The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [106]
Both Tom and Dorothy had been reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, published a year ago. Grahame had given the book to Humphry: they had once been colleagues in the Bank of England, where Grahame still worked—he was grander than Humphry had been, and was already promoted to Acting Secretary of the Bank. Like Humphry he wrote for the Yellow Book and like Humphry busied himself bringing culture to the East End. He had published a work called Pagan Papers in 1893, a tribute to the goat-god Pan, with a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley, which contained the stories of childhood which were continued in The Golden Age. Dorothy asked Tom if he thought going away to school would change him, like Edward in the book. Tom said, vaguely, of course things wouldn’t be the same, and suddenly, for the first time, focused his dreaming mind on what this new beginning was bringing to an end, on what he had done to himself by passing an exam. He was filled with fear and grief, which were impossible to impart to sharp Dorothy.
Olive, despite her preference for legend and fairytale, had herself published two books, that year, about imaginary children, written fast, and easily, and compulsively. Money had been needed because Humphry had had to “help out” with the confinement of Maid Marian in Manchester. He looked sidelong at Olive, before he asked for help, but he made no wild speeches of contrition, did not beat his breast, said, almost man to man, “She’s a good creature, you know. She’s got a good brain. She’s brave.” Olive said he should have thought of all that earlier, and Humphry said, with a kind of satyr-grin, that he had thought he had thought of it, but clearly not well enough. He was inviting Olive to grin with him. Much of his success as an errant husband lay in this whiskered grin of collusion—there were women out there whom, briefly, he couldn’t resist—but she, Olive, his wife, was the one he shared things with, the one to whom he spoke truthfully, from himself. She took a curious pleasure in the power of independence when she gave him a cheque to meet the Manchester bills. You did not so much mind being—conventionally—betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
Olive’s two stories were The Runaway and The Girl Who Walked a Long Way, and were based, in part, on the way Olive imagined the tale of Philip Warren and the tale of his sister Elsie. She had been able to use her own memories of escaping from the coalfield, and from the industrial smoke, to find oneself in the Garden of England amongst orchards full of apples, and gardens full of wholesome, clean vegetables. Her two characters were preadolescent children, escaping a cruel aunt and a drunken uncle. They settled, not in anywhere like Purchase, but in a farming community of orphan children and runaways like themselves. She had invented a kind of guru for this community, a Pied Piper who vaguely resembled Edward Carpenter in idealism and sandal-making. But she could not prevent this figure from being either domineering or sinister, and realised that this was because what children liked to read about was a world without adults, in which they themselves produced their food, and decided how to run things. So she replaced the Carpenter figure with a fourteen-year-old boy called Robin, who was camping in a derelict barn, and took in other fugitives. They called themselves the Outlaws, and learned how to pick mushrooms and berries, and entice runaway hens to lay eggs in their outhouse. She was rather pleased with this concept, and did not know whether to be annoyed or amused to find that Marian in Manchester had called her son Robin. She told Humphry that it was negligent—or invidious—of him to have two sons called Robin, and Humphry smiled his satyr-smile and said that only proved that he had little or nothing to do with Marian and her child, apart from making sure they had enough to live on. Olive didn’t point out that