The Children's Book (78 page)

He took the wet boot, rewarded the man, and set out to walk back to Purchase House. The Channel was darkening. The colour of the crashing foam was indescribable—you knew it to be white, but it was the ghost of white, light itself with silver sifted in, and the dark swell of the sucking water.

“I can see him,” said Frank Mallett. “Just walking out into it. He knew how it would take him, what it would do to him.”

They were walking back past the huts. They stopped, whilst Frank lit his lantern. Stars were showing, pale on the blue-black. The sudden beam of the lantern lit up a kind of clothes-line, stretched from the eave of one of the black huts to a mast-head, from which fluttered a narrow St. George’s cross, on a pennant.

“What’s that?” said Prosper.

It was shredded, and crumpled, and mangled. It was stained, and soaked, and it appeared to be the overall-robe Benedict Fludd had worn for his lecture. Flotsam, jetsam, retrieved from the sea.

“Mr. Mallett,” said Prosper Cain, as they walked slowly back towards Purchase House with a brown paper parcel. “Mr. Mallett—these thoughts may be premature—though I think both you and I think not. If my old friend has done away with himself, we may yet find him. He could hardly have chosen a more final place to disappear. The uncertainty will be very painful for his wife and daughters, very. Now I, too, am confiding my private anxieties to you. I wish to marry Miss Fludd
as soon as possible
—this event has both made me more anxious to do so, and rendered it harder to arrange. I do not know what would be appropriate mourning for a dead man—where no body exists. I do know that his family would live more easily if I were in a position to look after them with a right to do so. I should like you to marry us, Mr. Mallett. Quietly, but not surreptitiously. With flowers in the church, and a decorous feast. How soon could this be done, do you think?”

“If—if nothing floats in to shore—if he does not suddenly walk up the drive—maybe in a month?”

They quickened the pace.

“A final suggestion, Mr. Mallett. Would you agree to say nothing of this to anyone else until the kiln is cooled and the festivity is over? All we have to convey is doubt, suspicion, uncertainty. If we wait, certainty may come. And if it doesn’t, the uncertainty itself will be more of a certain thing—a
real
thing, if you follow me.”

“Indeed,” said Frank Mallett. “May I say, I am grateful to you for—for taking over the burden.”

“I have known Benedict Fludd, God rest his soul, for a very long time. He had genius. He was excessive in everything he did. I am not surprised he tried to frighten you. Your response is commendable.”

Prosper Cain was a man used to getting his own way. He was married to Imogen Fludd, in St. Edburga’s Church, on Tuesday, December 27th, in 1904. Frank Mallett married them. There was still no sign of Benedict Fludd, although a second boot had been fished up, weeks after the first. So they were neither in mourning, nor not in mourning. The congregation was small—the Purchase House people, including Philip and Elsie, Julian and Florence. Arthur Dobbin was there, and Marian Oakeshott, and Miss Dace. It was extremely cold. The stones of the church were like blocks of ice, and the grass in the graveyard was crusted with frost. Frank had two woollen vests under his surplice. All the women had solved the problem of mourning by resorting to discreet greys and violets. Florence had a very smart slate-coloured grosgrain long coat over a blue-crocus-coloured dress; her hat was severe crocus-grey tulle, to match. She was not a bridesmaid. Pomona was the only bridesmaid, in a dark-grey velvet gown, decorated with violets. The same flowers were round the brim of her hat. Seraphita was wrapped in a feather-edged robe in a kind of thick complicated tapestry, purple and grey and silver, edged with dyed swansdown and ostrich plumes.

Geraint gave away the bride. Miss Dace struck some chords on the piano, and Imogen Fludd laid down the stone hot-water bottle she had been clutching, picked up her sheaf of hothouse lilies and walked through the church. She was wearing shimmering silvery velvet, very plain, with a high white fur collar, and big white fur cuffs. Florence turned to stare at her as she went to meet Major Cain. Florence had been thinking of Imogen with bad words. Sly. Insinuating. ’umble. She thought her face would show false modesty, maybe, or irrepressible triumph, but she had to acknowledge—she was just—that what she saw was pure happiness, touched with fear. That Prosper loved Imogen, Florence acknowledged with some bitterness. She now acknowledged, also, that Imogen loved Prosper. She looked like the white wax of a candle, lit by a golden flame.

After the ceremony, Frank Mallett gave everyone hot drinks, or glasses of sherry, in front of his dancing fire. His housekeeper replenished the ladies’ stoneware hand-warmers with kettles of hot water. Rugs were wound round them, and they all drove back to the Mermaid
in Rye, where Prosper had ordered a wedding breakfast. There was a blazing wood fire in the hearth there, too. As the evening closed in, ruddy light flickered over the pale faces, and lit the grey silks and satins. The food was plentiful—soles with shrimps, smoked and roasted salt-marsh loin of lamb, elegant custards, an iced cake, which the bridegroom cut precisely with his sword. Geraint made a neat little speech, and said that he and Florence hoped—as soon as feasible—to tie further knots in the relationships of the families. Prosper replied, briskly, warmly, and then raised a glass to the absent Benedict Fludd. He wished, he said, that his old friend could have been there to share their happiness. He wished, of course, that his friend would return—as he had done before—from a journey. In the meantime—or, if necessary, in the long term—he himself was now part of the family, and would hope to take on some of the practical burdens of the work, and the house. The wind rushed and eddied up the cobbled street. The flames swirled in the hearth, and Philip stared into them. Seraphita stood up, and said, in a surprisingly strong voice that she would like—personally—to express her thanks to Major Cain, now her second son—and to say how much comfort the wedding had brought her, in this trying time. Florence, who might have looked at Geraint, who was looking at her intently, was still studying Imogen. The firelight ran up the folds of her dress, and made a blush on that palely ecstatic, unblushing face. I shall never be so happy, Florence thought. She could not bear—the thought made her sick—to imagine her father taking Imogen in his arms, alone in the black-beamed bedroom. Everything was going up in flames. Exultant, and dangerous.

Philip Warren had it in mind to make a memorial to Benedict Fludd. He had been included in talks between Geraint and Prosper about the future of Purchase pottery and sales through The Silver Nutmeg. He had felt the subsiding of hope or expectation in himself as the bottle kiln cooled slowly after the firing. He had waited alone, until the saggars were ready to be unpacked. Then he unpacked them, slowly. The firing had been almost wholly successful. Some small pieces of student work had crumbled, and one of his own seaweed bowls, to which he had been particularly attached, lay in shards. But generally the treasure gleamed and glistened. Pomona had crept quietly to his side and asked to be allowed to help to take out and arrange the ware. She seemed, he
thought without considering the matter, less determinedly childish. She had tied up her hair. She said

“Do you think he’s dead, Philip?”

“I don’t know. He has gone off, before.”

“I feel he’s dead. I think I would know inside me if he wasn’t.”

“I know what you mean. I feel that, too. He’s somehow gone.” She went on lining up slightly unbalanced amateur goblets. She said “Things will be different.”

Philip had just begun on what might turn out to be Benedict Fludd’s last warm pots, cooling under his fingers. A two-faced drinking mug leered at him. An elegant dragon spread its gold wings in an inky sky.

“You’ll be wanting to study, maybe,” he said to Pomona.

“I have no talents,” she said.

The projected memorial was a globe-shaped pot, large and simple. It was to be layered, like the round earth, with fire beating up from its depths, with coal over the fire, with fossil forms in the coal, with dark sea-blue flowing over the coal, and over the sea, on an inky sky, with a moon in it, a tracery of white foam which should be both wild and formal in its movements, somehow Japanese. He could see it clearly in his mind’s eye. It was fiendishly hard to conceive—all those glazes, welded together, the necessity for the difficult red to be simultaneously both bloody and fiery. He made drawings of lizards and dragonflies and snails, coiled in the jet-black coal. Sometimes he thought the moon should be full, and sometimes a hair-thin crescent, barely scratched in.

He thought—he was not much given to studying people’s feelings—that Seraphita was relieved and released by her husband’s death. She went out, spontaneously, to call on neighbours, to take tea with Phoebe Methley, who was kind to her. He was less sure about Pomona. She seemed both more ordinary, and stunned.

Then, one night, in the small hours he woke to hear footsteps in the corridor outside his room. He waited, irritably, for her to turn his doorhandle, but the steps went past. They were hurried, and measured. He thought of returning to sleep, and knew he must not. So he pulled on a
coat, and went down the stairs. He heard her unlock the kitchen door. And go out into the yard. He imagined her casting herself into the Military Canal. But she went into what he now thought of as his studio. There was a full moon. He lurked by the window, and heard a scratching, and a scraping. He was possessed by terror that she meant to break things. He crept up, and peered in. She was on the other side of the room, unlocking the forbidden pantry. He had not known she knew about it, let alone knowing where the key was hidden.

She came out with a white vase in the shape of a naked girl. She moved dreamily, mechanically, but he was now not sure she was sleepwalking. He followed, at a safe distance—they were both barefoot—into the garden. She flowed on, into the orchard. She sat down at the root of an apple tree, and took out a sharp trowel, from a space in its roots.

“I know you’re there,” she said. “Don’t say anything. Just help.”

He stepped forward, out of the shadows. She handed him the creature—lovely, with coiling hair, open lips in an ecstatic face, and underneath it an explicitly modelled vulva, spread wide, under its furry roof, with its delicate rounded lips. Pomona said

“I can’t smash them. I can put them away. Under the trees.”

“I could put them away for you.”

“They aren’t yours. I shall do it. One by one by one. When they are all—under—then—”

Philip found himself stroking the cold pot, out of a desire not to offer false comfort to the girl. He knelt beside her and took the trowel, and excavated. She brought out a piece of old linen, wrapped the image, and tucked it, neither kindly nor unkindly, into the cavity. Philip held out his hand to help her to her feet, and feared she would fling herself into his arms. But she held off.

On the day of Prosper Cain’s wedding,
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up
, opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in St. Martin’s Lane. It was late: it should have opened on the 22nd, and had been delayed by the failure of some of the complex machinery for its special effects. There was to have been a “living fairy” reduced to pygmy size by a giant lens. There was to have been an eagle which descended on the pirate Smee, and seized him by the pants to carry him across the auditorium. At the very last moment a mechanical lift collapsed, and with it racks of scenery. Much that was to become familiar—the Mermaids’ Lagoon, the Little House in the Treetops—was not yet constructed. And there were scenes, on that first night, that were later excised. It had all been kept a darkly veiled secret. That reconvened first night audience—an adult audience, at an evening performance—had no idea what it was about to see. And then the curtain rose on an enclosed nursery, with little beds with soft bedspreads and a wonderful frieze of wild animals high on the walls, elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers, kangaroos. And a large black and white dog, woken from sleep by a striking clock, rose to turn down the bedclothes and run the bath.

Both August Steyning and Olive Wellwood knew James Barrie, and were part of that first audience. Their party filled a whole row: Olive, Humphry, Violet, Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Hedda, Griselda. The light flared in the fake fire. The three children, two boys and a girl, all played by young women, pranced in pyjamas and played at being grown-ups, producing children like rabbits out of hats, having clearly no idea at all where children came from. The audience laughed comfortably. The parents, dressed for the evening, like the audience out in front of them, argued about the dog, Nana, who was deceived by Mr. Darling into drinking nasty medicine, and then chained up. The night lights went out. The crowing boy, who was Nina Boucicault, another woman, flew in at the unbarred window, in search of his/her shadow.

Olive Wellwood’s reaction to theatre was always to want to
write—
now, immediately, to get into the other world, which Barrie had cleverly named the Never Never Land. It was neither the trundling dog, nor the charming children, that caught her imagination. It was Peter’s
sheared shadow, held up by the Darling parents before being rolled up and put in a drawer. It was dark, floating lightly, not quite transparent, a solid theatrical illusion. When Wendy sewed it on, and he danced, and it became a thing cast by stage lighting climbing the walls and gesturing wildly, she was entranced.

The amazing tale wound on. The children flew. The greasy-locked pirate waved his evil hook. The Lost Boys demonstrated their total ignorance of what mothers, or fathers, or homes, or kisses, might be. Dauntlessly, they sunk their knives into pirates. There was a moment of tension when the darting light who was the fairy began to die in the medicine glass, and had to be revived by the clapping of those who believed in fairies. The orchestra had been instructed to clap, if no one else did. But timidly, then vociferously, then ecstatically, that audience of grown-ups applauded, offered its belief in fairies. Olive looked along the row of her party to see who was clapping. Steyning yes, languidly, politely. Dorothy and Griselda, somewhere between enthusiasm and good manners. Phyllis, wholeheartedly, eyes bright. Humphry, ironically. Violet, snappishly. She herself, irritated and moved. Hedda, intently.