The Children's Book

practised approaching rabbits and hares as Richard Jefferies recommended, putting his feet down softly and steadily, without a two-legged rhythm, keeping his arms close to his sides—human arms, Jefferies believed, alarmed wild creatures as teeth and claws and scent did in other predators. Tom got to be reasonably skilful at approaching recumbent hares, or keeping quiet in a wood at twilight and waiting for the badgers to emerge, snuffling. He could pick up their scent as though he was himself a wild thing. He spent hours rigorously training his imagination to understand the needs and limitations of the body of a bee, or a redstart, a slow-worm or a moorhen, a laying cuckoo or the enslaved foster-mother of its monstrous changeling. He made inventories of the varieties of grasses in the edges of the ploughed fields, or the numbers of nesting birds in one hedgerow, or the pond life in the clay-lined pond where the cattle slobbered with their lips, smelling of hay and dung and milkiness. He didn’t consider all this a preparation for any particular way of life. He didn’t want to “be” a naturalist, and had no professional interest in being either a sportsman or a gamekeeper. He read perpetually—there was always a book in the satchel he carried—but he only read two kinds of writings. He read books by naturalists—particularly Jefferies, whose very rooted mild English mysticism about the English soil seemed to Tom to be part of his own body. And he read and reread William Morris’s romances about tragic lovers, monstrous dangers, and infinite journeys; this included News from Nowhere, with its ideally happy craftsmen in their stone cottages, with their rich crops of vegetables, flowers, vines and honey. There was much that he did not read. He shied away from sexual intrigues, feeling what he characterised as boredom and disgust, and secretly half-knew was a kind of fear. He did not read, as did many Fabian children, and upper-class renegades like Charles/Karl, the angry descriptions of the condition of the working class, in Manchester and London, Liverpool and Birmingham. Nor, which is perhaps more surprising in a boy with his inclinations, did he read travels and explorations outside England. India did not inhabit his imagination, nor did the North American plains and the South American jungles. He knew there was savage fighting in the Veld in South Africa, he knew there were stubborn and sturdy Boers resisting Imperial Britain, but his imagination did not partake in gallant battles, or suffer wounds and setbacks. Still less did it reach out to the original black or brown inhabitants of those remote places. It burrowed into the chalk with solitary wasps, and sky-blue butterflies who laid their eggs in ants’ nests. He read Darwin’s work on earthworms, and accepted—without thinking too hard—Darwin’s views of the natural world, including human animals, as a perpetual violent striving and struggling for existence and advantage. Sex interested him in English creatures—he knew about the domestic lives of stoats, and the breeding of champion hounds and horses. Love interested him as something far away and hopeless in the world of romance. He walked over the earth, noting things like a scout or a hunter—a newly broken twig, a disturbed heap of pebbles, an unusually dense clump of brambles, the slotted footprint of a fallow deer, the holes stabbed in turf by predatory beaks. He seemed to be there just—simply—to take all this in, and know it. Underneath the earth, in an imaginary realm of rock tunnels and winding stairs, the shadowless seeker, with the trusted Company, never growing older, never changing their intent, travelled on towards the dark queen weaving her webs, and snares, and shrouds.

Olive Wellwood, visiting Prosper Cain in his London house, thick with the dust of building works, shaken by the sound of sledge-hammer and cranes, told the Keeper of Precious Metals, in confidence, that she was troubled about her son. She knew that Cain found this motherly concern attractive; she created, deliberately, a feeling of warmth and helplessness; it was also true, as she recognised with a slight shock of fear, that she was worried about Tom. He had been such a sunny child, she said, so sweet-tempered, so bright. And now he seemed to moon around, aimlessly, and had no friends. “I feel I don’t know him any more,” she said. Major Cain said that that was perhaps usual with parents and children. Children grew up, they moved away. Yes, said Olive, but Tom didn’t exactly move away, that was partly what she was saying. He had moved, she said finely, into himself.

She took Prosper Cain’s hand between her own.

“I wondered if Julian—he and Julian seemed to like each other—I wondered if Julian might come and—say— take a walk with him, talk to him?”

Cain thought it was always tricky, enlisting one member of a generation against another. He said cautiously that he knew that Julian had felt badly when Tom ran away from Marlowe.

“That was when it all began,” said Olive. “I don’t want you to ask Julian to interrogate Tom, that would be most unwise. Just to come and walk with him, talk with him.”

So Julian wrote to Tom and asked him to accompany him on a walk through the New Forest. He wrote, which was true, that he needed to get away from London and academic work. He thought they might mix sleeping out of doors with staying in pubs. Tom took time to reply, and then sent a colourless postcard saying he would be very pleased to come.

When Julian saw Tom again he knew he had always been in love with him. Or knew, for Julian was always double-minded, that he needed to indulge in the fantasy that he had always been in love with him. Tom at eighteen was lovely in the way he had been lovely at twelve, with the same rapid, shy, awkward grace, the same perfectly proportioned face, the same—for Julian was now experienced—lovely buttocks in his flannels. He was still like a carving, with his mass of honey-hair and his long gold lashes almost on his cheek when he blinked. And his mouth was quiet and calm, and the odd fact that he had become very hairy, on both face and body, only complicated the carved effect by veiling it. Men who loved boys, Julian thought, simply loved beauty, in a way men who loved girls did not. There were beautiful girls who had the same pure effect as beautiful boys, but girls were to be assessed as mothers-to-be, they were not simply and only lovely. He had no illusion that kissing Tom, or simply touching him, would have anything to do with communing with Tom’s soul. Tom’s body was opaque. If there was a soul animating it, Julian felt that it would be both presumptuous and possibly unrewarding to try to commune with it. He watched the light in the hairs on Tom’s forearm as he swung his pack to his shoulders. He felt—apart from a stirring in his trousers—as he felt when his father showed him a gleaming mediaeval spoon, when the wrapping fell away. He thought to himself that Tom had done well to leave Marlowe so precipitously. If he had stayed, he would have become prey to the hunters and possibly learned to be a nasty flirt, as happened to so many. This Julian thought along with many other things, as they strode along the field-paths and round the woodlands, for Tom was not given to conversation, only to companionable pace-keeping, so Julian talked to himself, in his head. Julian decided wryly that he had to be on his best behaviour, because Tom had been foolishly entrusted to him by their elders.

Tom did not look at Julian, almost at all. He poked with his stick in hedgerows, or stopped, raising his hand, to listen quietly to birdsong and rustlings. Julian knew that he himself was not only not beautiful, he was not even handsome. He was slight and wiry; his mouth was long, narrow and mobile; he was slightly knock-kneed, and he walked circumspect and hunched, unlike Tom’s habitation of all the air around him. Because he had the sense to say nothing for a very long time, Tom did begin to initiate conversations. They were about hedges and ditches. He pointed out good places to set snares. He found an orchid—“quite rare.” He discussed good and bad coppicing.

And at night—they slept out, on unrolled blankets and a waterproof—he talked about the stars. He knew them all, the planets and the constellations. Bright Venus, almost aligned with red Mars, Mercury faint on the horizon. The head of the Water-Snake, “just to the left of Canis Major” just below Gemini. The gibbous moon, waning.

He did not talk about himself. He never said “I want…” or “I hope …” and only rarely “I think …” He did express an impersonal grief at the vanishing of certain predatory species, exterminated by gamekeepers, the hen harrier, the pine marten, the raven. He speculated about why the weasel, stoat and crow had proved more cunning and more pertinacious. Julian said

“Perhaps you should be a naturalist? Study zoology and write books, or work in the Natural History Museum.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “I don’t write.”

“What are you going to do? What do you want to do?”

“Do you remember at the Midsummer party, they asked us all what we wanted to be? And Florian said, he