The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [186]
At this point they all fell silent, as they heard the crashing footsteps of the giant child. The cracks in the shutters were full of the red light of her skirts. The monster looked to see if its offering of food had been accepted, and sighed heavily when it saw it had not. It spoke, incomprehensibly, booming like an organ in a church. Rosy stayed mum. The door closed again, and the key turned.
Rosy said
“When it’s dark, you could all get out and run away to somewhere. I should think you’re so little the monster can’t even see you. You can run away like spiders.”
The little old woman then said something surprising.
“If you—Miss Rosy Monster—can push the key to the floor from inside the house, we can slide under the door, where the step dips, and take with us a string, a rope, which we can tie to the key, so that you can pull it back to the inside, and open the door, and go out.”
Rosy was dumbfounded.
“Why should you want to help me to get out?”
“Well,” said another woman, “we could say practically that your legs are a great deal longer than ours when it comes to making our way home. Or you could say we don’t approve of locking people up and making them into toys. Or you could say both.” She added “Don’t cry. It makes us damp.”
Rosy said “Even if I get out, I don’t know where we are, or how to get out of this kitchen.”
“That’s as may be,” said the little man. “One thing at a time. First we get out, second we hide and hide—we are good at hiding, we can give you advice—then we work out the way home.”
“We must have come over the mountain.”
“Then we find the mountain, and cross it. Some advice, young monster. You will be dreadfully visible in a bright pink dress. Find yourself some clothes the colour of shadows and dead leaves before nightfall. And make yourself a satchel of food you can eat, and put in some oats for us. We can travel in this basket and hide amongst the bobbins of thread. Think what you will need on a journey. Something to cut and stab with. Something to drink from, for you and for us. Now go and find string, to make a rope to pull in the doorkey.”
Rosy did as he said, and they waited till nightfall and all went as they had planned.
How they made their dangerous way home over fells and fens, how the large child helped the small people, and how they helped her, must wait for another tale …
27
No child, it is said, has the same parents as any other. Tom’s parents had been younger and wilder than Robin’s parents would ever be. Harry had never known a family where there were not older children who seemed free and powerful, came and went mysteriously, were not confined to the nursery. The little ones experienced the family as a flock of creatures who moved in clutches and gaggles, shared nurseries and also feelings and opinions. Tom and Dorothy were old, and separate enough to have started thinking of their own futures, away from Todefright, full of tenuous hopes and fears, and in Dorothy’s case a rigorous and sometimes dispiriting ambition. Tom, at the end of 1900, was eighteen. His parents had a plan for his future—he was to sit matriculation exams in the autumn, and present himself as a candidate for a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, at the end of the year. They had engaged tutors—Toby Youlgreave and Joachim Susskind. Beyond that they did not think very often about what was, or was not, going on in Tom’s head. Olive continued—at intervals—to elaborate the adventures underground, and Tom read them, feeling, as the year moved on, an increasing unease, almost a guilt, for being still so caught up in a tale. He had a fit of vehement anger when the journalist came, and was shown the secret books, even though everyone knew about them, they were not real secrets. He said you didn’t display that sort of private family thing to the public, as a kind of boasting. It wasn’t nice. Olive said she hadn’t intended to do it, it had just happened. They patched up the quarrel, but Tom glowered for two or