outside with its threaded slivers of emerald, opal, amethyst, peridot, hissing and crackling with electricity, electricity, a river of life, a river of death, were all one. It made her want to write, as things delightful and things threatening, both, made her want to write.
When they were safely back in Todefright, Humphry sat down to write an article on Exhibitions and the Arts of War and Peace.
Olive wrote a tale in which, at night, the silky ladies and resplendent peacocks, the manikins and marble men and maidens, the puppets and the glimmering butterflies and dragonflies and fishes in the tapestries, came to life and held their own market of magical goods in the shadowy spaces and the sumptuous uninhabited chambers of the Bing Pavilion.
24
The hot summer days were long in the Marsh. In the absence of Benedict Fludd and Philip there was less for Elsie to do, and Seraphita and Pomona did nothing anyway. Sometimes they sat in the orchard with their embroidery. Elsie cleared up, and shopped, and did sewing of her own. She had reached an age where every surface of her skin was taut with the need to be touched and used, and all she had to occupy her was a dusty old house and two mildly crazy women dressed in flowing floral gowns. She herself was also dressed in clothes constructed from altered hand-downs, covered with faded golden lilies and birds and pomegranates. What she wanted was a sleek, dark, businesslike skirt and a fresh white shirt with a collar, that would show off her narrow waist. She had no money, and did not know how to ask for any, for she knew there was very little in the household to cover the bread and milk and vegetables. She also had a problem with handed-down shoes, none of which fitted her exactly. She had red rubbed places on what she knew were pretty feet, scraped heels and bruised toe-joints. She tended to walk around in basketlike sandals that were too big, but didn’t hurt. More than anything she admitted to herself that she wanted, she wanted new shoes, her own shoes. Shoes that wouldn’t destroy her feet. More than anything, in fact, she wanted to be made love to, to have hands gripping her waist and stroking her lovely hair. She burned, but it was no use repining, or even admitting to herself that she burned. She set about remedying what little she could, taking dressmaking shears to the Morris & Co. fabrics, and converting the loose aesthetic robes to neatly shaped skirts, with darts and seams. She had seen in a shop window in Rye a soft, dark wine-red leather belt, with an arrow-shaped clasp at the front, that she desired passionately, as a substitute for hands, as a provocation to eyes.
Seraphita said nothing about the skirts. She stared vaguely, like a china doll, or a garden goddess, Elsie thought. The house now had few secrets from Elsie. She knew where Seraphita hid bottles, brown bottles of stout, little blue bottles of laudanum, amongst her wool-baskets and hairbrushes. She never touched or moved these bottles; she thought, indeed, of offering help with procuring them, but Seraphita had a trick of not hearing anything that was said, and must have had a satisfactory system already in place, though she never looked awake enough to contrive one.
Elsie knew she ought to be sorry for Pomona. The girl liked to follow her around, never offering to help with the housework, though sweetly admiring of Elsie’s achievements, such a delicious soup, such a pretty flower arrangement, such clean windows as there had never been, the sun had never come in so brightly. Pomona did touch Elsie. She stroked her, timidly, when Elsie sat down to sew, she asked if Elsie was happy. She said “We aren’t very lively here, now Imogen is gone,” and Elsie replied tartly that there was plenty of work to be getting on with. Somebody ought to be educating the girl, taking her out to meet possible husbands or teaching her a trade, Elsie thought, not very sympathetically. She wished Pomona would keep her distance. She preferred sitting alone to sew. She was making a not-bad, reasonably sober skirt, covered with willow boughs.
She went, when she could, into the potters’ studio. The balls of clay were damp-wrapped, the buckets of slip were tempting, and she ran her fingers through them, just to get the feel back. She took some clay—it wasn’t stealing, it could be squeezed back to nothing—and made several tiny figures, figures of women, sitting with their arms round their knees, or standing proudly naked, balanced on elegant legs.
She was curious about the locked pantry. She told herself that she had cleaned everywhere else, and should clean there, but knew that it was really the ancient challenge of the one locked door. The drawing of Bernard Palissy from the Kensington Valhalla was nailed to the locked door, one corner, she noticed, covering the keyhole. Without exactly setting about it, she looked for unattributable keys, telling herself at the same time that if the pantry held a secret, the key might be somewhere else altogether. Then, one day, standing precariously on a stool to reach a high shelf, she picked up a grim salt-jar, in the shape of a griffon with a threatening beak and lifted crest, and heard a metallic rattle. The jar was pushed back in the shadows. Elsie retrieved it, and brought it to earth. She tipped and the creature disgorged a fine iron key. Elsie put the key into the pocket of her apron, and smiled to herself, catlike. She replaced the jar. And then she waited. She waited two days, until Frank Mallett invited Seraphita and Pomona to a summer picnic at the Puxty vicarage. When she had the house to herself, she took out the tacks that held Palissy in place, and uncovered the lock. The key slid in easily, and turned easily, as though oiled. The pantry was indeed a pantry. A stone shelf ran round three of its walls, above and behind which were other shelves, rising to the low whitewashed ceiling. There was a small barred window, with a wire net to keep out flies, covered with dust.
On the shelves were pots. Elsie had expected something secret and different. One or two were largish plump jars, but most were small, and glimmered white in the shadows, white-glazed china, unglazed biscuit. When Elsie went nearer to make them out better her feet crunched on broken shards, as though someone had dropped, or thrown, a whole carpet of fragments to the ground.
The pots were obscene chimaeras, half vessels, half human. They had a purity and clarity of line, and were contorted into every shape of human sexual display and congress. Slender girls clutched and displayed vaselike, intricate modellings of their own lower lips and canals. They lay on their backs, thrusting their pelvises up to be viewed. They sat in mute despair on the lips of towering jars, clutching their nipples defensively, their long hair falling over their cast-down faces. There were also clinical anatomical models—always elegant, always precise and economical, of the male and female sexual organs, separate and conjoined. There were pairs of figures, in strenuous possible and impossible embraces, gentle and terrible.
Some of them had Imogen’s long face and drooping shoulders: some of them were plump Pomona. The males were faceless fantasms. Elsie crunched towards them over the destruction of other versions, and saw that the wavering arms and legs, the open mouths and clutching hands were not all the same age, went back years, into childishness. There were so many, Elsie thought they resembled a coral reef, thrusting out stony thickets underwater. It was hard for Elsie to look at them, in the state of bodily need which already possessed her. Something inside her own body responded to the opening up, the penetration, the visual shock of these. But under the sexual response, and stronger, was terror. Not terror, exactly, of what the girls had been made to do, or maybe only imagined as doing. Terror of the ferocious energy that had made so many, so many, compelled by a need she did not want to imagine. She backed away. She had the presence of mind to take off her hated shoes and wrap them in her apron to be brushed clean of traces. She did not think that the maker of this display would take kindly to any hint or trace of her own discovery of it.
She did not know if she would have told Philip, if he had been there. She had a strong need to tell no one, as if silence would unmake the shelves, and the gleaming white things, and the dusty light. It had the opposite effect. She was haunted. When Pomona returned from the tea-party, Elsie’s unwilling brain undressed her cream-skinned body, opened her legs, so that when Pomona next stroked Elsie’s arm, Elsie, for the first time, slapped away her hand, said sharply, “Don’t!” and turned away from Pomona’s face, where distress flickered and calmed itself.
At the August Bank Holiday weekend Geraint came home to see his mother and sister. Basil Wellwood took him into Kent in his new Daimler. He had formed a godfatherly affection for “young Gerry” as he was now known, which Gerry reciprocated, asking intelligent questions about mines, bonds, and
