The Children's Book (59 page)

“She looks a little forlorn,” he said.

“I sometimes think she would give anything never to see another
work of art again,” said Imogen. “But that isn’t to say she does want anything in particular. She doesn’t talk to me. She doesn’t talk to anyone. She tries to talk to Philip but that isn’t easy. I wish you could help her,” she said, sounding not entirely sincere, “but I truly don’t see how. She’s been dancing, at least, some of the time.”

“I wish your father had come.”

“I don’t.” She opened her mouth to say something further, and closed it again. Her hands tightened on his shoulder. He held her with military firmness, and they turned a corner.

Dorothy was dancing with Humphry. Humphry was possibly the best dancer in the room. He said to her “Let me lead,” and she let him lead, and they began to move as though they were a single creature, swaying and tripping, making tiny chasing and concentrated steps, floating dreamily. His hand was hot and strong in the small of her back: both halves of her body, above and below his hand, moved as he dictated. He went fast—she had the sensation she had when she was a little girl, on roundabouts and helter-skelters. He said

“Well, you’ve been having a good time, young woman.”

“I have.”

“Your dress shows you off. A great success.”

He held her very close. They waltzed towards one of the great, full-length mirrors in the room, framed as though it were a door, in cast-iron painted as
trompe-l’oeil
sepia-brown marble. The mirrors were angled to give the illusion that the room was infinite, that you could step around an invisible corner into another shining space. It was clear that it was a mirror partly because a Greek or Roman nymph stood on a fat marble pillar with her back to it. She was modestly clutching, in her front, a sculpted flow of drapery, that covered her thighs, but not her bared breasts over which her hands were defensively clasped in an ancient, conventional pose. At the back, oddly, she was entirely naked. Her shoulder blades, fine waist, and rounded buttocks were exposed to the mirror, though not to the room. She distracted Dorothy, as her father whirled her towards the glass. She saw her own pale little face, staring dreamily over his strong shoulder, and her own small, female hand on his arm. She saw her unaccustomed high knot of hair, and the sleek, foxy red of her father. And then, as she turned, she looked back at
the mirror, and saw the midnight-blue dress, and her bare back and shoulders, and the powerful hand planted on her waist, on the unaccustomed whalebone strips that shaped her.

“If you go on like this,” said Humphry “you’ll have them fighting over you.”

He said “Perhaps it’s true, what they always say, don’t you think?” She had no idea what he meant.

After the dance, the Todefright Wellwoods drove back to Portman Square, where they were staying with the London Wellwoods. Olive sat in the back of the carriage with Tom. Dorothy sat facing them, and put her head on her father’s shoulder. They didn’t speak much: they were sleepy and thoughtful.

Katharina sent the young people to bed, with a maid carrying milk, iced biscuits, and a small oil lamp with an etched glass shade. Dorothy always had the same bedroom when she came to Portman Square. It was small, and high up, looking out at the back over gardens. It was decorated in Katharina’s taste, in a froth of white muslin, sprigged with pink. The bed was a nest inside prettily swathed curtains. There was a washstand, with bowl and jug decorated with pink rosebuds on a china-blue ground, but no writing desk. Another young woman might have found all this nostalgic femininity charming after the plainness and brightness of Todefright. Dorothy didn’t. But she didn’t mind it, or feel at a loss in it.

She slipped out of her ball dress, and her petticoats—she didn’t need the maid to help, and told her so. Another maid would certainly be unhooking Griselda. She hung the midnight-blue dress neither carefully nor carelessly over a prettily upholstered dumpy chair, dropped her drawers on top of it and put on her plain, voluminous, white cotton nightdress, its bodice pleated by Violet. She thought she would read a little, before she turned out the light. She was trying to read fairytales in German to please Griselda. She was not a born linguist, and was ambivalent about fairytales.

Someone knocked at the door. She thought it would be Griselda, come to talk over the ball, and rather wished she wouldn’t. But she said, come in. It was Griselda’s house and she loved Griselda.

The door opened slowly and silently. It was not Griselda. It was
Humphry, her father, in a silk dressing-gown covered with coiling Chinese dragons. He looked around for a chair—both the fat chair and the dressing-table chair were covered with abandoned female garments. He sat down beside his daughter, sinking into her flowery eiderdown, and said

“I thought we might talk about things.”

He was in an aura of whisky. Censorious Dorothy believed that both his wives—as she now thought of them—should do something to stop, or slow down, the whisky-drinking. She said

“I’m tired.”

He put an arm around her shoulder.

“You are such a lovely girl. I never thought you were going to be so lovely. Queen of the Rosebud Garden of Girls. My Dorothy.” Dorothy stiffened.

“There are things I ought to tell you. But I wanted so much to tell you—to tell you”—he stumbled—“how perfectly
lovely—
”

He breathed hot whisky at her. She shrank back, and he gave her a clumsy push, which unbalanced her. She turned her face into the pillow, and muttered, in a child’s voice, “Go away. Please. Get off.”

And then he put his hand, unequivocally, inside the white cotton folds and touched naked flesh. Dorothy ceased to be timid and confused, and became very angry.

“Don’t do that
. Or I’ll scream. Or ring the bell.”

“I only want to play with you a bit. My darling.”

His face wavered over hers. One hand worked inside her nightdress. One came over her mouth. Dorothy bit it. She bit with all her strength and she was strong. She bit the soft cushion below the thumb, and her mouth filled with blood. She shook the hand in her teeth like a mongoose with a snake.

“Bitch,” said Humphry. He sat up. His hand was pouring blood on the white frilled bedclothes. He said “Have you got a hankie? We must stop this. That
hurt.”

“It was meant to. How
dare
you? Here’s a hankie. It’s far too small. Girls have stupid hankies. Go and get the hand towel. Then I’ll tear something up and make a bandage. I haven’t got much I can spare to tear up. Violet will be furious if I tear up this petticoat she spent so long on. You’ll have to put up with knickers.”

This word caused her to begin to shake. She said, drawing deep, sobbing breaths,

“You can’t go back with any of the stuff from this room, that belongs to the room, as opposed to belonging to
me
, or everyone will know. So it will have to be knickers. You could get to them. They’re in the drawer.”

Her pillow was blood-spattered. So was the neck of her nightgown. Humphry said with a ghastly laugh

“You’ve got blood on your teeth, like a stoat. And on your pretty lips.”

“I shall have to say I had a nosebleed. You’ve got blood on your nice dressing-gown, too. Two nosebleeds in a night is a bit unlikely. You must cut yourself shaving.”

She was trying to make a bandage strip from the knickers with an unsuitable pair of nail scissors.

Humphry said, stumbling over the words,

“Stop ordering me about.”

“It’s either be businesslike or collapse and scream, and I think even you would prefer the former. You’re drunk. I need to think for you. As well as for me,” she added, in a swallowed sob. She was breathing either too much or too little air.

Humphry said

“It’s not what you think.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? You—you
attacked
me. I was there. It’s not a question of thinking.”

“Yes it is. There are reasons. This is the wrong way to say it. I was always going to tell you. When the time came.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

“What do you think you know?”

“I’m Violet’s daughter. Someone—not me—has been listening into things.”

“Well someone has been garbling ‘things.’ You’re not Violet’s child. Phyllis is. And Florian. You’re Olive’s daughter. But not mine.”

Dorothy clutched the coverlet to her chest like the naked nymph in the ballroom.

“What?”

“You aren’t my daughter. So, you see, it wasn’t—this wasn’t—what you thought.”

Dorothy sat like stone.

“I didn’t mean to tell you this way. I do love you. Always have. Always will. My dear. Say something.”

Dorothy said
“Who is my father?”

“You met him one midsummer. He’s a German from Munich. His name is Anselm Stern. The puppet-man. Things got out of hand at a carnival.

“You can’t say it’s made any difference,” he added, foolishly. Dorothy said

“You are being childish. You aren’t
thinking
. Of course it makes a difference. I am not who I thought I was. Nor, for that matter, is Phyllis. You have muddled us all up. All of you, you and both of
them
have made this muddle. You can’t just say it made no difference.”

“I love you,” Humphry repeated, clutching his bandaged hand in his whole one.

“Please go away,” Dorothy said with desperate dignity. “I need to think. I can’t think with you saying silly things to me.”

“I handled it badly,” Humphry said, with drunken ruefulness.

“You didn’t even
handle
it,” said Dorothy with scorn. “You just added a worse muddle to a monstrous muddle that already existed. Go away. Please. We have to sort out tomorrow.”

“We can just go back to where we were, maybe …”

“That’s childish. We can’t. Go away.”

Humphry went.

Dorothy sat on top of her bed, clasping her knees, thinking furiously. She was thinking in order not to feel, and her whole body was set and aching with the force of the thinking.

She thought she would not go home—go back to Todefright.

She tried to rearrange Olive in her mind, and failed.

She thought she would not think about Humphry.

She thought, slowly and reluctantly, that she was going to need to tell Griselda—something, she was not sure what, she would have to think of that. She had not told Griselda anything about Hedda’s discovery. She had wanted to go on as they were, cousins and friends, and not let the evil creatures out of Hedda’s Pandora’s box.

She decided she must pretend to be ill, and stay here, in Portman Square. She would explain the blood-spattered sheets by a gushing nosebleed. She would also tell Griselda to tell people—in confidence and
untruthfully—that the Curse had come upon her early and with terrible pain, that she couldn’t bear to move.

She was one of those beings who cannot bear uncertainty or indecision. She must act, she must make a plan of action. She must get away, she could not sit any longer in Todefright with horrible secrets bubbling up around her like hot geysers out of a lava-field.

Where could she go, and how?

Tom had run away. Running away was what children in stories did. There was no point in hurrying off to be a wild woman in the woods. She wanted to be a doctor. She tried to think of someone she could plausibly visit for a time.

She was getting tired. She allowed her mind to touch, tentatively, at the image of Anselm Stern, her blood father.

Incurably truthful, she remembered she had not much liked him, had been even a little afraid of him. Griselda had liked him, had talked German to him.

She remembered a slim, black, bearded figure, a bit like a demon. Putting Death into Death’s own box.

His English was no better than her own clumsy German. His puppets had made her uneasy.

He was a kind of showman. Was he a serious person?

She thought a bit harder. Did he know she was his daughter? Did he know he had a daughter?

She felt, in a hot and angry way, that he should be
made
to know.

She felt, in an exhausted, tearful way, that she needed to know who he was.

Could she bring herself to tell Griselda?

In the morning, she did not go down to breakfast. She huddled under her eiderdown, and said to the maid who brought her ewer of hot water that she felt ill, really ill, and would be glad if Griselda could be fetched. The maid said she would speak to Mrs. Wellwood—either Mrs. Wellwood—and Dorothy said, no, she would be grateful if Griselda could come. Quickly. There was no need to bother anyone else.

Griselda came in, in a white shirt and green skirt, her hair knotted loosely on her neck.

“What is it? Aren’t you well? What’s wrong? Do you need a doctor, or anything?”

“No. I had a nosebleed. I’m sorry about the bedclothes. Something has happened, Grisel, something that changes all my life.”

Griselda moved the midnight dress, and the petticoat, folding them neatly, and sat down on the stubby chair.

“Tell.”

“I almost can’t.”

“We don’t have secrets from each other. Only from the world.”

“This is a secret that a lot of people know, which is a secret about me, and was kept from me.”

“Tell me.”

“My father—that is—well—he told me, I am not his real daughter. He had drunk a bit too much, and it sort of slipped out. He hadn’t been
planning
to tell me.”

Griselda’s pale face went white.

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say who your father was—is?”

“Yes. He’s that German man with the puppet-show who came to the Midsummer party, when we were younger.” She thought. “I don’t know if
he
knows he’s my father. I can’t face asking my mother—anything—I just can’t. I can’t go home. I’ve got to think of a way to get away. You must help.”

One tear rolled out of Griselda’s blue eye.

“Grisel, you don’t have to cry.”

“We aren’t cousins,” said Griselda. “If it’s true, we aren’t cousins.” Dorothy had not thought of that. They looked at each other.

“We’re even more best friends,” said Dorothy. “Help me. Where can I go?”