The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [197]
28
Prosper Cain was troubled by his responsibility for his motherless daughter, who was becoming a young woman. He feared she was in love, and he feared the love was hopeless. Before Julian went to Cambridge, he and Florence had been very close, reading the same books, taking walks together, arguing about the nature of things. Now Julian was at King’s he had moved into the penumbra of the secret society, the Apostles, and was being watched by young men like Morgan Forster, to see whether he would be a suitable embryo, to be propagated and “born” as a member, on the sacred hearthrug. The sponsor of an embryo was, in the occult language, his “father.” The members of the Society were Reality: everything else was merely Phenomenal. An older student, Gerald Matthiessen, a brilliant Classic, had taken an interest in Julian, with a view to potential fatherhood. He had invited him to breakfast, and taken him on long walks across the Fens. They had discussed Plato, the Aesthetic movement, the nature of virtue, the nature of love. They mocked each other, intently, like sparring partners in a gymnasium. Julian had at first thought that his own penchant for irony, his belief in the dangers of seriousness, would put off Gerald, the passionate thinker, the moralist. Gerald was handsome, in the way Julian himself would have been handsome—fine, narrow, dark, slightly evasive, even sly. Julian’s ideal lover was still someone blond and outdoor and innocent: Tom Wellwood. He was aware that Gerald was interested in him. Many of their conversations turned on male love, and the sublimation of base desires. Tamen usque recurret, murmured Gerald, one night over port. Julian, feeling like a girl, looked down at the cheese and grapes on his plate, and smiled a secretive smile. He rather thought he was putting up with the motes of sexuality in the light from the windows, the sensuality breathed like cigarette smoke and thinning out into the general air, just in order to be able to talk so intensely. But then again, maybe it was becoming his natural atmosphere. He invited Gerald to stay in the South Kensington house—“you will find the quarters cramped, but we have courtyards and staircases and secret cupboards to dream about.”
• • •
Prosper Cain was a connoisseur but not a university man. He had spent his life in the army, which was also a male enclave, and he knew the value of intense comradeliness, even though he knew nothing at all about the Apostles. He also, with deep alarm, saw that Florence was studying the male couple wistfully, was standing outside the pas de deux wanting to be let in. She could not fall in love with Julian. Nothing more natural than that she should fall in love with Julian’s other self, totally eligible, totally at home in the world she had grown up in. Simply because she was female, Florence was the creature Prosper Cain loved most in the world. He loved his son very nearly as much, except for the extra slight rage of protectiveness. He was offended to see his poised Florence with an expression of anxiety, or wistfulness, or looking lost and left out. He talked amiably to Gerald about majolica and putti, about Palissy and dried frogs and toads, and wanted to stab him in the heart for ignoring his daughter. For Gerald did not see Florence, except as a generic girl. He also did not see Imogen Fludd.
Imogen was doing good work as a jewellery designer. The small scale, the precision, the concentration suited her. She made some delightful asymmetrical silver pendants, decorated with drooping threads of tiny pearls like water-drops on spider-webs, and some elegant horn combs, to wear in the hair, inlaid with slivers of ebony, mother-of-pearl, and enamelled copper, one of which she gave to Florence. The art students liked her, but she was intimate with none of them, and did not appear to expect to be. She went only occasionally back to Purchase House, never alone, with Geraint, or—once or twice—with Florence. She had her mother’s long neck and large eyes, and might have been beautiful if she had been more animated. In