The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [204]
“Agreed.”
“I was thinking about how I can’t do quadratic equations, and how I never shall be able to, if you keep taking Mr. Susskind off to Germany on cultural trips just when I almost can. And I shall never matriculate, and never be a doctor.”
“What a very unromantic thought. There must be other tutors.”
“Well, this one knows what it is I don’t understand.”
A slow silence.
“You didn’t tell me what you are thinking?”
“Oddly, dear cousin, I was thinking in a sort of way about the same thing. I was thinking how nice it is in Munich, and about going secretly to cabarets which would give my mater a fit if she knew. You see, I am being honest.”
“Now we are at least talking to each other. What’s good about the cabarets?”
Charles said they were very avant-garde. And smoky. And that the police sometimes invaded them. He said he needed Joachim Susskind to do simultaneous translation.
“Ah,” said Dorothy, between fury and amusement, “but you don’t need him as I need him. Dog in a manger.”
Pomona’s little hand was chilly in Tom’s, and didn’t heat up. He felt sorry for her, which was good for him. She didn’t speak. He was looking into her mass of hair, which had embroidered flowers pinned into it. He said it must be wonderful to live in a magical place like the Denge Marsh.
In some ways it was, Pomona agreed.
Perhaps she was a bit lonely without Imogen, he ploughed on.
It wasn’t really Imogen, Pomona said in a small voice. It wasn’t very nice now Elsie had gone away.
Tom didn’t know about this. He asked where Elsie had gone, and was told, in a kind of gentle hiss, that she had gone to have a baby, and was coming back when it was all over, but that nobody was very cheerful because of this, neither Mama, nor Philip, nor Papa of course either.
There was another silence while Tom dredged up a reply. He was not going to ask about the baby, that was not what he would do. He repeated that the place was magical, and heard the banality in his own voice.
Pomona said
“From outside it is. I feel we’re under a spell. You know, behind one of those thickets in stories. We trail out to the orchard and back to the kitchen. And up to bed, and out to the orchard, and back to the kitchen. We sew. That’s part of the spell. We have to sew things or something dreadful will happen.”
If Dorothy had said all this, it would have been a joke. But Pomona’s voice was amiably monotonous.
“Well, I suppose you could go to College, like Imogen, couldn’t you?”
“And sew things? I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d be let go to College. Are you going to College?”
“I’m thinking about it,” Tom said evasively.
They trotted on, dancing neither well nor badly. Tom said
“There must be other things, besides sewing.”
“Pots,” said Pomona. “There are pots.”
Something in Tom evaded remarking stupidly that maybe she would get out and be married. He felt she was not all there, but then, there were moments when he felt he was not all there himself. Maybe, like him, she was somewhere else. He would have liked to get away from her, and this made him sorry for her, so he asked for another dance.
Gerald was enjoying the dance, against his expectations. He actually liked the physical exercise of dancing, which he had learned very thoroughly as a little boy in weekend dancing classes. There was no call to dance in King’s College. He looked at the young women to work out which would be pleasurable to dance with, from this point of view. The best dancer was Griselda Wellwood, who moved elegantly, almost like a perfect mechanical doll. But her little book—decorated with lilies of the valley—was crowded. He booked what he could, and went back to Florence Cain. She had more space, having refused to give Geraint as many dances as he wanted. She was, in Gerald’s view, the second-best dancer, less perfect in her movements, but also less mechanical, and, he discovered after stepping out with both young ladies, more responsive to his leading, readier to follow him in inventing variations on the steps. She annoyed him, at first, by what he saw