The Children's Book

28

Prosper Cain was troubled by his responsibility for his motherless daughter, who was becoming a young woman. He feared she was in love, and he feared the love was hopeless. Before Julian went to Cambridge, he and Florence had been very close, reading the same books, taking walks together, arguing about the nature of things. Now Julian was at King’s he had moved into the penumbra of the secret society, the Apostles, and was being watched by young men like Morgan Forster, to see whether he would be a suitable embryo, to be propagated and “born” as a member, on the sacred hearthrug. The sponsor of an embryo was, in the occult language, his “father.” The members of the Society were Reality: everything else was merely Phenomenal. An older student, Gerald Matthiessen, a brilliant Classic, had taken an interest in Julian, with a view to potential fatherhood. He had invited him to breakfast, and taken him on long walks across the Fens. They had discussed Plato, the Aesthetic movement, the nature of virtue, the nature of love. They mocked each other, intently, like sparring partners in a gymnasium. Julian had at first thought that his own penchant for irony, his belief in the dangers of seriousness, would put off Gerald, the passionate thinker, the moralist. Gerald was handsome, in the way Julian himself would have been handsome—fine, narrow, dark, slightly evasive, even sly. Julian’s ideal lover was still someone blond and outdoor and innocent: Tom Wellwood. He was aware that Gerald was interested in him. Many of their conversations turned on male love, and the sublimation of base desires. Tamen usque recurret, murmured Gerald, one night over port. Julian, feeling like a girl, looked down at the cheese and grapes on his plate, and smiled a secretive smile. He rather thought he was putting up with the motes of sexuality in the light from the windows, the sensuality breathed like cigarette smoke and thinning out into the general air, just in order to be able to talk so intensely. But then again, maybe it was becoming his natural atmosphere. He invited Gerald to stay in the South Kensington house—“you will find the quarters cramped, but we have courtyards and staircases and secret cupboards to dream about.”

• • •

Prosper Cain was a connoisseur but not a university man. He had spent his life in the army, which was also a male enclave, and he knew the value of intense comradeliness, even though he knew nothing at all about the Apostles. He also, with deep alarm, saw that Florence was studying the male couple wistfully, was standing outside the pas de deux wanting to be let in. She could not fall in love with Julian. Nothing more natural than that she should fall in love with Julian’s other self, totally eligible, totally at home in the world she had grown up in. Simply because she was female, Florence was the creature Prosper Cain loved most in the world. He loved his son very nearly as much, except for the extra slight rage of protectiveness. He was offended to see his poised Florence with an expression of anxiety, or wistfulness, or looking lost and left out. He talked amiably to Gerald about majolica and putti, about Palissy and dried frogs and toads, and wanted to stab him in the heart for ignoring his daughter. For Gerald did not see Florence, except as a generic girl. He also did not see Imogen Fludd.

Imogen was doing good work as a jewellery designer. The small scale, the precision, the concentration suited her. She made some delightful asymmetrical silver pendants, decorated with drooping threads of tiny pearls like water-drops on spider-webs, and some elegant horn combs, to wear in the hair, inlaid with slivers of ebony, mother-of-pearl, and enamelled copper, one of which she gave to Florence. The art students liked her, but she was intimate with none of them, and did not appear to expect to be. She went only occasionally back to Purchase House, never alone, with Geraint, or—once or twice—with Florence. She had her mother’s long neck and large eyes, and might have been beautiful if she had been more animated. In 1901 she was already twenty-two. At Easter she presented Prosper with a little jewelled egg she had been working on in secret, midnight-blue outside, pure milky white inside, studded with little moons and stars and crescents made of fine slivers of gold and pearl. Inside the egg was a gold charm in the shape of a phoenix, with crimson eyes and flaming crest. When she handed it to him, the blood flared up her neck and cheeks. “I owe you so much,” she said, in an almost-whisper. Cain put his arms round her, and felt the liveliness of her spine and the soft weight of her breasts. She needed a husband, he thought. She needed love, and a life of her own.

He conceived the romantic idea of giving a dance—a dance for Florence and also for Imogen. He would have given it on Midsummer Eve, but he wanted to invite the Todefright Wellwoods, and it would not do to clash with their annual festivities. So he decided on May 24th, the birthday of the late Queen, which fell on a Friday. He discussed the matter with Olive Wellwood, when she was visiting the Museum and checking gold and silver treasures. It was hard for him, he told Olive, to bring up a motherless daughter as he should. His Florence was eighteen, and should be thinking about things like “coming out,” he supposed, though she also talked about following Julian to Cambridge. He had the idea of giving a supper and dance—not too formal—in the Museum itself. He thought a small orchestra—the Regiment could make one up—could play in the tea-room in the evening. It would be very pleasant to see the young people dancing amongst the ceramic work of the students, and between the Minton pillars. And the Morris Green Dining-Room could be used as a kind of retirement room, where guests might sit and chat, or eat sorbets.

Olive was enthusiastic. It would be wonderfully romantic, she said. Like the dancing princesses in the hidden palace under the lake—it would have the pleasure of being secret and impossible. The Museum was impossible, in many ways, at present, said Major Cain. It was full of dust from the huge building works, it was not peaceful, as the hammers crashed and the drills howled. But in the evenings the tea-room was quiet and the dust had settled. He was in need of a fairy godmother to help organise everything. He did not think his company sergeants would understand romantic dances for young ladies. He wondered…

Olive Wellwood, like very many women who have risen from the lower classes, felt a primitive terror, a gulf opening at her feet, when asked to deal with social complexities she had never learned. She could not do it, she saw immediately, she would betray herself again and again. And yet, the delight of working with Major Cain, of being confided in, of exchanging confidences. Her mind whirled, frantically in her head, like a rat in a cage. She could give socialist, unconventional parties in her own garden. She made her own rules, and Humphry could carry off anything. But something semi-military, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is quite another matter. She said

“You know, I think you would do best to consult Katharina Well-wood, my sister-in-law. She wants so much to give parties and buy dresses for Griselda, and Griselda retreats into books, and says she wants to study at university. Griselda and Dorothy are quite naughty. They won’t join in. But here—she would be in her element—it is just what she most wants—”

Katharina was delighted. She discussed catering and flowers with Prosper. She recommended dressmakers and shoe shops. Griselda submitted to being measured for a new, grown-up party dress. Dorothy was to have her first real evening dress and Florence her first grown-up dance dress. They were like princesses in fairytales who had been given magic walnuts or acorns, which they cracked, and out floated beauty.

Florence’s dress was white lace over dark pink silk, with a silk rose in the low neck, and elbow-length lace sleeves. Griselda’s was made of Liberty silk, in grass-green strewn with floating white and gold flowers, lilies of the valley, pale primroses, bluebells.

Prosper Cain would have liked to give Imogen Fludd a ball dress—an elegant, modern, shapely ball dress. But he felt it would not be proper. He deputed Florence to ask her what she would wear. He had invited Benedict Fludd, Seraphita and Pomona to come to the party, and had found lodgings for them in a house near the Museum, with a retired sergeant-major and his wife. Florence repeated that Imogen had said that Purchase House was full of stunning embroidered silks and linens, all baled up and folded away. She suggested they both go down to the Marshes, find something possible, and bring it back to be refashioned by Katharina’s dressmaker into something less mediaeval and more up-to-date. What about Pomona? Florence asked Imogen. “She will just have to wear what Mama puts on her,” said Imogen. “She’s very pretty, whatever she’s wearing. She doesn’t seem to notice things like that.”

When they went to Purchase House, things were more than usually chaotic. Elsie was nowhere to be seen, and Benedict and Philip had just lost a whole firing of porcelain bowls. Seraphita was limp and pale, and Pomona scorched some grilled fish and boiled vegetables.

Imogen took Florence into a closed room, where dusty leather trunks full of folded materials and barely worn dresses were piled on top of each other. Pomona crept after them, and stood, large-eyed, half-in half-out of the room. Florence noticed that the sisters seemed to have nothing to say to each other. Imogen, resourceful and deliberate, turned over garments, shook out folds. She found what she was looking for—a dark green and ribbed silk, embroidered with pink and white daisies. It was shaped like a mediaeval gown, with a high waist and a little train. “We can do something with that,” she said. “And it will look good in the Green Dining-Room with the Burne-Jones panels and the Morris paper. It will blend in.”

It was Florence who asked Pomona what she would wear, if they could help…

Pomona replied flatly that her mother spent her life sewing, it was what she did, she would put together something, as she had done before. Her face was lovely, her voice was vanishing. Florence asked, where was Elsie?

“She went away to have a baby. She’s coming back, it’s all arranged.”

She did not invite questions. Florence asked lightly whether Pomona, too, would come and study at the Art School, and noticed that the question distressed both sisters, in different ways. A look went between them. Pomona said she thought not, she was needed here, in Purchase House. She looked down at the dusty floorboards. Imogen said they must go, they must go back to London, now.

In the train, on the way back, she said suddenly to Florence “I’d be happy if I never had to go back there again.”

“Why?” asked Florence, lightly.

“I can’t bear to be so odd and so hopeless. It’s a place without hope. Well, the pots are hopeful, when the kiln doesn’t melt down. But—but—I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you and your father.”

Florence dared not ask what Imogen thought about Elsie’s baby, or whose it might be. She did not dare raise the question of what was to happen to Pomona, though she didn’t know why. They went back to South Kensington where a delicious dinner, and the secretive, grave young men awaited them.

Violet said she would make Dorothy a dress. Humphry was told to bring ladies’ magazines from London, and Violet looked at the photographs and drawings. She said it wouldn’t suit Dorothy to wear a girlish colour—Dorothy was handsome, but not pretty. It should be deep rose, perhaps, or dark blue, maybe in shot taffeta with a glow in it. Dark blue like the midnight sky, said Violet, and insisted on taking Dorothy on an excursion to London, for if she was to have a grown-up dress she must have some sort of shaping bodice. Everything this year, in the magazines, was lacy. She had the idea of making a lacy jacket—not in bright white, in some silvery thread—with short sleeves and a collar that would stand up when Dorothy had put her hair up.

Dorothy found the expedition, and the subsequent sessions of fitting and pinning, both stressful and alarming. Before Hedda’s revelations, she had found Violet’s proprietary motherliness rather sad, when she thought about it at all. Violet was a spinster aunt whose role was to free their mother for her creative work. It was natural that she should insist on her affection, perpetually require that they repay it, that they love her, that they should be grateful for her life, which she had given them.

But now, Violet seemed, and felt, different. She moved around Dorothy’s hem on hands and knees, her mouth pressed tight over bristling pins, her thin hands tugging at Dorothy’s skirt, or tweaking and clasping her waist. Dorothy looked down into Violet’s tightly drawn scalp and the knob of her dark hair on her narrow neck. It was true, her body was more like Dorothy’s was going to be, than was Olive’s maternal amplitude. Dorothy, who was going to be a doctor, who had to keep telling herself she was going to be a doctor, since everyone was paying half-attention, at best, to this fact, had made it her business to inform herself thoroughly about how babies were born. She had cut open dead pregnant rats, full of tiny, pink, blind, beanlike sleepers. She had looked at a midwifery textbook, with a fat, full-term baby curled in a diagrammatic womb, the crown of its head in the pelvic cavity, the umbilical cord floating and twining in the fluid. She had stopped short of imagining either such a creature inside herself, or herself blindly waiting to be ejected from Olive, down there. But now, as Violet fussed over her, and admired her, she involuntarily had a vision of a Dorothy-puppet—snug or stifled, which?—inside Violet’s lean stomach. She did not feel a flow of filial warmth. She felt repelled. She stood in her midnight silk, in its stiff rustle, and wondered what had happened to the baby Hedda had been so sure was on the way. Violet was as flat as a board. As she always had been. It would be nice if Hedda was lying, or had deceived herself, but Dorothy did not think so. Hedda believed what she said, and what she said was convincing. Either Violet had been wrong about her condition, or she had been trying to upset Humphry, or she had done something to get rid of this unwanted brother or sister. That seemed the most likely. And yet here she was, her mouth full of pins, skinny and sexless, making “mmn” noises of satisfaction over Dorothy’s waist, over the bodices that gave her, for the first time, pushed up and into shape, a pretty little bust.

She ought to feel kind to Violet, indeed, indignant on her behalf. She did not. She was embarrassed and irritated to the depth of her soul.

Violet said “You’re growing into a good-looking young lady after all, my love. You were scraggy as a little ’un but you are going to blossom after all. You must put your hair up, and I’ll make you some silk flowers to put in it. Or maybe moons and stars on some frothy bits of illusion. To go with the sky. How do you feel?”

“Whatever you think.”

“ I think you are going to be the belle of the ball. You must stand up straight and not slouch. You’ll surprise them all.”

The note was—possessive? Fierce beyond what was needed? “What are you going to wear, yourself?”

“Am I invited? I think I may not be. It is a supper dance for young things. I’m not the mother, even if I do a lot of the mothering.”

The obvious irony hurt Dorothy, who did not know what to think or say.

Dorothy had no one to talk to about what Hedda had said, or about what she felt about it. Tom had closed it out as though it had never happened. Phyllis was “too young”—younger sisters are always too young to be talked to. She had not discussed this matter with Griselda, with whom she discussed almost everything. She felt that anything she said, any speculation she voiced, even to Griselda, would immediately become hard fact, out in the world. And then she might need to do something, or at least begin to be something she hadn’t known she was.

On the day of the supper dance, which the Wellwoods called the Ball, Prosper Cain persuaded the Museum, which was open until ten in the evening, to close the Refreshment Corridor early, so that the rooms could be decorated with flowers, and a dais built for his regimental music-players: a fiddle, a cello, a flute, an oboe, a clarinet and a horn. Food was prepared in the Grill-Room, and fragile gilt chairs were scattered around the Centre Refreshment Room. This had been designed to be washable, or possible to swill out, with the result that it was set out entirely in ceramic tiles. It was a light room, with huge arched windows, of light stained glass. There was a domed ceiling, supported by immense majolica pillars made by Minton, in peppermint-green and creamy white majolica, with dancing putti, supporting a crown of coat-hooks, at shoulder height. The floor was tiled in chocolate, the dado was faced with dark tiles, between maroon and umber, and the walls were tiled in yellow, green, white, with strips and stripes of complicated running designs, a text from Ecclesiastes, in cream pottery on a red-brown ground: “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his labour—XYZ.” Amorini cavorted and gambled along the dado. More decoration had been woven in, in more styles, than might seem possible. It was sumptuous and utilitarian, a cross between a fairy palace and a municipal dairy, with electric globes on gilded stems hanging from the ceiling.

The Royal College of Art backed onto this corridor, and Prosper Cain had judiciously invited both teachers and students from the College to make up his numbers. They came to the Refreshment Rooms from various directions, the guests, some through the great golden doors, which were originally designed to be the entrance from the Cromwell Road, some having wandered through those courtyards and corridors that were still open. There was a sullen background noise of thumping and slicing, from closed-off areas where Aston Webb’s prizewinning quadrangles and courts were at last being constructed. Olive held on to Humphry’s arm, and said that what with the dust that inevitably flew about the floor from the workings, and the dust-sheets that were thrown over various displaced glass cases, like palls over coffins, you felt you had entered both the palace of the Sleeping Beauty and the tomb of Snow White. The visitors to the gallery looked at the young women in their dance dresses and velvet cloaks as though they were a wedding-party, or an irruption from some other world.

In the dark, warm Grill-Room, with its blue and white tiles, and its ceramic panels of the Four Seasons, food was cooked and offered, patties of shrimp and trout, cups of consommé, confections of cherries and meringue and cream, a fruit punch shimmering and hissing icily in a great glass bowl, champagne with the bubbles wavering upwards in fine threads in misted, frosty glasses. In the Green Dining-Room the mothers and fathers could sit on more comfortable, Jacobean-style chairs.

Other military officers were there, with their wives, and Basil and Katharina, who was elegant in a gown with a lace overdress over black silk, with roses at her waist, and a short train behind. Seraphita was there, without her husband, who was, she said, packing a kiln with Philip. She was wound in a reddish-brown, flowing garment which by accident or design matched the twelve figures by Burne-Jones, representing the months, or the signs of the Zodiac with the sun and moon, no one was sure. She looked as though she belonged inside the dark green wallpaper with its woven willow boughs and dotted cherries and plums. Olive, on the other hand, was dressed for the dancing in the pillared hall, in a simple dress in a rich fabric, a darker green than the Minton pillars, with borders of gold and silver braid.

Prosper opened the dancing with Katharina and complimented her on Griselda’s beauty. Then he danced with Seraphita, who was taller than he was, and managed to be simultaneously graceful and ungainly, making exaggerated swoops, not on the beat. The young were clumped in separate clutches of males and females, talking distractedly and looking across the room. Julian and Gerald Matthiessen were there, leaning against the dado in a darkish corner. Prosper wandered past them, having returned Seraphita to the Green Dining-Room, and said he relied on his son to get the young people dancing. He went to speak to the orchestra, smart in their uniforms and shining buttons.

Julian looked around the Refreshment Room, which he secretly rather liked, but knew Gerald despised for its cluttered detail and congeries of styles.

“We shall have to dance. Who would you choose to dance with, out of all these beauties?”

“I couldn’t ask him, alas,” said Gerald, sotto voce, barely indicating Tom, who was standing alone in his formal suit, his fair head bent over a group of amorini on a pillar. Julian was both pleased to have Tom’s beauty recognised, and briefly, ludicrously, jealous on his own behalf.

“That’s his sister,” said Julian. “She’s changed. She was a tomboy.”

“I shall ask your sister,” said Gerald. “Then we can talk about you. That will be easy.”

“I hope you don’t,” said Julian. “I don’t know what she might say.”

Gerald strolled over towards Florence, who was standing with Imogen and a few female art students. Geraint Fludd, from the other side of the room, was making his way towards her a great deal more decisively. He had secured her hand by the time Gerald got there, to Florence’s distress, though she was able to write down a dance for Gerald later in the evening, in a pretty little book with a hand-painted cover, made by the Royal College calligraphy class, who had contributed a collection of these, all original, to the festivities. Geraint felt a sense of awe, and a rush of blood, as he put his hand in Florence’s, and took hold of her waist. Florence did not notice. She was wondering what, if anything, Gerald would have talked about. Julian told Gerald to ask Imogen Fludd. “The pater wants her to have a good time. She’s his protégée.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. He’s a good officer. Cares for his men. Students count as men.”

“These aren’t men,” said Gerald, with comic regret. He did as he was told, and asked for Imogen’s hand. For some time they sailed round the pillars in stately silence, occasionally getting out of step. Then Gerald asked her a few questions about silversmithing. It is a rule in Cambridge colleges that you do not talk professional shop on social occasions. Gerald thought it a foolish rule—he was a serious man, and did not really want to inhabit a world of clever banter. Imogen’s face lifted into life. She talked almost animatedly about the innovations of the new Professor Lethaby, who had abolished the miserable copying of ancient drawings of watercress, and had given the students new live, recalcitrant clumps of the vegetable to look at closely, and study the form. “And then,” said Imogen, “you really do understand how leaves grow on stems when it comes to formalising them in silver. I hope I’m not boring you?”

“No. I like learning new things. I mean that.”

They both smiled. Julian saw the smile, and was irritated. He went to ask pale Griselda for a dance, but everyone had decided that she was the most beautiful of the young women, and students and teachers were clustered about her. So he wandered, in an accidental-looking way, after Tom, who was retreating out of the Refreshment Room into the Green Dining-Room. Tom was headed towards his mother, who was sitting in her chair tapping her toe to the music, every inch of her resenting her reduction to a sedentary dowager.

Tom liked the Green Dining-Room. It reminded him of his vision of sleeping Lancelot, an unreal world more real than stiff collars and shiny shoes.

“I can see you want to dance,” said Tom to Olive. “I can see your toes moving. Come and dance with me, like we do at midsummer.”

“You must go and dance with the girls, my dear,” said Olive. “That’s what we’re here for, for you to dance with the girls. I’ll dance with you when you’ve taken a turn with two of those pretty creatures, not before.”

Julian joined them.

“I can ask you to dance, Mrs. Wellwood. I’m a kind of host, you can’t say no to me. Come and dance. Tom is quite right. I know you would like to dance.”

“Go along, Tom,” said Olive, standing up, arranging her skirt and purse, giving her hand to Julian. “Ask a girl.”

Olive and Julian progressed in an elegant way, pleased with the way their steps matched. Olive said

“I’m dancing with you because I’m at my wits’ end about Tom. Is that dreadful?”

Julian thought it would only be dreadful if they were dancing, man and woman, as a couple, which they were not. He had a half-philosophical idea about the nature and the importance of formal dancing, in terms of that idea about who was, and who wasn’t, a couple, a man and a woman. He thought about Jane Austen. “Whom are you going to dance with?” said Mr. Knightley to Emma. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma. Julian thought that was a perfect moment. And would never—not dancing—happen to him. He said

“I know what you mean about Tom. He doesn’t know what he wants.”

At that moment Tom danced jauntily past them, flashing a mild smile at his mother. He had found a partner who was indeed a young woman. She was also his sister.

Olive said “You care about him, I can see. I can’t tell if he is too contented, or somehow so discontented he’s just floating. Nothing we suggest seems to—interest him. He doesn’t take us seriously. He’s the most evasive person I know, for all his attentiveness and charm.”

“I know,” said Julian. “I know.”

Olive’s hand patted his shoulder.

“Do try to make him take things seriously.”

“I have enough trouble doing that, myself.”

Tom told Dorothy that she had suddenly become a young lady. She looked very pretty, he said. Different.

“That’s not very gallant.”

“I don’t have to be gallant to you. And anyway, you know what I mean, you’re just being difficult. You’re turning into a woman.”

Dorothy, determinedly medical, considered she had been a woman, willy-nilly, since her monthly Curse began. She had been proud of the bloodstains, and also, despite her academic anatomical interest, dismayed by the speed of the changes in her body. She was also niggled by the fact that it was Violet, not Olive, who had taken upon herself to explain this momentous event—about which Dorothy, of course, was already informed, through reading books. She thought, as she and Tom stumbled more or less companionably across the tiles, that Tom probably knew nothing at all about the Curse. She was right. But she had not stopped to think about Tom’s own reaction to puberty, which had tossed him about on waves of emotion, and rather disgusted him. He said, out of The Golden Age,

“You’re turning into a Grown-up. Is it nice?”

“You’re older than me. You should know.”

“Girls grow up quicker. They say. I’m not sure it is nice.”

The conversation was odd, rather formal, because they were in formal clothes, stepping formal patterns, between majolica pillars, to sentimental rhythms. Dorothy saw that Tom had chosen a daft moment to try to talk to her about something important. His hair was a shining mess. It was not parted and slicked down, like Julian’s hair, and Gerald’s and Charles’s, and Geraint’s, even though Geraint’s bush showed signs of rebellion. She gave a twitch to the waist of her shapely dress. She was thinking of an answer when the music stopped. Charles, who had put his name in her little starry book, came to claim her. She said to Tom

“Do go and ask Pomona to dance. Nobody seems to, and she looks desolate. It would be a kind act.”

Tom went over to Pomona, who was drooping a little, in a beautifully embroidered, less than perfectly tailored gown, white with a deep border of apple boughs, and embroidered strips of apple-blossom round waist, neck and sleeves.

Charles asked Dorothy if she was having a good time. He told her she looked quite the thing. He danced well—his mother had seen to that—and Dorothy followed, and they twirled cheerfully.

“What are you thinking?” Charles asked, after five minutes.

“Do you want the real answer?”

“I always do. There’s no sense in telling fibs. What are you thinking?”

“If I tell you, you must tell me.”

“Agreed.”

“I was thinking about how I can’t do quadratic equations, and how I never shall be able to, if you keep taking Mr. Susskind off to Germany on cultural trips just when I almost can. And I shall never matriculate, and never be a doctor.”

“What a very unromantic thought. There must be other tutors.”

“Well, this one knows what it is I don’t understand.”

A slow silence.

“You didn’t tell me what you are thinking?”

“Oddly, dear cousin, I was thinking in a sort of way about the same thing. I was thinking how nice it is in Munich, and about going secretly to cabarets which would give my mater a fit if she knew. You see, I am being honest.”

“Now we are at least talking to each other. What’s good about the cabarets?”

Charles said they were very avant-garde. And smoky. And that the police sometimes invaded them. He said he needed Joachim Susskind to do simultaneous translation.

“Ah,” said Dorothy, between fury and amusement, “but you don’t need him as I need him. Dog in a manger.”

Pomona’s little hand was chilly in Tom’s, and didn’t heat up. He felt sorry for her, which was good for him. She didn’t speak. He was looking into her mass of hair, which had embroidered flowers pinned into it. He said it must be wonderful to live in a magical place like the Denge Marsh.

In some ways it was, Pomona agreed.

Perhaps she was a bit lonely without Imogen, he ploughed on.

It wasn’t really Imogen, Pomona said in a small voice. It wasn’t very nice now Elsie had gone away.

Tom didn’t know about this. He asked where Elsie had gone, and was told, in a kind of gentle hiss, that she had gone to have a baby, and was coming back when it was all over, but that nobody was very cheerful because of this, neither Mama, nor Philip, nor Papa of course either.

There was another silence while Tom dredged up a reply. He was not going to ask about the baby, that was not what he would do. He repeated that the place was magical, and heard the banality in his own voice.

Pomona said

“From outside it is. I feel we’re under a spell. You know, behind one of those thickets in stories. We trail out to the orchard and back to the kitchen. And up to bed, and out to the orchard, and back to the kitchen. We sew. That’s part of the spell. We have to sew things or something dreadful will happen.”

If Dorothy had said all this, it would have been a joke. But Pomona’s voice was amiably monotonous.

“Well, I suppose you could go to College, like Imogen, couldn’t you?”

“And sew things? I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d be let go to College. Are you going to College?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Tom said evasively.

They trotted on, dancing neither well nor badly. Tom said

“There must be other things, besides sewing.”

“Pots,” said Pomona. “There are pots.”

Something in Tom evaded remarking stupidly that maybe she would get out and be married. He felt she was not all there, but then, there were moments when he felt he was not all there himself. Maybe, like him, she was somewhere else. He would have liked to get away from her, and this made him sorry for her, so he asked for another dance.

Gerald was enjoying the dance, against his expectations. He actually liked the physical exercise of dancing, which he had learned very thoroughly as a little boy in weekend dancing classes. There was no call to dance in King’s College. He looked at the young women to work out which would be pleasurable to dance with, from this point of view. The best dancer was Griselda Wellwood, who moved elegantly, almost like a perfect mechanical doll. But her little book—decorated with lilies of the valley—was crowded. He booked what he could, and went back to Florence Cain. She had more space, having refused to give Geraint as many dances as he wanted. She was, in Gerald’s view, the second-best dancer, less perfect in her movements, but also less mechanical, and, he discovered after stepping out with both young ladies, more responsive to his leading, readier to follow him in inventing variations on the steps. She annoyed him, at first, by what he saw as a tedious attempt to make conversation that would interest him. She discussed dancing in Jane Austen, she went on to Shakespeare and Dante. It took him quite some time, between the creation of steps-on-the-spot and sudden swirls, to realise that she was talking perfectly good sense—even wittily—about Shakespeare and Dante, even if a supper dance was the wrong place. He answered with amusement, and twirled her again. Both Prosper and Julian observed her flush of delight with irritation, bordering on fury. They were too far away to see that her knees were trembling, and only she knew what was going on inside her, under her flowing skirt, as she swayed in time to the music.

There was a late arrival, when the dancing had been interrupted for supper. The young went to collect their plates and glasses in the Grill-Room, and came back to the Centre Refreshment Room to eat in groups at the tiny, but heavy, tables, made of ornamental ironwork with small grey marble slabs, encased in more ironwork. In the Refreshment Corridor were plaster bas-reliefs, depicting abstract craftsmen—Industrial Science and Industrial Art—and real humans. Arkwright inventing the loom, Palissy taking baked pots from a furnace. Tom pointed these out to Pomona, to whom he had somehow become permanently attached. She shuddered when she saw Palissy, and said “That’s Palissy. You see, I can’t get away from weaving and pots.” Tom knew nothing about Palissy, and observed that he looked benign. Pomona said he might well have been, if you were interested in pots.

Geraint had managed to secure Florence for supper, since Gerald had insinuated himself into that place in Griselda’s little book. Geraint deciphered the inscription on the porcelain painting on the Grill-Room buffet, and read it out in a funny voice.

“May-Day, May-Day, the Blithe May-Day, the Merrie, Merrie Month of May.”

The Victorians were earnest, even about being merry, said the Edwardian young man. Florence laughed. But she felt a kind of loyalty to the ambition of the Museum, because of her father.

The late arrival was August Steyning, who went to join the elders in the Green Dining-Room, where waiters were serving supper on Minton plates. He was given a chair next to Olive. The table centre-piece was a large, glowing lustre bowl by Benedict Fludd, depicting that odd moment in the Rheingold when Freya is up to her neck in gold loot, the golden apples are turning grey and papery, and the two giants stretch out huge hands to take the young goddess. Fludd’s depiction of the heaped treasure, in ceramic, was masterly—goblets, bracelets, glinting crowns, trickling coins and the shape of a young woman underneath the heap, hinted suggestively. On the other side of the bowl lurked, not Wotan struggling with the ring, but Loge, holding a very lively golden apple in a cloak of flame.

August Steyning was rehearsing The Smart Set, a drawing-room comedy by J. M. Barrie, with an edge of pain and irony. Olive asked him how it was going.

“The actors are good. It has a pretty pace. It is not without meaning, even though too much of it turns on undelivered letters and impertinent servants. But—dear Mrs. Wellwood, dear Olive—it isn’t what I want to be doing. It’s bread-and-butter work, and I do it to the best of my ability. But if I could have my way, all the tasteful furniture which makes the stage like an airless mirror of daily life would be whisked lightly up—sofas like flying elephants, tables galloping into the wings like wild ponies—and we should see through the looking glass into the world of dream and story. The stage doesn’t have to reproduce drawing rooms with false balconies and unreal windows. We can put anything on the stage now, daemons, dragons, Worms, sly Elves, slow trolls, malign silkies, even the Brollachan and Nuckelavee. Instead of which I have actresses quarrelling over the waists of tea-gowns and freshly made egg-and-cress sandwiches every rehearsal.”

“We all went to see Bluebell in Fairyland, with Seymour Hicks,” said Olive. “The children loved it. The songs were pretty.”

“But it wasn’t fey, or uncanny, now was it? It was prettily whimsical, very English. The Germans know that otherworld creatures aren’t pretty little misses with wings and flower hats. They know that things lurk in dark woods and deep caves. Things we need to remember. Look at that, Olive. The bowl. I long to pick it up, but I dare not for it would certainly slip through my fingers and I should be cursed by the wraiths of Victoria and Albert, and a very lively Major Cain. The man—Fludd—is a genius. He takes the great—perhaps the only—Gesamtkunstwerk of our time and produces a version in a chilly, still world—that went through the fire all flowing with elements and elementals, and fused into colour and form—a regular-shaped bowl holding passion. Look at Loge’s wicked laughter. Please turn the bowl carefully, Major Cain, so that Olive may see Loge. See how the golden apples shimmer and fade, and the light is fiery and lucid and golden as the bowl turns. We need mystery.”

“Your rehearsal has upset you.”

“It has. This mysterious room restores my good nature. The eternal hounds, pursuing the eternal deer, under the dark eternal forest boughs. Those glooming Burne-Jones wodewomen. Prosper, your quails’ eggs are dainty and delicious, and your champagne is a chilly fountain of youth.”

“Why don’t you put on such a play, yourself?” asked Prosper Cain.

“Because I haven’t the imagination and can’t write. I need a mythmaker. You, Olive, you could do it. You could write me an Otherworld. You have the true sense of what is beyond window and mirror alike.”

After supper, they danced quadrilles. The elders mingled with the young. It was both more stately and more frivolous, more playful, than the waltzes and polkas. Olive and Steyning danced with Tom and Pomona: Humphry led out Katharina, and made a square with Dorothy and Charles. Prosper and Seraphita danced with Florence and Geraint.

Afterwards, as the evening drew to a close, fathers danced with daughters. Basil Wellwood claimed Griselda, clasped her firmly, whisked her round and round, and said he was proud of her, and she had made her mother very happy. Prosper danced with Florence, lightly, and said he hoped she had enjoyed her ball. She said she loved dancing and had danced every dance, and the Museum had been transfigured. Then he danced with Imogen, whose father was absent. She gave a little sigh, and settled into his arms as though she was comfortable there. She said he was a magician, who had conjured up a palace, which was, for her, an unexpected flight of fancy. She reported to him, as a daughter might, that Henry Wilson, from Jewellery, had danced with her twice, and had complimented her on her silver-work. “He said I understood both pennywort and silver,” she said. “I am in hope of being able to earn my living.” She rested her head briefly against his shoulder and he resisted the temptation to stroke her hair. Instead, he asked her whether she thought he should try and persuade her father to send Pomona to the Royal College, in her footsteps.

“She looks a little forlorn,” he said.

“I sometimes think she would give anything never to see another work of art again,” said Imogen. “But that isn’t to say she does want anything in particular. She doesn’t talk to me. She doesn’t talk to anyone. She tries to talk to Philip but that isn’t easy. I wish you could help her,” she said, sounding not entirely sincere, “but I truly don’t see how. She’s been dancing, at least, some of the time.”

“I wish your father had come.”

“I don’t.” She opened her mouth to say something further, and closed it again. Her hands tightened on his shoulder. He held her with military firmness, and they turned a corner.

Dorothy was dancing with Humphry. Humphry was possibly the best dancer in the room. He said to her “Let me lead,” and she let him lead, and they began to move as though they were a single creature, swaying and tripping, making tiny chasing and concentrated steps, floating dreamily. His hand was hot and strong in the small of her back: both halves of her body, above and below his hand, moved as he dictated. He went fast—she had the sensation she had when she was a little girl, on roundabouts and helter-skelters. He said

“Well, you’ve been having a good time, young woman.”

“I have.”

“Your dress shows you off. A great success.”

He held her very close. They waltzed towards one of the great, full-length mirrors in the room, framed as though it were a door, in cast-iron painted as trompe-l’oeil sepia-brown marble. The mirrors were angled to give the illusion that the room was infinite, that you could step around an invisible corner into another shining space. It was clear that it was a mirror partly because a Greek or Roman nymph stood on a fat marble pillar with her back to it. She was modestly clutching, in her front, a sculpted flow of drapery, that covered her thighs, but not her bared breasts over which her hands were defensively clasped in an ancient, conventional pose. At the back, oddly, she was entirely naked. Her shoulder blades, fine waist, and rounded buttocks were exposed to the mirror, though not to the room. She distracted Dorothy, as her father whirled her towards the glass. She saw her own pale little face, staring dreamily over his strong shoulder, and her own small, female hand on his arm. She saw her unaccustomed high knot of hair, and the sleek, foxy red of her father. And then, as she turned, she looked back at the mirror, and saw the midnight-blue dress, and her bare back and shoulders, and the powerful hand planted on her waist, on the unaccustomed whalebone strips that shaped her.

“If you go on like this,” said Humphry “you’ll have them fighting over you.”

He said “Perhaps it’s true, what they always say, don’t you think?” She had no idea what he meant.

After the dance, the Todefright Wellwoods drove back to Portman Square, where they were staying with the London Wellwoods. Olive sat in the back of the carriage with Tom. Dorothy sat facing them, and put her head on her father’s shoulder. They didn’t speak much: they were sleepy and thoughtful.

Katharina sent the young people to bed, with a maid carrying milk, iced biscuits, and a small oil lamp with an etched glass shade. Dorothy always had the same bedroom when she came to Portman Square. It was small, and high up, looking out at the back over gardens. It was decorated in Katharina’s taste, in a froth of white muslin, sprigged with pink. The bed was a nest inside prettily swathed curtains. There was a washstand, with bowl and jug decorated with pink rosebuds on a china-blue ground, but no writing desk. Another young woman might have found all this nostalgic femininity charming after the plainness and brightness of Todefright. Dorothy didn’t. But she didn’t mind it, or feel at a loss in it.

She slipped out of her ball dress, and her petticoats—she didn’t need the maid to help, and told her so. Another maid would certainly be unhooking Griselda. She hung the midnight-blue dress neither carefully nor carelessly over a prettily upholstered dumpy chair, dropped her drawers on top of it and put on her plain, voluminous, white cotton nightdress, its bodice pleated by Violet. She thought she would read a little, before she turned out the light. She was trying to read fairytales in German to please Griselda. She was not a born linguist, and was ambivalent about fairytales.

Someone knocked at the door. She thought it would be Griselda, come to talk over the ball, and rather wished she wouldn’t. But she said, come in. It was Griselda’s house and she loved Griselda.

The door opened slowly and silently. It was not Griselda. It was Humphry, her father, in a silk dressing-gown covered with coiling Chinese dragons. He looked around for a chair—both the fat chair and the dressing-table chair were covered with abandoned female garments. He sat down beside his daughter, sinking into her flowery eiderdown, and said

“I thought we might talk about things.”

He was in an aura of whisky. Censorious Dorothy believed that both his wives—as she now thought of them—should do something to stop, or slow down, the whisky-drinking. She said

“I’m tired.”

He put an arm around her shoulder.

“You are such a lovely girl. I never thought you were going to be so lovely. Queen of the Rosebud Garden of Girls. My Dorothy.” Dorothy stiffened.

“There are things I ought to tell you. But I wanted so much to tell you—to tell you”—he stumbled—“how perfectly lovely—”

He breathed hot whisky at her. She shrank back, and he gave her a clumsy push, which unbalanced her. She turned her face into the pillow, and muttered, in a child’s voice, “Go away. Please. Get off.”

And then he put his hand, unequivocally, inside the white cotton folds and touched naked flesh. Dorothy ceased to be timid and confused, and became very angry.

“Don’t do that. Or I’ll scream. Or ring the bell.”

“I only want to play with you a bit. My darling.”

His face wavered over hers. One hand worked inside her nightdress. One came over her mouth. Dorothy bit it. She bit with all her strength and she was strong. She bit the soft cushion below the thumb, and her mouth filled with blood. She shook the hand in her teeth like a mongoose with a snake.

“Bitch,” said Humphry. He sat up. His hand was pouring blood on the white frilled bedclothes. He said “Have you got a hankie? We must stop this. That hurt.”

“It was meant to. How dare you? Here’s a hankie. It’s far too small. Girls have stupid hankies. Go and get the hand towel. Then I’ll tear something up and make a bandage. I haven’t got much I can spare to tear up. Violet will be furious if I tear up this petticoat she spent so long on. You’ll have to put up with knickers.”

This word caused her to begin to shake. She said, drawing deep, sobbing breaths,

“You can’t go back with any of the stuff from this room, that belongs to the room, as opposed to belonging to me, or everyone will know. So it will have to be knickers. You could get to them. They’re in the drawer.”

Her pillow was blood-spattered. So was the neck of her nightgown. Humphry said with a ghastly laugh

“You’ve got blood on your teeth, like a stoat. And on your pretty lips.”

“I shall have to say I had a nosebleed. You’ve got blood on your nice dressing-gown, too. Two nosebleeds in a night is a bit unlikely. You must cut yourself shaving.”

She was trying to make a bandage strip from the knickers with an unsuitable pair of nail scissors.

Humphry said, stumbling over the words,

“Stop ordering me about.”

“It’s either be businesslike or collapse and scream, and I think even you would prefer the former. You’re drunk. I need to think for you. As well as for me,” she added, in a swallowed sob. She was breathing either too much or too little air.

Humphry said

“It’s not what you think.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? You—you attacked me. I was there. It’s not a question of thinking.”

“Yes it is. There are reasons. This is the wrong way to say it. I was always going to tell you. When the time came.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

“What do you think you know?”

“I’m Violet’s daughter. Someone—not me—has been listening into things.”

“Well someone has been garbling ‘things.’ You’re not Violet’s child. Phyllis is. And Florian. You’re Olive’s daughter. But not mine.”

Dorothy clutched the coverlet to her chest like the naked nymph in the ballroom.

“What?”

“You aren’t my daughter. So, you see, it wasn’t—this wasn’t—what you thought.”

Dorothy sat like stone.

“I didn’t mean to tell you this way. I do love you. Always have. Always will. My dear. Say something.”

Dorothy said “Who is my father?”

“You met him one midsummer. He’s a German from Munich. His name is Anselm Stern. The puppet-man. Things got out of hand at a carnival.

“You can’t say it’s made any difference,” he added, foolishly. Dorothy said

“You are being childish. You aren’t thinking. Of course it makes a difference. I am not who I thought I was. Nor, for that matter, is Phyllis. You have muddled us all up. All of you, you and both of them have made this muddle. You can’t just say it made no difference.”

“I love you,” Humphry repeated, clutching his bandaged hand in his whole one.

“Please go away,” Dorothy said with desperate dignity. “I need to think. I can’t think with you saying silly things to me.”

“I handled it badly,” Humphry said, with drunken ruefulness.

“You didn’t even handle it,” said Dorothy with scorn. “You just added a worse muddle to a monstrous muddle that already existed. Go away. Please. We have to sort out tomorrow.”

“We can just go back to where we were, maybe …”

“That’s childish. We can’t. Go away.”

Humphry went.

Dorothy sat on top of her bed, clasping her knees, thinking furiously. She was thinking in order not to feel, and her whole body was set and aching with the force of the thinking.

She thought she would not go home—go back to Todefright.

She tried to rearrange Olive in her mind, and failed.

She thought she would not think about Humphry.

She thought, slowly and reluctantly, that she was going to need to tell Griselda—something, she was not sure what, she would have to think of that. She had not told Griselda anything about Hedda’s discovery. She had wanted to go on as they were, cousins and friends, and not let the evil creatures out of Hedda’s Pandora’s box.

She decided she must pretend to be ill, and stay here, in Portman Square. She would explain the blood-spattered sheets by a gushing nosebleed. She would also tell Griselda to tell people—in confidence and untruthfully—that the Curse had come upon her early and with terrible pain, that she couldn’t bear to move.

She was one of those beings who cannot bear uncertainty or indecision. She must act, she must make a plan of action. She must get away, she could not sit any longer in Todefright with horrible secrets bubbling up around her like hot geysers out of a lava-field.

Where could she go, and how?

Tom had run away. Running away was what children in stories did. There was no point in hurrying off to be a wild woman in the woods. She wanted to be a doctor. She tried to think of someone she could plausibly visit for a time.

She was getting tired. She allowed her mind to touch, tentatively, at the image of Anselm Stern, her blood father.

Incurably truthful, she remembered she had not much liked him, had been even a little afraid of him. Griselda had liked him, had talked German to him.

She remembered a slim, black, bearded figure, a bit like a demon. Putting Death into Death’s own box.

His English was no better than her own clumsy German. His puppets had made her uneasy.

He was a kind of showman. Was he a serious person?

She thought a bit harder. Did he know she was his daughter? Did he know he had a daughter?

She felt, in a hot and angry way, that he should be made to know.

She felt, in an exhausted, tearful way, that she needed to know who he was.

Could she bring herself to tell Griselda?

In the morning, she did not go down to breakfast. She huddled under her eiderdown, and said to the maid who brought her ewer of hot water that she felt ill, really ill, and would be glad if Griselda could be fetched. The maid said she would speak to Mrs. Wellwood—either Mrs. Wellwood—and Dorothy said, no, she would be grateful if Griselda could come. Quickly. There was no need to bother anyone else.

Griselda came in, in a white shirt and green skirt, her hair knotted loosely on her neck.

“What is it? Aren’t you well? What’s wrong? Do you need a doctor, or anything?”

“No. I had a nosebleed. I’m sorry about the bedclothes. Something has happened, Grisel, something that changes all my life.”

Griselda moved the midnight dress, and the petticoat, folding them neatly, and sat down on the stubby chair.

“Tell.”

“I almost can’t.”

“We don’t have secrets from each other. Only from the world.”

“This is a secret that a lot of people know, which is a secret about me, and was kept from me.”

“Tell me.”

“My father—that is—well—he told me, I am not his real daughter. He had drunk a bit too much, and it sort of slipped out. He hadn’t been planning to tell me.”

Griselda’s pale face went white.

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say who your father was—is?”

“Yes. He’s that German man with the puppet-show who came to the Midsummer party, when we were younger.” She thought. “I don’t know if he knows he’s my father. I can’t face asking my mother—anything—I just can’t. I can’t go home. I’ve got to think of a way to get away. You must help.”

One tear rolled out of Griselda’s blue eye.

“Grisel, you don’t have to cry.”

“We aren’t cousins,” said Griselda. “If it’s true, we aren’t cousins.” Dorothy had not thought of that. They looked at each other.

“We’re even more best friends,” said Dorothy. “Help me. Where can I go?”

Griselda was thinking furiously. “Would you consider telling Charles?”

“He isn’t my cousin either,” said Dorothy, with a brittle cackle of laughter.

“No—but—he keeps going on these cultural trips to Germany with Joachim Susskind. He goes to Munich, where he—Herr Stern—is. Do you think—just possibly—we could go, too? With Charles, and Herr Susskind, and maybe even with—with—Toby—do you think a grown-up brother and two tutors would be chaperone enough? Charles is good at secrets. He has lots. He does all sorts of secret things with Joachim Susskind who looks so respectable and gentle. He gets up to all sorts of things—revolutionary things, avant-garde art things—the parents would die if they knew. We could both go. I could speak German and study there. And if the tutors went, you could go on working for your exams. I’m sure they have classes in Munich we could go to. And you could think about seeing him—Herr Stern—your father. I liked him. I liked him very much. He’s gentle.”

Dorothy sprang out of the bed and flung her arms round Griselda. They hugged each other. Griselda considered the bloodstains on the nightdress.

“That was a voluminous nosebleed. Buckets of blood. You must have had a frightful shock.”

“I did.”

“Are you all right now?”

“I’m all right as long as I keep doing something. I shall have to lurk here, for a bit. I’m not going back to Todefright.”

“Won’t your parents be upset? Will they let you go to Munich?”

“I need to make them frightened of what I will do if they don’t. Tell everybody. Run away altogether. Kill myself. Waste away. Shout and shout at them. They wouldn’t like any of those. Which do you think?”

“I think you should lurk here and be stormy and intimidating. Whereas I shall be persuasive and charming, and say if I can go and study in Munich for a bit, I will let them give a sumptuous ball for me when I get back.”

“I don’t think I shall ever enjoy another ball.”

“Well, if I fix this for you, you’ll have to promise me to come to that one. As moral support. We shall have to tell Charles or he’ll never agree. But if we do tell him, I think he might, because he does love secrets and subversive things.”