The Children's Book

“That was fairly clear from the outset,” said Violet. “What?”

“That was what I thought, myself. What has upset you?”

“She kissed him. He kissed her. I saw.”

“That was stupid of you. Better not see. She’s going away to be the schoolmistress at Puxty. What are you thinking of doing?”

“I am not made of stone, Violet, though you may think so. I have violent feelings. I feel—very angry, very—I can’t stand the mess. I can’t work if there’s a mess. You know that. I can’t afford to get agitated, I need to work.”

“Well then, you must not get agitated. You are the goose who lays the golden eggs on which we all depend. Including, I imagine, Mistress Maid Marian. You’ll be better off if you leave her to go earn her living at Puxty. You don’t need any more dependants.”

“He kissed her.”

“Well, you know what he is and what he does. He won’t leave us, all the same, you can feel safe on that count. Mistress Marian is the victim, not you, you goose.”

“But I saw—”

“Well, take good care to see no more. You’ve had practice. Kiss someone yourself, there are those who would enjoy that, and you know it.”

There was something going on, Hedda sensed, that she did not understand, over and beyond what she did understand. Olive gave a little laugh.

“Mr. Methley has been lecturing me on the nature of women.”

“He’s another who can’t keep his hands to himself.”

“You’ve noticed that?”

“There’s not much I don’t notice,” said Violet, with quick satisfaction. That was it, Hedda thought, she has to know everything, or she feels—smaller, lesser—

“So you think I should just go on—as though nothing—as though I’d noticed nothing—”

“Isn’t that one of your great accomplishments?”

“Oh, you are hard on me.”

“Rather the opposite,” said Violet.

That first summer school was ad hoc and haphazard, from start to finish. Later schools took up deliberately a pattern that developed casually and at odd moments, in that first year, where one event—a lecture, a drawing class, a poetry reading, the Play above all— became connected to the others, so that Toby Youlgreave gave a lecture on Italian tales of abandoned babies who were returned as beautiful girls, whilst the textile and embroidery group were put to designing floral prints and weaves for the black and white wintry first act, and the spring festival of the second, where Perdita scattered flowers. August Steyning came over to help with stage effects—notably Olive-Hermione, as statue—and stayed to instruct the young Fludds and Wellwoods in theatre and costume design. He took from The Winter’s Tale what fitted his version of the theory that marionettes were more profound in their presentation of human passion than clumsy or self-obsessed human actors. He instructed Florence in how to dance “like a wave of the sea,” bending her body with his own hands, inducing a paralysis of self-consciousness and then, inexplicably, a new freedom of flowing movement. Florence said, flicking her wrists and ankles,

“What have you done? I feel as though my hands and feet don’t belong to me.”

“Good,” said August Steyning. “Now, again, skip, skip, glide, make a full moon of your arms, let your fingers hold it—it is cold to the touch—so—”

Florence felt she was made of quicksilver.

Prosper Cain came when he could, when the business of the Museum allowed it. He gave a talk on the craft of art, and the art of craft, and of how—even in painting and sculpture—the two were inseparable. You needed design, and you needed basic physics and chemistry, or your paint would not dry under its varnish and your clay would not hold its glaze. And you needed also something—a sharpness of vision—which couldn’t be taught, but could not be acquired, in his view, without incessant practice.

He went to a class where several students—professionals and amateurs—were designing The Winter’s Tale series of alternating squares, tiles as it were, on stitched or printed fabric. Seraphita Fludd was ostensibly teaching this class, sitting at one end of the barn, and saying “very nice, very acceptable,” to whatever was brought up for her to look at. Cain wandered, with Olive Wellwood, behind the chairs and easels, offering comments. His own children had produced very pleasing, very faintly parodic, floral forms, Florence’s Dutch, Julian’s a version of Sevres porcelain. “Very nice,” said Prosper Cain to his son. “Very competent, you mean,” said Julian. “I can do this with one hand behind my back. It’s a mockery. I don’t have any of that sharpness of vision you were extolling this morning. It’s not real, as I know you know.”

“I wonder what it needs to become real?” said Prosper, accepting Julian’s evaluation of his own work.

“I don’t think art should be personal,” said Julian. “In fact, I think it shouldn’t be. And yet, what is wrong with my very nice roses, is that they’re nothing to do with me. They don’t need me, and I don’t need them.”

When they were out of earshot, Olive said to Prosper that he was fortunate to be able to talk to his children with such ease, to put them at ease, she meant to say—she wanted to say, how very well he had succeeded at bringing them up—at being—

“Both parents,” said Prosper. “Male and female, both. It hasn’t been easy. Soldiers are very male, by nature. Except that they need female skills, like sewing and polishing, for they live separately from women. In that sense, they are like the boys to whom Dr. Badley is diligently teaching needlework and cookery at Bedales. A concept that, as a soldier, I find attractive. Camps, and needlework for boys. And theatre. Come and look at Miss Fludd’s work. It interests me.”

There she sat, Imogen Fludd, in her imperfectly hand-sewn garments, that lacked both art and craft. She had designed one black and white square, and one small group of spring flowers. The black and white was frost-flowers on a window-pane, their petals outlined with meticulous strings of minuscule dots, a laciness that owed something to Beardsley’s work for the Yellow Book and the Savoy, though Prosper Cain could not imagine this dumb girl understanding Beardsley’s sly, sexual forms. The lips and clefts of her frost-flowers were surely innocent? Her spring flowers were in vanishing