The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [212]
“Mr. Woodhouse from Emma, Herbert?”
“No, my love, though the connotation is present, and you have perceptively noted it. It is spelt, in this case, Wodehouse. There is a figure—a kind of Green Man, a kind of Wild Man of the Woods—who is known as Wodwose. I discovered, to my great delight, that country people still talk about Wodwoses but call them Wodehouses. It is to be the tale of a timid man who retreats to a cottage in the woods to live naturally—a man who at that stage temperamentally resembles Mr. Woodhouse from Emma—who coddles himself with woolly comforters and embrocations—and meets the Wild Girl who is living freely in the depth of the forest—”
“You said it was a wood.”
“It is an English wood that symbolically takes on the properties of the deeper Forest—where he learns to walk free and naked in Nature—”
“What is she like, the Wild Girl?”
“I haven’t wholly invented her. She has your eyes, of course. I cannot invent a—a beloved woman—who does not have your eyes. But she is hard for to tame. Yes.”
“And how does it end?”
“I don’t know that, yet, either. Wonderfully, I think. But, it may be, with a wonderful disaster. I need to find it out, I need to follow my instincts. Which is why I need particular peace and quiet in the next few months—such as you have always protected for me, my darling.”
In June, a party consisting of Toby Youlgreave, Joachim Susskind, Karl Wellwood, Griselda Wellwood, and Dorothy Wellwood, set out by boat and railway for Munich.
Most of the persuasive talking had been done by Griselda. A child who has been brought up in a partly public space, surrounded by servants directly and indirectly concerned with the controlling and ordering of her own life, a child who has not been brought up in intimate contact with either of her parents, and who has been accustomed to meet them in formalised, public spaces, has had to learn to keep her own counsel, to create a private space for private projects, inside her own head and body. Many upper-class girls did not learn that, and went dolllike from nursery to dance floor to white lace in church and the unexpected fleshy horrors or delights of the bridal bedroom. If Griselda was not a doll, even though she had often been dressed as a doll, it was, in fact, because her father and mother loved her, with however much reticence, as a human being. She knew this—as indeed Charles/Karl also knew it in his own case—and now exploited it, with some cunning, on Dorothy’s behalf. She did not know what it was that had so shocked her cousin—it was something appalling in the way she had been casually told about her parentage, Griselda surmised. But she loved Dorothy, and Dorothy was shocked. So Griselda went to Katharina, and confided in her. What she confided was a series of half-truths and serious fibs about Dorothy’s unhappiness at home, about the lack of seriousness with which her flighty parents approached her steadfast ambition to be a doctor. Delicately, Griselda accused her mother of favouring Charles/Karl—he could command the attention of a tutor, and by travelling with this tutor as his companion, deprive Dorothy of lessons she needed. Dorothy was nervously depressed. She, Griselda, was restless. Why should they not, with each other for company, go with Charles and Joachim Susskind to Munich and perfect their German—
“You will not,” interposed Katharina from Hamburg, “learn classical German in Bavaria—”
“Herr Susskind speaks classical German. And he has an aunt, Mama, who has a pension and gives classes in mathematics and biology to young ladies—mathematical genius runs in Herr Susskind’s family—she is called Frau Carlotta Susskind—and we could stay in her pension and see the artworks, and study, and it would take Dorothy out of herself—I can’t bear to see her so unhappy.”
“Her unhappiness is very sudden.”
“No, it isn’t, Mama. She is very strong, and she hides things well. I can confide in you, she has given me permission—”
Katharina sometimes thought that Griselda and Dorothy were almost unhealthily bound up in each other. Griselda