The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [104]
et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas
admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae,
inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras …
Tom saw in his mind’s eye gradations of shadowy matter, thicker and thinner irreality, coiling like steam from a train or smoke from a chimney, but in the dark, under dark branches, cava sub imagine formae. Charles was annoyed by the enthusiasm of Tartarinov’s declamation. Charles saw nothing. Nothing was in his head. These things were unreal things, Gorgon, Harpy, Chimaera, things from childhood. No-things. He wanted another sign from Tartarinov, another wink for his secret self from the anarchist who had perhaps blood on his hands, who was far from his homeland because of his belief in his cause. But Tartarinov appeared to be truly obsessed with this old dead poetry in an old dead language. This man was double, Charles thought, a man with two faces and two minds, however whole-hearted he looked. And so was he, Charles/Karl, becoming double. His secret made him think of himself as invisible, a subtle being who thought his own thoughts and had his own purposes, whilst the outward boy said the banal things boys do say, about cricket and prep, about birds’ nests and punishments. This led him to wonder whether Tom was double, and if so, what was in the secret Tom. He thought perhaps Tom was not double. Tom appeared to take Tartarinov—and Charles himself—at face value, gently.
Once the idea of secret selves had begun to spread little roots in his mind, he began to look at everyone differently, half as a game, half as a dangerous piece of research. After the morning with Tartarinov he walked with Tom along the road past the woods and onto the Downs, where Toby Youlgreave had his cottage, which, he insisted, had once belonged to a swineherd. Toby was coaching the boys for the general essays they would have to write. It was a cold crisp winter day, with frost on the ground and snow in the air. They wore caps and mufflers and woollen gloves. Toby gave them mugs of tea, and toasted them crumpets at his inglenook hearth. The floor of his small sitting-room was populated by uneven pillars of stacked books, on some of which previous mugs of tea had stood, and butter had been smeared. He had set them an essay on “Dreams” and told them to take that word any way they liked— dreams, nightmares, daydreams, hopes for the future. He had said they would need to find vivid examples of whatever they chose. He made them read out what they had written, as though they were in a university tutorial. Tom read well, clearly, without expression, a little too fast. Charles paced himself, listening to his own argument. He liked to argue, even about dreams. Tom had chosen to write about real, night-time dreams, what they felt like, what they meant. Charles, who knew Tom would do that, had deliberately chosen the moral and political meaning of the word, the dream of justice, the dream of a future life, Utopia. Tom wrote about the sensation of dreaming, and distinguished between those dreams in which the dreamer is neither actor nor watcher but a kind of looker-on, like the voice of a storyteller in a story. Almost commenting, but not quite, because all the same you were sort of helpless, you couldn’t make decisions in dreams, but you did know you were in them, and that you would wake to the real world. Sometimes you tried to stay asleep, to see what would happen. Then there were the dreams you were really in and had the sensation that you couldn’t get out—dreams of being buried alive, or told you were to be hanged tomorrow