The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [292]
Julian was interested. He asked, what rules?
“They seem to me like coloured mosaics, with separate little pieces that fit together. Why does the stepmother always say the heroine has given birth to a monster? And why does the king then order her hands to be cut off and hung around her neck, and put her in a boat and push it out to sea? And why can the hands always be miraculously grown back?”
Julian gave a comic shudder. He said it was all very bloodthirsty, and those who wanted to keep fairytales from children were quite right.
“That’s another thing I want to study. I don’t think the real tales do frighten you. I think you accept the rules. They work in a fenced world which isn’t the real world, where nothing ever really changes. Witches get punished, and goose-girls become princesses, and what was lost is restored.”
“I don’t know. I was peculiarly horrified as a small brat by the eyeballs stuck on the thorns, or the dead men impaled on a fence round the glass hill, or the witch in the barrel full of nails.”
“I would suggest it was a kind of gleeful horror. Whereas H. C. Andersen’s stories do hurt the reader. The Little Mermaid walking on knives and losing her tongue.”
“So you think you will settle in Newnham and investigate magic woods and castles, and fairy foam on perilous seas?”
“I cannot make my mind up. Sometimes I think a women’s college is like the tower Rapunzel was shut in, or even the gingerbread cottage. I don’t want to become unreal. Do you know what I mean? I think it is different for men.”
“It may not be. I’m writing a thesis on English Pastoral—I wanted to compare the poets and painters. I wanted to look at the world of the Faerie Queene and the work of those painters who followed William Blake. Do you know Samuel Palmer?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“He paints magic corn-stooks with golden light pouring through them. English fields. Seductive. Lovely. Innocent. If you are half-German I’m half-Italian, and I sometimes think this College is simply the apotheosis of the public school—it looks like an iced cake, and we sit in it like—like—”
The image that came into his mind was enchanted rats and mice, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t utter it. He said
“Guinea pigs.”
“Guinea pigs? Why on earth?” Griselda laughed.
“I don’t know. Yes I do. Comfortable in a cage.”
They smiled at each other. Griselda was thin and sinuous. Her face was pale, and so were her lashes, and so was her fine gold hair, so demurely knotted. But she wasn’t pallid, like the poking-roots Apostles, she wasn’t pale because she was in the dark. She had a fine waist. She was much more beautiful, Julian thought, than the rosy, creamy, pretty Brooke. He suddenly remembered that he had swum naked with her, at the New Forest camp, years ago, and had paid no attention, because he was looking at Tom.
“There is an old gentleman who works in the Fitzwilliam Museum, who has a collection of Samuel Palmer. And Edward Calvert. I should like to show you. You could come with Florence, then we should be quite correct.”
“It is odd that we have to be so correct, when we have known each other so long. It is very silly.”
In flaming June, some weeks after Methley’s lecture, Charles/Karl put his bicycle on a train at Charing Cross, got out at Rye and rode out across the Romney Marsh, past East Guldeford, Moneypenny and the Broomhill Level, swerving between dykes and sewers, watching the plovers circle and hearing the geese honk, and the splash of a fish rising. He rode up beside Jury’s Gut Sewer towards Pigwell, skirting the Midrips ponds and the Lydd Firing Ranges of the army. He came to a cottage standing by itself, in a windswept but flowery garden, with a painted board, Birdskitchen Corner. It was an old, brick building, with a porch, and beach beside it. The lawn was small, lumpy and drying out. A small girl was playing on the lawn, with an assortment of pottery mugs and plates and dishes, and a ring of seated dolls and animals. She had long fine brown hair, and a small, neat face. “If you’re good,”