The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [282]
It was horribly undignified.
Was it the same as sexual desire, which she did not think she had felt? Can sexual desire be experienced in the abstract, almost? She didn’t want to grab Dr. Barty, or to be grabbed by him.
He had got into her mind, and invaded it.
That was because Dr. Anderson was right, fatigue did strange things to you.
• • •
Todefright was no longer a house overrun by children. Hedda, now fifteen, and Florian, now thirteen, had been sent to Bedales School, where they learned farming, swimming, physics, chemistry and thinking for themselves. Robin and Harry (eleven and nine) were both weekly boarders at a preparatory school in Tunbridge Wells. Tom and Phyllis were the odd children who had not left the nest. Phyllis had been assimilated into Violet’s housekeeping. She made cakes for Fabian picnics, and lace collars for bring-and-buy sales. She was now nineteen, and passively pretty. Tom was twenty-three. He wore his bright hair long, and his clothes were shabby and shapeless. He was pleased to see Dorothy, who put her head for a moment on his shoulder. He smelt of horse-tack, and fur, and brambles, with a note of wild garlic. He said, now they could go for walks, the leaves in the woods were turning.
Humphry was not there, and Olive was writing. Her children recognised the rhythm of Olive’s writing—in the early stages of the story, it could be juggled, put aside, boxed and coxed with tea-parties and excursions. Then there were intense periods when she forgot to eat, and worked into the night. Tom said to Dorothy that he was glad to see her because Olive was sunken, an old childhood word for late preoccupation. He did not ask Dorothy how she was, or how she came to be there. She thought, even last year, he might have asked.
Olive did not ask either. She kissed her eldest daughter, and said vaguely how nice it would be for Dorothy to be able to get out in the country, which was what Leslie Skinner said she needed. She said “I shan’t be very good company, I’m sunk in a very complicated play, which seems to change every day.” When Dorothy had been at home for a couple of days, Olive came down to lunch, and said that she and Dorothy must have “a little talk.” Dorothy did not want to talk, but felt it was right that talk should have been offered.
It turned out that the talk concerned Tom. Could Dorothy find out what Tom thought he would do with his life? He had taken to earning bits of money as a beater, or helping out in stables, or harvesting, or hedging. She didn’t know what he wanted. Did Dorothy?
Dorothy wanted Dr. Barty, though distance was fortunately making his dark face more abstract, more diagrammatic. She had no intention of telling her mother about Dr. Barty. She said, deliberately flatly,
“Maybe that’s all he wants, just to potter.” She asked, woman to woman, with a malice she didn’t know she felt,
“Does he get on your nerves?”
“I worry about him,” said Olive, with dignity. “I’d like him to have a purpose.”
“I see,” said Dorothy, still flatly. The little talk seemed to have ground to a halt.
Dorothy went into the woods, to the Tree House, with Tom. He loped along the paths, so fast she could hardly keep up with him. He showed her things, as he had when they were little—where the badgers were, where a hawk had nested, where there was a little crop of fungi that weren’t supposed to grow in Britain at all. Magic toadstools, said Tom, with an irony that was hard to interpret.
They came to the Tree House. It was still wonderfully disguised with brushwood and bracken and ferns. Tom had cared for it—alone, she supposed. He let her in, and made a little fire in the stove, and ceremoniously