The Children's Book

“You’ll keep her?”

“I couldn’t give her up, I couldn’t.” A silence. “If it wasn’t for you, and the other ladies, I w’d a had to. I can’t ever tell you… ” Both women were weeping.

Phoebe Methley had a fairly clear idea about who was Ann’s father, and could not, for some time, bring herself to look closely at her face. She had had, she now understood, a romantic hope that Elsie would want nothing to do with Ann, that she herself might have to offer this child a home, in a house where her own unmentionable children would never come. This act might entail a generosity of which she would not be capable, she knew also. She said

“Anything you need…”

“You are too good to me.”

“Women must work together,” said Phoebe, with a healthy asperity. That evening she said to her husband “Elsie Warren has given birth to a daughter.”

They were sitting at the dinner table. She served him a stew of haricot beans, simmered with onions and pork rind, and a spoon or two of molasses, and a trace of mustard, flavoured also with rosemary from their garden, and sprinkled with chopped parsley and chives. It was a slow-cooked, thoughtful dish. Herbert Methley sniffed it, and said that it was good. More than good, ambrosial, said Herbert Methley, not meeting his wife’s eye.

“I went to see them. Her name’s Ann. She’s a very sweet, tiny little thing.”

Herbert Methley did not like to talk of children, anyone’s children. He said he had, today, made enormous progress with his new novel, it had finally settled into shape, and was flowing along like water in a river-bed.

Phoebe went on, sternly and bravely.

“We formed a little feminist committee of fairy godmothers to make sure Ann will be well looked after. I wondered if we might even have her here, a little—only now and then, you understand—Marian Oakeshott has offered to ask Tabitha to help—”

Herbert Methley stared distractedly out of the window. He said he thought this new novel might be his best— his best yet—might make their fortune—if he could have time and silence and absence of distractions to write it at its current speed, while the spirit moved him. He said he had a good title.

“Do you, Herbert? What is it?”

“It is to be called Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl.”

“Mr. Woodhouse from Emma, Herbert?”

“No, my love, though the connotation is present, and you have perceptively noted it. It is spelt, in this case, Wodehouse. There is a figure—a kind of Green Man, a kind of Wild Man of the Woods—who is known as Wodwose. I discovered, to my great delight, that country people still talk about Wodwoses but call them Wodehouses. It is to be the tale of a timid man who retreats to a cottage in the woods to live naturally—a man who at that stage temperamentally resembles Mr. Woodhouse from Emma—who coddles himself with woolly comforters and embrocations—and meets the Wild Girl who is living freely in the depth of the forest—”

“You said it was a wood.”

“It is an English wood that symbolically takes on the properties of the deeper Forest—where he learns to walk free and naked in Nature—”

“What is she like, the Wild Girl?”

“I haven’t wholly invented her. She has your eyes, of course. I cannot invent a—a beloved woman—who does not have your eyes. But she is hard for to tame. Yes.”

“And how does it end?”

“I don’t know that, yet, either. Wonderfully, I think. But, it may be, with a wonderful disaster. I need to find it out, I need to follow my instincts. Which is why I need particular peace and quiet in the next few months—such as you have always protected for me, my darling.”

In June, a party consisting of Toby Youlgreave, Joachim Susskind, Karl Wellwood, Griselda Wellwood, and Dorothy Wellwood, set out by boat and railway for Munich.

Most of the persuasive talking had been done by Griselda. A child who has been brought up in a partly public space, surrounded by servants directly and indirectly concerned with the controlling and ordering of her own life, a child who has not been brought up in intimate contact with either of her parents, and who has been accustomed to meet them in formalised, public spaces, has had to learn to keep her own counsel, to create a private space for private projects, inside her own head and body. Many upper-class girls did not learn that, and went dolllike from nursery to dance floor to white lace in church and the unexpected fleshy horrors or delights of the bridal bedroom. If Griselda was not a doll, even though she had often been dressed as a doll, it was, in fact, because her father and mother loved her, with however much reticence, as a human being. She knew this—as indeed Charles/Karl also knew it in his own case—and now exploited it, with some cunning, on Dorothy’s behalf. She did not know what it was that had so shocked her cousin—it was something appalling in the way she had been casually told about her parentage, Griselda surmised. But she loved Dorothy, and Dorothy was shocked. So Griselda went to Katharina, and confided in her. What she confided was a series of half-truths and serious fibs about Dorothy’s unhappiness at home, about the lack of seriousness with which her flighty parents approached her steadfast ambition to be a doctor. Delicately, Griselda accused her mother of favouring Charles/Karl— he could command the attention of a tutor, and by travelling with this tutor as his companion, deprive Dorothy of lessons she needed. Dorothy was nervously depressed. She, Griselda, was restless. Why should they not, with each other for company, go with Charles and Joachim Susskind to Munich and perfect their German—

“You will not,” interposed Katharina from Hamburg, “learn classical German in Bavaria—”

“Herr Susskind speaks classical German. And he has an aunt, Mama, who has a pension and gives classes in mathematics and biology to young ladies—mathematical genius runs in Herr Susskind’s family—she is called Frau Carlotta Susskind—and we could stay in her pension and see the artworks, and study, and it would take Dorothy out of herself—I can’t bear to see her so unhappy.”

“Her unhappiness is very sudden.”

“No, it isn’t, Mama. She is very strong, and she hides things well. I can confide in you, she has given me permission—”