The Children's Book (88 page)

Olive was a woman who imagined male characters and male creatures. The travellers underground—Tom, the Gathorn, the salamander, the loblolly, were male, as Tom’s angrily detached shadow was male.

Steyning said a woman could better do the element of mask, of
über-marionette
, he wanted.

Olive needed to please Steyning.

The audition piece was the meeting between Thomas and the Gathorn. A series of variegated Puckish boys talked to a series of boyish women, interspersed with divas. Olive’s medium was words. She thought Lucy Fontaine might do, and imagined Gladys Carpenter as thickset. Sylvia Simon sounded hopeful, whereas Daisy Bremner and Glory Gayheart sounded girlish or unreal.

The women auditioned in skirts. Lucy Fontaine had a pleasant, clear voice and sizeable breasts and hips. Olive shut her eyes, and heard

“I’m lost, and I fear I shall never get out of here alive. I don’t know where I’m going, let alone how to get there. I have this small light, and a sketchy map.”

And the Gathorns. “It’s not so bad. I live here. You can delight in the dark, if you understand it. It’s full of unexpected riches.”

And the boys/women. “Who are you? How do you live down here?”

“You can see in the dark, if you get used to it. There are creatures down here who shine their own light. You need to meet a loblolly.”

“I’ve seen things glowing, or whisking along, in the distance.”

“The mine is full of spirits. Some kind, or fairly kind. Some are tricky. And some are downright nasty.”

“I didn’t ask to—to go on a quest. I just wanted to be in the fields.”

Stop, enough, Steyning would call at this point. Olive tried closing her eyes and simply hearing voices. She learned things. Her hero was more afraid, and less brave, than most heroes. Glory Gayheart, who was skinny enough, had a rich voice, a confident contralto. Lucy Fontaine got exactly the right mix of bleakness, light clarity, friendliness.
“Zu viel Brust,”
said Anselm Stern. Daisy Bremner was eager and girlish, Glory Gayheart was operatic, Sylvia Simon was scared and not good-looking, though Olive thought she knew what she was doing. Gladys Carpenter was tall and thin, with cropped white-blonde hair. Her face was bony. She had the luck of having by far the best Gathorn, a boy called Miles Martin, with a huge mouth which he curled into a variety of smiles and grins, a husky voice, a curly mop of hair and large eyes. He had worked out a crouching and skipping set of moves but when Gladys spoke, he
listened
, and she spoke to him. Olive shut her eyes again. The voice was sexless and silver. It was brave and full of the fear of the dark. She opened her eyes. This upright girl had crept into the skin of the boy she had imagined.

“I fear I shall never get out of here alive.”

Matter-of-fact, dignified, desperate.

“She’ll do,” said August. “The only one without too much expressiveness.”

They rehearsed. The Sterns worked on the puppets, the marionettes, the salamander, the loblolly, the coal-ball. Steyning designed and redesigned the sets. He rehearsed the masked groups—White Damp, Choke Damp, Fire Damp, the Fireman in white linen with rod and candle, rats, bats, shadows, spiders. New scenes were written to make more happen. The Silf—a girl of nineteen who looked fourteen and was called Doris Almond—was wound and unwound with cobwebs. They changed the material the cobwebs were made from, to something that shone, a little, and caught the light. The turntable that rose from under the stage broke and ground to an unbalanced halt. It was mended.
Puppets were discarded as too small, or ineffective. Wolfgang Stern designed and redesigned the coal-ball. A curtain was made, painted with black ferns, black dragonflies, black monstrous millipedes. Programmes were printed. The play opened. Steyning had given it a title:
Tom Underground
. Olive had not told Tom, either that they had adapted his story, or that they had taken his name. She had not thought about Tom whilst the work was going on. Names impose themselves on writers, and will not be changed, and come to be facts in nature, like stones, like plants, that are what they are. Only another writer, Olive thought, now it came to telling Tom Wellwood about the play, would believe her if she said that, about names. It was possible Tom would be
pleased
that his name was at the centre.

Steyning sent out invitations to the first performance. They were elegantly printed, with a silver bough and a coal-ball. “Olive Wellwood, August Steyning and the Management of the Elysium Theatre invite you to
Tom Underground
, a new form of theatrical drama.”

Tom opened his at breakfast. Olive was watching him. He read it out, to Violet, Florian, Hedda, Harry and Robin, all of whom had similar envelopes. Humphry was away, in Manchester, but would be back for the First Night. Olive knew she should say—should already have said—something.

Violet said “So the hero’s called Tom. That’s nice, Tom.”

“Yes,” said Tom, “that’s nice.” His voice was unemphasised, toneless, not, Olive thought desperately, unlike Gladys Carpenter. He said

“I wasn’t asked. Or told.”

Violet said “It was saved up for a nice surprise.”

Hedda said “Lots of people are called Tom. It’s a common name.”

“What’s it about?” asked Robin.

Violet said “That’s saved up for a nice surprise, too.”

The First Night was New Year’s Day 1909.

Humphry and Olive were in the box of Mr. Rosenthal, the impresario, with his wife, Zelda, Sir Laurence Porteous, a theatrical knight, and some Liberal politicians. The Sterns were behind the scenes, directing, deploying and manipulating the life-size puppets, the stringed marionettes, the loblolly and the salamander. Steyning was in the box with the Wellwoods, unusually fidgety. He felt that only he could get the lighting precisely perfect—the flood of blood, the White Damp, the Fire Damp, the brilliance surging out of the coal-ball. He was next to Olive, and at one point gripped her silver sleeve, and then muttered an apology.

The Wellwood children, with Violet, had a box of their own. Dorothy had not come. Tom was not in evening dress, but he was cleaned up, and had a clean shirt and an acceptable jacket. He was between Phyllis, in a golden caramel-coloured dress, made by Violet, and Hedda, in sea-green silk with a lace collar. Violet sat the other side of Phyllis. She wore black, trimmed with mauve, and a cameo brooch at her neck. She had set her pretty gilt chair back into the shadows.

The younger boys, Florian, Robin and Harry, now sixteen, fourteen, and thirteen, were grouped beyond Violet, washed and brushed.

Tom leaned his chin on the velvet rim of the box and stared out. The box was in the upper air of the dome, which was rich midnight-blue and star-studded. Gilded angels with silver trumpets sailed across it. There was a huge chandelier, a waterfall of crystal droplets, containing and scattering brightness. Tom looked out into emptiness, paradoxically crowded, with gargoyles under the boxes, and dreamy cherubs sitting above the curtained stage, which was a deeper emptiness.

Hedda said “You always feel as though you ought to jump, don’t you?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Violet.

Hedda insisted. “It sort of pulls you, to fall into it.”

“You’re making me feel sick,” said Phyllis, smiling. Tom put his head further into the cradle of his arms.

The orchestra arrived, and shifted and shuffled and made the usual
discordant scraping and peeping tuning noises. Then they played. The music had light-footed dances in it, and whirlwinds scattering leaves, and a kind of dark, downward sucking drift from the clarinets and bassoons. The curtains with their floating bats and spiders drew back, and revealed a walled garden in the sun, on which an artificial sun shone brightly and evenly, across which a man-size rat scampered and danced to flute and drum music, carrying in its teeth, which were sharp and glittering, a limp smoky-grey web, which it spread out, using its forepaws, to reveal an elongated human shape, uniformly ash-grey, lifeless. And it rolled it up and jumped out, over the wall.

And the shadowless boy came into the garden. He sat on a bench, and played a recorder. He sang a ballad. He was a woman. Tom was disgusted. She wore doublet and hose, and had shapely legs. She had a cropped cap of silver and gold hair. She had red lips and polished fingernails. She moved her hips like a boy but they were women’s hips. Another boy—a real one—came into the garden, and they played, and talked and the second boy said “Look at my shadow,” and threw it across the lawn. And then Tom, its name was Tom, discovered it was single and had no shadow.

The story wound on. Tom knew, and didn’t know, the story. His skin crawled. The Elf Queen came—she too had no shadow—and talked to Tom. The scene changed. It was a bare heath, with a crack which was a door in a wall of rock which was the backcloth. Red light poured blood from the wings. The orchestra played bloody sounds. Tom remembered Loïe Fuller in Paris. He refused grimly to suspend disbelief. The woman-Tom was up to the knees in the bloodlight, and staggered dramatically.

Tom cradled his head in his hands. Phyllis tapped him reproachfully on the shoulder. “You’ve got to look,” she hissed. “I
am
looking,” Tom mumbled. The dark cavern swallowed the woman-Tom. Cardboard, Tom thought, and lantern-slides, and smoke puffed with bellows. He did not think it out, but
knew
he was undergoing a trial or test. He must not for one moment, not for one second,
believe
. The test was not to be taken in by glamour, by illusion. The Tom-thing found something like a stalactite or stalagmite, a white pillar in the dark, which whispered incomprehensibly, to muted drumming from the orchestra in the rhythm of a heartbeat. The boy-woman and the person personating the Gathorn found a crack in the pillar and pulled. The stage was full of billowing
white scarves. Flutes and piccolos shrilled. The Silf came out of her wrappings, whiter than white, with outstanding white hair. She danced, spikily. Her face was white, like her hair. Again Tom put his head in his arms and again Phyllis tapped on him. Violet said “Sit up properly, Tom.” Tom shrugged and sat up. Violet was now permanently stiff with disapproval, or something darker. She talked to him as though he was ten years younger than he was.

The interval came and the audience applauded vigorously and there was a buzz of talk. Hedda said “It’s brilliantly atmospheric. The puppets are so clever. It’s sinister, don’t you think, Tom?”

Tom excused himself, and blundered out in the direction of the lavatory. He stood in an anonymous line of males, and went in and pissed into the porcelain and tried not to think, which he had trained himself to do, or not to do.

He went back to the box. He was both not-thinking, and not-believing. Something had been taken from him, certainly, but in these lights, against this backcloth, it was something fabricated and trivial, which it made no sense to mourn.

The end came. Light, and silken ferns in multifarious transparent greens and golds, flowed out of the coal-ball.

The audience, in the same way, erupted into cries of approval and hands beating hands.

“You ought to clap, Tom,” said Phyllis, clapping prettily.

Tom clapped, so that she would stop talking. They could see into the box where Olive was. People were applauding and pointing. She came with August Steyning, to the rim of their space, and inclined her head to the calling and clapping.

Tom thought, we are all shut up in these boxes and we can’t get out.

He knew he was prohibited from thinking about his mother. He was shut in a box, and there was nothing he could do.

“Must get out,” said Tom. “Air. Need air.” He pushed his golden chair back, found the door in the red throat of the box-trap, and stumbled out.

So that when Olive came with Humphry, to be kissed and congratulated by her children, Tom was not there. She was dazed with success; her hair was coming loose, she had to put it up, again and again. She had not looked into the cupboard in her mind when she had locked away any anxiety about Tom Wellwood and Tom Underground. It would work out. Things worked out. Violet said “I trust you are happy” and
Olive then looked round her children, kissed them all, and said to her sister, lightly, “Where’s Tom?”

“He went out to get some air, he said.”

“It
is
very hot,” said Olive. “I hope he enjoyed the play.”

“Everybody did,” said Violet. “And so they should.”

Olive was given a large bouquet of red roses, lilies and stephanotis, in a silver holder, the size you have to cradle in your arms, which made the control of her hair even harder. She was wearing a black stiff silk skirt, embroidered with gold flowers, and a silver shirt, with a ruffled neck. Humphry had given her a double row of amber beads. It was a present for the First Night. There were insects trapped in some of the beads: one was a lace-winged fly, millions of years old, which had left traces, in the hard translucent bead, of its struggle to escape the oozing sap. Humphry had said “I thought it was appropriate. I couldn’t give you a coal-ball.” Olive kissed him. “I love you, Humph,” she said. “We have come a long way from the
Dream
in Hackney.” “A long way and no way,” said Humphry, and kissed her again.

People came to praise. James Barrie, saying he was moved, and Bernard Shaw, saying she had managed to please the multitude with intelligence, which was hard to do, and H. G. Wells, who called the play an allegory, which caused Olive to frown. Fabians came, and the Portman Square Wellwoods, though Griselda and Julian Cain were not there, were coming with a party from Cambridge the following weekend. Prosper Cain was absent: his wife was near her time, and unwell, they were told.

Olive said “Where’s Tom?”

“He kept dozing off,” said Hedda, remorseless.

“Not really dozing,” said Phyllis. “More resting his head.”

“Where is he?”

“You know he doesn’t like crowds,” said Violet. “He’ll turn up.”

There was a party. There was champagne, and high excited laughter. People asked the Germans how they did it and were told it was an old German art made new. People embraced the Germans and embraced
Olive, again and again. Her beads were tangled in her flowers, and her hair came right down, and Humphry said she was the White Queen, removed the flowers, and found a theatrical make-up person to put up the hair again, with a red rose knitted into it. Steyning was criticising the timing of some of the lighting. Olive said