The Children's Book

36

The important lectures were at the weekends, so that audiences might come in from outside, or even travel down from London. On the first weekend, in the late afternoon, on the Saturday, Humphry Wellwood spoke on Human Beings and Statistics: Changing the Condition of the Poor. On the Sunday, Herbert Methley spoke. His subject was Leaving the Garden: the Shamefulness of Shame. Miss Dace had asked him if he was quite sure about this title, and he had answered, flatly, “Yes.”

Prosper Cain and Imogen Fludd were in a state of exultant tension. They smiled too much, and Florence watched them, and they watched Florence watching them. They touched hands, secretly, in doorways, and when they were sure they were quite alone, Imogen ran into his arms. He had not expected his intense, quasi-fatherly affection and concern to become blind physical passion, but that had happened and he felt reinvigorated and renewed. As for Imogen, the slight stoop she had had, the deferent low voice, the slow movements that resembled her mother’s had turned to eagerness and quickness. Prosper knew he should tell Florence, and found himself taking intense pleasure in secrecy.

Things were complicated by the arrival of Julian and Gerald, who were on a walking holiday and had decided to walk to Lydd and hear Humphry’s lecture. Gerald was trying to decide between becoming a moral philosopher and going into politics, if he could find a party that met his exacting standards. Julian had an idea for a thesis on English pastoral poetry and painting. He wanted to write about the bright, transparent visions of Samuel Palmer and the woodcuts of Calvert. Gerald was writing about Love and Friendship and the Good, when he was not talking late, or swimming in the Cam, or bicycling across the marshes, or climbing in the Alps. He thought Humphrey’s Fabian socialist views on human nature were interesting. The young men arrived at the Mermaid in time for lunch, and were shown up to the family sitting-room, where they found Florence, writing.

“You could have said you were coming,” she greeted them, taking in Gerald’s beauty under his floppy linen hat.

“We didn’t know. Then we saw a poster for this lecture, so we thought we’d call on you for lunch, and go to hear it. Where’s Papa?”

“Silversmithing.”

“Is he coming here for lunch?”

“He didn’t say.”

Julian looked at Florence, who was looking at Gerald. He said “Well, we can lunch with you, and cheer you up, can’t we?” He saw that she needed cheering up. He said

“Are you not helping with the silversmithing?”

“I have no skill. And I don’t want to.”

Gerald had walked across to the window, and was staring out. Julian said “What’s up?”

“You’ll soon see,” said Florence, darkly.

At the lecture, they found themselves in a row of old friends. Julian was on the end, and Florence was next to him, and Gerald was on the other side of her. Beyond Gerald was Geraint, and next to him the young woman from Purchase House, Elsie Warren, decorously dressed and looking severe. Next to Elsie was Charles/Karl Wellwood, who was thinking what to do at the end of his Cambridge studies, whether to go to the London School of Economics or to Germany, to be an anarchist or a socialist or some kind of worker. Dorothy and Griselda were not there. They had gone into the hay barn where the marionettes and life-size puppets were being constructed. Griselda wanted to speak German. Dorothy was watching Anselm Stern stitch a tiny costume on to a slender silken trunk. Wolfgang and Tom had made a lolling platoon of death-still scarecrow men and women, decked with hay and flowers, stretching out rigid arms of coat-hangers and hoes.

Humphry more or less bounded onto the stage, his red hair and beard darkly glowing. His wife was in the front row, looking queenly, and Marian Oakeshott was towards the back, looking thoughtful.

Humphry talked about the paradox of statistical surveys and individual human fates. The Christian religion, he said, which had formed our thought, insisted that each human soul was unique and valuable in the sight of God. Jesus Christ had advised the rich man to sell all he had, and give to the poor. He had also said that the poor were always with us. He had said that where every prisoner and sick man and pauper was, there He was also among them. He had urged charity on his followers.

Much had been done, much that was valuable, by those who had gone out amongst the starving and the derelict and had reported on crowded rooms in unsanitary buildings, dead and dying crowded together, the sickness of sweat-shop and lucifer workers. He read out a description of the appalling, rapid descent into penury and death of a good worker who injured his back.

He said that compared to individual witness and individual feelings, the compiling of statistics might seem dry. But those stirred not only the imagination but the reason, and the will to act. Statistics was a human science. It had begun, he rather thought, with Durkheim, noticing that the number of suicides in Paris did not vary from year to year. All of them different human creatures, all of them grim decisions taken that life was no longer bearable. The causes might be poverty, lost love, failure at business, humiliation or sickness. But the figure was the same.

In the case of poverty the compilation of figures touched the imagination in a way individual cases could not. The hero of this study was Charles Booth who had interviewed everybody—registrars, school attendance officers, School Board visitors, census-takers—and had produced, beginning in 1892, seventeen volumes of reports on the nature and extent of poverty in London. He had mapped it street by street, colouring the streets according to the data, and had come to the conclusion that a million people, over 30 per cent of the population of London, had not the wherewithal to subsist or continue living. This figure revealed an unjust society as individual descriptions alone could not. It was a prerequisite for putting forward constitutional and legal changes—the introduction of a pension for the aged in place of the foul and degrading Workhouse, the suggestion of minimum legal wages, and maximum hours of work, of help for the unemployed that was rationally administered and not a function of charitable impulses amongst the better-off.

Charles/Karl listened dubiously. He had been moving amongst those who believed that only a revolution of the underdogs would bring about any change in the gruesome system. Everyone bothered about the poor. His parents’ friends truly held the belief that the undeserving poor should be sequestered in concentration camps and reformed, reconstructed or even—in the case of imbeciles and madmen—charitably put to death. In his college in Cambridge lunches were given for working-men, some of whom were crusty, some of whom were boys with sidelong glances under long lashes, some of whom were auto-didacts, socialists, or would-be poets. He did not feel he had got to know any of these selected and collected examples. He did not know what to say to them. He did not speak their language though he could communicate with intense small groups of German anarchists. He thought he might discuss the LSE with Humphry. The glamour of statistics had touched him.

Gerald kept making remarks to Julian over the top of Florence’s hat, as though she was not there. He said once, with a sardonic smile,

“He who would do good must do it in minute particulars.”

Julian drawled back “Not clear, my dear chap. Are you referring to particular people, or minute particular figures?”

Florence said “William Blake was mad, you know,” but neither of them appeared to have heard her, and perhaps it was not a clever remark.

They gathered after the lecture, the three Kingsmen easy in each other’s company, analysing good points, dismissing bad ones. Personal relationships, said Gerald, were the root of every virtue, couldn’t be done without, a man could not spend his life on reducing other men to figures without damage. Florence said we are not all monads, and nobody answered. Charles/Karl said society did exist, it was not only a mass of individuals. Classes existed. And male and female said Florence, crossly. Indeed, said Julian politely. Geraint, who had joined them, said that new women’s groups for agitating were very interesting. Gerald took the conversation back to human friendship.

He was embarrassing Julian, not because he was insulting Julian’s sister, but because Julian no longer loved him, and was not ready to admit that, precisely because of the intensity of the Apostolic faith in friendship as a supreme value. Julian no longer wanted to kiss, or indeed even to touch, Gerald, who had—as often happens—become much more eager to touch, to hold, to grasp Julian as Julian withdrew. Julian had begun to think Gerald was clever and silly, and did not want to know he thought that, it was inconvenient, their group was so comfortable, their walks so companionable, Cambridge and the English countryside so lovely.

Geraint moved round the group to Florence’s side. He said “I wish you had been able to persuade Imogen to go back home for a few days.” So did she, said Florence, repressively.

Geraint said she was looking beautiful. She broke off her intent frown to smile weakly at him, which encouraged him. He did not feel at home with the theoretical Kingsmen. Also he half-despised them for their lack of acquaintance with “real life” which he thought he knew better. He asked Florence her opinion of Humphry’s talk and she said it did seem to suggest things that could really be done, and that it was absurd for the middle classes to live in fear, as they did, of the dirty and desperate armies in the sinks of their towns.

At this point, inopportunely, Elsie Warren approached them. She nodded to Florence, and asked Geraint, without urgency, if he had seen his father. Geraint had not.

“He’s not at home. At least I think not. He’s not at meals. Mind you, he often isn’t.”

“Probably recovering from his lecture,” said Geraint. “A very small quantity of society makes him a recluse for days.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Elsie. “Your mother isn’t bothered.”

“We shall need him at the end of the camp—for the firing.”

“I think he’ll come. He’ll want to oversee it.”

Geraint turned away from her rather abruptly, and asked Florence if he could walk her back to Rye. He expected her to say no, but she said yes. This was partly to claim independence from Julian and Gerald, and partly because she thought Geraint might have something to say about Imogen. But it was partly also that his feelings for her—his steadfastness and patience—were comforting. He was as much out of a men’s world as the Cambridge men, but in his men’s world, men liked women, women interested them.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Something is going on, that’s odd.”

“I always like talking to you. About anything at all.”

“I don’t know about this—”

“Try me,” said Geraint.

“It’s Papa,” said Florence.

They began to walk away, towards Rye.

Charles/Karl was left with Elsie Warren.

“You don’t recognise me, do you?” she said. “I’m out of place. You’ve met me at Purchase House, carrying dishes and clearing up. We’ve not been introduced, so to speak.”

He could not place her accent, which was not local, but he could tell that it was working-class. He considered her. She had made the best of herself, he thought. She had a pale grey high-necked shirt, with tight cuffs, and a swinging skirt in a dark grey cotton. She had a bright red belt, round a shapely waist, and a straw hat with a bright red ribbon and a dashing bunch of stitched anemones, red and purple and blue. He did not know what to say to her, or indeed, how to speak to her. He was also aware that she knew this, and was amused by it. Amusement was not a reaction he had expected.

“Did you enjoy the talk, then?” she said.

“It was of great interest. I am trying to decide whether to study these matters—statistics, poverty—at the London School of Economics.”

“Or?”

“What you mean, or?”

“If you don’t do that, what will you do?”

He could not say, be a good anarchist and foment a revolution. He blushed. “I might go to Germany.”

“Might you? Nice to have a choice. I should like such a choice.”

He looked at her and she looked back, intently. They saw each other clearly. She went on

“Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don’t come into it, much, for me. I do what I must.” Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn’t.

“I imagine you don’t talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects.”

“You are being unfair,” said Charles/Karl. “You are mocking me.”

“We can do that, at least, if we dare.”

“Miss Warren,” said Charles/Karl, “I wish you would not talk as though you were a group, or a class, or a committee. I should like to be talking to you as a person.”

“Can you?”

“Why should I not?”

“For every reason. I am both working-class and not respectable. I am a Fallen Woman. I have a daughter. You don’t want to be talking to me as if I were a person, Mr. Wellwood.”

This information, far from shocking him, excited him. In Munich the goddess, Fanny zu Reventlow, was the mother of a lovely child with no known father. Desire should be free, they said in Schwabing, and Charles/Karl listened, and desired in the abstract, and agreed in principle. He could not—not now—discuss Fanny zu Reventlow with this pugnacious person with a narrow waist, in a red belt.

“Do you talk to everyone like this, Miss Warren?”

“No. I don’t. Only to well-meaning persons like you.”

“I should like—” said Charles/Karl. He would like, he realised, to undo the belt, and several of the buttons, and slap her and kiss her. He was astounded. He was also gratified to find such a spontaneous reaction in himself.

“What would you like?” asked Elsie, in a way that almost persuaded him she had read his secret mind.

“I should like to get to know you. I should like you to stop treating me as a representative of a class, and allow me to talk to you. I should like to be permitted to walk you home, if you are going home.”

“I am. You can come, if you want. I really should be looking for Mr. Fludd, but if he don’t want to be found, he won’t be. He is a secret man.”

They set off together. Motion made them easy with each other. He said “Do you think a man and a woman can be good friends, Miss Warren?”

“Elsie, why don’t you. I suppose you call Philip, Philip.”

“Karl.”

“I thought it was Charles. Karl for Karl Marx?”

“You know a great deal.”

“I have friends—women friends—who are teaching me. I hope to become a teacher myself. I do not fancy cleaning and carting for ever. And, in answer to your question, I think yes, a man and a woman can be good friends. But it isn’t easy for them, being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then, there’s the problem of men and women being different sexes. You are not to laugh. It is a problem.”

“I know that. What I do think—”

“What do you think?”

“I think if they are good friends—then whatever else they are—or are not—is better.”

They went on walking. He said

“You will only laugh if I say you can be just as trapped in a house in Portman Square, and a public school and a university, as in the kitchen.”

“Yes, I will. I will laugh heartily. I will listen, Karl, and I will laugh and laugh.”

“I never talk to anyone as you talk to me.”

“I shall teach you, Mr. Deprived-Rich-Man. I may even introduce you to my very little, very clever daughter.”

She looked into his face to see if she had gone too far, had lost him.

“I should like that,” said Charles/Karl.

Herbert Methley leaned confidentially out over the lectern. He told his audience that he was a workingman. He worked hard as a gardener on a smallholding in this county, the Garden of England, and he worked also at his desk, describing life in that Garden. But the fruits of his labours had been taken from him by the police in their boots and helmets, and had been cast into a fiery furnace, and consumed. He had been told that what he had written was shameful. But it was the men in gowns and helmets who had real cause to be ashamed.

He was a stringy sunburned man, with a crimson silk neckerchief round his prominent Adam’s apple. He had that habit good lecturers have of letting his eye rove over the audience, looking for listening faces, or expressions of boredom. He saw Griselda and Dorothy with Tom and the two Germans, near the front. At the back, at the side, Julian and Gerald sat together. Florence was not with them. She was with Geraint, towards the front, in the centre. There was a row of older, judiciously composed women, Marian, Phoebe, Patty Dace, towards the back. Also near the back was Elsie Warren. Charles/Karl had seen that the seat next to her was empty, and had sat in it. She was sitting very upright, with her arms folded round her chest. Phyllis came in late, and sat down just behind Leon. Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin were there. Methley acknowledged them with a nod, before embarking on his attack on the clergy.

Where did the concept of shame come from? he asked. Our fellow creatures in the garden of earth do not know shame, though we persuade ourselves sometimes to feel it for them, to our shame. Shame began, we are told, in the Original Garden, when the innocent man and woman saw that they were naked, and were ashamed. What caused this? The wily serpent caused it, by making them eat the forbidden fruit, which he told them was the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, said Herbert Methley, insinuating that good and evil originated in those parts of the body that the shamed human beings now felt they must cover. Yet why should this be so? Are good and evil not much more— infinitely more—to be found in cruelty, in humiliation of others, in selfishness, in abuse of power, in theft—I could go on in this way, said Herbert Methley—for the rest of this little talk. Good and evil do not reside in human flesh, in which we should rejoice, about which we should not—neither men nor women—feel shame. Every day in this camp the young folk come out and perform graceful, and strenuous, and delightful bodily movements. He smiled, imagining them.

Gerald whispered to Julian, with the grave naughtiness of the Apostles, “I think he emits some kind of musk. From under his armpits. He has well-developed armpits, you can see.”

“Hush,” said Julian.

The lecturer developed the Garden metaphor. He passed on to Blake and the Garden of Love, in which a Chapel was built, with

Thou shalt not, writ over the door

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore

And I saw it was filled with graves

And tomb-stones where flowers should be

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

He said much of the distorting shamefastness of the world we lived in was the historical consequence of the centuries of celibate priesthood. He looked at Frank Mallett, who looked blandly back.

The novel had suffered. In England it was written to be read aloud round the fireside of a married vicar or curate, with his wife gravely listening. In France the priests took charge of the women and children, and novels were written for the separate—and often salacious—male readers.

It was not possible in a novel to describe most of the world as it really was.

It should be. We need honest novels much more than we need moralising tracts.

His own novel Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl had been about a modern man of the woods, a Wodwose, who had loved a woman as men do love women.

He believed, he said, in a pagan unity of nature. We are all one life which began long before there were any gardens, or any men in black gowns. Our feelings developed subtly, over millions of years, from the feelings and stirrings of jelly in the marshes, of slow, cold-blooded reptiles in hot swamps, of beings who clambered in trees that were now coal. It was possible, he said, to make a strenuous attempt to rediscover the strong, primal joy in being. One must go back to the roots of things. He quoted Marvell

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than Empires, and more slow—

Gerald said “That’s rich. Is he doing it on purpose?”

“Oh, I think so. Do be quiet.”

Elsie’s arms were still tightly clutched around her. Her mouth was set firm. Charles/Karl wanted to pull her fingers, to unwind her, and knew he must not.

Herbert Methley’s eye wandered over the upturned faces like a bumble-bee over a flowerbed. He had a skill the younger men had not developed. He could tell which of the women were, as he put it to himself, in need, potential wild girls. Dorothy’s dark face was judging him and made him uncomfortable. Griselda, blonde and peaceful, was weighing up the arguments—there was something alive there, and the face was lovely, but not in need. Phyllis was prim and pretty and undeveloped. He did not look at Elsie, though he had glimpsed the red belt. The agitated one, the one who breathed fast, and shifted in her seat, and looked about her for something, was Florence Cain. He took note of her.

After he had finished, some people left rapidly. Others came to talk to him. Frank Mallett said

“You have not given enough attention to the remarkable persistence of shamefastness. Men must need it very much if it is so tenacious.”

“A good point.”

“Marvell also said

‘How happy was that Garden State

When Man there walked without a mate.’ ”

“Indeed. There is a time for mutual love, and a time for solitude. I myself am solitary and celibate when pursuing my calling.”

Out of the side of his eye he saw Florence leaving with Geraint. There would be another time. Or another woman.

Florence and Geraint walked along a footpath by the Military Canal. Dragonflies skimmed the water. Moorhens paddled, and a rat slid out of a hole and swam busily away. The sun was still bright, though going down. Footsteps hurried after them. Geraint turned, irritably. It was Frank Mallett.

“I won’t keep you, I just wanted to ask you—”

He joined them.

“Yes?” said Geraint.

“Have you spoken to your father recently?”

“Not for some days. He hasn’t been around since his lecture last week. He tends to go into hiding after things like that. I was going to Purchase House when I’ve walked Miss Cain back to Rye.”

There was a silence. Geraint said

“Have you seen him?”

“Not for some days, also.” He strode along, looking at the water, and seemed to come to a decision. “No matter. No matter. When you do see him, please tell him I was asking after him.”

He turned back. Geraint said to Florence

“Something is worrying that man. My father does worry people.”

“I know.”

There was a long silence. They moved on, companionably, walking at the same pace. Geraint said, not looking at Florence,

“I am probably an idiot to choose this moment. When we are going on calmly, that is. You needn’t answer this, now, yet. But—I want you to be my wife. Don’t speak. I have wanted it for years, you know that, I think. I don’t have much to offer, yet—but I shall, for certain. I am doing well in the City, and Mr. Wellwood treats me as a son, almost. I am saving money. Also, I love you. I do love you. Don’t speak for a moment. It couldn’t be for a year or two. I ought not to tie you down. It may be only my fantasy. I have never seen—never—anyone like you. I think of you—you don’t know how much of the time.”

“May I speak now?”

“If you think it is even possible—I will ask again—later—if you—”

“May I speak? I was going to say—yes. Yes I will marry you. There.” They stopped walking and turned and looked at each other. Geraint said

“I haven’t just worn you out, with waiting and watching?”

“I said, yes. I do know my own mind.”

“I want you to be happy. You haven’t been looking happy, lately. I want—more than I want anything—for you to have what you want. Of course, I should like it to be me.”

“I haven’t been happy, it’s true. We can be happier together, I do think.” She gave a small smile. “We can try. Stop worrying.”

Very gently, he put his arms around her. She stiffened. He wished she had not, but he had learned patience.

“May I speak to your father?”

She gave a strange little laugh. “I shall be very happy for you to do that, yes. Then we can make plans.”

Dorothy Wellwood had set off alone, for a walk across the marshes. She had given herself a sick headache, with studying anatomy, and told herself that it was for the good of her own health that she was going out. She had been having trouble with willpower. She wanted to be with the German father and the German brothers, who were making intricate things in the barn, and laughing together. She was somehow hurt that Griselda could laugh with them, in German, and make clever suggestions for scenes in the puppet play, whilst she could not. She did not want to, of course—somewhere inside her there was a puritanical rejection of imaginary worlds, that was tough and largely unquestioned. Nerves and tendons, veins and arteries, were both more real and more mysterious than wired joints and dangling strings. She knew Griselda was far from trying to steal her new family—she was, on the contrary, hurt when Dorothy went off to do her hours of study, angry as much because she, Griselda, had no calling of her own, as because Dorothy was abandoning her. She walked faster and faster, running over the articulations of her body in her head. She found herself at Purchase House, looking up the avenue of trees beside the shabby drive.

She suddenly thought it would be good to see Philip Warren. She walked into the drive. She did not want to see Seraphita, or Pomona, or even Elsie. So she went neatly and quietly round the house, and into the stableyard, and directly to the door of the dairy-studio. She thought, then, too late, that she might encounter the ogre, Benedict Fludd. She peered in through the dusty window. There was Philip, in a blue overall, his back to her. No sign of Fludd. She tapped on the upper half of the door. Philip opened it, and smiled widely when he saw her.

“I were about to say, go away, I’m busy. And then I saw it was you. Come in.”

“I took a long walk, to think, and then I found I was here. So I came to see how you are getting on.”

“I’ve been drawing seaweeds. Wi’ things moving in them, with the water moving. Things like pipefish and cuttlefish and such.”

“Show me.”

He fetched his drawing pad, and they sat down, side by side, to look at it. There were some extraordinary images of bladderwrack, half-stranded, half-floating, its air pockets just above the surface of the shifting sea.

“First, I see how it looks. I keep looking, and see all the shapes as it moves in the different light. And then, a lot later, I make formal patterns.” He frowned. “You see what’s chance—little flips and flurries on th’ water—and what’s constant, what repeats.”

“It reminds me oddly of Gray’s Anatomy. I have to keep drawing veins, and muscles, and tendons, and joints. I could draw you different levels of what’s moving in your hand as you draw. Muscles that tighten, and what they do to other muscles. How the blood runs like a tide along the veins and arteries. You could make the most beautiful designs from the circulation of the blood. Like currents in the water, and strands of weeds. Only I’m not good at drawing, like you. I have to do it, for all these exams, and I try, and I try. But I mess it up.”

“Show me,” said Philip, pushing the paper pad towards her, and handing her the crayon. Dorothy laughed. She drew a rough image of a hand—the palmar surface—with the strong pulling parallel bands of the muscles and the cross-gartering effect at the sheath of the fingertip. Then she drew an arm, with the main nerves blacked in like rivers and tributaries. Philip was following her crayon by touching his own hand and arm, locating the stresses and counter-stresses, the flow and return.

“Sometimes,” said Dorothy, “I think I shall never get to grips with all of it. External cutaneous nerves. Deltoid. I sometimes feel I’d like to be free of it.”

“Not really,” said Philip. “It’s got you. You’ve got no choice, I think.” He took back the pencil and drew a more elegant version of the network of muscles. “Like me. I hadn’t a choice, from before I could think about it.”

“It means giving things up,” said Dorothy. “Things like camp and the play, now. Things like parties. And more, probably. Women don’t get to be doctors and have time to do the things women do, like getting married, even.”

“No,” said Philip. “It’s like monks and nuns, work, I come to see.”

“Show me your work. I like seeing it.”

Philip fetched out some pots with seaweeds flowing round them, dark green on a marine green blue, with flashes of tawny yellow. He showed her some of the variations on the climbing creatures on branches, derived partly from the Gloucester Candlestick and partly from the Gien version of majolica, with capering grotesques. Dorothy was happy enough with imaginary creepers and creatures anchored so safely in cold earth, held by glaze, set in place by fire.

Philip said

“D’you want to make a pot? I’ve been teaching i’ th’ camp—it’s amazing how people’s aptitudes vary—I think you would throw a good pot, with a bit of practice. You’ve got good, strong, solid hands. With good nerves and tendons and things in the fingers, I should think.”

So Dorothy sat down at the wheel, and Philip stood by her and made it move, and centred the clay for her. He showed her how to feel its texture, how to find a speed, how to hold the wall steady as it rose between her fingers like a cool, wet, living creature. Two or three vessels slumped and flailed, and then, suddenly, easily, she had a rhythm, a fat-bellied pot rose, widened, narrowed, and was cast off by Philip.

“Told you,” he said. “You’ve got good hands. You have to see wi’ your fingertips. Sometimes I think it’s done wi’ the whole body. The rhythm an’ all. And the mind.”

Dorothy thought of her future. Pulling blood-covered curled human beings out of another woman, making them breathe, cutting the cord. Cutting into flesh with scalpels. The only person she knew who understood the glamour and the terror of work was Philip. They didn’t bother each other. They didn’t know each other. But they understood some of the same things. She felt better for having come. She had not exactly set out to see Philip, but it turned out to be what she meant to do.

• • •

Griselda Wellwood and Florence Cain found themselves in the Mermaid Inn without their families. So they sat down and talked to each other, over a cup of tea and plate of scones. Griselda talked about the interesting aspects of the camp play or pageant, of the way it explored and exhibited so many unexpected talents, in such new cooperative ways. But she sounded a little wistful, and a little discontented. Florence did not say much at all, until Griselda had run out of commentary. She bit her sandwiches sharply and looked faintly disapproving.

“We are all so good at playing, nowadays,” she said. “Like children.”

“Oh, I think it’s more than play. They are artists, Mr. Steyning, my aunt, Herr Stern and his son Wolfgang.”

“It may not be play for them, but it is for most of the camp people. Physical exercises, creative snipping with scissors, fancy dress and so on. You wonder where the real world really is.”

“You do,” said Griselda. “I agree, about that. My brother worries a lot about the poor. He is thinking of going to the LSE to study statistics. He has always been bothered about what was real. He doesn’t want the life my father planned for him.”

“And what life did they plan for you?” said Florence. “As a woman?”

“Oh, they hoped I would go to dances and make a good match. I went to the dances, and was bored stiff by all the eligible young men, and now I don’t know where I am. The future seems very long, don’t you think? It is different for women. There’s this huge thing coming—getting married—all the lace veils and stuff, as Mrs. Elton said—and then what? Choosing patterns, and menus, and telling servants what to do, and worrying that they won’t or can’t do it. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t plan a future without making a decision about all that—which is hard to do, in the abstract.”

“Do you think—if a woman marries—there can be any other future than what you just said?”

“I want to think. Just as much as Charles does, but no one cares what I want to think about, as they do with him, whether they are for or against what he thinks is important.”

“I want to think, too,” said Florence, slowly. “I want a life of my own, that I choose. I want to be someone, not someone’s wife. But I don’t know much about the someone I want to be.”

“Nor do I. Dorothy does. She’s got a vocation. She’s got her future all planned out, general science exams, medical exams, surgical exams, a place in a hospital. It’s like an iron corset, I think, but she seems to need it. I think she is prepared to give up on the marriage thing. I don’t know that I would be. It would seem unnatural. But surely so does not thinking.”

“Some women do both.”

Florence had just agreed to marry Geraint Fludd. She felt a violent need not to confess this to Griselda Wellwood. Once it was out in the open, this engagement, it would become a different kind of fact.

“Not many women do both.”

Florence said “Do you remember, the day we went to Todefright for Midsummer, and everyone—our age—had to say what they want to do in life? And both you and I said we would go to university. To Newnham College, or somewhere like that. I’ve gone on thinking about that. What do you feel?”

“I feel a lot of incompatible things. I feel I must think or I’ll go mad. And then I think of those colleges full of women—knitting, I imagine them, and flower-arranging, and drinking cocoa. And I think, is it like taking the veil, which is an idea that’s always given me the horrors. Unhealthy, part of me says. And then, part of me says it all is secretly exciting. New. Doing things women haven’t done, aren’t expected to do. Things brothers take for granted—look at Julian and Charles. One would be a new kind of human being—”

“It’s not the same as Dorothy being a doctor.”

“It’s very clear what a doctor is. I’ve been talking to Toby Youlgreave. I’m going to do some hard work, and try to go there. Find out what I am.”

“I started on my matriculation and stopped,” said Florence. “I shouldn’t have. Would Mr. Youlgreave take me on? I know my father would be positively pleased—”

“It would be wonderful,” said Griselda, sincerely.

Florence was in a turmoil. She had promised herself to Geraint, and she was now promising herself to years of study. She did not think Newnham College would care for married students. She wished to disturb her father, at some ferocious girlish level, and felt—she was not really thinking—that the engagement would do that.

And yet—like Griselda, she did want to think. And she did see her future as, perhaps, the choice between thinking and sex.

• • •

Not only did The Fairy Castle change and develop as the campers worked on it during the days of construction—it went on developing during the performances in the Tithe Barn, for the ten days during which it was performed. August Steyning was in charge of both the set design and the production. There were two castles at the end of the barn, one in front of the other. The smaller was shining and gilded, a casket of a castle, in which the marionettes performed fairy feasts and transformations. Behind it, in shadow, rose the curiously kiln- or oast-house-shaped dark tower, made of wooden crates painted to look like mossy stone blocks, with no apparent way in, and no apparent way of looking out. The story was simple and complicated at the same time. It began with two children, playing in a clearing in a wood.

The clearing was in the centre of the barn. The trees were children, clothed in green and brown dyed cheesecloth, holding up branches. The children were Hedda, now fourteen, and Robin Wellwood, now ten, with his father’s flaming red hair. The Girl went to sleep with her head against a stump. A crew of tiny goblins, with pricking whiskers and long tails, of stumping dwarves with boots and beards, and an imperious Elf king and queen moved in on the couple and held out enticing iced cakes and transparent beakers of shiny liquid to the Boy, who nibbled and sipped, and fell dramatically into their arms. They carried his rigid body through the barn, and behind the golden box. Lights shone on a white sheet that rose (held up by Phyllis and Pomona) and then, magically, a swarm of flying shadows of the tiny beasts, only infinitely tinier, whirled like a swarm of wasps, or a crowd of starlings, and plunged into the secret castle.

The Girl woke and was disconsolate. She waved her arms and howled. A cottage on twelve naked feet danced into the clearing, and swayed to a standstill. Out of it came a lame old woman on a stick, who asked the Girl for help picking apples, for water from the well, for a shoulder to lean on as she walked. She gripped and was heavy. Hedda stumbled with pain. The old woman then revealed herself as a serious and beautiful gold-headed child, who gave instructions as to how to find the stolen Boy.

“You must travel on, over the mountain, beyond the sun and the moon, to the Land of the Stars. You must not speak a word. You must offer help to all who ask it. Enemies can be unmasked and defeated with cold iron.” She gave Hedda a large, slightly rusted kitchen knife, and went back into the cottage, which tripped out of the barn.

Hedda went on, and on, and on. Steyning did some very clever things with lighting, so that she seemed to be hurtling through snowstorms, and staggering across hot deserts, and treading through shining pillars of ice. She met, and defeated, the man of straw, the wolfman (in a pine forest) and the monstrous armoured death’s-head man who turned out to be a blooming child—the other Robin, Robin Oakeshott, uncannily like Robin Wellwood—who told her how to penetrate the impenetrable fortress.

Hedda went behind the golden box, and flute music was heard. The puppet Hedda appeared as a shadow on the screen, and then in the centre of the feasting in the castle. With strong gestures of her arms, and swinging of her hair, she refused to taste food, or sip drink, and brandished the knife at the creatures, who hissed loudly and collapsed into dislocated heaps of cloth and tangled limbs. The puppet Hedda bent over the sleeping puppet and took his hand.

In the dark tower, behind the golden casket, slits of light appeared between the building blocks, one of which fell forward, as the Girl stepped out, carrying her knife, holding the hand of the Boy.

Tom’s big dolls sat in the audience. At the final performance, these creatures rose, and waddled, or rolled, or hopped, or trundled through the barn towards the dark tower. Two of them (Wolfgang and Leon, to be safe) carried away the golden castle, and the rest of the creatures fell upon the dark tower, and tore it brick from brick to shrieks of laughter from the audience, and a few tears from children. Tom had begged to be allowed to orchestrate this mayhem every night. He had said he would reconstruct the tower with his own hands, for the fun of bringing it down again. But Steyning said it was not to be risked, until the very end. So when the destruction came, it was thorough and savage. Things flew through the air, and lumps rolled into the audience. It was ghastly and comic. Everyone was exhausted.