The Children's Book (47 page)

Benedict Fludd—that is to say, Prosper Cain on his behalf—had sold a very large midnight-blue bowl with a miasma of pale gold dragons to Siegfried, sometimes Samuel, Bing. He had French money in his pocket. He led Philip through streets alternately dark and flaring with lamplight, alternately silent and shrill with voices, to a narrow street of tall houses, where needle-strips of brightness showed on the upper floors at the edges of shutters. Fludd knocked imperiously at one of these, and the door was opened, after a time, by a trim servant in a dark dress. Fludd said, in French, that Madame Maréchale was expecting him. He said that Philip was his apprentice, a word that had only recently crept into their relationship, which Philip recognised in French.

They climbed a narrow, carpeted staircase, and were ushered into a room with many tiny bright lights under etched glass shades, wine-red, strawberry-pink, topaz. It was inhabited by women, in various states of dress and undress. Some had elaborately knotted hair, and some wore it loose, like young girls. They wore ambiguous gowns, somewhere between morning gowns and dressing-gowns, open to display the swing of their breasts and sometimes more. There was a confusion of smells—orris root, which Philip had never met and found sickly, attar of roses, wine, cigarette smoke and an undertone of human bodily odours. He made out faces through drifts of smoke, faces weary, faces laughing, faces middle-aged and faces very young. The fully and fashionably dressed lady of the house hurried forwards to welcome Benedict Fludd. Champagne was brought, and Philip, now sitting gingerly on a sofa facing a watchful row of ladies, had his first taste of it. It steadied him. He was excited and afraid. More champagne was brought. He was studied and discussed in incomprehensible French. Benedict Fludd sat in an armchair decorated with cabbage roses, with a young woman on his knee, a girl with her hair down, meekly dressed in white cotton, barefoot,
and, Philip could see, wearing nothing under the cotton. The ladies who were assessing him were older and more assertive. They smiled, professionally, but amiably enough. “Take your pick, Philip,” said Benedict Fludd. “They can teach you a thing or two. They are good girls. I know them well.”

Philip did not think he could know them very well, since he spent his life stamping around the Marshes or tending the furnace. He was suddenly homesick for the Romney emptiness, and the marsh grass. He had had too much of too many bodies, all these last days, and he did not know if he was overexcited or surfeited. He remembered
The Crouching Woman
, and primitive desire stirred in him. He drank more champagne and looked at the women. One had a bony face not unlike Rodin’s squatting figure, and a big, sharp mouth. She was wearing a crêpe de Chine dressing-gown, with the kind of silvery crinkle over Japanesey flowers that reminded him of the clever crackle-glaze on the Gien pottery which he admired but did not like. He did not know how you went about “picking” a lady, so he asked her, in English, what her name was. Rose, she said, my name is Rose.

She took him upstairs, to a little room with an ample bed, a huge mirror and more shaded lights. He was curious, and afraid. He knew about the danger of disease. He might be killing himself. It was odd that he felt compelled to go on—Fludd expected it, his manhood was in question, there were things he needed to know. She took off his clothes, and sat beside him on the bed, exhaling tobacco. The skin of her face was quite thickly painted, and did not breathe. She looked kind, he thought. She began to teach him the parts of the body, in her language, pouring him more champagne, dabbing his fingers and chin and eyes with it, naming them in French, and licking away the champagne. Chest, navel, cock and balls. His body answered her touch. His fingers, with which he thought, set about her body, feeling the difference between flesh and clay, the weight of a breast, the warmth and damp of her, underneath. Briefly he remembered cold naked Pomona, pushing under his blanket in Purchase House. Cold and white like marble, like
The Danaïde
. Rose had clever, coercive fingers, with which she too thought. Philip, who was growing up fast in every sense, thought that the naming of parts must be a routine she went through with all foreigners, and then thought he didn’t care, it was all perfectly sensible and efficient. Rose
was generous to him. He got overexcited and came quickly, and she then revived him and showed him subtler ways of pleasure, slower rhythms, until at last he was thinking with that part of him, as happened occasionally when he was pleasuring himself. He thought Rodin must think a lot in this way. He had an obscure vision of a church window, on the Marsh, showing the Fall of Man, the woman handing the man the round apple from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and the fork-tongued snake staring with satisfaction. It had never made any sense to him, and he didn’t believe a word of it, but suddenly as he pushed into the compliant Rose, clutching her breast, he saw it in his body, the round apple, the tough sinuous snake, the knowledge of nakedness and good and evil.

“Bon?”
said Rose, with professional concern.

“Bon,”
said Philip, drowsily, feeling the damp of sex like the slip on the clay.

August Steyning invited everyone to see Loïe Fuller perform in her own theatre; they went back to England the next day, so the dance was the finale of their visit. Loïe Fuller’s image was pervasive in the Exposition—her whirling figure crowned the Palais de la Danse, and stood above the entrance to her own theatre, with her floating veils solidified into plaster. Bronze figurines and statues of her were on sale there and elsewhere. Philip said to Fludd that there must be better ways of making images of floating cloth than these solid blobs which reminded him of melting butter. The theatre itself was low and white, and its front wall, modelled to resemble a skirt or shawl with a frilled hem, resembled, Philip also thought, an iced cake before it was trimmed. There was a low portal, like the entrance to a grotto or cavern. Inside were huge butterflies and flowers and a grille of Lalique’s bronze butterfly-women. “That is the way to do it,” said Fludd to Philip. “With veining and empty space.” Lalique had designed the electric light fittings also, in gilt bronze. Laughing imps were cupped round the mysterious face of an enchantress, above whose head the electric bulbs were suspended in delicate, snowdrop-shaped flowers on fine stems.

Fuller’s dances depended on two things—furling, unfurling, billowing lengths of cloth, and electric lighting, in magic lanterns covered by different
coloured gelatines. Her body was half-glimpsed through coils transparent, translucent, opaque. She deployed her veiling with the aid of supporting batons. They saw “The Flight of the Butterflies,” and “Radium,” an iridescent shimmering confection dedicated to Pierre and Marie Curie. They saw, finally, the Fire Dance, in which the dancer was lit from below, through a lantern using an intense scarlet light. The moving silks became a stream of volcanic magma, they became the rising flames of a burning pyre, they became the oven of a holocaust. “The Ride of the Valkyries” sang out, and the woman gyrated in a cocoon of fire—like red clay, like white marble luridly lit, smiling in the conflagration, stepping through the fires of hell-mouth incandescent and unconsumed. They were all entranced. Julian wondered if it was vulgar, and then got lost in the silk fringes. Tom was happy with that happiness that comes from being shut in the unreal box of the theatre. Olive was reminded of the uncanny feeling she had had as Hermione, wound in marble folds of grave-cloth or wedding dress. She remembered the flowing marble hair of Rodin’s
Danaïde
, and felt that everything was of a piece, that the dancer, and the carved woman, and the glassy lit surface of the river outside with its threaded slivers of emerald, opal, amethyst, peridot, hissing and crackling with electricity, electricity, a river of life, a river of death, were all one. It made her want to write, as things delightful and things threatening, both, made her want to write.

When they were safely back in Todefright, Humphry sat down to write an article on Exhibitions and the Arts of War and Peace.

Olive wrote a tale in which, at night, the silky ladies and resplendent peacocks, the manikins and marble men and maidens, the puppets and the glimmering butterflies and dragonflies and fishes in the tapestries, came to life and held their own market of magical goods in the shadowy spaces and the sumptuous uninhabited chambers of the Bing Pavilion.

The hot summer days were long in the Marsh. In the absence of Benedict Fludd and Philip there was less for Elsie to do, and Seraphita and Pomona did nothing anyway. Sometimes they sat in the orchard with their embroidery. Elsie cleared up, and shopped, and did sewing of her own. She had reached an age where every surface of her skin was taut with the need to be touched and used, and all she had to occupy her was a dusty old house and two mildly crazy women dressed in flowing floral gowns. She herself was also dressed in clothes constructed from altered hand-downs, covered with faded golden lilies and birds and pomegranates. What she wanted was a sleek, dark, businesslike skirt and a fresh white shirt with a collar, that would show off her narrow waist. She had no money, and did not know how to ask for any, for she knew there was very little in the household to cover the bread and milk and vegetables. She also had a problem with handed-down shoes, none of which fitted her exactly. She had red rubbed places on what she knew were pretty feet, scraped heels and bruised toe-joints. She tended to walk around in basketlike sandals that were too big, but didn’t hurt. More than anything she admitted to herself that she wanted, she wanted new shoes, her own shoes. Shoes that wouldn’t destroy her feet. More than anything, in fact, she wanted to be made love to, to have hands gripping her waist and stroking her lovely hair. She burned, but it was no use repining, or even admitting to herself that she burned. She set about remedying what little she could, taking dressmaking shears to the Morris & Co. fabrics, and converting the loose aesthetic robes to neatly shaped skirts, with darts and seams. She had seen in a shop window in Rye a soft, dark wine-red leather belt, with an arrow-shaped clasp at the front, that she desired passionately, as a substitute for hands, as a provocation to eyes.

Seraphita said nothing about the skirts. She stared vaguely, like a china doll, or a garden goddess, Elsie thought. The house now had few secrets from Elsie. She knew where Seraphita hid bottles, brown bottles of stout, little blue bottles of laudanum, amongst her wool-baskets and hairbrushes. She never touched or moved these bottles; she thought, indeed, of offering help with procuring them, but Seraphita had a trick of not hearing anything that was said, and must have had a satisfactory
system already in place, though she never looked awake enough to contrive one.

Elsie knew she ought to be sorry for Pomona. The girl liked to follow her around, never offering to help with the housework, though sweetly admiring of Elsie’s achievements, such a delicious soup, such a pretty flower arrangement, such clean windows as there had never been, the sun had never come in so brightly. Pomona did touch Elsie. She stroked her, timidly, when Elsie sat down to sew, she asked if Elsie was happy. She said “We aren’t very lively here, now Imogen is gone,” and Elsie replied tartly that there was plenty of work to be getting on with. Somebody ought to be educating the girl, taking her out to meet possible husbands or teaching her a trade, Elsie thought, not very sympathetically. She wished Pomona would keep her distance. She preferred sitting alone to sew. She was making a not-bad, reasonably sober skirt, covered with willow boughs.

She went, when she could, into the potters’ studio. The balls of clay were damp-wrapped, the buckets of slip were tempting, and she ran her fingers through them, just to get the feel back. She took some clay—it wasn’t stealing, it could be squeezed back to nothing—and made several tiny figures, figures of women, sitting with their arms round their knees, or standing proudly naked, balanced on elegant legs.

She was curious about the locked pantry. She told herself that she had cleaned everywhere else, and should clean there, but knew that it was really the ancient challenge of the one locked door. The drawing of Bernard Palissy from the Kensington Valhalla was nailed to the locked door, one corner, she noticed, covering the keyhole. Without exactly setting about it, she looked for unattributable keys, telling herself at the same time that if the pantry held a secret, the key might be somewhere else altogether. Then, one day, standing precariously on a stool to reach a high shelf, she picked up a grim salt-jar, in the shape of a griffon with a threatening beak and lifted crest, and heard a metallic rattle. The jar was pushed back in the shadows. Elsie retrieved it, and brought it to earth. She tipped and the creature disgorged a fine iron key. Elsie put the key into the pocket of her apron, and smiled to herself, catlike. She replaced the jar. And then she waited. She waited two days, until Frank Mallett invited Seraphita and Pomona to a summer picnic at the Puxty vicarage. When she had the house to herself, she took out the tacks that
held Palissy in place, and uncovered the lock. The key slid in easily, and turned easily, as though oiled. The pantry was indeed a pantry. A stone shelf ran round three of its walls, above and behind which were other shelves, rising to the low whitewashed ceiling. There was a small barred window, with a wire net to keep out flies, covered with dust.

On the shelves were pots. Elsie had expected something secret and different. One or two were largish plump jars, but most were small, and glimmered white in the shadows, white-glazed china, unglazed biscuit. When Elsie went nearer to make them out better her feet crunched on broken shards, as though someone had dropped, or thrown, a whole carpet of fragments to the ground.

The pots were obscene chimaeras, half vessels, half human. They had a purity and clarity of line, and were contorted into every shape of human sexual display and congress. Slender girls clutched and displayed vaselike, intricate modellings of their own lower lips and canals. They lay on their backs, thrusting their pelvises up to be viewed. They sat in mute despair on the lips of towering jars, clutching their nipples defensively, their long hair falling over their cast-down faces. There were also clinical anatomical models—always elegant, always precise and economical, of the male and female sexual organs, separate and conjoined. There were pairs of figures, in strenuous possible and impossible embraces, gentle and terrible.