The Children's Book

Pavilion?”

“No.”

“Benedict should be showing you things. I wanted to show some of the dealers here some of your work. You could come and draw for them. I might need you, if Fludd’s out of form.”

•  •  •

Benedict Fludd was under a wine-stained sheet, with his head entangled in a serpentine French bolster. “Get out,” he said to Cain.

“I won’t. You are lunching with Bing, as you very well know. Get up. You owe it to Philip Warren, to show these folk his work, as well as to yourself. Bing is interested in your pond bowl. Very interested. Get up. In the army we had very nasty ways of making people get up. Get up and get washed. Horrible man.”

Everyone, therefore, gathered at the Lalique stand. It was yet another imaginary dwelling, with pleated gauze hangings. Shining white moire bats swooped in a highly arched window, and there was a screen, sinister, delicate, lovely, made of five naked bronze women, with huge, skeletal wings like the bronze veins of moths, hanging below and beside them. The most prominent exhibit was a large ornament, in the form of a turquoise woman’s bust rising out of the mouth of a long, long dragonfly, its narrowing gold body studded with shimmering blue and green jewels at regular intervals, diminishing to a tiny sharp gilt fork at the base. The woman’s head was crowned with an ornament which was a helm, or a split scarab, or the insect eyes of the metamorphosing being. From her shoulders hung what were at once stiff, spreading sleeves, and the realistic wings of the dragonfly, made in the new, transparent, unbacked enamel, veined in gold, studded with roundels of turquoise and crystals. The beast had huge dragonlike claws, stretching either side of the womanhead, on gold muscular arms. Round this piece were lesser jewels in the shapes of insects and flowers. Philip asked Fludd if he knew how the transparent enamel was done. He said to him “Look” at a brooch made of two completely realistic stag-beetles, their heads locked, the pitted horny roughness of their wing-cases perfectly reproduced.

“Hmn,” said Fludd. “Another French wizard who moulds from life, I imagine. Like Palissy.”

Fludd was coming to life. He took out an eye-glass and peered at the tiny tourmaline eggs which crusted the rumps of the insects, at the blood-red stone they clutched between them.

Julian pointed out to Tom that the heart-shaped form of another jewel with two dragonflies conjoined was in fact an exact reproduction of copulation. So it was, said Tom, with a naturalist’s interest.

“I meant to surprise you,” said Olive Wellwood, floating up to them under a creamy hat clustered with butterflies and silken bees. “Now be surprised, my darling. I couldn’t resist, after your lovely letter—”

She was accompanied by Humphry, looking casually elegant, and August Steyning, wearing moth-grey and a peacock-blue cravat.

There were exclamations and kisses. Olive was lovely and excitable, with a hectic flush on her face. She was carrying a rose-coloured silk parasol, which, out of doors, made her shadowed face dark rose in pale rose. Tom had a feeling he immediately remembered, though he had never learned to expect it. Olive in the flesh, Olive perfumed with attar of roses, was not the secret sharer of the otherworld, to whom he wrote letters. That was a kind of second self, who wrote him and inhabited his dreams. This was a lively, sociable woman in creamy broderie anglaise, over whose fingers Prosper Cain was gallantly bowing his head.

“How pleasant to see you, dear Mrs. Wellwood. Just the right setting, among the peacocks and damselflies. I did not know you intended to visit the Exposition.”

“I did not know myself. It was an impromptu decision, prompted by a letter from Tom—now I am speaking nonsense, impromptu can’t be prompted—a letter describing all the enticements and enchantments so that I was irresistibly drawn to them. And we discovered that August Steyning had already planned a visit, so we attached ourselves to him. You must tell us everything, you must show us all the beautiful things …”

She is overdoing it, thought Tom. What he could not know was that Olive’s coming was the effect of a move by Herbert Methley, who had insistently and even fiercely tried to coerce her into performing a sexual thing she found disgusting. She had blushed like fire. Tears had started from her eyes. She had no idea whether Methley was a monstrous pervert, or whether she herself was—as he accused her of being—naive and cold, not to understand, not to respond. She suddenly couldn’t stand the smell of him, struggled out of his arms, and out of the hired bed, and thought blindly “I have got to get away.” She was so pleased to see Prosper Cain, whose admiration for her was old-fashioned and gallant.

And Tom, of course, she was pleased to see Tom, Tom loved her more than anyone did.

Prosper Cain was buying jewellery. He liked buying small pieces, and was looking for the perfect gift to take home for Florence. He had bought her one of Lalique’s horn combs, with carved sycamore seeds, and was hesitating over an unusual anemone brooch, in which the lovely flower was denuded of all its petals but one, made of pink enamel, set amongst twining ivory roots, through which strange faces peered. But perhaps you didn’t give an image of fall and decay, however beautiful, to a young girl? He found a plique-a-jour enamelled poppy—“like a thin, clear bubble of blood” as Browning said of the wild tulips—and bought it to pin on his daughter’s dark hair. He then examined another, paler piece, which combined transparent enamelled honesty seed-cases with a sumptuous thistle, made of enamelled silver and frosted glass. Olive, who was touching the jewels with a gloved fingertip, holding a snake-bracelet against her wrist to admire it, suddenly wondered if the second piece might be an offering designed for herself. It had a soft, fairytale gleam. Cain watched its wrapping, and put it, with the poppy, in his pocket. He thought he might give it to Imogen Fludd, if that would not embarrass her. She had become interested in jewellery design—the small scale, the precise craft, the rigour and delicacy of it suited her temperament. But London was full of ladies doing bits of enamelwork and stringing beads. If jewellery was to be her means of independence she must do it well, very well.

It was a mistake to try to visit the Grand Palais in a large group. There were thousands of paintings in the Decennale, which showed work from the last ten years of the century, from all the exhibiting countries. August Steyning said in a forthright way that they should all proceed at their own pace and follow their own interests until it was time for lunch, when they should forgather—“for a reason”—in front of Jean Weber’s painting Les Fantoches. They strolled in ones and twos—Steyning, Cain and Olive, Tom and Julian, Charles and Joachim Susskind, Fludd and Philip. Philip was oppressed by the size and weight and insistent dark meaning ofmuch ofthe work. He was appalled by vast paintings of clumped dead and dying naked humans, strewn with snakes and surveyed by tiny winged angels. In one painting, entitled Towards the Abyss, a woman in modern dress, with huge batwings and a windblown bonnet, strode forward against the wind, followed by a crawling crowd of nudes, geriatric and bearded, female and glaring, all in extremis, some already expiring. Philip timidly asked Fludd what it meant.

“Dunno,” said Fludd. “She might be Woman, but she is not very taking, looks like a mad governess. She might be Capitalism but she looks like a miserable vampire. Or the Church, she might be. Or syphilis. Very French, she is. I prefer pots. They don’t have to be weighed down with meaning. They are what they are, earth and chemistry.”

Julian, by now an eager student of Art Nouveau and the artists of the Secession, hurried Tom away to look at Klimt, whose delicious Lady in Pink shone palely out, and whose ambitious allegory of Philosophy glittered with elegance. Joachim Susskind and Charles were arrested by