The Children's Book (76 page)

She suddenly thought it would be good to see Philip Warren. She walked into the drive. She did
not
want to see Seraphita, or Pomona, or even Elsie. So she went neatly and quietly round the house, and into the stableyard, and directly to the door of the dairy-studio. She thought,
then, too late, that she might encounter the ogre, Benedict Fludd. She peered in through the dusty window. There was Philip, in a blue overall, his back to her. No sign of Fludd. She tapped on the upper half of the door. Philip opened it, and smiled widely when he saw her.

“I were about to say, go away, I’m busy. And then I saw it was you. Come in.”

“I took a long walk, to think, and then I found I was here. So I came to see how you are getting on.”

“I’ve been drawing seaweeds. Wi’ things moving in them, with the water moving. Things like pipefish and cuttlefish and such.”

“Show me.”

He fetched his drawing pad, and they sat down, side by side, to look at it. There were some extraordinary images of bladderwrack, half-stranded, half-floating, its air pockets just above the surface of the shifting sea.

“First, I see how it looks. I keep looking, and see all the shapes as it moves in the different light. And then, a lot later, I make formal patterns.” He frowned. “You see what’s
chance
—little flips and flurries on th’ water—and what’s constant, what repeats.”

“It reminds me oddly of
Gray’s Anatomy
. I have to keep drawing veins, and muscles, and tendons, and joints. I could draw you different levels of what’s moving in your hand as you draw. Muscles that tighten, and what they do to other muscles. How the blood runs like a tide along the veins and arteries. You could make the most beautiful designs from the circulation of the blood. Like currents in the water, and strands of weeds. Only I’m not good at drawing, like you. I have to do it, for all these exams, and I try, and I try. But I mess it up.”

“Show me,” said Philip, pushing the paper pad towards her, and handing her the crayon. Dorothy laughed. She drew a rough image of a hand—the palmar surface—with the strong pulling parallel bands of the muscles and the cross-gartering effect at the sheath of the fingertip. Then she drew an arm, with the main nerves blacked in like rivers and tributaries. Philip was following her crayon by touching his own hand and arm, locating the stresses and counter-stresses, the flow and return.

“Sometimes,” said Dorothy, “I think I shall never get to grips with all of it. External cutaneous nerves. Deltoid. I sometimes feel I’d like to be free of it.”

“Not really,” said Philip. “It’s
got
you. You’ve got no choice, I think.” He took back the pencil and drew a more elegant version of the
network of muscles. “Like me. I hadn’t a choice, from before I could think about it.”

“It means giving things up,” said Dorothy. “Things like camp and the play, now. Things like parties. And more, probably. Women don’t get to be doctors and have time to do the things women do, like getting married, even.”

“No,” said Philip. “It’s like monks and nuns, work, I come to see.”

“Show me your work. I like seeing it.”

Philip fetched out some pots with seaweeds flowing round them, dark green on a marine green blue, with flashes of tawny yellow. He showed her some of the variations on the climbing creatures on branches, derived partly from the Gloucester Candlestick and partly from the Gien version of majolica, with capering grotesques. Dorothy was happy enough with imaginary creepers and creatures anchored so safely in cold earth, held by glaze, set in place by fire.

Philip said

“D’you want to make a pot? I’ve been teaching i’ th’ camp—it’s amazing how people’s aptitudes vary—I think you would throw a good pot, with a bit of practice. You’ve got good, strong, solid hands. With good nerves and tendons and things in the fingers, I should think.”

So Dorothy sat down at the wheel, and Philip stood by her and made it move, and centred the clay for her. He showed her how to feel its texture, how to find a speed, how to hold the wall steady as it rose between her fingers like a cool, wet, living creature. Two or three vessels slumped and flailed, and then, suddenly, easily, she had a rhythm, a fat-bellied pot rose, widened, narrowed, and was cast off by Philip.

“Told you,” he said. “You’ve got good hands. You have to see wi’ your fingertips. Sometimes I think it’s done wi’ the whole body. The rhythm an’ all. And the mind.”

Dorothy thought of her future. Pulling blood-covered curled human beings out of another woman, making them breathe, cutting the cord. Cutting into flesh with scalpels. The only person she knew who understood the glamour and the terror of
work
was Philip. They didn’t bother each other. They didn’t
know
each other. But they understood some of the same things. She felt better for having come. She had not exactly set out to see Philip, but it turned out to be what she meant to do.

•  •  •

Griselda Wellwood and Florence Cain found themselves in the Mermaid Inn without their families. So they sat down and talked to each other, over a cup of tea and plate of scones. Griselda talked about the interesting aspects of the camp play or pageant, of the way it explored and exhibited so many unexpected talents, in such new cooperative ways. But she sounded a little wistful, and a little discontented. Florence did not say much at all, until Griselda had run out of commentary. She bit her sandwiches sharply and looked faintly disapproving.

“We are all so good at
playing
, nowadays,” she said. “Like children.”

“Oh, I think it’s more than play. They are artists, Mr. Steyning, my aunt, Herr Stern and his son Wolfgang.”

“It may not be play for them, but it is for most of the camp people. Physical exercises, creative snipping with scissors, fancy dress and so on. You wonder where the real world really is.”

“You do,” said Griselda. “I agree, about that. My brother worries a lot about the poor. He is thinking of going to the LSE to study statistics. He has always been bothered about what was real. He doesn’t want the life my father planned for him.”

“And what life did they plan for you?” said Florence. “As a woman?”

“Oh, they hoped I would go to dances and make a good match. I went to the dances, and was bored stiff by all the eligible young men, and now I don’t know where I am. The future seems very
long
, don’t you think? It
is
different for women. There’s this huge
thing
coming—getting married—all the lace veils and stuff, as Mrs. Elton said—and then what? Choosing patterns, and menus, and telling servants what to do, and worrying that they won’t or can’t do it. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t plan a future without making a decision about all that—which is hard to do, in the abstract.”

“Do you think—if a woman marries—there can be any other future than what you just said?”

“I want to
think
. Just as much as Charles does, but no one cares what I want to think about, as they do with him, whether they are for or against what he thinks is important.”

“I want to think, too,” said Florence, slowly. “I want a life of my own, that I choose. I want to be
someone
, not someone’s wife. But I don’t know much about the someone I want to be.”

“Nor do I. Dorothy does. She’s got a vocation. She’s got her future all planned out, general science exams, medical exams, surgical exams,
a place in a hospital. It’s like an iron corset, I think, but she seems to need it. I think she is prepared to give up on the marriage thing. I don’t know that I would be. It would seem unnatural. But surely so does
not thinking.”

“Some women do both.”

Florence had just agreed to marry Geraint Fludd. She felt a violent need
not
to confess this to Griselda Wellwood. Once it was out in the open, this engagement, it would become a different kind of fact.

“Not many women do both.”

Florence said “Do you remember, the day we went to Todefright for Midsummer, and everyone—our age—had to say what they want to do in life? And both you and I said we would go to university. To Newnham College, or somewhere like that. I’ve gone on thinking about that. What do you feel?”

“I feel a lot of incompatible things. I feel I must
think
or I’ll go mad. And then I think of those colleges full of women—knitting, I imagine them, and flower-arranging, and drinking cocoa. And I think, is it like taking the veil, which is an idea that’s always given me the horrors. Unhealthy, part of me says. And then, part of me says it all is secretly exciting.
New
. Doing things women haven’t done, aren’t expected to do. Things brothers take for granted—look at Julian and Charles. One would be a new kind of human being—”

“It’s not the same as Dorothy being a doctor.”

“It’s very clear what a doctor is. I’ve been talking to Toby Youlgreave. I’m going to do some hard work, and try to go there. Find out what I am.”

“I started on my matriculation and stopped,” said Florence. “I shouldn’t have. Would Mr. Youlgreave take me on? I know my father would be positively pleased—”

“It would be wonderful,” said Griselda, sincerely.

Florence was in a turmoil. She had promised herself to Geraint, and she was now promising herself to years of study. She did not think Newnham College would care for married students. She wished to disturb her father, at some ferocious girlish level, and felt—she was not really thinking—that the engagement would do that.

And yet—like Griselda, she did want to think. And she did see her future as, perhaps, the choice between thinking and sex.

•  •  •

Not only did
The Fairy Castle
change and develop as the campers worked on it during the days of construction—it went on developing during the performances in the Tithe Barn, for the ten days during which it was performed. August Steyning was in charge of both the set design and the production. There were two castles at the end of the barn, one in front of the other. The smaller was shining and gilded, a casket of a castle, in which the marionettes performed fairy feasts and transformations. Behind it, in shadow, rose the curiously kiln- or oast-house-shaped dark tower, made of wooden crates painted to look like mossy stone blocks, with no apparent way in, and no apparent way of looking out. The story was simple and complicated at the same time. It began with two children, playing in a clearing in a wood.

The clearing was in the centre of the barn. The trees were children, clothed in green and brown dyed cheesecloth, holding up branches. The children were Hedda, now fourteen, and Robin Wellwood, now ten, with his father’s flaming red hair. The Girl went to sleep with her head against a stump. A crew of tiny goblins, with pricking whiskers and long tails, of stumping dwarves with boots and beards, and an imperious Elf king and queen moved in on the couple and held out enticing iced cakes and transparent beakers of shiny liquid to the Boy, who nibbled and sipped, and fell dramatically into their arms. They carried his rigid body through the barn, and behind the golden box. Lights shone on a white sheet that rose (held up by Phyllis and Pomona) and then, magically, a swarm of flying shadows of the tiny beasts, only infinitely tinier, whirled like a swarm of wasps, or a crowd of starlings, and plunged into the secret castle.

The Girl woke and was disconsolate. She waved her arms and howled. A cottage on twelve naked feet danced into the clearing, and swayed to a standstill. Out of it came a lame old woman on a stick, who asked the Girl for help picking apples, for water from the well, for a shoulder to lean on as she walked. She gripped and was heavy. Hedda stumbled with pain. The old woman then revealed herself as a serious and beautiful gold-headed child, who gave instructions as to how to find the stolen Boy.

“You must travel on, over the mountain, beyond the sun and the moon, to the Land of the Stars. You must not speak a word. You must offer help to all who ask it. Enemies can be unmasked and defeated with
cold iron.” She gave Hedda a large, slightly rusted kitchen knife, and went back into the cottage, which tripped out of the barn.

Hedda went on, and on, and on. Steyning did some very clever things with lighting, so that she seemed to be hurtling through snowstorms, and staggering across hot deserts, and treading through shining pillars of ice. She met, and defeated, the man of straw, the wolfman (in a pine forest) and the monstrous armoured death’s-head man who turned out to be a blooming child—the other Robin, Robin Oakeshott, uncannily like Robin Wellwood—who told her how to penetrate the impenetrable fortress.

Hedda went behind the golden box, and flute music was heard. The puppet Hedda appeared as a shadow on the screen, and then in the centre of the feasting in the castle. With strong gestures of her arms, and swinging of her hair, she refused to taste food, or sip drink, and brandished the knife at the creatures, who hissed loudly and collapsed into dislocated heaps of cloth and tangled limbs. The puppet Hedda bent over the sleeping puppet and took his hand.

In the dark tower, behind the golden casket, slits of light appeared between the building blocks, one of which fell forward, as the Girl stepped out, carrying her knife, holding the hand of the Boy.

Tom’s big dolls sat in the audience. At the final performance, these creatures rose, and waddled, or rolled, or hopped, or trundled through the barn towards the dark tower. Two of them (Wolfgang and Leon, to be safe) carried away the golden castle, and the rest of the creatures fell upon the dark tower, and tore it brick from brick to shrieks of laughter from the audience, and a few tears from children. Tom had begged to be allowed to orchestrate this mayhem every night. He had said he would reconstruct the tower with his own hands, for the fun of bringing it down again. But Steyning said it was not to be risked, until the very end. So when the destruction came, it was thorough and savage. Things flew through the air, and lumps rolled into the audience. It was ghastly and comic. Everyone was exhausted.

The climax of the camp was the Firing. During the first half of the camp students and professional potters had been constructing vessels and objects and figures, some of which had been given a previous biscuit firing before being returned to their makers to be decorated in various ways. Geraint had prevailed upon his father, when the camp was only a project, to allow the Firing to take place in the big bottle kiln in the field at Purchase House. The kiln was wood-fired. The Firing would last forty-eight hours, more or less, and the cooling another day or more. At the end of the second day there would be a celebration for the workers, potters, wood collectors and campers. Benedict, in the euphoria which had led to his public lecture, had agreed to give a talk on the firing and management of the kiln. But he had disappeared, and the task fell to Philip, who was anyway more practical at packing and setting the kiln. He knew its hot places and its draughty places, the parts where the fire raged strongest, and the parts where it was cooler and more even. It was customary, given the size of this kiln and the infrequency of its use, to fire green, or clayshapes (biscuit) at the same time as the glazed shapes needing the hotter fire of a glost kiln. Philip had put a lot of thought and experiment into the packing. He had constructed saggars to hold the pots, which stood in carefully ordered heaps, or bungs, allowing the flames to rush and flicker between them. They stood on layers of quartz sand and were protected by fire bricks and tiles. Delicate ware stood on clay stilts in the saggars. Clay pugging was placed around the rims of the saggars. Fire-cones of clay which changed colour at certain heats were placed at spy-holes to be watched during the firing. Like all professionals Philip had his own refinements—a new form of stilt, a pacing of the baiting, or feeding, of the fire in the three fireholes.