The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [159]
She is overdoing it, thought Tom. What he could not know was that Olive’s coming was the effect of a move by Herbert Methley, who had insistently and even fiercely tried to coerce her into performing a sexual thing she found disgusting. She had blushed like fire. Tears had started from her eyes. She had no idea whether Methley was a monstrous pervert, or whether she herself was—as he accused her of being—naïve and cold, not to understand, not to respond. She suddenly couldn’t stand the smell of him, struggled out of his arms, and out of the hired bed, and thought blindly “I have got to get away.” She was so pleased to see Prosper Cain, whose admiration for her was old-fashioned and gallant.
And Tom, of course, she was pleased to see Tom, Tom loved her more than anyone did.
Prosper Cain was buying jewellery. He liked buying small pieces, and was looking for the perfect gift to take home for Florence. He had bought her one of Lalique’s horn combs, with carved sycamore seeds, and was hesitating over an unusual anemone brooch, in which the lovely flower was denuded of all its petals but one, made of pink enamel, set amongst twining ivory roots, through which strange faces peered. But perhaps you didn’t give an image of fall and decay, however beautiful, to a young girl? He found a pliqué-à-jour enamelled poppy—“like a thin, clear bubble of blood” as Browning said of the wild tulips—and bought it to pin on his daughter’s dark hair. He then examined another, paler piece, which combined transparent enamelled honesty seed-cases with a sumptuous thistle, made of enamelled silver and frosted glass. Olive, who was touching the jewels with a gloved fingertip, holding a snake-bracelet against her wrist to admire it, suddenly wondered if the second piece might be an offering designed for herself. It had a soft, fairytale gleam. Cain watched its wrapping, and put it, with the poppy, in his pocket. He thought he might give it to Imogen Fludd, if that would not embarrass her. She had become interested in jewellery design—the small scale, the precise craft, the rigour and delicacy of it suited her temperament. But London was full of ladies doing bits of enamelwork and stringing beads. If jewellery was to be her means of independence she must do it well, very well.
It was a mistake to try to visit the Grand Palais in a large group. There were thousands of paintings in the Décennale, which showed work from the last ten years of the century, from all the exhibiting countries. August Steyning said in a forthright way that they should all proceed at their own pace and follow their own interests until it was time for lunch, when they should forgather—“for a reason”—in front of Jean Weber’s painting Les Fantoches. They strolled in ones and twos—Steyning, Cain and Olive, Tom and Julian, Charles and Joachim Susskind, Fludd and Philip. Philip was oppressed by the size and weight and insistent dark meaning ofmuch ofthe work. He was appalled by vast paintings of clumped dead and dying naked humans, strewn with snakes and surveyed by tiny winged angels. In one painting, entitled Towards the Abyss, a woman in modern dress, with huge batwings and a windblown bonnet, strode forward against the wind, followed by a crawling crowd of nudes, geriatric and bearded, female and glaring, all in extremis, some already expiring. Philip timidly asked Fludd what it meant.
“Dunno,” said Fludd. “She might be Woman, but she is not very taking, looks like a mad governess. She might be Capitalism but she looks like a miserable vampire. Or the Church, she might be. Or syphilis. Very French, she is. I prefer pots. They don’t have to be weighed down with meaning. They are what they are, earth and chemistry.”
Julian, by now