The Children's Book

38

Prosper Cain was a man used to getting his own way. He was married to Imogen Fludd, in St. Edburga’s Church, on Tuesday, December 27th, in 1904. Frank Mallett married them. There was still no sign of Benedict Fludd, although a second boot had been fished up, weeks after the first. So they were neither in mourning, nor not in mourning. The congregation was small—the Purchase House people, including Philip and Elsie, Julian and Florence. Arthur Dobbin was there, and Marian Oakeshott, and Miss Dace. It was extremely cold. The stones of the church were like blocks of ice, and the grass in the graveyard was crusted with frost. Frank had two woollen vests under his surplice. All the women had solved the problem of mourning by resorting to discreet greys and violets. Florence had a very smart slate-coloured grosgrain long coat over a blue-crocus-coloured dress; her hat was severe crocus-grey tulle, to match. She was not a bridesmaid. Pomona was the only bridesmaid, in a dark-grey velvet gown, decorated with violets. The same flowers were round the brim of her hat. Seraphita was wrapped in a feather-edged robe in a kind of thick complicated tapestry, purple and grey and silver, edged with dyed swansdown and ostrich plumes.

Geraint gave away the bride. Miss Dace struck some chords on the piano, and Imogen Fludd laid down the stone hot-water bottle she had been clutching, picked up her sheaf of hothouse lilies and walked through the church. She was wearing shimmering silvery velvet, very plain, with a high white fur collar, and big white fur cuffs. Florence turned to stare at her as she went to meet Major Cain. Florence had been thinking of Imogen with bad words. Sly. Insinuating. ’umble. She thought her face would show false modesty, maybe, or irrepressible triumph, but she had to acknowledge—she was just—that what she saw was pure happiness, touched with fear. That Prosper loved Imogen, Florence acknowledged with some bitterness. She now acknowledged, also, that Imogen loved Prosper. She looked like the white wax of a candle, lit by a golden flame.

After the ceremony, Frank Mallett gave everyone hot drinks, or glasses of sherry, in front of his dancing fire. His housekeeper replenished the ladies’ stoneware hand-warmers with kettles of hot water. Rugs were wound round them, and they all drove back to the Mermaid in Rye, where Prosper had ordered a wedding breakfast. There was a blazing wood fire in the hearth there, too. As the evening closed in, ruddy light flickered over the pale faces, and lit the grey silks and satins. The food was plentiful—soles with shrimps, smoked and roasted salt-marsh loin of lamb, elegant custards, an iced cake, which the bridegroom cut precisely with his sword. Geraint made a neat little speech, and said that he and Florence hoped—as soon as feasible—to tie further knots in the relationships of the families. Prosper replied, briskly, warmly, and then raised a glass to the absent Benedict Fludd. He wished, he said, that his old friend could have been there to share their happiness. He wished, of course, that his friend would return—as he had done before—from a journey. In the meantime—or, if necessary, in the long term—he himself was now part of the family, and would hope to take on some of the practical burdens of the work, and the house. The wind rushed and eddied up the cobbled street. The flames swirled in the hearth, and Philip stared into them. Seraphita stood up, and said, in a surprisingly strong voice that she would like—personally—to express her thanks to Major Cain, now her second son—and to say how much comfort the wedding had brought her, in this trying time. Florence, who might have looked at Geraint, who was looking at her intently, was still studying Imogen. The firelight ran up the folds of her dress, and made a blush on that palely ecstatic, unblushing face. I shall never be so happy, Florence thought. She could not bear—the thought made her sick—to imagine her father taking Imogen in his arms, alone in the black-beamed bedroom. Everything was going up in flames. Exultant, and dangerous.

Philip Warren had it in mind to make a memorial to Benedict Fludd. He had been included in talks between Geraint and Prosper about the future of Purchase pottery and sales through The Silver Nutmeg. He had felt the subsiding of hope or expectation in himself as the bottle kiln cooled slowly after the firing. He had waited alone, until the saggars were ready to be unpacked. Then he unpacked them, slowly. The firing had been almost wholly successful. Some small pieces of student work had crumbled, and one of his own seaweed bowls, to which he had been particularly attached, lay in shards. But generally the treasure gleamed and glistened. Pomona had crept quietly to his side and asked to be allowed to help to take out and arrange the ware. She seemed, he thought without considering the matter, less determinedly childish. She had tied up her hair. She said

“Do you think he’s dead, Philip?”

“I don’t know. He has gone off, before.”

“I feel he’s dead. I think I would know inside me if he wasn’t.”

“I know what you mean. I feel that, too. He’s somehow gone.” She went on lining up slightly unbalanced amateur goblets. She said “Things will be different.”

Philip had just begun on what might turn out to be Benedict Fludd’s last warm pots, cooling under his fingers. A two-faced drinking mug leered at him. An elegant dragon spread its gold wings in an inky sky.

“You’ll be wanting to study, maybe,” he said to Pomona.

“I have no talents,” she said.

The projected memorial was a globe-shaped pot, large and simple. It was to be layered, like the round earth, with fire beating up from its depths, with coal over the fire, with fossil forms in the coal, with dark sea-blue flowing over the coal, and over the sea, on an inky sky, with a moon in it, a tracery of white foam which should be both wild and formal in its movements, somehow Japanese. He could see it clearly in his mind’s eye. It was fiendishly hard to conceive—all those glazes, welded together, the necessity for the difficult red to be simultaneously both bloody and fiery. He made drawings of lizards and dragonflies and snails, coiled in the jet-black coal. Sometimes he thought the moon should be full, and sometimes a hair-thin crescent, barely scratched in.

He thought—he was not much given to studying people’s feelings—that Seraphita was relieved and released by her husband’s death. She went out, spontaneously, to call on neighbours, to take tea with Phoebe Methley, who was kind to her. He was less sure about Pomona. She seemed both more ordinary, and stunned.

Then, one night, in the small hours he woke to hear footsteps in the corridor outside his room. He waited, irritably, for her to turn his doorhandle, but the steps went past. They were hurried, and measured. He thought of returning to sleep, and knew he must not. So he pulled on a coat, and went down the stairs. He heard her unlock the kitchen door. And go out into the yard. He imagined her casting herself into the Military Canal. But she went into what he now thought of as his studio. There was a full moon. He lurked by the window, and heard a scratching, and a scraping. He was possessed by terror that she meant to break things. He crept up, and peered in. She was on the other side of the room, unlocking the forbidden pantry. He had not known she knew about it, let alone knowing where the key was hidden.

She came out with a white vase in the shape of a naked girl. She moved dreamily, mechanically, but he was now not sure she was sleepwalking. He followed, at a safe distance—they were both barefoot—into the garden. She flowed on, into the orchard. She sat down at the root of an apple tree, and took out a sharp trowel, from a space in its roots.

“I know you’re there,” she said. “Don’t say anything. Just help.”

He stepped forward, out of the shadows. She handed him the creature—lovely, with coiling hair, open lips in an ecstatic face, and underneath it an explicitly modelled vulva, spread wide, under its furry roof, with its delicate rounded lips. Pomona said

“I can’t smash them. I can put them away. Under the trees.”

“I could put them away for you.”

“They aren’t yours. I shall do it. One by one by one. When they are all—under—then—”

Philip found himself stroking the cold pot, out of a desire not to offer false comfort to the girl. He knelt beside her and took the trowel, and excavated. She brought out a piece of old linen, wrapped the image, and tucked it, neither kindly nor unkindly, into the cavity. Philip held out his hand to help her to her feet, and feared she would fling herself into his arms. But she held off.