The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [184]
She began to feel, without realising it, that she was gross and monstrous.
Her chubby hands seemed to her like legs of ham, and her fingers were like rolling-pins.
She said, “Please, play with me, it is such a lovely house.”
Now, it is necessary to know that Rosy’s house was on the edge of a meadow, by a cold stream that had come leaping and rushing down the side of a mountain, and spread out into still pools across the flat grassland, under willows and white poplars. In the old days this side of the river had been known as the Debatable Land, and no one had built there, because over and beyond the mountain was a strange country where no one went, and from which strange things and creatures occasionally came. There were tales of wild wolves, flowing in grey clouds along the hillside, and tales of the fairy folk, in green cloaks, and soft boots, selling strange foods that melted in the mouth and drove young women to death and starvation, for they refused all other food after tasting these pale wafers and sharply sweet berries. There were also tales of giants, who had put huge legs over the ridge, and came down into the plain, filling their pockets with cattle and sheep, pulling up whole trees, and leaving sandy pits, which were their footprints. Rosy had been told these “fairy stories” and liked to hear them. Like all children, her nature was unsatisfied by what she could immediately see and touch. But also, like all children, she enjoyed the comfort of knowing that dragons and witches, giants and wood demons, are real only in a different world, where the mind, but not the body, can travel. “Over the mountain” changed colour, shape and topography constantly, as Rosy made it up, with little thrills of delight and safe fireside terror.
But perhaps we only dream such things because somewhere, some time, they are and were as we imagine them? Rosy told no one about the little people in her doll’s house, who were solid enough, and cross enough, to be independently real. But they were not to be shared, in case, despite being solid, they vanished.
One day Rosy was lying on her stomach, gazing in at the window of the doll’s house. Her mother had crossed the river to shop in the village. She heard a heavy sound, like a hammer on a road, or in a forge. Thud, thump, thud, a regular crashing. The floor of her house trembled, and Rosy trembled on it. The windows of her house darkened. She heard a great wind, sighing and soughing in the chimney. She lifted her head, and tried to look out of the window, and could not at first make out what she saw. It was black velvet dark, ringed with concentric splinters of palest blue, mixed with silvery threads and emerald-green lights. The circle of splinters was surrounded by something whitish, between blancmange and the white of a soft-boiled egg. It was an eye. It was an eye that was as big as the window. There was an enormous gruff grunt, like an oak tree falling. Then her house began to sway from side to side. And then to rise, as though some vast creature was pulling it up by the roots, which was indeed what was happening. Rosy felt very sick and held on to a stool, which didn’t help, as the stool shot across the sloping floor and back. The house was lifted, shaken, and dropped, falling with a muffled sound into soft dark. Then it rose again, and began to move, jerk by jerk—huge jerks—stride by stride. Something, someone, had dropped the whole house into a monstrous sack, and was making off with it. Rosy began to cry. Finally—because the striding went on so long, she fell into something between a faint and a sleep.
Later she peeped cautiously out of the kitchen window of her house. She saw huge carved posts rising out of sight, and realised that they were the legs of a vast table, whose surface was out of sight. She made out a bucket as big as the house she was in, and a lot of overlapping coloured blankets, which she understood to be the edge of a rag rug, the size of a lawn. Then she heard thudding again, and saw