The Children's Book (24 page)

Philip walked almost ceremoniously along the shingle towards the bank of pebbles at the edge of the land. The first time he came—he came many times—he was eager to reach the water edge, and only took in the human clutter and the tenacious vegetables with sidelong glances. He met no one. It was his adventure, and felt like his place. When he came to the end, he scrambled up the bank with the pebbles rattling and rushing below him, pulling him down with them, so that he went up slowly and with effort. There was the sea, to be seen from the unstable summit. He stood under a sunny sky and saw that it was dark and deep, with patches of wind, and contrary currents, pulling this way and that, and the waves coming in, and in, and shifting and grinding the stones. He thought it would be good to see it in a storm, if he could stand up. He was at the edge of England. He thought about edges, and limits, and he thought about Palissy, studying salt water, and fresh water, springs and runnels on the earth. He hadn’t ever considered the fact that the earth was round, that he stood on the curved surface of a ball. Here seeing the horizon, feeling the precariousness of his standpoint, he suddenly had a vision of the thing—
a huge ball
, flying, and covered mostly with this water endlessly in motion, but
held to the surface
as it hurtled through the atmosphere, and in its dark depths, blue, green, brown, black, it covered other colder earth, and sand and stone, to which the light never reached, where perhaps things lived in the dark and plunged and ate each other, he didn’t know, maybe no one knew. The round earth, with hills and valleys of earth, under the liquid surface. It was pleasant, and frightening, to be alive in the sun.

He sat down on the pebbles, which were warm, and ate the bread and cheese and apple he had brought. He thought he must take a stone back with him. It is an ancient instinct to take a stone from a stony place, to look at it, to give it a form and a life that connect the human being to the mass of inhuman stones. He kept picking them up, and discarding them, charmed by a dark stain, or a vein that glittered, or a hole bored through. He held them, and looked at them, put them down and lost them, gathered up others. The one he finally chose—almost irritably by now, feeling anxious about the huge accumulated bank of rejects—was egg-shaped, with white lines on it, and narrow little bore-holes that
didn’t come all the way through. Hiding places for tiny creatures, sand-spiders or hair-thin worms.

He spent time drawing things—the leaves of the seakale, a ghostly crab-shell, a piece of bleached driftwood, just for the pleasure of looking and learning. Now and then he looked furtively at the water, to see if it had changed—it always had. He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

He returned often, and extended his exploration also across the Marsh, discovering the Norman churches perched in sheets of marshy water, kept from foundering by dykes and ditches. Once he saw, from the height of the pebble bank, on a windy day, the bent figure of Benedict Fludd, struggling along at the water’s edge, shuffling his feet amongst the stones, gripping his hat. He appeared to be shouting at the sea. Philip did not hail him, and did not mention later that he had seen him.

He drew, and drew, and drew.

He went to Benedict Fludd, when his sketch-book was full, and showed him designs he had made from his drawings, which he thought might perhaps be worked into tiles. He had an idea for a series. An allover pattern of seakale leaves, and one of tangled seaweed, with keylike forms and plump bladders. A very delicate, lacy pattern, formalised one day when he had seen, outside the lonely church of St. Thomas Becket in Fairfield, that the dykes and the marsh grass were completely infested with crane-flies, long-winged, angular-legged, fragile.

He made a geometric web of their touching bodies. He made another with the pale little balls of the seakale seeds on their separate stalks, and one with fronds of fennel. He got interested in a principle of design that used the underlying geometrical structure of the natural forms to make a new formalised geometry. He marked them out as best he could with soft pencil on greyish furry paper. He said to Fludd that he knew something about pricking out paper designs which could be used to repeat patterns in biscuit, before glazing. But he didn’t know how to make glazes. He knew about pin-dust, which made pea-green, and various things that could be done with manganese. But he didn’t know how to
get that grey-blue-green of the thicker kales. Or the ghost-colour of the crane-flies, which, he said daringly, it would be good to trace over cobalt colours, or maybe a sort of marshy green?

Fludd said he had an eye. He said his paper was rubbish, and was ruining his designs. Philip said it was all he had. Fludd opened a cupboard and thrust several sketch-pads into Philip’s hands, and a box of variegated pens and pencils. He said he thought they might make the tiles. They could try out glazes.

When they had a batch ready for firing, they reloaded the kiln, and sat up all night, feeding it with driftwood and sawn hop-poles. Geraint offered to help, which was unusual. He liked the drama of the cavern of flame and was interested in the product. The firing and the cooling were surprisingly successful. The kiln produced a row of tiles, blue, gold, green and scarlet, with the Dungeness patterns in webs of grey and charcoal and burnt umber over the colours, and another row, in a creamy glaze, with the patterns in crimson and blue and coppery-green. Philip was entranced. Pomona said they were very pretty. Geraint asked if they could make more—a lot more? “It’s not too hard,” said Fludd.

“You could sell them. Supply them. To architects and people. They’d make lovely hearths. It could be a steady income.”

Geraint was only fifteen, but he was in a perpetual anxiety, bordering on rage, about the absence of a steady income. He mentioned the tiles to Frank Mallett when he went for his history lesson. He asked Frank if he knew anyone who might need tiles to decorate a house, or a church. He said that if only there was a place to show the tiles—in Rye, in Winchelsea, in London, how did he know? But he knew it must be
possible
to find a way. My father is so impractical, said Geraint. He’s an artist, he doesn’t make things people can buy. But these tiles Philip has made look very nice and can be repeated, they say, over and over. Papa says they are very original. They may be, I don’t know. But I do know people will
like
them. Only how will they see them?

Frank and Dobbin discussed the matter with Geraint over luncheon. It was Dobbin who had the bright idea of enlisting Miss Dace. She would know people who might be prepared to display a few tiles—very elegantly—in a bay window, or in the window of an art shop, or even a shop that sold fashions. In the end, they might make their
own
window.
Maybe even a London showroom. Dobbin thought back to the Todefright midsummer. He said that Prosper Cain had been there, from South Kensington. He himself had seen Benedict Fludd’s work in the Museum, a wonderful vase, and a kind of dish. Maybe Major Cain might help? When he first came to Purchase House himself, he had hoped to be able to suggest a community there—like Edward Carpenter’s, but different, centred on the art of ceramics. If all went well, he said, delicately skirting the question of Fludd’s problematic temperament, might not Major Cain send funding, and students who would assist, and provide knowledge about buyers for a new range of ceramic work?

Geraint said it all depended on Philip Warren, whether it would last, this time. He had got the kiln going, and designed the tiles.

Dobbin said he was sure Philip would stay, if there was work for him.

And food, said Geraint, and even a living wage. Nobody seems to have thought about
that
. My family thinks it is vulgar to think about money, they think it is too low a thing for them to attend to—but
I know
there isn’t any. There really
isn’t any
. They can’t buy clay, and they’re in debt to the farmer for milk and eggs, and I have to charm the shopkeepers in the most disgusting way to have tea, or coffee, or meat. He brightened. “We might offer the butcher some of the tiles, for his display, in exchange for meat. I am not a vegetarian by choice. I
like meat.”

In November 1895 Olive Wellwood was great with child. She sat at her desk in her usual flowing robes, which still concealed her condition from visitors and small children, and tried to write. She found it hard to write when she was “expecting;” the stranger inside seemed to suck at her energy and confuse the rhythm of sentences in her blood and brain. Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare’s rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet. She never got used to owning these things, never saw them simply as household stuff. They were still less real than the ash pits of Goldthorpe. They still had the quality Aladdin’s palace must have had for him and the princess, when the genie erected it out of nothing. She kept trying to write a story with the title “Safe as Houses,” which would be ironic, because houses were not safe, like the Three Little Pigs’ foolish constructions of straw and wattle, or the house in the Bible builded upon sand. Houses were builded upon money, and Humphry had quarrelled with his rich brother, and abandoned his solid job amongst the ingots in the Bank in Threadneedle Street. Her ever-inventive mind played like light over Banks and turf banks, straw, sand, wattle and square-cut quarried stone, but the story would not come, it was not ready, and she was not ready to inhabit her fear of dispossession.

She loved Todefright as much as she loved any living being, including Humphry and Tom. When she thought of it, it had always two aspects, its carved and crafted presence, doors, windows, chimneys, stairs, and the world she had constructed in, through and under it, the imagined, interpenetrating world, with its secret doors into tunnels, and caverns, the otherworld under the green fairy hill. She imagined her home standing on terrifying strata of underground rocks and ores—flint and clay, coal and schist, basalt and grit, through which snaked rivers and branching tributaries of cold water and gleaming ores—liquid silver and gold—she always imagined them liquid, like quicksilver though she knew they were not.

All writers perhaps have talismanic phrases which represent to them the force, the intrinsic nature of writing. Olive’s was from the ballad tale of True Thomas, who had been taken under the hill by the Queen of Elfland.

She wanted to write that—the wading through blood—the absence of sun and moon, and the roaring of the sea—but she had never done so, for her tales, though they were getting darker and stranger, were meant to be for children. There was a proliferation of Christian stories at that time, about the exemplary deaths of little children, looking upwards to the skipping little angels in the fluffy clouds of heaven. But there was nothing like red blood to the knee. She thought briefly about the coming birth, the blood that would flood, the pain that would gripe, the possibility that the emerging stranger on the flood of blood would be mottled, waxy and inert, a tight-lidded doll, like Rosy. She knew about amniotic fluid—the unborn creature did not
really
float in blood—but blood went to it, her blood, down a livid rope that could give life, or could strangle. These things were not spoken of, or written about. They were therefore more real, and more unreal, intensely, simultaneously.

She needed to keep writing. Todefright’s continuance depended on it. Humphry had sold several articles, on the Randlords, on poverty in the East End, on the desirability of the public ownership of all land. He was giving courses of lectures in Manchester and Tunbridge Wells and Whitechapel, one of them with Toby Youlgreave on Shakespeare’s England, one on local government and one on the history of Britain. He was happy, but he was earning much less than his salary at the Bank. And he was away for days and weeks together. Olive imagined young women staring at him from hard chairs in municipal halls, as she and Violet had stared. She was of two minds about this. She did not like to be touched, when pregnant, and felt practically that there was something to be said for Humphry being distracted. But there was always the risk of a little more than distraction, a public scandal, a wavering of his love, a threat to the safe house.

•  •  •

When she had no ideas for stories, she turned, half-reluctantly, to the secret tales that belonged to Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis and Hedda, rewriting bits of them in easier, public forms, rounded-off and simplified. There was no stated understanding that the secret and private should be inviolate. Tales are tales, Olive told herself, endlessly retold and reforming themselves, like severed worms, or branching rivers of water and metal. The children’s tales contained things taken from other storytellers—her own True Thomas met the Queen of Elfland in her skirt of grass-green silk, and a sinister Mole in Dorothy’s world of shape-shifting animals owed much to Olive’s own excited childhood fear of Andersen’s “Thumbelina.” There were passages she wrote and rewrote, sometimes changing them radically, sometimes hardly altering a word. One of the beginnings of “Tom Underground” had been written some time after the original beginning, which had been the meeting with the Elfland Queen. Maybe she could use it to make a saleable tale and Tom would grimace, and she would say it was not the
same
tale, and would confide in him, woman to man, about the terrors of the Cash Flow.

She took up her pen and began writing, on a new sheet. Blood flowed from heart to head, and into the happy fingertips, bypassing the greedy inner sleeper. She would begin with the baby. Sometimes the baby in the tale was a royal prince, and sometimes a sturdy son of a miner. Today, she settled for the prince.