The Children's Book

interested in the human body. She had a clear idea of how children came into the world. It was easy not to know who your father was. It was much harder not to know who your mother was, though it could happen, Griselda had suggested ways in which society women slid changelings into families. Some village families had complicated structures where grandmothers, mothers, aunts and elder sisters were indistinguishable, where children grew up supposing their mother was their sister, and their grandmother their mother. People had babies at ages hardly older than she herself now was, this she knew. But here, who, how? Violet liked to say she was their “real mother” but as far as Dorothy could work out, she liked to say this precisely because she was not, she offered free mother-love from the position of not-mother, of maiden aunt. You could see who was somebody’s mother, you could see the unborn child growing.

It was odd, it was certainly odd, that there was a family habit of sending everyone away before the arrival of new babies. She hadn’t been at home at the moment of anyone’s birth. She had been with Griselda, or on holiday at the seaside with friendly families. Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.

•  •  •

Tom did not think clearly. He felt his world was threatened, and his world was Todefright, woven through and through with the light from the woods and lawns, summer and winter, golden and frosty, and also woven through and through with the web of his mother’s stories, stories whose enamelled colours and inky shadows, hidden doors and flying beasts made the real Todefright seem briefly like a whited, plaster-cast sort of a place, a model of a home merely, which propped up the constant shape-shifting of the otherworld, whose entrance was underground. He didn’t—he couldn’t—even begin to imagine Olive not his mother, and it did not occur to him to try. And Humphry was Humphry, who had always been there. What he feared was that everything might turn out to be cardboard and plaster of Paris, though he feared this in the depth of his gut and behind his eyes. He could not have put it into words.

Phyllis did not hear all the words of the shouting parents. She watched Tom and Dorothy, for a clue to how to react. They were upset. Why? They were excited. By what? As usual, she was left out, too stupid, too innocent. She pulled at Tom’s arm—he was kinder than Dorothy—to ask “What is it, what is it?” a meaningless question that went unanswered. Dorothy said “We’d better scarper, we’ll get found out,” and began to tiptoe, rapidly, up the stairs. As she did so, silence fell inside the study. They had never stooped to peering through keyholes, and so did not see Humphry and Olive, entwined, her heavy womb pressed against his trousers, her head burrowing into his shoulder, his hand stroking and stroking her descending hair, a small smile on his sharp mouth.

The next day, Humphry ordered the yard-boy to bring the dog cart early, and drive him to the station. Olive appeared, fully dressed, in coat and hat, long before her usual time of rising. She said she intended to visit Prosper Cain. She needed to resurrect her museum adventure story. John Lane the publisher was interested in it. Humphry smiled, and helped her up, and they drove off together, chatting amiably. Humphry fully understood that it was necessary for Olive to reestablish the balance between them, by visiting a man who clearly admired her. He understood, more ruefully, that her financial anxieties, and the sense that the household depended on her writings, and her fear that these were threatened by the coming birth, were real concerns, even if she was half-teasing him with her independence and importance.

Tom and Dorothy and Phyllis watched them go.

“ That seems to be more or less patched up,” said Dorothy. “Is it, is it?” said Phyllis, and got no answer.

“If he makes it up with Uncle Basil, I shall certainly get sent away to school,” said Tom.

“You might like it,” said Dorothy, who knew Tom was appalled at the idea of sleeping and eating with hundreds of what she thought of, and was sure he did, as savage boys.

“I might not,” said Tom, digging her in the ribs. “Let’s go to the Tree House.”

Its secret enclosure was calming and energising, even in wet late autumn, even in the beginning of winter. It was easier to find, now the leaves were fallen, but still protected by clumps of natural-looking bracken, pushing into crannies, and by the low sweep of the evergreen branches. Phyllis walked, as usual, three steps behind the others. None of them spoke. Part of Tom’s mind was watching a supernatural horse, in the next coppice, with a cloaked rider. Dorothy examined gateposts on which a gamekeeper had pinned rows of stiff little corpses, bedraggled crows, and stretched stoats, and the small, pathetic shrunken velvet of moles. It was unfortunate for Olive, who had no idea of this, that Dorothy associated her “own” story of the anthropomorphised furry creatures in and under the woods and meadows, with these slaughtered pests and predators. Dorothy carried a leather satchel, into which she pushed carefully unpinned specimens, who could be dissected and examined. She didn’t ask herself if Olive knew she didn’t like “her” story. She was taciturn by nature, and observed drily to herself that Olive was so excited by her own inventions that she hardly needed a response from the designated audience. Dorothy wasn’t a very reading child, though she was very bright, and read fluently. She had one book which she carried in a pocket because it amused her darkly. It had been sent to Olive to review in The English Illustrated Magazine, along with a heap of children’s tales and fairy stories, although it was no such thing. It was called Mother Nature’s Little Book of Bedtime Rhymes, and was by Herbert K. Methley. It contained prancing, jaunty little rhymes about creatures which, if anthropomorphised at all, must appear evil in that human guise. The spider and the praying mantis, crunching up the living, nutritious limbs of their mates. The cuckoo, that great deceiver, laying her camouflaged egg (Nature was so helpful, the blotches were indistinguishable from the willow-warbler’s own eggs) and flying off to sing in the branches, whilst her industrious skinny offspring, with its blind, fleshy head, evicted the little warblers, one by one, and grew into a monster that dwarfed the nest. The ichneumon fly, laying its exquisite eggs under the skin of grubs, who were walking larders, slowly sucked dry. Dorothy had showed it to Tom, who waved it away. He was not a boy who pulled the legs and wings off things. Dorothy said

“It’s a good book because that’s how the world really is. And it makes it funny, which is clever.”

“What is it, how is the world, what do you mean?” asked Phyllis, and got no answer.

12

Prosper Cain was happy to be distracted, by Olive Wellwood, from the problems of the Museum. Various papers and magazines were on the attack, criticising the circulating exhibitions, expressing shock at the imprudent purchase of fakes, including the Palissy platter, and most of all complaining that the art education of the British had “idiotically and inexplicably become vested in the hands of soldiers.” The Museum was nothing more than an almshouse for the army. The present Director, Professor Middleton, was not a soldier, but a reclusive scholar from Cambridge, who was greatly ill at ease with Major-General Sir John Donnelly, head of the Department of Science and Art, and was also persecuted by the irascible aesthete James Weale, keeper of the Art Library. The atmosphere was sour, and Prosper Cain spent much of his time shuttling between incompatible people with unacceptable proposals. He had no one in whom to confide, and felt lonely. It was pleasant to be greeted by Mrs. Wellwood’s warm smile of admiring respect, to be asked for anecdotes and practical information that were easy and pleasant to impart. He noticed her condition, under her swinging Liberty dress. In some curious way it allowed him, safely, to