The Children's Book

lovely wedding, and a house just like this, with a rose garden, and I want to bake bread, and wear lovely dresses, and have seven children …”

Phyllis knew she was pretty. She was always being told she was. The young Fludds, Imogen and Pomona, could have been described as beautiful, but they were beautiful in a subdued and uncertain way, certainly unlikely to be Stunners. They were both graceful and awkward in their home-woven linens and hand-enamelled bracelets. Imogen had full breasts, and wore no supporting underwear. She looked plump. She said she had from time to time thought of studying embroidery at the Royal College. Pomona said she might like that, too, or she might like to stay and make tiles in Dungeness. Hedda said she wanted to be a witch. Violet slapped her wrist.

They turned to Florence Cain. Florence had had a governess who had borne in upon her that she had caused her mother’s death, and must devote her life to caring for her father. Florence had not mentioned these admonitions to her father, who was quite unaware of them, and was also well looked after by housekeepers and sappers. He liked to play games with both Julian and Florence, filling brass trays with miscellaneous buttons, beads, bottles, snuffboxes and so on, and asking his children to remember them, describe them and identify them. He took quite as much delight in Florence’s acuity as in Julian’s. Florence did, indeed, look like his lost Giulia, but he thought of the likeness in terms of a Van Eyck angel, serene amongst its crimped hair.

“Well,” he said, “Florence. What will you do?”

“I shall keep house for you,” said Florence, who thought this was understood.

“I hope you won’t. I hope you’ll have a home of your own, and before that, an education. I hope Julian will go to Cambridge, and I hope you will too. Newnham College offers a great deal. I hope you will want to go there.”

Florence was confused. They had never discussed this, and now firm statements were being made, in the middle of a large party. She did not know anything about Newnham College. It was just a name.

“She doesn’t want to be a maiden lady,” said Julian. “A bluestocking.”

This annoyed Florence, who said she didn’t see why she shouldn’t learn something. Julian was going to. She would do so. She fell over her words, and fell silent. She couldn’t imagine what she might try to learn.

That left Griselda. Basil and Katharina were clear about her future. She would be Presented at court, become a debutante, and make an advantageous match. Katharina said she hoped Griselda would be as happily married as her parents.

Griselda twisted a puce bow rhythmically round and round. Her mother tapped her fingers. Griselda had been shocked—deeply shocked—when Dorothy said she wanted to be a doctor. She had not thought of wanting anything beyond release from puce bows. She had an intense secret life, which consisted of reading novels about women reduced to silent attentiveness, full of inner rebellion, or of the effort of resignation. Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Maggie Tulliver. But all these had really wanted love and marriage. None had wanted anything so—so destructive—as to be a doctor. Why had Dorothy never said anything of this intention? Griselda loved Dorothy as Dorothy loved Griselda. She loved Todefright with a passion she dared not admit to, even in Todefright. She came to stay there, and was immediately released from her good clothes and set loose to run wild in the woods. There were books everywhere. She had it in her pale head that she and Dorothy might live in the country together, and never bother with stays and hatpins and button-hooks. That was all she had thought of. And now suddenly Dorothy’s world was black bags, and blood, and sickbeds, and grief and drama, and Griselda was nowhere. Dorothy had a secret. Griselda, her face white, said

“I mean to study. Like Florence. I learn German and French. I mean to study languages.”

Katharina said that Griselda had the best possible teachers, and her progress was exemplary.

Basil remarked to the surrounding bushes that women’s education simply made them dissatisfied. He did not say with what.

Griselda twisted another bow, and her mother tapped her hand. Humphry Wellwood picked up Florian.

“And what do you want to be, Florian?”

“A fox,” said Florian, with total certainty. “A fox, in a foxhole, in a wood.”

5

Olive believed she was a wonderful party-giver, and the belief was infectious, though not entirely well founded. It rested on the charm of her presence, and where she was, her parties were lively. She liked to be at the centre. She liked to charm, and to charm those she was excited to entertain—in this case leaders of culture, Prosper Cain and August Steyning, both of whom stood, champagne glasses in their hands, laughing at her self-deprecating jokes. She relied on others to do what was needful—introduce people, feed people, change the structure of groups. To a certain extent Violet could do this—she saw to bodily comforts, but was uneasy with bright talk. And Humphry could normally be relied on to amuse both men and women, but he had become ominously locked in argument with his brother. Children flickered and flitted along the flowerbeds and in and out of the shrubbery as the light thickened.

Vasily Tartarinov was performing his party piece to the Skinners and the young, Tom, Julian, Philip, Geraint, Florence and Charles. His party piece, which also formed part of his London lectures, was the story of a horse. The English cared about horses. It was the way to hook their attention. This horse, a noble black beast, Varvar the barbarian, had played an essential part in a series of daring escapes from Russian prisons and police surveillance, including Tartarinov’s own. Varvar had been waiting when Prince Kropotkin flung off his immensely heavy green dressing-gown, in a movement practised for weeks, and simply ran out of the prison hospital courtyard and into a waiting carriage, where one conspirator was waiting, whilst another distracted the guards by showing them how to see parasites under a microscope. Varvar had galloped out of sight with Sergey Mikhailovich Kravchinsky, known universally as Stepniak, and now a much-loved member of English socialist and anarchist groups, advising on the translation of the Russian classics, looking like a great, amiable bear in his thick beard. Tartarinov, in his turn, had been on his way down from his apartment, with a small bundle of essentials, to rush away behind Varvar, when he met the secret police coming up.

“I dissembled,” he told them, in his high-pitched voice. “I said to them, we are too late, I am on the same errand, the bird is m-m-m-flown. The trail is cold, that is how I put it. We all descended together, and I got into the carriage, and we walked sedately to the corner, and then away flew the great Varvar, like the wind. He took me back to Cherkasov’s estate, where he lived, and I disguised myself as a seaman, and worked my way, via Sweden and Holland, to my refuge here. Others were less fortunate.” He touched a handkerchief to his eye.

The English socialists were embarrassed to ask certain questions. Three years ago an anonymous article in the New Review had described the cold-blooded killing of a certain General Mesentsev. He had been stabbed with a blade, a kitchen knife wrapped in a newspaper, exactly the method subsequently used to