The Children's Book (13 page)

He bowed. His pale hair flipped over his face. He stepped behind the box.

•  •  •

An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth, composite whole. The world inside the box, a world made of silk, satin, china mouldings, wires, hinges, painted backcloths, moving lights and musical notes, must come alive with its own laws of movement, its own rules of story. And the watchers, wide-eyed and greedy, distracted and supercilious, preoccupied, uncomfortable, tense, must become one, as a shoal of fishes with huge eyes and flickering fins becomes one, wheeling this way and that in response to messages of hunger, fear or delight. August’s flute was heard, and some were ready to listen and some were not. The curtains opened on a child’s bedroom. He sat against his pillows. His nurse, in comfortable grey, bustled about him, and her shadow loomed over him on the white wall.

She told the small Nathanael about the Sandman. “He steals the eyes of naughty little children,” she said, comfortably, “and feeds them to his own children, who live in a nest on the moon, and open their beaks like owlets.”

There was a heavy tap-tap of slow feet ascending the stairs. The backcloth showed the shadow of the turning of the banister, and the rising head and shoulders of the shadow of the old man, hook-nosed, hump-backed, claw-handed, stump, stump, his coat-skirts swinging.

The puppet-child pulled the blankets over his head, and the stage darkened.

In the next scene Nathanael’s father, the alchemist, and his horrible visitor, Dr. Copelius, bent over their secret work in a cauldron. The stage was full of shimmering firelight. Nathanael hid, and was discovered. Copelius waved his ebony stick. The father fell dead and crumpled into the flames. Smoke rose.

Happier scenes followed. The grown Nathanael, his friend Lothar, and Lothar’s sister Clara, met and embraced in a garden. Clara had spun-gold hair and a blue silk dress. The garden was full of roses and lilies and blue light. They danced to flute music.

Then Nathanael was in his study in Rome, surrounded by tiny books, a globe, an astrolabe, the articulated skeletons of tiny creatures which danced furiously together when the room was empty of humans. Snakes, rats, lizards, cats. They gave the pleasure that the miniature gives, the tiny perfect replica of something that arouses an inexplicable
delight in the onlooker. Nathanael in this pleasant place was visited by the Copelius-puppet in disguise, wearing a cloak, a brimmed hat and an eye-shade, carrying a pedlar’s tray of glinting glass eyes and tiny tubes which were spyglasses. Nathanael bought a spyglass. When he looked into it, holding it to his eye in his white china fist, a circle of rosy light appeared, moving as he moved his head.

And then, on one side of the stage, there was a female figure in a window, in a rosy halo, and Nathanael at the opposite side, staring through his glass. She wore a plain white silky dress, which the light filled with pink flares and sanguine folds. She moved very little—she raised her little hand to her calm round mouth, to cover a yawn, she turned her head modestly down.

The ball scene, which followed, was a triumph. A musical box played, invisible. Couples whirled across the stage, gliding smoothly in a waltz, capering extravagantly in polka and hornpipe, curtseying and bowing. Nathanael danced with Olimpia. The puppetmaster, with extraordinary skill, created simultaneously the agitated movements of his hero, and the mechanical glide of his beloved. The male puppet rushed busily around the female, ushering, supporting, interrogating, bowing over her hand, trembling with emotion. She repeated her series of restricted gestures, the graceful inclination of the head, the raising of the elegant hand to the pink, round mouth.

The curtains closed, and reopened. Nathanael burst into the room where Olimpia’s princely father was quarrelling with Dr. Copelius. They menaced each other with ebony canes. Copelius leaped into the air like a furious frog. They laid hands on Olimpia, who lay still, draped over a satin chair. They grasped her, one by the neck, one by the feet. They tugged. Olimpia trembled, but did not struggle; the representation of her minimal movement was very fine. Suddenly and terribly she came apart in their hands, exploding all over the stage, her head flying upwards with floating hair, her trunk flying sideways, extruding a coil of metal wires. The prince and the doctor menaced each other with an arm and a leg. Hedda clapped her hands, and an infant anarchist began to cry and had to be comforted. Nathanael collapsed in despair.

Lothar and Clara reappeared, lifted him, restored him to life. They went walking on a church tower, against battlements. Nathanael had his arm around Clara’s blue waist. And then Nathanael’s shadow rose huge in the limelight as the blue sky darkened and began to menace him, independent of him, larger than life. He turned to face it, and
began a gyratory, jerky dance of shadow-boxing, like a hanged man on the end of his strings. Lothar took hold of Clara and led her away from the maddened whirl. Nathanael’s movements became wilder, jerkier, less and less human, and his shadow clawed at him out of the backcloth. He leaped up, cycling his legs in emptiness, for a moment in flight and weightless, and then plunged over the parapet to his doom.

Everyone applauded. Tom felt winded, as though he had been in a fight, and lost. He looked furtively at Julian, Charles and Geraint, to see how they had responded to the play, and saw that they were all smiling and clapping enthusiastically, so he too clapped. Philip clapped. He had been interested above all by the china faces of the characters. How did you decide, when a character went through so much, and could have only one expression, what that expression should be? He could see how Dr. Copelius could do well with a mouth that both smiled and sneered, but Nathanael was exactly right, serious and not strong, delicately thin and not quite smiling. His mad dance at the end had showed more of the shadow than the solid face. That was clever. And the
difference
between the “real” puppet and Olimpia the puppet-automaton was wonderfully done. To glide with a caricature of the gliding all puppets did—that was something. He clapped.

Dorothy hadn’t liked
Cinderella
, and didn’t like this. Her head was full of the idea of spiders, and strings, and stings. She thought of the clever fingers controlling the story and its characters, and she thought, only half-consciously, of all such control as dangerous and to-be-resisted. She enjoyed the disintegration of Olimpia. She told herself she couldn’t see the point, but she could, and didn’t like it.

Griselda did like it. She felt a freedom in the otherworld inside the box, where things were livelier, more beautiful and more terrible than the mundane. Clara’s blue silk robe was magical in its tiny pleats where her own Miss Muffet dress was a monstrosity. Olimpia was an excellent parody of, and commentary on, the world of calling-cards and teacups. There were better things in the world than she was being offered. The puppetmaster knew that.

He came out, Anselm Stern, with August Steyning, from behind the velvet box that now concealed his creatures, and bowed to his audience, shyly, without meeting their eyes. Mrs. Betts brought more
refreshments. Anselm Stern disappeared again. Griselda looked at Dorothy, who looked cross.

“I’d like to look at the puppets. Shall we?”

“I’m sure he’d be pleased if you did. I don’t really want to.”

Griselda hesitated.

“Go on,” said Dorothy. “He’ll be pleased.”

Griselda went and stood beside Anselm Stern, who was sorting and winding the wires, and putting the little figures, now inanimate, into their boxes or beds. They stared out of their pale faces with black intense eyes, in no particular direction. Griselda said

“Ich danke Ihnen, Herr Stern, ich danke Ihnen für eine grosse Freude. Das war ausgezeichnet.”

The puppetmaster looked up and smiled.

“Du sprichst Deutsch?”

“Meine Mutter ist aus Deutschland. Ich lerne nur, ich kann nicht gut sprechen. Aber die Sprache gefällt mir. Und die Märchen. Ist es möglich
, Der Sandmann
zu lesen?”

“Natürlich. Es ist ein Meisterwerk von E. T. A. Hoffmann. Ich schicke dir das Buch, sobald ich nach Hause komme. Deutsch mit Hoffmann zu lernen, das ist etwas.”

He stood up, and rather formally offered her his hand. Then he took a small notebook and a pencil from his pocket, and asked her to write her name and address in it. Griselda was elated, both because she had had a real conversation in German, and because she was to receive a book of fairytales.

Arthur Dobbin was thinking about Philip. He wanted to suggest to someone that Philip should go back with the Fludds and himself to Purchase House. Benedict Fludd was in need of an assistant. Dobbin had hoped to be that assistant, and had failed. The clay squirmed to shapelessness under his fingers. His kilns aborted. Fludd had told him, when he left for Todefright, not to bother to come back. He wanted to go back. Fludd had genius, and Dobbin wanted to be near it. He wanted to take Philip as a peace-offering. He considered asking Seraphita Fludd, but she was not in the habit of making decisions; she endured, stately
and smiling. Her daughters appeared to be like her. Geraint might listen, but Dobbin sensed that Geraint did not like him. And Geraint was afraid of his father’s moods, like everyone else. There was also Prosper Cain, who came to Purchase House for advice on ceramics, since Fludd would not go to him. Dobbin found decision-making hard. He watched Philip watch the puppets, intent and thoughtful. Dobbin wanted to be part of a wider group, a fellowship. He looked at Philip with a preliminary love. Lydd in the Romney Marshes was a perfect place for a community, even if Fludd was a difficult figurehead. Dobbin could smooth things. He thought that might be his vocation.

He had come to Lydd by accident. Like many of his kind he had changed his life as a result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe. Carpenter, with his working-class friend George Merrill, lived a life of studied simplicity, cultivating the earth, wearing homespun and homemade sandals, sunbathing and windbathing naked to the elements. Dobbin had heard Carpenter lecture, in Sheffield, on the evils of civilisation, and the way to cure them. Dobbin had responded violently to the anarchist saint’s reasonable charisma.

He was the plump son of a doctor’s widow. He was dutifully studying medicine, as his father would have wished, and continually failed the medical exams. He imagined, timidly, passionate friendships with fellow students, but was almost pathologically dumb with embarrassment. When he heard Carpenter, he knew that the only answers were a complete change of life, or self-slaughter. He thought he was not imaginative. He had no idea where to look for a new life.

Some of this he managed to mutter to Carpenter, over the convivial beer and smoke after the lecture. Carpenter recognised him for what he was, and invited him to visit Milthorpe.

There he enjoyed George Merrill’s salmon pie, and watched the two men quietly knitting. The house was occupied by a shifting population of seekers, idealists and the lost. There were Cambridge men and farmworkers, emancipated women and unsatisfied clerics. Dobbin gave up medicine and got a job in a pharmacy. At Milthorpe one summer he bathed naked in the stream with a gipsyish wanderer called Martin Calvert. Calvert had trained for the priesthood and given it up. He had been a lay member of a religious community in Glamorgan. He had learned to weave at a Crafts community in Norfolk. When Dobbin met him, he had decided to be a potter. To work with the stuff of the earth itself, he said. Dobbin was immediately taken with this idea of an art of
the earth. They noticed, blushing and laughing as they bathed, that their members were erect and swaying in the water—“like charmed snakes” Martin laughed, and Dobbin was charmed.

They went on a walking tour, in search of a master of ceramics. They went to the South Kensington Museum and saw vessels made by Benedict Fludd. Martin Calvert said that this man was a master, and they might try to find him. Dobbin saw the perfection of the pots, through Martin’s eyes, as Martin described them, the proportions, the subtle glaze, the authority.

They walked south, in search of Fludd. They found him in Purchase House, a partly derelict Elizabethan manor, hidden in woodland in the flat marshy plain beyond Lydd. Martin spoke for both of them, with engaging enthusiasm. Fludd was in an expansive mood, and accepted their offer of help with a firing. The firing was a disaster. Fludd’s mood darkened. He cursed them. Dobbin was almost sure that he uttered a formal curse, out of a commination service. The next morning, Martin was not there. He had taken his pack, crept out before dawn and disappeared.

Dobbin stayed where he was, and waited for a message, which did not come. He avoided Benedict Fludd who was now in semi-retreat—and tried to be helpful to Seraphita and her family. He couldn’t make pots, but he could cook. He cooked fresh fish, and vegetable pasties, and custard tarts. The Fludd women could not cook, and they were at the time too poor to employ a cook. They accepted him. His heart was broken, but he was too genuinely humble to make much of it.

This continued for six months or so. Fludd mostly pretended not to see Dobbin, and Seraphita gave him small sums of money to do shopping and repairs. One day, he went into the village church. The marshes are spread with imposing churches, built for rich farmers and seafarers before the sea receded and the waterways silted up. This church was dedicated to St. Edburga. To Dobbin’s surprise it had a small Burne-Jones window, showing the saint in a graceful white gown, barefoot amongst flowery meadows. Dobbin knelt down under her grass-and-golden light, put his head in his hands, and found himself weeping, with tears spouting between his fingers.

Someone came up behind him, touched him gently, and offered help.

That was how Arthur Dobbin met Frank Mallett, the curate at St. Edburga’s. He was thin, blond and skinny, with a pretty little moustache,
and a Shakespearean pointed beard. He was a bachelor and lived in a cottage in the village of Puxty. He was not Martin, and not Edward Carpenter. In some ways—shyness, lack of self-respect—he resembled Dobbin, so that he easily abandoned the roles of counsellor or rescuer, and became a friend. They talked of the dream of a community or fellowship, of the new life that could start in the draggled barns and outhouses of Purchase House to the benefit of everyone.