“There are all sorts of reasons,” she said into the wind and the spray, “why this can’t happen. It can’t.”
“Would you like it, if it could?”
She bowed her head. The hood flopped forward.
“I shall speak to your father. Today.”
“You can’t. I mustn’t… they need me, Mother and Father, Pomona …”
“And what do you need? Your brother hasn’t felt he must stay here.”
Geraint had indeed taken himself off to the counting rooms and telegrams of the City of London, where he was rapidly becoming successful in Basil Wellwood’s bank.
“I believe I have some influence with your father. I shall convince him you will be safe, for I shall invite you to stay with myself and Florence, whilst you learn the ways of the college. How can he object?”
“You don’t understand—” said Imogen, dully. He stopped, and took her by the shoulders, and looked into her face.
“No, I don’t understand everything. But I believe I understand enough to put a case to your father.”
And then, suddenly, she flung herself into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. He could not hear what she was saying, nervously and rapidly, into his jacket, but he held her, and patted her back, and felt her sob between his hands.
He approached Benedict Fludd himself with an anxiety he concealed completely. He went to see Fludd in his study—the room that had once been a scullery, and was now full of drying pots and drawing pads, in the midst of which was a Morris & Co. Sussex armchair, in which Fludd was sitting. He said
“I have something I want to say to you—a proposal I want to put you. About Imogen.”
Again, that lurking, parodic sense of being a suitor.
“What about Imogen?” said Fludd, ungraciously. Prosper Cain said that he had been impressed by Imogen’s talent, and explained his plan for her immediate fortune.
“She’s very well where she is,” said Fludd.
“She’s lonely and unemployed,” said Cain.
“Her family needs her, I need her.”
“You have Philip Warren and the inestimable Elsie. You have your wife and Pomona. I think it is time to give Imogen her freedom.”
“Ha! You think I imprison her.”
“No. But I think it is time for her to leave.”
“You are an interfering pompous military bastard. And you know, none better, that there’s no money to pay for her keep in the filthy city.”
“I propose that she lives with me as a visitor until—as I believe she can and should—she wins a scholarship to the Royal College. And then she will be enabled to earn her own keep. If she doesn’t marry. She doesn’t meet many young men, here.”
“You believe I don’t know what my duty is? And
“Not now, not yet, however you look at it. Old friend, you are behaving like a tyrannical father in a story. I know you better than that. I know you love your daughter—”
“Do you? Do you know that?”
“Too much to part with her easily. But she will love you more freely if you can bring yourself to let her go. And I’ll bear the cost of her move if you’ll let me have that oxblood jar with the smoky snakes on it, which I’ve had my eyes on for a couple of years. It ought to be displayed in the collection, and you know it.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know I don’t know. But I have watched Imogen, and you haven’t given one good reason why she shouldn’t come to London.”
“Oh, take my daughter, and take my jar, and go to the Devil, Prosper Cain. Have a brandy. Look at Philip’s dandelion heads on these plates, with the seeds blowing. He’s a bright lad.”
“He’s a young man, too, as Imogen is a young woman. May I take some of the dandelion work to show to the Keepers, as well?”
Imogen came to London, and Prosper said to his daughter that something must be done to get her a decent hat and dress, but he didn’t know how. Florence said “I’ll find a hat— you know how good I am at hats—and I’ll tell her it’s mine and I can’t wear it. She’s too tall for my dresses. I’ll think of a way.”
“I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?”
“No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.”
• • •
In the Cains’ house inside the Museum, apart from the crashing and trundling and dust of the building programme, Imogen did indeed seem to settle into a more cheerful normality. She turned out to have an unexpected flair for architectural drawing, she made a few silk rosebuds and forget-me-nots for the simple hat Florence found for her, and she set out of her own accord to restructure her clothing into a usual shape for a lady art student. In the Fludds’ house, things were less cheerful. After Imogen’s departure, Pomona began sleepwalking again. She ended up, several times, in Philip’s bedroom, on one occasion wearing no clothes, and wrapped only in her excessively long, not very clean, golden hair. Philip and Elsie talked about this. Elsie thought Pomona was play- acting. She told Philip that Pomona was throwing herself at him—literally—because he was the only young male person anywhere in reach. She said Pomona was hysterical and was putting it on. Philip said no, she wasn’t, she was deeply asleep, he could tell when she touched him. He wanted to tell Elsie that Pomona’s cold, naked flesh,
