The Children's Book

his own. He rather thought she might be an embodiment—symbolic or actual—of a kind of elder-tree witch, a guardian of flowers and berries. She had no blemishes, and was evasive. What Frank responded to was a something in Methley’s description of the relations between the church building and the landscape. In this world, the church was gaunt and skeletal, a solid shell around a lifeless space. The spiritual energy had leached into, or returned to, the earth and the marsh and the water around the church. Trees appeared to walk, and moved angry arms, or spoke in inhuman voices, creaking and groaning. The marsh lights flittered and gathered in dancing circles, and split again into snakes of light, running errands across the evening darkness. Frank had been impressed as a boy by Wordsworth’s sense of the ancient force—not measured by human time—in crags and boulders. Methley had learned from him—huge stones lurched like primeval scaled beasts, from the lips of brackish lakes to dry land and back. Hillocks heaved with slow, slow energy. Cracks opened into traps. The whole earth was possessed, and either indifferent or inimical, unless the inadequate Bertha was meant to be a way to enter it, or find harmony in it. Gabriel Medcalf failed the test, and ventured less and less frequently outside his church, and its walled graveyard. Gabriel in the novel lost his sense of the divinity of Christ, and saw him as “a kindly Jew, slaughtered long ago in Palestine.” This phrase had got under Frank Mallett’s skin. He recognised it, and resented his recognition. At times he felt his own church, like the one in Methley’s novel, to be surrounded by inimical elementals, crowding in, peering through keyholes, muttering and waiting. He wasn’t sure he wanted to meet the author. But he didn’t like failing tests. He suggested that he and Arthur should call on Mr. Methley and discuss their project with him.

Patty Dace said that that was an excellent idea. She thought for a moment or two, and then said that the Methleys were very keen on their smallholding and were enthusiastic gardeners. If they didn’t answer the doorbell, they could usually be found by walking round into the garden at the back.

They pedalled the East Guldeford road in a companionable silence, and found their way to Wantsum Farm, which was hardly large enough to be called a farm, but supported a few sheep, some ducks, a pair of goats and a small orchard. The farmhouse was squat, with small windows and an ill-fitting door. They rang the bell, and when no one answered, did as Miss Dace had suggested, and went along the path round to the back of the house, across a rough lawn with a diminutive duckpond, and through a gate in a wall into the kitchen garden.

They made their way to the centre of this space between high rows of peas and beans, growing up poles with supporting netting. These screening plants explained why they came upon the Methleys, quite suddenly, in a sheltered spot at the centre of the radiating paths. They were sitting side by side upon the grass. Herbert Methley was holding up a book and Phoebe Methley was shelling peas and broad beans into a colander on her lap.

Both of them were naked. Both wore spectacles.

Everyone stared.

Neither Arthur Dobbin nor Frank Mallett had seen a naked woman during his adult life, though Frank had visited sweaty sick or dying ladies in dishevelled nightgowns.

Both Methleys had sun-roughed and reddened noses, necks and wrists. Both were otherwise lean and pale. Herbert Methley was dark, with flopping fine hair, and a luxuriant black growth under his armpits and round his relaxed member. He was quite sinewy, with thin but muscular arms and legs, and a spattering of wiry hair on his chest. Phoebe Methley had sandy hair tied up in a knot with a broad band. Her breasts—they saw her breasts first, to the exclusion of the rest of her—were flattening mounds, hanging over her rib-cage, with nipples the colour of dog-roses, not sticking out, but retracted. They saw that she too had a lower bush of hair, a brighter ginger than her head, and averted their eyes. She had a long neck, and the skin on it was just beginning to crease into folds. She had big eyes—very big behind the glasses—which if she had been clothed might have been the first thing they would have noticed. They startled her into upsetting the colander, which had been resting on her thighs, so that hard bright green spheres of peas, and grey-green kidney-shaped broad beans rolled everywhere on flesh and earth.

Neither Frank nor Dobbin, curiously, felt urged to back off, or retreat in disorder. Herbert Methley said, easily,

“You have caught us taking the sun. Sun-worshipping, in fact. It is our habit, when we can, and this is truly flaming June.”

Frank Mallett murmured that he had been told they would find them in the garden. Innate caution led him not to say by whom he had been told. There had been a glitter in Miss Dace’s eye.

Phoebe Methley rolled on her hip to gather up the peas and beans. Dobbin felt impelled to help her with this task, and impelled to turn his head away. He did neither, but continued to study her naked flesh. Frank Mallett said

“Perhaps we should return another time. We came to ask about a lecture series in the autumn. We hoped you might…”

Herbert Methley stood up, stolid on his naked feet, and reached from a camping stool some folded garments that turned out to be two embroidered gowns in the form of kimonos. He held one out to his wife, who stood up, in a practised movement, and held out her arms for the sleeves. She did up her sash, and went down on her knees to continue the gathering of the peas and beans. Herbert Methley said

“The original couple in the original garden were in a happier state before they learned shame. Come into the house. Tell me about your lectures.”

His voice had a northern tang, which Frank, a child of the Home Counties, could not place. Dobbin knew it came from somewhere quite a way north of his Sheffield.

They padded back in single file, into the house through the back door, Phoebe Methley in the rear with the colander, like some saint’s attribute in a painting. She went into the kitchen, to make tea. Herbert Methley offered the two friends seats in low, slatted Arts and Crafts armchairs. The room was full of a smoky darkness, after the blaze of light in the garden. There was a vase of field flowers on a carved table. Dobbin explained the lecture plan to Herbert Methley, and Frank withdrew into his own mind for a moment, wondering whether to thank Methley for Marsh Lights, or at least to tell him how it had moved him. He decided against this. He found he was annoyed that this robed person, with his electric black hair, was more the owner, so to speak, of the imagined rocks and stones and elder bushes than he, the reader. Readers ought not to meet writers, he thought. They are meant not to.

He came out of his brief reverie to hear Methley proposing a lecture on “something like ‘Elements of paganism in modern art,’ or even ‘Elements of the pagan in modern art and modern religion.’” Frank said that that was exactly what they had hoped for. He then added, with a fake casualness, that he had enjoyed Mr. Methley’s work very much. Mr. Methley said he was delighted. He asked if Frank had read his latest book, Apple- bobbing. He would be happy to present a copy. He found one, and inscribed it, in a neat hand. The man in the dog-collar smiled cautiously at the man in nothing but a robe splashed with crimson peonies and gold and silver chrysanthemums.

As they rode back home, Dobbin said

“The odd thing is, how much more bad-mannered it seems it would have been, to run away. It is really odd that courtesy seemed to mean we had to stand and stare.”