The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [189]
“I’ve found something out.”
“You’re always finding things out. You shouldn’t snoop.”
“This is an important thing. It changes everything.”
Tom had a vision of bankruptcy. Dorothy had a vision of her father leaving for good, perhaps joining Mrs. Oakeshott. Phyllis sat even more still than she had been. She had a great capacity for not moving, somewhere between composure and inertia.
“Spit it out,” said Tom. “Now you’ve started, you’d better get on with it.”
“I saw. I heard. He goes into Aunt Violet’s bedroom late at night, and stays. I’ve seen him before. You can hear them. You can tell what they’re doing.”
“You don’t know if you haven’t seen them,” said Dorothy.
“They make cuddling noises.” She blurted out “He calls her, little flower. And she called him Booby.”
This revelation upset everyone, and made them all angry. They were angry with Hedda for making them know this, rather than with Humphry and Violet for what they did and said.
“Last night she was crying a lot. She said she was sure about something, and that she hadn’t been wrong before. She said she wished she could die. She said she was frightened.”
“Well?” said Tom, his imagination recoiling. Hedda looked at Dorothy, who was going to be medical. Hedda’s brow was creased with pain and rage.
“She was saying,” said Hedda, “that she was going to have a baby, that’s what she was saying. And she said—she’d had babies before—she said—I heard—some of us are really hers. Children of my body she said.”
The melodrama of the phrase felt improbable to Tom and Dorothy, just as the word “Booby” had done. But once it was said it was in the world. Their irritation with Hedda increased.
“So?” said Tom, with a little spirit. If there was one thing in the world he was sure of, it was that he was his mother’s son. “I don’t see what you think we can do.”
“If we aren’t—who we think we are—it might be good to know.”
“I don’t think so,” said Phyllis, flatly. “What good would it do? We are still the same people, in the same house, with the same family.”
Dorothy’s thoughts were whirring. She didn’t look like Tom, she had always felt only precariously attached to the group life. Different. All children felt “different,” she had always supposed. She felt that she had always irritated Olive. She had thought that was perhaps because Olive loved Tom too completely to have enough love left over for her. But maybe …
The story Olive wrote for her rose up in her mind’s eye. It was about shape-changers, scuttling, bustling little people who hung up animal skins on the hooks in the kitchen, and then put them on, and became half-hedgehogs, to go out into the bushes and ditches.
Violet was a scuttling, bustling little person, whose nature was domestic, like the aproned hedgehog-women in the underground kitchens of Dorothy’s tale.
Dorothy wanted not to be imaginative. She wanted to measure chemicals and mend limbs and organs. But her imagination was just and fierce. If anyone was Violet’s child, she herself probably was.
She did not say any of this to anyone. She said to Hedda
“I could shake you till your teeth rattled.”
“I don’t know why you’re all so cross with me. You should be cross at them.”
Some sort of deep prohibition prevented all four of them from making any effort to imagine the emotions, the predicament, the delights and terrors, of Booby and little flower. Their minds were busy with rearranging the family patterns in their heads, like chessboards which suddenly lacked a bishop and had too many knights, or where the queen ran amok in zigzags.
Knowledge is power, but not if it is only partial knowledge and the knower is a dependent child, already perturbed by a changing body, squalling emotions, the sense of the outside world looming outside the garden wall, waiting to be entered. Knowledge is also fear.
Tom dealt with Hedda’s revelation by absconding on a long walk, stomping along the Downs, carrying his bedding on his back. Walking fast is a good way of channelling all sorts of emotions: fear, desire, panic.