The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [267]
“I were about to say, go away, I’m busy. And then I saw it was you. Come in.”
“I took a long walk, to think, and then I found I was here. So I came to see how you are getting on.”
“I’ve been drawing seaweeds. Wi’ things moving in them, with the water moving. Things like pipefish and cuttlefish and such.”
“Show me.”
He fetched his drawing pad, and they sat down, side by side, to look at it. There were some extraordinary images of bladderwrack, half-stranded, half-floating, its air pockets just above the surface of the shifting sea.
“First, I see how it looks. I keep looking, and see all the shapes as it moves in the different light. And then, a lot later, I make formal patterns.” He frowned. “You see what’s chance—little flips and flurries on th’ water—and what’s constant, what repeats.”
“It reminds me oddly of Gray’s Anatomy. I have to keep drawing veins, and muscles, and tendons, and joints. I could draw you different levels of what’s moving in your hand as you draw. Muscles that tighten, and what they do to other muscles. How the blood runs like a tide along the veins and arteries. You could make the most beautiful designs from the circulation of the blood. Like currents in the water, and strands of weeds. Only I’m not good at drawing, like you. I have to do it, for all these exams, and I try, and I try. But I mess it up.”
“Show me,” said Philip, pushing the paper pad towards her, and handing her the crayon. Dorothy laughed. She drew a rough image of a hand—the palmar surface—with the strong pulling parallel bands of the muscles and the cross-gartering effect at the sheath of the fingertip. Then she drew an arm, with the main nerves blacked in like rivers and tributaries. Philip was following her crayon by touching his own hand and arm, locating the stresses and counter-stresses, the flow and return.
“Sometimes,” said Dorothy, “I think I shall never get to grips with all of it. External cutaneous nerves. Deltoid. I sometimes feel I’d like to be free of it.”
“Not really,” said Philip. “It’s got you. You’ve got no choice, I think.” He took back the pencil and drew a more elegant version of the network of muscles. “Like me. I hadn’t a choice, from before I could think about it.”
“It means giving things up,” said Dorothy. “Things like camp and the play, now. Things like parties. And more, probably. Women don’t get to be doctors and have time to do the things women do, like getting married, even.”
“No,” said Philip. “It’s like monks and nuns, work, I come to see.”
“Show me your work. I like seeing it.”
Philip fetched out some pots with seaweeds flowing round them, dark green on a marine green blue, with flashes of tawny yellow. He showed her some of the variations on the climbing creatures on branches, derived partly from the Gloucester Candlestick and partly from the Gien version of majolica, with capering grotesques. Dorothy was happy enough with imaginary creepers and creatures anchored so safely in cold earth, held by glaze, set in place by fire.
Philip said
“D’you want to make a pot? I’ve been teaching i’ th’ camp—it’s amazing how people’s aptitudes vary—I think you would throw a good pot, with a bit of practice. You’ve got good, strong, solid hands. With good nerves and tendons and things in the fingers, I should think.”
So Dorothy sat down at the wheel, and Philip stood by her and made it move, and centred the clay for her. He showed her how to feel its texture, how to find a speed, how to hold the wall steady as it rose between her fingers like a cool, wet, living creature. Two or three vessels slumped and flailed, and then, suddenly, easily,