The Children's Book (83 page)

Julian gave a comic shudder. He said it was all very bloodthirsty, and those who wanted to keep fairytales from children were quite right.

“That’s another thing I want to study. I don’t think the real tales do frighten you. I think you accept the rules. They work in a fenced world which isn’t the real world, where nothing ever really changes. Witches get punished, and goose-girls become princesses, and what was lost is restored.”

“I don’t know. I was peculiarly horrified as a small brat by the eyeballs stuck on the thorns, or the dead men impaled on a fence round the glass hill, or the witch in the barrel full of nails.”

“I would suggest it was a kind of gleeful horror. Whereas H. C. Andersen’s stories
do
hurt the reader. The Little Mermaid walking on knives and losing her tongue.”

“So you think you will settle in Newnham and investigate magic woods and castles, and fairy foam on perilous seas?”

“I
cannot
make my mind up. Sometimes I think a women’s college is like the tower Rapunzel was shut in, or even the gingerbread cottage. I don’t want to become unreal. Do you know what I mean? I think it is different for men.”

“It may not be. I’m writing a thesis on English Pastoral—I wanted to compare the poets and painters. I wanted to look at the world of the
Faerie Queene
and the work of those painters who followed William Blake. Do you know Samuel Palmer?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“He paints magic corn-stooks with golden light pouring through them. English fields. Seductive. Lovely. Innocent. If you are half-German I’m half-Italian, and I sometimes think this College is simply the apotheosis of the public school—it looks like an iced cake, and we sit in it like—like—”

The image that came into his mind was enchanted rats and mice, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t utter it. He said

“Guinea pigs.”

“Guinea pigs?
Why on earth?” Griselda laughed.

“I don’t know. Yes I do. Comfortable in a cage.”

They smiled at each other. Griselda was thin and sinuous. Her face was pale, and so were her lashes, and so was her fine gold hair, so demurely knotted. But she wasn’t pallid, like the poking-roots Apostles, she wasn’t pale because she was in the dark. She had a fine waist. She was
much more beautiful, Julian thought, than the rosy, creamy, pretty Brooke. He suddenly remembered that he had swum naked with her, at the New Forest camp, years ago, and had paid no attention, because he was looking at Tom.

“There is an old gentleman who works in the Fitzwilliam Museum, who has a collection of Samuel Palmer. And Edward Calvert. I should like to show you. You could come with Florence, then we should be quite correct.”

“It is odd that we have to be so correct, when we have known each other so long. It is very silly.”

In flaming June, some weeks after Methley’s lecture, Charles/Karl put his bicycle on a train at Charing Cross, got out at Rye and rode out across the Romney Marsh, past East Guldeford, Moneypenny and the Broomhill Level, swerving between dykes and sewers, watching the plovers circle and hearing the geese honk, and the splash of a fish rising. He rode up beside Jury’s Gut Sewer towards Pigwell, skirting the Midrips ponds and the Lydd Firing Ranges of the army. He came to a cottage standing by itself, in a windswept but flowery garden, with a painted board, Birdskitchen Corner. It was an old, brick building, with a porch, and beach beside it. The lawn was small, lumpy and drying out. A small girl was playing on the lawn, with an assortment of pottery mugs and plates and dishes, and a ring of seated dolls and animals. She had long fine brown hair, and a small, neat face. “If you’re
good,”
she said to a stuffed badger, “you can have two slices.” She poured water from the teapot, and handed out dandelion heads. “Not that you ever
are
good,” she said, and looked up, and saw Charles/Karl. “Hello, Ann,” said Charles/Karl.

She stood up, turned and ran into the house. She came out again, followed by Elsie, wiping floury fingers on her apron.

“I was just passing by,” he said to her, smiling cautiously.

“It’s not often people pass by here, seeing that the track doesn’t really go anywhere.”

“It’s a track I’ve come to like,” he said. “So I ride down it.”

“Sit down,” commanded Ann. “And I’ll give you some tea and cake.”

“May I?” he said to Elsie.

“I think so,” she said.

So he sat on the bench, and was given a blue lustre cup of clear water, and a rosy plate with two dandelions and a daisy. “Pretty cups and plates,” said Charles/Karl.

“Philip makes them for her. Well, no, now I look at them, you’ve got a little dish I made myself, years ago.”

They were silent for a moment. He reached into his haversack and brought out a parcel in green shiny paper, tied with ribbon, which he handed to Ann. She opened it. It was a book of nursery rhymes, prettily illustrated. Ann held it to her chest, and said to Charles/Karl

“I can read, you know, I can read all by myself.”

“She can, too,” said Elsie. “I taught her.” She said “You can stay to dinner, if you want. There’s cod, enough for three, and parsley sauce, and potatoes.”

“I should like that.”

So they went in, and sat at table, and talked peacefully, to and about Ann.

“Mrs. Oakeshott is away?”

“She’s gone to a lecture in Hythe. And Robin’s out with a friend. So we’d have been peacefully lonesome, if you hadn’t come along.”

Elsie was now a student-teacher, in Puxty School. She earned a little money, and lived in part of Marian Oakeshott’s cottage. Charles/Karl, after praising the juiciness of the cod, and the freshness of the sauce, asked if the work was as interesting as she’d hoped.

“It’s
interesting,”
said Elsie. “It’s good to be needed, and watch the little ones light up when they grasp how to read. But I’m not satisfied. I don’t know that I’ll
ever
be satisfied.”

“I don’t know why I so like to see that half-cross look on your face. It was the first thing I noticed about you, a kind of constructive discontent.”

“Well, that’s not likely ever to change, I think.”

“I don’t know …”

Elsie got up abruptly, and began to wash the dishes. Charles/Karl took a cloth, and dried them. Ann wandered away, and fell into a doze on a sofa. They went out, and sat down again on the beach, by the porch, looking out over the beds of reeds and strips of shingle. He said

“You are the only person in the world I feel quite comfortable with. Despite your being so prickly and unsatisfied.”

“I like to be wi’ you, too. But we’re going nowhere. This is th’ end of the road. That track gets to the shingle bank and just
ends.”

“I should like to be able to see you much more—to be with you. You’re good for me.”

“I’m good for no one but Ann. And the little ’uns at the school, I suppose. I’ve made one mistake, Mr.—Karl—and I’m not about to make any more.”

“It wouldn’t be like
that.”

“You don’t know how ‘that’ was. I made my bed, I’ll lie in it. I’ve got good friends. You and me—this is an imaginary tea-party, like Ann giving you flowers and water. We come out of two different worlds, and they don’t mix.”

“I don’t believe in all that.”

“I think you do. You couldn’t ever take me home to your high-up family—don’t pretend to yourself, you couldn’t. We are no good to each other.”

Charles/Karl answered this by putting his arms round her, and gripping fiercely. He had not known he was going to do this. Their heads came close. He said “I want you, I need you, I need
you.”

There were tears in her eyes. He wiped them away. He kissed her; they were both trembling; it was a careful, not a greedy, kiss.

“You’ll do me no good. I must be
respectable.”

“Oh, my love, I know that. I do know.”

Ann came out into the sunlight, and they drew apart before she saw them. Charles/Karl said he must be going. He said “I’ll come back, if I may?”

“I can’t stop you passing by, on this road that goes nowhere—”

“I’ll come back. Soon.”

“Thank Mr. Wellwood for your book, Ann.” He rode away.

Herbert Methley came back to Cambridge at the beginning of the Easter Term. The Newnham Literature Society invited him to give an informal tea-time talk, in the tea-room in North Hall. He spoke about the changes that were taking place, and would take place, in women’s lives, as sensible politics prevailed. He did say that women had a right to fulfil all their needs, but he mentioned neither Free Love, nor Mr. Wells’s proposal for nurseries run by the State. He seemed, Florence thought, to be speaking particularly to her, responding to her interest, skating away from what didn’t interest her. She remembered the warm, lean grip of his hand in King’s. She considered his face and body. He was ugly, for certain. His neck was strained and muscular, round the Adam’s apple. There was too much of his mouth, but it was not slack, it was full of movement. His eyebrows danced, as he moved from pleasant to unpleasant themes. He pushed his hair back boyishly, but he was a man, not a boy. She remembered his grip, again. After the meeting, the women gathered round the writer and asked questions. Florence asked him if he thought marriage would disappear and he said he thought it would not: human beings, it appeared, needed a long-term nest and partners, like swans and some seabirds. But other creatures had developed other habits. He thought, looking round him at the students, that the idea of dress as a prison—unmanageable hats and trains, shoes you couldn’t walk on—indeed feet that were painfully crushed and broken, in China—all this might well be superseded. Young women now rode bicycles, which would have been unthinkable. He shook everyone’s hand before leaving. He held Florence’s for too long. His fingers played on hers.

Back in her room Florence paced, unsatisfied, dissatisfied. She looked out into the garden at one or two women playing badminton against a grey sky—the flimsy shuttlecock seemed to be her flimsy life. There were aspects of Newnham that were like a prison. She was near tears.

He tapped on the door. She opened it. She took in a huge breath.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I told them I was a friend of the family, a
kind of uncle, and had left behind something I needed urgently—and so I found you. Let me in, and shut the door.” She let him in, and shut the door.

He said “It was
you
I came back for,
you
I had lost and found. You feel it too, I’m sure of that.”

She stood stock-still, and made a small sound, between a sob and a gasp.

He took her in his arms, and kissed her, softly, not invasively. He touched her breast, under her shirt, softly, and then less softly. He stroked her haunch and she responded, involuntarily, pressing herself against him. He was all overcoat and buttons. He stood back, undid the buttons, and shrugged off the coat. He said

“Now you can
feel
what I want.”

Florence didn’t speak. If she had spoken, it would have to have been to protest, and she was not protesting.

“Buttons,” said Herbert Methley, “are a bore and a tease.”

He undid some of Florence’s buttons on her shirt. Then he pressed his face into the bodice, under the blouse. His moustache prickled. So did Florence’s skin. He did not take off her skirt, but searched for her body, with his hands, through it. Her body became independent of her mind. It rose to meet him, it pushed against him.

And then he said “I must go now. Remember, this is
good
, this is
right
, this is
your right
. Don’t have second thoughts, my beauty, when I’ve gone. I’ll write. I’ll think of a place where we can meet, and…”

He left her, and she stood there, unbuttoned, unsatisfied, every nerve fizzing and hot, not knowing how to imagine what she had been made to want violently. She did up the buttons and thought, this is dangerous, I won’t get any further in, I won’t answer his letter. Little currents of anonymous desire ran all over her, and contradicted her mind.

But when the letter came, amusing, tempting and urgent, Florence answered. It was mid-May, and sunny. She wanted a life of her own. So she went to lunch with Herbert Methley, unchaperoned and secretly, at a restaurant called Chez Tante Sophie, with a very curtained window in a passage in Soho. She wore a pretty green dress and a gay hat, with long ribbons. They ate whitebait, and poulet de Bresse, and crêpes Suzette, and drank rather a lot of white Burgundy. They talked about literature and about the Woman Question, and the agitation for the Vote. There
was a novel to be written, said Herbert Methley, about a truly free woman, who was
not
a commodity, and chose her own life. Something in Florence was repelled by this—it was old-fashioned, in its daring, compared to the ideas of some of the Newnham women, who were sober about real difficulties. But she was resolutely kicking over the traces, so she smiled and smiled, and made an uncharacteristic girlish squeak of pleasure when they lit the brandy over the pancakes and it flared intensely blue.

It turned out that they were to take coffee and cognac in a little private room Herbert Methley had reserved. “It will be an adventure,” he said obscurely, following Florence up a narrow, winding stair.

The private room was furnished with a couch, and low coffee tables, a silk spread with an oriental look, embroidered with feather patterns, and candles in pretty china candlesticks. It had no window on the outside world. It had a perfumed smell. It was not a room Florence would have chosen to spend time in, but there were things she had to know, and do. She unpinned her hat, and laid it aside; she accepted a large cognac; she trembled. Herbert Methley stroked her, as a man would stroke a nervous filly. He drank a large glass of cognac himself. He made a joke about adventures with buttons, and divested himself, and then Florence, of various garments. Florence wanted to know, but did not yet know what that meant. Herbert Methley, brown-skinned, bony, nervy, touched and touched her, and talked in her ear, not about love, but about desire, and need, and
right
. There were things he knew how to do that Florence had never imagined—places he brought into shivering excitement that had always been quiescent, or vaguely troubled. She drank more cognac, and thought, “I am being played upon, like a musical instrument.” This thought was strengthening. The player, or conjurer, removed more clothing, from both of them. Florence whispered that someone might come, and he said confidently that all was safe, all was prepared, all was provided for this purpose. Florence drank more cognac. Her hair slipped from its moorings. She was in her petticoat and bodice and her body was being stirred by a myriad small fingerprints.