The Children's Book (79 page)

Not Tom. You would have wagered that Tom would clap hardest.

The penultimate scene was the testing of the Beautiful Mothers, by Wendy. The Nursery filled with a bevy of fashionably dressed women, who were allowed to claim the Lost Boys if they responded sensitively to a flushed face, or a hurt wrist, or kissed their long-lost child gently, and not too loudly. Wendy dismissed several of these fine ladies, in a queenly manner. Steyning spoke to Olive behind his hand. “This will have to go.” Olive smiled discreetly and nodded. Steyning said “It’s part pantomime, part play. It’s the play that is original, not the pantomime.” “Hush,” said the fashionable lady in front of him, intent on the marshalling of the Beautiful Mothers.

After the wild applause, and the buzz of discussion, Olive said to Tom

“Did you enjoy that?”

“No,” said Tom, who was in a kind of agony. “Why not?”

Tom muttered something in which the only audible word was “cardboard.” Then he said “He doesn’t know
anything
about boys, or making things up.”

August Steyning said “You are saying it’s a play for grown-ups who don’t want to grow up?”

“Am I?” said Tom. He said “It’s make-believe make-believe make-believe. Anyone can see all those boys are girls.”

His body squirmed inside his respectable suit. Tom said “It’s not like
Alice in Wonderland
. That’s a real other place. This is just wires and strings and disguises.”

“You have a Puritan soul,” said Steyning. “I think you will find, that whilst everything you say is true, this piece will have a long life and people will suspend their disbelief, very happily.”

In the New Year of 1905, on a frosty evening, Humphry and Olive went to dine with August Steyning at Nutcracker Cottage. The room was candlelit. A log fire was burning in the inglenook. It had been hard to light, and everything was veiled with smoke and smelled of smoke. Steyning gave them comforting winter food—a winter soup of dried peas and ham, roast pheasant, stuffed with a piece of fillet steak, Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, glazed with marsala sauce. The only other guest was Toby Youlgreave.

They discussed
Peter Pan
. Toby had seen it, and was enthusiastic. Nothing like it had been done before. He supposed the young Well-woods had enjoyed it. Especially Tom.

“Tom hated it,” said Olive, sadly. “I thought he’d like it. He always liked the stories more than any of the others did. But it seemed to make him angry. He said it was make-believe and cardboard. He didn’t like the women playing boys.”

“He refused entirely to suspend disbelief,” said Steyning. “It was odd, and almost alarming.”

Toby asked how old Tom was now. Olive said she thought he was twenty-two: Toby said that his history of failing exams, or failing to be fit to sit exams, was perplexing, given his intelligence. Humphry said maybe they should think of some other course. He could not do nothing for ever. Dorothy was only twenty and had passed her Highers, and the Preliminary Scientific Exam, and begun her medical studies. She was lodging with the Skinners in Gower Street. Phyllis was the home-loving daughter. He did not know himself what Tom did with his time. He was out of doors, for much of most days. Olive said doubtfully that
he had said from time to time that he meant to be a writer. Humphry asked irritably whether she had ever seen any writing he had done. No, she said. No, she had not. He thought it was private.

“You can’t make a living out of
private writing
,” said Humphry. Toby said Tom was a Wanderer. He meant that he had a vision of Tom as an inhabitant of woods and downs, something out of Hudson and Jef-feries. Steyning said drily that maybe he disliked Peter Pan because he recognised something. Olive said indignantly no, it was not that, she was sure it was not that, he found the play simply unappealing.

Steyning said that Tom had seemed to enjoy being occupied with the puppet play in the summer. He had made some good lay figures. Maybe the theatre would suit him.

Olive looked into the candle-flame, and across at Steyning’s long, pale, regular face, lit, with dark shadows, from beneath. For most of Tom’s life she believed she had known in her body—as though held to the boy by a myriad spider-threads—exactly where he was, how he felt, what he needed. He had been part of her, part of her had gone running with him, she had
felt
his sleep after he was tucked up. Or so she thought she had felt. Lately, she had found herself using, and then rapidly rejecting, the word “coarsened” in her thoughts of Tom. He was bristly. He was sulky. He was automatically argumentative. He did not seem to read her needs, as before he always had. She thought she would be glad if he found something to do, and stopped, as she almost put it to herself,
lurking
in the bushes.

August Steyning said
Peter Pan
had renewed his interest in writing a different kind of magical play.
Peter Pan
had used children’s make-believe—”slapstick” said August Steyning. It had drawn on the English pantomime, which was a connivance between actors and director and audience. He stopped for a moment and did it justice. “Not that it doesn’t get under your skin, and infest your mind. It does. In ways I think that odd little person who wrote it can’t conceive. He is both sweetly innocent and positively
uncanny
about mummies and daddies—and what are we to make of the identity of the daddy in the dog-kennel and the evil Hook? Who would have thought of casting the same actor? It’s a work of genius, but the genius is twisted like a corkscrew.”

He said “I want to stage a fairy play that shall be closer to Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk
than to pantomime. We made a beginning in the Denge Marsh Camp. What is needed is new versions—but only
versions
—of the old, deep tales that are twisted into our souls. The dark Palace under the Hill, the guest, the lights dancing on the marsh. We could use stage machinery, yes—not to lift sweetly pretty girl-boys in pyjamas—but to make
dames blanches
float, and bats and lizard-dragons cluster on rocks and branches. I know things about lighting—and shadows—no one else in this country knows. There are Germans doing clever things with masks and puppets that would entrance an audience of children and disturb an audience of grown-ups, rightly deployed.”

“If
Gesamtkunstwerk,”
said Humphry, “will you not need singers?”

“It will not be an opera. It
will
have unearthly music. I envisage hidden flutes and concealed drums and tambourines. And wailing voices, singing in the wind.”

He said “I am relying on you, dear Olive, to write me such a tale.”

“It would be hard—”

“But you could do it.”

“I have an idea …”

“Yes?”

“But I need to think about it. I promise I will think.”

Florence Cain tried hard not to be depressed by the new, extravagant happiness in the Kensington home. She had watched, with Imogen, the new double bed on its way up the narrow staircase. It was a festive bed with a bedhead carved with cherubs, not the catafalque of Prosper’s dream. It embarrassed Florence, though she tried hard to prevent it. They could not keep their hands off each other, Prosper Cain and his new wife, though they tried to do so, when Florence was present. She felt aggrieved—she was
de trop
in her own house, for reasons nothing to do with her own conduct. Imogen had tried, once, to open a discussion. “I can see it must be strange for you, now, now that I’m …” Florence snapped. “Of course it’s strange. It doesn’t matter. We needn’t speak of it.”

“But, I—”

“Just be happy. I can see you are.”

“I—”

“I said, we needn’t discuss it.”

•  •  •

She also did not wish to discuss it with her fiancé, Geraint Fludd. Geraint came often, running administrative errands between Purchase House, to which its owner had not returned, The Silver Nutmeg and the V and A. He had managed to become a Member of the Stock Exchange during a brief period of easy admission in November 1904, before the rules were tightened. On New Year’s Eve, in 1905, he came to dine with the Cains, and was received by Florence.

“I’ve brought you something,” he said. He handed her a small box, wrapped in cherry-coloured paper, with a silver bow. Inside was a pretty ring, the work of Imogen’s jewellery master Henry Wilson, with amethyst and moonstone forget-me-nots set in woven silver leaves.

“The silver is my own,” he said. “I bought it in a warehouse, in the City. I bought the stones, too, from a mining man I know. I hope you’ll wear it. I hope it is the right size. I asked Imogen.”

Florence was startled. It was a very pretty ring. Not what she would have expected from Geraint. Though she could not see why she should not have expected it. She said

“The engagement isn’t announced…”

“You don’t like it?”

“How could I not like it? It’s delightful. Only …”

“I’d be happy if you wore it on the other hand.”

Florence said “I’ve decided to study at Cambridge, at Newnham College. I’ve sent in an application.”

This was a lie.

“I’m glad,” said Geraint. “I think—I think you would be happy there. For a time. I do believe in women studying and working. I could come to the College and take you out.” He was a good man, Florence thought, and she was taking advantage of him. She thought shrewdly that women were tempted to think less well of men they could hurt, if they chose to. She thought: if I felt about Geraint what Imogen feels about Papa, I should put my arms round him and weep. She drew the pretty ring slowly onto the finger of her right hand. It fitted perfectly. Geraint, with courtesy and care, took hold of the hand, and kissed it. Then he kissed her smooth cheek. The vision flashed through his mind of a knot of legs and buttocks on the dishevelled bed of Miss Louise, whom he had lately visited, despite thinking he ought not to. Could
Florence ever come to behave like that? He thought how odd the huge, smoky gap was between what you were thinking and what you were doing. He decided to keep hold of the hand, but then Prosper and Imogen came into the room. They had clasped hands, themselves, and brushed a kiss, at the foot of the stairs. Imogen said “Oh, the lovely ring—”

Florence would have liked to kill someone, but did not know whom.

In 1905 Dorothy began to do practical work in the London School of Medicine for Women. The students went on ward visits and began to dissect the dead. Dorothy was well liked by the other women, but she kept herself to herself and made no close friends, returning to the Skinners’ house to study in the evenings, and visiting Griselda, or Florence, at the weekends. In September of that year both Griselda and Florence became freshers at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Dorothy felt doubly lonely, because those two were now such good friends, and because they were no longer in London. Griselda was to study Languages, and Florence had opted for History.

In the autumn Dorothy felt, unusually for her, dispirited and low. She enjoyed the Anatomy, but was fazed by the patience, and terror, and occasional bliss of the women in the gynaecological wards. The Hospital for Women made things comfortable for patients: they had pretty curtains, and stoneware vases of flowers, and brightly coloured bedspreads. The women’s bodies were used. Dorothy’s was not. It was covered in a long skirt—the female students, like the nurses, had to wear skirts with braided hems, long enough for their ankles not to be seen if they bent over a patient. Over the long skirt was a flowing overall. Their hair was tightly coiled on the tops of their heads, or in the napes of their necks.

Quite suddenly and farcically, she fell in love. She fell in love with a demonstrator, Dr. Barty, during a dissection class. He was showing her the human heart, and how to extract it from the cavity where it lay and no longer beat. There was a smell—a stink—of formaldehyde. The room was ventilated by a small opening in the end wall, with a gas jet burning to draw up the heated air. The hospital was a converted house—the space was cramped and full of women, twenty living, one dead, soft and leathery. Dr. Barty asked Dorothy to make the cuts to extract the organ, a cross-shaped cut in the pericardium, then, with a larger scalpel, slices through the six blood vessels going into the heart,
and the two that went out. Dr. Barty—a muscular, youngish man, in a green buttoned overall and a surgical cap—congratulated Dorothy on the precision of her work. He told her to take out the heart, and place it in the tray for another student to continue. Dorothy put her hands round the heart, and tugged. She looked up at the bearded, severely smiling Dr. Barty, and
saw
him. It was as though time stopped, as though she stood there for ever with another woman’s heart in her hands. She saw every lively hair of his black brows, and the wonderful greens and greys of his irises, and the dark tunnels of his pupils, opened on her. She saw the chiselled look of his lips, in the fronds of his rich beard, reddish-black, curling softly. His teeth were white and even. She must have been studying him for weeks, quite as much as the inanimate fingers and toes, tarsals and metatarsals he exposed to her.

Her helplessness made her furious. She took in a deep breath of tainted air and fell unconscious to the ground: the dead heart rolled damply beside her.

It was not unusual for the women to faint. Dorothy, however, had never fainted before. They carried her out, and fanned her, and practised hands held a beaker of water for her to sip. She came brusquely to consciousness, and insisted on returning to the class, though she took no further active part. She watched Dr. Barty, who was kind to her. He was one of the doctors who went out of his way to be kind to, and to encourage, the women. He was said to take a particular interest in slender Miss Lythegoe, whose work was better than Dorothy’s, whose demeanour was grave.

Dorothy went back to Gower Street and crept up the narrow stairs as though she had no strength. She
did not want
this visitation. Her life had a direction, which did not include desiring or swooning over Dr. Barty. They all looked at him a little soppily, she had thought, and now she had caught it, like a bacillus.