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By Root 2134 0

said, presenting her with a woollen jacket and knitted boots. She learned to sit up, and sat where she was put, and looked around Marian Oakeshott’s cottage garden, seeing hollyhocks and marigolds she assumed were eternal. One day she stood up, and staggered from grass to border, crashing down amongst the delphiniums and knowing them now as an acrid smell as well as a blue series of towers. For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come “again” and began to learn to expect. She learned language, and faces, Elsie and Marian, Tabitha and Robin, who pushed her over and kissed her better, his red hair blowing in the breeze. She learned to expect sweets from Patty Dace and Arthur Dobbin and Frank Mallett, who made her daisy chains. Marian Oakeshott said to Elsie, as they walked with their children along the Military Canal in the summer of 1903, that she thought Ann was a very clever child, a noticing child, a thinking child. “Like you,” said Marian to Elsie.

“Much good it has done me,” said Elsie to Marian, not denying that she was clever.

“It’s not too late,” said Marian. In 1903 Elsie was twenty-four. She would be twenty-eight in 1907, which is almost thirty, and was no longer “young.” She was already afraid in 1903 of being somehow solidified into resignation in 1907.

“It is too late,” she said to Marian, whom she had come to care for. “I done for myself having Ann, you know that. So I must sit in this Marsh and slave for these silly women. I made my own bed. Or at least, I put the mattress down.”

“I don’t ask Tabitha to look after Ann so that you can settle down in a Slough of Despond. What do you want to do? You must want something.”

Elsie wanted sex, but there was no one to offer it whom she would have touched, and Ann’s coming had made her wary. She wondered if Marian wanted sex. Once, thinking about desire, which she didn’t do for a good year and a bit after Ann’s birth, she had said to Mrs. Oakeshott “I expect you still miss him terribly.” And Marian had said “Who?” And Elsie had known, as Marian smoothly talked over her mistake, and said she missed him all the time—Elsie had known that Marian was in the same position as herself, that there was no Mr. Oakeshott, dead or alive. This made her feel less beholden—which was good for her—and protective, which was also good for her. She knew Marian knew she knew. She knew neither of them would ever mention her knowledge. She felt a kind of love for Marian’s courage and resourcefulness.

She said now, with her usual sharpness, “Girls from my class, mam, are not encouraged to want things.” The mam was a joke, they both knew. They walked on in silence. Elsie said

“I did want to make very small pots. Miniature pots. I still do sometimes, when Mr. Fludd and Philip are away. But then I squash them up again, almost all. It’s hard having Philip around. I know what a really good pot looks like, and I know his look like that and mine don’t mostly. They can exist or not, it don’t matter.”

“You’d be better off being a teacher than a sort of servant.”

“Hah! And how should I be qualified to do that? I don’t read too well.”

“I shall teach you to qualify to be a teacher. I shall teach you—and two or three others—in the evenings. Once you’ve got some of the way, you can be a teaching assistant and go on to qualify. Then you’ll be able to choose where to work and earn wages. I still can’t fathom how the Fludds pay you.”

“They don’t, mostly. Philip does. He sells a few pots and he gives me some money. They give him some, sometimes, not regularly. What he really cares about is being able to buy clay and chemicals and fuel and things. But he sees me right.”

“You’re all mad and muddled. It’s shocking.”

“I’d like to try this teachering. I can bring Ann, can I?”

“That is my idea.”

Between 1902 and 1907 Tom Wellwood changed from being someone who was about to settle down to be a student, to being someone who had