The Children's Book

27

No child, it is said, has the same parents as any other. Tom’s parents had been younger and wilder than Robin’s parents would ever be. Harry had never known a family where there were not older children who seemed free and powerful, came and went mysteriously, were not confined to the nursery. The little ones experienced the family as a flock of creatures who moved in clutches and gaggles, shared nurseries and also feelings and opinions. Tom and Dorothy were old, and separate enough to have started thinking of their own futures, away from Todefright, full of tenuous hopes and fears, and in Dorothy’s case a rigorous and sometimes dispiriting ambition. Tom, at the end of 1900, was eighteen. His parents had a plan for his future—he was to sit matriculation exams in the autumn, and present himself as a candidate for a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, at the end of the year. They had engaged tutors—Toby Youlgreave and Joachim Susskind. Beyond that they did not think very often about what was, or was not, going on in Tom’s head. Olive continued—at intervals—to elaborate the adventures underground, and Tom read them, feeling, as the year moved on, an increasing unease, almost a guilt, for being still so caught up in a tale. He had a fit of vehement anger when the journalist came, and was shown the secret books, even though everyone knew about them, they were not real secrets. He said you didn’t display that sort of private family thing to the public, as a kind of boasting. It wasn’t nice. Olive said she hadn’t intended to do it, it had just happened. They patched up the quarrel, but Tom glowered for two or three weeks.

Neither Humphry nor Olive really knew what subjects he was studying for matriculation. Humphry was away, much of the time, writing and lecturing. Olive sat in her study and scribbled. Violet made steak and kidney pie, and darned socks, and gave Tom biscuits and milk at bedtime when he looked tired. It occurred to both Toby and Joachim that Tom was possibly going to fail to matriculate. This was partly because he sometimes failed to turn up for lessons—he had gone for a long walk, had slept out in a tent, had forgotten, he was sorry. Joachim and Toby did not tell Humphry and Olive about these absences. They joined Tom on country walks and discussed Shakespeare and botany as they went.

Tom’s exam results in the autumn were, in a way, both odd and shocking. He gained a distinction in elementary botany, but failed general elementary science. He failed Latin, and scraped through in English. He passed elementary sound, heat and light, and failed maths, which Joachim could not understand. It was all somewhat embarrassing for the tutors. The tutors also felt that Humphry and Olive should have been more perturbed than they were by the patchiness of the results, by the evidence of Tom’s lack of interest or application. But they said, never mind, he can sit the exams again at the same time as the Cambridge exam. He will find a way to do it, said the parents, without any real evidence to justify this view.

In the months leading to the Cambridge exam Tom went out more and more, striding away in all weathers. He took his books to the Tree House. Dorothy, who was worried about him, didn’t know how often he opened them. What she did know was that he had made friends with the gamekeeper with whom he walked the woods, tracking down predators and poachers, looking for illicit snares and traps. The gamekeeper had been hostile at first—gamekeepers don’t like wandering children, or picnickers—but this one seemed to accept Tom as a serious apprentice. Tom showed Dorothy, one day, the gibbet on the black tarred wall of a forest hut. There they hung on nails, rows of dead beaked things, and things with sharp teeth opened in agony. Some were fresh—a staring owl, pinned by the wings, a broken-necked jay, a couple of stoats. Some had been rotted in wind and weather to no more than scraps of mouldered skin and the odd adhering bone, or tooth, or battered quill. Dorothy said it was horrible, and Tom said no, it was the way things really were, it was how the real world worked. Dorothy said lightly “Maybe really you’d rather be a gamekeeper?”

Tom said “Oh no, I’ve got to go to Cambridge, it’s expected, this is just—I like finding things out from Jake, I like knowing new things—like woodwork—”

The week before the Cambridge exams, Tom went out at night, not with Jake, but alone. He didn’t come back. Search parties set out—rather belatedly, as he’d been expected to return as he always did. He was found, unconscious, with a broken wrist and blood in his hair, in a shallow quarry. His ankle was still entangled in the wire snare he had caught it in, tracking poachers along the rim of the quarry, by moonlight. He didn’t regain consciousness for two days, and when he did, appeared a little crazed, and couldn’t remember what had happened to him. Violet brought him nourishing broth and fed him with a spoon. He lay bandaged among his pillows, staring mildly at the window and the sky.

It was, of course, quite impossible in the circumstances, that he should sit the Cambridge entrance examinations, or even, with a broken wrist, resit his failed matriculation exams.

Dorothy thought that at some level, he was smug about this.

Tom and Dorothy noted hidden and shadowy things in the family, and then, on the whole, did not think about them. They heard Olive operatic behind closed doors, or saw Humphry pack his bags and leave in a sudden hurry, and they took stock of these events, and stayed silent. They were both afraid of uncovering things they were better not knowing. Hedda had no such inhibitions. Hedda was a finder-out, a sleuth, a discoverer and uncoverer. In 1901 she was eleven, and belonged neither with the elder nor with the younger children. She had spent hours of her childhood lurking outside the Tree House, trying to overhear conversations to which she had not been invited. It was Hedda who pricked up her ears when Marian Oakeshott was meaningfully and casually mentioned at table, and Hedda who knew Mrs. Oakeshott’s handwriting on letters, though she had never gone so far as to try to read one. She was a light sleeper, and padded about the house, at night, lurking on the back stairs, standing in shadows of tallboys on the landing. She knew that the grown-ups crept about the house at night. She knew—and had so far not shared her knowledge—that Humphry Wellwood visited Violet Grimwith in the small hours. He always closed the door with velvet softness. She had never had the nerve to listen at the keyhole, though she wanted to.

Then, one night, there was more than a susurration or a chuckle from behind that door. There was a storm of weeping, passionate and audible, and broken murmurs and shushings from a male voice. Violet wailed, and Hedda crept up, because she could hear the words in the wailing, and she could sense that the two inside were too locked in some sort of argument to be listening out for creeping children.

“It is possible that you are mistaken,” said Humphry’s voice, trying for calm.

“I wasn’t mistaken before. I am only just past forty, it is perfectly possible. I can’t go through it again, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. The pain and the fear and the hiding. I shall die. And she will kill me this time, she will…”

“Hush, little flower,” Humphry improbably said. “I’ll look after you, I always have, we’ll sort it resourcefully, we always do. We are clever creatures, you and I. We mean no harm.”

“She will kill me this time. And I cannot abide any more hiding and lying. The children of my body don’t know they are mine—though in some sense they are all mine, all, who is their mother if not I? Oh, Booby, we can’t start again, on concealing and pretending and contriving, I’m too tired, I’d rather die, I might do away with myself—”

“And where would all your lovely family be then? Keep still, keep calm, breathe deeply. I’ll go down and fetch you a flask of brandy.”

“Better gin,” said Violet’s voice, in choking sobs. “Better a great glass of neat gin.”

Hedda stepped hurriedly into the shadow of the tallboy and flattened herself against a wall. The trim figure of her father whisked past her and flew down the back stairs. She was side-tracked in her thoughts by the silliness of the nickname. “Booby” diminished her clever and elegant father—just as the revelation of his relations with Violet diminished him. This was altogether less pleasant than his mistake with Marian Oakeshott. And Hedda didn’t like the idea of Olive—whose greatest failing so far in her eyes was abstraction—a want of attention—being ready to “kill.”

It was only then that she realised she had been told that some of the children—an unspecified number—were, as Violet had put it, Violet’s children “of my body.”

Who? Who was not who they thought they were?

What did it mean?

Hedda heard her father coming back, creeping in his slippered feet. She waited until he had gone back into the room, carrying a bottle and two glasses, and then she retreated. She had been changed, and she did not know how.

Hedda called a meeting of the elders in the Tree House. She had never done this. Meetings were called almost always by Tom, sometimes—when there were practical problems to discuss, like birthday presents—by Dorothy. The elders were Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis and now Hedda. She told them they had got to come, it was something very important, and it was secret, secret, secret.

• • •

They sat on their wooden stump stools, in the hidden interior crackling with brown bracken. Tom poured lemonade from a bottle into a mixed collection of enamelled mugs, blue, white and black. He said, a little lordly,

“Well, what is it?”

Hedda suddenly did not know how to begin. Once it was out in the open, it would start to act amongst them. At the moment, it was only eating at her.

“I’ve found something out.”

“You’re always finding things out. You shouldn’t snoop.”

“This is an important thing. It changes everything.”

Tom had a vision of bankruptcy. Dorothy had a vision of her father leaving for good, perhaps joining Mrs. Oakeshott. Phyllis sat even more still than she had been. She had a great capacity for not moving, somewhere between composure and inertia.

“Spit it out,” said Tom. “Now you’ve started, you’d better get on with it.”

“I saw. I heard. He goes into Aunt Violet’s bedroom late at night, and stays. I’ve seen him before. You can hear them. You can tell what they’re doing.”

“You don’t know if you haven’t seen them,” said Dorothy.

“They make cuddling noises.” She blurted out “He calls her, little flower. And she called him Booby.”

This revelation upset everyone, and made them all angry. They were angry with Hedda for making them know this, rather than with Humphry and Violet for what they did and said.

“Last night she was crying a lot. She said she was sure about something, and that she hadn’t been wrong before. She said she wished she could die. She said she was frightened.”

“Well?” said Tom, his imagination recoiling. Hedda looked at Dorothy, who was going to be medical. Hedda’s brow was creased with pain and rage.

“She was saying,” said Hedda, “that she was going to have a baby, that’s what she was saying. And she said—she’d had babies before—she said—I heard—some of us are really hers. Children of my body she said.”

The melodrama of the phrase felt improbable to Tom and Dorothy, just as the word “Booby” had done. But once it was said it was in the world. Their irritation with Hedda increased.

“So?” said Tom, with a little spirit. If there was one thing in the world he was sure of, it was that he was his mother’s son. “I don’t see what you think we can do.”

“If we aren’t—who we think we are—it might be good to know.”

“I don’t think so,” said Phyllis, flatly. “What good would it do? We are still the same people, in the same house, with the same family.”

Dorothy’s thoughts were whirring. She didn’t look like Tom, she had always felt only precariously attached to the group life. Different. All children felt “different,” she had always supposed. She felt that she had always irritated Olive. She had thought that was perhaps because Olive loved Tom too completely to have enough love left over for her. But maybe …

The story Olive wrote for her rose up in her mind’s eye. It was about shape-changers, scuttling, bustling little people who hung up animal skins on the hooks in the kitchen, and then put them on, and became half-hedgehogs, to go out into the bushes and ditches.

Violet was a scuttling, bustling little person, whose nature was domestic, like the aproned hedgehog-women in the underground kitchens of Dorothy’s tale.

Dorothy wanted not to be imaginative. She wanted to measure chemicals and mend limbs and organs. But her imagination was just and fierce. If anyone was Violet’s child, she herself probably was.

She did not say any of this to anyone. She said to Hedda

“I could shake you till your teeth rattled.”

“I don’t know why you’re all so cross with me. You should be cross at them.”

Some sort of deep prohibition prevented all four of them from making any effort to imagine the emotions, the predicament, the delights and terrors, of Booby and little flower. Their minds were busy with rearranging the family patterns in their heads, like chessboards which suddenly lacked a bishop and had too many knights, or where the queen ran amok in zigzags.

Knowledge is power, but not if it is only partial knowledge and the knower is a dependent child, already perturbed by a changing body, squalling emotions, the sense of the outside world looming outside the garden wall, waiting to be entered. Knowledge is also fear.

Tom dealt with Hedda’s revelation by absconding on a long walk, stomping along the Downs, carrying his bedding on his back. Walking fast is a good way of channelling all sorts of emotions: fear, desire, panic.

Phyllis rearranged everything in her chest of drawers and her little desk. She mended a torn apron. Violet said she would have done that, and Phyllis said she knew, but she could do it herself.

Hedda thought bluntly that more knowledge would reduce the menace of the knowledge they had. She listened to every sentence the adults said to each other, and decided that, since they had been so deceived, she did after all have a right to read people’s letters, when the opportunity presented itself.

Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick film, a coloured oilcloth, spread over a cauldron of vapours which shaped and reshaped themselves into shadowy forms, embracing, threatening, glaring.

She looked at Violet. She had always reproached herself for not liking Violet. Violet was pernickety and small-minded, Violet was the female fate she meant to avoid by having a profession in the world. She had, she now saw, slightly despised Violet for minding another woman’s children. That must be revised. Violet had once said to her that they, Violet and Dorothy, had “the same eyes” and she had wanted to say, no they didn’t, and had had to admit that they did. Dorothy took to looking furtively at Violet, which made Violet shrug as though a mosquito was buzzing. Dorothy still could not manage to like Violet, and was only abstractly sorry for her.

She stopped reading her fairytale, in its leaf-green notebook. It was only added to occasionally when the mood took Olive to think about wild things and little people. It was not like Underground, whose tale flowed compulsively on through the tunnels and corridors. After a time, wryly and crossly, Dorothy realised that Olive had not noticed that she was not reading it. It confirmed her cynical perception that Olive wrote for Olive, and was most complete in the act of reading and writing herself.

There were secrets also covered over in Purchase House, though perhaps there the covering was more frayed and threadbare than in Todefright. Philip had come back from Paris full of new knowledge about how his body worked, and new fears that he might have caught madness and death from his tutor. He was lucky. His body remained healthy and was only tormented by the dull ache, and the feverish greed, to do it again. He was edgy and wary with Benedict Fludd, who went into what was for him a good-humoured flurry of inventiveness, and needed constant assistance. He felt distant from Elsie, the stay-at-home in the kitchen. He did not notice her new shoes, or the red belt. He found it much—much—harder to be phlegmatic when Pomona sleepwalked and made her way into his bedroom. He did not particularly desire Pomona—there was something marbly, or even soapy, about her firm young flesh. But he desired someone so much that Pomona’s slippery, sleepy embraces became a torment.

Elsie’s mind had been full of the modelled jars and obscene nymphs. But for a long time she did not show them to Philip. At first she was afraid of Fludd, who might notice that the key had been moved and used, or might suddenly appear and catch her, looking, in flagrante delicto, but in the spring of 1901, on a day when Fludd had gone up to London to see Prosper Cain and Geraint, when Seraphita and Pomona were out to tea with Miss Dace in Winchelsea, she said to Philip that she had something to show him, and something to tell him.

She fetched the key. They stood in the cobwebby shadow of the locked pantry and stared at the whitely glimmering forms, the breasts, the vulvas, the chaste flower-shaped containers that, seen from another angle, were swollen female bellies. Philip, like Tom and Dorothy with Hedda, felt embarrassed and irritated by the revelation. It would have been more seemly, he vaguely felt, for Elsie to pretend to have seen nothing. He said “Well?” meaning “So what?” but it didn’t ring true. Professional curiosity overcame both his sexual stirring and his distaste. He picked up one or two vases, turned over a reclining girl-child and found a swollen, almost man-size, clitoris. He remembered Fludd’s fingers on Rodin’s creatures.

“It’s them,” said Elsie. “He makes pots about them. It isn’t right.”

“Of course it isn’t. But they might not know. It isn’t our business. We should lock it up.”

“I think they know. But I don’t know what they think about it. Perhaps he—”

Perhaps he puts himself inside them, she wanted to say, and couldn’t, but Philip heard the meaning of the silence.

“It isn’t our problem. You shouldn’t be thinking about such things.”

“I have something to tell you. I’m going to have to go away. You’ll have to do without me.”

Philip turned to her, still holding the girl-on-her-stomach. He stammered. Had she got a job? Was she thinking of getting married?

No, said Elsie. She was going to have a baby. She would be cast out. If you looked at—all this—it would be unfair to turn her out, but that was what would happen. She would have, she said, in a steely way, to find one of those places for Fallen Women that the do-gooders talked about. She needed Philip to help her to do that.

Philip tried to say that someone must be responsible, and ask who he was. Fludd, Geraint, the fisher-boy?

“I’m not saying any more, and you won’t make me. Just help me to go away, without a lot of scenes and shouting. I can’t abide to be told off and shouted at. I can’t and won’t abide it.”

She was terribly on edge. Philip put the china girl down and put his arm round his sister.

“I’ll think of something,” he said, rather hopelessly. He didn’t know how he could or would, or what he would think of. But, in the event, he did.

He felt he could talk better to a man, and decided on Frank Mallett. He walked over to Puxty and said he needed to talk to the vicar in private.

Frank Mallett was not a judging man. His own temptations, made so much more comfortable by the sturdy openmindedness of Edward Carpenter, made him generous to the differing temptations of others. He listened to Philip, who was both worried and censorious, and remarked mildly that a person was about to come into the world in difficult circumstances, and needed the best possible start. It would be a good thing, he said, if it could all be managed without too much blame or punishment. Gently, said Frank Mallett. Did Philip know who the father was? Was marriage possible or desirable, was there likely to be any support, moral or financial?

“She won’t say,” said Philip. “She’s hard as a rock. She’s not going to say. So I don’t think she’s getting married, and I don’t think she’s expecting help.”

“Don’t take it too hard yourself,” said the vicar. “I don’t know how the family at Purchase House could manage without your sister. I can’t see any help in appealing to them—they’d be baffled, merely. In different ways.”

“They don’t pay her a penny. It isn’t really right, but they’ve made a good sort of—well, not a home—place to be, for the pair of us.”

“I think,” said Frank Mallett, “I shall consult the good ladies of Romney Marsh. But I shall consult them privately. I shall not put the case to the Home for Fallen Women, or the charitable trusts. No, I shall invite the imaginative ones to tea. Miss Dace, I think, who is practical and generous. Mrs. Oakeshott, who knows what it is to bring up a single child. And maybe Mrs. Methley, who has become a friend of Miss Dace, and is anxious for employment. I shall ask for their help.”

“I don’t want them to lay into Elsie or talk down to her. Even if she’s been daft.”

“I think with the best will in the world you won’t avoid a little talking-down. You could even argue it would be deserved. But I think they’ll find practical steps to take.”

Frank’s tea-party—to which he invited neither Philip nor Elsie—went well. It produced some interesting insights into the feelings of the three ladies. They were brisk, and they were practical, and they were kindly disposed. Miss Dace knew of a nursing home which would look after the young woman when the time came. She said that she and the Sister in charge of the Forget-me-not Home had together arranged several successful adoptions, quite quietly. Marian Oakeshott remarked mildly that it was always possible that Elsie would want to keep the child. Though she needed to be able to keep her job, if possible, and her board and lodging.

Phoebe Methley had said little. She said suddenly, with passion, “It is a terrible thing to separate a mother from her children—from her child. We are fighting the injustices of the law on this—we should be careful not simply to grasp at a young woman’s child and take it away.” She paused. “Love,” she said. “Love. Romantic sweeping-away, and loss of self. The trouble with the sex instinct is its power. It deranges you and makes you mad. But true love—true steady love—is what a woman feels for the child in her arms, for the sight of its head, bobbing on the lawn outside the window. You can’t take that from her, without being very sure you’re doing the right thing.”

Miss Dace put her head on one side, and smiled, dryly, but with friendship. Marian Oakeshott said

“Of course I agree. Of course I know—”

She looked at Phoebe Methley. Both women thought they knew who was the father of Elsie’s child.

“We are all friends here,” said Phoebe. “It must be clear that I feel this personally. I have three children in Yorkshire whom I had to leave because—because of my great love for Herbert. There is not a day—not an hour—when I do not feel their absence and distance as a perpetual pain. I may never see them again. I envy you your Robin,” she said to Marian, “whenever I see him. I admire you so greatly for what you have been able to do—to have your son, and to work, and to be independent.”

“It occurs to me,” said Marian, “that I myself may be the solution. Elsie Warren may wish never to see this unborn child again. I do not know her state of mind. But I employ a young woman to mind Robin, who could easily undertake the care of another child, whilst its mother worked—and then the child could return to its mother for weekends and holidays—”

“Someone,” said Frank, “would need to talk to the people at Purchase House. They cannot do without either Philip or Elsie. They should, in my view, be paying both of them good wages for everything they do. They could be talked into seeing their own best interests, as well as their charitable duty—”

“If—if the father of the child is not in that family,” said Miss Dace, blushing.

“He is not,” said Phoebe Methley. “I am certain of that.” She too was blushing. Frank handed round a plate of shortbread. He said

“First, we must put this—this very satisfactory and generous plan—to Elsie. Then, one of us must talk to Mrs. Fludd. I am never quite sure that she really hears what I say, or remembers it. Who shall we send?”

The three good fairies looked at each other. Which of them could be most calm, most reasonable, most pragmatic?

• • •

In the end they decided they would all three speak to Elsie, and deputed Frank to ask Philip to bring her to Miss Dace’s little house. They were enjoying each other’s company—each felt—in the discussion of this intimate problem, that they had discovered new, real, friends.

Elsie came into Miss Dace’s drawing-room and stood to attention, looking angry. She was wearing her hat, and one of Imogen’s loose mediaeval gowns, neatly darned and patched. Miss Dace begged her to sit down, and gave her a cup of tea, some cubes of sugar, a slice of fruitcake. They had agreed that they must not frighten the young woman with moral lectures. She sipped her tea, and drew her head back, like, Marian Oakeshott thought, a frightened snake ready to strike. Miss Dace spoke. It was her drawing-room.

“We know about your problem, Elsie, your predicament, and we haven’t asked you here to lecture you, but to tell you how we intend to help you. I myself know a respectable—and kindly, very kindly—lady who will help with—with the birth of the child.”

“We don’t know,” said Marian Oakeshott, “what you will want to do when the child is born. I should like to say that—if you so wish, if you want to… if you like… I would be happy to ask Tabitha to take on its care so that you could continue to work for Mrs. Fludd and to be with your brother.”

Elsie was silent, her head still back. Marian said

“Then you could come to the child, or he could come to you, in your time off—you would not be separated.” Elsie said nothing.

Phoebe Methley said “We propose to speak on your behalf to Mrs. Fludd, and make the arrangements clear and satisfactory.” Elsie said slowly

“There’s been a deal of talking about me behind my back.”

“You are in a situation,” said Marian, “where that inevitably happens. We are truly trying to help.”

“I came to your meeting about women. I suppose I’m a single woman, and a Fallen Woman.” She paused. She said, looking pale, “I really don’t feel very well. I don’t know as I can go on, anyway, hauling buckets and hanging over stoves.”

“I shall ask my good doctor to examine you,” said Miss Dace. “He will tell you what you may and may not do, in your condition, and give you tonics to help you, things like that.”

“I am grateful,” Elsie said slowly and flatly. “It’s more than I could hope for.”

“But—” said Marian Oakeshott, “there is a but in your voice. You may speak freely to us, we should prefer it.”

“I never meant to go into Service, ma’am. What I do not want is to slave in someone else’s kitchen and wash their clothes for the rest of my life. I didn’t and don’t want that. And now it seems my only way forward. I thought it was temporary, till Philip got to know his craft and got well known, as he will, and has the help here he needs. My mother was a paintress—she was a good paintress, the most delicate with her brushes of any in the studio—she died of it, of the chemicals in the air. She wasn’t a skivvy, she wasn’t a scullery-maid, she was an artist. You care about women’s work, I’ve heard you talk. All of you. So I’ll admit to you, I don’t have Philip’s talent. He has a right to expect to be an artist. I don’t. But that don’t mean I want to be a skivvy.”

A sudden moment of involuntary spite came over her.

“And that lot are so useless and helpless and don’t pay me a penny. And I’ve got this lump in me, that turns about and about, and will come out and need vests and caps and milk, and how can I make do, when I get nothing—”

“Don’t cry,” said Marian.

Elsie gulped.

“I shan’t. I daren’t. I’ve got to keep myself together.”

Phoebe Methley said “What you say is true and moving. But you must admit—you are in this situation because of things you have done—about which Philip tells us it is no good to ask, so we are not asking. You are probably not the most guilty person in this muddle, but we are talking about help, not about guilt. And there is one entirely innocent person, who is not yet born, and must be cared for.”

“Will you agree to us talking to Mrs. Fludd?” asked Miss Dace.

“I don’t seem to have much choice. No, don’t listen to me, that’s not fair of me. I am grateful to you ladies—I couldn’t have expected so much—I am, I am. But I am scared stiff, too. I’ve always been a strong one.”

The three good ladies became more frank as they grew more intimate over the moral problem of the fate of Elsie Warren’s baby. They held, and enjoyed, a long discussion of how best to approach Seraphita Fludd. They agreed that they had little idea what she thought or felt about anything. “Never have I met a woman so determinedly vague,” said Miss Dace, whose disposition was the opposite of vagueness. They imparted to each other what was common knowledge about her history. Her name was not Seraphita. She had been separated from her class by her great beauty. She had been, in late Pre-Raphaelite, early Aesthetic days, a “Stunner” and had modelled for Millais. The ladies agreed that she was still a lovely woman. The proportions of her facial bones were perfect, said Marian Oakeshott. “And all that mass of hair, hardly faded,” said Phoebe Methley. “She doesn’t look you in the eye, ever,” said Patty Dace. “It isn’t that she’s devious, it is that she’s absent.” They agreed comfortably that she had no idea how to run a house, or how to bring up children. Geraint had run wild, and the poor girls—though lovely to look at, as their mother was—had no social nous, no common sense even. They had heard that Geraint was doing well in the City, having thrown over the whole pastoral aesthetic.

Marian said it was quite possible that Seraphita had come from much the same world as Elsie, but she entirely lacked her common sense or her willingness to make do.

Patty Dace said that that fact could make her harsher with Elsie’s predicament, or more sympathetic, there was no way of knowing. She might feel she had to keep up appearances.

“What appearances?” asked Phoebe Methley, tartly. “They’re all darned and draggled, or were before Elsie took over.”

“And Elsie seems to be saying that she isn’t paid.”

“That isn’t right.”

“It’s not. Is it our business?”

“What about him in all this,” asked Marian Oakeshott. “He’s another, you don’t know what he thinks, or feels, or what drives him, except the making of beautiful pots. For which it appears he needs Philip.”

“I do not know them well,” said Phoebe Methley. “But I have to say, I have never seen him address one word to his wife. Not one word. Once I had noticed this, I observed him a little. He may have married her for her beauty, but his eye passes over her as though she were a jug, and not a masterwork of ceramics, but a common earthenware crock.”

They were overexcited by their own openness. Miss Dace did not feel able to speculate about anyone’s sex instinct or sexual behaviour.

Indeed she preferred to ignore such matters. But Marian Oakeshott, daring, said to Phoebe

“I saw him brush against her on the lawn. He flinched. And she turned that head of hers the other way.”

“Are we any nearer to knowing what to say to her?” asked Miss Dace.

“Has she any substance to oppose to our decisiveness?” asked Marian. “Can we not overwhelm her with our calm certainty about what is best to be done?”

The day they went to speak to Mrs. Fludd was a bright spring day. They found her sitting in the orchard in a sagging basket chair, working—or about to work—on a circular tapestry frame, with a basket of wools open in the grass at her side. Marian Oakeshott, who had seen some Impressionist paintings, thought that Seraphita resembled a painting by Monet or a painting by Millais. The apple branches cast dappled shadows over the chalky face, which gave the impression of being blurred, as though rapidly and sketchily filled in. She was wearing floating dove-coloured muslin, which again appeared brushed-up, in the half-shadow, and her long fingers and long neck were insubstantially slender and very slightly textured, shantung, not smooth silk. Her large eyes were surrounded by slatey skin, slightly puffed, with liquid under it. The skeins of wool in the basket were bright jewel colours, emerald, amber, jacinth, sapphire, ruby. They were precise and sharp amongst the floating cloudiness. She greeted them without rising. It was delightful to see them, she said. Where was Elsie? Elsie would bring more chairs, and make tea. Marian said Elsie had gone into Rye, and that she herself would find more chairs, which she did, dragging them in from other parts of the orchard and garden. They had something particular to say, said Marian. It was no accident that Elsie was out.

Seraphita dropped her frame into her lap, and had to hunt for her needle. She said she hoped Elsie had done nothing bad.

“Have you noticed nothing—about Elsie?” asked Phoebe.

“No,” said Seraphita flatly, her eyes widening.

“Elsie is expecting a baby,” said Miss Dace. “In the summer. She hasn’t seen a doctor, it is not precise.”

There were several long moments whilst Seraphita took this in, and seemed to decide what to say. Her face creased up, with thought perhaps, although it looked as though she was about to cry. She said in a faint voice “Who…?”

As she didn’t finish the sentence, none of the ladies felt a need to answer.

Seraphita next brought out “I should send her away …?”

This exasperated all three ladies, who all knew that Elsie cost Seraphita nothing, and saved her a good deal. Marian, more kindly, noticed a plaintive hint of social fear in the wavering voice. Seraphita was afraid of being judged for not sending Elsie away. Marian said

“We came to discuss with you the possibility of not doing that, Mrs. Fludd. We are very aware of the importance of Elsie’s work to the comfort of this household—you and your family,” she said, lying, “have often told us so. And it is a very happy circumstance that both Elsie and her brother have been so welcome here, and contributed so much. Philip confided in the Reverend Mallett, who consulted us, as, so to speak, busybodies or good fairies, we hope. With your agreement, we can make arrangements for the lying-in, and for the care of the child, should Elsie wish to keep it, and continue to keep her place here.”

Seraphita went white, which might have been thought impossible. Even her lips blanched. She breathed a series of unachieved phrases, kind, too kind, such a shock, so unexpected, and again who… ? and the whispered word “responsible”? Marian could see her trying not to think of either her husband or her son in connection with that word. Unlike Phoebe Methley, Marian did not have a clear idea of the unmentionable male, and had wondered about both Benedict Fludd, and the lively and handsome Geraint. She answered obliquely

“I am sure if Elsie feels that there is no obstacle to her staying here, you need not worry, Mrs. Fludd. And we have talked to Elsie, who accepts our plans, or appears to.”

“She doesn’t feel very well,” said Miss Dace. “I hope you will encourage her to work less hard for a few months. I am arranging for her to see my doctor.”

Seraphita did not offer to pay the doctor. She was beginning to tremble. She said

“Do as you think best… infinitely grateful…” She said, in a different voice, staring into space,

“It is a terrible thing to be a woman. You are told people like to look at you—as though you have a duty to be the object of… the object of… And then, afterwards, if you are rejected, if what you… thought you were worth … is after all not wanted… you are nothing.”

She gave a little shrug, and pulled herself together, and said “Poor Elsie,” in an artificial, polite, tea-party voice, though she had not offered, and did not offer, to make tea.

The secrets in the house in Portman Square were of a more innocent kind, which might be thought odd, since Basil and Katharina Wellwood inhabited the fringes of the new, naughty social world of the pleasure-loving King. Both children, Charles/Karl and Griselda, were secretive, which distressed their parents, who nevertheless did not bring the subject up. Katharina Wildvogel had inherited a great deal of money, and employed a large number of servants. Her secret was that she was temperamentally a hausfrau. She would have loved to bake and sew and discuss clothes with her daughter, and perhaps even advise her son on affairs of the heart. She herself had no pretensions to beauty—she was slender, and carried herself well, and chose her hats and shoes and jewellery with taste. She saw Griselda as the being who would do, rightly and easily, everything she herself had had to struggle with, contrive, approximate. Griselda at seventeen was indeed—in her pale, fragile way—almost a beauty, with a pretty figure and a clean-cut face under her white-blonde hair. She was, or said she was, not interested in dressing-up. She spent as much of her time as she could with her cousin Dorothy. They were trying to become educated women, though in both cases their parents were only half-hearted about the education, and had to be badgered and pestered to arrange classes at Queen’s College, or tutorials with Toby Youlgreave and Joachim Susskind.

Dorothy’s path was harder—she did not live in London, and had to travel up by train, or stay for days together in Portman Square, aware that Katharina, though she liked Dorothy well enough in herself, deprecated her influence on Griselda’s ambitions. Dorothy got moral support from Leslie and Etta Skinner, who arranged for her to attend demonstrations and experiments at University College. But she was aware that the Todefright Wellwood family income fluctuated alarmingly, and dared not ask for too much. The life of the mind was easier for Griselda, who sat curled in the window-seat reading—at great speed—histories, philosophies, poems and fiction. Griselda felt both pain and pleasure over being secretly in love with Toby Youlgreave. Of course he must never know, but the tingle of imprecise desire delighted Griselda whilst she felt vaguely frustrated. And it meant she saw herself as set apart. She did not have to worry about Charles’s friends flirting, or her mother’s preoccupation with suitable dancing partners.

They were troubled, as intelligent girls at the time were troubled, by the question of whether their need for knowledge and work in the world would in some sense denature them. Women worked, they knew, as milliners and typewriters, housekeepers and skivvies. They worked because they had no means, or were not pretty or rich enough to attract a man. The spectre of imaginary nuns haunted them. If Griselda did manage to be admitted to Newnham College, in Cambridge, would it be like entering a nunnery, an all-female community, mutually supporting intellectual desire and ambition which the world at large still saw as unnatural, and frequently as threatening? Griselda’s quiet love for Toby reassured her on this front also—she had ordinary womanly feelings, she was not a freak, or a withdrawn contemplative. She just wanted to be able to think.

Dorothy was sterner—she had to be—the path she had chosen was still into hostile country, even though there were now a respectable number of qualified women doctors in the world, and a new women’s hospital. The life of the mind, and the truly useful life of medicine, would doom her, too, to the inhabiting of an all-female community. Women doctors treated only women, and worked with other women doctors. One side of her nature would have to be denied, in order for her to become the professional person she meant to be. It was not so for males. Men doctors married, and their wives supported their surgeries, and comforted them when they were tired. In low moments, late at night, Dorothy asked herself if she was some kind of monster. But she went on, at least partly because she could not imagine confining her life to frills, furbelows, teacups, gossip. If women only, better the operating theatre than the sewing-circle. But it wasn’t easy.

Charles’s secret, his political opinions, caused him paradoxically to live in the frivolous, parasitic way those opinions condemned. He didn’t want to commit himself to university, and kept telling his father he needed time to work out what he really wanted to do and be. He went on European cultural journeys, frequently to Germany, since he was, after all, half-German. He talked Joachim Susskind into accompanying him for tours of six or eight weeks—thus putting a great strain on Dorothy’s instruction and disrupting her planned progress. Susskind was originally from Munich, and liked to go back there and talk anarchism and other forms of disorder—sexual, theatrical, religious—in the Café Stefanie, and in the Wirthaus zum Hirsch in Schwabing. Charles/ Karl was introduced to a psychoanalyst, wild Otto Gross, and the social anarchist Gustav Landauer. He went to satirical cabarets, which he did not follow, because his German was not idiomatic enough, and his local political knowledge was nonexistent. But he loved the smoke-filled air and the smoke-stained ceilings and the air of serious, witty wickedness and idealism. He would have liked to be a writer or a painter, but was not sure he could write or paint. He bought a sketch-pad and drew some secret cows and naked women, both of which were so wooden that he tore them up. Munich was full of serious, laughing women, painting in the open air. He loitered behind them, and watched their wrists turn as they put the strokes of paint on the canvas. He said to Joachim that he would like to stay long enough to take lessons in art or design. Joachim said complacently that München was a cauldron of creativity.