The Children's Book

“There is clearly a need if you are reduced to this state. Perhaps we should say you are ill, and cannot attend this summer school at all? Maybe we should take a holiday.”

“Don’t. I must stop this nonsense.”

“You will soon be independent. Your work is good, as you know.

You will be able to earn a living, and, I hope, find someone to love, and a home of your own, where you will be safe.”

This caused renewed, quieter tears. Then Imogen said

“I must go away, now. But not back to that house. I don’t know what to do.”

“I hope you will let me look after you, until you have found,” he repeated his earlier phrase, “someone to love, to care for you—”

“I do love someone,” said Imogen. Her eyes were closed. There was an infinitesimal silence of decision: “I love you.” The silence went on. “So I must go away.”

They sat still, side by side. Then Imogen put out her arms and cast herself from her chair into Prosper Cain’s chair, her face against his, her body leaning into his.

His arms closed automatically around her, to save their balance. So long, so very long, without women, even though his small house felt full of them. He kissed her hair. He held her, and tried to stay stiff as a ramrod, which he found he was in a perfectly double sense.

“It isn’t possible,” he said, very gently. “For every reason we can think of. It is an impossible thing, in this world. It must be forgotten.”

“I know that. So I must go away. And instead, everything is conspiring to send me back into that house—”

He found he felt violently that she should not go back into that house. He said

“I will take care of everything. Dry your eyes, and tidy your hair, and let us go home.”

He did not know what he would do. But he imagined he would think of something, as he always did.

He found it hard to go to sleep, that night. He looked at himself in the mirror. A sable, silvered moustache elegantly clipped, a lined face, steady eyes, the right side of fifty, but not for much longer. And a young woman—a lovely young woman—had fallen into his arms and said she loved him. He stroked his moustache, and stood to attention. She was probably right, she should go away, but who would look after her, if he did not? He had made her happy, when she had been unhappy and at a loss. He was not her father. She had a father, of whom she was afraid. She loved him, he was sensible enough to see (he told himself) because she was afraid of her father. That could be described as a tangle, or a muddle. He was good at cutting through tangles, and smoothing muddles, in the army, in the Museum. But they were not his own tangles or muddles. He had had enough of self-scrutiny, and got ready for bed in his military cot. Who dares, wins, he said to himself drowsily, without knowing what he meant. He couldn’t, he thought, ask Florence about this, as he had asked her about everything else. Damn that self-satisfied young animal, Gerald Matthiesen.

Cold water, he said to himself. Clean cold water, pour on it.

He had one of those terrible dreams in which things will not fit. In it, he found himself, as he frequently did, supervising the movement of furniture in the Museum, furniture swathed in dust sheets, shrouded and bound about and about. There was a large crew of beetlelike workers shifting an object, first in one direction, then in another. They were trying to get it through a door into the Crypt, and it was too large, it would not go. “You will scrape it,” said Prosper in the dream, “you careless fools, try some other way.”

Then he was back with the removal men, all boys, who were now struggling to move the piece of furniture round a sharp angle on a narrow staircase where it would not fit. They were carrying it down; it was suspended over the narrow banister. He said “Can’t you see it won’t go?” “Then us mun tek it up, see,” said one of the men or boys, in the voice of a thick corporal whose life Prosper Cain had once saved when the lad made a silly error with a firing mechanism. He had gripped his wrist, and the boy had thought of aiming a blow at him and had thought better of it. In the dream, Prosper Cain was pleased to see Simms. He said “Use your head, Simms, it won’t go up there, it’s too big by far.”

“You told us, sir, it mun go up,” said Simms, and gave an almighty heave, which broke the bands on the shrouding, and caused it to flap to earth over the banisters.

The object was a huge, beautifully carved, ebony bed, fit for a sultan. “And all his harem,” said Prosper’s mind, as the beetle-men rammed the monstrosity into what he saw was his own wall, toile de jouy and all. The staircase began to disintegrate under the weight.

“You’ll bring the house down,” said Prosper to Simms, and, perhaps fortunately, woke up.

35

The presence of the Sterns, father and sons, in Nutcracker Cottage should have agitated—and to a certain extent, did agitate—Olive Well-wood. She had a sense, when she thought about it, which she tried not to do, that everything unseen in her household had shifted its invisible place. Things had always been behind thick, felted, invisible curtains, or closed into heavy, locked, invisible boxes. She herself had hung the curtains, held the keys to the boxes, made sure that the knowable was kept from the unknown, in the minds of her children, most of all. And now she knew that grey, invisible cats had crept from their bags and were dancing and spitting on stair-corners, that curtains had been shaken, lifted, peeped behind by curious eyes, and her rooms were full of visible and invisible dust and strange smells. She was rather pleased with all these metaphors and began to plan a story in which the gentle and innocent inhabitants of a house became aware that a dark, invisible, dangerous house stood on exactly the same plot of land, and was interwoven, interleaved with their own. Like thoughts which had to stay in the head taking on an independent life, becoming solid objects, to be negotiated.

She knew very well that Dorothy had gone to Munich to see Anselm Stern. She knew that Humphry knew that, and supposed, but had not been told, that he had spoken about this to Dorothy. She waited for either Humphry or Dorothy—or Violet, in whom Humphry might have confided—to say something to her, and none of them did. Dorothy went on just as normal—except that it was not, and could not be, as normal. She had become, her mother thought, disagreeable and domineering about this medical training of which she did speak, a great deal, in an accusing voice, or so Olive understood it. Humphry placated their daughter.

She did not think Tom knew any more than she did. He had most innocently made great friends with the