The Children's Book

“She was saying,” said Hedda, “that she was going to have a baby, that’s what she was saying. And she said—she’d had babies before—she said—I heard—some of us are really hers. Children of my body she said.”

The melodrama of the phrase felt improbable to Tom and Dorothy, just as the word “Booby” had done. But once it was said it was in the world. Their irritation with Hedda increased.

“So?” said Tom, with a little spirit. If there was one thing in the world he was sure of, it was that he was his mother’s son. “I don’t see what you think we can do.”

“If we aren’t—who we think we are—it might be good to know.”

“I don’t think so,” said Phyllis, flatly. “What good would it do? We are still the same people, in the same house, with the same family.”

Dorothy’s thoughts were whirring. She didn’t look like Tom, she had always felt only precariously attached to the group life. Different. All children felt “different,” she had always supposed. She felt that she had always irritated Olive. She had thought that was perhaps because Olive loved Tom too completely to have enough love left over for her. But maybe …

The story Olive wrote for her rose up in her mind’s eye. It was about shape-changers, scuttling, bustling little people who hung up animal skins on the hooks in the kitchen, and then put them on, and became half-hedgehogs, to go out into the bushes and ditches.

Violet was a scuttling, bustling little person, whose nature was domestic, like the aproned hedgehog-women in the underground kitchens of Dorothy’s tale.

Dorothy wanted not to be imaginative. She wanted to measure chemicals and mend limbs and organs. But her imagination was just and fierce. If anyone was Violet’s child, she herself probably was.

She did not say any of this to anyone. She said to Hedda

“I could shake you till your teeth rattled.”

“I don’t know why you’re all so cross with me. You should be cross at them.”

Some sort of deep prohibition prevented all four of them from making any effort to imagine the emotions, the predicament, the delights and terrors, of Booby and little flower. Their minds were busy with rearranging the family patterns in their heads, like chessboards which suddenly lacked a bishop and had too many knights, or where the queen ran amok in zigzags.

Knowledge is power, but not if it is only partial knowledge and the knower is a dependent child, already perturbed by a changing body, squalling emotions, the sense of the outside world looming outside the garden wall, waiting to be entered. Knowledge is also fear.

Tom dealt with Hedda’s revelation by absconding on a long walk, stomping along the Downs, carrying his bedding on his back. Walking fast is a good way of channelling all sorts of emotions: fear, desire, panic.

Phyllis rearranged everything in her chest of drawers and her little desk. She mended a torn apron. Violet said she would have done that, and Phyllis said she knew, but she could do it herself.

Hedda thought bluntly that more knowledge would reduce the menace of the knowledge they had. She listened to every sentence the adults said to each other, and decided that, since they had been so deceived, she did after all have a right to read people’s letters, when the opportunity presented itself.

Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick film, a coloured oilcloth, spread over a cauldron of vapours which shaped and reshaped themselves into shadowy forms, embracing, threatening, glaring.

She looked at Violet. She had always reproached herself for not liking Violet. Violet was pernickety and small- minded, Violet was the female fate she meant to avoid by having a profession in the world. She had, she now saw, slightly despised Violet for minding another woman’s children. That must be revised. Violet had once said to her that they, Violet and Dorothy, had “the same eyes” and she had wanted to say, no they didn’t, and had had to admit that they did. Dorothy took to looking furtively at Violet, which made Violet shrug as though a mosquito was buzzing. Dorothy still could not manage to like Violet, and was only abstractly sorry for her.

She stopped reading her fairytale, in its leaf-green notebook. It was only added to occasionally when the mood took Olive to think about wild things and little people. It was not like Underground, whose tale flowed compulsively on through the tunnels and corridors. After a time, wryly and crossly, Dorothy realised that Olive had not noticed that she was not reading it. It confirmed her cynical perception that Olive wrote for Olive, and was most complete in the act of reading and writing herself.

There were secrets also covered over in Purchase House, though perhaps there the covering was more frayed and threadbare than in Todefright. Philip had come back from Paris full of new knowledge about how his body worked, and new fears that he might have caught madness and death from his tutor. He was lucky. His body remained healthy and was only tormented by the dull ache, and the feverish greed, to do it again. He was edgy and wary with Benedict Fludd, who went into what was for him a good-humoured flurry of inventiveness, and needed constant assistance. He felt distant from Elsie, the stay-at-home in the kitchen. He did not notice her new shoes, or the red belt. He found it much—much—harder to be phlegmatic when Pomona sleepwalked and made her way into his bedroom. He did not particularly desire Pomona—there was something marbly, or even soapy, about her firm young flesh. But he desired someone so much that Pomona’s slippery, sleepy embraces became a torment.

Elsie’s mind had been full of the modelled jars and obscene nymphs. But for a long time she did not show them to Philip. At first she was afraid of Fludd, who might notice that the key had been moved and used, or might suddenly appear and catch her, looking, in flagrante delicto, but in the spring of 1901, on a day when Fludd had gone up to London to see Prosper Cain and Geraint, when Seraphita and Pomona were out to tea with Miss Dace in Winchelsea, she said to Philip that she had something to show him, and something to tell him.

She fetched the key. They stood in the cobwebby shadow of the locked pantry and stared at the whitely glimmering forms, the breasts, the vulvas, the chaste flower-shaped containers that, seen from another angle, were swollen female bellies. Philip, like Tom and Dorothy with Hedda, felt embarrassed and irritated by the revelation. It would have been more seemly, he vaguely felt, for Elsie to pretend to have seen nothing. He said “Well?” meaning “So what?” but it didn’t ring true. Professional curiosity overcame both his sexual stirring and his distaste. He picked up one or two vases, turned over a reclining girl-child and found a swollen, almost man-size, clitoris. He remembered Fludd’s fingers on Rodin’s creatures.