The Children's Book

Dorothy thought that at some level, he was smug about this.

Tom and Dorothy noted hidden and shadowy things in the family, and then, on the whole, did not think about them. They heard Olive operatic behind closed doors, or saw Humphry pack his bags and leave in a sudden hurry, and they took stock of these events, and stayed silent. They were both afraid of uncovering things they were better not knowing. Hedda had no such inhibitions. Hedda was a finder-out, a sleuth, a discoverer and uncoverer. In 1901 she was eleven, and belonged neither with the elder nor with the younger children. She had spent hours of her childhood lurking outside the Tree House, trying to overhear conversations to which she had not been invited. It was Hedda who pricked up her ears when Marian Oakeshott was meaningfully and casually mentioned at table, and Hedda who knew Mrs. Oakeshott’s handwriting on letters, though she had never gone so far as to try to read one. She was a light sleeper, and padded about the house, at night, lurking on the back stairs, standing in shadows of tallboys on the landing. She knew that the grown-ups crept about the house at night. She knew—and had so far not shared her knowledge—that Humphry Wellwood visited Violet Grimwith in the small hours. He always closed the door with velvet softness. She had never had the nerve to listen at the keyhole, though she wanted to.

Then, one night, there was more than a susurration or a chuckle from behind that door. There was a storm of weeping, passionate and audible, and broken murmurs and shushings from a male voice. Violet wailed, and Hedda crept up, because she could hear the words in the wailing, and she could sense that the two inside were too locked in some sort of argument to be listening out for creeping children.

“It is possible that you are mistaken,” said Humphry’s voice, trying for calm.

“I wasn’t mistaken before. I am only just past forty, it is perfectly possible. I can’t go through it again, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. The pain and the fear and the hiding. I shall die. And she will kill me this time, she will…”

“Hush, little flower,” Humphry improbably said. “I’ll look after you, I always have, we’ll sort it resourcefully, we always do. We are clever creatures, you and I. We mean no harm.”

“She will kill me this time. And I cannot abide any more hiding and lying. The children of my body don’t know they are mine—though in some sense they are all mine, all, who is their mother if not I? Oh, Booby, we can’t start again, on concealing and pretending and contriving, I’m too tired, I’d rather die, I might do away with myself—”

“And where would all your lovely family be then? Keep still, keep calm, breathe deeply. I’ll go down and fetch you a flask of brandy.”

“Better gin,” said Violet’s voice, in choking sobs. “Better a great glass of neat gin.”

Hedda stepped hurriedly into the shadow of the tallboy and flattened herself against a wall. The trim figure of her father whisked past her and flew down the back stairs. She was side-tracked in her thoughts by the silliness of the nickname. “Booby” diminished her clever and elegant father—just as the revelation of his relations with Violet diminished him. This was altogether less pleasant than his mistake with Marian Oakeshott. And Hedda didn’t like the idea of Olive—whose greatest failing so far in her eyes was abstraction—a want of attention—being ready to “kill.”

It was only then that she realised she had been told that some of the children—an unspecified number—were, as Violet had put it, Violet’s children “of my body.”

Who? Who was not who they thought they were?

What did it mean?

Hedda heard her father coming back, creeping in his slippered feet. She waited until he had gone back into the room, carrying a bottle and two glasses, and then she retreated. She had been changed, and she did not know how.

Hedda called a meeting of the elders in the Tree House. She had never done this. Meetings were called almost always by Tom, sometimes—when there were practical problems to discuss, like birthday presents—by Dorothy. The elders were Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis and now Hedda. She told them they had got to come, it was something very important, and it was secret, secret, secret.

•  •  •

They sat on their wooden stump stools, in the hidden interior crackling with brown bracken. Tom poured lemonade from a bottle into a mixed collection of enamelled mugs, blue, white and black. He said, a little lordly,

“Well, what is it?”

Hedda suddenly did not know how to begin. Once it was out in the open, it would start to act amongst them. At the moment, it was only eating at her.

“I’ve found something out.”

“You’re always finding things out. You shouldn’t snoop.”

“This is an important thing. It changes everything.”

Tom had a vision of bankruptcy. Dorothy had a vision of her father leaving for good, perhaps joining Mrs. Oakeshott. Phyllis sat even more still than she had been. She had a great capacity for not moving, somewhere between composure and inertia.

“Spit it out,” said Tom. “Now you’ve started, you’d better get on with it.”

“I saw. I heard. He goes into Aunt Violet’s bedroom late at night, and stays. I’ve seen him before. You can hear them. You can tell what they’re doing.”

“You don’t know if you haven’t seen them,” said Dorothy.

“They make cuddling noises.” She blurted out “He calls her, little flower. And she called him Booby.”

This revelation upset everyone, and made them all angry. They were angry with Hedda for making them know this, rather than with Humphry and Violet for what they did and said.

“Last night she was crying a lot. She said she was sure about something, and that she hadn’t been wrong before. She said she wished she could die. She said she was frightened.”

“Well?” said Tom, his imagination recoiling. Hedda looked at Dorothy, who was going to be medical. Hedda’s brow was creased with pain and rage.