The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [199]
Prosper Cain would have liked to give Imogen Fludd a ball dress—an elegant, modern, shapely ball dress. But he felt it would not be proper. He deputed Florence to ask her what she would wear. He had invited Benedict Fludd, Seraphita and Pomona to come to the party, and had found lodgings for them in a house near the Museum, with a retired sergeant-major and his wife. Florence repeated that Imogen had said that Purchase House was full of stunning embroidered silks and linens, all baled up and folded away. She suggested they both go down to the Marshes, find something possible, and bring it back to be refashioned by Katharina’s dressmaker into something less mediaeval and more up-to-date. What about Pomona? Florence asked Imogen. “She will just have to wear what Mama puts on her,” said Imogen. “She’s very pretty, whatever she’s wearing. She doesn’t seem to notice things like that.”
When they went to Purchase House, things were more than usually chaotic. Elsie was nowhere to be seen, and Benedict and Philip had just lost a whole firing of porcelain bowls. Seraphita was limp and pale, and Pomona scorched some grilled fish and boiled vegetables.
Imogen took Florence into a closed room, where dusty leather trunks full of folded materials and barely worn dresses were piled on top of each other. Pomona crept after them, and stood, large-eyed, half-in half-out of the room. Florence noticed that the sisters seemed to have nothing to say to each other. Imogen, resourceful and deliberate, turned over garments, shook out folds. She found what she was looking for—a dark green and ribbed silk, embroidered with pink and white daisies. It was shaped like a mediaeval gown, with a high waist and a little train. “We can do something with that,” she said. “And it will look good in the Green Dining-Room with the Burne-Jones panels and the Morris paper. It will blend in.”
It was Florence who asked Pomona what she would wear, if they could help…
Pomona replied flatly that her mother spent her life sewing, it was what she did, she would put together something, as she had done before. Her face was lovely, her voice was vanishing. Florence asked, where was Elsie?
“She went away to have a baby. She’s coming back, it’s all arranged.”
She did not invite questions. Florence asked lightly whether Pomona, too, would come and study at the Art School, and noticed that the question distressed both sisters, in different ways. A look went between them. Pomona said she thought not, she was needed here, in Purchase House. She looked down at the dusty floorboards. Imogen said they must go, they must go back to London, now.
In the train, on the way back, she said suddenly to Florence “I’d be happy if I never had to go back there again.”
“Why?” asked Florence, lightly.
“I can’t bear to be so odd and so hopeless. It’s a place without hope. Well, the pots are hopeful, when the kiln doesn’t melt down. But—but—I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you and your father.”
Florence dared not ask what Imogen thought about Elsie’s baby, or whose it might be. She did not dare raise the question of what was to happen to Pomona, though she didn’t know why. They went back to South Kensington where a delicious dinner, and the secretive, grave young men awaited them.
Violet said she would make Dorothy a dress. Humphry was told to bring ladies’ magazines from London, and Violet looked at the photographs and drawings. She said it wouldn’t suit Dorothy to wear a girlish colour—Dorothy was handsome, but not pretty. It should be deep rose, perhaps, or dark blue, maybe in shot taffeta with a glow in it. Dark blue like the midnight sky, said Violet, and insisted on taking Dorothy on an excursion to London, for if she was to have a grown-up dress she must have some sort of shaping bodice. Everything this year, in the magazines, was lacy. She had the idea of making a lacy jacket—not in bright white, in some silvery thread—with short sleeves and a collar that would stand up when Dorothy had put her hair up.
Dorothy found the expedition, and the subsequent sessions