The Children's Book (80 page)
Read The Children's Book Online
Authors: A.S. Byatt
She began to weep. She could not stop. After a time, Leslie Skinner tapped on her door. (Etta was out at a meeting.) He said
“Are you unwell, Dorothy?”
“I must be. I’m sorry.” She sobbed.
Leslie Skinner came in and sat beside her. He said he had thought for some time she was overdoing it. She was burning herself up. She should take a rest. She should perhaps take a week or two off and go home to
the country, out of the foul London air. Dorothy sobbed and shook. Skinner petted her shoulder. When she closed her eyes, Dr. Barty’s face rose in the hollow of her head, full of life and smiling mysteriously. Leslie Skinner read aloud to her, from an article by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, in the
Encyclopaedia Medica
. Anderson was, Dorothy thought, maybe the greatest woman who had lived. She had so neatly, so persistently, so patiently, so
successfully
fought to be a doctor, a woman doctor, when there were none. The Hospital was her creation. She was also a married woman, but Dorothy did not think many women could be both wife and doctor.
“In health, the nervous force is sufficient for all the ordinary demands made upon it. We work and get tired, we sleep and eat and are again as new beings ready for another day’s work. After some months of continuous work we are tired in a different way; the night’s rest, and the weekly day of rest, do not suffice; we need a change of scene—and a complete rest. With these we renew our force and are presently again ready to enjoy work.”
The Skinners’ doctor, when consulted, reinforced this message. He said he did not consider Miss Wellwood to be overtaxed or unsuited to study. He did consider her to be in need of a rest. She should go to the country, and read, and walk, and let her strength flow back. Dorothy’s nerves were jangling and her head ached. She did not want to go back to Todefright—it was a form of defeat. But she went.
Violet Grimwith was sent to fetch her home. She helped her pack, and asked no questions. As they sat in the train, rattling out of Charing Cross, going south, out of the smoke, Dorothy, whose eyes were closed to preclude conversation, tried to think scientifically about Love. It was an affliction of the nervous system. It bore some relation to the aura that was said to precede epileptic fits. It was not self-induced. It was like a blow to the brain. It could be recovered from.
It was horribly undignified.
Was it the same as sexual desire, which she did not think she had felt? Can sexual desire be experienced
in the abstract
, almost? She didn’t want to grab Dr. Barty, or to be grabbed by him.
He had got into her mind, and invaded it.
That was because Dr. Anderson was right, fatigue did strange things to you.
• • •
Todefright was no longer a house overrun by children. Hedda, now fifteen, and Florian, now thirteen, had been sent to Bedales School, where they learned farming, swimming, physics, chemistry and thinking for themselves. Robin and Harry (eleven and nine) were both weekly boarders at a preparatory school in Tunbridge Wells. Tom and Phyllis were the odd children who had not left the nest. Phyllis had been assimilated into Violet’s housekeeping. She made cakes for Fabian picnics, and lace collars for bring-and-buy sales. She was now nineteen, and passively pretty. Tom was twenty-three. He wore his bright hair long, and his clothes were shabby and shapeless. He was pleased to see Dorothy, who put her head for a moment on his shoulder. He smelt of horse-tack, and fur, and brambles, with a note of wild garlic. He said, now they could go for walks, the leaves in the woods were turning.
Humphry was not there, and Olive was writing. Her children recognised the rhythm of Olive’s writing—in the early stages of the story, it could be juggled, put aside, boxed and coxed with tea-parties and excursions. Then there were intense periods when she forgot to eat, and worked into the night. Tom said to Dorothy that he was glad to see her because Olive was
sunken
, an old childhood word for late preoccupation. He did not ask Dorothy how she was, or how she came to be there. She thought, even last year, he might have asked.
Olive did not ask either. She kissed her eldest daughter, and said vaguely how nice it would be for Dorothy to be able to get out in the country, which was what Leslie Skinner said she needed. She said “I shan’t be very good company, I’m sunk in a very complicated play, which seems to change every day.” When Dorothy had been at home for a couple of days, Olive came down to lunch, and said that she and Dorothy must have “a little talk.” Dorothy did not want to talk, but felt it was right that talk should have been offered.
It turned out that the talk concerned Tom. Could Dorothy find out what Tom thought he would do with his life? He had taken to earning bits of money as a beater, or helping out in stables, or harvesting, or hedging. She didn’t know what he
wanted
. Did Dorothy?
Dorothy wanted Dr. Barty, though distance was fortunately making his dark face more abstract, more diagrammatic. She had no intention of telling her mother about Dr. Barty. She said, deliberately flatly,
“Maybe that’s all he wants, just to potter.” She asked, woman to woman, with a malice she didn’t know she felt,
“Does he get on your nerves?”
“I worry about him,” said Olive, with dignity. “I’d like him to have a purpose.”
“I see,” said Dorothy, still flatly. The little talk seemed to have ground to a halt.
Dorothy went into the woods, to the Tree House, with Tom. He loped along the paths, so fast she could hardly keep up with him. He showed her things, as he had when they were little—where the badgers were, where a hawk had nested, where there was a little crop of fungi that weren’t supposed to grow in Britain at all. Magic toadstools, said Tom, with an irony that was hard to interpret.
They came to the Tree House. It was still wonderfully disguised with brushwood and bracken and ferns. Tom had cared for it—alone, she supposed. He let her in, and made a little fire in the stove, and ceremoniously made her some tea from blackberry leaves he had dried himself. He said
“I sleep here, as often as not.” There was a blanket-bed, on a heap of dry bracken. “I like the sounds. The trees. The creatures. The creakings. The wind, coming and going. Sometimes, Dorothy, I wake up and think I’m not there.”
“Frightening?”
“No. I like it. I’d like to be able to vanish into the hedge, like one of those things you can’t see, if they don’t move. The hedge sparrows. Moths. I’d like to be speckled and freckled like a moth. I try to write about moths, but I’m no good, I think.”
“Can I see?”
“No.”
“I fainted,” said Dorothy. “I came home because I fainted. In an anatomy class. Holding a heart.”
“Don’t. I feel sick. You’re all right now.” It was a statement, not a question. Dorothy sipped the leafy brew. She said “Have you ever been in love, Tom?”
He wrinkled his brow. His brows, Dorothy thought, were fair and innocent. What was it that
wasn’t there?
Tom said “Once I was in love, for about a month, I think. With a vixen.”
He saw her look of puzzlement, and said
“Oh, a real vixen. A young one, very graceful, covered with soft red fur, with a thick brush, and a creamy white chest. She knew I watched her every day. She
showed herself
to me, all the graceful things she did, curving this way and that. They seem to smile, foxes. I thought I
was
her, and she was me. I don’t know what she thought. She stopped coming, when she had cubs. I’m not telling you very well. It was love, that was what it was.”
There was a silence. It was impossible to introduce Dr. Barty. Tom said
“I read a story about trees that walked. Sometimes, lying here, I think the trees are moving in on the Tree House, taking it
in—
”
Dorothy was suddenly very irritated with Tom. She said, “I think it’s time to go back, now.”
“But we’ve only just come.”
“I’ve been here long enough. I’m not well. I want to go back.”
She didn’t sleep well. She walked at night, in the moonlit rooms, not needing a candle, looking for something to nibble, or something to read. One night in the hall, she heard someone else, skirt rustling, slippers sliding. She stood still in a dark corner, shrunk into shadow.
It was Olive, in her flower-spread robe, gliding towards the cupboard where the family tales were kept. She was carrying one large manuscript book; she unlocked the cupboard and replaced it. Then she went away again, not having noticed Dorothy.
Dorothy was the one who had taken little interest in her “own” story, about the metamorphosing hedgehogs and the uncanny root-cavity-dwellers. She wondered for the first time if Olive was still spinning particular tales for particular children. She opened the story-cabinet. There were books for Robin and Harry. Florian’s was now quite fat. The one Olive had been carrying was Tom’s—his story now occupied a series of books, taking up a whole shelf, dwarfing the others. Dorothy hesitated a moment, and then took out the Dorothy book, with the fairies and woodland creatures on its cover. She had no imagination of what it felt like to be a writer and spin stories. She assumed her own story would have petered out, somehow, long ago.
She turned to the last page.
• • •
So Peggy went on her travels, and saw many strange and wonderful sights, snow-covered mountains, and sunny southern meadows. She met Interesting strangers, and rode on shining, smoking trains. She thought at bed-time of the other, secret world in the roots of the Tree, of its inhabitants who spoke with strange voices, hissing or chuntering, squeaking or whispering. She thought of the strangers she had helped when they were caught on thorns, or hurt by cold iron, the Grey Child and the Brown Boy, with their glancing, inhuman eyes. They had helped her, too. They had found things that were lost. They had sung to her. When she thought of them, they grew thinner, more transparent in her mind’s eye, wisps and tattered fragments. But they were there, and she knew they were there, always
.
When she finally came back, she wore a long skirt with a braided hem which brushed on the grass, leaving a trail in the dew, when she hurried out to the Tree. It seemed older, with more cracks and knobs. She knelt down and looked into the hollow, and it was full of the kind of undisturbed dust that had not been there before, for there had been busy brooms to sweep it. She turned over the heaped leaves in the hole where she had always found the hedgehog-coat, which shrank her when she fingered it, so that she could slip inside it. It was there. It was stiff and dusty. She bent over, and lifted it out and saw that it was not—it was and was not—her hedgehog-coat. It was a hedgehog, a real hedgehog, long dead and dried to leather. On its nose were dried drops of blood, and its bright little eyes were lidded
.
Nothing more
.
So she walked back along the path, in her long, heavy skirt, and the breeze through the trees was cold and aimless, the light was simply scattered and lit nothing in particular, and no birds sang
.
• • •
Dorothy put the book back, as though it had stung her. Psychology was not her gift; she had set her will to being practical. She did not want to think about the feeling behind this coda. Her mind became full of an uninvited ghost of Dr. Barty. She started to cry. She was ashamed. She hurried back to her bedroom, and lay down, and wept. There was nothing for her here.
• • •
She was saved, though she never knew it, by Violet, who sent a message to Vetchey Manor, just in case Griselda was there. Griselda was. The next day, Dorothy saw her pedalling up the drive, dressed in country tweeds. Dorothy went slowly—she didn’t feel up to running—to meet her. They kissed.
“You look dreadful. I heard you were here, so I came over. Are you ill?”
“I fainted. I fainted in an anatomy class. I was holding a heart in my hand and I dropped it, and fainted. I was so ashamed.”
“You’ve overdone it, as I always knew you would.”
“They sent me here for a rest.”
“Is it working?”
“No. No, it’s not.”
They went into Todefright, and Dorothy made mugs of tea. Griselda said that maybe Dorothy should visit her in Cambridge. “Do you like it, there, Grisel?”
“It’s not quite real, but in some ways it’s better than real. I really like the work. I like
thinking
, you know, thinking about things that aren’t myself.”
So Dorothy packed her things, and went on the train with Griselda to Cambridge, and was given a guest room in Sidgwick Hall.
Newnham College was austere, graceful and comfortable. The buildings were red-brick and slightly Dutch, which is to say, domestic. There was a very large, beautiful garden, with an orchard where in the summer the young ladies swayed in hammocks, reading Ovid and John Stuart Mill. There was a hockey field where they covertly (their legs in shortened skirts must not be seen) played vigorous and enthusiastic matches. There was a croquet lawn. They were in the University on sufferance; the women’s colleges were not part of the University, and the women, though they took the same exams as the men, were not awarded degrees by the University. They were free women, pursuing the life of the mind, professionally. Opposition to their presence was smouldering and occasionally broke out into violent polemic, or even hostile rioting. They were felt to be a temptation to, and danger for, the morals of the often rackety young men who
were
part of the University.
Their tutors and mentors reacted to this opposition by using supreme caution. The young ladies must be chaperoned wherever they went. They must not entertain men who were not fathers, brothers or uncles. There were male lecturers in the University who admitted them to classes—always with chaperones—and those who did not. Florence Cain was the single woman student at a series of economic history lectures in Trinity College, and had to be accompanied by one of the Newnham Fellows on a bicycle. The women felt themselves to be both demure and dangerous, determined and impeded. They found their situation both frustrating and from time to time wildly comic.
