The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [128]
They were going past a fenced field with a herd of cream-coloured cows, heavy, muddy, staring cows. In a corner, under an elm tree, one female cow was busily mounting another, making the movements a bull would make, although unequipped, and provoking—they both noticed—a quiver of response (or irritation) in the strained area under the lower cow’s tail.
“Does not that prove my point?” said Herbert Methley. “The poor things are deprived of the presence of a bull—who would in nature be there, guarding his harem and snorting defiance at other bulls. Yet they feel a need…”
Olive felt a blush mounting from her bosom to her face.
“I hope I have not shocked you. I did not mean to shock you.”
“I think you did. But I am not shocked. And I take your point. Scientifically, your example—look, she has got down, and sauntered away—is evidence for what you say it is.”
“When we can prevent the unfortunate consequences of following our instincts to what John Donne called the one true end of love—our society will be different, and we shall be transfigured.”
“By sexual freedom? Instincts are one thing. Donne uses the word, love.”
“Is not desire always love, whilst it exists? Whatever it may become. I sometimes think, there are as many ways of loving women, as there are women. And I sometimes think, if women were honest, there are as many ways of loving men as there are men.”
“Ah, but a good student of human nature needs also to study indifference, and even revulsion and distaste. For these also are instincts.”
Methley thought for a moment or two about his remark, and then attacked directly.
“I hope I inspire none of those in you?”
He laughed, not quite easily.
“Don’t be foolish,” said Olive. “We are not talking about ourselves. And we are good friends, which is yet another relation between men and women, hard to manage and rare to find.”
When she got back to the inn where they were staying, she found herself shrugging her whole body with a mix of emotions. Of course such talk aroused some kind of—yes, sexual—pricklings in her. It had to. She knew what desire was, and what its satisfaction was. But she had no idea whether she desired Herbert Methley. The presence of his body aroused her own in some way, but it was not clear to her that what it aroused wasn’t indifference, revulsion and distaste. He was not lovely to look at, as Humphry was. Though he had a kind of dreadful energy which is always—how did she know these things?—stirring, like a huge octopus quivering through water, or flailing on a slab and slipping back into the sea.
What was very certain was that she had had none of these thoughts at Elsie Warren’s age. They were a grown woman’s thoughts.
Benedict Fludd held classes in clay modelling in what had been the grand coach-house. Elsie had cleaned its little row of spider-webbed windows and Philip had brought tubs and buckets of clay and slip. There was a serious group of five young women from the Royal College, whose previous experience of ceramics had been painting tiles, and one or two young men also. Then there were locals who wanted to try their hands—Patty Dace, Arthur Dobbin, a schoolmaster from Lydd, and the new schoolmistress-to-be from Puxty, a young widow called Mrs. Oakeshott. Mrs. Oakeshott had come from the North, to make a new beginning, she said, after the tragic death of her young husband in a railway accident. She was accompanied by her small son, Robin, who would start school at Puxty in September, with the few Marsh children who attended—the whole school, from five to eleven, was only fourteen children. Frank Mallett, who was on the local education committee, had been delighted to find Mrs. Oakeshott, and was already afraid she would find the harsh weather and the loneliness unbearable. She had excellent qualifications and a mild wit. Her son had come with her to Purchase, accompanied