The Children's Book

leggings, a frayed jumper, a jacket from a pawn shop, a workingman’s cap, which he pulled over his eyes, enjoying the feeling both of disguise and of becoming some other person. All this was conducted most discreetly by the tutor and his pupil—they didn’t discuss, or plot, these refinements, they simply happened. They did discuss whether it would be “a good thing” for Karl to go out into Hyde Park, or anywhere else, to sell bundles of The Torch, and they decided that he could do so, if he kept away from places near Portman Square. Susskind and Karl wandered many London streets at times when Charles was thought to be doing homework, or joining in rambles, mildly discussing imprisonment and execution, and whether the planting of bombs was a duty or an act of irresponsibility. Those who had gone to the scaffold in Paris and Chicago were brave martyrs. They had had “no alternative” Susskind said, and Karl agreed. But they agreed also that they were not, themselves, natural killers. Susskind said, padding along Baker Street, that he should like to believe reasonable persuasion was enough.

One evening, at a meeting in Ossulston Street, to discuss this very issue of the requirement of a violent response to the violence of oppression, Karl had a shock. There were more people there than usual—some new Comrades had arrived, having been smuggled out of Russia. When they came in, Vasily Tartarinov came with them, wearing the suit he always wore to teach Latin and Greek to the boys. Charles/Karl sat in a dark corner with his cap pulled down. He did not know what his parents might do to him if they found out how he spent his time. He did know that Joachim Susskind would be treated as a traitor, and probably lose his job.

The meeting eddied about. Long speeches were made, and the man with the placard said that since the Day of Judgement was coming almost immediately there was little to be said for bothering to kill people. They would all soon be overwhelmed. A kettle of tea was provided, and poured into cracked and greasy cups. Tartarinov came past Karl. He said “Good evening,” formally and distantly. Karl looked up at him. Tartarinov winked, and refroze into formal strangeness.

At their next tutorial meeting Tartarinov greeted Tom and Charles as usual, and as usual, tartly, praised Tom’s translation at the expense of Charles’s. They were still working on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, where the hero, having broken off the golden bough, descends to the Underworld to interrogate his dead father. They had reached the passage where the Sibyl and Aeneas come to the vast elm, where false dreams hang from the branches like bats, and shadows of imagined monsters hiss and gnash their teeth. The Sibyl prevents Aeneas from turning his sword on the bodiless, flitting lives, their forms only transitory and vanishing. Tartarinov chanted the Latin in a lusty Russian accent.

et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas

admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae,

inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras …

Tom saw in his mind’s eye gradations of shadowy matter, thicker and thinner irreality, coiling like steam from a train or smoke from a chimney, but in the dark, under dark branches, cava sub imagine formae. Charles was annoyed by the enthusiasm of Tartarinov’s declamation. Charles saw nothing. Nothing was in his head. These things were unreal things, Gorgon, Harpy, Chimaera, things from childhood. No- things. He wanted another sign from Tartarinov, another wink for his secret self from the anarchist who had perhaps blood on his hands, who was far from his homeland because of his belief in his cause. But Tartarinov appeared to be truly obsessed with this old dead poetry in an old dead language. This man was double, Charles thought, a man with two faces and two minds, however whole-hearted he looked. And so was he, Charles/Karl, becoming double. His secret made him think of himself as invisible, a subtle being who thought his own thoughts and had his own purposes, whilst the outward boy said the banal things boys do say, about cricket and prep, about birds’ nests and punishments. This led him to wonder whether Tom was double, and if so, what was in the secret Tom. He thought perhaps Tom was not double. Tom appeared to take Tartarinov—and Charles himself—at face value, gently.

Once the idea of secret selves had begun to spread little roots in his mind, he began to look at everyone differently, half as a game, half as a dangerous piece of research. After the morning with Tartarinov he walked with Tom along the road past the woods and onto the Downs, where Toby Youlgreave had his cottage, which, he insisted, had once belonged to a swineherd. Toby was coaching the boys for the general essays they would have to write. It was a cold crisp winter day, with frost on the ground and snow in the air. They wore caps and mufflers and woollen gloves. Toby gave them mugs of tea, and toasted them crumpets at his inglenook hearth. The floor of his small sitting-room was populated by uneven pillars of stacked books, on some of which previous mugs of tea had stood, and butter had been smeared. He had set them an essay on “Dreams” and told them to take that word any way they liked— dreams, nightmares, daydreams, hopes for the future. He had said they would need to find vivid examples of whatever they chose. He made them read out what they had written, as though they were in a university tutorial. Tom read well, clearly, without expression, a little too fast. Charles paced himself, listening to his own argument. He liked to argue, even about dreams. Tom had chosen to write about real, night-time dreams, what they felt like, what they meant. Charles, who knew Tom would do that, had deliberately chosen the moral and political meaning of the word, the dream of justice, the dream of a future life, Utopia. Tom wrote about the sensation of dreaming, and distinguished between those dreams in which the dreamer is neither actor nor watcher but a kind of looker-on, like the voice of a storyteller in a story. Almost commenting, but not quite, because all the same you were sort of helpless, you couldn’t make decisions in dreams, but you did know you were in them, and that you would wake to the real world. Sometimes you tried to stay asleep, to see what would happen. Then there were the dreams you were really in and had the sensation that you couldn’t get out—dreams of being buried alive, or told you were to be hanged tomorrow (he had that one often) or dreams where you were being pursued, and the beast you thought was behind you turned out to have gone about and around, and was waiting for you at the end of the corridor. It was odd that the dreams you were completely inside were almost all bad dreams.

Not all, said Toby Youlgreave. You might dream—he hesitated delicately—that you were loved by someone—or that someone dead was living after all, it was all a mistake.

In that case, said Tom, waking would be as dreadful as dreaming the bad dreams.

Charles wondered if Toby’s secret was to do with love. With the sex instinct. He kept coming back to it, though that might be because he got so wound up in poetry all the time. There was an awful lot of love, and sex, in poetry. It made Charles’s skin prick, but he wasn’t sure he cared for it. Flather, he thought, using one of his nanny’s old words. Flather. Toby’s secret is some sort of flather.

His own essay had been a rather perverse, but certainly clever, demolition of the dream of the good life in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and the kind of communities associated with it, who wore hand-printed skirts and ate vegetables. He wrote that the dream of Heaven had always worried him because it was so boring—there was nothing to do—and the dreams of Heaven on Earth, going back to the land, living in vegetable gardens and little plots of flowers, with no machines to be seen anywhere, struck him as a sleepy refusal to look at real problems and make real plans about what to do. He quoted Morris against himself

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time

Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

He was indeed, wrote Charles/Karl censoriously, “the idle singer of an empty day.”

His anger stirred in his sentences, making them alternately blunt and incoherent. Toby Youlgreave set about benignly to sharpen and point them. He said these points were perhaps best not made in a scholarship exam for a very privileged school.