The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [113]
Philip was at the wheel, his wet hands inside the moving, growing clay wall of a pot. Dorothy stood in the doorway and watched him. She touched the tips of her own fingers with other fingers, trying to imagine, in her skin, how this work would feel. It was precise, and extraordinary. Philip came to the end of turning, finished his rim, smoothed the sides with a wooden baton, and lifted the bat from the wheel. He said to Dorothy “Hello, then,” without turning round. She hadn’t been sure he knew she was there. He said
“Would you like to make a pot?”
Dorothy said she would. Philip found a smock for her, and ceded his seat at the wheel. He took a ball of clay, and slapped it on the wheel, and centred it for her. “Now,” he said, “press down, so, with both hands—use your thumbs—and feel it come up.”
Dorothy pressed. The clay was wet and clammy and dead, and yet it had a motion of its own, a response, a kind of life. The wheel turned, the clay turned, Dorothy held her fingers steady inside the red-brown cylinder which rose, with narrowing walls, to the rhythm of the turning. Dorothy was delighted. And then, suddenly, something went wrong—the rhythm faltered, the clay walls frilled, slipped and collapsed inwards, and where there had been a tube there was a flailing blob. Dorothy turned to Philip to ask what she had done wrong. She was half-laughing, half-crying. Philip was laughing. He said “That always happens.” He took the lump in his hands to re-form it, and at that moment Elsie came in from the storeroom door, carrying something, unaware of Dorothy’s presence, holding it out to Philip.
“Look what I found. Did you ever see the like?”
Then she saw Dorothy, and blushed crimson. Dorothy wondered why she had alarmed her so—they knew each other, a little, not very well—and then began to understand what she was holding. Philip had understood immediately, and the blood was also rising in his face.
“It was in a box at the very back of a kind of gloryhole,” said Elsie.
It was white and shining. It was a larger-than-life, extremely detailed, evenly glazed model of an erect cock and balls, every wrinkle, every fold, every glabrous surface gleaming.
“I didn’t do it,” said Philip.
“I didn’t think you did,” said his sister. She said to Dorothy “I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure if she was on first-name terms with Dorothy or not.
Dorothy advanced, with her hands covered in wet slip.
“Can I have a look? I’m going to study anatomy. Do you think it’s for use in hospitals?”
“No,” said Philip. “I think—I think it’s a phallic Thing.”
He had learned that word from Benedict Fludd’s talk. Neither of the other two knew what it meant.
“Religious, sort of,” said Philip, half-embarrassed, half on the edge of hysterical laughter.
Dorothy took the phallus and brandished it. She said “It’s very big,” and also began to laugh uncontrollably. Elsie joined in the laughter.
“Do you think—do you think”—Dorothy asked—“it’s a self-portrait, so to speak?”
She had left brown clay fingerprints where she had clasped it.
“You’ll have to wash it,” she said to Elsie, and collapsed again into laughter.
“Give it me,” said Philip. “I’ll run it under the tap. And then Elsie shall put it quickly back where she found it.”
His fingers recognised just how well it had been made, how its maker’s fingers had felt it out, and followed its swelling veins.
When they had given up laughing, they did not know what to say to each other, and yet felt very close. Dorothy said she had better be off. She asked if Philip would give her another lesson. She asked Elsie, in a voice still thick with laughter, if Elsie made pots.
“Aye,” said Elsie. “Tiny little ’uns, when there’s no one watching. I like ’em thin and small.”
“You never told me that,” said Philip.
“You never asked,” said Elsie.
16
Olive rewrote the beginning of Tom’s story yet again.
TOM UNDERGROUND
T WAS A CURIOUS FACT that when the young prince was a small child, with a sunny nature, and a normal quantity of childish curiosity and naughtiness, the absence of his shadow appeared more to amuse and enchant those