The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [209]
“I handled it badly,” Humphry said, with drunken ruefulness.
“You didn’t even handle it,” said Dorothy with scorn. “You just added a worse muddle to a monstrous muddle that already existed. Go away. Please. We have to sort out tomorrow.”
“We can just go back to where we were, maybe …”
“That’s childish. We can’t. Go away.”
Humphry went.
Dorothy sat on top of her bed, clasping her knees, thinking furiously. She was thinking in order not to feel, and her whole body was set and aching with the force of the thinking.
She thought she would not go home—go back to Todefright.
She tried to rearrange Olive in her mind, and failed.
She thought she would not think about Humphry.
She thought, slowly and reluctantly, that she was going to need to tell Griselda—something, she was not sure what, she would have to think of that. She had not told Griselda anything about Hedda’s discovery. She had wanted to go on as they were, cousins and friends, and not let the evil creatures out of Hedda’s Pandora’s box.
She decided she must pretend to be ill, and stay here, in Portman Square. She would explain the blood-spattered sheets by a gushing nosebleed. She would also tell Griselda to tell people—in confidence and untruthfully—that the Curse had come upon her early and with terrible pain, that she couldn’t bear to move.
She was one of those beings who cannot bear uncertainty or indecision. She must act, she must make a plan of action. She must get away, she could not sit any longer in Todefright with horrible secrets bubbling up around her like hot geysers out of a lava-field.
Where could she go, and how?
Tom had run away. Running away was what children in stories did. There was no point in hurrying off to be a wild woman in the woods. She wanted to be a doctor. She tried to think of someone she could plausibly visit for a time.
She was getting tired. She allowed her mind to touch, tentatively, at the image of Anselm Stern, her blood father.
Incurably truthful, she remembered she had not much liked him, had been even a little afraid of him. Griselda had liked him, had talked German to him.
She remembered a slim, black, bearded figure, a bit like a demon. Putting Death into Death’s own box.
His English was no better than her own clumsy German. His puppets had made her uneasy.
He was a kind of showman. Was he a serious person?
She thought a bit harder. Did he know she was his daughter? Did he know he had a daughter?
She felt, in a hot and angry way, that he should be made to know.
She felt, in an exhausted, tearful way, that she needed to know who he was.
Could she bring herself to tell Griselda?
In the morning, she did not go down to breakfast. She huddled under her eiderdown, and said to the maid who brought her ewer of hot water that she felt ill, really ill, and would be glad if Griselda could be fetched. The maid said she would speak to Mrs. Wellwood—either Mrs. Wellwood—and Dorothy said, no, she would be grateful if Griselda could come. Quickly. There was no need to bother anyone else.
Griselda came in, in a white shirt and green skirt, her hair knotted loosely on her neck.
“What is it? Aren’t you well? What’s wrong? Do you need a doctor, or anything?”
“No. I had a nosebleed. I’m sorry about the bedclothes. Something has happened, Grisel, something that changes all my life.”
Griselda moved the midnight dress, and the petticoat, folding them neatly, and sat down on the stubby chair.
“Tell.”
“I almost can’t.”
“We don’t have secrets from each other. Only from the world.”
“This is a secret that a lot of people know, which is a secret about me, and was kept from me.”
“Tell me.”
“My father—that is—well—he told me, I am not his real daughter. He had drunk a bit too much, and it sort of slipped out. He hadn’t been planning to tell me.”
Griselda’s pale face went white.
“Did you believe him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say who your father was—is?”
“Yes. He’s that German man with the puppet-show who came to the Midsummer party, when we were younger.” She thought. “I don’t