The Children's Book

“With great interest,” Olive said, substituting the word “interest” for the word “pleasure” at the last moment.

“You are a shrewd reader. You will see that parts of it are taken from life. More than is usual in my work. I wanted you to have read it, to know me.”

“Ah—” said Olive, looking down. He put his hand over her hand, on the sand. He gripped a little. She did not withdraw her hand.

“A love like that—a history of such—such pain, and such fulfilment—is a sacred history. It changes a man. Like Roger in the book, I used to take myself lightly, I was consumed with what I believe is normal widespread curiosity about the sex-feelings. But once a man has truly given himself—and sacrifices have been made—there can be no further question …”

Olive thought, rather sharply, I do not need warning off. She extracted her hand, and used it to rearrange her hair. It was probable, of course, that he was not warning her, but shoring up himself, against his own inclinations, which he seemed to be only too much aware of. She said, demurely, with a little smile, that what he said was very right, very honourable. She thought to herself that this kind of conversation was altogether more perturbing than Toby’s devotion, or Prosper’s courtesy. She would be glad when Humphry came back from wherever he had gone—he had said it was Leeds, but it could well be Manchester.

Olive Wellwood was thirty-eight. She came from a class where many, perhaps most, women did not live much beyond that age, where what was in women’s minds was diminishing strength and the looming of real death. Yet here she was in the magical Garden of England, with a good body, and a face that was, she thought, more interesting, more defined, yes indeed, more beautiful, than when she had been a green girl. And spider-webs of sexual attraction floated everywhere, and touched their skins, like dandelion seeds on white spiralling parasols, like ozone wafting in from the sea. It was still her time, she thought, looking out at the Channel and the children—and Toby who was leaping with them, and Violet camped with nanny and pram—and Prosper who was striding towards them in a smart panama hat. The children were children, blessed children, not yet formed. Though she saw that Herbert Methley had detached his attention from her, and was staring with a pleased expression at the gaggle of girls, pale, fine Griselda, brisk dark Dorothy, dreamy Pomona and inhibited Imogen, pretty Phyllis and composed Florence, the only one in whom could be seen a shadow of the woman she would be. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said to Methley, who gave her a sharp look, smiled conspiratorially, and agreed.

The boys were coming out of the water, onto the sand. They were like sealfolk, Olive thought. Sleek creatures of the deep, beaching themselves and taking human form. Shaggy Geraint and precise-gestured Charles, and behind them, riding in prone on a wave, then standing thigh-deep in the moving water, his hair streaked and streaming with it, Tom. He seemed reluctant to come out. He bent and stirred the surface of the water with his golden arms. He was the most graceful creature she had ever seen. It was noon. The sun was high and shone directly down on her golden boy, who was not reflected in the moving surface of the sea, which he had broken into shining particles, myriads of slanting glassy fragments, a mosaic of surfaces, as there were myriads of glittering water-drops catching the light and making rainbows along his shoulders and in his long hair. He had fine gold hairs all over his body, too, she saw. Fine gold hairs long enough to cling together and make dripping patterns on his chest and thighs. Olive saw—it was the effect of dandelion-plumes and ozone—that his thin rod (she had no familiar word for it) was half- upright along his stomach. She loved Tom. She could not keep him. Tom loved her—this was still her time, with him, too—but he would go away, and be changed.

She started making-up, in the other world. The queen in the clearing, on the horse with fifty silver bells and nine at every tett of its mane—whatever a tett was. The woman and the boy, in the clearing. A story. She smiled, at a safe distance now, and Herbert Methley wondered what she was smiling at, and misconstrued it, as was natural.

Dorothy went to the pottery workshop, to see how Philip was.

Philip was at the wheel, his wet hands inside the moving, growing clay wall of a pot. Dorothy stood in the doorway and watched him. She touched the tips of her own fingers with other fingers, trying to imagine, in her skin, how this work would feel. It was precise, and extraordinary. Philip came to the end of turning, finished his rim, smoothed the sides with a wooden baton, and lifted the bat from the wheel. He said to Dorothy “Hello, then,” without turning round. She hadn’t been sure he knew she was there. He said

“Would you like to make a pot?”

Dorothy said she would. Philip found a smock for her, and ceded his seat at the wheel. He took a ball of clay, and slapped it on the wheel, and centred it for her. “Now,” he said, “press down, so, with both hands—use your thumbs—and feel it come up.”

Dorothy pressed. The clay was wet and clammy and dead, and yet it had a motion of its own, a response, a kind of life. The wheel turned, the clay turned, Dorothy held her fingers steady inside the red-brown cylinder which rose, with narrowing walls, to the rhythm of the turning. Dorothy was delighted. And then, suddenly, something went wrong—the rhythm faltered, the clay walls frilled, slipped and collapsed inwards, and where there had been a tube there was a flailing blob. Dorothy turned to Philip to ask what she had done wrong. She was half-laughing, half-crying. Philip was laughing. He said “That always happens.” He took the lump in his hands to re-form it, and at that moment Elsie came in from the storeroom door, carrying something, unaware of Dorothy’s presence, holding it out to Philip.

“Look what I found. Did you ever see the like?”

Then she saw Dorothy, and blushed crimson. Dorothy wondered why she had alarmed her so—they knew each other, a little, not very well—and then began to understand what she was holding. Philip had understood immediately, and the blood was also rising in his face.

“It was in a box at the very back of a kind of gloryhole,” said Elsie.

It was white and shining. It was a larger-than-life, extremely detailed, evenly glazed model of an erect cock and balls, every wrinkle, every fold, every glabrous surface gleaming.

“I didn’t do it,” said Philip.

“I didn’t think you did,” said his sister. She said to Dorothy “I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure if she was on first- name terms with Dorothy or not.

Dorothy advanced, with her hands covered in wet slip.

“Can I have a look? I’m going to study anatomy. Do you think it’s for use in hospitals?”

“No,” said Philip. “I think—I think it’s a phallic Thing.”

He had learned that word from Benedict Fludd’s talk. Neither of the other two knew what it meant.

“Religious, sort of,” said Philip, half-embarrassed, half on the edge of hysterical laughter.