The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [140]
“No, I can’t. I’m shocked. Tell me.”
“You must have noticed. I love Toby Youlgreave. It’s hopeless, I know. But things happen to me when I see him. I go to his lectures just to hear his voice—well no, not just—what he says is amazing—but when I hear it, I feel a jump, inside me.”
“He’s old,” said Dorothy flatly. She said it too vehemently, because she had prevented herself from saying “But he’s in love with my mother.”
“I know,” said Griselda. “It’s totally inappropriate,” she said lugubriously. She added sententiously “It doesn’t matter how old he is, because at our age it would be a disaster to meet the one, because it would be the wrong time. Since it has to be hopeless, he can be as old as he likes. Well, is. As old as he is.”
“I think you’re making fun of me, Grisel.”
“No, I’m not, I’m not. There’s a sensible watching bit of me that knows I’m making use of beloved Toby, to practise being in love, in safety so to speak. And there’s an irrational bit that goes swoony and dissolving when I see him. Doesn’t that happen to you at all?”
“No,” said Dorothy, staunchly and truthfully. They began to laugh, for no good reason, and were soon weak with laughter.
Prosper Cain was pleased with his children. The Wellwoods were anxious about Tom. He had become solitary in a way that was unexpected and did not seem quite natural. Charles had passed his Highers comfortably. Tom had not. He had done well in geometry and zoology and had failed everything else, including English, which was hard to do. Basil and Olive were surprised, as were Toby Youlgreave and Vasily Tartarinov, who had both expected him to pass with better results than his cousin. Tom remarked briefly that he felt he hadn’t been concentrating. He had found the whole situation—writing all that stuff—time-restrictive and unreal. What did he intend to do? Humphry asked him. Tom didn’t know, apparently. He was always occupied. He spent his days on foot, in the woods, on the hills, never really considering going outside the bowl of English countryside between the North and South Downs. He didn’t seem to mind being alone—Dorothy, to whom he had been close, lived as much at Griselda’s houses as her own, and was concentrating furiously on physics, chemistry and zoology. He made friends, in a remote way, with gamekeepers and farmers’ boys—he was good at leaning on fences, for long periods, asking questions about rabbits, pheasants, trout and pike. He sat on river banks with a rod and line, observing the weeds and shadows where the fish hung in the current, or lurked under a stone. He practised approaching rabbits and hares as Richard Jefferies recommended, putting his feet down softly and steadily, without a two-legged rhythm, keeping his arms close to his sides—human arms, Jefferies believed, alarmed wild creatures as teeth and claws and scent did in other predators. Tom got to be reasonably skilful at approaching recumbent hares, or keeping quiet in a wood at twilight and waiting for the badgers to emerge, snuffling. He could pick up their scent as though he was himself a wild thing. He spent hours rigorously training his imagination to understand the needs and limitations of the body of a bee, or a redstart, a slow-worm or a moorhen, a laying cuckoo or the enslaved foster-mother of its monstrous changeling. He made inventories of the varieties of grasses in the edges of the ploughed fields, or the numbers of nesting birds in one hedgerow, or the pond life in the clay-lined pond where the cattle slobbered with their lips, smelling of hay and dung and milkiness. He didn’t consider all this a preparation for any particular way of life. He didn’t want to “be” a naturalist, and had no professional interest in being either a sportsman or a gamekeeper. He read perpetually—there was always a book in the satchel he carried—but he only read two kinds of writings. He read books by naturalists—particularly Jefferies, whose very rooted mild English mysticism about the English soil seemed to Tom to be part of his own body. And he read and reread