The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [205]
There was a late arrival, when the dancing had been interrupted for supper. The young went to collect their plates and glasses in the Grill-Room, and came back to the Centre Refreshment Room to eat in groups at the tiny, but heavy, tables, made of ornamental ironwork with small grey marble slabs, encased in more ironwork. In the Refreshment Corridor were plaster bas-reliefs, depicting abstract craftsmen—Industrial Science and Industrial Art—and real humans. Arkwright inventing the loom, Palissy taking baked pots from a furnace. Tom pointed these out to Pomona, to whom he had somehow become permanently attached. She shuddered when she saw Palissy, and said “That’s Palissy. You see, I can’t get away from weaving and pots.” Tom knew nothing about Palissy, and observed that he looked benign. Pomona said he might well have been, if you were interested in pots.
Geraint had managed to secure Florence for supper, since Gerald had insinuated himself into that place in Griselda’s little book. Geraint deciphered the inscription on the porcelain painting on the Grill-Room buffet, and read it out in a funny voice.
“May-Day, May-Day, the Blithe May-Day, the Merrie, Merrie Month of May.”
The Victorians were earnest, even about being merry, said the Edwardian young man. Florence laughed. But she felt a kind of loyalty to the ambition of the Museum, because of her father.
The late arrival was August Steyning, who went to join the elders in the Green Dining-Room, where waiters were serving supper on Minton plates. He was given a chair next to Olive. The table centre-piece was a large, glowing lustre bowl by Benedict Fludd, depicting that odd moment in the Rheingold when Freya is up to her neck in gold loot, the golden apples are turning grey and papery, and the two giants stretch out huge hands to take the young goddess. Fludd’s depiction of the heaped treasure, in ceramic, was masterly—goblets, bracelets, glinting crowns, trickling coins and the shape of a young woman underneath the heap, hinted suggestively. On the other side of the bowl lurked, not Wotan struggling with the ring, but Loge, holding a very lively golden apple in a cloak of flame.
August Steyning was rehearsing The Smart Set, a drawing-room comedy by J. M. Barrie, with an edge of pain and irony. Olive asked him how it was going.
“The actors are good. It has a pretty pace. It is not without meaning, even though too much of it turns on undelivered letters and impertinent servants. But—dear Mrs. Wellwood, dear Olive—it isn’t what I want to be doing. It’s bread-and-butter work, and I do it to the best of my ability. But if I could have my way, all the tasteful furniture which makes the stage like an airless mirror of daily life would be whisked lightly up—sofas like flying elephants, tables galloping into the wings like wild ponies—and we should see through the looking glass into the world of dream and story. The stage doesn’t have to reproduce drawing rooms with false balconies and unreal windows. We can put anything on the stage now, daemons, dragons, Worms, sly Elves, slow trolls, malign silkies, even the Brollachan and Nuckelavee. Instead of which I have actresses quarrelling over the waists of tea-gowns and freshly made egg-and-cress sandwiches every rehearsal.”
“We all went to see Bluebell in Fairyland, with Seymour Hicks,” said Olive. “The children loved it. The songs were pretty.”
“But it