Tom and Julian wandered away across the lawn.
“You are always told you don’t want to hear things precisely because you do,” said Julian.
“Do you?” Tom asked.
“They think we don’t know these things. They ought to know you learn in school, just by being a boy. You learn them along with Greek and cricket and rowing and drawing. And sniggering and poking and passing messages. They ought to know we know. They must have known themselves.”
Tom did not know. He lived at home and was home-tutored, though Basil and Humphry were planning for him to do the Marlowe scholarship exams next spring. Basil had intervened when Humphry had spoken of sending Tom to the newfangled newly founded Bedales where boys mucked out farm animals and swam naked. Basil would help, he said, with his nephew’s fees. Tom was very bright, good at maths, good at languages. He did Latin and Greek with the anarchists, who liked teaching, and were grateful for the income. He did maths with a tutor, whose lessons would increase after the summer. Tom walked through lanes and meadows to his lessons. He lived wild, much of the time. He was not sure he wanted to know what Julian was talking about. He was not sure he wanted to be friends with Julian. He was often unsure what he wanted, and as a result, being amiable, he had many acquaintances and no close friends. He was thirteen, and still all boy, whereas Julian was fifteen, and could on occasion be a serious young man.
Tom’s spectacles made him look owlish. His fine fair hair sprang all ways, and asked to be ruffled. His skin was young, unspotted, and golden brown with outdoor living. He had his mother’s eyes and long lashes. His cheekbones were high and wide, his mouth gentle. He was the sort of beautiful boy, quite unconscious of his beauty, who was much discussed and courted both in Julian’s prep school, and at Marlowe. Julian had asked himself whether Tom was pretty, or a possible object of passion, and had seen that, in theory, he certainly was. Pretty boys at school became rapidly self-conscious. Tom seemed unconcerned, and it lent him charm and distance. Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew—and he was knowing. Also he was constantly concerned by pustules, and the craters of past pustules. He was not sure whether Tom, despite being pretty, was not so simple that he was boring.
Tom was assessing Julian in his usual terms. Was he, would he ever be, someone who could be invited into the Tree House? It was too early to tell, but he rather thought not. He said, blandly and meaninglessly,
“Grown-ups always think we don’t know things they must have known themselves. They need to remember wrong, I think.”
The audience were gathered for the marionettes like a flock of hens. They sat in a half-moon, in the blue daylight, on chairs, stools, grass. Griselda and Dorothy sat together on embroidered footstools, to safeguard Griselda’s skirt. They both thought they were too old for puppet shows.
August Steyning stepped out from behind the booth that he and Herr Stern had erected. It had star-spangled midnight-blue curtains. He bowed, profoundly, and announced
“We welcome you to
He went back, behind the dark box.
A trumpet sounded, and a tapping drum. The curtains swept open. A funeral procession crossed the stage, to a slow beat: black-coated mourners, carrying a coffin, the sombre widower, the decorous daughter, cloaked in black, her face shadowed. The coffin was lowered, to sad drumbeats. A green mound, and a gravestone rose in its place. Father and daughter embraced.
The next scene was in the house. The stepmother and stepsisters arrived to strutting violin music. The marionettes were delicate creatures, with fine porcelain faces, real human hair twisted or plaited into elaborate coiffures, and a frou-frou of finely stitched skirts, crimson, lilac, amber. The sisters were not ugly. They were fashionable beauties, with pearl necklaces and haughty little faces with sneering mouths and plucked and painted eyebrows. They and their mother were like peas in a pod, from the same mould. Aschenputtel had long golden plaits, and a simple sky-blue dress. The step-family indicated imperiously chairs she should dust and arrange, silver tureens she should carry, the hearth she should sweep, the fire she should tend. She moved as they commanded. A puff of real smoke came from the fireplace.
Aschenputtel shuddered, sat on a stool, put her sweet china face in her fine china hands. The shudder was human and disturbing, as the little limbs swayed and folded.
The father returned, booted and caped for a journey. He kissed their hands and asked what they would like as a gift on his return.
There were few words in this production, but this ritual question was spoken in August Steyning’s high, light, reedy voice, which seemed proportionate to the tiny actor. He lifted it to counter-tenor. Silk and velvet, said the crimson sister. Rubies and pearls, said the violet. A branch of whatever tree touches your hat, said Aschenputtel.
She was next seen kneeling by the green mound and the grey stone, smoothing the grass, planting the twig. Slowly, wonderfully, a tree unfolded from beneath the stage, a wiry trunk uncurling branches, hung with a haze of leaves. Two white doves, fluttering and swooping, stitched from feathers and silk, with jet beads for eyes, pink toes and iridescent ruffs, settled in the tree. The violin twittered. The doves flew to Aschenputtel’s fingers. She lay down and embraced the mound, and they strutted and preened in her hair.
Dorothy blinked. The little creatures had taken on a sinister life, which perturbed her. She set herself against giving in to the illusion. Griselda beside her was staring, engrossed.
The stepmother set Aschenputtel to sorting lentils from cinders. The doves sifted the ashes, and deftly threw the lentils into a pan—a rain of tiny clatterings could be heard.
The sisters were fitted with ball-gowns, by a new marionette, a subservient dressmaker, her painted mouth full of pins. One sister had puce bows. One had purple pom-poms. Aschenputtel sat by the hearth, head in hands.
The weeping daughter stood by the mound, her hair now loose, a mass of gold threads, under the dancing tree, which waved its arms and produced, like a descending angel, a fine gold dress, a coronet, a pair of gold slippers.
The Ball was done behind gauze, with whirling figures, and dance music in a music box, twanging waltzes, prancing polkas. The prince had shining white hair, tied back, a long dark coat and knee-breeches. He danced with the golden girl. The clock struck. She fled. The tree and the birds made a second dress out of thin air, silver as the moon. And a third, caught like the starry sky in the pointy branches. The countertenor sang.
Shiver and shake, little tree
Throw gold and silver over me.
The prince appeared, with a pot of pitch, and cunningly painted the steps of his palace. They danced, the
