The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [133]
“Practically, you will need to hold on to the pleats, whilst you’re up there, or they’ll come out. Your right arm across your breast, to hold the veil down at your left shoulder. The left arm around the waist to hold the cloth in so it doesn’t swirl away when you move. You need white rings on your fingers, ivory or moonstone, I’ll see what I can find.”
Olive was not very good at gliding like an automaton, and became irritated by the constant repetition.
“You are related to the stone man in Don Giovanni, you are a sister of Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea … Think of the stone music—”
“I am a woman of a certain age, who has borne a number of children,” said Olive drily.
“You are a fine figure of a woman,” said Steyning, who was still thinking in terms of sculpture.
So there she stood, on the first night, with the moon behind her, making shadows in her wound garments, which she clutched, pale-knuckled. She was surprised how very difficult it was to keep still, for so long. She thought about her body, under all its unaccustomed white sheeting—like a dressmaker’s dummy, she thought, something vague and muffled. She was ageing. She was pleated across her stomach as well as over her shoulders. She was still in her time. Prosper Cain admired her. Herbert Methley desired her. Humphry wanted her, but she was cross with Humphry. She had cheered herself somewhat, going over Humphry’s conversation with Maid Marian, by remembering that it was quite clear from what he said that he had not known either that Marian was the new schoolmistress at Puxty, or that she was coming to the summer school. It would go by, she thought, as other things had gone by. She made what she hoped was an invisible adjustment to her stance, as her ankles were both numb and strained.
A woman on a plinth can see over a hedge she is designed to protrude above. There in the lane behind the yew hedge, their heads bent together, were Humphry, in his royal robes and hose, his red hair artificially whitened by August, and Marian Oakeshott, in a pretty dress with forget-me-not sprigs on cream. She was brushing the white powdering from his hair off the velvet shoulders of his cloak. It was a very wifely gesture. When she had brushed it away, she patted his arm, in an even more wifely way. Rage gripped the statue, who nevertheless must remain motionless. Rather deliberately, she thought of Herbert Methley’s investigating fingers. Involuntarily she remembered the ludicrous and alarming cows. She was her own woman.
At the moonlit garden party to celebrate the success of the play, Olive stood with Humphry in a circle of admirers which included Marian Oakeshott. Everyone praised Olive’s impassivity and stillness as the statue. Mrs. Oakeshott commented intelligently on the brilliant verse-speaking of Hermione’s passionate self-defence in Act I. She was even able to quote felicities of stress. Olive was confused by this and turned gladly to Herbert Methley, who made several remarks about the character of Hermione as Woman, and spoke of how few of Shakespeare’s female characters were women, since they were mostly to be played by young boys who were better at young girls. He had always wondered how a boy could create Cleopatra. He would like to see Mrs. Wellwood undertake Cleopatra. He kissed her hand, and held on to it too long.
And so Olive found herself in a bed with Herbert Methley. It was a bed in an inn called the Smugglers’ Rest, on a bit of coast looking out at the Channel. It was a bed that sagged, and seemed likely to creak, in a bedroom with an uneven wooden floor and an ill-fitting window, with a crocheted curtain with fish on it. The inn was run by a somewhat unctuous and over-friendly fat woman, who had fed the lovers on plates of shellfish and day-old bread and butter. Methley said he took a room there from time to time when he needed to