The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [11]
She had a rather fierce little face, not pretty, and looked cross most of the time. He did not wonder why. Exhaustion was overcoming him. Olive asked him two or three more probing questions about the ill-treatment she was convinced he had undergone. He answered monosyllabically, spooning blancmange into his mouth. This time he was rescued by Violet, who said the boy was dead on his feet and she proposed to find him a candle and see him to his bed.
Violet said “You mustn’t mind my sister. She’s a storyteller. She’s making up stories for you. I don’t mean lies, I mean stories. It’s her way. She’s fitting you in.” Philip said
“She’s been—so very kind. You all have.”
“We have our beliefs,” said Violet. “About what the world should be like. And some of us have experience—like yours—of what it shouldn’t be.”
The moon was caught in the branches of the trees round the cottage. He was solaced by learning the lines of the network of twigs, which was both random and ordered. He didn’t point this out to Violet, but thanked her again, as he took his candle, and made his way into his cottage. He feared she might try to kiss him goodnight—he could not predict what these people would do—but she simply stood, and watched him take his candle up the ladder.
“Sleep tight,” she called.
“Thank you,” he said, yet again.
And then he was alone, with a brave candle, in a cottage. This was what he had wanted, or part of it. There was a nightshirt, laid out on the clean sheets of the wooden bed that was temporarily his. He looked out of the window, and there were the branches, lit by the moon on a dark blue, cloudless sky, with their fish-shaped leaves overlapping, and just trembling. He translated the shapes into a glaze, and puzzled over it briefly. It was too much. He wanted to cry out, or to weep, or, he understood, to touch his body—his body washed clean—as he had only ever been able to do furtively, in dirty places. He must not leave marks, that would be shameful. He finally contrived a safety-pad of the handkerchief he had been given or lent. He could rinse it, subsequently, under the pump.
He lay back, and took himself in hand, and worked himself into a rhythm of delight, and a soaring wet ecstasy.
Then he lay still, listening to the sounds in the silence. An owl called. Another owl answered. A big branch creaked. Things rustled. The pump below dripped in the stone sink. How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.
The next day, they prepared the Midsummer Party. Violet gave Philip a breakfast of eggs, toast and tea, and told him he was co-opted to make lanterns. The garden would be full of them. He was to go up to the schoolroom, where the lanterns were being made.
The imposing staircase took an interesting turn as it went up. In an alcove, at the turning, standing on an oak coffin stool was a jar. It was a large earthenware vessel, that bellied out and curved in again, to a tall neck with a fine lip. The glaze was silver-gold, with veilings of aquamarine. The light flowed round the surface, like clouds reflected in water. It was a watery pot. There was a vertical rhythm of rising stems, water-weeds, and a dashing horizontal rhythm of irregular clouds of black-brown wriggling commas, which turned out, inspected closely, to be lifelike tadpoles with translucent tails. The jar had several asymmetric handles which seemed to grow out of it like roots in water, but turned out to have the sly faces and flickering tails of water-snakes, green-spotted gold. It rested on four dark green feet, which were coiled, scaled lizards. Or minor dragons, lying with closed eyes and resting snouts.
This was what he had come to look for. His fingers moved inside its contours on an imaginary wheel. Its form clothed his sense of the shape of his