The Children's Book

know that, I think. I don’t have much to offer, yet—but I shall, for certain. I am doing well in the City, and Mr. Wellwood treats me as a son, almost. I am saving money. Also, I love you. I do love you. Don’t speak for a moment. It couldn’t be for a year or two. I ought not to tie you down. It may be only my fantasy. I have never seen—never—anyone like you. I think of you—you don’t know how much of the time.”

“May I speak now?”

“If you think it is even possible—I will ask again—later—if you—”

“May I speak? I was going to say—yes. Yes I will marry you. There.” They stopped walking and turned and looked at each other. Geraint said

“I haven’t just worn you out, with waiting and watching?”

“I said, yes. I do know my own mind.”

“I want you to be happy. You haven’t been looking happy, lately. I want—more than I want anything—for you to have what you want. Of course, I should like it to be me.”

“I haven’t been happy, it’s true. We can be happier together, I do think.” She gave a small smile. “We can try. Stop worrying.”

Very gently, he put his arms around her. She stiffened. He wished she had not, but he had learned patience.

“May I speak to your father?”

She gave a strange little laugh. “I shall be very happy for you to do that, yes. Then we can make plans.”

Dorothy Wellwood had set off alone, for a walk across the marshes. She had given herself a sick headache, with studying anatomy, and told herself that it was for the good of her own health that she was going out. She had been having trouble with willpower. She wanted to be with the German father and the German brothers, who were making intricate things in the barn, and laughing together. She was somehow hurt that Griselda could laugh with them, in German, and make clever suggestions for scenes in the puppet play, whilst she could not. She did not want to, of course—somewhere inside her there was a puritanical rejection of imaginary worlds, that was tough and largely unquestioned. Nerves and tendons, veins and arteries, were both more real and more mysterious than wired joints and dangling strings. She knew Griselda was far from trying to steal her new family—she was, on the contrary, hurt when Dorothy went off to do her hours of study, angry as much because she, Griselda, had no calling of her own, as because Dorothy was abandoning her. She walked faster and faster, running over the articulations of her body in her head. She found herself at Purchase House, looking up the avenue of trees beside the shabby drive.

She suddenly thought it would be good to see Philip Warren. She walked into the drive. She did not want to see Seraphita, or Pomona, or even Elsie. So she went neatly and quietly round the house, and into the stableyard, and directly to the door of the dairy-studio. She thought, then, too late, that she might encounter the ogre, Benedict Fludd. She peered in through the dusty window. There was Philip, in a blue overall, his back to her. No sign of Fludd. She tapped on the upper half of the door. Philip opened it, and smiled widely when he saw her.

“I were about to say, go away, I’m busy. And then I saw it was you. Come in.”

“I took a long walk, to think, and then I found I was here. So I came to see how you are getting on.”

“I’ve been drawing seaweeds. Wi’ things moving in them, with the water moving. Things like pipefish and cuttlefish and such.”

“Show me.”

He fetched his drawing pad, and they sat down, side by side, to look at it. There were some extraordinary images of bladderwrack, half-stranded, half-floating, its air pockets just above the surface of the shifting sea.

“First, I see how it looks. I keep looking, and see all the shapes as it moves in the different light. And then, a lot later, I make formal patterns.” He frowned. “You see what’s chance—little flips and flurries on th’ water—and what’s constant, what repeats.”

“It reminds me oddly of Gray’s Anatomy. I have to keep drawing veins, and muscles, and tendons, and joints. I could draw you different levels of what’s moving in your hand as you draw. Muscles that tighten, and what they do to other muscles. How the blood runs like a tide along the veins and arteries. You could make the most beautiful designs from the circulation of the blood. Like currents in the water, and strands of weeds. Only I’m not good at drawing, like you. I have to do it, for all these exams, and I try, and I try. But I mess it up.”

“Show me,” said Philip, pushing the paper pad towards her, and handing her the crayon. Dorothy laughed. She drew a rough image of a hand—the palmar surface—with the strong pulling parallel bands of the muscles and the cross-gartering effect at the sheath of the fingertip. Then she drew an arm, with the main nerves blacked in like rivers and tributaries. Philip was following her crayon by touching his own hand and arm, locating the stresses and counter-stresses, the flow and return.

“Sometimes,” said Dorothy, “I think I shall never get to grips with all of it. External cutaneous nerves. Deltoid. I sometimes feel I’d like to be free of it.”

“Not really,” said Philip. “It’s got you. You’ve got no choice, I think.” He took back the pencil and drew a more elegant version of the network of muscles. “Like me. I hadn’t a choice, from before I could think about it.”

“It means giving things up,” said Dorothy. “Things like camp and the play, now. Things like parties. And more, probably. Women don’t get to be doctors and have time to do the things women do, like getting married, even.”

“No,” said Philip. “It’s like monks and nuns, work, I come to see.”

“Show me your work. I like seeing it.”

Philip fetched out some pots with seaweeds flowing round them, dark green on a marine green blue, with flashes of tawny yellow. He showed her some of the variations on the climbing creatures on branches, derived partly from the Gloucester Candlestick and partly from the Gien version of majolica, with capering grotesques. Dorothy was happy enough with imaginary creepers and creatures anchored so safely in cold earth, held by glaze, set in place by fire.

Philip said