The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [111]
It was the tale of a young man in the provinces who liked women. It began by making the point that very few men admitted to liking women, in the plural. A good man should be in search of the One Woman who would partner his soul, but how was he to recognise her if he did not explore, compare, investigate what women were?
The first part of the novel detailed the hero’s relations with various young girls, classmates at school, girls who sang in the church choir, girls like solid dryads met when he was wandering through the woods in search of peace and quiet, girls who were quizzical behind haberdashery counters. His name was Roger Thomas. The descriptions of his relations with the girls were coded, but somehow the nature and variety of extensive sexual experiment was conveyed. There was enough description of skin and electricity, of hands grasping petticoats, of long young throats and the eye travelling downwards, or lovely young legs, going upwards from fine ankles. There was hair—curly black like blackberries, shiny brown like chestnuts, pale like flax. About halfway through the book Roger Thomas noticed a melancholy woman, a married woman, his elderly headmaster’s young, lovely wife. He felt her intelligent eyes on the back of his head. He began to fear her judgement of his innocent and less innocent flirtations. He was now working as an apprentice teacher. She and he sat side by side at her kitchen table, drawing up lists of exam results, making papers. One day she put up her hand, with the pen still in it, and traced the shape of his mouth with her fingers.
They became lovers. They lay tragically in each other’s arms on blankets in the woods, on the carpet in front of the little heater, with its red glow, in his rented room. They planned a clandestine weekend in a pub, and loved each other with abandon, grieving over each passing moment as they took delight in it. That was meant to be the passionate farewell to sin, but the story ended in the same way as Methley’s confided tale of his relations with Phoebe.
Olive thought it must be autobiographical. She thought Herbert Methley was very good at writing about flesh and its stirrings, and was surprised that the book had not been banned by the Lord Chamberlain, or seized by the police. She was interested in the way descriptions of sex incited sexual stirrings in a reader—in this case, herself. The word made flesh, she muttered to herself, half-amused, half-irritated. He had meant to do this to her, she knew it. But her response was confused by the image of Phoebe Methley, whose solid flesh and sensible face came between Olive the reader and her entry into the world of the book. She kept seeing Phoebe’s rather large knuckles, the beginnings of wrinkling on her neck, the slight sag of her stomach and breasts in her bathing suit.
What did Methley want her to feel? She thought about the relation between readers and writers. A writer made an incantation, calling the reader into the magic circle of the world of the book. With subtle words, a writer enticed a reader to feel his or her skin prickle, his or her lips open, his or her blood race. But a writer did this on condition that the reader was alone with printed paper and painted cover. What were you meant to feel—what was she meant to feel—when the originals of the evanescent paper persons were only too solidly present in flesh and bone and prosaic clothing? A gingery tweed jacket, a faded cotton skirt with lupins on it, and an elastic waist that clumped oddly?
Herbert Methley came and sat beside her on the beach a few days later. Tom, Charles and Geraint were swimming. The girls were walking barefoot at the edge of the sea, in their swimming costumes. Julian was reading a book. Methley said to Olive
“Did you read my book?”
“With great interest,” Olive said, substituting the word “interest” for the word “pleasure” at the last moment.
“You are a shrewd reader. You will see that parts of it are taken from life. More than is usual in my work. I wanted you to have read it, to know me.”