The Children's Book

coxcombs with a stick, and cried Down wantons down!

Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.

Rupert Brooke’s rooms were much grander than the Newnham bedsitters, and had a deliberate leathery shabbiness. The dinner party consisted of a few Apostles and a few Fabians, including some of the Newnham ladies. They stood, and sipped sherry, and nervously discussed the lecture.

Rupert Brooke must be, Julian thought, the most beautiful man in Cambridge. All his features had exactly the right generous proportions in relation to each other, brow, chin, lips; shoulders, waist, long legs. His skin was milky and his eyes—long-lashed—small and grey-blue. He wore his hair long, parted in the middle, and was always tossing it back. It was bright gold, with a shade of foxy russet in it. He did not often meet your eye. His voice was less lovely than his face—too high, too light, with a squeak in it. The Kingsmen fell in love with him, one after the other, and he appeared not to notice. His election to the Society, Julian thought, was because he looked like a Greek statue—they wanted him—and was part of a trend to admit members whose claims to be interesting relied on loveliness rather than intellect. Julian was not attracted to him. He tried too hard, was too universally amiable.

But his presence made Julian think critically of his fellow Apostles. They were plain, the serious ones, knobbly and awkward, and above all pale, like things come out from under stones, Julian thought. They looked washed-out. Julian considered Herbert Methley’s metaphor of pale roots pushing blindly in the dark, and looked at the nerveless, long Strachey fingers, the thin necks and hunched shoulders of his fellow students. They were famous in this little world, but they were timid outside it. He had fits of thinking he had had enough of all this earnestness and bawdiness. He was half-Italian. He needed red wine and strong cheese, not crumpets and honey.

He said, truthfully, to his sister, that the Newnham ladies made the gathering much more interesting. Florence asked him what he thought of the lecture, and Julian said that Methley was master of mixed metaphor. “But he is right,” said Florence. She went across the room to where the writer was being questioned, and said, very clearly, that she believed he had said things that needed saying.

Methley held both his hands out to her. They were thin, strong brown hands, that took a grip on Florence, in one polite movement.

“Thank you very much,” he said. And then “I remember you. You came to my lecture at Puxty, and listened to it. A lecturer is always glad to see a face with real understanding in it. This is the second time.”

He did not add that an understanding face is more highly valued when it is young, female and handsome. But his look implied it. Florence flushed, and then paled again. She asked him a question about one of his novels.

Julian found himself, when dinner was served, sitting next to Griselda Wellwood. He discovered that, like himself, she was considering a life devoted to scholarship.

“What do you intend to study?” he asked her.

“I am half German. I should like to study German fairytales. They’ve been much studied already—as examples of an old Germanic religion, the life of the Volk, going back to Aryan sources, all that. But that isn’t what interests me. It’s really all the ways in which fairytales aren’t myths that interests me. The way there are so very many versions—hundreds—of the same odd tale—Cinderella, say, or Catskin—and they are all the same and all different. They work according to some sort of rules and I’d like to work out what they are.”

Julian was interested. He asked, what rules?

“They seem to me like coloured mosaics, with separate little pieces that fit together. Why does the stepmother always say the heroine has given birth to a monster? And why does the king then order her hands to be cut off and hung around her neck, and put her in a boat and push it out to sea? And why can the hands always be miraculously grown back?”

Julian gave a comic shudder. He said it was all very bloodthirsty, and those who wanted to keep fairytales from children were quite right.

“That’s another thing I want to study. I don’t think the real tales do frighten you. I think you accept the rules. They work in a fenced world which isn’t the real world, where nothing ever really changes. Witches get punished, and goose-girls become princesses, and what was lost is restored.”

“I don’t know. I was peculiarly horrified as a small brat by the eyeballs stuck on the thorns, or the dead men impaled on a fence round the glass hill, or the witch in the barrel full of nails.”

“I would suggest it was a kind of gleeful horror. Whereas H. C. Andersen’s stories do hurt the reader. The Little Mermaid walking on knives and losing her tongue.”

“So you think you will settle in Newnham and investigate magic woods and castles, and fairy foam on perilous seas?”

“I cannot make my mind up. Sometimes I think a women’s college is like the tower Rapunzel was shut in, or even the gingerbread cottage. I don’t want to become unreal. Do you know what I mean? I think it is different for men.”

“It may not be. I’m writing a thesis on English Pastoral—I wanted to compare the poets and painters. I wanted to look at the world of the Faerie Queene and the work of those painters who followed William Blake. Do you know Samuel Palmer?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“He paints magic corn-stooks with golden light pouring through them. English fields. Seductive. Lovely. Innocent. If you are half-German I’m half-Italian, and I sometimes think this College is simply the apotheosis of the public school—it looks like an iced cake, and we sit in it like—like—”

The image that came into his mind was enchanted rats and mice, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t utter it. He said

“Guinea pigs.”

“Guinea pigs? Why on earth?” Griselda laughed.

“I don’t know. Yes I do. Comfortable in a cage.”