The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [278]
Not Tom. You would have wagered that Tom would clap hardest.
The penultimate scene was the testing of the Beautiful Mothers, by Wendy. The Nursery filled with a bevy of fashionably dressed women, who were allowed to claim the Lost Boys if they responded sensitively to a flushed face, or a hurt wrist, or kissed their long-lost child gently, and not too loudly. Wendy dismissed several of these fine ladies, in a queenly manner. Steyning spoke to Olive behind his hand. “This will have to go.” Olive smiled discreetly and nodded. Steyning said “It’s part pantomime, part play. It’s the play that is original, not the pantomime.” “Hush,” said the fashionable lady in front of him, intent on the marshalling of the Beautiful Mothers.
After the wild applause, and the buzz of discussion, Olive said to Tom
“Did you enjoy that?”
“No,” said Tom, who was in a kind of agony. “Why not?”
Tom muttered something in which the only audible word was “cardboard.” Then he said “He doesn’t know anything about boys, or making things up.”
August Steyning said “You are saying it’s a play for grown-ups who don’t want to grow up?”
“Am I?” said Tom. He said “It’s make-believe make-believe make-believe. Anyone can see all those boys are girls.”
His body squirmed inside his respectable suit. Tom said “It’s not like Alice in Wonderland. That’s a real other place. This is just wires and strings and disguises.”
“You have a Puritan soul,” said Steyning. “I think you will find, that whilst everything you say is true, this piece will have a long life and people will suspend their disbelief, very happily.”
In the New Year of 1905, on a frosty evening, Humphry and Olive went to dine with August Steyning at Nutcracker Cottage. The room was candlelit. A log fire was burning in the inglenook. It had been hard to light, and everything was veiled with smoke and smelled of smoke. Steyning gave them comforting winter food—a winter soup of dried peas and ham, roast pheasant, stuffed with a piece of fillet steak, Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, glazed with marsala sauce. The only other guest was Toby Youlgreave.
They discussed Peter Pan. Toby had seen it, and was enthusiastic. Nothing like it had been done before. He supposed the young Well-woods had enjoyed it. Especially Tom.
“Tom hated it,” said Olive, sadly. “I thought he’d like it. He always liked the stories more than any of the others did. But it seemed to make him angry. He said it was make-believe and cardboard. He didn’t like the women playing boys.”
“He refused entirely to suspend disbelief,” said Steyning. “It was odd, and almost alarming.”
Toby asked how old Tom was now. Olive said she thought he was twenty-two: Toby said that his history of failing exams, or failing to be fit to sit exams, was perplexing, given his intelligence. Humphry said maybe they should think of some other course. He could not do nothing for ever. Dorothy was only twenty and had passed her Highers, and the Preliminary Scientific Exam, and begun her medical studies. She was lodging with the Skinners in Gower Street. Phyllis was the home-loving daughter. He did not know himself what Tom did with his time. He was out of doors, for much of most days. Olive said doubtfully that he had said from time to time that he meant to be a writer. Humphry asked irritably whether she had ever seen any writing he had done. No, she said. No, she had not. He thought it was private.
“You can’t make a living out of private writing,” said Humphry. Toby said Tom was a Wanderer. He meant that he had a vision of Tom as an inhabitant of woods and downs, something out of Hudson and Jef-feries. Steyning said drily that maybe he disliked Peter Pan because he recognised something. Olive said indignantly no, it was not that, she was sure it was not that, he found the play simply unappealing.
Steyning said that Tom had seemed