The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [153]
Julian said
“I suppose we try it out in books, or on beautiful boys at school. Until we find something real—”
Tom flinched, and Julian remembered what he imagined had been done to Tom at Marlowe.
They sipped their citrons pressés. Julian said “Don’t you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you—all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven’t met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures—unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.”
“When I think that thought,” said Tom, “I think of caves of ice, I don’t know why, with things frozen into weird shapes, and tunnels all bored into it—”
“They talk as though youth is carefree, and at the same time, ever so subtly, they try to mould you, into a gentleman, or an empire-builder, or whatever. I don’t want anything to do with the Empire. I don’t ever want to rule anyone, or order anyone to do anything.”
“What do you want?” It was Tom asking, now.
Julian said “After seeing all this—all this lovely stuff people have made—I think I do want what my father wants for me—which is very banal and unorthodox, to agree with one’s father, one ought to be in—manly rebellion. I wouldn’t mind being a collector, or a dealer, in beautiful things. And I want to love, of course, someone. To love and be loved.”
He looked straight at Tom, who had his chin in his hand and was staring, unfocused, at the beckoning ladies on the outside of the Bing Pavilion. Julian wondered if Tom was putting this distant innocence on. He thought not.
He said to himself that he had never met anyone so virginal.
Karl Wellwood was finding out about sex in a quite different way. Joachim had hurried him to the Palace of Woman, an elegant modern building, in whose entrance hall stood figures of women of achievement, with the Byzantine Empress Theodora side by side with Harriet Beecher Stowe. There they met the famous Cassandra, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who was just bidding goodbye to a group of earnest American tourists. She was a serious-looking woman, with cropped dark hair, deep-set eyes and a black bow at the neck of a striped shirt. She kissed Joachim Susskind, and shook Karl’s hand, saying that anyone trusted by Joachim was a friend of her own. They had heard her speak passionately against the South African War, earlier that year, in London, dealing wittily with hecklers, arguing lucidly. Her good sense and passion for justice and tolerance, like those of Peter Kropotkin, who spoke with her, were part of what excited Charles about anarchy, although, still the son of a successful businessman, he could not help feeling that these individualist idealists would save no one without better, and more, organisation.
They strode swiftly away to the boulevard Saint-Michel, where Susskind and Goldman were staying in the same hotel. Goldman told Charles she was earning her keep by being a cicerone at the Exposition and by cooking lunch on an alcohol burner for a group of friends in the hotel—“I am a good cook, you will see, I invite you to lunch, and you may pay what you can.” She was, she said, irritated to desperation by the prudery of the American schoolteachers, who were embarrassed by naked statues in the Louvre—“What, I ask myself, do they make of the women for sale on every pavement—but I dare not ask them, for I must smile and smile and earn my loaves and fishes. I would truly like to guide them round the circles of a hotter place. Have you seen Rodin’s Gates of Hell? You must—more than once, it is a masterpiece. That man knows how much sex matters, in the