The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [248]
The two heroes of this camp were Wolfgang Stern and Tom. They made friends. Leon and Charles/Karl sat and discussed utopia with Joachim Susskind, but Wolfgang charmed everyone, male and female. Dorothy, very sensibly, had drawn Wolfgang aside, and had said, flatly, “I have said nothing to Tom.”
“No?” said Wolfgang.
“He wouldn’t understand,” said Dorothy, defensively. “He would change. I don’t want that.”
“So you arrange your brothers, to suit yourself, Schwesterchen.”
“You are always laughing at me. You do understand, really.”
“I shall be silent as night, and—I don’t know the word, it is not cunning, which I do know—taktvoll.”
“Tactful.”
Dorothy was somewhat apprehensive when she watched Wolfgang set out to charm Tom. They went on little rambles together and exchanged names of plants—Rittersporn, larkspur—the spur is in both. He charmed the young women, too, paying carefully casual compliments to Imogen, Griselda, Florence and even Phyllis, finding them little gifts, stones and bunches of flowers. Julian, who was the same age as Wolfgang, envied him his ease. He was able to swing on the gate between youth and man, innocence and experience, back and forth, easily, with his dark, sharp, alert smile, at once youthfully silly, and slyly almost sexual. “What do you like best about me?” he said to Griselda, with whom he conversed in an Anglo-German babble. “Oh, that’s easy. Your name.”
“My name? But I was simply given that, it is not me.”
“You were simply given your long legs and your face, for that matter,” said Griselda, resting her eyes on these excellent forms. “But you can’t hear Wolfgang in English. It’s terribly romantic. Wolf walk. Wolf pace. We don’t have names that mean dangerous animals.”
“Am I dangerous?”
“Oh yes.”
But this was as far as flirting went, and he had much the same conversation with Florence, and with Imogen.
They waited until the very end of the camp to hold the daring bathing party in which they all went naked into the pool. Wolfgang said it was a ceremony to ensure friendship would last, a kind of pagan total immersion. They invited the tutors to join them, but neither wanted to come. Julian knew that this was because their bodies were already less than perfect. They came shyly out of their tents and took hands, and danced on the lawn, white and gold Griselda with high mediaeval breasts, thickset Dorothy, willowy Imogen, the one who was trying to cover herself, and could not, because Florence, gleaming like porcelain, and chubby Phyllis were holding her hands. They circled a bit, singing “Greensleeves,” as they all knew the tune, and then the line peeled off, and one by one, resolute, laughing, looking furtively at each other, they ran, still holding hands, into the water, shrieking as it closed over their sexes, laughing as their hair tumbled under, and then chasing each other, swimming like ducks or fish. Wolfgang’s hand closed around Griselda’s breast and let go. Geraint managed to catch Florence, and hold her, before she wriggled away like an eel or a Rhine maiden. Tom leaped up out of the water, and somersaulted, and dived down in a curtain of mist and came up, and dived again.
Julian sat on the little pier, his sex lolling between his thighs, and looked on. He thought, we are such fools. We cannot imagine we shall grow old, and we shall grow old, year by year, all this pretty—more than pretty—flesh will be damaged and diminished, one way or another. He put his chin in his hands, and from below the water Tom pulled him down by the ankles, and, laughing wildly, smeared him all over with mud.
Time is cyclical. Time is linear. Time is biological—breasts change shape, mouths harden, hair loses a little gloss. Time is named in years and months. In 1903 they made an attempt to repeat the camp and its innocent pleasures, in the same tents, in the same garden, by the