The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [286]
“I don’t want to have a house, and staff, and have to order legs of lamb and prunes, black and watery or not. It’s not enough.”
“But is this enough, all these earnest women, and timid girls and the artifice of a manless world?”
“You needn’t worry,” said Griselda. “You are engaged to be married.” Privately, she was curious about Florence’s capacity to appear to forget this fact. Florence said that that presented its own problems. They drifted on in silence.
“The truth is,” said Florence, “that the women we are—have become—are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don’t, there will be no help for us. We shall be poor monsters, like Viola in Twelfth Night, or Miss Harrison’s harpies and gorgons. Do you not think it might be harmful to ignore the sex instinct? Don’t you think that after twenty years of studying Cinderella you might be seized by the idea of the children you never had?”
“Quite probably,” said Griselda, lifting a dripping oar and suspending it, so that the boat swung in the current. “But after twenty years of childbearing and fever and confinement and being shut in a house I might be seized by the idea of Cinderella.
“You are very quiet, Dorothy. Can you see yourself falling in love, and marrying?”
Dorothy revisited her mental image of Dr. Barty. He had lost much substance whilst she was in Newnham. He had lost, she saw, precisely, sex. All that was left of him was a Cheshire-cat-like smile. She ducked, as the boat slipped under a weeping willow, accompanied by a slip of fallen leaves.
“I think it best to suppose that I shan’t,” she said. “But nobody can tell what will happen to them. Do you think getting the Vote would help?”
“It would remove one of the endless humiliating differences between women and men. It might make it possible—in some new world—for the sexes to talk to each other, like people. At the moment the agitation is just making the women more womanish and the men more grumpy and masculine. Of course we ought to be able to vote. But I don’t know that having the Vote will affect the things that frighten me.” Griselda paused. “Whereas, if I wrote a really good book, that might. Or if you invented a new surgical procedure, or discovered a new drug.”
“Ah,” said Florence, grimly. “A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree.”
Griselda feathered the water, elegantly, and turned the boat, and they went back to tea, and glazed buns, and muffins. Dorothy felt a sudden need for London, and the labs.
In 1906 there was a General Election. There was a Liberal landslide; fifty-three Labour members were elected, of whom twenty-nine were professed socialists. There was a savage and arcane argument about the nature of the House of Lords. John Burns, the working-class man, entered the Cabinet. The bristling, pugnacious Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. H. G. Wells, also bristling and pugnacious, joined the Fabian Society, and read them a paper on the Faults of the Fabians. Those Fabians who were children of Fabians formed what became known as the Fabian Nursery, full of forward-looking, idealist young men, and determined young women. Fabian summer camps were instituted, with lectures, discussions, and physical jerks. Dorothy and Griselda occasionally attended the meetings of the Nursery. Charles/Karl went to Germany and went from Munich to Ascona, where he watched the wilder German young ladies dancing naked, argued about vegetarianism, and realised that anarchy was impossible. A bomb was thrown that year at the King of Spain and his English bride on their wedding day, killing twenty people. Charles/Karl was appalled, both by the hatred and despair that had caused the deed, and by the random waste of life. In January 1905 on