The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [283]
“I sleep here, as often as not.” There was a blanket-bed, on a heap of dry bracken. “I like the sounds. The trees. The creatures. The creakings. The wind, coming and going. Sometimes, Dorothy, I wake up and think I’m not there.”
“Frightening?”
“No. I like it. I’d like to be able to vanish into the hedge, like one of those things you can’t see, if they don’t move. The hedge sparrows. Moths. I’d like to be speckled and freckled like a moth. I try to write about moths, but I’m no good, I think.”
“Can I see?”
“No.”
“I fainted,” said Dorothy. “I came home because I fainted. In an anatomy class. Holding a heart.”
“Don’t. I feel sick. You’re all right now.” It was a statement, not a question. Dorothy sipped the leafy brew. She said “Have you ever been in love, Tom?”
He wrinkled his brow. His brows, Dorothy thought, were fair and innocent. What was it that wasn’t there?
Tom said “Once I was in love, for about a month, I think. With a vixen.”
He saw her look of puzzlement, and said
“Oh, a real vixen. A young one, very graceful, covered with soft red fur, with a thick brush, and a creamy white chest. She knew I watched her every day. She showed herself to me, all the graceful things she did, curving this way and that. They seem to smile, foxes. I thought I was her, and she was me. I don’t know what she thought. She stopped coming, when she had cubs. I’m not telling you very well. It was love, that was what it was.”
There was a silence. It was impossible to introduce Dr. Barty. Tom said
“I read a story about trees that walked. Sometimes, lying here, I think the trees are moving in on the Tree House, taking it in—”
Dorothy was suddenly very irritated with Tom. She said, “I think it’s time to go back, now.”
“But we’ve only just come.”
“I’ve been here long enough. I’m not well. I want to go back.”
She didn’t sleep well. She walked at night, in the moonlit rooms, not needing a candle, looking for something to nibble, or something to read. One night in the hall, she heard someone else, skirt rustling, slippers sliding. She stood still in a dark corner, shrunk into shadow.
It was Olive, in her flower-spread robe, gliding towards the cupboard where the family tales were kept. She was carrying one large manuscript book; she unlocked the cupboard and replaced it. Then she went away again, not having noticed Dorothy.
Dorothy was the one who had taken little interest in her “own” story, about the metamorphosing hedgehogs and the uncanny root-cavity-dwellers. She wondered for the first time if Olive was still spinning particular tales for particular children. She opened the story-cabinet. There were books for Robin and Harry. Florian’s was now quite fat. The one Olive had been carrying was Tom’s—his story now occupied a series of books, taking up a whole shelf, dwarfing the others. Dorothy hesitated a moment, and then took out the Dorothy book, with the fairies and woodland creatures on its cover. She had no imagination of what it felt like to be a writer and spin stories. She assumed her own story would have petered out, somehow, long ago.
She turned to the last page.
• • •
So Peggy went on her travels, and saw many strange and wonderful sights, snow-covered mountains, and sunny southern meadows. She met Interesting strangers, and rode on shining, smoking trains. She thought at bed-time of the other, secret world in the roots of the Tree, of its inhabitants who spoke with strange voices, hissing or chuntering, squeaking or whispering. She thought of the strangers she had helped when they were caught on thorns, or hurt by cold iron, the Grey Child and the Brown Boy, with their glancing, inhuman eyes. They had helped her, too. They had found things that were lost. They had sung to her. When she thought of them, they grew thinner, more transparent in her mind’s eye, wisps and tattered fragments. But they were there, and she knew they were there, always.
When she finally came back, she wore a long skirt with a braided hem which brushed on the grass, leaving