The Children's Book (69 page)

Julian Cain was at King’s College, Cambridge, where he discussed both the Higher and the Lower Sodomy with Gerald and others. In 1901 he had been an Apostolic “embryo,” invited to breakfasts and dinners, investigated to see if he had interesting or amusing ideas. In 1902 he went through the birthing ceremony on the famous hearthrug, received the essential anchovy toast, and became a full member of the secret Conversazione Society, or the Apostles. He gave a witty talk on the manifold uses made of museums by human beings, from cognoscenti and artists to tradesmen, policemen and naughty children, which was well received. The Apostles gently mocked German philosophy by referring to themselves as The World of Reality—everything else in the universe was only Appearance, and persons who were not chosen Apostles were dismissed as phenomena. Something similar was going on, but with more bombast and more edge, in Bohemian Schwabing where the anarchist Erich Mühsam claimed that Schwabing had no boundaries because nothing in it was normal, there was no norm, measurement was not possible. The members of the Schwabing exclusive society, the Kosmische Rundschau, referred to themselves as
Enorme
, or Giants, or outside the normal—and those who were not
Enorme
were
Belanglosen
, unattached, meaningless. The
Kosmiker
inclined towards nature mysticism, and racial mysticism, and were given to dressing-up as ancient Greeks and Romans, with vine leaves in their hair. They put on plays and pageants, as did that beloved Apostle, Rupert Brooke, who enacted the Herald in Aeschylus’
Eumenides
in 1906, lovely in boots, greaves, helmet and a military tunic and skirt so short that he was unable decently to sit down at the postperformance party in the Darwin house in Silver Street.

Julian talked easily to Brooke and to Bloomsbury but he did not belong. He was cynical about their high-mindedness, and more cynical about their cynicism. He wanted to want something, and did not know what it would be, or if he would find it. He knew it was not Gerald, though he loved him. He thought to himself that a love-affair, once begun, always envisaged its end. Time did not stand still. If Gerald could have loved Florence, as Arthur Henry Hallam, Alfred Tennyson’s beloved friend in the days when they were young, and Apostolic, had apparently come to love Tennyson’s sister Emily, there might have been a future, with the children Tennyson had imagined dandling on an
avuncular knee. Sometimes, Julian thought, he would not much mind if he were told he was to die tomorrow. It wouldn’t matter. When he felt like that he walked into the Fitzwilliam Museum and asked to look at Samuel Palmer’s water-colours. They shone from an unearthly, too earthy, earth.

Charles/Karl decided for study, rather than immediate anarchy, and also went to Cambridge, a year later than Julian, and also to King’s. He was neither observed nor selected by the Apostles, and did not know of their existence. He took part in the luncheons and talks the serious undergraduates of those days arranged for workingmen, and found himself tongue-tied and at a loss. He went, in the summer vacation, on a walking holiday with Joachim that happened to wander past the new clinic on the Monte Verità, and the encampment of the holy, the mad, the aesthetic, the criminal and the lecherous that lay around it. He danced amiably in circles, hand-in-hand with
Mädchens
and maenads, greeted the Sun, discussed the coming of a future state of total freedom, and went back to Cambridge. He discovered he was good at economics. He graduated in 1905 and went to Germany to visit old friends. The British Government appointed a Royal Commission to study the Poor (and appointed Beatrice Webb as a member). Karl decided he could help the poor better by studying them than by getting to know them, and enrolled as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics.

Geraint Fludd was in love, and making money. He was in love with Florence Cain, who smiled enigmatically and sadly when he told her so, and behaved as if he had said nothing. He found he needed urgently to know about sex and visited those who sold it. He coupled with street women, thinking of Florence, told himself he would not do that again, and did it again. Basil Wellwood, from time to time, found himself treating “Gerry” as the son he would have wished to have, interested in money, that most abstract of subjects, and in the ships and caravanserais and descending pitc-ages and slow barges that took things, all sorts of things, coconuts, carpets, sugar cane, glass beads, ingots, wheels with spokes, light bulbs, oranges, apples, wine and honey and converted them into change and exchange, shares and hunting and fishing and house parties and golf.

Basil asked Gerry what he “would do” theoretically, in certain situations—the issue of Consols, the run on Kaffirs—and lent him small sums of money, like the landlord in the parable of the Talents—five
guineas, say, which Gerry made into another five guineas. At the end of May, in 1902, it was clear that the war in South Africa was coming to an end. There was expectancy in the Kaffir market. Gerry made a quick profit on some shares in a project called “Geduld Deep” which was simply a hole in the ground unrelated to the respectable Geduld Proprietary Mines. He bought, and sold, before the bubble burst and the story was over. The
Financial News
downplayed the concentration camps—in April they say, there were only 298 deaths out of 112,733 inhabitants—2.6 per thousand, say 32 per 1,000 per annum. “English factory towns often get as high as that.” Gerry had a straw boater and a selection of stiff collars. He felt slightly contemptuous of those, like Julian, Tom and his parents, who had no idea of the intricate beauty of gold and silver, the real things. But he was also lonely, and when invited to the summer camps by the river amongst the trees, he came, divested himself of suit and city boots, and bathed naked with the others.

Time moved as differently for the generation of the fathers, mothers and aunts. Humphry Wellwood welcomed the end of the war—it had been uncomfortable, even if gallant, being a pro-Boer. He wrote articles about mining scandals, including Geduld Deep, mocking the confidence men and the gullible alike. He became slowly obsessed by the way in which Alfred Dreyfus must have experienced Time, since time was the most terrible aspect of the long-drawn-out, cruel and confusing injustice done to him. He had been arrested and condemned, for a crime he did not commit, in 1894. His sword had been broken in front of him, and for five years he had been a convict, in appalling conditions, on Devil’s Island. The real traitor—acquitted in 1898—had killed himself, and in 1899 Dreyfus’s case had been reopened. His conviction was quashed by the Court of Cassation—he was still marched into court between guards, a convict—and then he was reconvicted, and sentenced to spend ten years in prison. Humphry had stood with the crowds and had seen him, a sickly, upright, grey husk of a man, with lightless eyes. (In 1906 he would be exonerated, and recalled to active duty.) He twined round Humphry’s imagination. All those stolen years, all that time of meaningless horror in that place—how did it pass, what was in his mind? Was it sluggish, or a false eternity, or did it burn with the pain of injustice and solitude? Humphry wrote about it. He wrote an article in
which he said it was everyone’s duty to imagine, every day, that apparently endless, unreal reality of subjugation. Humphry wrote better as he got older.

He had hoped that his inconvenient need for new women would slacken with his muscles. Women his age were no longer desirable, why should he be? And yet, he was. He kept testing it—women lecturers at summer schools, youngish ladies in bookshops, Fabians, socialists, he excited them, and through them, himself. He visited Marian Oakeshott from time to time, and played with her Robin and young Ann, before catching her round the waist and complimenting her on her fine figure and lively intelligence. Her Robin was the spitting image of his other Robin, at Todefright. He felt everyone must notice this, but no one said anything. Marian did not love him, now, he knew. But he sometimes persuaded her into bed, because she had a need, which tormented her, for certain things he had taught her. “I hate you,” she would say, clutching him, and he would murmur cheerfully, as he pumped, “Better hatred than indifference. At least we are alive.” And she would laugh drily.

He had frightened himself by clutching at Dorothy. He did love Dorothy. He had always loved Dorothy, always knowing she was not his. And it was not that he loved, in her, the same things he loved in Olive for she was not darkly passionate but stubbornly practical, somehow wise in her independence. He was tortured by the rift he had caused. (He relieved the torture by seducing a female student from the LSE after a meeting on women’s rights.) He watched her behaviour, when she came home. She spoke to him in public, drily, practically, much as she always had. He wondered whether she would ever allow him to speak to her in private again. Then, one day, she came to him, in his study—it was the summer of 1902, and she had sat some of her exams for matriculation, and was preparing others for the end of the year. The tutors were organising a reading party in a cottage in the New Forest, a romantic cottage, in a clearing in the trees, with a river running past. Dorothy said she was going, with Tom and Griselda and Charles, to read there—and Julian and Florence would come, and Geraint and maybe the Fludd girls. She said

“And my father is coming to stay with August Steyning, and his sons are coming with him, and I think it would be fun to invite them to the camp. Wolfgang and Leon, that is.”

Humphry dared not ask any questions. He murmured, awkwardly, “That’s good, that’s good.” Then, lightly, “What do they know?”

“As much as they need to know. We don’t really talk about it. But I like them. Very much. And they like me.”

“Well, that’s good. No harm done?”

Dorothy hesitated. Both of them remembered the urgently fumbling hands, the blood. Humphry wanted to say, please don’t set one mad moment against a lifetime—well, your lifetime—of love. He stared at the floor. Dorothy said, judiciously,

“Not no harm, no. But it is all right. You are my father, that’s a fact.”

It was a warning, as well as a concession.

“I do love you,” said Humphry, entering the forbidden ground. And Dorothy was able to say, lightly, practically, apparently easily, “I love you too. Always did.”

Humphry put his arms briefly round her, and kissed the top of her head, as he had done when she was a little girl. And she kissed the side of his beard, lightly, lightly, as she had done as a little girl.

During these years Prosper Cain was preoccupied with the slowly rising, dangerous, dust-clouded new building, draped in a network of scaffolding, muffled, and mysterious. Under the scaffolding domes, pinnacles and a central crowned tower came into being. Inside the building there was dissension between those concerned primarily with the beauty of the objects to be displayed, and those concerned with their utility as teaching aids for craftsmen. There was a movement on the Continent to construct or reconstruct rooms and settings—panelled, or with stone pillars and lancet windows, in which beds, tables, chairs, carpets and ceramics could be seen as the museum designers imagined their makers might have seen them. In Munich the Bavarian National Museum was newly built to show—on its façade—every period and style of architecture—and inside rooms with ceilings, floors and pillars expressly designed to show off a collection of church furnishings, or a lady’s boudoir. Photographs of these splendours were published in 1901, and the Emperor of Prussia expressed approval and delight.

Prosper Cain had failed to save the strange and lovely furniture, bought by one of the jurors at the Paris Exhibition and donated to the
Museum. It had been banished to Bethnal Green, and South Kensington had been sneered at as a “pathological museum for design disease” by those favouring order and logic. In 1904 Major Cain travelled with the Director, Sir Casper Purdon Clarke, and Arthur Skinner, who was to succeed Clarke, to the opening of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin: they went also to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, and Cain went on to Munich, where the display impressed him. They went in 1901 to the opening in Paris, in the Louvre, of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and saw that the display mixed “order and connection to facilitate study” with “sufficient variety to give the feeling of life: thus a piece of tapestry is seen, as it should be, over a bed, a chest or a seat, not placed in a line between an earlier and a later specimen.” This was what Prosper Cain would have wished to achieve. But it was not to be. The Museum’s fate was to be decided by a civil servant from the Board of Education, Robert Morant, who had tutored the royal family in Siam, and taught the poor in Toynbee Hall, before setting South Kensington in order. He believed that it was the duty of the curators to make an educational order—spoon after spoon, banister next to banister, dishes in rows and carpets side by side. He simply demoted Skinner—who died fifteen months later, in 1911 at the age of fifty, of a broken heart. Prosper Cain had admired Skinner and had shared his views. He kept his own post but felt detached from the new order. All this was still to come. Major Cain plotted and planned and projected in the first seven years of the new century. It ate up his life, but he took pleasure in it.

His children delighted and worried him. Julian seemed to have settled for the life of a scholar, for want of an urgent vocation. Florence, who had been so forthright and practical as a girl, became, he said to himself, “moony” as she grew into womanhood. He was distressed by her ability to cling on to a hopeless—indeed, he considered it an unreal—passion for a man who was not what she thought he was. He thought he should perhaps speak to her, but was profoundly shy, when it came to speaking of the heart. She would not listen to him if he
did
speak, and what could he decorously say? He assumed—he needed to assume—that Julian would grow out of what he, as an army man, saw as a normal phase of passionate male friendship. But the other—this Gerald—he knew in his bones would not. But you can’t say that to a young girl. He considered appealing to Imogen Fludd but she, too, could not be decently approached on this subject.