4

The Wellwoods’ Midsummer was a slightly movable feast. Humphry explained to Philip that midsummer day—that is, the longest day of the solar year—is in fact June 21st. But the European Feast of St. John is the evening of June 23rd leading to St. John’s Day on June 24th and that also is called Midsummer. “In practice,” said Humphry, who believed in talking to the young as though they were fellow men, “in practice, we have been somewhat eclectic with our own celebrations, choosing true midsummer, or St. John’s day, depending on the convenient day of the week for holding a party. Today is Friday 21st which is true midsummer, although midsummer eve was yesterday, and we shall be embarking on the declining days at dawn on Saturday, though still in advance of Europe… Saturday is full moon, so we will celebrate—if we are lucky with the weather—by the light of a waxing gibbous moon. ‘Gibbous’ is a good word,” said Humphry, who was a word-savourer. Philip had been alarmed at the number of words flying round the table that he had never before encountered. But he now had a mental image of a waxing gibbous disc, and his ever-active mind’s eye began to decorate a large bowl with waning gibbous, waxing gibbous, and truly circular discs. It could be interesting. Silver and gold on dark cobalt.

“Friday is a good day for friends to join us,” said Olive. “They are all gathering here for the weekend away from the city. We shall keep you very busy with preparations, Philip.”

“Good,” said Philip.


The household, family, staff and Philip, was set to frenzied work. Olive and Humphry had both already completed their writing stints, around dawn, before breakfast. The kitchen was full of smells of cooking, and no one was to have anything for lunch except bread and cheese, for the stove, and most of the crockery, were pre-empted. Philip was assigned to help with the decoration of the garden and orchard. He helped set up trestle tables on the lawn near the house, and then to arrange little cosy, or conspiratorial, groups of chairs in picturesque places. All chairs were requisitioned—wicker chairs, deckchairs, schoolroom chairs, the nursery rocking chair, cane and metal garden chairs. They were placed in arbours, in the clearing at the centre of the shrubbery, even in the orchard. Then the lanterns were swung from branches, and half-concealed in clumps of tall grasses and decorative thistles in the herbaceous borders. Philip was sent with Phyllis to hang lanterns in the orchard. It was an unkempt, raggedy place with moss and lichens on the twisted branches of old fruit-trees, and brambles snaking in from the wild and in places smothering everything. Some of the trees had odd structures in them made from planks and bits of rope. These were good places for illuminations, Phyllis said. She attached lanterns to ropes and sent Philip climbing up to the platforms. “These are old tree houses,” said Phyllis. “From when we were little. Even Hedda can get into these. We’ve got a much better one—out in the forest. But it’s a secret,” she added, doubtfully. Philip was picking up hard windfall apples. Phyllis told him to watch for wasps. “You get all sorts of worms in them, popping their little black heads out at you. It’s a horrible idea, biting into something wriggly—”

They wandered into the orchard. Phyllis pointed.

“These two trees are the magic trees from the story. The golden apple and the silver pear. You can only see the gold and silver in certain lights, you have to believe. These two are the centre. Their branches touch the ground, and their heads are in the sky. And all this—stuff—the bryony and the wild roses—grows over them to make them lovely—”

They were old, neglected, beautiful trees. Philip looked at the shapes of the snarling of their branches and wished he had a pencil. Phyllis took his hand and pulled him forward.

“This is where Rosy lies. See this circle of white stones. Rosy is under these, under the apple and the pear.”

A kitten, a bird?

“We bring her flowers on her birthday. We pour out libations of apple juice for her. We don’t forget her. We will never forget her.”

Her voice was solemn, and creamy with warmth.

“She lived for a week, just one little week, that was all she lived. She had the most perfect little fingers and toes. Now she sleeps here.”

She bent her head reverently. Philip, without putting it into words, detected play-acting. He wondered unkindly if Phyllis even thought about what was really under the white stones, amongst the roots. He said vaguely and falsely

“That’s good.”

He threw several of the hard little apples into the bramble patch. Then he hung a lantern with a crescent moon and a black bird-shadow in the branches of the pear tree, over the white stones.

Phyllis took his hand. She pushed her little body against his side. He had the sense that her flesh had always been clean and pleasant, and that, by contrast, his own never had. This was a feeling, again not in words. He pulled away.

After the decoration of the garden, and the bread and cheese lunch, the business of dressing-up began. Violet dressed the children—including Philip—in the schoolroom whilst Humphry and Olive went to put on their robes, which were a gesture towards “their” play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not rigidly Elizabethan, not yet Athenian, but more flowing Arts and Crafts silks and linens, silver and gold, flowery and floating.

There was a large painted chest in the schoolroom, an imitation of a Renaissance marriage-chest, with woodland scenes of dark glades, pale ladies, hounds and a white stag painted on the sides. This was the dressing-up chest, and it was unusually well stocked with silken shifts, frilled shirts, embroidered shawls, fillets for veils and coronets for princes.

“It helps,” Violet said to Philip, “to have a dressmaker as an auntie, who can turn a toga into a ball dress and back, or magic silk flowers out of old stockings. I think we should dress Hedda as Peaseblossom. Here is a lovely pink and violet shift.”

Hedda had her arms deep in the silks, rummaging.

“I want to be a witch,” she said.

“I told you, dear,” said Violet. “Hallowe’en’s for witches. Midsummer is for fairies. With pretty wings, organdie, look.”

“I want to be a witch,” Hedda repeated. Her small face was an angry frown.

Olive had come in with a sparkling buckle she needed Violet to stitch to a sash. She ruffled Hedda’s hair.

“She can be a witch if she likes,” she said easily. “We want them to be comfortable, don’t we, so they can run about and have fun. Have you found witch clothes, darling? Here’s my old black shawl with a lovely fringe and a fiery dragon on it. And here’s Phyllis’s old black dancing-tunic—if you just put a few stitches, Vi, so she doesn’t spring apart. And here’s a glass beetle-brooch, just the thing. And Philip will make you a hat with black paper. Not too big, Philip, so it stays on—”

“And a broomstick,” said Hedda.

“You must ask in the kitchen for the loan of a besom.”

Violet’s face had a mutinous look, not unlike Hedda’s, but she did as she was asked, or told, and the little girl was soon spinning in a whirl of black batwings and floating fringe. Violet did up the unresisting Florian in yellow and green, with a scalloped jerkin, as Mustardseed. He had a pointed felt cap, which he kept patting uncertainly. Phyllis accepted the rejected Peaseblossom, and was lovingly hung with silk gauze, mauve, rose and ivory; she had a silver cloak, like folded dragonfly-wings, and a wreath of silk flowers on her hair.

Dorothy was Moth, in a grey velvet tunic with a cloak with painted eyes. Violet tried vainly to persuade her to wear wired antennae.

Tom had to be Puck. He went barefoot in brown tights and a leaf-coloured jerkin. He too rejected a headdress and said he would put twigs in his own hair. Phyllis said Puck didn’t wear glasses. Tom said “This one does. Or he’ll fall into the pond and get trapped in brambles.”

They came to the question of Philip. He said he couldn’t dress up, he would feel silly. No one wanted to suggest he should be a rude mechanical. It would be insensitive. Tom said “Can’t you put on a sort of toga and be one of the Athenians?”

Philip did not know A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was totally baffled by the costume selection. He said he didn’t think he could wear a toga. He was not, in fact, sure what a toga was.

“I don’t like to be looked at,” he said, strangled. All the children, even those who were prancing about flaunting their disguises, understood the need not to be looked at. Dorothy had an idea, and took down the butcher-blue painting smock Tom wore for crafts lessons.

“You could go as an artist. You might wear this anyway, to make pots and things.”

The smock had a high neck, full sleeves, deep pockets. It was a coverall. It was in many ways less of a disguise than the borrowed clothes he had on. Philip looked down at his legs.

“You could go barefoot,” said Dorothy. “We do.”

“You could just stay as you are,” said Tom.

Philip put on the smock. He felt comfortable. He allowed Violet to change his boots for sandals. Everyone who was not barefoot wore sandals.

“Now you can run and jump,” said Dorothy.

His feet under the straps were whitish but not white. He felt a moment’s pleasure at the idea of running and jumping.

• • •

The guests began to arrive in the midafternoon. They came at intervals, from far and near, in carriages, pony-traps, station flies, on foot, and, in one case, on a tandem tricycle.

Humphry and Olive stood on the steps to receive them. They were dressed as Oberon and Titania. Humphry had a silk jerkin embroidered with Florentine arabesques, black breeches and a voluminous velvet cloak, swinging at a daring angle from a silken cord across his shoulder. He looked absurd and beautiful. And amused. Olive wore pleated olive silk over pleated white linen, with a gauze overcloak, veined like insect wings. Her hair was dressed with honeysuckle and roses. She looked warm and wild. Violet, beside her, wore a dress stitched with ivy-leaves on satin, and held her head girlishly on one side, heavy with silk ivy and white feathers. The children were running around. They would be called to order when other children arrived.


The firstcomers—they had only to walk across the meadow from their farm cottage—were the Russian anarchists. Vasily Tartarinov had escaped from St. Petersburg in 1885. He gave lectures on Russian society, and received generous assistance (including the cottage) from English socialists. He had two sets of clothes, his working smock and the dress suit in which he gave his lectures. He had come in the dress suit. He was a dramatic figure, inordinately tall and thin with a long pointed white beard like a wizard. His wife, Elena, wore the better of her two dresses, which was brown poplin with black braid and black buttons. Her hair was scraped back. They had made no concession to fancy dress. The children, Andrei and Dmitri, both around Phyllis’s age, wore their usual aprons, red and blue. They mostly pretended they could not speak English.

The tricycle rolled in, vigorously pedalled by Leslie and Etta Skinner, fellow Fabians. Skinner worked on human statistics and heredity at University College, London. He had sleek black hair, white skin and blue eyes. Etta Skinner was older than Leslie. They had met in the Men and Women’s Club, at the college, in the 1880s. They had discussed the Woman Question, birth control, animal passion and the sexual instincts. Skinner was very serious and had a beautiful voice. He aroused a great deal of animal passion in colleagues and students. The Wellwoods agreed he had married Etta to protect himself from frenzied maenads. Etta was a dedicated Theosophist, attended gatherings on esoteric and astral matters in Albemarle Street, lectured on vegetarianism, and taught reading, writing and arithmetic to the London poor. She had a round face, tight lips and pepper and salt hair with a fuzz of broken ends. She looked as though she had once been expectant and greedy, but had learned better. She was distantly related to the Darwins, the Wedgwoods and the Galtons, which, Humphry pointed out, must have been attractive to a specialist in heredity. But the Skinners, married for ten years, had no children. Humphry said it was odd that people interested in ancestry often were not ancestors. Olive replied that she didn’t like Etta’s clothes, which were home-dyed and sacklike. The usual dress appeared, in an unsteady plum colour, as she divested herself of her cycling skirt and veil.

Close on their heels came Toby Youlgreave, also on a bicycle. He had a tiny weekend cottage in the woods. He and Etta began a discussion of folk customs at midsummer.

Prosper Cain came from Iwade House in a carriage, with Julian, and his daughter, Florence. They wore fancy dress. Prosper was disguised as Prospero in a sumptuous black robe covered with signs of the zodiac. He carried a long staff, made of a narwhal tusk, with a pommel stuck with moonstones and peridots. Julian was Prince Ferdinand, in theatrical black and silver. Florence, who was twelve, was very prettily dressed as Miranda, in a flowing sea-coloured shift, with her dark hair flowing, and a necklace of pearls. Julian and Tom eyed each other cautiously. They had shared an adventure, but were not sure they wanted to be friends. Olive came smiling forward and Prosper kissed her hand. He said in her ear

“I borrowed this fantastic object from the collection, dear lady, but tell no one.”

“I don’t know whether to believe you.” He was still holding her hand. “No one ever does. I encourage uncertainty.” Julian caught sight of Philip in the smock. “I didn’t recognise you.”

Philip shifted from foot to foot. Tom said “He’s made topping lanterns. Come and see.”

They went off, and Florence followed.

The Dungeness party were in a kind of brake; the ladies had brought their party dresses in wicker baskets, because they had come a long way. Benedict Fludd, as Olive had predicted, had not come. Seraphita, in the days when she was a Stunner from Margate called Sarah-Jane Stubbs, had been painted by Burne-Jones and Rossetti. Now in her forties she still had the fine bones, the knot of black hair, the huge brow, the wide-spaced green eyes and calm mouth of the paintings, but her body was heavier and her expression less mildly beneficent. She was travelling in a loose Liberty robe, but had brought a grander one, with a confection of veiling to throw round her head and shoulders. Her children were Imogen, a child of sixteen embarrassed by breasts, Geraint, a little older than Tom, who had inherited his mother’s eyes and hair, and Pomona, who was Tom’s age, had flowing chestnut-coloured hair and had brought a home-woven gown, embroidered with crocus, daffodils and bluebells. Both girls had also brought beaded and embroidered Juliet caps. Geraint had a kind of handwoven smock, not unlike Philip’s.

The Fludds were accompanied by a solemn young man whose name was Arthur Dobbin. Dobbin saw himself as Benedict Fludd’s apprentice. He hoped to found a commune of craftsmen in the salt marshes round Rye. He was smallish, and plump, with slicked hair and an anxious, determined look. He would have liked to come dressed as Oberon, or Sir Galahad, and he knew it would not do. He was dressed in the knitted Jaeger woollen garments, popularised by G. B. Shaw, which were a little sweaty in flaming June.

Dorothy was waiting for the next carriage. So was Humphry, who drew in a breath as it pulled up smartly in front of the house. The other Wellwoods were here. They had driven over from Vetchey Manor, their country house. They were soberly dressed in travelling costumes, and had bandboxes with them. Basil and Katharina sat looking forwards; their son and daughter, Charles and Griselda, sat behind the driver, looking back.

Dorothy was waiting for Cousin Griselda. Cousin Griselda came into her mind when she had to use the word “love” which she tended to be careful with. Griselda was the same age as Dorothy, and was closer to Dorothy than her sister Phyllis. Dorothy, a realist, rather thought she did not love Phyllis, though she knew she ought to. Perhaps because of this she loved Griselda—whom she did not see very often—a little more emphatically. Dorothy was sometimes afraid that she had started out with a smaller capability for love than most people. Phyllis loved everything—Mother, Father, Auntie Violet, Hedda, Florian and Robin, Ada and Cathy, the ponies, the fluffy kitten, dead Rosy in the orchard, the Todefright toads. Dorothy had varying feelings for most of these people, some of them loving. But she did love Griselda, she had fixed on Griselda to love.

Frieda, Katharina’s lady’s-maid, had the seat beside the driver. She came down to oversee the unloading of the bandboxes.

Basil Wellwood was shorter and more muscular than his younger brother. He wore a well-cut pale grey suit, which he did not intend to change, and had a diamond ring and a multiple watchchain of complicated links. He did not quite suppress a frown when he saw Humphry’s bright garments which he thought were absurd. He complimented Humphry on the hot sunlight, as though Humphry had found someone to procure it, which Humphry in turn found absurd.

Charles, aged fourteen and preparing for the Eton scholarship exams, resembled both brothers, with red-gold hair, sandy lashes and strong features. He too wore a suit, with a cravat with a pearl tiepin.

Katharina was thin and pale, her head on its slender neck dwarfed by a hat with dove-wings on its rim, and a closely tied spotted veil. Her hair was between faded grey and mouse-blonde. She had large, mixed-coloured eyes in slightly ravaged sockets of bruised skin, finely wrinkled and folded.

Griselda was very thin, with fine silver-blonde hair, plaited round her head, like a true Mädchen, Humphry thought. She wore a mushroom-coloured travelling costume. Her mouth was thin and unsmiling. She was tall, and did not look strong. Dorothy ran to greet her.

They went inside, to change their clothes. Phyllis, attaching herself to Dorothy and Griselda, said

“Have you got a lovely costume, Cousin Grisel?”

“You are all in fancy dress.”

“It’s midsummer,” said Dorothy. “We always are. Aren’t you?”

“I am not. I have got my new party dress. You will see.”

The dressing took time. There were endless laces and buttons. When mother and daughter emerged from Olive’s bedroom they were lovely to look at and completely out of place. Katharina was in mauve and white shot silk moiré and Valenciennes lace with huge leg-of-mutton puffs above the elbow. She wore kid gloves and had a confection of lace and fresh rosebuds, like a giant pincushion, on her head. Griselda was in shell-pink satin, with a lace yoke, decorated with all sorts of little darker pink bows, around her puffed sleeves, around her hem. Phyllis said it was lovely. Dorothy said “It might get dirty if we go in the orchard.”

Griselda said “It’s completely inappropriate. Charles calls it Little Bo-Peep.”

“You do look like a china doll,” said Dorothy, “one in a fairy story, standing on a shelf, that’s loved hopelessly by a tin soldier or a presumptuous mouse.”

“It would not be remarkable in Portman Square,” said Griselda, quite flatly. “I shall just have to endure.”


A pony-trap arrived, which appeared at first sight to be carrying a troupe of ghosts and ghouls, white-faced and staring. The driver was Augustus Steyning, who lived in Nutcracker Cottage on the edge of the Downs. He stepped down on long long legs, pointing elegant toes like a dancer. He had a small silver beard, and an elegant moustache, and thick, well-cut silver hair. He was wearing a country suit, but turned out to be also dressed as Prospero, having brought a cabbalistic hooded gown and a knobby walnut staff. He was a theatre director and occasional playwright, whose best-known works were productions of Peer Gynt and The Tempest, although he had written a historical drama about Cromwell and Charles I. His ideas were advanced. He was interested in the new German drama and in German tales and imaginings. (His house, though it had nut trees in its garden, was not named out of English whimsy so much as for Hoffmann’s sinister tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King.) His trap was full of large theatrical masks.

“I brought an ass’s head, my dears—Midsummer is incomplete without one and this one had the distinction of having been worn by Beerbohm Tree himself. We may take turns to disappear inside it and be metamorphosed. And I brought these delicious disguises from Venice—here are Pierrot and Columbine, here is a vulture who is really a plague doctor keeping away from bubos, here is a black enchantress with sequins. Here is the Sun, with flaming rim, and here is the Moon, with cloudy mountains and silver tears …”

He turned to Olive.

“I took the liberty of bringing my guest. He is driving himself, as he needs space. He is just behind me—”

A shadow of irritation passed over Olive’s face. It was her party. She was the giver. And then the second trap arrived, with one man, and an inanimate company—in this case hidden in black boxes and brass-hasped cases.

“He is an old friend of yours, I believe—” said August Steyning. (He liked to call himself August, in honour of the clowns.) “I hope I did well.” He had noticed Olive’s little grimace.

Olive looked at the newcomer, hesitated and then swept forward with outstretched hands.

“Welcome to our house. What an unexpected delight—”

The stranger stepped down. He was small, thin and dark, clothed in black drainpipe trousers and a long black jacket, and a black felt hat with jay feathers in the band. He had a theatrical pointed beard and groomed moustache. His feet did not crunch on the gravel. He bowed briefly over Olive’s hand.

“This is indeed an old friend, whom we met in Munich. Major Cain, let me introduce Herr Anselm Stern, who is an artist of a most unusual kind. Herr Stern, this is Mr. Wellwood, my brother-in-law, and Katharina Wellwood…”


She did not introduce the children.

Cathy was instructed to help Herr Stern with his boxes. Hedda touched them, and asked what was in them.

“You shall see in good time,” said August Steyning. “With your mother’s permission, we hope to show you.”

Herr Stern, supervising the stowing of the boxes, suddenly found his voice, and said, in halting English,

“I have brought a gift for the little girls.”

He looked uncertainly from Dorothy to the befrilled Griselda to pretty Phyllis, to the small black witch with the beetle-brooch. “The box with the red string,” Herr Stern told Cathy. “Please.”

“What can it be?” said Phyllis.

“Open it, please,” said Anselm Stern.

It was in parchmentlike paper, and the size of a shoe-box. Violet cut the string, Phyllis undid the paper. Hedda darted forward and took the lid from the box inside, which was very like a shoe-box if not a shoebox. She peeped in.

“There is a shoe,” she said.

Violet lifted it out.

It was a very large shoe made of stitched leather, dark russet-red, with a large tongue and a big steel buckle with a sharp spike.

Inside were what Dorothy at first took for mice. She took a step back.

“They are babies,” said Phyllis uncertainly.

The shoe was crammed full with little stuffed dolls, each with a round head, and staring beady eyes.

They wore either small lederhosen, or small enveloping aprons. Phyllis laughed uneasily. The dolls stared out. Hedda said

“It’s the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Only there’s no Woman, the children are on their own in there.”

She grabbed the shoe and held it to her chest. The other girls felt relief.

“It is a most original toy,” said Violet. “You like it?” said Herr Stern to Hedda. “It’s a bit scary. I like scary things.”

August Steyning explained that Anselm Stern was a puppetmaster. He performed enchantments with glove puppets, and with marionettes. As a surprise gift for the queen of fairytale, he said, bowing to Olive, they hoped to perform a version of Cinderella for the guests. The cast were safely enclosed in the black japanned boxes they saw. And if the curtain-raiser pleased them, he hoped they would all come next day to Nutcracker Cottage to see something more elaborate. “I say we shall perform,” he explained, “because Anselm has been instructing me in the mystery of the marionettes. I am to be Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I shall animate the Ugly Sisters.”

Olive smiled. Humphry invited them all to refreshments.

“First, food and drink. Then the performance. Then further refreshment and dancing. We have talented musicians—Geraint on the flute, Charles with the fiddle, and Tom, who does what he can with a tin whistle.”


They gathered on the lawn. Steyning, just returned from meeting Anselm Stern, had brought shocking news from London. The Liberal government had unexpectedly fallen. A routine vote on the army estimates, the supply of small arms, had unexpectedly become a Vote of Confidence. Lord Rosebery had resigned, and Lord Salisbury was now Prime Minister, until an election could be held, in the autumn.

Prosper Cain said this change might affect the Museum badly. It was still waiting for Sir Aston Webb’s winning plans for the new front and courtyard to become solid things. “We are a builders’ yard,” he complained. “This can at best delay things further.”

Basil Wellwood saw no one with whom he could discuss the effect of the events on the Stock Exchange. He thought he was amongst a curious clutch of people, all tinsel and fake gilding.

Leslie Skinner spoke in an undertone. He believed Lord Rosebery’s name had been mentioned in the sad events surrounding the recent trials. It had been rumoured that the sad death of Lord Queensberry’s eldest son—not Lord Alfred Douglas, but Lord Drumlanrig—had been not a shooting accident but an act of self-destruction, designed—they did say—to protect Lord Rosebery’s good name? And there had been concerns about this during Mr. Wilde’s unsuccessful libel suit against Lord Queensberry? Skinner had a look of pure academic enquiry. His grave face expressed a desire for precise knowledge.

Violet Grimwith made a clucking sound and gathered together those children who were listening, leading them away to taste fruit cup. Julian and Tom did not follow. Julian beckoned to Tom, and they sauntered in hearing distance behind a trestle table, sampling tartlets. It was less than a month since Wilde’s third court appearance, his second trial for indecency, after a first jury had failed to agree. Everyone discussed it endlessly. Julian, like his schoolfellows, had read the press reports. He wanted to hear. Leslie Skinner said to August Steyning that he believed he had been in court.

“I was,” said Steyning. “I was indeed. The poor man stood in need of a friendly audience. I was compelled to bear witness. It was a true tragic fall. With uncanny aspects. Did you hear the story of the palm-reader’s predictions?”

No, they all said, though Humphry at least knew the tale very well.

Steyning told them, holding out his own long, pale, exquisite hands, one after the other, in illustration.

“It was at a supper of Blanche Roosevelt. The chiromancer was in obscurity behind a curtain, and the guests thrust in their anonymous hands. The left hand, it appears, shows the destiny written in the stars, and the right hand shows what its owner will make of that destiny. Oscar’s left hand—they were much plumper than mine—showed huge, brilliant achievement and success. The right showed ruin—at a precise date. The left hand is the hand of a king, but the right that of a king who will send himself into exile. Oscar asked the precise date, was given it, and abruptly took his leave. The prophecy appears to be fulfilled.”

Skinner asked Steyning’s impression of the trial.

“He bore himself with dignity and stood like a sacrificed beast. He allowed himself to be trapped into witticism. He spoke bravely about the love that dare not speak its name. He was applauded. But it was no triumph. And his present state is desperate. They have removed his name from the theatres where his plays are performing—not for much longer, I suspect. It is said prison is killing him. He had some idea of treating it as a monastery, or Prospero’s study, but he sleeps on a board, has neither books, nor pen, nor ink, and is made to work the treadmill. His flesh is fallen into folds. He cannot sleep.”

Humphry, who moved in the world of press gossip, remarked lightly that Lord Rosebery had been sick, very sick, for months, and had suddenly recovered at the end of May. Only for his government to fall, it appeared, today. He exchanged glances with Steyning and suddenly saw Tom and Julian.

“You don’t need to stand around listening to political chatter. Go and arrange seats for the marionettes.”

Tom and Julian wandered away across the lawn.

“You are always told you don’t want to hear things precisely because you do,” said Julian.

“Do you?” Tom asked.

“They think we don’t know these things. They ought to know you learn in school, just by being a boy. You learn them along with Greek and cricket and rowing and drawing. And sniggering and poking and passing messages. They ought to know we know. They must have known themselves.”


Tom did not know. He lived at home and was home-tutored, though Basil and Humphry were planning for him to do the Marlowe scholarship exams next spring. Basil had intervened when Humphry had spoken of sending Tom to the newfangled newly founded Bedales where boys mucked out farm animals and swam naked. Basil would help, he said, with his nephew’s fees. Tom was very bright, good at maths, good at languages. He did Latin and Greek with the anarchists, who liked teaching, and were grateful for the income. He did maths with a tutor, whose lessons would increase after the summer. Tom walked through lanes and meadows to his lessons. He lived wild, much of the time. He was not sure he wanted to know what Julian was talking about. He was not sure he wanted to be friends with Julian. He was often unsure what he wanted, and as a result, being amiable, he had many acquaintances and no close friends. He was thirteen, and still all boy, whereas Julian was fifteen, and could on occasion be a serious young man.

Tom’s spectacles made him look owlish. His fine fair hair sprang all ways, and asked to be ruffled. His skin was young, unspotted, and golden brown with outdoor living. He had his mother’s eyes and long lashes. His cheekbones were high and wide, his mouth gentle. He was the sort of beautiful boy, quite unconscious of his beauty, who was much discussed and courted both in Julian’s prep school, and at Marlowe. Julian had asked himself whether Tom was pretty, or a possible object of passion, and had seen that, in theory, he certainly was. Pretty boys at school became rapidly self-conscious. Tom seemed unconcerned, and it lent him charm and distance. Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew—and he was knowing. Also he was constantly concerned by pustules, and the craters of past pustules. He was not sure whether Tom, despite being pretty, was not so simple that he was boring.

Tom was assessing Julian in his usual terms. Was he, would he ever be, someone who could be invited into the Tree House? It was too early to tell, but he rather thought not. He said, blandly and meaninglessly,

“Grown-ups always think we don’t know things they must have known themselves. They need to remember wrong, I think.”


The audience were gathered for the marionettes like a flock of hens. They sat in a half-moon, in the blue daylight, on chairs, stools, grass. Griselda and Dorothy sat together on embroidered footstools, to safeguard Griselda’s skirt. They both thought they were too old for puppet shows.

August Steyning stepped out from behind the booth that he and Herr Stern had erected. It had star-spangled midnight-blue curtains. He bowed, profoundly, and announced

“We welcome you to Aschenputtel, or Cinderella.”

He went back, behind the dark box.

A trumpet sounded, and a tapping drum. The curtains swept open. A funeral procession crossed the stage, to a slow beat: black-coated mourners, carrying a coffin, the sombre widower, the decorous daughter, cloaked in black, her face shadowed. The coffin was lowered, to sad drumbeats. A green mound, and a gravestone rose in its place. Father and daughter embraced.

The next scene was in the house. The stepmother and stepsisters arrived to strutting violin music. The marionettes were delicate creatures, with fine porcelain faces, real human hair twisted or plaited into elaborate coiffures, and a frou-frou of finely stitched skirts, crimson, lilac, amber. The sisters were not ugly. They were fashionable beauties, with pearl necklaces and haughty little faces with sneering mouths and plucked and painted eyebrows. They and their mother were like peas in a pod, from the same mould. Aschenputtel had long golden plaits, and a simple sky-blue dress. The step-family indicated imperiously chairs she should dust and arrange, silver tureens she should carry, the hearth she should sweep, the fire she should tend. She moved as they commanded. A puff of real smoke came from the fireplace.

Aschenputtel shuddered, sat on a stool, put her sweet china face in her fine china hands. The shudder was human and disturbing, as the little limbs swayed and folded.

The father returned, booted and caped for a journey. He kissed their hands and asked what they would like as a gift on his return.

There were few words in this production, but this ritual question was spoken in August Steyning’s high, light, reedy voice, which seemed proportionate to the tiny actor. He lifted it to counter-tenor. Silk and velvet, said the crimson sister. Rubies and pearls, said the violet. A branch of whatever tree touches your hat, said Aschenputtel.

She was next seen kneeling by the green mound and the grey stone, smoothing the grass, planting the twig. Slowly, wonderfully, a tree unfolded from beneath the stage, a wiry trunk uncurling branches, hung with a haze of leaves. Two white doves, fluttering and swooping, stitched from feathers and silk, with jet beads for eyes, pink toes and iridescent ruffs, settled in the tree. The violin twittered. The doves flew to Aschenputtel’s fingers. She lay down and embraced the mound, and they strutted and preened in her hair.

Dorothy blinked. The little creatures had taken on a sinister life, which perturbed her. She set herself against giving in to the illusion. Griselda beside her was staring, engrossed.

The stepmother set Aschenputtel to sorting lentils from cinders. The doves sifted the ashes, and deftly threw the lentils into a pan—a rain of tiny clatterings could be heard.

The sisters were fitted with ball-gowns, by a new marionette, a subservient dressmaker, her painted mouth full of pins. One sister had puce bows. One had purple pom-poms. Aschenputtel sat by the hearth, head in hands.

The weeping daughter stood by the mound, her hair now loose, a mass of gold threads, under the dancing tree, which waved its arms and produced, like a descending angel, a fine gold dress, a coronet, a pair of gold slippers.

The Ball was done behind gauze, with whirling figures, and dance music in a music box, twanging waltzes, prancing polkas. The prince had shining white hair, tied back, a long dark coat and knee-breeches. He danced with the golden girl. The clock struck. She fled. The tree and the birds made a second dress out of thin air, silver as the moon. And a third, caught like the starry sky in the pointy branches. The countertenor sang.

Shiver and shake, little tree


Throw gold and silver over me.

The prince appeared, with a pot of pitch, and cunningly painted the steps of his palace. They danced, the chimes sounded, Aschenputtel fled, the little gold shoe was left shining on the tar.

The final scenes were gruesome. One disdainful sister, her proud expression unchanging, aided and abetted by her mother took a kitchen cleaver to her big toe, splat. “When you are queen, you will not need to go on foot,” said the mother, falsetto. The bride and groom set off on horseback, on a finely caparisoned horse made of real hide. The gold shoe brimmed with blood. Several of those children remembered, well into their future, that they had seen the red liquid dripping from the shoe.

Dorothy blinked and refused to imagine.

The pirouetting doves called to the prince

Turn around, look behind


Blood in the shoe.


Turn around, change your mind


She’s not the bride for you.

So they turned back. And the stepmother, learning nothing, following her fate, took the cleaver, slap, to the second sister’s heel, and crammed her porcelain toes into the golden shell.

“How horrible,” said Hedda, audibly. “When it’s already all bloody.”

The doves sang, the prince turned back.

Aschenputtel’s father called her from the cinders where she sat in drab rags. She came and put her dainty toe in the slipper and was embraced by the prince. She ran off, and reappeared, radiant in her starry dress. Puppet father and puppet daughter clung to each other, centre-stage, her china cheek on his shoulder, as he stroked her golden hair.

The backdrop became a candlelit choir. The wedding procession came back from the altar. The doves flew down, at the church door, cooing and shrilling, and mobbed the haughty sisters, beating their white wings about their heads, topping their headdresses, obscuring with commotion faces that were then revealed to be eyeless, with bloody sockets.


Griselda closed her lips. Dorothy shuddered crossly. Phyllis said that it was all wrong, there had been no pumpkin, no godmother, no glass coach. No rats and mice and lizards, cried Hedda, overexcited, unnerved by cruel doves. Florian said, More, having understood nothing, mesmerised by the moving miniature world.

Griselda said to Dorothy that it was interesting, how different the story was. Dorothy said she herself wasn’t very interested but that if Griselda wanted to know, she should ask Toby Youlgreave, he was always going on about fairytales.

Griselda, looking like a lost china shepherdess in a swarm of raggedy fairies, pulled timidly at Toby’s arm. She said she really wanted to know why the story was different. “Dorothy said you would tell me.” Toby sat down beside her on a garden seat. He said that the version she was used to was the French one by Charles Perrault—whose stories were written for young ladies, and usually had fairy godmothers. Whereas Anselm Stern’s version was German, out of the Brothers Grimm. Griselda said that she herself was half-German, but that she did not have German fairytales at home. She wished she did. Toby said those were only two of the endless versions from many, many countries from Finland to Scotland to Russia—with varying combinations of some or all of the events—wicked stepmother, selfish sisters, friendly animals, magic dresses, shoes, with or without blood in them. The Grimms believed that what they were collecting were part of the very old beliefs and magic tales of the German Volk. There are English fairytales, too, said Toby. Mrs. Olive Wellwood uses them, very cleverly.

Griselda said that her aunt’s fairy stories frightened her. So did Hans Andersen, he made her cry. But not this sort of tale. She didn’t know why. It should be scary, there was a lot of blood. Toby said these were memories of some other time, long ago, and he agreed, they weren’t scary.

“They are just like that,” said Griselda, feeling for what intrigued her, not finding it.

Toby looked at the serious thin face. He said he would send her a book of the Grimms, if she was allowed to receive it. Griselda said she didn’t think her family had anything against the Grimms. They just didn’t know about them. Toby wanted to stroke her hair, and say, don’t worry, but he didn’t think that was a good idea.


Everyone, old and young, now gathered for a kind of sumptuous picnic. As happens in such gatherings, where those whose lives are shaped, fortunately or unfortunately, are surrounded by those whose lives are almost entirely to come, the elders began asking the young what they meant to do with their lives, and to project futures for them.

They started, naturally, with the older boys. Prosper Cain said Julian had a fine eye for antiques, and could tell the real thing from a fake. He had a collection of valuables he had found in flea-markets, a mediaeval spoon, a very old Staffordshire slipware beaker. Julian said easily that after Cambridge he might indeed like to work in museums, or galleries. Seraphita Fludd said she hoped Geraint would be like his father, an artist, and make lovely things. Geraint said she knew really he was no good at that kind of thing. He was good at maths. An astronomer! cried Violet. Geraint said he should like to make a comfortable living. He smiled amiably. Basil said he should go into business, in that case. Like William Morris, said Arthur Dobbin, who hoped to introduce business practices in the artists’ workshops in Lydd. Geraint went on smiling, and eating jellied ham mould. Basil Wellwood said Geraint was welcome to join Charles in his family firm. Charles made a strangled noise, blushed, and was heard to mutter that that was yet to be decided. Etta Skinner said it was odd that nobody in this forward-looking community had asked any of the girls what they wanted to be. She hoped some of them had ambitions. Prosper Cain, simultaneously, asked Tom what he hoped to become. Tom had no idea. He told the truth.

“I don’t ever want to leave here. I want to go on being in the woods—out on the Downs—just being here—”

“And to be boy eternal,” said August Steyning, inevitably, with a theatrical hum. Olive said Tom had all the time in the world.

Leslie Skinner took up Etta’s point. He addressed Dorothy, almost pugnaciously.

“And you, young woman. What do you hope to be?”

“I am going to be a doctor,” said Dorothy.

Violet said that was the first that had been heard of that idea. It was indeed, the first time it had formed in Dorothy’s mind, and she had spoken spontaneously. Doctors and nurses was not a game they played. But she heard herself answer, and suddenly in her head there existed a grown-up Dorothy, a doctor. Not sweetly benign, but wielding a scalpel. Skinner said that was a fine ambition, though the way was hard still, and he hoped she would come to University College.

“But you must want to be married, Hejjog,” said Phyllis, using a nickname Dorothy disliked. “I do. I want a lovely wedding, and a house just like this, with a rose garden, and I want to bake bread, and wear lovely dresses, and have seven children …”

Phyllis knew she was pretty. She was always being told she was. The young Fludds, Imogen and Pomona, could have been described as beautiful, but they were beautiful in a subdued and uncertain way, certainly unlikely to be Stunners. They were both graceful and awkward in their home-woven linens and hand-enamelled bracelets. Imogen had full breasts, and wore no supporting underwear. She looked plump. She said she had from time to time thought of studying embroidery at the Royal College. Pomona said she might like that, too, or she might like to stay and make tiles in Dungeness. Hedda said she wanted to be a witch. Violet slapped her wrist.

They turned to Florence Cain. Florence had had a governess who had borne in upon her that she had caused her mother’s death, and must devote her life to caring for her father. Florence had not mentioned these admonitions to her father, who was quite unaware of them, and was also well looked after by housekeepers and sappers. He liked to play games with both Julian and Florence, filling brass trays with miscellaneous buttons, beads, bottles, snuffboxes and so on, and asking his children to remember them, describe them and identify them. He took quite as much delight in Florence’s acuity as in Julian’s. Florence did, indeed, look like his lost Giulia, but he thought of the likeness in terms of a Van Eyck angel, serene amongst its crimped hair.

“Well,” he said, “Florence. What will you do?”

“I shall keep house for you,” said Florence, who thought this was understood.

“I hope you won’t. I hope you’ll have a home of your own, and before that, an education. I hope Julian will go to Cambridge, and I hope you will too. Newnham College offers a great deal. I hope you will want to go there.”

Florence was confused. They had never discussed this, and now firm statements were being made, in the middle of a large party. She did not know anything about Newnham College. It was just a name.

“She doesn’t want to be a maiden lady,” said Julian. “A bluestocking.”

This annoyed Florence, who said she didn’t see why she shouldn’t learn something. Julian was going to. She would do so. She fell over her words, and fell silent. She couldn’t imagine what she might try to learn.

That left Griselda. Basil and Katharina were clear about her future. She would be Presented at court, become a debutante, and make an advantageous match. Katharina said she hoped Griselda would be as happily married as her parents.

Griselda twisted a puce bow rhythmically round and round. Her mother tapped her fingers. Griselda had been shocked—deeply shocked—when Dorothy said she wanted to be a doctor. She had not thought of wanting anything beyond release from puce bows. She had an intense secret life, which consisted of reading novels about women reduced to silent attentiveness, full of inner rebellion, or of the effort of resignation. Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Maggie Tulliver. But all these had really wanted love and marriage. None had wanted anything so—so destructive—as to be a doctor. Why had Dorothy never said anything of this intention? Griselda loved Dorothy as Dorothy loved Griselda. She loved Todefright with a passion she dared not admit to, even in Todefright. She came to stay there, and was immediately released from her good clothes and set loose to run wild in the woods. There were books everywhere. She had it in her pale head that she and Dorothy might live in the country together, and never bother with stays and hatpins and button-hooks. That was all she had thought of. And now suddenly Dorothy’s world was black bags, and blood, and sickbeds, and grief and drama, and Griselda was nowhere. Dorothy had a secret. Griselda, her face white, said

“I mean to study. Like Florence. I learn German and French. I mean to study languages.”

Katharina said that Griselda had the best possible teachers, and her progress was exemplary.

Basil remarked to the surrounding bushes that women’s education simply made them dissatisfied. He did not say with what.

Griselda twisted another bow, and her mother tapped her hand. Humphry Wellwood picked up Florian.

“And what do you want to be, Florian?”

“A fox,” said Florian, with total certainty. “A fox, in a foxhole, in a wood.”

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