The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [269]
“It’s not the same as Dorothy being a doctor.”
“It’s very clear what a doctor is. I’ve been talking to Toby Youlgreave. I’m going to do some hard work, and try to go there. Find out what I am.”
“I started on my matriculation and stopped,” said Florence. “I shouldn’t have. Would Mr. Youlgreave take me on? I know my father would be positively pleased—”
“It would be wonderful,” said Griselda, sincerely.
Florence was in a turmoil. She had promised herself to Geraint, and she was now promising herself to years of study. She did not think Newnham College would care for married students. She wished to disturb her father, at some ferocious girlish level, and felt—she was not really thinking—that the engagement would do that.
And yet—like Griselda, she did want to think. And she did see her future as, perhaps, the choice between thinking and sex.
• • •
Not only did The Fairy Castle change and develop as the campers worked on it during the days of construction—it went on developing during the performances in the Tithe Barn, for the ten days during which it was performed. August Steyning was in charge of both the set design and the production. There were two castles at the end of the barn, one in front of the other. The smaller was shining and gilded, a casket of a castle, in which the marionettes performed fairy feasts and transformations. Behind it, in shadow, rose the curiously kiln- or oast-house-shaped dark tower, made of wooden crates painted to look like mossy stone blocks, with no apparent way in, and no apparent way of looking out. The story was simple and complicated at the same time. It began with two children, playing in a clearing in a wood.
The clearing was in the centre of the barn. The trees were children, clothed in green and brown dyed cheesecloth, holding up branches. The children were Hedda, now fourteen, and Robin Wellwood, now ten, with his father’s flaming red hair. The Girl went to sleep with her head against a stump. A crew of tiny goblins, with pricking whiskers and long tails, of stumping dwarves with boots and beards, and an imperious Elf king and queen moved in on the couple and held out enticing iced cakes and transparent beakers of shiny liquid to the Boy, who nibbled and sipped, and fell dramatically into their arms. They carried his rigid body through the barn, and behind the golden box. Lights shone on a white sheet that rose (held up by Phyllis and Pomona) and then, magically, a swarm of flying shadows of the tiny beasts, only infinitely tinier, whirled like a swarm of wasps, or a crowd of starlings, and plunged into the secret castle.
The Girl woke and was disconsolate. She waved her arms and howled. A cottage on twelve naked feet danced into the clearing, and swayed to a standstill. Out of it came a lame old woman on a stick, who asked the Girl for help picking apples, for water from the well, for a shoulder to lean on as she walked. She gripped and was heavy. Hedda stumbled with pain. The old woman then revealed herself as a serious and beautiful gold-headed child, who gave instructions as to how to find the stolen Boy.
“You must travel on, over the mountain, beyond the sun and the moon, to the Land of the Stars. You must not speak a word. You must offer help to all who ask it. Enemies can be unmasked and defeated with cold iron.” She gave Hedda a large, slightly rusted kitchen knife, and went back into the cottage, which tripped out of the barn.
Hedda went on, and on, and on. Steyning did some very clever things with lighting, so that she seemed to be hurtling through snowstorms, and staggering across hot deserts, and treading through shining pillars of ice. She met, and defeated, the man of straw, the wolfman (in a pine forest)