The Children's Book

39

On the day of Prosper Cain’s wedding, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in St. Martin’s Lane. It was late: it should have opened on the 22nd, and had been delayed by the failure of some of the complex machinery for its special effects. There was to have been a “living fairy” reduced to pygmy size by a giant lens. There was to have been an eagle which descended on the pirate Smee, and seized him by the pants to carry him across the auditorium. At the very last moment a mechanical lift collapsed, and with it racks of scenery. Much that was to become familiar—the Mermaids’ Lagoon, the Little House in the Treetops—was not yet constructed. And there were scenes, on that first night, that were later excised. It had all been kept a darkly veiled secret. That reconvened first night audience—an adult audience, at an evening performance—had no idea what it was about to see. And then the curtain rose on an enclosed nursery, with little beds with soft bedspreads and a wonderful frieze of wild animals high on the walls, elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers, kangaroos. And a large black and white dog, woken from sleep by a striking clock, rose to turn down the bedclothes and run the bath.

Both August Steyning and Olive Wellwood knew James Barrie, and were part of that first audience. Their party filled a whole row: Olive, Humphry, Violet, Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Hedda, Griselda. The light flared in the fake fire. The three children, two boys and a girl, all played by young women, pranced in pyjamas and played at being grown-ups, producing children like rabbits out of hats, having clearly no idea at all where children came from. The audience laughed comfortably. The parents, dressed for the evening, like the audience out in front of them, argued about the dog, Nana, who was deceived by Mr. Darling into drinking nasty medicine, and then chained up. The night lights went out. The crowing boy, who was Nina Boucicault, another woman, flew in at the unbarred window, in search of his/her shadow.

Olive Wellwood’s reaction to theatre was always to want to write—now, immediately, to get into the other world, which Barrie had cleverly named the Never Never Land. It was neither the trundling dog, nor the charming children, that caught her imagination. It was Peter’s sheared shadow, held up by the Darling parents before being rolled up and put in a drawer. It was dark, floating lightly, not quite transparent, a solid theatrical illusion. When Wendy sewed it on, and he danced, and it became a thing cast by stage lighting climbing the walls and gesturing wildly, she was entranced.

The amazing tale wound on. The children flew. The greasy-locked pirate waved his evil hook. The Lost Boys demonstrated their total ignorance of what mothers, or fathers, or homes, or kisses, might be. Dauntlessly, they sunk their knives into pirates. There was a moment of tension when the darting light who was the fairy began to die in the medicine glass, and had to be revived by the clapping of those who believed in fairies. The orchestra had been instructed to clap, if no one else did. But timidly, then vociferously, then ecstatically, that audience of grown-ups applauded, offered its belief in fairies. Olive looked along the row of her party to see who was clapping. Steyning yes, languidly, politely. Dorothy and Griselda, somewhere between enthusiasm and good manners. Phyllis, wholeheartedly, eyes bright. Humphry, ironically. Violet, snappishly. She herself, irritated and moved. Hedda, intently.

Not Tom. You would have wagered that Tom would clap hardest.

The penultimate scene was the testing of the Beautiful Mothers, by Wendy. The Nursery filled with a bevy of fashionably dressed women, who were allowed to claim the Lost Boys if they responded sensitively to a flushed face, or a hurt wrist, or kissed their long-lost child gently, and not too loudly. Wendy dismissed several of these fine ladies, in a queenly manner. Steyning spoke to Olive behind his hand. “This will have to go.” Olive smiled discreetly and nodded. Steyning said “It’s part pantomime, part play. It’s the play that is original, not the pantomime.” “Hush,” said the fashionable lady in front of him, intent on the marshalling of the Beautiful Mothers.

After the wild applause, and the buzz of discussion, Olive said to Tom

“Did you enjoy that?”

“No,” said Tom, who was in a kind of agony. “Why not?”

Tom muttered something in which the only audible word was “cardboard.” Then he said “He doesn’t know anything about boys, or making things up.”

August Steyning said “You are saying it’s a play for grown-ups who don’t want to grow up?”

“Am I?” said Tom. He said “It’s make-believe make-believe make-believe. Anyone can see all those boys are girls.”

His body squirmed inside his respectable suit. Tom said “It’s not like Alice in Wonderland. That’s a real other place. This is just wires and strings and disguises.”

“You have a Puritan soul,” said Steyning. “I think you will find, that whilst everything you say is true, this piece will have a long life and people will suspend their disbelief, very happily.”

In the New Year of 1905, on a frosty evening, Humphry and Olive went to dine with August Steyning at Nutcracker Cottage. The room was candlelit. A log fire was burning in the inglenook. It had been hard to light, and everything was veiled with smoke and smelled of smoke. Steyning gave them comforting winter food—a winter soup of dried peas and ham, roast pheasant, stuffed with a piece of fillet steak, Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, glazed with marsala sauce. The only other guest was Toby Youlgreave.

They discussed Peter Pan. Toby had seen it, and was enthusiastic. Nothing like it had been done before. He supposed the young Well-woods had enjoyed it. Especially Tom.

“Tom hated it,” said Olive, sadly. “I thought he’d like it. He always liked the stories more than any of the others did. But it seemed to make him angry. He said it was make-believe and cardboard. He didn’t like the women playing boys.”

“He refused entirely to suspend disbelief,” said Steyning. “It was odd, and almost alarming.”

Toby asked how old Tom was now. Olive said she thought he was twenty-two: Toby said that his history of failing exams, or failing to be fit to sit exams, was perplexing, given his intelligence. Humphry said maybe they should think of some other course. He could not do nothing for ever. Dorothy was only twenty and had passed her Highers, and the Preliminary Scientific Exam, and begun her medical studies. She was lodging with the Skinners in Gower Street. Phyllis was the home-loving daughter. He did not know himself what Tom did with his time. He was out of doors, for much of most days. Olive said doubtfully that he had said from time to time that he meant to be a writer. Humphry asked irritably whether she had ever seen any writing he had done. No, she said. No, she had not. He thought it was private.

“You can’t make a living out of private writing,” said Humphry. Toby said Tom was a Wanderer. He meant that he had a vision of Tom as an inhabitant of woods and downs, something out of Hudson and Jef-feries. Steyning said drily that maybe he disliked Peter Pan because he recognised something. Olive said indignantly no, it was not that, she was sure it was not that, he found the play simply unappealing.

Steyning said that Tom had seemed to enjoy being occupied with the puppet play in the summer. He had made some good lay figures. Maybe the theatre would suit him.

Olive looked into the candle-flame, and across at Steyning’s long, pale, regular face, lit, with dark shadows, from beneath. For most of Tom’s life she believed she had known in her body—as though held to the boy by a myriad spider-threads—exactly where he was, how he felt, what he needed. He had been part of her, part of her had gone running with him, she had felt his sleep after he was tucked up. Or so she thought she had felt. Lately, she had found herself using, and then rapidly rejecting, the word “coarsened” in her thoughts of Tom. He was bristly. He was sulky. He was automatically argumentative. He did not seem to read her needs, as before he always had. She thought she would be glad if he found something to do, and stopped, as she almost put it to herself, lurkingin the bushes.

August Steyning said Peter Pan had renewed his interest in writing a different kind of magical play. Peter Pan had used children’s make-believe—”slapstick” said August Steyning. It had drawn on the English pantomime, which was a connivance between actors and director and audience. He stopped for a moment and did it justice. “Not that it doesn’t get under your skin, and infest your mind. It does. In ways I think that odd little person who wrote it can’t conceive. He is both sweetly innocent and positively uncanny about mummies and daddies—and what are we to make of the identity of the daddy in the dog-kennel and the evil Hook? Who would have thought of casting the same actor? It’s a work of genius, but the genius is twisted like a corkscrew.”

He said “I want to stage a fairy play that shall be closer to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk than to pantomime. We made a beginning in the Denge Marsh Camp. What is needed is new versions—but only versions—of the old, deep tales that are twisted into our souls. The dark Palace under the Hill, the guest, the lights dancing on the marsh. We could use stage machinery, yes—not to lift sweetly pretty girl-boys in pyjamas—but to make dames blanches float, and bats and lizard-dragons cluster on rocks and branches. I know things about lighting—and shadows—no one else in this country knows. There are Germans doing clever things with masks and puppets that would entrance an audience of children and disturb an audience of grown-ups, rightly deployed.”

“If Gesamtkunstwerk,” said Humphry, “will you not need singers?”

“It will not be an opera. It will have unearthly music. I envisage hidden flutes and concealed drums and tambourines. And wailing voices, singing in the wind.”

He said “I am relying on you, dear Olive, to write me such a tale.”

“It would be hard—”

“But you could do it.”

“I have an idea …”

“Yes?”

“But I need to think about it. I promise I will think.”

Florence Cain tried hard not to be depressed by the new, extravagant happiness in the Kensington home. She had watched, with Imogen, the new double bed on its way up the narrow staircase. It was a festive bed with a bedhead carved with cherubs, not the catafalque of Prosper’s dream. It embarrassed Florence, though she tried hard to prevent it. They could not keep their hands off each other, Prosper Cain and his new wife, though they tried to do so, when Florence was present. She felt aggrieved—she was de trop in her own house, for reasons nothing to do with her own conduct. Imogen had tried, once, to open a discussion. “I can see it must be strange for you, now, now that I’m …” Florence snapped. “Of course it’s strange. It doesn’t matter. We needn’t speak of it.”

“But, I—”

“Just be happy. I can see you are.”

“I—”

“I said, we needn’t discuss it.”

• • •

She also did not wish to discuss it with her fiancé, Geraint Fludd. Geraint came often, running administrative errands between Purchase House, to which its owner had not returned, The Silver Nutmeg and the V and A. He had managed to become a Member of the Stock Exchange during a brief period of easy admission in November 1904, before the rules were tightened. On New Year’s Eve, in 1905, he came to dine with the Cains, and was received by Florence.

“I’ve brought you something,” he said. He handed her a small box, wrapped in cherry-coloured paper, with a silver bow. Inside was a pretty ring, the work of Imogen’s jewellery master Henry Wilson, with amethyst and moonstone forget-me-nots set in woven silver leaves.

“The silver is my own,” he said. “I bought it in a warehouse, in the City. I bought the stones, too, from a mining man I know. I hope you’ll wear it. I hope it is the right size. I asked Imogen.”

Florence was startled. It was a very pretty ring. Not what she would have expected from Geraint. Though she could not see why she should not have expected it. She said

“The engagement isn’t announced…”

“You don’t like it?”

“How could I not like it? It’s delightful. Only …”

“I’d be happy if you wore it on the other hand.”

Florence said “I’ve decided to study at Cambridge, at Newnham College. I’ve sent in an application.”

This was a lie.

“I’m glad,” said Geraint. “I think—I think you would be happy there. For a time. I do believe in women studying and working. I could come to the College and take you out.” He was a good man, Florence thought, and she was taking advantage of him. She thought shrewdly that women were tempted to think less well of men they could hurt, if they chose to. She thought: if I felt about Geraint what Imogen feels about Papa, I should put my arms round him and weep. She drew the pretty ring slowly onto the finger of her right hand. It fitted perfectly. Geraint, with courtesy and care, took hold of the hand, and kissed it. Then he kissed her smooth cheek. The vision flashed through his mind of a knot of legs and buttocks on the dishevelled bed of Miss Louise, whom he had lately visited, despite thinking he ought not to. Could Florence ever come to behave like that? He thought how odd the huge, smoky gap was between what you were thinking and what you were doing. He decided to keep hold of the hand, but then Prosper and Imogen came into the room. They had clasped hands, themselves, and brushed a kiss, at the foot of the stairs. Imogen said “Oh, the lovely ring—”

Florence would have liked to kill someone, but did not know whom.

In 1905 Dorothy began to do practical work in the London School of Medicine for Women. The students went on ward visits and began to dissect the dead. Dorothy was well liked by the other women, but she kept herself to herself and made no close friends, returning to the Skinners’ house to study in the evenings, and visiting Griselda, or Florence, at the weekends. In September of that year both Griselda and Florence became freshers at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Dorothy felt doubly lonely, because those two were now such good friends, and because they were no longer in London. Griselda was to study Languages, and Florence had opted for History.

In the autumn Dorothy felt, unusually for her, dispirited and low. She enjoyed the Anatomy, but was fazed by the patience, and terror, and occasional bliss of the women in the gynaecological wards. The Hospital for Women made things comfortable for patients: they had pretty curtains, and stoneware vases of flowers, and brightly coloured bedspreads. The women’s bodies were used. Dorothy’s was not. It was covered in a long skirt—the female students, like the nurses, had to wear skirts with braided hems, long enough for their ankles not to be seen if they bent over a patient. Over the long skirt was a flowing overall. Their hair was tightly coiled on the tops of their heads, or in the napes of their necks.

Quite suddenly and farcically, she fell in love. She fell in love with a demonstrator, Dr. Barty, during a dissection class. He was showing her the human heart, and how to extract it from the cavity where it lay and no longer beat. There was a smell—a stink—of formaldehyde. The room was ventilated by a small opening in the end wall, with a gas jet burning to draw up the heated air. The hospital was a converted house—the space was cramped and full of women, twenty living, one dead, soft and leathery. Dr. Barty asked Dorothy to make the cuts to extract the organ, a cross-shaped cut in the pericardium, then, with a larger scalpel, slices through the six blood vessels going into the heart, and the two that went out. Dr. Barty—a muscular, youngish man, in a green buttoned overall and a surgical cap—congratulated Dorothy on the precision of her work. He told her to take out the heart, and place it in the tray for another student to continue. Dorothy put her hands round the heart, and tugged. She looked up at the bearded, severely smiling Dr. Barty, and saw him. It was as though time stopped, as though she stood there for ever with another woman’s heart in her hands. She saw every lively hair of his black brows, and the wonderful greens and greys of his irises, and the dark tunnels of his pupils, opened on her. She saw the chiselled look of his lips, in the fronds of his rich beard, reddish-black, curling softly. His teeth were white and even. She must have been studying him for weeks, quite as much as the inanimate fingers and toes, tarsals and metatarsals he exposed to her.

Her helplessness made her furious. She took in a deep breath of tainted air and fell unconscious to the ground: the dead heart rolled damply beside her.

It was not unusual for the women to faint. Dorothy, however, had never fainted before. They carried her out, and fanned her, and practised hands held a beaker of water for her to sip. She came brusquely to consciousness, and insisted on returning to the class, though she took no further active part. She watched Dr. Barty, who was kind to her. He was one of the doctors who went out of his way to be kind to, and to encourage, the women. He was said to take a particular interest in slender Miss Lythegoe, whose work was better than Dorothy’s, whose demeanour was grave.

Dorothy went back to Gower Street and crept up the narrow stairs as though she had no strength. She did not want this visitation. Her life had a direction, which did not include desiring or swooning over Dr. Barty. They all looked at him a little soppily, she had thought, and now she had caught it, like a bacillus.

She began to weep. She could not stop. After a time, Leslie Skinner tapped on her door. (Etta was out at a meeting.) He said

“Are you unwell, Dorothy?”

“I must be. I’m sorry.” She sobbed.

Leslie Skinner came in and sat beside her. He said he had thought for some time she was overdoing it. She was burning herself up. She should take a rest. She should perhaps take a week or two off and go home to the country, out of the foul London air. Dorothy sobbed and shook. Skinner petted her shoulder. When she closed her eyes, Dr. Barty’s face rose in the hollow of her head, full of life and smiling mysteriously. Leslie Skinner read aloud to her, from an article by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, in the Encyclopaedia Medica. Anderson was, Dorothy thought, maybe the greatest woman who had lived. She had so neatly, so persistently, so patiently, so successfully fought to be a doctor, a woman doctor, when there were none. The Hospital was her creation. She was also a married woman, but Dorothy did not think many women could be both wife and doctor.

“In health, the nervous force is sufficient for all the ordinary demands made upon it. We work and get tired, we sleep and eat and are again as new beings ready for another day’s work. After some months of continuous work we are tired in a different way; the night’s rest, and the weekly day of rest, do not suffice; we need a change of scene—and a complete rest. With these we renew our force and are presently again ready to enjoy work.”

The Skinners’ doctor, when consulted, reinforced this message. He said he did not consider Miss Wellwood to be overtaxed or unsuited to study. He did consider her to be in need of a rest. She should go to the country, and read, and walk, and let her strength flow back. Dorothy’s nerves were jangling and her head ached. She did not want to go back to Todefright—it was a form of defeat. But she went.

Violet Grimwith was sent to fetch her home. She helped her pack, and asked no questions. As they sat in the train, rattling out of Charing Cross, going south, out of the smoke, Dorothy, whose eyes were closed to preclude conversation, tried to think scientifically about Love. It was an affliction of the nervous system. It bore some relation to the aura that was said to precede epileptic fits. It was not self-induced. It was like a blow to the brain. It could be recovered from.

It was horribly undignified.

Was it the same as sexual desire, which she did not think she had felt? Can sexual desire be experienced in the abstract, almost? She didn’t want to grab Dr. Barty, or to be grabbed by him.

He had got into her mind, and invaded it.

That was because Dr. Anderson was right, fatigue did strange things to you.

• • •

Todefright was no longer a house overrun by children. Hedda, now fifteen, and Florian, now thirteen, had been sent to Bedales School, where they learned farming, swimming, physics, chemistry and thinking for themselves. Robin and Harry (eleven and nine) were both weekly boarders at a preparatory school in Tunbridge Wells. Tom and Phyllis were the odd children who had not left the nest. Phyllis had been assimilated into Violet’s housekeeping. She made cakes for Fabian picnics, and lace collars for bring-and-buy sales. She was now nineteen, and passively pretty. Tom was twenty-three. He wore his bright hair long, and his clothes were shabby and shapeless. He was pleased to see Dorothy, who put her head for a moment on his shoulder. He smelt of horse-tack, and fur, and brambles, with a note of wild garlic. He said, now they could go for walks, the leaves in the woods were turning.

Humphry was not there, and Olive was writing. Her children recognised the rhythm of Olive’s writing—in the early stages of the story, it could be juggled, put aside, boxed and coxed with tea-parties and excursions. Then there were intense periods when she forgot to eat, and worked into the night. Tom said to Dorothy that he was glad to see her because Olive was sunken, an old childhood word for late preoccupation. He did not ask Dorothy how she was, or how she came to be there. She thought, even last year, he might have asked.

Olive did not ask either. She kissed her eldest daughter, and said vaguely how nice it would be for Dorothy to be able to get out in the country, which was what Leslie Skinner said she needed. She said “I shan’t be very good company, I’m sunk in a very complicated play, which seems to change every day.” When Dorothy had been at home for a couple of days, Olive came down to lunch, and said that she and Dorothy must have “a little talk.” Dorothy did not want to talk, but felt it was right that talk should have been offered.

It turned out that the talk concerned Tom. Could Dorothy find out what Tom thought he would do with his life? He had taken to earning bits of money as a beater, or helping out in stables, or harvesting, or hedging. She didn’t know what he wanted. Did Dorothy?

Dorothy wanted Dr. Barty, though distance was fortunately making his dark face more abstract, more diagrammatic. She had no intention of telling her mother about Dr. Barty. She said, deliberately flatly,

“Maybe that’s all he wants, just to potter.” She asked, woman to woman, with a malice she didn’t know she felt,

“Does he get on your nerves?”

“I worry about him,” said Olive, with dignity. “I’d like him to have a purpose.”

“I see,” said Dorothy, still flatly. The little talk seemed to have ground to a halt.

Dorothy went into the woods, to the Tree House, with Tom. He loped along the paths, so fast she could hardly keep up with him. He showed her things, as he had when they were little—where the badgers were, where a hawk had nested, where there was a little crop of fungi that weren’t supposed to grow in Britain at all. Magic toadstools, said Tom, with an irony that was hard to interpret.

They came to the Tree House. It was still wonderfully disguised with brushwood and bracken and ferns. Tom had cared for it—alone, she supposed. He let her in, and made a little fire in the stove, and ceremoniously made her some tea from blackberry leaves he had dried himself. He said

“I sleep here, as often as not.” There was a blanket-bed, on a heap of dry bracken. “I like the sounds. The trees. The creatures. The creakings. The wind, coming and going. Sometimes, Dorothy, I wake up and think I’m not there.”

“Frightening?”

“No. I like it. I’d like to be able to vanish into the hedge, like one of those things you can’t see, if they don’t move. The hedge sparrows. Moths. I’d like to be speckled and freckled like a moth. I try to write about moths, but I’m no good, I think.”

“Can I see?”

“No.”

“I fainted,” said Dorothy. “I came home because I fainted. In an anatomy class. Holding a heart.”

“Don’t. I feel sick. You’re all right now.” It was a statement, not a question. Dorothy sipped the leafy brew. She said “Have you ever been in love, Tom?”

He wrinkled his brow. His brows, Dorothy thought, were fair and innocent. What was it that wasn’t there?

Tom said “Once I was in love, for about a month, I think. With a vixen.”

He saw her look of puzzlement, and said

“Oh, a real vixen. A young one, very graceful, covered with soft red fur, with a thick brush, and a creamy white chest. She knew I watched her every day. She showed herself to me, all the graceful things she did, curving this way and that. They seem to smile, foxes. I thought I was her, and she was me. I don’t know what she thought. She stopped coming, when she had cubs. I’m not telling you very well. It was love, that was what it was.”

There was a silence. It was impossible to introduce Dr. Barty. Tom said

“I read a story about trees that walked. Sometimes, lying here, I think the trees are moving in on the Tree House, taking it in—”

Dorothy was suddenly very irritated with Tom. She said, “I think it’s time to go back, now.”

“But we’ve only just come.”

“I’ve been here long enough. I’m not well. I want to go back.”

She didn’t sleep well. She walked at night, in the moonlit rooms, not needing a candle, looking for something to nibble, or something to read. One night in the hall, she heard someone else, skirt rustling, slippers sliding. She stood still in a dark corner, shrunk into shadow.

It was Olive, in her flower-spread robe, gliding towards the cupboard where the family tales were kept. She was carrying one large manuscript book; she unlocked the cupboard and replaced it. Then she went away again, not having noticed Dorothy.

Dorothy was the one who had taken little interest in her “own” story, about the metamorphosing hedgehogs and the uncanny root-cavity-dwellers. She wondered for the first time if Olive was still spinning particular tales for particular children. She opened the story-cabinet. There were books for Robin and Harry. Florian’s was now quite fat. The one Olive had been carrying was Tom’s—his story now occupied a series of books, taking up a whole shelf, dwarfing the others. Dorothy hesitated a moment, and then took out the Dorothy book, with the fairies and woodland creatures on its cover. She had no imagination of what it felt like to be a writer and spin stories. She assumed her own story would have petered out, somehow, long ago.

She turned to the last page.

• • •

So Peggy went on her travels, and saw many strange and wonderful sights, snow-covered mountains, and sunny southern meadows. She met Interesting strangers, and rode on shining, smoking trains. She thought at bed-time of the other, secret world in the roots of the Tree, of its inhabitants who spoke with strange voices, hissing or chuntering, squeaking or whispering. She thought of the strangers she had helped when they were caught on thorns, or hurt by cold iron, the Grey Child and the Brown Boy, with their glancing, inhuman eyes. They had helped her, too. They had found things that were lost. They had sung to her. When she thought of them, they grew thinner, more transparent in her mind’s eye, wisps and tattered fragments. But they were there, and she knew they were there, always.

When she finally came back, she wore a long skirt with a braided hem which brushed on the grass, leaving a trail in the dew, when she hurried out to the Tree. It seemed older, with more cracks and knobs. She knelt down and looked into the hollow, and it was full of the kind of undisturbed dust that had not been there before, for there had been busy brooms to sweep it. She turned over the heaped leaves in the hole where she had always found the hedgehog-coat, which shrank her when she fingered it, so that she could slip inside it. It was there. It was stiff and dusty. She bent over, and lifted it out and saw that it was not—it was and was not—her hedgehog-coat. It was a hedgehog, a real hedgehog, long dead and dried to leather. On its nose were dried drops of blood, and its bright little eyes were lidded.

Nothing more.

So she walked back along the path, in her long, heavy skirt, and the breeze through the trees was cold and aimless, the light was simply scattered and lit nothing in particular, and no birds sang.

• • •

Dorothy put the book back, as though it had stung her. Psychology was not her gift; she had set her will to being practical. She did not want to think about the feeling behind this coda. Her mind became full of an uninvited ghost of Dr. Barty. She started to cry. She was ashamed. She hurried back to her bedroom, and lay down, and wept. There was nothing for her here.

• • •

She was saved, though she never knew it, by Violet, who sent a message to Vetchey Manor, just in case Griselda was there. Griselda was. The next day, Dorothy saw her pedalling up the drive, dressed in country tweeds. Dorothy went slowly—she didn’t feel up to running—to meet her. They kissed.

“You look dreadful. I heard you were here, so I came over. Are you ill?”

“I fainted. I fainted in an anatomy class. I was holding a heart in my hand and I dropped it, and fainted. I was so ashamed.”

“You’ve overdone it, as I always knew you would.”

“They sent me here for a rest.”

“Is it working?”

“No. No, it’s not.”

They went into Todefright, and Dorothy made mugs of tea. Griselda said that maybe Dorothy should visit her in Cambridge. “Do you like it, there, Grisel?”

“It’s not quite real, but in some ways it’s better than real. I really like the work. I like thinking, you know, thinking about things that aren’t myself.”

So Dorothy packed her things, and went on the train with Griselda to Cambridge, and was given a guest room in Sidgwick Hall.

Newnham College was austere, graceful and comfortable. The buildings were red-brick and slightly Dutch, which is to say, domestic. There was a very large, beautiful garden, with an orchard where in the summer the young ladies swayed in hammocks, reading Ovid and John Stuart Mill. There was a hockey field where they covertly (their legs in shortened skirts must not be seen) played vigorous and enthusiastic matches. There was a croquet lawn. They were in the University on sufferance; the women’s colleges were not part of the University, and the women, though they took the same exams as the men, were not awarded degrees by the University. They were free women, pursuing the life of the mind, professionally. Opposition to their presence was smouldering and occasionally broke out into violent polemic, or even hostile rioting. They were felt to be a temptation to, and danger for, the morals of the often rackety young men who were part of the University.

Their tutors and mentors reacted to this opposition by using supreme caution. The young ladies must be chaperoned wherever they went. They must not entertain men who were not fathers, brothers or uncles. There were male lecturers in the University who admitted them to classes—always with chaperones—and those who did not. Florence Cain was the single woman student at a series of economic history lectures in Trinity College, and had to be accompanied by one of the Newnham Fellows on a bicycle. The women felt themselves to be both demure and dangerous, determined and impeded. They found their situation both frustrating and from time to time wildly comic.

There have, throughout history, been communities of women, from nuns who had taken vows of chastity and sometimes silence, to the women paupers, ruthlessly segregated by the Poor Laws. These women were different. They had asserted their desire—indeed, their need—to use their minds, to understand the nature of things, from mathematical forms to currency and banking, from Greek drama to the history of Europe. This generation, in the first ten years of the twentieth century—was neither as austere nor as single-minded as the pioneers of the 1870s and 1880s. They worked less hard, frequently, and were often more frivolous, as well as more uncertain, in many cases, of what would be the outcome of what they were doing.

And as Virginia Woolf observed, in a book which began as a lecture in that College, they liked each other. They made friends. The friendships were based on things other than sex and shopping, clothes and mating. Or sometimes, most often, they were.

College life had its odd little rituals, in which Dorothy was included. The women lived in comfortable bed-sitting rooms, heated by coal-fires, which were often temperamental and had to be coaxed to burn. There were maids, who carried hot water night and morning, and washed up the china. Shoes were cleaned by a man who collected them. Beds were made, fires were laid. In the early days the College had been left money to provide a lady’s maid for every five young ladies, but the ladies’ maids were not wanted, and the money was used to provide half a pint of sterilised milk each evening for each student. This had led to the custom of giving cocoa parties, often very late at night. Invitations caused anxieties, jealousies, bliss and other emotions. There was a curious custom of “propping”—short for “proposing”—by which one young lady would suggest formally to another that they cease to address each other as Miss Simmonds and Miss Baker and call each other Cicely and Alice. Griselda received many such proposals; Florence, who intimidated people, fewer. Griselda had a distaste for what she called Schwärmerei and attracted a lot of it, with her pale, composed look. She said to Dorothy, on Dorothy’s first evening, that she would find both fiercely independent persons and perpetual schoolgirls in the company, and so it proved.

Dorothy, used to the pressure of laboratory work and demonstrations, was surprised by how much students like Florence and Griselda were left to their own devices. Florence seemed to be largely responsible for her own reading and learning, and had a tutor who barely commented on her essays. Griselda, studying Languages, was better off. She took Dorothy to a lecture by Jane Harrison, the Classics don who was also a public personality, passionate, eccentric, with a reputation outside the College and outside Cambridge. She lectured in the College, dressed in flowing black robes with a shining emerald stole, which she used to gesture with, almost like Loïe Fuller, whom she also resembled in her dramatic use of magic lantern slides, made from photographs and drawings of Greek carvings and jars. The lecture was on Ghosts, Sprites and Bogeys. It dealt with Sirens, Snatches and Death-Angels, bird-footed man-eating women and Gorgons with evil eyes. It had the odd effect on Dorothy of making her want to return to the labs, partly at least because Miss Harrison reminded her of her mother. Several of the women, Griselda said, were in love with Miss Harrison, and jostled to sit next to her in Hall. She was said to be a great tutor to those she considered worth her attention.

They walked along the river, and went out in a rowing-boat, Griselda, Florence and Dorothy. They discussed the shape of their lives. Griselda said she half-desired to spend the rest of her life in this College—largely because here she could call her life her own, and do what she wanted to do, which was to think about a kind of German version of what Miss Harrison was doing. She wanted to study the relations between fairytales and religions, find out all the ways in which particular stories—say Cinderella—varied and repeated themselves.

“And for that,” said dark Florence, sitting in the bow of the boat, letting the river run through her fingers—“for that, you would be happy to live on burned legs of lamb with bleeding interiors, and watery prunes, for ever and ever?”

“I don’t want to have a house, and staff, and have to order legs of lamb and prunes, black and watery or not. It’s not enough.”

“But is this enough, all these earnest women, and timid girls and the artifice of a manless world?”

“You needn’t worry,” said Griselda. “You are engaged to be married.” Privately, she was curious about Florence’s capacity to appear to forget this fact. Florence said that that presented its own problems. They drifted on in silence.

“The truth is,” said Florence, “that the women we are—have become—are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don’t, there will be no help for us. We shall be poor monsters, like Viola in Twelfth Night, or Miss Harrison’s harpies and gorgons. Do you not think it might be harmful to ignore the sex instinct? Don’t you think that after twenty years of studying Cinderella you might be seized by the idea of the children you never had?”

“Quite probably,” said Griselda, lifting a dripping oar and suspending it, so that the boat swung in the current. “But after twenty years of childbearing and fever and confinement and being shut in a house I might be seized by the idea of Cinderella.

“You are very quiet, Dorothy. Can you see yourself falling in love, and marrying?”

Dorothy revisited her mental image of Dr. Barty. He had lost much substance whilst she was in Newnham. He had lost, she saw, precisely, sex. All that was left of him was a Cheshire-cat-like smile. She ducked, as the boat slipped under a weeping willow, accompanied by a slip of fallen leaves.

“I think it best to suppose that I shan’t,” she said. “But nobody can tell what will happen to them. Do you think getting the Vote would help?”

“It would remove one of the endless humiliating differences between women and men. It might make it possible—in some new world—for the sexes to talk to each other, like people. At the moment the agitation is just making the women more womanish and the men more grumpy and masculine. Of course we ought to be able to vote. But I don’t know that having the Vote will affect the things that frighten me.” Griselda paused. “Whereas, if I wrote a really good book, that might. Or if you invented a new surgical procedure, or discovered a new drug.”

“Ah,” said Florence, grimly. “A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree.”

Griselda feathered the water, elegantly, and turned the boat, and they went back to tea, and glazed buns, and muffins. Dorothy felt a sudden need for London, and the labs.

In 1906 there was a General Election. There was a Liberal landslide; fifty-three Labour members were elected, of whom twenty-nine were professed socialists. There was a savage and arcane argument about the nature of the House of Lords. John Burns, the working-class man, entered the Cabinet. The bristling, pugnacious Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. H. G. Wells, also bristling and pugnacious, joined the Fabian Society, and read them a paper on the Faults of the Fabians. Those Fabians who were children of Fabians formed what became known as the Fabian Nursery, full of forward-looking, idealist young men, and determined young women. Fabian summer camps were instituted, with lectures, discussions, and physical jerks. Dorothy and Griselda occasionally attended the meetings of the Nursery. Charles/Karl went to Germany and went from Munich to Ascona, where he watched the wilder German young ladies dancing naked, argued about vegetarianism, and realised that anarchy was impossible. A bomb was thrown that year at the King of Spain and his English bride on their wedding day, killing twenty people. Charles/Karl was appalled, both by the hatred and despair that had caused the deed, and by the random waste of life. In January 1905 on Bloody Sunday the Russian troops had massacred the workers, who had come to petition the Czar, and in February the cruel Grand Duke Sergei was exploded in his carriage by a bomb thrown by a young revolutionary. Charles/Karl made his decision, and enrolled at the London School of Economics to work under Graham Wallas and J. A. Hobson on the causes and structures of poverty. He knew he could not kill anyone, and had come to believe that that was not the way. So he too joined the Fabian Society, and went to the camps.

Julian Cain was also doing postgraduate work, trying to define a subject for a thesis on English Pastoral, in literature and art. He too went along to the Fabians, with younger men like Rupert Brooke and James Strachey.

The fiery Wells published a strange fiction, In the Days of the Comet, in which, in some immediate future to come, the magnetic field of a passing comet completely changed the sexual nature of the human race, which became simultaneously promiscuous without guilt, rational and ready to bring up children at the expense of the state in communal nurseries. The books that were loved, however, were still written for children. E. Nesbit published The Railway Children, in which the children’s father was imprisoned, wrongly, and had connections with the Russian liberals. She published, also, The Story of the Amulet, the first book in which children were able—after finding an amulet in an odds and ends shop—to visit the remote past. The remote past, and the English earth, came hauntingly and solidly to life in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, set in Sussex, full of fairytales and magic from under the hill.

Humphry was sadly amused and pleased by the final rehabilitation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who, looking pale, transparent and somehow mechanical, was given back his command in the French army.

Olive was writing. She was writing the play, in collaboration with August Steyning. They had tried this plot, and that, Elves and changelings, Grimm and Lady Wilde. And one day, Olive had raided the cupboard, and carried the books containing the endless Underground tale over to Nutcracker Cottage. She said, hesitantly, that of course it was long, far too long, but it contained things … Steyning would see …

He was alight with excitement. Here was what they needed. Mines, shadows, a journey, supernatural beings, a good Queen and a bad Queen, a travelling crew of magical creatures, the Gathorn … She had written it as though she had had his own staging skills—his use of lighting—in mind. And Anselm Stern and Wolfgang would be integral to the special effects, the making of the world. They wrote, and talked, and rewrote, all through 1906.

At the end of that year Tom went to the woods, and found that a gamekeeper had chopped down the Tree House. They were public woods, and he had thought the man was his friend. But there was the Tree House, hacked into a heap of logs and spars—even including those branches of the tree which had supported and concealed it. The contents—the little stove, his writings, such as they were, Dorothy’s outgrown collection of rabbit bones and bird bones and dried skins—all this had been taken. As had his blanket-bag, his mug, his knives. His wooden stool was chopped into chunks alongside the log pile.

Tom had a few very simple beliefs, one of which was that we should not be attached to things. Other creatures were not. He had taken to wearing the same clothes until they wore out—though Violet grabbed them, washed them, and returned them, at intervals. He saw that these chopped things were not possessions, they were—or had been—parts of himself.

He had no one to tell. He thought of going to London, to tell Dorothy, and then thought, how would that help? He didn’t know whether she had come to the Tree House since he told her about the vixen, which he had regretted, as though he had betrayed either the vixen or himself.

He stood very still, for a long time, like a man at a graveside, looking from pale plank to brown bracken to moss on the branches.

A shadow went over the sun, and it was cold. Tom turned round, and wandered into the wood.