The Children's Book

46

There were births, also. Tom Underground opened on New Year’s Day 1909. Tom Wellwood was buried three weeks later. Imogen Cain’s labour began on the same day. It was long, and difficult. Nurses came, and a specialist obstetrician. A day of pain went past. The doctors brought chloroform, and Imogen struggled briefly under the mask. The small, pale girlchild was helped into the world with forceps, in a flood of blood, which was hard to staunch. She was a small child, frighteningly inert. The midwife cleaned, and slapped and shook her, and in the end she mewed and breathed. Imogen lay in her blood, white as alabaster. Prosper Cain, who had seen blood on the battlefield, who had been called because of unnamed fears on the part of the specialist, turned white himself, and swallowed, and took a deep breath, and took her hand. Her fingers fluttered in his.

Mother and child lay in a no man’s land between life and death. Imogen’s head was full of shadowy, greedy, threatening things. They showed her her tiny daughter, swaddled in a shawl, and she smiled, but was not strong enough to take her. Her hair was wet with sweat on her pillow. The nurse fed her water with a spoon.

They had agreed to call the child Cordelia.

Imogen was still in danger when Prosper should have set out for Ascona, to offer support to his lost daughter. He could not leave his wife. He asked Julian, who was at home, in order to work in the British Museum, if he would go out to Italy. He was a just man in great moral distress. Julian, having taken a distant look at his new sister, thought he would be hopeless and useless where birth and babies were concerned. He was writing an essay on the scarcely known painter Samuel Palmer, who had painted golden, English, paradisal pictures of apple trees, sheep and ripened corn under a harvest moon. It was a long way from all this mess and medical odours. He said, of course he would go. For the first time in his life he patted his father’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You must stay, of course. And I can do almost anything you could do, in Ascona.”

• • •

He arrived in Ascona to find Florence huge-bellied and somehow shining with complacency, which he had not expected. He said “I can’t kiss you, I can’t reach.” They laughed. It was sunny on the mountainside, even in February. They sat together in the shelter of the terrace, and Julian started to describe Imogen’s state, realised this was tactless, and cut himself off. Florence smiled. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Talk to me like a grown-up person. No one here really does that, except Gabriel.”

“I don’t understand, about this Gabriel.”

“He’s a good man. In an odd way.”

Julian supposed odd meant queer, in a Cambridge sense, but when Gabriel came to eat with them, he saw no sign of it. He was both monkishly detached from the world, and observant, for the sake of kindness. Too good to be true, Julian tried to think, but couldn’t keep it up, as they talked about socialism, about psychoanalysis, about literature. They were learnedly discussing Heinrich von Ofterdingen when Florence gave a low cry. Then she gave a gasp. Gabriel was immediately out of his chair.

“It begins? May I?”

Cautiously, without deranging her dress, he felt the rippling muscles. Julian was both repelled and moved. He wanted to go a long way away and he wanted his sister—his dear sister—not to hurt.

“Ah!” she said in another gasp and cry.

“Mr. Julian,” said Gabriel. “Two doors down is a pony-trap. Knock and ask the owner to come.”

“Quickly,” said Florence, red with pressure.

“Do not worry,” said Gabriel Goldwasser. “A first child is always slow. You may find it easier to walk up and down. Have you things packed?”

She had not. They called Amalia, who packed a bag with nightdress and toilet things. Florence walked up and down. She said, between contractions, “How do you know what to do, Gabriel?”

“I am a trained doctor. From a good hospital. I have the sense to observe the—midwives, is it? I have seen all this before.”

Florence gave a muffled scream. “I hope it is slow.”

“If it is very slow, you will hope the opposite.”

Julian returned with the trap. They all three got in, behind the driver. The horse set off up the mountain, straining its muscles. Florence’s muscles conducted their own purposeful, involuntary dance.

• • •

It was not slow. The child was not born in the pony-trap, nor yet in the wheelchair in the clinic corridor. But she arrived, on a great crest of pain, with a loud, defiant wail, barely an hour later. Julian was not there, but Gabriel was. There was a nurse, whose observations he translated, and commented on.

“She says you have good muscles.”

“I—have not—thought about—these muscles.”

Florence had lived with the fear that “the child,” when it arrived, would resemble Herbert Methley, and she would hate it. The nurse cleaned it, and Gabriel gave it to its mother.

“A daughter,” he said, waiting to see if she was pleased. The child had a shock of dark hair—like Florence’s own, like Julian’s Italian hair. It had large dark eyes which it appeared to fix on Florence. And a character. There she was, all shocked with rushing into the world, and she pushed with her head, impatient for something. Years later, thinking it all over, Florence admitted to herself that she had recognised in the daughter a kind of excessive primitive energy she had responded to in the father. And responded to in the daughter. She took her, triumphant, into her arms, and kissed her hair. Julian came into the room.

“Meet Julia Perdita Goldwasser,” said Florence, laughing a little wildly. Julian bent courteously and kissed the small new hand as it clutched its shawl.

“I do not know,” said Florence to Gabriel, “what I should have done without you. In every way.”

“It was destiny,” said Gabriel Goldwasser.

He said later, to Julian, over a glass of apple juice, “She was not afraid. Most women are afraid. Or become afraid.”

“She was lucky?”

“Oh yes. She will think of it as virtue, but mostly it is luck. Salut!”

“Salut!”

In June 1909 King Edward VII opened Sir Aston Webb’s new buildings for the Victoria and Albert Museum. He opened them with a golden key, with a stem of steel damascened with gold. The long white buildings, which had emerged slowly from their wrappings of tarpaulin, and thickets of scaffolding, were judged to be rhythmic and lovely, were compared to symphonies and chorales. The opening was attended by a glistening crowd of courtiers and dignitaries. The Webbs were there, and Alma-Tadema, with Balfour, Churchill and the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. The workers who had made the building were there, in smart suits, with bowler hats or top hats; they read an Address, composed by themselves, at the monarch’s personal request. The choir from the Royal College of Music, perched high in an arch, sang Dowland’s piercing “Awake, sweet love” and the Irish Guards played in the background. Prosper Cain was among the party, elegant in his uniform.

He was, like many of his colleagues and many amongst the public, disappointed by the uniform whiteness and looming austerity of the inside of the new buildings. The Keeper of the Wallace Collection, Claude Phillips, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he was “overwhelmed by the vastness, the coldness, the nakedness” of the new halls. The interior still resembled a warehouse, or a public hospital. Prosper Cain had been present when the then Director, Arthur Banks Skinner, had been harshly and suddenly demoted in a public meeting, called to announce a new Director, Cecil Harcourt Smith. Skinner was aesthetic. The new regime was orderly and utilitarian. The civil servant in charge, Sir Robert Morant, was a failed candidate for Holy Orders, who had tutored the royal children in Siam. Objects in the museum were displayed by the succession of materials: glass with glass, steel with steel, cloth with cloth, like with like, so that the craftsman might study the development of his skill, and the historian the changes over time. Claude Phillips wrote that the soul had gone, that beauty had vanished. The newspapers made grumbling comparisons with the imaginative arrangements in German museums, in Berlin, and Munich. Prosper agreed with them, and was distressed by Skinner’s quiet, humiliated grief. He was detaching himself from his work, involuntarily and half unconscious of it.

He had had to move house, and was now in a pretty Arts and Crafts town house in Chelsea, with more space—not for his random collection of objects, but for nurses, nurseries, and vociferous babies. Frau Goldwasser had returned, with the energetic Julia in her arms, to find she had an airy bedroom, with a delicious French wallpaper and pretty electric lights. Prosper and Imogen had discussed things, and decided that one nurse and one nursery would do for two babies. The room was most beautifully decorated by the ladies from the Glasgow School of Art. There was a frieze of flying, ephemeral creatures, and white tables and chairs of a severe yet delightful modern design.

Cordelia was six months old and Julia five. It is an age when a baby can sit up, but not an age when it takes much notice of another baby. They had a nanny and a nursemaid. Florence had breast-fed her baby at first. Imogen had not been able to do so.

Florence, with her laughing child, saw what she could always have seen, if she had cared, that Imogen was afraid of her. Cordelia was a quiet, watchful little mite, tentative even when she reached for a rattle. Julia crowed and bounced, and had brief fits of roaring rage. Florence found herself encouraging Cordelia to play, and then talking naturally to Imogen. Prosper Cain smiled wryly under his moustache.

Florence could not, of course, return to Newnham College. She went to see Leslie Skinner, and started attending lectures, and classes in History, at University College. Dorothy was still with the Skinners. Florence discovered that Dorothy was now an MD and qualified to practise as a doctor. She was continuing her studies: she wanted to qualify as a surgeon. She was working in the Women’s Hospital. She invited Florence, with Griselda, who was a postgraduate student at Cambridge, to her graduation ceremony that summer. She said her mother was ill, and would not be able to come. This proved to be so. Dorothy looked serious in her gown and cap. Griselda and Florence wore frivolous dresses and sunny hats.

Olive took to her bed, most of the time, much of the time in the dark. She was not writing. She was depleting Humphry’s stocks of whisky. Her hair straggled on the pillows, turning grey, a rather glossy, metallic grey. Humphry sat with her, and opened the curtains, and told her she had six other children, who needed her. Olive replied curtly that they frightened her. Once, when she had drunk a great deal of whisky, she said “If you know that you can kill a child—”

“You have killed no one. Don’t be absurd.”

Olive shrank back into the pillows. “You don’t know.”

“Tell me—”

Humphry did not really want to hear. She said “You don’t really want to hear.”

• • •

In the autumn of 1909 August Steyning drove over in his new motor car to see Olive. She usually stirred herself when he came, and sat at the tea-table, staring around as though she did not recognise the room. She listened to his account of the continuing success of Tom Underground, and when asked about cuts in the narrative, or changes in the cast, said “Do as you will.”

Violet, coming in with cream cakes on a plate said “Ah” and fell forward, crashing to the ground with her face in the cream, on top of one of Philip Warren’s early Dungeness plates, decorated with seaweeds and umbellifers. The plate smashed. Steyning tried to help Violet, but she did not move and was not breathing. Her cynical sharp face was red and twisted. She was quite dead. She was turned over, and wiped clean. A servant was sent for a doctor. Olive said

“Poor Vi. Not that it’s not a good way to go, when your time comes. But I had no idea hers had. She did not complain. Though it is doubtful I would have heard, if she had.”

This event also was not a story.

After Violet’s funeral, Humphry asked Phyllis into his office and gave her a box, containing Violet’s few pieces of jewellery: a jet necklace, a cameo, a small ring, with a polished bluejohn stone, which Phyllis put on. Humphry watched her in silence. He did not know what to say. Phyllis said

“You don’t need to tell me. I know. She was my real mother. Hedda found out. She likes finding things out. I don’t think I do. Nobody asked me.”

Humphry said “I’m sorry.”

Phyllis said “I think you should be. But it’s too late, isn’t it. I can look after the house, now.”

Her pretty face was like a china doll. She said

“I’d be glad if you’d sack Alma, and get a new kitchenmaid. She doesn’t like me, and won’t do anything I tell her.”

She said “Nobody asked her what she felt, when she was alive. Even I didn’t, because of knowing what I’d not been told.”

Humphry said, almost grumpily, “I asked her. I may have been at fault, but I did—care for her.”

“Yes. Well. It’s too late, now. For everything.”

• • •

Alma was sacked, and replaced by Tilly, who appreciated the finer points of Phyllis’s household-management.

Olive went back into her bedroom.

Humphry went to Manchester.

Life—for the living—went on. Leached of much of its colour, still where it had been full of movement.

Phyllis tended Olive. She could have said, and didn’t, that she knew Olive didn’t like her. Olive could not be sacked. But she could be made to be grateful for kindnesses she did not want. Phyllis persisted.