The Children's Book (39 page)

Here she was briefly foiled by her own ingenuity. How could he unwind her, if her bindings were poisonous? He did it with his magic blade, which hissed where it came into contact with the liquid, and chipped away at the bits that had solidified. She could see it now. The bindings lay in writhing little strips, and solid stuff like clay or porcelain, like broken fingernails. When all the wrappings were removed, she stepped out of her shroud, a white-haired woman with a bent head, and hunched shoulders, who looked for a moment too old and exhausted to survive her release. She stumbled forward, and the young hero caught her in his arms, and steadied her, and suddenly found that she was a youthful fairy, her snowy hair full of unearthly life and light, her emerald eyes glittering with magic. And then again, she was old, white-lipped, her skin drawn over her bones.

She told him she was a powerful fairy, who had gone Under the Hill to help those whose shadows had been stolen, and had been snared by the dark Weaving Queen down there, and bound in dead shadow-matter, sucked dry of life by the Weavers. If there had been enough to cover her eyes, she would have become as they were. But she still had a little power, in her look.

Olive stopped, dissatisfied. The image was a good image, but the Underground story was not the right place for it. And the presence of this—apparently adult—fairy seemed to her to weaken, not to strengthen, the
conflict between the white Queen of Elfland and the dark Queen of the Abyss. She had somehow been unable to put in female characters who were not those two. They would not come to life, boy readers would find them sissy, they messed up the thread of the narrative.

Nevertheless the idea of the good creature bound in dead shadow-matter was too good to lose.

So she rewrote the passage, taking away the height and age and beauty of the fairy, and substituting an air spirit, fine-limbed, with hair like pale gold sunlight (and no visible sex, she referred to it as an it). She was fascinated by the Paracelsian earth spirits—sylphs, gnomes, undines and salamanders. But as she had begun consciously to craft Underground, she had taken to excising any words or images that too easily made short-cuts to classical mythology and aroused all sorts of lazy, facile responses she didn’t want her readers to make. She wanted her readers—Tom first, but she was very vaguely thinking of others—to see her air creature, as she had invented it. She made its hair spiky, as though the wind was in it, transparent as ice, but warm with sunlight. She gave it veins and sinews with blue of the sky and gold of the sun coiling in them. Its bones too were transparent. Its eyes? Uncanny yellow-gold eyes, with a black sunspot in the centre. She thought about it, and wondered, if she called it a Silf, whether getting rid of the Greek y and ph would steer away the classical associations. Silf was close to Elf, an English word, softened.

The Silf neither staggered with helpless age, nor lay like a ripe woman in the boy’s arms. It danced about like a marsh light, celebrating its freedom, and warned the Company of unexpected dangers lurking in the next passages. It said that if it were Tom, it would go back whilst it could, and thought he could subsist perfectly happily without his shadow, in a perpetual noonday. It said “Maybe your Shadow won’t want to come up to the air. Maybe it will want to stay with the gnomes and salamanders.” Tom said “My shadow is mine.”

“Maybe it no longer thinks so,” the Silf said, and Olive wondered wildly what were the implications of that remark, which she had inserted on an impulse from nowhere.

At the turn of the century, the young were about to be adults, or some of them were, and the elders looked at the young, with their fresh skins and new graces and awkwardnesses with a mixture of tenderness, fear and desire. The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.

Prosper Cain’s family appeared to be unproblematic, indeed hopeful. Julian went to Cambridge in December 1899 and took the entrance exam for King’s College, where he was awarded a scholarship. He would start in the autumn of 1900. Florence was studying for Cambridge higher certificates in several subjects, and was talking of studying languages at Newnham College. The newly named Victoria and Albert Museum was in a turmoil of building and a turmoil of reorganisation; arguments raged between those who saw the museum as a “collection of curios,” and those who saw its primary task as the academic education of craftsmen and teachers. The Royal College of Art, which had replaced the National Training School, of which Walter Crane had been Principal in 1898–9, was now ruled by a Council of Art, four experts from the Art Workers Guild, full of Arts and Crafts idealism. W. R. Lethaby became the first Professor of Design at the college, and the course was energetically rearranged for “Art Teachers of both sexes,” “designers,” and “Art Workmen.” There was a Matron for Women Students since there was no woman teacher, and a large body of young ladies.

Prosper Cain had been watching Imogen Fludd. He could not, he told himself, stand the sight of her mooning around Purchase House looking something between a draggled goosegirl and an incarcerated princess. By 1900 she was twenty-one, or thereabouts, and had neither husband, nor profession, nor sensible life at home. But she did, he thought, have a delicate but real artistic talent. He was sure she should get out of Benedict Fludd’s aura, and the miasma of Seraphita’s inactivity, and learn to do something. He spoke to Walter Crane, who admired Benedict Fludd’s pots, and was well aware of the vagaries of his temperament. Prospective students had to take a rigorous series of exams in architecture (twelve hours for a drawing of a small architectural
object); a six-hour modelling exam of—say—in charcoal the mouth of Michelangelo’s David; drawing (a life drawing of the head, hand and foot); ornament and design—a drawing from memory of a piece of foliage, such as oak, ash or lime; and lettering by hand of a given sentence. Prosper Cain did not know whether Imogen had skills enough—or courage enough—to enter these public competitions. He persuaded Crane to allow her to attend the college classes as an amateur observer. They would see how she developed. There could be a polite fiction that she was “visiting” the Keeper of Precious Metals.

Cain went down to Lydd in the late autumn of 1899 and put this idea to Imogen, whom he took for a walk along the beach, having rather firmly and rudely rejected Seraphita’s hints that Pomona would like to come too. This gave him a ridiculous feeling that he was behaving like a suitor, when in fact his feelings were quasi-paternal. Imogen wore a long hooded cloak, held together with two beaten silver clasps which he thought were very ugly. The hood would not stay over her head, and the whole garment blew and flapped in the wind coming off the sea. When the hood was down, her hair blew about too. It was caught up in theory, by a plaited strand which held it in a mane behind her head, but the whole thing, he thought, was a dreadful mess. She should see a hairdresser. She should have a hat with some style to it. She looked downwards, with cast-down lashes, at her serviceable but very worn boots, and reached, with hands draped in fingerless lacy mittens, to hold down the blown bits of her clothing. She had, he thought, a very sweet face, an innocent face, that should not have had the quality of lifelessness he perceived in it.

“I wanted to catch you by yourself, which has proved difficult. I have an idea I should like to put to you.”

“I don’t think—”

“Please, hear me out, before you refuse me.” That sounded very like a suitor. She went on looking down.

He put his plan to her. He explained that after the period of apprenticeship, and learning the ropes, she could take the entrance exam, and become a craftswoman, or a teacher, as she chose.

“Why?” she said. “Why are you doing this for me?”

“I don’t like waste. And you have talent.”

“There are all sorts of reasons,” she said into the wind and the spray, “why this can’t happen. It can’t.”

“Would you like it, if it could?”

She bowed her head. The hood flopped forward.

“I shall speak to your father. Today.”

“You can’t. I mustn’t… they need me, Mother and Father, Pomona …”

“And what do you need? Your brother hasn’t felt he must stay here.”

Geraint had indeed taken himself off to the counting rooms and telegrams of the City of London, where he was rapidly becoming successful in Basil Wellwood’s bank.

“I believe I have some influence with your father. I shall convince him you will be safe, for I shall invite you to stay with myself and Florence, whilst you learn the ways of the college. How can he object?”

“You don’t understand—” said Imogen, dully. He stopped, and took her by the shoulders, and looked into her face.

“No, I don’t understand everything. But I believe I understand enough to put a case to your father.”

And then, suddenly, she flung herself into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. He could not hear what she was saying, nervously and rapidly, into his jacket, but he held her, and patted her back, and felt her sob between his hands.

He approached Benedict Fludd himself with an anxiety he concealed completely. He went to see Fludd in his study—the room that had once been a scullery, and was now full of drying pots and drawing pads, in the midst of which was a Morris & Co. Sussex armchair, in which Fludd was sitting. He said

“I have something I want to say to you—a proposal I want to put you. About Imogen.”

Again, that lurking, parodic sense of being a suitor.

“What about Imogen?” said Fludd, ungraciously. Prosper Cain said that he had been impressed by Imogen’s talent, and explained his plan for her immediate fortune.

“She’s very well where she is,” said Fludd.

“She’s lonely and unemployed,” said Cain.

“Her family needs her, I need her.”

“You have Philip Warren and the inestimable Elsie. You have your wife and Pomona. I think it is time to give Imogen her freedom.”

“Ha! You think I imprison her.”

“No. But I think it is time for her to leave.”

“You are an interfering pompous military bastard. And you know, none better, that there’s no money to pay for her keep in the filthy city.”

“I propose that she lives with me as a visitor until—as I believe she can and should—she wins a scholarship to the Royal College. And then she will be enabled to earn her own keep. If she doesn’t marry. She doesn’t meet many young men, here.”

“You believe I don’t know what my duty is? And
her
duty is to care for her parents.”

“Not now, not yet, however you look at it. Old friend, you are behaving like a tyrannical father in a story. I know you better than that. I know you love your daughter—”

“Do you? Do you know that?”

“Too much to part with her easily. But she will love you more freely if you can bring yourself to let her go. And I’ll bear the cost of her move if you’ll let me have that oxblood jar with the smoky snakes on it, which I’ve had my eyes on for a couple of years. It ought to be displayed in the collection, and you know it.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know I don’t know. But I have watched Imogen, and you haven’t given one good reason why she shouldn’t come to London.”

“Oh, take my daughter, and take my jar, and go to the Devil, Prosper Cain. Have a brandy. Look at Philip’s dandelion heads on these plates, with the seeds blowing. He’s a bright lad.”

“He’s a young man, too, as Imogen is a young woman. May I take some of the dandelion work to show to the Keepers, as well?”

Imogen came to London, and Prosper said to his daughter that something must be done to get her a decent hat and dress, but he didn’t know how. Florence said “I’ll find a hat—you know how good I am at hats—and I’ll tell her it’s mine and I can’t wear it. She’s too tall for my dresses. I’ll think of a way.”

“I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?”

“No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.”

•  •  •

In the Cains’ house inside the Museum, apart from the crashing and trundling and dust of the building programme, Imogen did indeed seem to settle into a more cheerful normality. She turned out to have an unexpected flair for architectural drawing, she made a few silk rosebuds and forget-me-nots for the simple hat Florence found for her, and she set out of her own accord to restructure her clothing into a usual shape for a lady art student. In the Fludds’ house, things were less cheerful. After Imogen’s departure, Pomona began sleepwalking again. She ended up, several times, in Philip’s bedroom, on one occasion wearing no clothes, and wrapped only in her excessively long, not very clean, golden hair. Philip and Elsie talked about this. Elsie thought Pomona was play-acting. She told Philip that Pomona was throwing herself at him—literally—because he was the only young male person anywhere in reach. She said Pomona was hysterical and was putting it on. Philip said no, she wasn’t, she was deeply asleep, he could tell when she touched him. He wanted to tell Elsie that Pomona’s cold, naked flesh, pressed against him, did stir and disturb him—he was only human—but at the same time as being most desirably creamy-white, with firm little breasts and soft pale pink nipples, she was somehow inert, meaty, kind of dead, he said to himself, so deeply asleep she was. Elsie did not tell Philip of an odd conversation she had had with Imogen, the day of Imogen’s departure. It was so improbable, that when she tried to remember it, she wondered if she had made it up. Imogen had embraced her warmly, which was uncharacteristic, was indeed the first time she had embraced Elsie, whom she always held at arm’s-length, in every way. She said to Elsie that there was something she must say to her. She drew her into the kitchen, in the pretext of checking supplies.

“If he asks you to—to pose for life-drawings, don’t. That is, don’t take your clothes off, even if you feel it’s all right, don’t. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” said Elsie, feeling perversely that she would take her clothes off if she liked, whereas if she had been asked ten minutes earlier whether she would ever pose nude for an artist, she would have laughed sharply, and said “Not on your life.”