The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [276]
Philip Warren had it in mind to make a memorial to Benedict Fludd. He had been included in talks between Geraint and Prosper about the future of Purchase pottery and sales through The Silver Nutmeg. He had felt the subsiding of hope or expectation in himself as the bottle kiln cooled slowly after the firing. He had waited alone, until the saggars were ready to be unpacked. Then he unpacked them, slowly. The firing had been almost wholly successful. Some small pieces of student work had crumbled, and one of his own seaweed bowls, to which he had been particularly attached, lay in shards. But generally the treasure gleamed and glistened. Pomona had crept quietly to his side and asked to be allowed to help to take out and arrange the ware. She seemed, he thought without considering the matter, less determinedly childish. She had tied up her hair. She said
“Do you think he’s dead, Philip?”
“I don’t know. He has gone off, before.”
“I feel he’s dead. I think I would know inside me if he wasn’t.”
“I know what you mean. I feel that, too. He’s somehow gone.” She went on lining up slightly unbalanced amateur goblets. She said “Things will be different.”
Philip had just begun on what might turn out to be Benedict Fludd’s last warm pots, cooling under his fingers. A two-faced drinking mug leered at him. An elegant dragon spread its gold wings in an inky sky.
“You’ll be wanting to study, maybe,” he said to Pomona.
“I have no talents,” she said.
The projected memorial was a globe-shaped pot, large and simple. It was to be layered, like the round earth, with fire beating up from its depths, with coal over the fire, with fossil forms in the coal, with dark sea-blue flowing over the coal, and over the sea, on an inky sky, with a moon in it, a tracery of white foam which should be both wild and formal in its movements, somehow Japanese. He could see it clearly in his mind’s eye. It was fiendishly hard to conceive—all those glazes, welded together, the necessity for the difficult red to be simultaneously both bloody and fiery. He made drawings of lizards and dragonflies and snails, coiled in the jet-black coal. Sometimes he thought the moon should be full, and sometimes a hair-thin crescent, barely scratched in.
He thought—he was not much given to studying people’s feelings—that Seraphita was relieved and released by her husband’s death. She went out, spontaneously, to call on neighbours, to take tea with Phoebe Methley, who was kind to her. He was less sure about Pomona. She seemed both more ordinary, and stunned.
Then, one night, in the small hours he woke to hear footsteps in the corridor outside his room. He waited, irritably, for her to turn his doorhandle, but the steps went past. They were hurried, and measured. He thought of returning to sleep, and knew he must not. So he pulled on a coat, and went down the stairs. He heard her unlock the kitchen door. And go out into the yard. He imagined her casting herself into the Military Canal. But she went into what he now thought of as his studio. There was a full moon. He lurked by the window, and heard a scratching, and a scraping. He was possessed by terror that she meant to break things. He crept up, and peered in. She was on the other side of the room, unlocking the forbidden pantry. He had not known she knew about it, let alone knowing where the key was hidden.
She came out with a white vase in the shape of a naked girl. She moved dreamily, mechanically, but he was now not sure she was sleepwalking. He followed, at a safe distance—they were both barefoot—into the garden. She flowed on, into the orchard. She sat down at the root of an apple tree, and took out a sharp trowel, from a space in its roots.
“I know you’re there,” she said. “Don’t say anything. Just help.”
He stepped forward, out of the shadows. She handed him the