The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [152]
Inside was a series of various furnished rooms, all different, all rich and simple together, with shining woodwork, mottled and inlaid with other woods, with fabrics woven from stiff damask and spider-light threads, with tapestries and burnished copper, with glass, and fine ceramics, and touches of gilding that glittered in dark corners. Julian took a secret pleasure in “framing” Tom in these unlikely stage-sets. He looked as if he had wandered into the citrus-wood and damask off an English village green, having just put down his bat. He looked also like a Greek statue of a young athlete, who would not have been out of place here, naked but crowned with filigree vine-leaves.
They went into what was perhaps the most beautiful room, a dressing-room by Georges de Feure, all in moony colours, with furniture of dappled Hungarian ash, decorated with silvery copper inlay, hung with a shimmering silk tapestry of blue and grey formal flowers, shifting shape in the light, woven on a woof of silver threads. The chairs were covered with blue-grey cloth embroidered with white silk roses. Julian thought he would have liked to see Tom in a silk dressing-gown, standing in that room—he imagined the gown in midnight-blue, he imagined it in dark pewter, he combined the two, whilst Tom strode around with genuine curiosity and repeated that it was a pity his mother could not see it. “It would give her so much for her work,” said Tom. He pushed his hands through his fair thatch, making temporary horn-stubs. They moved on into a bedroom, where a great bed was spread with an embroidered cover in every muted shade. Julian tried to imagine Tom spread naked on it, whilst Tom stood a little stiffly taking an interest in the bed-curtains. A large number of fashionable ladies and gentlemen came into the little room and exclaimed over the fittings, and made aloud several observations about inhabiting the bed. Tom said suddenly that he was tired, he felt oppressed, he should be glad if they could sit down.
They sat in an adjacent café, waiting for Prosper Cain. They ordered citrons pressés, and Tom deranged his hair with his fingers a little more. Julian couldn’t think what to say to Tom, and Tom said nothing, so Julian said
“Doesn’t it seem odd that Herr Susskind turns up, just like that?”
“Does it? Everybody in the world seems to be here. I can’t get my breath for being crushed by people. I admit there are so many, the chances of meeting any particular one can’t be very high.”
“I think he fixed it with Charles. I think he knew we were there. Maybe he has a thing about Charles.”
“A thing?”
“Maybe he’s in love with Charles. He seemed excited.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of that. It’s odd, though. I bumped into them together, once, in Hyde Park. I was going through with Papa. They pretended not to see us, and we pretended not to see them. Papa said it was gentlemanly to look the other way. I didn’t quite know why, but I could see everyone was embarrassed.”
Julian said “Have you ever been in love? Really in love?” Tom looked down at the table. Julian immediately thought he had gone too far. Tom was in fact thinking that Julian was sophisticated, and would mock the true answer. Nevertheless, he said
“Only in the imagination.”
“A mysterious answer. What do you mean by that?”
Tom was dumb. Then he said “I don’t know why I said that.”
“Do you mean love in the imagination with real people you don’t love—in the flesh, so to speak? Or in the imagination with ideal people you don’t know at all?”
Tom looked up, and flushed. Julian was looking at him with a quizzical, but amiable grin.
“More the second. But they get mixed. You wonder what it would be like, you know—”
What Tom meant by “what it would be like,” was in fact a reference to knights and damsels riding together through forests, heading from the city into the vacant and the unknown. He had had a habit since childhood of inserting his imagination into Sir Gareth, in Tennyson’s “Gareth and Lynette,” who had been bidden by