed china, unglazed biscuit. When Elsie went nearer to make them out better her feet crunched on broken shards, as though someone had dropped, or thrown, a whole carpet of fragments to the ground.

The pots were obscene chimaeras, half vessels, half human. They had a purity and clarity of line, and were contorted into every shape of human sexual display and congress. Slender girls clutched and displayed vaselike, intricate modellings of their own lower lips and canals. They lay on their backs, thrusting their pelvises up to be viewed. They sat in mute despair on the lips of towering jars, clutching their nipples defensively, their long hair falling over their cast-down faces. There were also clinical anatomical models—always elegant, always precise and economical, of the male and female sexual organs, separate and conjoined. There were pairs of figures, in strenuous possible and impossible embraces, gentle and terrible.

Some of them had Imogen’s long face and drooping shoulders: some of them were plump Pomona. The males were faceless fantasms. Elsie crunched towards them over the destruction of other versions, and saw that the wavering arms and legs, the open mouths and clutching hands were not all the same age, went back years, into childishness. There were so many, Elsie thought they resembled a coral reef, thrusting out stony thickets underwater. It was hard for Elsie to look at them, in the state of bodily need which already possessed her. Something inside her own body responded to the opening up, the penetration, the visual shock of these. But under the sexual response, and stronger, was terror. Not terror, exactly, of what the girls had been made to do, or maybe only imagined as doing. Terror of the ferocious energy that had made so many, so many, compelled by a need she did not want to imagine. She backed away. She had the presence of mind to take off her hated shoes and wrap them in her apron to be brushed clean of traces. She did not think that the maker of this display would take kindly to any hint or trace of her own discovery of it.

She did not know if she would have told Philip, if he had been there. She had a strong need to tell no one, as if silence would unmake the shelves, and the gleaming white things, and the dusty light. It had the opposite effect. She was haunted. When Pomona returned from the tea-party, Elsie’s unwilling brain undressed her cream-skinned body, opened her legs, so that when Pomona next stroked Elsie’s arm, Elsie, for the first time, slapped away her hand, said sharply, “Don’t!” and turned away from Pomona’s face, where distress flickered and calmed itself.

At the August Bank Holiday weekend Geraint came home to see his mother and sister. Basil Wellwood took him into Kent in his new Daimler. He had formed a godfatherly affection for “young Gerry” as he was now known, which Gerry reciprocated, asking intelligent questions about mines, bonds, and markets, which Charles had never done. Geraint was now working as a clerk in Wildvogel & Quick’s currency department. He had lodgings in Lambeth, and strode daily across London Bridge in a crowd of black-clothed men, hurrying and intent, like army ants, or a tidal stream like the grim river beneath. It was a huge change for a ragged boy, “dragged up” aesthetically in an impoverished marsh. He preened himself in his new clothes, signs of a total metamorphosis, a grub become a dragonfly. He found the hum and murmur and heat and scent of the human crush the most alarming thing but he was resolute that he must not only get used to it, but learn to like it. He was amiable to other clerks, and learned to join in japes, and outings, where to be enthusiastic, where to hold back. He was canny, deliberately rather than instinctively canny. His handwriting was precise and beautiful—he had inherited something of his father’s eye. He discovered he had a facility for accurate calculation, and took intense pleasure in it. It was of no use in a dusty old house in a dismal marsh.

He was frequently bored to exhaustion, but never yawned. There were things to learn. He looked around to learn them. He was going to have a country house, and servants, and champagne, and—much more vaguely—an elegant wife in fashionable gowns. He had a double vision of the City and the Stock Exchange. He loved its conformity, its narrowness, its pure drive to money-making. He learned to love its dun air, in which floated a fine haze of soot and grit, an air which was thick, like the sediment on dusty windows, a colouring at once a respectable toning-down, and a kind of vanishing, like the drab breast feathers of dunnocks scurrying under hedges. And it came to him vaguely that what was at the centre of it all was both a thing, and a symbolic key or clue to all other things, the gold that lay quietly in sovereign pieces and stacked ingots in the vaults of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the strong-rooms of Wildvogel & Quick. For the figures he scribed and arranged in his elegant ink columns, the telegrams and the bankers’ drafts, were also symbols of things, whose solidity delighted his imagination. Things like bicycle-wheels, dynamos, thick cement, bolts of silk and bales of wool and pyramids of dusky bright carpets, tin-lined cases of tea and sacks of coffee beans, trawlers, steamships, typewriters, wines and sugar, coal and salt, gases in carboys, oil in flasks and barrels, spices sealed in lead caskets. It was all full of a curiously lively dust, which drifted and rose and fell. Dust from the cinders of thousands of chimneys, mixed with a sediment of spice and sugar, mixed again with the imagined glimmer of gold dust.

Once these things had been held in huge vaulted warehouses along the Docks, but this was changing, as Basil explained to him. The warehouses were becoming echoing empty sarcophagi, through the influence of telegrams and steamships. The Baltic Exchange, Basil told Gerry, received three telegrams every minute. Each could result in the dispatching of a ship which would take only a week or so from the States and only four or five weeks from Australia and the Orient. The great holding-merchants must change their ways or die out.

Geraint saw the turning globe in his mind’s eye, with its vast red Imperial patches, its shifting frontiers, criss-crossed by the invisible threads of the telegrams and the visible furrows of the great iron ships forging steadily through flying foam and mirror-calm seas.

In the Daimler, on the bright Bank Holiday Saturday, Basil Well-wood talked about gold. Gold was needed to fight the war in South Africa, which Humphry had written against, describing it as a war in the interests of the London gold market, the bullion reserve, and the speculators. Basil was unsettled, because the Chancellor had chosen that day, at the beginning of the Bank Holiday weekend, when the Stock Exchange was closed and the city was empty, to announce a War Loan designed to replenish the depleted stocks of gold coins and bullion held by the Bank of England. Investors were disadvantaged. Trains would not run on time because of the holiday and time was vital at this delicate point. It was unfairly done. Geraint nodded agreement. He mentioned the South American mines—Camp Rind, Crickle Creek—where venture corporations were looking to replace the supplies which had thinned with the closing of many South African mines since the outbreak of war.

He was handling correspondence about these matters. His work was more interesting than it might have been, because four of the clerks from Wildvogel & Quick had marched away with the City Imperial Volunteers. Such patriotic young men had, of course, been promised that their posts would be kept open for them. There had been a most unpleasant incident when the Daily Mail had accused another German bank of telling two such clerks that they would have to leave. The paper had not named the bankers, but the City knew they were Kahn and Herzfelder, and Maurice Herzfelder had been closed in on, jostled, baited, brought down and kicked about his body and face by angry inhabitants of the Kaffir Circus. No one had been brought to book. The Stock Exchange was a place of anarchic gathering crowds, with wild emotions. Gerry had been in place on May 18th when the Relief of Mafeking was announced. Everyone marched and howled and sang, waving flags and blowing trumpets and singing anthems, accompanied by coaching horns. Gerry too, marched and sang. “Rule Britannia,” “God Save the Queen.” His mind was hooked into the communal mind. It was new to him, he had never known anything like it.

The Bank Holiday weather was golden. Basil and Gerry sat behind the chauffeur and looked out benignly at hopfields and cornfields. When they came to the Wellwood country house, Basil, in an excess of friendliness, invited his young clerk in for a glass of sherry, and then ordered the chauffeur to take the young man and his bag through the country roads to Purchase House. It would be a fine surprise, for his family, to see him turn up in an automobile. They would not be expecting that. Geraint was a little worried because he was not sure they were expecting him at all—he had meant to surprise them. He was agitated in his mind about what to do about the chauffeur—would the man expect a tip, should he be invited in, how would he negotiate this? They wheeled and chugged out of the Garden of England and into the Marsh, and drove up the long drive to Purchase House. No one stirred. They came into the stable-yard, which was empty and full of heat, like a vat. Nobody came out to meet them. Geraint said he could perhaps find a beer to refresh the chauffeur, who refused politely (he had his own beer in his lunch basket, he wanted to get back to his own family, he was aware of Geraint’s social predicament, and only residually interested in showing off the automobile to the inhabitants, if any appeared, of Purchase House). Geraint stood in the yard with his bag, and watched the chauffeur crank up the engine and reverse out of the yard, with a series of spluttering and petroleum farts.

Elsie Warren came out of the dairy-studio just in time to see the high back of the car disappear between the trees. She greeted Geraint civilly, and expressed the right amount of surprise, both at his appearance, and at his conveyance. She said she had seen one or two in Rye, they were quite startling. She said she would make him up a bed, and that his mother was taking a nap, as she usually did in the afternoon. She did not know where Pomona was. She might have gone out with a bicycle. Was he hungry?

He was very hungry. Elsie produced, in a very short time, an excellent lobster salad and some fresh brown bread. “There’s a fisher-boy,” she said, “who brings me a lobster or a crab now and then as an excuse to hang around.”

Geraint looked at her with mild curiosity. So she had a follower? He saw her see what he thought—she smoothed down her skirt over her hips, self-consciously. He saw that she had become extremely pretty, that her figure was just as it should be, and her face full of life. He observed her observing his observations. They both decided to say nothing. He looked at her reconfigured arts and crafts garments. They did not hang perfectly. He remembered shouting at Prosper Cain that no one had seen fit to pay Philip. He did not know if Philip was now paid—he was at least being taken on an educational trip to Paris, so Imogen and Florence had told him, when he called in at the Museum. He wondered if Elsie was paid. He thought if he didn’t find out, no one would. Someone—the invisible fisher-boy?—would be after Elsie Warren, would want to take her away, make love to her, make a wife and mother of her. This would be both right and very inconvenient. He thought he must talk to Elsie.

Pomona came in and rushed into his arms, kissing and hugging him. He told her, as he had not told Elsie, that she was becoming a beautiful young woman, and she tossed her mass of pale hair and cast down her eyes. Imogen had asked him to look out for Pomona. She herself was taking a course in jewellery, and making drawings of designs for small silver and enamel pendants. She seemed calm, which made Geraint aware that in earlier days she had not seemed calm, only dulled, or dimmed. She said she worried about Pomona, who would have, she said obscurely, to “bear everything” now that both she and Geraint were gone. Geraint had looked anxiously across at Florence Cain, who was pouring tea. He was a little in awe of Florence, who was seventeen, two years younger than he was, one year younger than Pomona, and a good four years younger than Imogen, but seemed wiser and more assured than any of them. He thought Florence was beautiful, like an Italian painting of a saint. He thought she was “just right,” without analysing her dress, or the way she managed a tea-tray. Imogen said “Don’t mind Florence, she’s a friend,” and it was Geraint, not Florence, who blushed as their eyes met. He remembered Florence as he took in Pomona, bundling herself into his embrace, stroking his face. Her eyes were wet. Geraint said

“Have you been all right, Pommy? Are you missing us? Do you have plans?”

Seraphita came sleepily downstairs at this point, and was duly astonished to see her changed son, in his new linen jacket. She asked vaguely if Elsie had “seen to” him, and he said Elsie had. Elsie began, briskly, to clear up the salad plates. Seraphita sat majestically and smiled. Pomona said “Tell us about… tell us about…” but could not think what question to ask about a life of which she knew nothing.

“I came in an automobile,” said Gerry. “Mr. Wellwood sent the chauffeur to bring me here. He is very considerate to me.”

He was never going to be able to tell these two about bullion and loans, about telegrams and dust.

The holiday ticked on, in a sunlit haze. Geraint got in some good solitary walks across the Marsh, and some bicycle rides with Pomona. Elsie produced delicious dishes of fried sprats and dressed crab and potato salad with mustard. Herbert and Phoebe Methley called, and were given tea, and asked all the questions about life in the City which his family had not asked. He described the hurrying march of men over London Bridge, the hurly-burly in the Stock Exchange, the celebration of the Relief of Mafeking. Herbert Methley said it was generally believed that Money was soulless, but this was not so. Mammon was a great spiritual power, and perturbed both angels and demons. Mammon was conducting this horrific killing in the Veld. Gold had made the war, and gold kept it in motion. This disquisition annoyed Geraint. He knew gold was a kind of living force, but the personification weakened and sentimentalised it, which he sensed, without being able to put it precisely into words. He saw gold in his mind’s eye, bright ingots, a hot flood from a crucible. He wanted no moth-eaten demon. Pomona said “We had no idea it was all so exciting. We thought it was dull and—and mechanical.” So it is, said Geraint. Dull, mechanical and exciting. Elsie whisked past with fresh scones she had made, and a pot of excellent gooseberry jam.

He liked breathing the air of the Marsh, he felt stronger in his body; but he was not unhappy when the time came to leave. Before that, he had his little talk with Elsie. He asked her to step into the orchard, he wanted to talk to her. They paced between the trees. “Do you need anything?” asked Geraint. “You seem to perform small miracles with loaves and fishes—I feel I do need to ask, have you enough—enough money—to manage? My mother is not practical.”

Elsie surprised him. She sat down on a grassy hump and stretched out her legs. She took off her bulky sandals.

“Look at my feet,” she said. Her feet were not pretty. They were pinched and bruised, they had corns and lumps, they bled a little. She said, dry and intense,

“I want shoes of my own. I can’t get about and do everything I do with these feet. I get hand-downs from Frank Mallett, none of them fit, I have thin feet. Look at them, Mr. Fludd. Look at them. They are old woman’s feet. They are being smashed into old woman’s feet. I shall truly be more use with shoes of my own.”

“I have to ask—forgive me—are you being paid?”

“I don’t see why you need to be forgiven, and I think you know the answer. No, I am not paid, I get board and lodging and hand-downs. I don’t complain, I know money is tight, but I do need shoes.”

“You don’t—intend to leave, to go elsewhere?”

“Listen. I always swore I would never, never go into Service, whatever I had to do. I would have stayed in the Potteries and decorated the ware, it would have been a trade I would have had. Like my mam, who is dead. I came to look for Philip, when she died, because she wanted me to. I love Philip, Mr. Fludd, he’s all I love. And I know he’s right and has always been right—he’s got a real gift, and he’s driven. This is his dream-world, because your father is a great master. He is learning what he might never have hoped to learn. I don’t think he’s more than half pleased I’m here—he’d got away, into another place, and I remind him of what he’d left. But as long as I make things here comfortable for everyone, Philip is free—he can make pots, he can invent, he can work. I never meant to be a housekeeper. I had my own little ambitions. I can’t bear the fecklessness here—forgive me, that’s rude—I do enjoy tweaking things, mending and making do, and brightening a bit.”

She was working herself up. She spoke rapidly, drily, furiously. She said

“And I feel a fool in all this flowery cloth and embroidered bits and pieces, I’d like the Reverend Mallett to see me in ordinary respectable boring things, I’m not a puppet or an Aunt Sally. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t complain about that, I didn’t mean to. But, you know, Mr. Fludd, the saying is a true saying—my feet are killing me. I’m sorry. Now I’ll shut up. I am sorry.”

Geraint sat down on the grass beside her. To his own surprise, he took one of the hot feet in his hands and bent over it. “How much do shoes cost?”

“I don’t know. You must know that better than I could. You’ve got ordinary clothes now—handsome clothes, I should say—good shoes.”

His City shoes had cost a month’s wages. He looked after their glowing leather like his own skin, and they were indeed smoother than that, as it tended to erupt. Geraint Fludd had only recently had money of his own, earned by his own efforts, in his pockets, and he was what Elsie would have called “close,” very close with it. But he fetched out his purse now and counted four silver half-crowns into Elsie’s hand.

“This should buy some shoes for you. When I come back, I shall expect to see you striding about comfortably, and going on long walks.” He hesitated. He wanted to say that he would come with her, to choose the shoes. He was rearranging in his mind the little luxuries he would forfeit for the shoes and a magnanimous glow filled him at the thought of the fine toes wriggling comfortably in new leather. But there was something intimate, something improper, about going to a shoe shop with this young woman. Either he behaved as though she was—was a kind of vassal, of whom he was lord and master, or he behaved like an almost-lover, making gifts, which might expect a return. He said, a little stiffly,

“I do know how much more you do for my family than you need, or they—we—really appreciate. I do know.”

Elsie smiled ruefully. She would have liked someone to be with her, on her momentous shoe-shop visit. Maybe she should wait for Philip. But her feet were killing her.

Geraint went back to Vetchey Manor in the dog cart, and in a day or two Elsie walked across the Marsh, and up the hill into Rye. There were two or three boot and shoe shops, in the window of one of which—Jas. Plaskett, estd. 1872—was the red leather belt with the arrow clasp. Elsie stood on the cobbles, staring into the window, calculating. She did not want her first pair of shoes to be workingwomen’s clodhopping boots and she knew, with fatal realism, that if she bought herself any shoes remotely shapely, or almost dressy, she wouldn’t ever be able to bring herself to wear them, for what she needed, trotting across the yard, running up and down stairs, walking into Lydd. She should buy something sensible, which, if assiduously scraped and polished, would look acceptable below her plain skirt, when she got it. She hoped for a moment that Geraint might have given her enough to buy both shoes and the red belt. She calculated. As long as she didn’t go into the shop, she could imagine owning the belt.

“I have been wondering what you are dreaming about,” said a pleasant voice behind her. Elsie jumped. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Herbert Methley. “I’ve been watching you thinking for maybe twenty minutes, and I couldn’t resist, in the end, asking about what you are thinking and frowning and murmuring to yourself. You don’t have to answer, I know I’m impertinent.”

Elsie laughed. “Shoes. I’m thinking about shoes. For the first time in my life I’m buying new shoes, for me. I can’t make up my mind. I don’t know how to decide.”

“And as long as you don’t decide, all the shoes are yours to think about,” said the writer.

“Yes, and the smart red belt with the arrow there. I could just about manage the belt if I bought cheaper boots—but I don’t need the belt, I need shoes that don’t hurt.”

“This is indeed a momentous decision. I am a storyteller, you know, and I do need to know how it will come out. I think you must try on the shoes—as many as you can, so that you may see your feet in every possible light and every possible form. You will certainly find that some of the shoes that look good in the window, that promise comfort and prettiness, will turn out to be deceivers, will pinch your heel or hurt your great toe. And others, that look like nothing much sitting there on the stand, will turn out to feel like gloves that were made specially with your feet and your elegant ankles in mind. In an ideal world you would be buying walking shoes, and dancing shoes, and everyday housework shoes, but you need to find one pair that can be all these at once, I assume, and that isn’t easy. I hope you will let me help you. I do have a good eye for women’s feet, I have always been told. I really want to know how this tale will come out—”

So they went into the dark, leather-scented shop, and Elsie sat on an upholstered chair, with Herbert Methley kneeling on one side of her and the shoe-shop boy on the other, bringing more and more shoe-boxes from his store behind his counter. Methley stroked her feet as she inserted them carefully into black shoes and brown shoes, shoes with little heels and shoes with punched trimmings, and serviceable brogues. He was uncannily accurate about which shoes would prove to fit her feet comfortably, rejecting those that were too heavy, and also those that might prove to pinch. He made her walk in the shoes, and turn her body round so that he could see from all angles, and asked where the tips of her toes reached, and whether her heels scrubbed. It was oddly intimate. They had it down to two pairs, long after Elsie on her own would have made a rushed decision for the cheapest and ugliest, out of a sense that she didn’t “deserve” to have anything better.

“They need to feel like gloves, Elsie. They need to support all those tiny little bones that do so much work in the arch of your foot, and you need to be able to move all your toes, without feeling you’re wearing a shoe-box instead of a shoe. I myself like this black pair with the little heel best. At a pinch—or not at a pinch—they have a certain elegance—severe but fine—and yet I am sure they will be serviceable.”

Elsie agreed to buy those shoes and was prepared to walk back to Purchase House in them. Methley told her she must not. “Wear them every day for a short time, until you and they know each other. You need to warm and stretch them, little by little. To make them yours. May I walk back to Purchase House with you? I was out for a stroll anyway, and should like the company.”

Elsie was confused. Herbert Methley was, in her eyes, old, part of the father’s generation. Maybe his friendliness and—and—assiduity were fatherly, though she didn’t think so. He was much uglier than Geraint, and much more interested and interesting than Geraint. She had change from Geraint’s half-crowns, though not the price of the red belt. She said she would be glad if he walked back with her, and then he produced, like a conjuror, a small parcel, tied with string.

“For you,” he said. “Open it.”

It was, of course, the red belt.

“I can’t.”

“Why not? It isn’t often that one can surprise someone with their heart’s desire. And you are quite right, you have excellent taste, it is a lovely belt.”

It was shaped to sit on the hips, and point downwards, like an arrow, between them. Herbert Methley insisted on fastening it round her, his long hands, very briefly, echoing its form, lingering a few seconds, pointing down.

After this they walked back, over the Marsh, side by side, aware of each other. Methley said

“I wonder if you would mind very much if I put your feet—and your shoes—into a novel I am writing? They are just what I need as a solid example—”

“Example of what?” Elsie asked, neither pleased nor displeased.

“It’s a novel about—about what’s wrong with women’s lives. Women’s clothing is a form of oppression and confinement.”

Elsie considered the jump of subject from shoes to freedom. She said she’d never had occasion to think about these things. She had too much to do, she almost said, and restrained herself, for she felt the sentence would sound silly.

“But you should think, Elsie. Why should your brother be in gay Paris, and you here as a domestic slave, with no shoes?”

“He’s a real good potter. I’m not.”

“Have you ever thought what you might be, if you had a real choice?”

“There’s no point,” said Elsie.

She thought about her discontent, making ends meet for those feckless and aimless females in Purchase House. She thought of the pantry, full of lascivious pots. There were several in which the female figure lay back with her fingers between her legs, at the spot towards which the arrow on the new red belt was pointing. She was aroused and disturbed—not entirely pleasantly—by Herbert Methley. He stirred her up, as Geraint, and the fisher-boy, did not. She needed to keep her head.

“And what is to happen to your—your character with no shoes? Does she end well?”

“She works out her own freedom, and is able to dance barefoot,” said Methley. “She learns to live.”

Elsie did not ask who would teach the barefoot girl. She made a remark about the view across the Marsh, and the larks singing. Methley followed her lead, and they sauntered on, demonstrating great interest in wild flowers and marsh sheep, in windblown trees and the Royal Military Canal, along whose deliberately designed bank they walked for some way. Methley turned off the road before it turned towards the drive to Purchase Hall. Elsie thanked him, with some constraint, for his help and for the belt. He said “I think you should come to a public meeting about the rights of women that Miss Dace is organising in Lydd. I think you should take an interest. Women’s lives are about to change utterly. You—you yourself—need to think about that.”

Elsie said she would need to think about whether it could be managed.

“My wife and I will be there. You would be among friends.”

“I shall need to ask,” Elsie said, already a little mutinous at having to ask Seraphita for anything.

“Maybe Mrs. Fludd would also consider coming? We need to speak to all women.”

Elsie did not know how greatly Seraphita Fludd feared that Elsie herself would leave as suddenly and mysteriously as she had come.