The Children's Book

House, taking it in—”

Dorothy was suddenly very irritated with Tom. She said, “I think it’s time to go back, now.”

“But we’ve only just come.”

“I’ve been here long enough. I’m not well. I want to go back.”

She didn’t sleep well. She walked at night, in the moonlit rooms, not needing a candle, looking for something to nibble, or something to read. One night in the hall, she heard someone else, skirt rustling, slippers sliding. She stood still in a dark corner, shrunk into shadow.

It was Olive, in her flower-spread robe, gliding towards the cupboard where the family tales were kept. She was carrying one large manuscript book; she unlocked the cupboard and replaced it. Then she went away again, not having noticed Dorothy.

Dorothy was the one who had taken little interest in her “own” story, about the metamorphosing hedgehogs and the uncanny root-cavity-dwellers. She wondered for the first time if Olive was still spinning particular tales for particular children. She opened the story-cabinet. There were books for Robin and Harry. Florian’s was now quite fat. The one Olive had been carrying was Tom’s—his story now occupied a series of books, taking up a whole shelf, dwarfing the others. Dorothy hesitated a moment, and then took out the Dorothy book, with the fairies and woodland creatures on its cover. She had no imagination of what it felt like to be a writer and spin stories. She assumed her own story would have petered out, somehow, long ago.

She turned to the last page.

•  •  •

So Peggy went on her travels, and saw many strange and wonderful sights, snow-covered mountains, and sunny southern meadows. She met Interesting strangers, and rode on shining, smoking trains. She thought at bed-time of the other, secret world in the roots of the Tree, of its inhabitants who spoke with strange voices, hissing or chuntering, squeaking or whispering. She thought of the strangers she had helped when they were caught on thorns, or hurt by cold iron, the Grey Child and the Brown Boy, with their glancing, inhuman eyes. They had helped her, too. They had found things that were lost. They had sung to her. When she thought of them, they grew thinner, more transparent in her mind’s eye, wisps and tattered fragments. But they were there, and she knew they were there, always.

When she finally came back, she wore a long skirt with a braided hem which brushed on the grass, leaving a trail in the dew, when she hurried out to the Tree. It seemed older, with more cracks and knobs. She knelt down and looked into the hollow, and it was full of the kind of undisturbed dust that had not been there before, for there had been busy brooms to sweep it. She turned over the heaped leaves in the hole where she had always found the hedgehog-coat, which shrank her when she fingered it, so that she could slip inside it. It was there. It was stiff and dusty. She bent over, and lifted it out and saw that it was not—it was and was not—her hedgehog- coat. It was a hedgehog, a real hedgehog, long dead and dried to leather. On its nose were dried drops of blood, and its bright little eyes were lidded.

Nothing more.

So she walked back along the path, in her long, heavy skirt, and the breeze through the trees was cold and aimless, the light was simply scattered and lit nothing in particular, and no birds sang.

•  •  •

Dorothy put the book back, as though it had stung her. Psychology was not her gift; she had set her will to being practical. She did not want to think about the feeling behind this coda. Her mind became full of an uninvited ghost of Dr. Barty. She started to cry. She was ashamed. She hurried back to her bedroom, and lay down, and wept. There was nothing for her here.

•  •  •

She was saved, though she never knew it, by Violet, who sent a message to Vetchey Manor, just in case Griselda was there. Griselda was. The next day, Dorothy saw her pedalling up the drive, dressed in country tweeds. Dorothy went slowly—she didn’t feel up to running—to meet her. They kissed.

“You look dreadful. I heard you were here, so I came over. Are you ill?”

“I fainted. I fainted in an anatomy class. I was holding a heart in my hand and I dropped it, and fainted. I was so ashamed.”

“You’ve overdone it, as I always knew you would.”

“They sent me here for a rest.”

“Is it working?”

“No. No, it’s not.”

They went into Todefright, and Dorothy made mugs of tea. Griselda said that maybe Dorothy should visit her in Cambridge. “Do you like it, there, Grisel?”

“It’s not quite real, but in some ways it’s better than real. I really like the work. I like thinking, you know, thinking about things that aren’t myself.”

So Dorothy packed her things, and went on the train with Griselda to Cambridge, and was given a guest room in Sidgwick Hall.

Newnham College was austere, graceful and comfortable. The buildings were red-brick and slightly Dutch, which is to say, domestic. There was a very large, beautiful garden, with an orchard where in the summer the young ladies swayed in hammocks, reading Ovid and John Stuart Mill. There was a hockey field where they covertly (their legs in shortened skirts must not be seen) played vigorous and enthusiastic matches. There was a croquet lawn. They were in the University on sufferance; the women’s colleges were not part of the University, and the women, though they took the same exams as the men, were not awarded degrees by the University. They were free women, pursuing the life of the mind, professionally. Opposition to their presence was smouldering and occasionally broke out into violent polemic, or even hostile rioting. They were felt to be a temptation to, and danger for, the morals of the often rackety young men who were part of the University.

Their tutors and mentors reacted to this opposition by using supreme caution. The young ladies must be chaperoned wherever they went. They must not entertain men who were not fathers, brothers or uncles. There were male lecturers in the University who admitted them to classes—always with chaperones—and those who did not. Florence Cain was the single woman student at a series of economic history lectures in Trinity College, and had to be accompanied by one of the Newnham Fellows on a bicycle. The women felt themselves to be both demure