The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [143]
The next day was hot. They found a river, and Tom said they would swim in it. He put down his pack, stripped to his skin, folded his clothes neatly and put them on the top of his pack. Then he waded in, through the reeds on the bank of the river: Julian sat on the bank, amongst the buttercups, and watched him, entranced. He would never, he thought, forget the vision of Tom’s penis against his hairy thigh as he bent over his clothes. He would never forget the sight of those thighs, striding through brown-green water into something suddenly deeper, so that he vanished and rose again with floating duckweed scattered like confetti in his thick hair. Tom was not only sunny, he was sunburned. Everywhere exposed to the sun had been painted a ruddy-tanned colour, with paler hairs gleaming on it. The V of his shirt-neck, the bracelet of colour-change on his upper arms, various zebra-gradations of gold on his calves and thighs.
“Come on in. What are you doing?”
“Looking at you.”
“Well, don’t. Come and feel the water, the delicious water. It’s hot on top, and cold and clammy under. I’ve got mud and tiddlers between my toes. Come on in.”
Oh, and how I would like to come into him, Julian thought, undressing, patting down his own member with precautionary fingers. I can’t believe he knows as little as he appears to know. He ought to be a dreadful bore. He would be, if he wasn’t beautiful. No, that isn’t fair, he’s nice, he’s nice through and through, whatever that useless word means. A nice young man. But sad, I intuit, sad under. His own knees were going under, and then the embarrassing appendage. Tom splashed him—from a distance, always from a distance—with great rainbows of water, and then swam off, upriver, like a trout.
“I’ll show you where the pike would hide themselves,” he said. “I know.” He said “This is good, this is good fun.”
“Yes,” said Julian, enjoying the water as substitute sensation. “It is good fun.”
Tom said, when they were sitting in the sun to dry themselves “What’s your favourite poem?”
“Just one? I could say ten. Busy old fool, unruly sun. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? ‘Caliban upon Setebos’? What’s yours?”
“What was he doing, the great god Pan
Down in the reeds by the river?
“I can say all of it. I often do.”
“Say it.”
“What was he doing, the great god Pan
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river…
“He cut it short, did the great god Pan
(How tall it stood in the river!),
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
“ ‘This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
‘The only way, since gods began
To make a sweet music, they could succeed.’
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river…
“Yet half a beast is the great god Pan
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.”
21
At Purchase House, things deteriorated. Benedict Fludd had always had swings of mood—there were days when he worked beside Philip with furious energy, and times when he sat for days together, motionless in his chair, snarling if Philip asked him for information or money, sneering at Seraphita if he spoke to her at all. After Imogen left for London he immediately went into a black depression, sitting and glaring at his picture of Palissy, or hunched with his head in his hands, as though it hurt. When the period of slump was over, he did not now return to work, but shambled rapidly, and without warning, out of the house and into the marshes, hatless and jacketless even on wet, windy days. On one very bad day he swept a whole tray of newly glazed pots to the ground, muttering that they were