The Children's Book

“If you like.”

They walked through the woods under turning leaves, yellow and yellow- green, lifeless as green leaves, not yet crisp and brilliant as russet or scarlet leaves. Now and then, one dropped through the branches, resting on a twig, falling a bit further, eddying aimlessly, reaching the mulch under their feet. Dorothy tried to talk to Tom. She did not talk to him about her work, because she sensed a determined lack of interest in it. She talked about the pots, and about Hedda’s school exams, and about Violet’s problems with the bones in her ankles, which she had not known about, and thought must be more serious than anyone appeared to realise. Tom said almost nothing. He pointed out pheasants, and a rabbit. The wood smelt of rich, incipient rottenness. They turned a corner, to where the Tree House used to stand, camouflaged and secret.

“It’s gone,” said Dorothy. The neat heaps of chopped-down wood were still there.

“Yes,” said Tom.

For a moment she thought he had done this himself, in an excess of depression or madness.

He said “It was the gamekeeper. He had no right, it is public land, not part of his coppices.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

Tom said, meekly and meanly, “I didn’t think you’d be interested. Not really. Not much.”

“It was the Tree House. All our childhood.”

“Yes,” said Tom.

“I’m sorry,” said Dorothy, as though she had hacked at the walls herself.

“Not your fault,” said Tom. “There it is. Where shall we go now?”

Olive called Dorothy into her study, before the pony-cart took her back to the station.

“I wish you’d come home more often. I’m worried about Tom.”

The study had changed. It was full of odd dolls, and papier-mache figures, and stage-sets in miniature, and puppets with strings perched on bookshelves. Anselm Stern’s work, thought Dorothy, piqued that her real parents appeared to be working together behind her back. She said

“What do you think is wrong with Tom?”

“I don’t know. He’s hostile to me. I can’t reach him.”

“Maybe you don’t try,” said Dorothy, and wished she had not. Olive put her head briefly in her hands. She said with a weary spite

“You certainly don’t. You never come home. I know you mean to save lives and work wonders, but you’re too busy to notice your family, or be kind to them.”

Dorothy picked up one of the puppets—a small grey, ratlike puppet, with a gold collar and stitched-in ruby- beaded eyes.

“And where do you think I learnt that?” she heard herself ask. “Look at you. Tom looks sick, and your room is full of all these stuffed dolls—”

“I’m writing a play. With August Steyning. We’ve just got the lease of the Elysium Theatre next year. There’s never been anything like it.”

“Well, I hope it’s a very successful play. I really do. But I think Tom is sick. And you’re his mother. Not me.”

“Ah, but he loves you, and trusts you, you were always so close.”

Dorothy set her teeth, and started to run over a list of all the small bones in the human skeleton, one by one, in her mind. Work. Work was what mattered. Olive’s work was hopelessly contaminated with play.

“Someone should make Tom grow up,” said Dorothy.

“He is grown up,” said Olive, and then, in a small voice “I know, I know.”

“I’ve got to go. I’ll miss my train.”

“Come back soon.”

“I’ll see how it fits in,” said Dorothy.

43

Olive dreamed that a theatre was a skull. She saw it loom in a foggy, sooty street, pristine white and smiling. There was nothing surprising in this shape. She floated in, somehow, between the teeth, and was in a dome full of bright flying things, birds and trapeze artists, angels and demons, fairies and buzzing insects. She was supposed to do something. Sort them, catch them, conduct them. They clustered round her head like the playing-cards in Alice, like a swarm of bees or wasps. She couldn’t see or breathe, and woke up. She wrote down the dream. She wrote “I see I have always thought of the theatre as the inside of a skull. A book can be held by a real person, in a train, at a desk, in a garden. A theatre is something unreal everyone is inside.” She was both entranced, and sometimes exasperated, by the exigencies of August Steyning. He had a skeleton of a theatrical performance to which things must be fitted. There needed to be curtains at the end of acts, there needed to be development, and a climax. “Your story is like an interminable worm,” he said to Olive. “We must chop it into segments and reconstitute it. We must see what theatrical machinery we have, and we must use it. There must be music.”

Anselm Stern said what was needed was music like Richard Strauss. No, no, said Steyning, something English and fairylike, something between “Greensleeves” and The Ring of the Nibelung. There was a young musician collecting English folk songs who would know what was wanted.

The play was to open with the shadowless boy meeting the Queen of the Elves—who would also have no shadow. The lighting was complicated. They argued over whether they should dramatise the Rat taking the shadow, and decided to save the Rat for a later encounter. Steyning named the boy Thomas—he was to evoke True Thomas, he was not a fairy prince, or a prince of any kind, said August Steyning, and Olive concurred. He would wade in blood, which could be done with red lighting, and the Queen would give him a silver apple branch, as a talisman, and as a source of imperishable food, as happened in Celtic myths. She would also give him a coal-ball which would protect him in