The Children's Book

41

Herbert Methley came back to Cambridge at the beginning of the Easter Term. The Newnham Literature Society invited him to give an informal tea-time talk, in the tea-room in North Hall. He spoke about the changes that were taking place, and would take place, in women’s lives, as sensible politics prevailed. He did say that women had a right to fulfil all their needs, but he mentioned neither Free Love, nor Mr. Wells’s proposal for nurseries run by the State. He seemed, Florence thought, to be speaking particularly to her, responding to her interest, skating away from what didn’t interest her. She remembered the warm, lean grip of his hand in King’s. She considered his face and body. He was ugly, for certain. His neck was strained and muscular, round the Adam’s apple. There was too much of his mouth, but it was not slack, it was full of movement. His eyebrows danced, as he moved from pleasant to unpleasant themes. He pushed his hair back boyishly, but he was a man, not a boy. She remembered his grip, again. After the meeting, the women gathered round the writer and asked questions. Florence asked him if he thought marriage would disappear and he said he thought it would not: human beings, it appeared, needed a long-term nest and partners, like swans and some seabirds. But other creatures had developed other habits. He thought, looking round him at the students, that the idea of dress as a prison—unmanageable hats and trains, shoes you couldn’t walk on—indeed feet that were painfully crushed and broken, in China—all this might well be superseded. Young women now rode bicycles, which would have been unthinkable. He shook everyone’s hand before leaving. He held Florence’s for too long. His fingers played on hers.

Back in her room Florence paced, unsatisfied, dissatisfied. She looked out into the garden at one or two women playing badminton against a grey sky—the flimsy shuttlecock seemed to be her flimsy life. There were aspects of Newnham that were like a prison. She was near tears.

He tapped on the door. She opened it. She took in a huge breath.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I told them I was a friend of the family, a kind of uncle, and had left behind something I needed urgently—and so I found you. Let me in, and shut the door.” She let him in, and shut the door.

He said “It was you I came back for, you I had lost and found. You feel it too, I’m sure of that.”

She stood stock-still, and made a small sound, between a sob and a gasp.

He took her in his arms, and kissed her, softly, not invasively. He touched her breast, under her shirt, softly, and then less softly. He stroked her haunch and she responded, involuntarily, pressing herself against him. He was all overcoat and buttons. He stood back, undid the buttons, and shrugged off the coat. He said

“Now you canfeel what I want.”

Florence didn’t speak. If she had spoken, it would have to have been to protest, and she was not protesting.

“Buttons,” said Herbert Methley, “are a bore and a tease.”

He undid some of Florence’s buttons on her shirt. Then he pressed his face into the bodice, under the blouse. His moustache prickled. So did Florence’s skin. He did not take off her skirt, but searched for her body, with his hands, through it. Her body became independent of her mind. It rose to meet him, it pushed against him.

And then he said “I must go now. Remember, this is good, this is right, this is your right. Don’t have second thoughts, my beauty, when I’ve gone. I’ll write. I’ll think of a place where we can meet, and…”

He left her, and she stood there, unbuttoned, unsatisfied, every nerve fizzing and hot, not knowing how to imagine what she had been made to want violently. She did up the buttons and thought, this is dangerous, I won’t get any further in, I won’t answer his letter. Little currents of anonymous desire ran all over her, and contradicted her mind.

But when the letter came, amusing, tempting and urgent, Florence answered. It was mid-May, and sunny. She wanted a life of her own. So she went to lunch with Herbert Methley, unchaperoned and secretly, at a restaurant called Chez Tante Sophie, with a very curtained window in a passage in Soho. She wore a pretty green dress and a gay hat, with long ribbons. They ate whitebait, and poulet de Bresse, and crêpes Suzette, and drank rather a lot of white Burgundy. They talked about literature and about the Woman Question, and the agitation for the Vote. There was a novel to be written, said Herbert Methley, about a truly free woman, who was not a commodity, and chose her own life. Something in Florence was repelled by this—it was old-fashioned, in its daring, compared to the ideas of some of the Newnham women, who were sober about real difficulties. But she was resolutely kicking over the traces, so she smiled and smiled, and made an uncharacteristic girlish squeak of pleasure when they lit the brandy over the pancakes and it flared intensely blue.

It turned out that they were to take coffee and cognac in a little private room Herbert Methley had reserved. “It will be an adventure,” he said obscurely, following Florence up a narrow, winding stair.

The private room was furnished with a couch, and low coffee tables, a silk spread with an oriental look, embroidered with feather patterns, and candles in pretty china candlesticks. It had no window on the outside world. It had a perfumed smell. It was not a room Florence would have chosen to spend time in, but there were things she had to know, and do. She unpinned her hat, and laid it aside; she accepted a large cognac; she trembled. Herbert Methley stroked her, as a man would stroke a nervous filly. He drank a large glass of cognac himself. He made a joke about adventures with buttons, and divested himself, and then Florence, of various garments. Florence wanted to know, but did not yet know what that meant. Herbert Methley, brown-skinned, bony, nervy, touched and touched her, and talked in her ear, not about love, but about desire, and need, and right. There were things he knew how to do that Florence had never imagined—places he brought into shivering excitement that had always been quiescent, or vaguely troubled. She drank more cognac, and thought, “I am being played upon, like a musical instrument.” This thought was strengthening. The player, or conjurer, removed more clothing, from both of them. Florence whispered that someone might come, and he said confidently that all was safe, all was prepared, all was provided for this purpose. Florence drank more cognac. Her hair slipped from its moorings. She was in her petticoat and bodice and her body was being stirred by a myriad small fingerprints.

“Here is the place,” said Herbert Methley. He stroked and stroked without removing her drawers. Within them, Florence began to feel like a fountain unsealed, like a geyser rising. When he saw this, he did remove her drawers, and said “I must come in. You must let me in.”

Florence’s head lay back on the cushions and the room went round and round like a waterwheel. He was much more in control of her body than she was. She felt him push, with his own body, against her private place, and then push hard, like a mining machine. She tore open, and convulsed, and cried out, and he made a low deflated moan, and everywhere was wet, with blood, and semen, mixed.

“Damnation,” said Herbert Methley. “That was tight. You were a virgin.”

“What did you think I was?” said Florence, sickly.

“I didn’t think,” he said, having lost his self-assurance. “This is a terrible mess. I shall have to offer to pay for this—this bedcover thing. I suppose. I imagine they must expect this kind of thing from time to time. I wonder how much they will ask?”

“There is some money in my purse,” said Florence, tightly. She thought she was going to be sick, because of the cognac, and she wanted desperately not to be sick, she wanted control of one end at least of her body. She wanted to go home. She gulped. She tried to stand up, and fell back again. Methley pulled aside a little curtain and discovered a washstand, and a ewer of water. He began, rather uselessly, to wipe the coverlet with a wet handkerchief. Florence managed to stand up, stagger to the washbowl, and mop her reddened flesh. Back to back, and awkwardly, they replaced their clothes, all except Florence’s drawers, which were impossible. She rolled them up and put them in the ewer. She rebuttoned her dress, and repinned her hat.

She stood in the restaurant doorway so as not to have to see Methley negotiating payment for the damaged covers. She thought she might die, standing there, in public, waiting. She sensed that Methley did not know how to deal with the owners of the café to which he had so confidently brought her. He looked a fool, and she would never forgive him for that. She noted that he looked as though he had had to pay more than was comfortable for him.

Outside, he hailed a cab, and had to ask her if she had money to pay for it to take her home.

“Yes, I told you,” said Florence, in nausea and scorn. He ought to have offered to come with her, to see that she was all right, for she knew she was not, but by then she already hoped never to see or hear of him again.

The cab-driver took her, half-fainting, back to the Museum. She walked into the little house, and up the stairs. Imogen was in the drawing room and expressed mild surprise at seeing her there, in mid-term. Florence said that she had suddenly felt she must get away from Cambridge for a couple of days. She did not feel very well. She would go to her room and rest. Imogen bent her head to her book, and Florence went, with difficulty, upstairs. The next day she went back to Newnham, and worked harder than usual.

When she came back for the summer vacation, she found that Imogen had put aside her silverwork and begun to embroider—pink rosebuds and blue forget-me-nots, on nuns’-veiling fine wool. Florence watched her for some time in silence. Imogen looked dreamy, and plumper than before—a contented Pre-Raphaelite madonna …

“What are you working on?”

“A coverlet.”

“It’s small.”

“It’s to cover a small bed. I am expecting a baby.” She pushed the needle in and out, resolutely, and did not look up.

“I am very happy for you,” said Florence, mechanically. “When are we to expect the happy event?”

“At the turn of the year. Maybe even Christmas, which is a hard time to be born.”

“How strange, “ said Florence.

“Is it not? I feel very strange. Everything is hazy and I am sick.”

Florence didn’t want to know. She had just understood that the child would be her half-sister, or brother. The idea was uncouth.

“Please—” said Imogen, and could not finish her sentence.

Florence said that she and Griselda had agreed to go back, more or less immediately, to Cambridge and keep the Long Vacation Term, which provided an opportunity for more intensive study. Imogen bent her head lower over her moving fingers.

Prosper Cain was much exercised in his mind by events in the Museum, where the battle was still in progress over how to arrange and exhibit the whole collection. The Director, Arthur Skinner, was being, in Prosper’s view, brutally harried by the Civil Servants. Cain was sitting in his office, writing a memorandum, when Florence found him. He looked up reluctantly, frowning.

“I am to congratulate you, I’m told,” said Florence.

“Oh, yes. It is a very happy—” He couldn’t find a word.

“You might have told me.”

“I left it to Imogen. Woman to woman.”

“You are my father,” said Florence. “She isn’t.”

“Oh, my dear, please don’t be difficult. Please be happy.”

“I shall try. I’m going to Cambridge tomorrow.”

“Isn’t it the Long Vacation?”

“Yes it is. I want to study. We are allowed to stay in College and study for some weeks. Griselda is coming.”

Later, this conversation haunted Prosper Cain. He should have paid attention. Damn Robert Morant, and his browbeaten staff, and his lack of imagination and his interfering ways. Damn him. It was hard for him to imagine the unborn child. And now he had failed to imagine the grown child.

In Cambridge, Florence said nothing to anyone, not even Griselda. She found it hard to work. She imagined the baby, fat and smiling, and she felt a kind of disgust, mixed for some reason with shame.

She was tight-lipped and worked hard. She told Griselda, expressionless, about Imogen’s expectations, and Griselda said, enthusiastically, “Wonderful,” and reddened in the heavy silence that ensued. Florence felt sick, all the time. She worked through waves of nausea, which she accepted as a punishment for what she thought of as “that mess.” She read about battles and diplomacy, and her stomach lumped and lurched. One day, Griselda came into her room and found her vomiting into the wash basin.

“Florence,” she said, “tell me what’s wrong. I think you should see a doctor.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ve been like this for some time, now.”

Florence sat down on the bed, retching a little. Her handsome face was white and silvered with sweat.

“I think I may be—I may be—”

Griselda’s imagination supplied the word. She said

“We should write to Geraint. He ought to know. He could arrange things …”

“It wasn’t Geraint. It was once only, and it was dreadful. It made me long for a quiet monkish life in this place, talking to books. Instead of which, if we are right, I shall be turned out of here, out of Cambridge …”

“You should be looked at. You should see a doctor.”

“Who? Not the College doctor. Not my father’s regimental doctor. I wish I was dead.”

“Dorothy,” said Griselda. “She’s done all her midwifery and obstetrics, I know. She would look at you. She might know how to stop you being so sick. She might know—”

She might know how to stop the pregnancy, they both thought, and didn’t say. How to get rid of it. They wrote a letter to Dorothy saying they urgently needed her advice, and went down to dinner, their hair smoothly knotted and shining behind their heads, one dark, one glistening gold and silver. They joined a spirited discussion of employment for women, of what work, if any, they should be excluded from.

Dorothy came to visit. During the days the letter took to reach her, and her answer took to reach them, whatever was inside Florence went on growing, cell by dividing cell, on a string, in the dark.

Dorothy came, and was given a guest room. Late at night, when even the most determined cocoa-drinker had turned in to sleep, the three young women gathered in Florence’s pretty room, with its “Lily and Pomegranate” curtains and bedspread. The light of the fire and the lamps flickered on the Venetian glass Florence collected, advised by her father. They had enjoyed shopping together, comparing vases and dishes, testing their eyes. Florence sat on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped in her lap. She was mute. Dorothy turned to Griselda, who said, hesitantly, “Florence thinks she is pregnant. We wanted you to—to tell her—if she’s right.”

Dorothy had done her midwifery. She had probed other women with diagnostic fingers. She had seen a dead child finally ejected from an exhausted body. She had held a howling newborn in her two hands and looked—the first thing he saw—into his opening eyes. She was socially embarrassed by the idea of poking into the elegant Florence Cain.

“You do know how to tell, Dorothy?” said Griselda.

“Yes, I know. I’m a little embarrassed.”

“We all are,” said Florence. “But since the situation is worse than embarrassment I think we should forget that bit of it. There’s only you I can trust to help me.”

Dorothy took a deep breath.

“Right. Questions first. And can Griselda get some boiled water, and if you have antiseptic to sterilise my hands …

“How long, Florence, since you last had the Curse.”

“Just after Easter… I don’t recall exactly. Well before …”

“Yes.” She asked about the nausea. She asked about sleep. And weight. She asked Florence to lie back, with a towel under her, on the pretty bedspread, and she felt her belly, with confident, firm, gentle fingertips, inside and out. Florence shivered. She said

“It bleeds. But it is only the—the periphery, so to speak.”

“You got torn,” said Dorothy, whose experience did not stretch to the defloration of young women. Florence, accepting Dorothy’s authority, said “It was only once, in fact, just the once. There was so much—mess—it didn’t occur to me that I might—”

“I think you are past the early stage when women often miscarry. I think there is no doubt about this. I think you should tell Geraint.”

“It wasn’t Geraint. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Griselda and Dorothy looked at each other across the recumbent Florence. They were both thinking that Geraint, nevertheless—who loved Florence … They felt queasy. Florence rearranged her clothes and sat up. She said grimly

“I shall have to go away from here. Immediately, I think. You are saying—there isn’t any way of—of losing this.”

Dorothy hesitated. She said, half-way between agitated friend and calm doctor, “There’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t be horribly dangerous. I think you should go through with it. And then decide what to do…”

“I shall have to go and see Papa. I am horribly afraid of what will happen then. I had better start packing, now.”

Griselda said “No, don’t do that, don’t. I can pack, with the bedders, later, when you know where … I can happily do that. I’ll make us all some cocoa. Settle your stomach with pasteurised milk and sugar.”

They sat, companionably, and put more coal, and some wood Florence had collected, on the fire.

“I was always in two minds about this place,” said Florence. “I thought it was a fortress of irredeemable innocence—and experience was outside, and was all shiny and tempting. Now I’d give anything to be able to stay here, and learn to think clearly. Which I obviously don’t. I followed my feelings and they were bad, and worse, they were silly. So the angel will close the gates and wave me goodbye with her sword. I think it’s a female angel, in a women’s college.

“Griselda, I have a huge favour to ask of you.”

“Ask,” said Griselda.

“Will you come with me to face Papa? I am afraid of someone—Papa, me—saying something unforgivable, or doing something silly … mad…”

“Are you sure?” said Griselda.

“I think so. Would you anyway come to London, and see how I feel there?”

The two young women stood in Prosper Cain’s study, amongst the fake Palissys and under a fake Lorenzo Lotto Annunciation. Prosper sat behind his desk and said it was a pleasant surprise to see them. He could see that whatever it was was not pleasant. He thought Florence must be in money trouble. He asked them to sit down. The room was small—he had to stay behind his desk, like a judge.

Florence said “I asked Griselda to come because I need—I need this talk to stay—to stay formal—I need you to think.”

“It sounds very dreadful,” said Prosper, lightly.

“It is,” said Florence. “I’m afraid I’m pregnant.” Prosper’s face tightened into a mask. Florence had never seen it like this, though his soldiers had, once or twice. He said “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Not exactly. I dared not. I asked Dorothy. She’s passed all her exams … in that area…”

“Well,” said Prosper Cain. “He must marry you. Now, immediately. If he’s worried about money, I must help.”

“It’s not Geraint,” said Florence. She added, miserably, “I must send his ring back. I should have done that already. I feel—I feel—”

“In that case,” said Prosper, “who?”

He was a soldier. He knew how to kill people, and he wanted to kill. Florence saw yet another face she had never seen. Her own face tightened into a mask, not unlike his.

“I don’t want you to know. It was only once. I don’t want… the person … to know. I was very silly.” She flinched. Her father, who had never done so, looked as though he was about to hit her. She watched him decide not to. Griselda, watching both of them, thought their hard faces were like masks in a Greek tragedy. Prosper gave a kind of gasp.

“I need to think. Let me think.”

Things raced through his mind like hunted animals in a dark wood. He would stand by Florence. For most of his life she was the creature he had most loved and delighted in. This caused him to think of Imogen, and the expected child. He knew, without putting it into words, that the inconvenient child was there in some way because of the loved and welcomed child. He could not, therefore, think of—yes, of killing—this child who was, or would be, the grandchild of his Giulia. He thought: I must take her in, and face—expect her, expect them to face—the opprobrium, and worse. He thought, and then, almost in a whisper, said

“I must leave the Museum, and take a house in the country, somewhere quiet, where we can all—”

“You can’t do that,” said Florence. “I can’t bear it if you do that. I’d rather be dead.”

She said “What we must arrange, is for me to go away somewhere—until—and find someone to take—the …”

She could not say, child. Prosper’s imagination chewed at the unmanageable facts. How could his daughter ever now be in his house, with his new wife and his new child? He did not want her to give away her child—it was his flesh and blood, and did not deserve to be pushed into the dark. He was at a loss. His new mask was that of an old man, indecisive.

Griselda said “Perhaps Florence could go abroad—to Italy, say—as a young widow maybe—to a clinic, until the birth—and then decide what to do? It is too hard to decide now what to do. But it does seem clear Florence should go away. People are always going away to clinics—Frances Darwin spent two years in one when she had a breakdown when her mother died. My brother is always going to Ascona where there is a whole colony of artists and philosophers who believe in free love and wouldn’t ask questions. There is a new clinic there. It’s a beautiful place. Mountains, Lake Maggiore, Italian farms. Florence might be peaceful there.”

Prosper and Florence sat still and silent, as though exhausted. Florence said

“I’m sorry. You can’t know how sorry …”

Imogen Cain chose this moment to tap at the door and come in, her waist already thicker under a loose dress. She took in the stricken faces and her smile died.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

“No,” said Florence. “Don’t. You will have to know, so you may as well stay. I’m expecting a child. We are making plans for me to leave the country.”

Imogen went white. She put her hand to her belly, protectively, opened her mouth to speak, closed it and began to weep, completely silently, huge tears falling heavily down her face and into her collar.

“My dear—” said Prosper, standing up.

“This is my fault,” said Imogen, not dramatically, but flatly, as though it was incontrovertible.

“No—” said Florence. “It is me who has been stupid and me who should be punished. I did it, you didn’t. And I—I should say—I haven’t been very nice to you, lately. I’ve been unpleasant. I know it. I’m sorry. But you can’t say you’re responsible for what I do. I am. I shall go abroad.”

Imogen went on weeping. Florence stared, stony. Griselda said to Prosper “I could ask my brother about that clinic. He says the place is an earthly paradise.”

“I can’t stay here,” said Florence. “At all. Now. I must go away now.”

Griselda said Florence could come with her, if Major Cain agreed. Prosper was standing, still behind his desk, like a stag brought to bay by three hunting nymphs. He came out, now, took out his handkerchief, and wiped his wife’s wet face. Then he turned to his daughter.

“You will allow me to accompany you—on the journey. You will need…”

Much depended on her answer to this question. She gave a little sobbing sound, but did not weep, only relaxed her tense muscles ever so little.

“Thank you. That will make a great difference.”

Prosper said to Griselda that he was grateful for her presence. She said she would make sure all Florence’s things were properly packed in Cambridge and sent back to the Museum. She would take care of the glass. She said to Florence

“I’ll visit you, in the vacations. You won’t be quite on your own.”

“What shall I do if Charles comes … and sees …”

“Well, he won’t be disapproving. He’s an ex-anarchist. And he can be told not to talk, which he’s actually good at, he’s spent his life not telling people things …”

Father and daughter travelled slowly, and mostly in silence, across Europe to the southern foothills of the Alps, to the town of Locarno and the village of Ascona. Prosper Cain was baffled and neither as precise nor as competent as he usually was. One night, in a hotel in Paris, Florence heard, or imagined she heard, muffled sobs from the hotel room next to hers. Having made enquiries about the clinic at Monte Verita, Major Cain had discovered that it was new, and austere, giving courses of sunbathing, mud-baths, water and a strictly vegetarian diet, with no eggs, milk or salt. He liked the idea of sunbathing—as a soldier he had made sure his men exercised outdoors, whatever the weather. But he was not sure that a woman expecting a child should deprive herself of milk, or nourishing beef teas. When they reached Locarno, Florence became Signora Colombino, her mother’s maiden name. A cottage was rented on the mountain slope, looking out over a meadow; a manservant was engaged, with a pony-carriage, and a string of young women were interviewed as housekeeper-companions. Florence and her father agreed that the best was a powerful, smiling girl called Amalia Fontana. Prosper visited the new clinic, and found a doctor, who agreed to care for the young Englishwoman, who had lost her husband who must never be mentioned. I have got into a second-rate novel, Prosper told himself in a moment of grim humour, and added that second-rate novels sprouted out of repeated real disasters. His daughter was monosyllabic, acquiescent and heavy-footed, although her pregnancy was not yet visible. When he tried to comfort her, anything he could say appeared to be a reproach.

“I wanted you to have everything,” he said once. “I wanted you to go to University, and be a free woman.”

“You see what has happened,” said Florence, with a grim little smile, and then flung her arms round him. “No one could have cared for me better,” she said. “We have all been very happy.”

But this genuine cry of love was also made bitter by their sense—both of them in very different ways—that the coming of Imogen had broken the circle, and left the ends flying. And the time came when he must go, precisely back to Imogen and her unborn child. He said “I’ll come back, soon. I’ll write. I think Griselda will come, in the vacation. You must tell me everything—”

“This is all my fault, you know, not yours,” said Florence. Prosper looked weary.

“Some of it is certainly your fault. But I did not pay attention.”

“I shall read and read and plan a thesis,” said Florence, who had brought boxes of history books.

They dined late, by candlelight, the first night in Ascona. Prosper looked across the table at his daughter, and handed her a small box.

“I always meant you to have this,” he said. “It is your mother’s wedding ring. You will need to wear a ring.”

The ring was slender, and gold, with finely worked clasped hands. Florence tried it: it fitted exactly.

“You are very like her,” said her father. “Here, in Italy, you look Italian.”

He began to say something clumsy and heartfelt about the ring protecting, or bringing luck. And then he remembered how Giulia had died, and would have taken it back, if he could. Florence turned it in the creamy light, and it shone.

“I shall take care of it,” she said. “You have been so good to me, when I have been so wilful and bad.”

But she did not read. The lethargy of pregnancy came over her, and she sat on her little terrace, staring out at the mountain, doing little. People came past. Respectable, black-shrouded Italian peasants, driving goats, or sheep. Strange nature-worshippers, bearded, smiling, spectacled, with walnut skins and bare shanks over homemade sandals under vaguely biblical tunics. Women in broidered robes with flowers in their hair. Travelling musicians, with lutes. Rapid purposeful priests. Fat curates. She could not understand much of Amalia’s accent, and came to see that the young woman had put on an Italian, over her patois, in which she could say simple, and necessary things, but could not make conversation.

She went up to the clinic, at first in a pony-trap and then on foot, where she spent days purifying herself with vegetable juice, and water, and lying in the sun in a linen gown, on a long, slatted daybed. The doctor had kind hands, and told her she should abstain from meat and preferably from any animal matter. He saw how it was with her, and, she thought, judged her harshly. Depression set in, as how should it not? And then, she met an unlikely saviour.

There were people in the clinic who were neither doctors, nor patients, nor servants, but appeared to be helping out, in exchange for psychiatric or medical help. Florence’s doctor had asked if she felt she would be helped by psychiatry, and she had, more robustly than she felt, rejected the offer. Her autonomy was dreadfully threatened—by Methley, by the thing growing inside her, by her dependence. She didn’t want to talk or be talked to. She was a soldier’s daughter. She stiffened her shoulders. She felt she was dissolving into jelly, but did not mean anyone to see.

One of the helpers had a huge mop of tangled golden hair, like a lion or a dandelion, a reasonable beard he trimmed from time to time, and a mild, blue-eyed, slightly vacant expression. He wore a kind of white clinical gown, and sandals. He arranged cushions to prop Florence’s back, and got them in the right place. He noticed when she needed to vomit, and he noticed when her stomach was settled, and brought her vegetable soup, which could have done with some butter and salt, but was palatable.

“Not so sick this week,” he pronounced, in English. “It will be better from now on.”

Another day, he said to her, “You are lonely.” If he had asked, she would have denied it. But he stated. “You need bread,” he said. “You are hungry.”

He was always right. His name, he told her, was Gabriel Goldwasser. He was Austrian. “I was training to be a psychoanalyst,” he said. “And now?”

A smile lurked in his beard.

“I am recovering from training to be a psychoanalyst.”

They became friends. Cautiously, courteously, they became friends. “Here, you should be honoured,” he said to her. “The sun-worshippers in the village, they want to return to an ancient matriarchy. Away with the bearded Fathers who are the root of all evil.”

“I do not belong here,” said Florence. “My mother was Italian, but she died, when I was born.”

She was briefly silent, thinking of death in childbirth. Gabriel Gold-wasser answered the unspoken thought.

“The doctors here are good doctors,” he said. “It is a good clinic. You are in good hands. Where, then, do you belong?”

“In a museum.”

“You are young, not old.”

“No, I mean it literally. I grew up in a museum. My father is a Keeper. He knows about gold and silver.”

“An alchemist,” said Gabriel Goldwasser. “So you will go back there?”

“I don’t know,” said Florence, and faltered. Prosper’s strategic planning had not yet extended beyond the birth. “I don’t know,” she said again, turned her face away, and began to cry. “I think I can’t,” she said.

Gabriel Goldwasser looked into the distance. Florence lay with her face in her pillow. He put a light hand, lightly, on her shoulder, and said nothing.

She asked him, once, when they had been talking about the study of history, what he had meant, when he said he was recovering from training to be a psychoanalyst. He hesitated. He said

“You must understand. I need not to think, not to talk, about myself.”

“Have you done something dreadful?” asked Florence, lightly, but with a genuine apprehension.

“I have done nothing, that is my problem.” He smiled, mildly. “My parents were—are—psychoanalysts. In Vienna. They sent me to the Burgholzli in Switzerland, to talk to Herr Dr. Jung. They thought it was an essential part of living, to be psychoanalysed. I earned my bread there, as I do here, helping. I was telling my dreams to Dr. Jung and also to Dr. Otto Gross, who was telling his dreams to Dr. Jung and hearing Dr. Jung’s dreams in return. They were angels wrestling, you must understand.” He paused.

“I dreamed the wrong dreams.”

“Wrong in what way?”

“I think they were—timid dreams, is that a word?”

“It is a good word.”

“Quiet dreams, like a cow dreaming of grass, or a squirrel of nuts. They were judged as inadequate dreams. And by listening to my silly dreams, bit by bit, those two changed my dreams. I dreamed I was stepping down stone tunnels to hidden caves, full of dragons and lions and snakes. I dreamed of the seven-branched candle—which I also did in my timid dreams, I am a Jew, the candle to me means a meal with my family—though my family had been dreamed into flesh-eating monsters and petrified women to please those two.”

“You are making me laugh, but it isn’t funny.”

“No man has a right to dictate another man’s inner life—the furniture inside his skull. They made me into someone else. An acolyte—you say acolyte?—good—of a new ancient religion. We were all dreaming the same dreams, because they were the dreams that excited Herr Jung and Herr Gross.

“They had invented me, do you see?”

“I do.”

“They had made me into a—into an unpleasant sculpture, or painting. I was trapped in my artificial dreams, and couldn’t get out. And then, I got out. I have to admit—you must not mock me, Frau Colombino—it was a dream which showed me the way out.”

“What did you dream?”

Florence turned her body, and its burden, on one side, and gave him her whole attention.

“I dreamed I was in a studio full of light. I was surrounded by canvases perfectly painted. They were all very pale. White on white, with minimal shadows, in full light. Vast paintings, of a cup with its saucer and a silver spoon, on an endless white starched cloth, with folds in it. Or white flowers in a white jar on a white ground—in a white window with white curtains—”

“As though you were dead and had gone to heaven.”

“Do you think? I didn’t. I analysed it for myself. It said to me—like a commandment—consider the surfaces. Care for the surfaces. Don’t dig under.”

“Did you? Can you?”

“It can be done. All that white paint was a surface—a visible skin, laid on a surface. I went out and saw the lake. I looked at the light on the surface. Something said to me, if you can see the surface well, you are in a right relation to the world in which it is.”

“But the lake has depths. Trees have insides. So does the earth.”

“We can know that, yes. But I know I must live by staying on the surface. Like those flies that walk on water. Like a painted flower on a plate.”

“So you gave up being analysed?”

“Everyone said it would be very dangerous, but I insisted. Then there was a lot of trouble with Dr. Gross, and Herr Jung was preoccupied, and my parents sent me here to come to my senses, which I thought I had done, myself, quite adequately.”

He laughed, and Florence laughed with him.

“You should found a school of painting,” she said. “Or of philosophy.”

“I think more, of rigorous contemplation. I should like to be a Buddhist. I do paint, but I cannot paint the surfaces I see. Living on the surface is hard, Frau Colombino.”

Florence suddenly thought that her own surfaces were not the truth about her and the creature growing inside her. She looked away, and began to weep. He said

“I did not mean to distress you. Rather the opposite.”

“I am in a state of permanent distress. It is tedious.”

“You are not naturally a… superficial person. But as an exercise, it is good. Look at the wind on the surface of the meadow, and how all the surfaces of all the grasses turn in the light…”

It was absurd, and yet, when she turned her gaze on the meadow, it was somewhere between a wonder and relief. She looked at the surface of the juice in her glass tumbler, and how it appeared to be suspended between the walls, an oval ruddy-gold coin. She looked at the sun on Gabriel Goldwasser’s hair and beard. She had sensed him as an incomplete person, not in the real world, and talked to him for that reason, because there was no threat in him. Now she saw how deliberate was this absence of threat.

On another occasion she said to him “I can’t live like you.”

“I think not, no, that is so,” he said, calmly.

One bright day, some weeks later, he said “Forgive me, but I think I have a superficial answer to a superficial part of your problem.”

“My problem?”

“I think you are an unmarried lady, expecting a child, and you cannot take your child back to your own country, because of social disgrace—for you, and for your esteemed alchemical father.”

“That is so. If I tell you the whole silly—the whole mad—story, you will despise me. I have almost decided I must give away this—this child—without even looking at it. Immediately. But that is a hard thing to contemplate.”

“You will harm yourself if you do so. As well as the child. Has it no father?”

Florence’s face, which for the last weeks had been grave and somewhat vacant, puckered into tearful rage, which was then mastered.

“I dislike him. It’s weaker than hatred, it’s pure dislike. Do you understand? I made a very foolish mistake. It is horrid, the whole thing is horrid.”

“But your father cares for you.”

“He has a young wife. The same age—as me. She is expecting a child. They are very happy. Or they were, until I made my mistake. I have ruined their happiness and my own.”

“These children will be born and will have their own lives. They are not ruined. But human children are helpless. They must be cared for until they can stand on their feet. I sound sententious. But you have forgotten this.”

Florence was silent. Gabriel said

“I think you would be better if you had a husband?”

“I can’t. I have to face that, too. No one will…” She said “I was engaged to be married. I sent the ring back.”

Gabriel Goldwasser’s silences provoked truth-telling.

“I didn’t love him. I always knew that. I’ve ruined his happiness, too.”

“Only if he allows that. You are not a Fate, Frau Colombino, but a young woman who has made one or two mistakes. If you had a husband, you could go back to your museum, with your child—”

“I don’t know that I want to go back—”

“Or make a life somewhere. I want to suggest—to propose myself, as a suitable Austrian husband.”

“But you—”

“I know it is odd. I am proposing myself because I am living on the surface. I shan’t want to marry in the way people marry—for—passion, or for—social reasons. My best hope is to continue living lightly, on the surface. But I should like to give you—a viable identity.”

Something appalling happened to Florence. She had a vision of Gabriel Goldwasser, like the angel he was named for, walking on the surface of the lake, scattering brightness from his sunny hair. She saw that she ought not to marry him, not because he did not love her, but because she might come to love him. And he was queer, and had secrets, which he was not looking into.

“What would you do,” she said, on a dangerous impulse, “if I married you, and then came to love you?”

“I do not think that would happen,” he said. “You are too intelligent. You know we love each other, in an—unusual?—way, and that that is all. It is a good reason for marrying. I need to help you.”

Florence began to weep. Gabriel stroked her hair. The child inside stretched its frog-fingers and its stick-legs, and put a fine thumb into its unfinished ghost-mouth, and sucked.

Prosper Cain came back to Ascona, and Florence explained Gabriel’s plan.

“I could be Frau Goldwasser. I could come home.”

“And what would Herr Goldwasser gain from this? Does he need money?”

“No, no, he needs nothing, that is why I trust him. He says he needs to live on the surface. He is a kind of monk, Papa, he is quixotic.”

“Don Quixote was anything but a monk.”

“Don’t mix me up. You always do. I know it sounds mad, but I do believe it may work. What did you think would happen to this child? I shan’t lie on these sunbeds and drink juice for ever.”

“I imagined it would be given away. No, Florence, don’t, don’t be angry. I thought you must decide. I thought that was what you would decide.”

“I could not give away the child, Papa, and come home and see you and Imogen dandling one. How could I do that? This way, I can—I can plan my life—”

Prosper Cain met Gabriel Goldwasser and took to him. It was hard for him not to, though the soldier was trim and upright, and the Austrian was shaggy and bearlike. Prosper prided himself on being able to judge character: here was an honest man, who proposed a viable solution to the problem that tormented him. Frau Goldwasser and her child could return to South Kensington, and Prosper could protect them. He organised. The marriage could not take place in the Catholic village; he found a Swiss Protestant church in an Alpine valley and took rooms in the White Rose Inn. There was a wedding-party, of a kind. Griselda was visiting Florence, accompanied by Charles/Karl, Joachim Susskind and Wolfgang and Leon Stern. Of these, only Griselda knew Florence’s secret: the others believed she was suffering from nervous prostration owing to the pressure of work in Cambridge. Florence had a cream-coloured linen coat and skirt, over a rose-pink silk shirt, and a linen hat with a severe ribbon in a blushing pink. The bridegroom was unrecognisable in an old-fashioned frock-coat and complicated grey silk necktie. Joachim was best man, and Griselda attended the bride. At the last moment it was discovered that there was no ring for this wedding. Florence gave her mother’s ring to Gabriel, who gave it to Joachim, who remarked how elegant it was. They were married by a stolid pastor. Prosper gave his daughter to Gabriel, who put Prosper’s ring back on Florence’s finger and kissed her. Griselda wept. They all dined companionably in the White Rose. Griselda talked to Gabriel Goldwasser in German. His descriptions of the clinic, and the psychiatrists, made her laugh, with an uneasy pleasure. What was Florence doing? What was happening?

Nothing was happening, said Florence. Gabriel was helping out. She was now a respectable married lady.

There were many things Griselda could have said in reply, and she suppressed them all. Florence was relaxed and smiling: she had not relaxed or smiled since Dorothy had examined her. Griselda wanted to know what Gabriel Goldwasser really felt. Perhaps he was secretly in love with Florence? He appeared to be mildly friendly. Helpful. Smiling. Wolfgang Stern said patients often fell in love with their nurses. But the nurses were usually women.