The Children's Book (12 page)

“I saw you enchanting those men. You can’t help it. The German and the don, the playwright and the soldier from the Museum, you gave them all a look—”

“There’s no harm in that. Whereas it really isn’t proper to tell little girls like Griselda, that green dresses were for prostitutes, because they were tumbled in the grass.”

“Did I do that? I have seriously drunk too much. I shouldn’t think Griselda knows what a prostitute is. She doesn’t live in reforming circles.”

“Well, Dorothy knows, she can hardly help it. So I imagine Griselda does.”

“Etta Skinner will be enrolling them to promote pro-prostitute leaflets.”

“You have drunk too much.”

She was plucking the wilting wired flowers, one by one, from her hair. He stepped out of his clothes and stood naked, slightly aroused, reaching for his nightshirt. This was white cambric, embroidered by Violet with bulrushes and arum lilies. She had made him a nightcap, with gold chrysanthemums. He never wore this, but it hung on the bedpost, and perhaps Violet supposed that he wore it.

“I drank too much because of Basil. He knows, now. He always knew, I suspect, but it wasn’t in the open. According to his lights what I wrote was not honest.”

Olive said, easily, “You did what you thought right.”

“I don’t know. I did what I felt I must do. Now, you know, I think I shall have to resign from the Bank. For noble and ignoble reasons, both. I think I must. I don’t know how we shall pay Tom’s school fees.”

“And what will you do?” said Olive, pausing in the act of unbuttoning.

“I shall write. I shall use my pen. I shall write for journals. I shall write books. I can get things done, in the world.”

Olive resumed her unbuttoning. She stepped out of her underwear.

“I shall write harder. I am doing better than adequately. I shall work harder.”

“You like that idea. The woman as breadwinner.”

“I do like it, yes. We both do, I think.”

“We make a good partnership. Fortunately.”

Olive had put on her nightdress, white and not embroidered by Violet.

“Maybe too good. This is the wrong moment, but I have to tell you. There will be another little open mouth. I am almost sure.”

Humphry tilted his beard up, laughed, and embraced his wife. She could feel him erect, under the bulrushes.

“Clever girl. Clever Humphry. How good we are at what we do, isn’t it so, creamy Olive?”

“You needn’t be smug. You know it has dangers. You know it will be an expense. It won’t be so easy for me to win bread.”

“We’ve love enough for another. We’ll find a way, we always do.”

He stroked her flanks, smiling.

“I expect you’re so pleased, because you’re still drunk. How shall we manage?”

“Violet will take over. You will rest and write. And I shall change the world, one of these days.”

From his moonlit room, leaning on the windowsill, Philip could see their forms, moving across their window-pane, graceful, obscurely occupied. He did not know them. He was outside, peering in. That suited him. He watched their lamp go out, and stood still for some time, looking at the moon. Then he took his towel, and lay down, and pleased himself again, shivering with brief delight in his solitude. Then he was limp, and drifted into sleep.

Nutcracker Cottage, like many English things, appeared at first sight to be an instance of pure whimsy, but was in fact more complicated. It was a restored labourer’s cottage, with new thatch, and small recessed windows in thick white walls. The front garden had long beds along a flagged path, thick with flowers—hollyhocks, delphiniums, foxgloves and pinks, sweet williams and bachelors’ buttons, with a haze of self-sown forget-me-nots. The front door opened directly into the parlour, with walls covered by what William Morris had called “honest whitewash, on which sun and shadow play so pleasantly.” The parlour had been made by knocking two rooms into one. At one end was an alcove-study papered with Morris’s pink and gold honeysuckle, and containing a plain table. There was little furniture—a heavy dining-table, some heavy, mediaeval-looking chairs, a modern box piano. The plainness was contradicted, to an extent, by a scattering of incongruous pots, on the mantelshelf, in the hearth, on the windowsill. There were lunatic mugs with smiling faces, a piece of fine Italian gold and indigo majolica, decorated with arabesques and maenads, an imposing piece of Sèvres-style Minton, in that violent dark sugar-pink, with Pierrot and Columbine on an oval plaque amongst roses and clematis. Standing in a corner, four feet high, was an object that amazed Philip and was immediately identified by Prosper Cain as a version of the Prometheus Vase shown by Minton at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Prometheus in fleshy earthenware sprawled on the gleaming turquoise dome of the lid. A green-gold eagle perched on his thigh and belly, and tore at his crimson liver. The tall handles were blond-bearded chained Titans in mail shirts. The body of the vase was painted with fury, a whirling scene of mounted, turbaned oriental hunters and hounds, spearing a hippopotamus at bay, its painted mouth wide open, displaying tusks, molars, and a coral tongue and throat. At the foot of the vase snakes were coiled and intertwined with acanthus leaves. Philip stared. He could not begin to comprehend the glazes, let alone the subject-matter.

The puppet theatre was already set up on the dining-table, which had been displaced to make room for the audience. It was a large, black lacquered box, veiled by black velvet curtains, with imitation onyx
pillars and a gilded architrave. The table itself was covered by a velvet pall, underneath which the puppet caskets were stacked.

August Steyning offered everyone tea in the garden. His housekeeper, Mrs. Betts, was arranging sandwiches and an urn on the round stone table on the lawn. The garden was surrounded by trees—a walnut, an ash, hawthorns, sloes—and fenced, with a wicket-gate that led to the wild, a little wood on a rising hillside, in which, Steyning said, he had hidden surprises for children bored by adult talk.

Anselm Stern was wearing a soot-coloured, not-entirely-British Norfolk jacket over his dark drainpipe trousers. He stood with his teacup (Minton, Dresden shape, painted with pansies) and spoke in German to Vasily Tartarinov. He was hesitant in English, but became rapid and passionate in German. Tartarinov, much taller, wearing his working smock, bent over him, speaking softly and insistently. The English formed an impression of conspiratorial secrets, partly because the only words they understood were the names of the recently assassinated French President, Carnot, and the guillotined anarchist, Vaillant, who had thrown a nail-bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. Yet a few moments later, Tartarinov joined authoritatively in a discussion about royal treasuries between Olive Wellwood and Prosper Cain with some knowledgeable observations about the gold and silver objects in the possession of the Tsar. Etta Skinner, wearing a shapeless flowing apple-green tent, took her teacup gingerly and stared critically at the sandwich plate, which had the Three Graces dancing on a floral meadow, surrounded by sugar-pink. August Steyning smiled at her. He said she probably thought he should have earthenware plates, bearing the marks of the fingers that made them, was that not William Morris’s diktat? Etta said that was indeed her preference, but everyone had a right to his own taste. August said he liked things absurd and fragile, and that the skill of the painter and gilder was as much skill as that of the moulder. Philip stood, looking sullen, taking in the argument, thinking of his mother. Prosper Cain said he had a weakness for Minton who had designed some bold pieces—including the ceramic pillars—for the museum. Olive Wellwood described how, as a small child, she had made up stories about people on teacups.

“We had some precious ones that only came out on Sunday, and feast days, with girls in pink floating petticoats clinging to craggy ledges with
bushes with roots in the air. I gave them all names, and worked out how they got stranded on those stony places, and how they were rescued by eagles, just as the North Wind set about to blow them over…”

When Olive spoke, she made an electric silence around her. She was looking lovely, in a tea-gown of cream Liberty lawn, covered with field flowers, cornflowers, poppies and marguerites. She had a straw hat with a scarlet ribbon. When she saw they were all listening, she laughed, and said

“I still do that. People on plates, sipping from glasses they will never empty, plucking roses they never put in their hair. I imagine them escaping, out of their flat circle. I had an idea about two-dimensional beings trying to locate themselves in a three-dimensional world. And then the three-dimensional beings would enter another dimension in just the same way. Catch glimpses, of other life-forms—”

Anselm Stern said something to Tartarinov about Porzellan-sozialismus.

“Ah, yes, m-m-m,” said Tartarinov. “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s definition of utopian socialism, m-m-m, the pleasant and frangible vista on a teacup. Porcelain socialism.”

“Maybe that is all we are,” said Humphry, ruefully. “Porcelain socialists, or in the case of Etta, earthenware socialists. When the just society comes, we will have quite other ideas of beauty. I agree with Morris, Sèvres is an abomination. I am shocked at you, August.”

“To be frivolous is to be human,” said August. “To be pointlessly skilful is to be human, as far as I can see. I hope you would not consider legislating to prevent me from having a Sèvres vessel.”

Humphry frowned. “We must hope to make a society where nobody wants anything so absurd.”

Etta nodded vehemently. Leslie Skinner said that a new society must produce new patterns, as yet not thought of. Made by craftsmen, not by wage-slaves. Humphry looked round for Philip, but he had sidled away to go back and look at the Prometheus Vase.

The children, most of them, had wandered, as instructed, into the wood. In it they found creatures squatting in hollows, perching on roots, warty toads, scaly lizards, an owl with matted clay feathers and amber glass eyes, a pair of malevolent crows. Tied to their necks and claws were shiny scarlet boxes of sugar flowers, and burnt toffees. They wandered,
nibbling, along a rapid little stream, over a wooden bridge. Hedda had brought the shoeful of manikins, from which she would not be separated.

Philip stayed behind. He wanted to stay inside and study the vase, but came out to be given tea and cake, and found something just as interesting. This was a fountain, which was, like the two-faced jars and mugs indoors, and the grotesque creatures in the wood, the work of the Martin Brothers, which appealed to August Steyning’s theatrical imagination. It was shaped in a series of thick dishes, glazed in muddy greens and browns and occasionally vivid ceramic emerald slime. The stem of it was intertwined roots, serpents, worms and creeping ivies. The dishes were inhabited and clung to by toads and newts and fish with legs.

Behind the column, blending into it, was a figure of Pan, knob-horned, bearded, squinting and grinning, with water pouring down his smooth torso and into the shaggy hide of his haunches and over his cleft hooves. He brandished his pipes, through which water and green vegetable threads dripped, slowly.

Philip pretended to be absorbed in it, and then was.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder.

“I am told you are an expert on pots.”

It was Arthur Dobbin, who had accompanied the Fludd ladies. Philip shrugged and shook his head. He muttered that he come from Five Towns, that was all.

“And what do you make of this monstrous creation?”

Philip said it was clever. It was interesting. It was difficult, he should think. Dobbin gave him a little lecture on the Martin Brothers and their strange craft. He said he had been told Philip wanted to make pots. Was this right? Was this why the fountain intrigued him?

Philip said guardedly that yes, he did want to make pots.

“Not like this, exactly. This is—alive and very clever—but I want—I want—”

He remembered that Dobbin was associated with the aqueous pot at Todefright.

“I work with a potter,” Dobbin informed him. “I work with Benedict Fludd, the husband of that lady. I try to help, but he finds me inept. I believe in hand-crafts, but my talent isn’t—isn’t for working with clay. Mr. Fludd is not a patient man. I do believe he is a genius. I should like to encourage a community of artists—that is my dearest ambition—it would be easier if I were more skilful with my hands.”

His tone was a strange mixture of cheerful enthusiasm and stolid gloom. He squeezed Philip’s shoulder. Philip said

“I should like to see Mr. Fludd’s work. I saw the pot—back at the house—I saw it—I’ve never seen anything better—”

Dobbin squeezed again, and relaxed.

“Where do you go from here?”

“I dunno. They seem to be thinking about it.”

“I might be able to help.”

August Steyning came out of his house with a large drum, and beat a tattoo, proclaiming in his high, clear voice, that the show was about to begin.

When they were all indoors, and seated, he stood before the curtained box, and spoke to them.

They were about to see the Sternbild Marionettes, from Munich, perform E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
Der Sandmann
. August wanted to offer a word or two about marionettes. Many of those present would know Punch and Judy. He himself had his own Punch and Judy. They, and their German cousin, Kasperl, were honest artists, with ancient traditions. They were glove puppets, and glove puppets were of the earth, earthy. They spring up from below, like underground beings, gnomes or dwarves, they belabour each other with cudgels and go back into the depths, of their booths, of our human consciousness. Marionettes, by contrast, are creatures of the upper air, like elves, like sylphs, who barely touch the ground. They dance in geometric perfection in a world more intense, less hobbledehoy, than our own. Heinrich von Kleist, in a suggestive and mysterious essay, claims daringly that these figures perform more perfectly than human actors. They exhibit the laws of movement; their limbs rise and fall in perfect arcs, according to the laws of physics. They have—unlike human actors—no need to charm, or to exact sympathy. Kleist goes so far as to say that the puppet and God are two points on a circle. The earliest shadow puppets were in fact gods, the presences of gods. “I found in Amsterdam some exemplars of the oriental shadow-figures, the Wayang Golek, whose movements were made by trained priests. Herr Stern and I have studied these marvellous beings, and introduced some refinements into his German figures.”