The Children's Book

“I am Griselda Wellwood. We are—cousins—”

“And one of you—you I think—must be the mysterious, beautiful sister of Karl whom we see in the Cafe Stefanie and the Scharfrichter—Karl has been rather quiet about his sister. I think he is rather quiet about many things.”

“So I am finding out,” said Griselda.

“We shall be very happy,” said Wolfgang, “to take you to one of our father’s plays. Maybe Karl and Herr Susskind would like to come too? And your other companion—Herr Youlgreave? My father would be honoured.”

He could not stop looking at Griselda. This was not unusual. Many young men looked with excitement at Griselda’s pale and beautiful face. What was unusual, Dorothy thought, noticing as always, despite her own agitation, was that Griselda was responding. She was looking equally persistently at Wolfgang. She was looking down at the table, and up into his eyes, and her lips were parted. Toby Youlgreave came over from another table, where he had been talking to Joachim and Karl, and also noticed the alert stares of both Wolfgang and Griselda. He knew that Griselda was in love with himself—he had known it for a long time, and never said a word. Recently, however, as Griselda had grown into her beauty, and Olive Wellwood had grown stouter and angrier, he had begun to wonder if… and whether… he was not entirely pleased to see the smiling German so eager to make friends. He agreed, in a reserved way, that they would all enjoy a visit to the Spiegelgarten. He spoke about what he remembered of Anselm Stern’s work. The beautiful automaton in the Sandman was peculiarly fine. She was differently artificial, in a world where all the actors were in fact artificial. He said this in a mishmash of German and English, to which Wolfgang replied in a similar way.

“I have some pitiful in English,” said Wolfgang to Griselda. “You must teach me more.”

Leon, like Dorothy, said nothing, only looked on.

Later, in Dorothy’s bedroom, the two girls discussed the Stern brothers. Griselda was overexcited. She said it was wonderful suddenly to have two such interesting brothers. Dorothy sat stony and tears stood in her eyes.

“It is not wonderful. I wish I had never come. I wish all this had never happened. I wish I was the same as I used to be.”

Griselda was immediately sympathetic and said they need not go to the Spiegelgarten if Dorothy didn’t want to. Dorothy said grimly that they must go.

“I can’t bear mess and muddle,” she said. “I thought if I found out—about him—I should be clear in my head. But I see now, it might all be worse mess and muddle.”

Dorothy found it hard to sleep. Her feather quilt was heavy and hot. She felt a surge of homesickness for Todefright. Her mind fixed on her Todefright brother, Tom, and his golden, slightly maddening, innocence. Tom was part of an idea she had had of an English family, the children running wild in safe woods, in dappled sunlight, the parents smilingly there, when they came home, scratched and breathless, from the Tree House and its simple secrets. They had all been one thing, the whole graduated string of busy children, all the same, all different, as children are, and they had all been absorbed by daily life and ever so slightly confined and constricted by it—a feeling which she now sensed as a luxurious indulgence. She knew the garden and the staircases, her little bedroom and the Tree House, as she knew her own body, her hair under the brush, her thin feet, her wiry hands. Only nothing was what it seemed. Violet was not an old maid of an aunt. Phyllis was only half her sister, Hedda with her cross and nosy habits of investigation and suspicion turned out to be wiser than Tom and Dorothy, her elders and superiors, who knew nothing. She thought hard about Tom, in order not to have to think about Humphry and Olive, past and present, real and imagined. Long-legged Tom, running and running with purposeful absence of purpose. He had sensed that the Garden of England was a garden through a looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up. Dorothy had always known she was going to grow older, and had been slightly impatient to get on with it. Now, she thought Tom might get away with his unknowing, and almost envied him. The Downs were full of young, and not so young, men in breeches and tweed or jackets, carrying rods or guns, with linen hats flopping, striding from pub to pub and talking wisely about trout, and weather, and the diseases of trees.

Tom, she thought, as she almost wept over him, was no more and no less her brother than these two dark Germans, the flirtatious one, and the quiet one. Well, that wasn’t true. She had shared her life with Tom. They had played at families in the Tree House. They had held out hands to each other as they climbed, rode or strode naked into deep ponds.

It was hard to admit that she was homesick for those two deceivers, Humphry and Olive, who had turned out to be snakes in the grass as well as Adam and Eve in the Garden. She let her mind get round to Humphry’s “act” as she referred to it in her head. She remembered his hand in her nightdress, her own mixture of excitement and revulsion. “I love you,” he had said, “you know I love you, I have always loved you.” And she had never for a moment doubted that he did—all along the lie of their life together—and what was more, she was just enough to recognise that he did indeed love her—as a father should—and had always done so. They were a modern, liberal, Fabian family. He was no paterfamilial tyrant, no ogre, no invisible person who disappeared to Work and was unknowable—as his brother was, in many ways, to Karl and Griselda. He knew how to play with his children. He had played with all of them, laughing and inventive, and still did. She had ridden on his ankle as a horse, when she was tiny, she had later ridden behind him on a bicycle in the lanes, he had steadied her. And loved her.

She had always, perhaps naturally, loved her father much more than her mother. She sensed that Olive had attention to spare for only one of her children—and that was Tom, not Dorothy. From quite early, she had refused to play Olive’s game—to live in a fairy story, not on the solid earth with railway trains and difficult exams. Olive wanted to love her as a hedgehog, and she wanted to be human and adult.

It is just my bad luck, she thought, wryly and tragically, to have a mystery parent who turns out to make fairy stories—and sinister ones—with automata and dolls.

•  •  •

They went to Frau Holle’s Spiegelgarten together, Toby and Joachim, Griselda and Karl, and Dorothy. They had arranged to meet Wolfgang and Leon at the door of the house in the Romerstrasse where the marionette theatre was. Dorothy had thought of confiding in Toby about her reasons for coming, and had decided against it. She had an instinctive knowledge of his relations with her mother—she had not, unlike Hedda, wanted to investigate these— and this made him, in a puzzling way, into yet another father or father-substitute. She wished that Wolfgang and Leon did not have to be present, and yet—since it was impossible, obviously, for her to speak to Anselm Stern in their presence—they allowed her to defer the encounter. She would watch him, and think what to do.

The house was high and forbidding. It had runes—Toby said they were runes—painted on its doorposts and lintels, and a Jugendstil painting of an apple tree, with gold and silver fruit, in the architrave. The young men met them at the door. They went through a dark inner corridor directly to the back of the house, which was lit through a stained-glass window, with more runes, in ruddy gold on white, and a medallion depicting a figure in a circle of flames.

Through this door, they went into a high, bright courtyard, with painted inner walls and bushes in flower in tubs