The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [245]
His children delighted and worried him. Julian seemed to have settled for the life of a scholar, for want of an urgent vocation. Florence, who had been so forthright and practical as a girl, became, he said to himself, “moony” as she grew into womanhood. He was distressed by her ability to cling on to a hopeless—indeed, he considered it an unreal—passion for a man who was not what she thought he was. He thought he should perhaps speak to her, but was profoundly shy, when it came to speaking of the heart. She would not listen to him if he did speak, and what could he decorously say? He assumed—he needed to assume—that Julian would grow out of what he, as an army man, saw as a normal phase of passionate male friendship. But the other—this Gerald—he knew in his bones would not. But you can’t say that to a young girl. He considered appealing to Imogen Fludd but she, too, could not be decently approached on this subject.
He had his worries about her, also. In 1902 she was twenty-three and becoming an accomplished silversmith. He liked to watch her work.
The new Professor of Design, W. R. Lethaby, and Henry Wilson, the expert in silverwork and jewellery, newly arrived from the Art-workers Guild, had introduced new ways of working. The artists sat at French jewellers’ benches, which were made of beech and had semicircular holes cut, like a flower, under which hung leather sheepskins to catch every shred and filing of precious metals as they fell. Each worker had his or her own blow-pipe, and tall Imogen sat there patiently, her hair coiled behind her head, tending the sharp blue flame, making long silver wires for filigree work, beating silver plates finer and finer. She worked in soft stones—turquoise, opals. She used a delicate bow, an ash rod strung with iron wire, to slice opals, which had to be done very very slowly and precisely. Prosper Cain liked to look at her calm face as she concentrated. She wore an indigo-blue overall, full length, and tucked her long legs under the sheepskin. At first he had thought her inexpressive and slow, but he thought now that she was a masked woman, that underneath was another kind of creature, fierce, precise, determined, capable of beauty. He was surprised that none of the male students seemed to have discovered these qualities. They paid her little attention. Other women students were vivacious or sultry. Imogen Fludd was—as her teachers recognised—an artist, and committed to her art. But Prosper Cain felt she should have life, too. Her douceur was unnatural.
There had been talk of Pomona joining Imogen at the Royal College. She had come up to London, looking flustered and pink, and had taken the exams. She had failed. Neither her father’s reputation, nor her sister’s excellent progress, nor Prosper Cain’s interest in her could disguise the fact that she had no talent, the examiners said, that the work was both childlike and childish. She seemed rather relieved, than not, when the decision was broken to her, and went back to Lydd. It was Imogen whose eyes were red-rimmed at supper that evening, but she said nothing.
33
The New Forest camp took place in the peaceful summer of 1902, when the war in South Africa had ended. There was a cottage in a clearing, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a parlour, made of old, red, crumbling bricks. Its windows were unevenly