“I trust you have some time for me? I have sunk into a slough of despond, and need your strong hands to pull me out.” He saw Hedda. “Good afternoon, young lady.” He turned back to her mother. “I need you, my dear, I really need your help.” His voice was light and cool, his emphases almost mocking. Hedda shuffled her feet.
“Hedda, do go away, I’ve already asked you to go away. I need to talk to Mr. Steyning and he needs to talk to me. Go and—go and read a book.”
She said to Steyning that they would have tea on the lawn, and took his arm. They turned their backs on the glowering girl.
“Do you remember,” Steyning asked Olive, “the appalling boredom of being that age? With nothing to do, and only oneself to think about? There are compensations to being older.”
Olive sat in a basket chair and spread her skirts. She turned an eager face to her visitor, as he took his chair. Humphry was sulking, Methley had vanished, Toby was going to the station with Dorothy, laughing and insouciant. She flirted in a serious way with August Steyning, of whom she was slightly in awe. He was hidden a long way behind his quizzical smile and his narrow face. She thought he really liked her, but was not sure. She knew he liked to look at her, but did not think he felt desire, as Toby and Herbert Methley did. She did not know him well enough to know how he lived. She supposed he might, like the imprisoned Oscar, feel romantic love for young men. This was common in the theatre. She tried to be broadminded—she would have liked to be Bohemian—but felt in fact a squeamish distaste for the physical descriptions in the newspapers of the hotel rooms to which Oscar had taken his boys. She smiled at August Steyning who smiled back.
The maid brought a tea-tray, and set up a table. She poured tea. August said it always did him good to be in that garden. It was a hive of energy. He could feel Olive’s mind, hovering and inventing in that garden, finding strange creatures in the shrubbery and drama in the bonfire. Did she remember their discussion of that fairy play? He wanted to suggest to her that she might write him a tale—a play—a real work of the imagination. Strange and wonderful, not pretty. Like the Austrians—like Hofmannsthal—or like the Ring of the Niebelung. He was so sick of tea-parties on the stage, and of cheeky servants, and soubrettes, and jeunes ingenues. He wanted to make people’s hair stand on end. Adventure, danger, dark and light.
Olive drew him out and gave him sandwiches and iced biscuits. He talked about the mood in the world of the arts. Everyone, he said, was reading stories originally written for children—stories of magic, stories of quests, stories of half-humans who were still in touch with the ancient earth, of speaking beasts, and centaurs, Pan and Puck. He was quite sure she could write him a play along those lines—in that dreamworld that was more real than urban rattle—he wanted to do something delightful and complicated with mirrors, and lights, and wires … and shadows.
Olive said, her voice dragging a little, that she was writing a tale about a boy—a Prince—who lost his Shadow, and went Underground in search of it.
“How did he lose it?”
“Oh, it was snipped off his feet in his cradle, by a monstrous rat, with sharp yellow teeth, who rolled it up, and took it behind the skirting-board, and down horrible holes, underground, to the Queen of the shadows. His family— the King and Queen—try to keep him safe, in a walled garden—you know how these things always—but he meets the Queen of Elfland who needs his help, and carries him away on her white horse with bells—through seas of blood abune the knee, of course—to the opening of a mine-shaft. And he has to go in, and further in, and further in—and meets all sorts of strange creatures down there, some friendly, some evil, some indifferent… ”
“Does he get it back?”
“I haven’t got there yet. It’s an interminable story. I’m telling it for Tom. Each of my children,” she said, in the charming voice with which she had spoken to Miss Catchpole, “has his or her own story, in his or her own notebook. They were bedtime stories, but now the children are older—or some of them are— they’re a kind of game. I don’t know why I keep that going. Sometimes it feels a little silly. You know what you have said, about stories under the hills, of old things and inhuman things, and magic that used to run through everything and has now shrunk to odd little patches of magic woods and hummocks? Toby Youlgreave talks a great deal about the Brothers Grimm and their belief that fairytales were the old religion— the old inner life—of the German people? Well, I sometimes feel, stories are the inner life of this house. A kind of spinning of energy. I am this spinning fairy in the attic, I am Mother Goose quacking away what sounds like comforting chatter but is really—is really what holds it all together.” She gave a little laugh, and said “Well, it makes money, it does hold it all together.”
30
They arrived at the Pension Susskind, in Schwabing, which was managed by Joachim Susskind’s aunt, Carlotta. Katharina Wellwood, being German, imagined this place as a severe and upright dwelling, spotlessly clean, with dull and wholesome food served promptly at fixed hours. “Lotte” Susskind she saw in her mind’s eye as a tall figure in black, with a chatelaine at her waist, an impeccable white collar, and a shiny knot of greying hair. Olive imagined something more informal and rosy—her vision of Lotte Susskind wore a fresh apron over a large bosom, and baked sweetmeats for the lucky residents. In fact Joachim Susskind’s aunt was a young aunt, though she had two teenage daughters, Elli and Emmi. She was bony and angular, dressed in flowing blouses and sweeping skirts, with a mop of wild wiry hair, and a pointed, slightly witchy chin. The pension was a rambling building, with balconies and corridors joining structures which might once have been stables or dairies. Dorothy and Griselda had adjacent attics under the eaves, minimally furnished, with little wooden box-beds, plain wooden tables, muslin curtains and fat feather quilts. The walls were painted apple-green, and the woodwork was mustard-yellow. Dorothy wondered if this was usual in Germany. Griselda knew it was not. Charles had been here before, and was greeted by Lotte as a returning prodigal.
The pension was amiably noisy. It was inhabited by very diverse people. There were two very large men with huge heads of hair and tangled sprouting beards, one red, one dark. They sat in shirtsleeves, in a corner of the eating-room, and argued—about the cosmos, Griselda thought, trying to understand the southern German accents and eccentric terminology. There were two very buttoned-up, precise men, with slick black hair and small moustaches, who wore pince-nez with black rims, and with tiny circular handles on the eye- pieces like moons on a planet. They went in and out—to work, presumably—but over dinner joined in the arguments about the cosmos. There were also three young women—art students at one of the independent women’s art schools. The Royal Bavarian School of Art admitted only men. One of the young women was clearly well off—she had many changes of dress, elegant hats and elaborately dressed hair. The other two were patched and darned and serviceably clothed. All three laughed a great deal. There was a perpetual smell of paint and varnish in the pension. Elli and Emmi, when they came home in the evening, turned out to be younger versions of these three. Both had their mother’s bony and somehow rackety good looks, and struck up casual and amusing conversations with the other inhabitants. They had simple dresses under aprons streaked with spilled colour. They hugged Charles, as though he was a family member or old friend, and expressed surprise when he introduced Griselda as his sister. We didn’t know you had a sister, said Emmi and Elli in unison, and laughed.
