The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [122]
Dorothy went out. She didn’t go to stay with Griselda, or to any of her lessons. She went out into the country and disappeared. It was odd that neither Humphry nor Olive noticed her absence, though they might have been supposed to be anxious about their other children.
Dorothy went to the Tree House, which was still well camouflaged by autumn foliage and bracken turning gold. She sat quietly on the edge of one of the bracken beds, and waited. After six weeks, she found a chipped pottery mug, and some mouldy crumbs, just inside the door. She began to stalk the Tree House, creeping up on it from behind, not approaching down paths, and by this method she was able, one day, to go in and find the ragged boy curled like an unborn child in the heather nest, with worn shoe soles, a filthy jacket several sizes too large, a satchel she recognised, a shock of long, dusty hair, full of all sorts of things, living and very dead.
Dorothy said “I knew you’d come here. I think I’d have known if you were dead. I thought you weren’t.”
Tom made a scratching, snuffling noise.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Helping a gamekeeper,” said Tom. It was all the answer she, or anyone, ever got. It was like and unlike one of Olive’s tales of fugitives. It took Dorothy two more days to persuade him to walk back with her to Todefright. She never, ever told Olive that she had known for two days where he was, without saying anything, for she would never have been forgiven.
When Olive saw ragged Tom she had to rush into the cloakroom to be violently and unromantically sick. She came back, her face white as plaster, and put her arms around her boy, who smelled of unspeakable things, and whose skin had no bloom. He stiffened, and instinctively pushed her away. She said “Where have you been?” She said “We were sick with worry.” Tom did not reply. Olive put her arms again round his hunched, unresponsive shoulders and said “You will never go back there again.” Olive wanted to tell him, in pain and grief and rage, what the days of waiting and not knowing had been like, and knew that his own state was too bad for her to burden him with hers. She had been there before, when the pit flooded, when the fire damp puffed its venom. She had waited and grimly known she was waiting in vain, had almost longed for certainty to replace the agony of uncertainty. Something in her—because of those earlier waits—had known Tom would never be seen again. And now he was here, alien and grubby. She said “My poor boy.” She said to Violet “He must have a bath, and his own clothes.” She said to Tom “You can tell me all about it, in your own good time.”
But he never told her about it. Olive suspected that he was telling Dorothy, and interrogated Dorothy. Dorothy said, quite truthfully, that she knew nothing except that Tom had been helping a gamekeeper. Olive did not really believe that this was all that Dorothy knew. Tom said one thing, after a week or so. “I haven’t got the story.” Olive said “Never mind. I have a copy. Don’t worry. I know all about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” said Tom, and went and shut himself in his bedroom.
Olive felt shut out. Tom was part of her, and she was part of Tom, and the evil boy, Hunter, had severed the connection. She was angry with Tom, because of the waiting she had done, and his unawareness of the waiting. She was not given to introspection. She had “been through” something bad, and she dealt with it in her usual way, writing a children’s story of an innocent boy set upon by bullies at school, and bravely defying them. She made a Gothic horror out of the neo-Gothic turrets of Marlowe and included a heartfelt appeal for schools to become kinder and more civilised places. Innocence should not be regimented and brutalised, like recruits to an army. We should care for our young, and teach them tolerance, kindness and self-reliance. This book, with the title Dark Doings at Blacktowers, was a huge success. Julian Cain read