The Children's Book

a farmyard hen, clucking. (Though it was Violet, at a little distance, who was wiping Florian’s sandy face after a fall, and sponging Robin where he had dirtied his pants.) Methley said the family must be of inestimable value when it came to writing tales for children. She wrote with such insight into the hopes and fears of childish minds. Olive said that she did not believe having children was necessarily helpful. It was enough to have been a child…

“I do not know,” said Methley. “I am childless, and sometimes, these days, I lose touch with the child I once was. Do you think there is an age when we become completely adult, Mrs. Wellwood, with no child left in us? When is that, do you think? I am not referring to second childhood that comes to all of us who don’t die early enough.”

His voice was dropped and very serious. He spoke to a thought Olive had had. She wrote for the child she had been, the child she was. In a kind of flurry she asked Methley whether he regretted having no children. The moment she had spoken she regretted the question. There were many reasons why marriages were childless. They were best left unmentioned.

He bent towards her.

“I have observed that there are childless marriages in which the unique pair are everything to each other, everything. They enact the absent children, they love the child in each other, they have a capacity for play and innocence which often—I have noticed—disappears from more fecund relations. Though they can also be—to use Blake’s term—experienced with each other, uninhibited by any watching presence …”

Olive could not think of a quick answer. Herbert Methley went on

“It is not quite true that my marriage is childless. I feel I can trust you, Mrs. Wellwood—like all good writers, you let your private self be seen in public, and I know you are wise and kind. I myself have no children. My wife has three daughters. She was the wife of—a vicar in Batley—happily married but unawakened. Living in a dream world of good deeds and pretty dresses. We met—she and I—and tried to deny for two years what had struck into us and struck us down. She was ill. I could not write. She had a mysterious fatigue, she could barely stand or walk. I went to tell her that I was leaving Batley—I thought of emigrating to Canada—and I took her hand—and we saw, together, as one, that I could not leave, not alone, not ever again. So she came with me, and we live happily here, and are, as I said, everything to each other. We do not tell most people of this. Her husband refuses to divorce her. Or to allow her to see her daughters—which may be as well—she has chosen another life, and any step back into the old one would be painful, very painful.”

Two or three days later, Herbert Methley came alone to the old vicarage. He found Olive in the orchard, sitting at a folding table, writing. She was wearing a simple straw hat and a loose, butcher-blue dress, not unlike her daughters’ aprons. He stood easily before her—his body was always at ease, even if his voice was not.

“Do not let me disturb you, dear Mrs. Wellwood. No one knows better than myself the horror—the vein-freezing unpleasantness—of having the flow of writing disrupted. I came merely to bring you a little present—here it is—I have taken the liberty of writing in it—it is possibly the best of my work—but you shall be the judge.”

He handed her a wrapped book, and went away. Olive was moved. Almost nobody knew how painful it was to have the inky thread of sentences snapped by others. He was a considerate man.

The book was Daughters of Men by Herbert Methley. Inside, he had written

“For Olive Wellwood, a wise woman and a gifted writer. From her good friend, Herbert Methley.”

Olive finished her writing stint, and began to read Daughters of Men as she rested in a hammock after lunch.

It was the tale of a young man in the provinces who liked women. It began by making the point that very few men admitted to liking women, in the plural. A good man should be in search of the One Woman who would partner his soul, but how was he to recognise her if he did not explore, compare, investigate what women were?

The first part of the novel detailed the hero’s relations with various young girls, classmates at school, girls who sang in the church choir, girls like solid dryads met when he was wandering through the woods in search of peace and quiet, girls who were quizzical behind haberdashery counters. His name was Roger Thomas. The descriptions of his relations with the girls were coded, but somehow the nature and variety of extensive sexual experiment was conveyed. There was enough description of skin and electricity, of hands grasping petticoats, of long young throats and the eye travelling downwards, or lovely young legs, going upwards from fine ankles. There was hair—curly black like blackberries, shiny brown like chestnuts, pale like flax. About halfway through the book Roger Thomas noticed a melancholy woman, a married woman, his elderly headmaster’s young, lovely wife. He felt her intelligent eyes on the back of his head. He began to fear her judgement of his innocent and less innocent flirtations. He was now working as an apprentice teacher. She and he sat side by side at her kitchen table, drawing up lists of exam results, making papers. One day she put up her hand, with the pen still in it, and traced the shape of his mouth with her fingers.

They became lovers. They lay tragically in each other’s arms on blankets in the woods, on the carpet in front of the little heater, with its red glow, in his rented room. They planned a clandestine weekend in a pub, and loved each other with abandon, grieving over each passing moment as they took delight in it. That was meant to be the passionate farewell to sin, but the story ended in the same way as Methley’s confided tale of his relations with Phoebe.

Olive thought it must be autobiographical. She thought Herbert Methley was very good at writing about flesh and its stirrings, and was surprised that the book had not been banned by the Lord Chamberlain, or seized by the police. She was interested in the way descriptions of sex incited sexual stirrings in a reader—in this case, herself. The word made flesh, she muttered to herself, half-amused, half-irritated. He had meant to do this to her, she knew it. But her response was confused by the image of Phoebe Methley, whose solid flesh and sensible face came between Olive the reader and her entry into the world of the book. She kept seeing Phoebe’s rather large knuckles, the beginnings of wrinkling on her neck, the slight sag of her stomach and breasts in her bathing suit.

What did Methley want her to feel? She thought about the relation between readers and writers. A writer made an incantation, calling the reader into the magic circle of the world of the book. With subtle words, a writer enticed a reader to feel his or her skin prickle, his or her lips open, his or her blood race. But a writer did this on condition that the reader was alone with printed paper and painted cover. What were you meant to feel—what was she meant to feel—when the originals of the evanescent paper persons were only too solidly present in flesh and bone and prosaic clothing? A gingery tweed jacket, a faded cotton skirt with lupins on it, and an elastic waist that clumped oddly?

Herbert Methley came and sat beside her on the beach a few days later. Tom, Charles and Geraint were swimming. The girls were walking barefoot at the edge of the sea, in their swimming costumes. Julian was reading a book. Methley said to Olive

“Did you read my book?”