The Children's Book

knew that his eyes were on her waist, and the eager movements of her hands, and the curl of her haunch and thighs under her. He said he was afraid his Florence had too much gravitas to run freely with Dorothy and Griselda. She had been forced into grown-up seriousness before her time. Look at her now, sitting on a rock, staring out to sea like a mermaid. He did not know how to make it up to her. Olive asked, looking down at his solid fingers playing with the sand, if he had ever thought of remarrying—even perhaps for Florence’s sake? And Julian’s. Prosper said he had wondered if he should, but had never yet met any woman he could—take to in that way. Or if he had, he said, they were already spoken for. He knew there were things he could not discuss with Florence, that she might need to discuss with someone. Olive said she thought he did very well on his own; he was a percipient person. She said Julian was a young man, now, he had almost nothing of the little boy left in him. She did not like, she confessed, the thought of Tom going away to Marlowe. She did not believe Tom was as strong as Julian. “He is ludicrously innocent, I sometimes think,” she said confidingly. “Life will deal him blows. He has run wild, delightfully, but he will find it hard to adjust to discipline.”

So they talked on quietly, sharing things, in a rather pleasant electrical prickle of unactivated sex. It was like dancing. Olive enjoyed it. She had a right, she thought, considering Maid Marian. There needed to be balance, if balance was the word, latitude for latitude, excursion for excursion. Humphry’s vagaries meant she had a right to take pleasure in being admired, looked at, confided in.

Toby loved her too much. He waited, perpetually dumb, he didn’t know for what, and everyone could see it, she thought, and she herself had to be circumspect and watchful, for the truth was, she couldn’t do without Toby, she needed Toby to talk to about fairy mythology, about plots and tales. Every now and then she paid for conversation —she didn’t feel commercial, it was loving, as she loved Toby—with a silent, passionate embrace, mouth to mouth, skin to skin, her laughing face close to his bemused one. He had understood from the beginning that these encounters could only happen if no one spoke, and they were never referred to. He had been awkward at first, blushing, clumsy, but he had grown adept at clutching and letting go, at fierceness followed by lassitude and a kind of consequent indifference. She guided his fingers into hidden places, her body at first immobile and then quivering a little. She did not know what he thought of all this. It didn’t matter, as long as they were not discovered, and he did not become overexcited, indignant, or morose.

Toby had been lecturing in Winchelsea and Lydd, in the winter and spring, speaking about the Saxon fairy- faith, and the Paracelsian elementals. He had become a great friend of Patty Dace, Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin. The inner group of the Theosophists had held discussions of Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age in Miss Dace’s parlour. This group included Herbert and Phoebe Methley, who were resolutely outspoken about the fact that sex-love and its expression were natural and necessary to both sexes. If Patty or Frank or Dobbin directed a curious look at their bodies as they said these things—and these looks were almost inevitable—they stared back, amiable and unabashed.

Olive wanted to meet Methley, and commanded Toby to bring the Methleys to Sunday lunch in the vicarage. She wanted to meet Methley because, like Frank Mallett, she had been greatly perturbed by one of his stories. He had a book of inconsequential tales of the sighting of fairies, or people of the hills, or the kind folk (who were not kind). These tales were written in a pragmatic first person by a naturalist who saw and observed these creatures as other men observed rare bugs or birds. The introduction to this book pointed out, persuasively enough, that there were indeed more things in heaven and earth than humans could usually apprehend with their limited senses. We cannot see radio, or molecules. We can receive an electrical shock from an apparently inert wire. We see clouds form and unform—where is what made up that bulging grey muscle a minute ago, where now is the grey-blue veil of mist that hung over the marsh poplars? How can it be that our species so steadily and persistently and consistently reported sightings of the fair folk, and occasional dealings with them, if they do not exist? In the beginning of the Bible men talked and walked with God: then with Angels: then with invisible voices. Some humans—of whom I myself am one, wrote the narrator, whose name, he wrote, was Nathanael Carter—have the trick of vision that lets us see these people, which is perhaps no odder than knowing where a trout lies under the shelf of a stream, or where honey is hidden in a tree-trunk.

“Nathanael Carter” claimed to have seen the fair folk from early childhood, and to have thought nothing of it, as a boy, until a teacher reproved him for lying when he told what he had seen. So he did not tell, any more. He understood that he saw because he did not tell.

Olive had never supposed for one moment that fairies or spirits existed. She lived most intensely in an imagined world peopled by things and creatures that drew their energy and power from other human imaginings, centuries and centuries of them. But she didn’t suppose that these creatures were tangible—or alive and going about their purposes when she was not “making them up,” or watching them in her mind—did she? Did she? She read Methley’s tales and was half-convinced that the storyteller must indeed have seen what he said he had seen—it felt like sober fact, to read, and did not run into the usual groove of the fantasy-tale. Did he really know something she didn’t? Or was he simply an extraordinarily competent writer? Either way, she needed to meet him.

His creatures were not exactly pleasant. One story began

I came upon one of these folk when I was out with my butterfly-net on the moors. I saw a wriggle of grey flesh in the heather, and believed I had startled a young rabbit, and then my eyes came into the right frame to see the other, and he came clearly into my vision as though I were adjusting a binocular glass. He was sitting with crossed legs in a clump of gorse, and his flesh was silver-grey like an eft, but duller, like pewter. He must have been about two feet high, if standing. He was all the same colour—he had long, rather coarse, pewter-coloured hair, and pewter eyes in his cobweb-grey face. They weren’t human eyes—nor cats’ eyes neither, and didn’t resemble the eyes of any beast or fish I have ever seen. I don’t think he saw me. His bony mouth was pursed with effort, and his long sharp fingers were busy. He was skinning a fat slow-worm—which was still alive and writhing—with a triangular stony knife, chipped to the thinness of a leaf. He was quite naked. All the fair people I have seen have been quite naked, except for a female walking unobserved in Smithfield Market, who wore a skirt made from a single cloth, like a Malay, and a necklace of pearls.

Olive mentioned this tale to its author, who sat next to her at lunch. She asked him quite directly if he saw the things he described.

“They ring true, do they? I don’t think I could make them up. Sometimes I embroider a bit, or add a bit—but I must see them, to begin with. Don’t you? Your splendid stories are so full of authentic powers, I imagined…”

After the visit, Herbert and Phoebe Methley took to walking in the direction of the old vicarage, or joining the games of cricket and rounders on the beach. Methley wore cotton shirts and a floppy sunhat. His legs were long and brown and wiry. He was a good bowler—too good, he demolished the younger batsmen too quickly—and an indefatigable fielder. Olive sat with Phoebe, or with Prosper Cain, and watched them all run. Herbert and Phoebe went bathing with Toby and the children. Phoebe wore a bathing cap which made her face look gaunt, Olive thought, and a bathing dress with a bunched little skirt round her thin hips.

When Methley was alone with Olive he spoke to her with a different intentness. He consulted her about writing, about editors, about literature. What did she make of Bernard Shaw? Had the man a heart, when all was said and done? And Kenneth Grahame, did she succumb to his charm? Was it not all a little bloodless? He was a man who looked a woman in the eye and did not look away. What did she make of John Lane’s new magazine, The Savoy? He said he envied Olive the fullness and complexity of her life. The boys and girls and their different characters. He did not know how she could stretch her love so far—though he saw very clearly that she did so. He had no experience of it. They were sitting on the beach, picking at a dish of strawberries. Olive said that children connected you to the earth, and therefore weighed you down, a little. She felt, she said, like