The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [263]
At this point, inopportunely, Elsie Warren approached them. She nodded to Florence, and asked Geraint, without urgency, if he had seen his father. Geraint had not.
“He’s not at home. At least I think not. He’s not at meals. Mind you, he often isn’t.”
“Probably recovering from his lecture,” said Geraint. “A very small quantity of society makes him a recluse for days.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Elsie. “Your mother isn’t bothered.”
“We shall need him at the end of the camp—for the firing.”
“I think he’ll come. He’ll want to oversee it.”
Geraint turned away from her rather abruptly, and asked Florence if he could walk her back to Rye. He expected her to say no, but she said yes. This was partly to claim independence from Julian and Gerald, and partly because she thought Geraint might have something to say about Imogen. But it was partly also that his feelings for her—his steadfastness and patience—were comforting. He was as much out of a men’s world as the Cambridge men, but in his men’s world, men liked women, women interested them.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Something is going on, that’s odd.”
“I always like talking to you. About anything at all.”
“I don’t know about this—”
“Try me,” said Geraint.
“It’s Papa,” said Florence.
They began to walk away, towards Rye.
Charles/Karl was left with Elsie Warren.
“You don’t recognise me, do you?” she said. “I’m out of place. You’ve met me at Purchase House, carrying dishes and clearing up. We’ve not been introduced, so to speak.”
He could not place her accent, which was not local, but he could tell that it was working-class. He considered her. She had made the best of herself, he thought. She had a pale grey high-necked shirt, with tight cuffs, and a swinging skirt in a dark grey cotton. She had a bright red belt, round a shapely waist, and a straw hat with a bright red ribbon and a dashing bunch of stitched anemones, red and purple and blue. He did not know what to say to her, or indeed, how to speak to her. He was also aware that she knew this, and was amused by it. Amusement was not a reaction he had expected.
“Did you enjoy the talk, then?” she said.
“It was of great interest. I am trying to decide whether to study these matters—statistics, poverty—at the London School of Economics.”
“Or?”
“What you mean, or?”
“If you don’t do that, what will you do?”
He could not say, be a good anarchist and foment a revolution. He blushed. “I might go to Germany.”
“Might you? Nice to have a choice. I should like such a choice.”
He looked at her and she looked back, intently. They saw each other clearly. She went on
“Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don’t come into it, much, for me. I do what I must.” Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn’t.
“I imagine you don’t talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects.”
“You are being unfair,” said Charles/Karl. “You are mocking me.”
“We can do that, at least, if we dare.”
“Miss Warren,” said Charles/Karl, “I wish you would not talk as though you were a group, or a class, or a committee. I should like to be talking to you as a person.”
“Can you?”
“Why should I not?”
“For every reason. I am both working-class and not respectable. I am a Fallen Woman. I have a daughter. You don’t want to be talking to me as if I were a person, Mr. Wellwood.”
This information, far from shocking him, excited him. In Munich the goddess, Fanny zu Reventlow, was the mother of a lovely child with no known father. Desire should be free, they said in Schwabing, and Charles/Karl listened, and desired in the abstract, and