The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [305]
Even Dorothy Wellwood was there. Her mother, handsome in dark red velvet, said to her
“There is Tom, lurking again in a corner. Do go and make him talk to people. He used to be so charming.”
Dorothy thought of a retort, and then thought she did, after all, want to talk to Tom. He had a sweetly uncertain look about him. He was drinking champagne as though it was lemonade.
“Come and look at the pots, Tom. This is all your doing. If you hadn’t found Philip, when he was hiding in the Museum, none of this would have happened.”
Tom said he supposed Philip would have found a way. Philip knew what he wanted.
They walked round, looking at the work.
There were various clusters of pots. The central exhibit was a group of vessels—bowls, jars, tall bottle shapes, with formally abstract glazes, many of them with a dull hot red like molten lava at the base, bursting into a sooty black layer on top of which raged a kind of thin sea of sullen blue with a formal crest of white foaming shapes rearing and falling. Other pieces had intricately random glazes that raced and climbed and plunged and scattered like forces driving in the glassy curls of wild sea water. There were greens and greys and silvers like needles of rushing air in dark depths. Dorothy turned to speak to Tom, and found that he had disappeared, and the presence at her shoulder was Philip.
“These are for Fludd,” said Philip. “In memory of. Some of them are his shapes.”
“Yes,” said Dorothy.
“The ones over here are my own.”
The second group was glazed gold, or silver, or lustre shot with both. The pots were covered with a lattice of climbing and creeping half-human creatures, not the little demons of the Gloucester Candlestick, not the tiny satyrs of the Gien majolica, but busy figures—some bright blue with frog-fingers, some black, some creamy-white, with white manes tossing—unlike anything Dorothy had seen.
“Pots are still,” said Philip.
“Nothing keeps still on your pots.”
“I make things keep still. That don’t, naturally, keep still. Sea water. Things in the earth. You need to hold the pots to see how it works.”
He reached over and picked up a round golden jar, covered with silver and soot-black imps.
“Here. Hold that.”
“I’m afraid to drop it.”
“Nonsense. You’ve got good hands. Remember?”
Dorothy stood with the pot in her hands, which held the cool light weight of the shell. The moment it was between her fingers, she felt it three-dimensional. It was a completely different thing if you measured it with your skin instead of your eyes. Its weight—and the empty air inside it—were part of it. Dorothy closed her eyes, to see how that changed the shape. Someone said “Excuse me, sir, madam, you must put that back, it is not allowed to touch the exhibits.” A small man was pulling at Philip’s sleeve.
“I can touch them if I like,” said Philip. “They’re mine. I made them.”
“Please, sir. Put it back. Madam, please.”
He had blond hair plastered to a red-hot head. He said “You have to understand, everyone wants to pick them up, the pots ask for it, and if you start…”
Philip laughed. “Put it back, Dorothy. He’s made his point.” He said to the attendant “This lady is studying to be a surgeon. She’s got steady hands.”
“Yes, sir. Even so—”
Dorothy returned to the pot to its stand.
Charles/Karl said to Elsie “We could go out and eat dinner.”
“And how would I get back?”
“Back to where?”
“Me and Philip are in a hotel in Kensington.”
“I can take you back.”
“I can’t. You can see that. I have to have dinner with Philip, and the—the other people.”
Charles/Karl said “I could cadge an invitation. Then we could—”
“All this is no good, and you know it.”
But he cadged his invitation, and managed to sit next to her, and they both felt hot, and too much alive, and desperate.
Julian was in love with Griselda. He had not known for very long that this was the case. He liked keeping it quiet, a secret even from the beloved, unlike the simmering male gossip and endless speculation at King’s. He was