The Children's Book (3 page)

“It is so strong as it is,” she explained. “It has no need of my imagination.”

“I should have thought it calls upon all our imaginations, the fate of those lost works of art and craft…”

“I am intrigued by your toads and snakes.”

“For a tale of witchcraft? As familiars?”

At this point the door opened, and Julian led Philip Warren in, followed by Tom, who closed it.

“Excuse me, Father. We thought you should know. We found—
him
—hiding away in the Museum stores. In the crypt. I’d been keeping an eye on him and we tracked him down. He was
living
down there.”

Everyone looked at the dirty boy as though, Olive thought, he had risen out of the earth. His shoes had left marks on the carpet.

“What were you doing?” Prosper Cain asked him. He didn’t answer. Tom went to his mother, who ruffled his hair. He offered her the story.

“He makes drawings of the things in the cases. At night he sleeps all alone in the shrine of an old dead saint, where the bones used to be. Amongst gargoyles and angels. In the dark.”

“That’s brave,” said Olive, turning the dark eyes to Philip. “You must have been afraid.”

“Not really,” said Philip, stolidly.

He had no intention of saying what he really felt. This was that if you have slept on one mattress, end to end with five other children—a mattress moreover on which two brothers and a sister had died, neither easily nor peacefully, with nowhere to remove them to—a few old bones weren’t going to worry you. All his life he had had a steady craving for solitude, hardly even named, but never relaxing. He had no idea if other people felt this. On the whole it appeared they did not. In the Museum crypt, in the dark and dust, briefly, this craving had been for the first time satisfied. He was in a dangerous and explosive state of mind.

“Where are you from, young man?” asked Prosper Cain. “I need the whys and the hows. Why are you here, and how did you get into a locked space?”

“I come from Burslem. I work in t’Potteries.” A long pause. “I run off, that’s it, I ran away.” His face was stolid. “Your parents work in the Potteries?”

“Me dad’s dead. He were a saggar-maker. Me mum works in th’ paint shop. All of us work there, one way or another. I loaded kilns.”

“You were unhappy,” said Olive.

Philip considered his inner state. He said “Yes.”

“People were hard on you.”

“They had to be. It weren’t that. I wanted. I wanted to make something…”

“You wanted to make something of your life, of yourself,” Olive prompted. “That’s natural.”

It may have been natural, but it was not what Philip meant. He repeated

“I wanted to make something…”

His mind’s eye saw an unformed mass of liquescent mud. He looked around, like a baited bear, and saw the flaming de Morgan lustre bowl on the mantelshelf. He opened his mouth to comment on the glaze and decided against it.

Tom said “Won’t you show us your drawings?” He said to his mother “He used to show the lady students, they liked them, they gave him bread…”

Philip undid his satchel and brought out his sketch-book. There was the Candlestick with its coiling dragons and poised, wide-eyed little men. Sketch after sketch, all the intricacies of the writhing and biting and stabbing. Tom said

“That’s the little man I liked, the elderly one with the thin hair and the sad look.”

Prosper Cain turned the pages. Stone angels, Korean gold ornaments for a crown, a Palissy dish in all its ruggedness, one of the two definitely authentic specimens.

“What are these?” he asked, turning more pages.

“Those are just my own ideas.”

“For what?”

“Well, I thought salt-glazed stoneware. Or mebbe earthenware, that page. I were drawing the metal to get the feel of it. I don’t know metal. I know clay. I know a bit about clay.”

“You have a fine eye,” said Prosper Cain. “A very fine eye. You were using the Collection as it is intended to be used, to study design.”

Tom drew a sigh of relief. The story was to have a good ending.

“Would you like to study in the Art School?”

“I dunno. I want to make something…”

He was suddenly at the end of his resources, and began to sway. Prosper Cain was still studying the drawings, and said, without looking up,

“You must be hungry. Ring for Rosie, Julian, and tell her to bring fresh tea.”

“I am always hungry,” said Philip, suddenly loudly, with twice the force of his earlier remarks. He had not meant it to be funny, but because he was truly about to be fed, they all took it as a joke, and laughed merrily together.

“Sit down, boy. This isn’t an interrogation.”

Philip looked doubtfully at the flame and peacock silk cushions.

“They’ll clean. You look all in.
Sit down.”

•  •  •

Rosie, the parlourmaid, made several journeys up the narrow stairs, bringing trays with porcelain cups and saucers, a cakestand with a solid block of fruitcake, a platter of various kinds of sandwich, delicately designed both to appeal to a lady and to nourish growing boys (cucumber slivers in some, wedges of potted meat in others). Then she brought a dish of tartlets, a teapot, a teakettle, a cream jug. She was a wiry small person in starched cap and apron, about as old as Philip and Julian. She set everything out on occasional tables, put the kettle on the hearth, bobbed at Major Cain and went downstairs again. Prosper Cain asked Mrs. Wellwood to pour. He was amused to see Philip raise his cup to his eye to study the shepherdesses on flowered meadows around it.

“Minton porcelain, Sèvres-style,” Prosper said. “An abomination in the eyes of William Morris, but I have a weakness for ornament…”

Philip put the cup down on the table at his elbow, and did not answer. His mouth was full of sandwich. He was trying to eat daintily, and he was
horribly
hungry, he was ravenous. He tried to chew slowly. He gulped. They all watched him benignly. He chewed, and blushed under the dirt. He was close to tears. They were aliens. His mother painted the borders of cups like these, with fine brushes, day after day, proud of her repetitive faultlessness. Olive Wellwood, smelling of roses, stood over him, handing him slabs of fruitcake. He ate two, though he thought it was probably impolite. But the starch and the sugar did their work. His unnatural tension and wariness gave way to pure fatigue.

“And now?” said Prosper Cain. “What shall we do with this young man? Where shall he sleep tonight, and what should he do with himself?”

Tom was put in mind of David Copperfield’s arrival at Betsey Trot-wood’s house. A boy. Coming to a real home, out of dirt and danger. He was about to echo Mr. Dick—give him a bath—and managed not to. It would have been most insulting.

Olive Wellwood turned the question to Philip

“What do you
want
to do?”

“Work,” said Philip. It was an easy answer and it was largely right.

“Not to go back?”

“No.”

“I think—if Major Cain agrees—you should come home now, with me and Tom, for the weekend. I imagine he has no thought of prosecuting
you for trespass. This weekend is Midsummer Eve, and we are having a midsummer party at our house in the country. We are a large family, and friendly, and one more or less makes no difference.” She turned to Prosper Cain.

“And I hope that you too will come over to Andreden from Iwade, for midsummer magic, and bring Julian, and Florence too, to join the young folk.”

Prosper Cain bent over her hand, mentally cancelled a card party and said he would—they all would—be delighted. Tom looked at their captured boy, to see if he was pleased, but he was staring at his feet. Tom was not entirely sure about Julian coming to his party. He found him intimidating. It would be good to have Philip, if he would consent to enjoy himself. He thought of adding his voice to his mother’s, and was embarrassed, and did not.

They took the train to Andreden, in the Kentish Weald, and took a fly at the station. Philip sat opposite Tom and his mother, who leaned against each other. Philip’s eyes kept closing, but Olive was explaining things to him, to which he knew he should attend. Andred was the old British name for the forest. Andreden meant a swine pasture in the forest. Their house was called Todefright. In fact they had changed it from Todsfrith, but the change was etymologically sound. Fryth, in the old language of the Weald, was a word for scrubland on the edge of a forest. The local Kentish word for that was “fright.” They supposed Tod meant toad. Philip asked stolidly, were there any toads, then? Lots, said Tom. Big fat ones. Spawn in the duckpond. Frogs too, and newts, and tiddlers.

They drove between hawthorn and hazel hedges, along curling lanes between overhanging woods of beech, and birch, and yew. Philip had felt the shift in the air as the train pulled out of the London pall. You could see the edge of the darkness. It was not as bad as the thick dark air full of hot grit and melted chemicals that poured from the tall chimneys and bottle ovens in Burslem. His lungs felt nervous and overdilated. Olive and Tom did not take the fresh air for granted. They exclaimed ritually about how good it was to get out of the dirt. Philip felt dirt was engrained in him.

Todefright was an old Kentish farmhouse, built of stone and timber. It had meadows and a river before it, woods rising uphill behind it, and a wide view to the high edge of the Weald across the river. The house had been tactfully extended and modernised by Lethaby, in the Arts and Crafts style, respecting (and also creating) odd-shaped windows and eaves, twisting stairs, nooks, crannies and exposed roof-beams. The front door, solid oak, opened into a modern version of a mediaeval hall, with settles and alcoves, a large hand-crafted dining-table, and a long dresser, shining with lustreware. Beyond this were a (small) panelled library, which was also Olive’s study, and a billiard-room, which was Humphry’s, when he was at home. There were many outhouses—kitchens, sculleries, guest cottages, stables with haylofts, inhabited by scratching hens and nesting swallows. A wide, turning staircase rose out of the hall to the upper floors.

A large number of people, adults and children, came running and strolling to welcome Olive and Tom. Philip took them in. A short,
dark-haired woman in a loose mulberry-coloured dress, printed with brilliant nasturtiums, was carrying a baby—maybe a year old—whom she handed to Olive to be kissed and hugged, even before Olive had taken off her coat. Two servants, one motherly, one girlish, stood by to take the coats. Two young ladies in identical indigo aprons, long hair falling over their shoulders, one dark, one tawny, younger than Philip, younger than Tom, but not by much. A little girl in a robin-red apron, who shoved past the others, and grabbed Olive’s skirts. A little boy, with blond curls, and a Fauntleroy lace collar, who clung to the mulberry lady’s skirts, and hid his face in them. Olive buried her nose in the neck of the baby, Robin, who was reaching for her poppies and hat-pin.

“I am like a tree with birds in it. This is Philip, who has come to stay for a little while. Philip, the two big girls are Dorothy and Phyllis. This is my sister, Violet Grimwith, who makes everything work here—everything that
does
work, that is. This little demon is my clever Hedda, who cannot keep still. The one being bashful is Florian, who is three. Come out and say hello to Philip, Florian.”

Florian held on to Violet Grimwith’s skirts, and was distinctly heard to say, into the cloth, that Philip smelled bad. Violet picked him up, shook him, and kissed him. He kicked at her hips. Olive said

“Philip has left home, and come a long way. He needs a bath, and some clean clothes—and a bed made up in Birch Cottage, if Cathy could see to that. And Ada might perhaps fill a bath for him—go with Ada, Philip, first things first—and when you are refreshed, we will see about supper and plan-making.”

Violet Grimwith said she would look out something for Philip to wear. She thought he was too big to get into anything belonging to Tom. But there might be a shirt, in Humphry’s weekend drawer, and even maybe breeches …

Philip mutely followed Ada, who was the cook, into the servants’ part of the house, and then through the back, into the stable-yard and across to the guest cottage, which had a downstairs room with a sink and a pump, and an upstairs loft, reached by a ladder, where Cathy could be heard, thumping bedclothes. Philip stood awkwardly. Ada fetched a tin bath, two jugs of hot water, a jug of cold water, soap and a towel. Then she left him. He took off the top layer of his clothes, and tentatively mixed some of the hot and cold water in the bath. Then he took off the
remaining protection of his underpants and singlet. He was not used to baths. He was used to a quick sluicing under a cold communal pump. He lifted a leg to straddle the rim of the bath. Violet Grimwith came in without knocking. Philip reached for the towel to cover himself, and stumbled with a splash into the water, barking his shin on the edge. He made a choked, wailing cry.

“You don’t need to mind me,” said Miss Grimwith. “Let me see that scrape. There’s nothing I haven’t seen. I’ve nursed all their little wounds, all their lives, I’m the one they turn to, when they
need
to, and so I hope will you, young man.”

Much to his alarm, she advanced on him, bearing the soap, and a cannikin of warm water, which without warning she poured over his thick hair, so that jets sprang into his eyes and over his shoulders.

“Shut your eyes,” she advised him. “Keep ’em tight shut, I’ll get to the
roots
of it, I will.”

She applied soap and water to his hair as she spoke, pommelling and twisting and then massaging the skin of his scalp, probing with thin fingers for the taut muscles in his neck and shoulders.

“Let go,” said the surprising woman. “We’ll have every cranny clean and lively, wait and see.”

She spoke to him as though he was a baby, or just possibly a fully grown and complicit man. Philip decided to keep his eyes shut, in every sense of shut. He tightened his sphincters, pushed his chin into his chest, and felt the fingers and palms slap and maul him. Under the water they came, accidentally or on purpose, briefly fluttering against what he thought of as his whistler.