pastel colours, a hint of rose, a shadow of primrose, a blue stain like the vein in her pale wrist. They were trying to retreat back into the plane of the paper, they were blushing mildly to be present at all. He was about to say something anodyne and pass on when the shapes pulled together in his head, and he saw that she had, in a helpless way, exactly that sharp vision that Julian had rightly renounced. He said
“These could be good, you know. Why do your flowers lurk in the centre of the paper? As though they were going down a funnel. You should do what Mr. Morris always insisted on, extend the vegetable forms to the edges of the square so that they can grow beyond it—”
“I can’t.”
She didn’t look up, her face was heavy.
“Well, then,” said Prosper, on an impulse. “Define their limits. May I?”
She handed him her charcoal and her pencils.
He enclosed the frost-flowers in squared panes. And then he drew a circle round the spring flowers, almost as though they were on a plate, or inside the rim of a basket. It was surprising how the confinement brought them to life. He laughed.
“They needed to feel safe,” he said.
“They needed to feel safe,” she repeated.
He said
“Have you other work I can see?”
She handed him a portfolio. He found a series of drawings of little coloured fishes, springing and curling, blue and yellow and red.
“I was trying to illustrate
Prosper enclosed the fishes in an extempore frying pan, with two handles, bringing them to life in the same curious way.
“Not,” he said, “that you can now say they are safer. But they are livelier. They have a purpose, if it is only to get out of the frying pan.”
“Into the fire?” said Imogen doubtfully.
“Have you thought of enrolling at the Royal College?” Prosper said. “You have talent. You could learn a craft —”
“I don’t know,” said Imogen.
“You should think. I will talk to your father.”
He saw her think of begging him not to do so, and then deciding to say nothing.
When they had left the class, Olive asked him why he had encouraged Imogen Fludd, and not his own children. Who were, she said, clearly much more accomplished.
“Accomplished, oh yes,” said Prosper Cain. “But that girl has what you have, my friend—she knows the shapes of things, as you know the shape of tales. Look at her work. One artist should recognise another.”
“I am not an artist. I earn my living by storytelling.”
“That is nonsense, dear lady, and you know it.”
So they came slowly to the performance of the play, and the end of the summer school. The theatre was the wild garden at the side of Purchase House, which had once been a formal garden, and had unkempt hedges which had once been clipped yew, and were now bearded and tufted and invaded by brambles and Old Man’s Beard. Steyning commandeered some students and helpers, including Dobbin and Frank Mallett, to make papier-mache statuary on wire frames, which in the winter scenes were stark and in the summer scenes were garlanded with silk flowers and real flowers, mixed. He had brought footlights, with limelight, which altered the shadows on these forms, making them bald and sinister, or bright and clear. There was a goat-horned herm, with shaggy thighs, and a naked girl with falling hair, seen from the back. There were two squatting, cross-legged little fauns who grinned at the stage-corners in the harvest scene, and were absent in the Sicilian sculpted palace. Then there was Hermione’s plinth. He was exigent about this object—he wanted the woman-statue higher than the cast and the audience, with the moon, which was full, silver and shadowy behind her. He wanted both stone mother and fleshly daughter to be chastely clothed in endless swirling pleats of white cloth, and exhausted Olive by rearranging both her standing place and her complicated garment over and over again. He pointed out that by moonlight, with her back to the moon, and a veil cast over her, she would glow in the shadows, the shape of the dark bushes and her mysterious cowled head against the moon would be magical. And she must move, when she stepped down, like an automaton. As though the force of gravity, not her own will, lifted each foot, bent each knee, held her arms in place. “I don’t know what to do with my arms.”
“Practically, you will need to hold on to the pleats, whilst you’re up there, or they’ll come out. Your right arm across your breast, to hold the veil down at your left shoulder. The left arm around the waist to hold the cloth in so it doesn’t swirl away when you move. You need white rings on your fingers, ivory or moonstone, I’ll see what I can find.”
Olive was not very good at gliding like an automaton, and became irritated by the constant repetition.
“You are related to the stone man in
“I am a woman of a certain age, who has borne a number of children,” said Olive drily.
“You are a fine figure of a woman,” said Steyning, who was still thinking in terms of sculpture.
So there she stood, on the first night, with the moon behind her, making shadows in her wound garments, which she clutched, pale-knuckled. She was surprised how very difficult it was to keep still, for so long. She thought about her body, under all its unaccustomed white sheeting—like a dressmaker’s dummy, she thought, something vague and muffled. She was ageing. She was pleated across her stomach as well as over her shoulders. She was still in her time. Prosper Cain admired her. Herbert Methley desired her. Humphry wanted her, but she was cross with Humphry. She had cheered herself somewhat, going over Humphry’s conversation with Maid Marian, by remembering that it was quite clear from what he said that he had not known either that Marian was the new
