The Children's Book

35

The presence of the Sterns, father and sons, in Nutcracker Cottage should have agitated—and to a certain extent, did agitate—Olive Well-wood. She had a sense, when she thought about it, which she tried not to do, that everything unseen in her household had shifted its invisible place. Things had always been behind thick, felted, invisible curtains, or closed into heavy, locked, invisible boxes. She herself had hung the curtains, held the keys to the boxes, made sure that the knowable was kept from the unknown, in the minds of her children, most of all. And now she knew that grey, invisible cats had crept from their bags and were dancing and spitting on stair-corners, that curtains had been shaken, lifted, peeped behind by curious eyes, and her rooms were full of visible and invisible dust and strange smells. She was rather pleased with all these metaphors and began to plan a story in which the gentle and innocent inhabitants of a house became aware that a dark, invisible, dangerous house stood on exactly the same plot of land, and was interwoven, interleaved with their own. Like thoughts which had to stay in the head taking on an independent life, becoming solid objects, to be negotiated.

She knew very well that Dorothy had gone to Munich to see Anselm Stern. She knew that Humphry knew that, and supposed, but had not been told, that he had spoken about this to Dorothy. She waited for either Humphry or Dorothy—or Violet, in whom Humphry might have confided—to say something to her, and none of them did. Dorothy went on just as normal—except that it was not, and could not be, as normal. She had become, her mother thought, disagreeable and domineering about this medical training of which she did speak, a great deal, in an accusing voice, or so Olive understood it. Humphry placated their daughter.

She did not think Tom knew any more than she did. He had most innocently made great friends with the unacknowledged German brothers. He was uneasy, yes, but this was because he felt people thinking he himself ought to be, or do, something.

A metaphor for herself came into her mind, which was the equivalent of her metaphor for Dorothy. Dorothy she perceived as a doorless, windowless hut, encountered by a lost soul in a deep forest in need of shelter. The quester prowled around and around, and the blind brick walls emitted no light or sound, and there was no way in.

Sometimes she moved the brick tower to a distant place on the plain. Surrounded—her mind worked busily—by the dried-up skeletons of those who had seen it as a refuge and arrived thirsty and starving.

Opposite it, on the plain, stood a building which was made of hard porcelain, which had once had the shape of a capacious wardrobe, and was now carapace, in which a living creature was enclosed, or self-enclosed, had perhaps excreted the shell, which had graded colours and ridges and frills, as a whelk might, or a monstrous hermit-crab.

There were things—many things—she did not wish to know, was appalled to think of knowing.

The porcelain was light, lighter than air. The wind took it over quicksands. The porcelain was painted with eyes, but they did not see as a peacock’s tail does not see, or a moth’s wing.

If she stopped spinning, the thing would sink.

Another part of the problem was Anselm Stern. When he had first come to England, she had treated him gracefully as an acquaintance, and he had accepted her lead. There was a sense in which he was no more than an acquaintance. They had met in masks, amidst music, in an unreal world where everything is permitted, which seemed more real than the real world, which was always happening to Olive, whether at Todefright, or in Munich, or anywhere, almost, except the Yorkshire coalfield. But now, he too had acquired a lacquered surface, like the faces of his puppets, with their single, fixed expressions to which the lights and shadows added meanings. She had seen him look at Dorothy—quick, quick, think of a story about someone who had a child they never knew they had—stolen away by a witch—would they recognise each other if no one told them, or pass unacknowledged in the street? It was a good story, but it made her profoundly unhappy to see the two smiling secretively at each other. She thought of a story of a puppeteer for whom all human creatures had strings to pull and batons to direct. That was a good story too, but its impulse was unjust. The damned couple were happy. They did not intend her to share the happiness.

There was a kind of relief, and a kind of anguish, to her, to understand that all principal actors intended to maintain this state of affairs.

She was surprised when August Steyning asked her to collaborate on a kind of pageant or play to be worked on during the arts and crafts camp. He had an idea for a play about magic that would use human actors and puppets—puppets moreover, of two kinds, both life-size, with a dark human moving them, and glittering small marionettes, with their own stage. He had in mind one of Olive’s magical tales. Something like The Shrubbery, the human boy entering the land of the Little People, which could be represented by marionettes.

Mrs. Wellwood sat and stared at her teacup; she looked at Anselm Stern, to see what he thought, and he was looking out of the window, with a carved, motionless face, inscrutable. She liked August Steyning. She felt safe with him—he liked her work, there was no human mess or muddle.

“Mr. Stern?” she said, lightly, lightly.

“I think this idea of August is a very good idea. We might make a new art. An art of two worlds.”

“I am so happy to be included,” she said sincerely, sounding insincere, because she was in two worlds.

August Steyning, English and urbane, poured tea.

One advantage of putting on a play—or performance—at a summer camp is that it is possible to use a huge cast, and a large crew of wardrobe and props workers, without paying them. Indeed, Steyning said to Olive, they pay you. They sat down with Anselm Stern and Wolfgang at the dinner table in Nutcracker Cottage and elaborated a plan. Steyning’s first idea had been to use the tale of the stolen child—or possibly of the stolen wet-nurse—who is spirited into the Fairy Hill, and needs to be rescued. This, he explained, would mean that you could “see into the hill” if the marionette theatre could be—a closed, curtained world—in the midst of the human theatre. Anselm Stern said that they might use those versions of the universal Cinderella story—Catskin, Allerleirauh—in which the princess, fleeing her father, finds a prince, only to have him spirited away by a witch, at the ends of the earth and put into a magic sleep of forgetfulness. He had always been particularly drawn to those tales of a resourceful heroine covering the earth in her search, asking guidance of the sun, the moon, the stars, the winds. Wolfgang said he was interested in making life-size masks and puppets. He had had an idea of making a whole audience of great dolls and scarecrows, who would be there at the beginning, and sit quite still, and then suddenly—dangerously—join in the action. Besiege the fortress, maybe. Maybe be invoked by the many-furred girl. Olive said

“There is something in my mind. A search for a real house in a magic world. A search for a magic house in a real world. Two worlds, inside each other.”

“The Wizard of Oz,” said Steyning.

“Humphry says that is an allegory about Bimetallism and the Gold Standard, with its road of gold ingots and its silver shoes.”

“It has a little wizard in a huge machine,” said Stern. “Which is good for marionettes, or other puppets.”

“The fortress is like the Dark Tower in Sir Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” said Olive. “A lightless block.”

“There is a lot one can do with lighting,” said Steyning. “Even in a barn, without a conflagration.”

“These small pieces of tales are like a kaleidoscope,” said Stern. “Without end to be reshaped, differently ordered.”

It was an odd play. It grew like a vegetable from its story-seeds, and the metaphors in Olive’s mind. The early days of the camp were spent on construction and reconstruction. Marian Oakeshott appeared and took charge of an army of wardrobe workers, who brought old clothes and new bales, and cut, and stitched, and decorated. Wolfgang had a workshop for life-size puppets and mask-construction, in which he involved Tom, who was full of inventiveness. The workshop was in an old barn where bales of straw still stood about, and Tom began to make a strawman. This creature turned out not to be benign, like the one in The Wizard of Oz, but vacant, swollen and menacing. He had a huge boll of a head, with black tunnel-eyes and a mouth stitched with string, jaggedly. This head lolled and revolved above a larger-than-life-size bale of a body, with swivelling dropsical legs, and short, useless arms, no more than fringes of sticks at the shoulders. Wolfgang said it was full of horror, and should be one of the enemies met on the way. I’ll act it, said Tom. It can burn up. It should burn up, said Steyning, admiring it, but we can’t risk it, not in a barn full of children and dolls.

“Blasebalg,” said Anselm Stern. “I do not know the English.”

“Bellows,” said Steyning. “Of course. Straws in the wind. A small tourbillon, leaving nothing.”

“And I shall be a Wolf-man,” said Wolfgang. “Someone has brought a coat of fur and a fox with some paws, and I was going to use them for Allerleirauh, but I shall make me a wire Beast, with a hot red tongue and a how-do-you-say, zuckender Schwantz, and great tearing nails.”

“Twitching tail. Claws,” said Steyning.

“Ja, claws. I shall be killed with a sword.”

“Our heroine doesn’t have a sword. She is a girl, not a woman.”

“Why?”

“Because she has been promised to my sister Hedda, and because my sister Dorothy will have nothing to do with it.”

“Cold iron,” said Steyning. “Those who go out against the Good People, or the Pharisees, must go armed with cold iron. She takes a kitchen knife.”

“I wouldn’t like to face Hedda with a kitchen knife,” said Tom.

Olive thought the final adversary should be a metal man, a machine-man. A suit of armour, said Steyning. Tom remembered the night-black rider in Gareth and Lynette. He recited, and Olive joined in

High on a night-black horse, in night-black arms

With white breast-bone and barren ribs of Death

And crowned with fleshless laughter—

Wolfgang liked that. A helmet which was a skull, a skeleton which was a carapace. Ah, said Tom, but there is a twist. Inside there is a blooming boy. With a bright fresh face. Nothing bad. A part for Robin, said Olive. Florian can be the stolen changeling. Leon can move the Death figure, said Wolfgang. He’s no good at making, but he is good moving.

Geraint enjoyed planning, he enjoyed finding the right person for a job, he was, in his City form, as good at compromise and consultation, as in his Marsh form of sulky boy he had been inept and sulky. He met an army quartermaster from Lydd in a pub near Old Romney, and arranged to borrow a number of tents and some cooking equipment, which amazed everyone. He drew up an agenda, a timetable. Gymnastic exercises and dance movements after breakfast. Excursions to churches. Classes in embroidery, silversmithing, ceramics, theatre design, acting. A lecture at the end of most afternoons before the evening meal.

Benedict Fludd had to give one of the first lectures—so that all the aspiring potters could learn first principles from him. He would speak in the Tithe Barn, and Philip would sit at the wheel on the platform beside him, to demonstrate wedging, and fritting, and pulling, and building, and centring, and the rhythm of the wheel. Later they would return, and demonstrate painting and glazing. And at the very end of the camp they would examine the pots that had been made, and choose which were fit to be fired, and fire the great bottle kiln, for which the wood was being collected. At a much later stage in the planning, during an idle conversation with Wolfgang Stern, Geraint conceived the wild idea of dismantling the fairy tower—which itself bore an odd resemblance to a bottle kiln or oast-house—and carrying it through the lanes to add to the firing. Wolfgang said his fabricated audience—a mixture of sagging or rigid scarecrows and stuffed dolls, softly representing smiling women, with pink painted cheeks, or men in blazers and boaters—could rise up and pull it all down, and run through the landscape. The best drama, Wolfgang said, would be, if they put the Puppen in the fire door. It would be an amazement. But I do not know that I could support to burn so much careful work.

Burn the failures, said Geraint. There always are some.

Prosper Cain, and Florence, and Imogen were in the Mermaid Inn, in Rye. Geraint came to drive them over to Benedict Fludd’s lecture. Geraint supposed, as the rest of his family supposed, that Imogen would then go on to Purchase House with his family. Over breakfast, Imogen had said, in a thick, swallowed voice,

“You do understand. I’m not going back.”

“We understand. Florence needs you. I shall explain.”

When Imogen had gone to fetch her hat, Florence said

“I wish you would not say I need Imogen. I don’t. She may need me.”

“She doesn’t wish to return home.”

“I know that. You consider all her wishes. There was no suggestion, when she came, that she would be here for ever.”

“Oh, Florence.” He looked a little helplessly at his rigid, rigorous daughter. “She won’t be here for ever. She must find a way to make a living, and a home for herself.”

“I’m sure her mother wants to see her,” said Florence, who was sure of nothing of the kind. She said with passion

“I wish we could go back to Italy, to Florence. I don’t want to spend my summers in dingy Dungeness where I have nothing to do.”

Prosper Cain was about to put his arm round his daughter, who had been born in Florence, when Imogen returned with her hat, which was very pretty, huge-brimmed, covered with artlessly artful feathery flowers.

The Cains arrived at the Tithe Barn when the audience for the lecture was largely assembled. There was a raised platform at one end, on which stood a lectern, and next to the lectern a potter’s wheel, and a table on which bowls, jars, models, stood, some perfect and gleaming with intricate design, some pale and matt, with unfired glaze, one or two blown into strange hobbling or deliquescent shapes by misfirings.

Benedict Fludd and Philip came on together, to mild applause. Philip was cleanly clothed as an apprentice, in a linen overall, his bush of hair smoothed down. Fludd was wearing a kind of overall-robe, in midnight-blue, with gold piping, streaked with clay stains, including a ghostly handprint. His full Victorian beard also had clay in it. He wore small, round spectacles, which gave him the air of a scientific eccentric. He stood quite still, staring out at the audience, checking, and then began to speak. His family was in a row—Seraphita in floating embroidery, Pomona in innocent muslin, Elsie in a round shiny black straw hat, fastidious Florence in brown linen, Prosper Cain in a summer suit, and Imogen, under her flowers. He nodded to them, and began to speak.

“Potters, like gravediggers, are marked by clay. We work with the cold stuff of Earth, which we refine by beating and mixing, form with our fingers and the movement of our feet and then submit to the hazards of the furnace. We take the mould we are made of and mould it to the forms our minds see inside our skulls—always remembering that earth is earth, and will take only those forms proper to its nature. I hope to show you that those forms are infinitely more extensive than most people may imagine—though not infinite, as earth is not infinite. We are chemists— we must know metals and ores, temperatures and binding elements, weights and measures. We are artists—we must be able to be exact and flourishing together, with a brush or a cutting tool. We are like the alchemists of old—we employ fire, smoke, crucibles, gold, silver, even blood and bone, to make our vessels, our simulacrae, our fantasies and those containers necessary for daily functions, food and drink—which can be lovely, however plain, graceful, however simple …”

He went on. Everyone listened. He called on his assistant to demonstrate the mystery of the craft, and Philip silently, and skilfully, taking lumps of clay from baths and bins ranged beside him, made airless blocks, or rising coils, or, towards the end, a turning bowl, wavering up against gravity between his strong fingers.

There was much applause. Tea and sandwiches were served and Fludd made his way to his own family group. Prosper Cain told him the lecture was both earthy and fiery. He accepted the compliment. He moved step by sideways step to where Imogen stood, talking to Elsie in a self-consciously absorbed way.

“You came,” he said. “You have come back to us. We are fellow workers, fellow members of the crafts. My dear.”

He put his arms around her. Imogen stiffened. When he released her, she brushed down her dress, as though slivers of clay were on it. She said

“You spoke wonderfully. As always.”

Fludd was bustling and smiling. Members of the audience crowded him, all complimentary. Philip, on the platform, was packing the exhibits into crates. Geraint joined him. He said, “That went well.” Philip frowned.

“He’s excited. When he’s this full of himself, there’s always a reaction. You know that. I’m bothered. He has set so much on—”

“On?”

“On her coming back. But it won’t be for long. And then—”

When everyone else had gone, the Fludds remained. Benedict said to Imogen

“Come now. Everything is ready, Elsie has seen to it.”

“I’m staying—with Florence,” whispered Imogen. “Bring Florence. Come.”

“I’m going back to Rye.”

Her father caught her wrist. He gripped and ground it.

“You are coming home. I’m here because you agreed to come home.”

He stared, or glared, at her.

Florence took two or three little steps back, out of the group. Imogen said, inaudibly, “You know I can’t.” Prosper said

“Benedict, you are hurting her. Let her go. Let her come back to the Mermaid, and we’ll talk things over—” Benedict turned on Prosper Cain.

“All this is your doing. You seduced her. You are keeping her from me—”

“Be careful what you say,” said Prosper. “Be very careful.”

Benedict hit him. Not with a clenched fist, with a flat hand, very heavily, across the cheek, leaving fingermarks that looked flayed, and clay on the tips of the moustache.

Prosper ducked the second blow.

Imogen began to shake.

Prosper said, very formally, to Seraphita, “You must see, madam, that she is a woman grown, and may choose where she sleeps. I shall take her back to the inn until we are all calmer.”

“Philip—” said Seraphita. “Fetch Philip—”

Prosper Cain swept his ladies away. He had to support Imogen. Florence trailed behind them, treading with little stamps of her heels. Geraint, annoyed by the failure of his well-planned day, and anxious in some other dark place he did not wish to acknowledge, went back to Philip, and helped him to help Benedict, who appeared to be choking, into a pony-trap.

The Cain party had its own small breakfast room. Imogen did not appear the next morning. Florence and her father ate largely in silence. He said, once,

“We might go to Italy later this summer.”

“Never mind Italy,” said Florence, repressively, chewing toast. “What are you going to do now?”

“Do?”

“About Imogen Fludd.”

Prosper Cain took a long time to answer. Florence observed

“They are all impossible people, all of them.”

“Should you like to go for a drive this morning, perhaps.”

Florence said she was going out to walk with Griselda Wellwood, who was also in Rye. She said her father would be expected at the crafts camp. She went out.

After a time, Imogen appeared in the doorway, dressed in travelling clothes, carrying a small portmanteau. Prosper asked her to sit down and drink some tea, and eat some toast at least. She did sit down, rather heavily. He poured tea for her. There was a silence. “Where are you going?” asked Major Cain.

“I thought, to Geraint. He will have to help me. He is my brother, he is the right person.”

“He is a very young man, and he works long hours in a difficult place, and lives in a lodging-house. Much better stay here, and we will think about what is best, together, sensibly.”

Imogen sipped her tea. The tension in her usually calm face made it, Prosper thought, wild and beautiful.

“There are things you don’t know,” she said.

“The world is full of things I don’t know, and shan’t know. I know what I need to know when I am in a campaign, and I know what I need to know about how to run a museum department and buy gold and silver. I don’t know what I need to know about young women. I am not well equipped, as regards young women. But I am very good at not seeking to know what does not concern me. Often it is best to remain ignorant for ever of painful things. I have known several people who have brought themselves to confess this, or that, or to complain violently of this, or that, and have regretted it for the rest of their lives.”

He looked at her portmanteau.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “I used to pack a suitcase, and form a project of running away. Sometimes the packing was enough. Sometimes I set out, and had to be brought back. Once I was away a whole night, and was savagely beaten, on my return, and then cuddled and kissed.”

“I am not a child, and I do know I must go.”

“I hope you will let me look after you.”

“You can’t. I see that, now. For every reason.”

“My dear,” said Prosper Cain, very stiffly, his back rigid, “I have not forgotten, and cannot forget, what you said to me in Clerkenwell.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Did you not? It has made me see what I myself feel. For my own part, I can think of no greater happiness than making you my wife. And giving me the right to look after you. I am much older than you are. I know that. So do you. But in some timeless place, I do believe, we see each other as equals, face to face. I don’t want to let you go. Perhaps I should, but I cannot. And will not.”

He looked at her, almost angrily.

She looked at him. Her large eyes were steady. She said “I love you. I do love you. Perhaps that is all that need matter?” He thought of cross Florence, and raging Benedict Fludd, and knew it was not. He was a strategist, he would devise a strategy. He said “Come here—”

She stood up and came. He took her in his arms and kissed her brow, and her neck, and then, gently, her lips, and then, less gently, her whole mouth, and he knew that she did indeed love him.

He said “We won’t tell Florence, until we have thought things out, further. Or Julian, of course. I do not think that will be easy, but I think it may be managed. What I shall do, as soon as possible, with your permission, is drive over to Purchase House—no, my love, you will not come with me—and ask your father, very formally, for your hand in marriage. Everything else, we will plan calmly, and carefully. Do you feel able to go to the metalwork school in the camp? I could drive you there, on my way.”

Elsie let him into Purchase House. She pointed across the yard, to the studio in the dairy. She opened her mouth to impart some information or other, and closed it again.

“He’s in there. I saw him go in,” she volunteered.

“Thank you,” said Cain, and marched across the yard. Fludd was standing at a high table, modelling one of his facing-both-ways jugs. He was incising more sullen lines into the sullen side. The other was a blank oval.

“Who is it?”

“Me, old friend.”

“Ah, you.” Fludd turned round, at bay. Cain did a mental calculation about their respective ages. Fludd must be less than ten years older than himself. He was not yet fifty and Fludd was not, he thought, sixty, though he looked older, grizzled and heavy.

“I have come to ask you something.”

“You have done enough harm.”

“I don’t think it’s harm. It is—I agree—unexpected how it has turned out. I have come to ask you for your daughter. Who has agreed to become my wife.”

“Wife—”

“I am older than she is, but she is happy to set it aside. She says I may ask you for your goodwill.”

“I don’t give it.”

“Wait. Think. She does love me. I do love her, Benedict. I think in an odd way we have a chance of happiness. We are at ease with each other. I can make her comfortable, and encourage the talent she has inherited from you—”

“What have you done to her?”

“Nothing. She has been like my daughter, together with my daughter. And very recently things have changed—developed, one might say—”

“Stop making reasonable noises, for Christ’s sake. You can’t do this. That’s final.”

“She is of age, and I don’t need your consent. But I do beg you to think for a moment of her—this is a chance of happiness for her—I have assured myself that—”

“She was happy here.”

“I think not, Benedict. I do think not. But this is a new beginning.”

“Howl,” said Benedict unexpectedly. “Howl, howl, howl.”

After a moment Prosper realised that this impossible person was quoting King Lear, as he came on stage bearing his dead daughter in his arms.