The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [311]
The Wellwood children, with Violet, had a box of their own. Dorothy had not come. Tom was not in evening dress, but he was cleaned up, and had a clean shirt and an acceptable jacket. He was between Phyllis, in a golden caramel-coloured dress, made by Violet, and Hedda, in sea-green silk with a lace collar. Violet sat the other side of Phyllis. She wore black, trimmed with mauve, and a cameo brooch at her neck. She had set her pretty gilt chair back into the shadows.
The younger boys, Florian, Robin and Harry, now sixteen, fourteen, and thirteen, were grouped beyond Violet, washed and brushed.
Tom leaned his chin on the velvet rim of the box and stared out. The box was in the upper air of the dome, which was rich midnight-blue and star-studded. Gilded angels with silver trumpets sailed across it. There was a huge chandelier, a waterfall of crystal droplets, containing and scattering brightness. Tom looked out into emptiness, paradoxically crowded, with gargoyles under the boxes, and dreamy cherubs sitting above the curtained stage, which was a deeper emptiness.
Hedda said “You always feel as though you ought to jump, don’t you?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Violet.
Hedda insisted. “It sort of pulls you, to fall into it.”
“You’re making me feel sick,” said Phyllis, smiling. Tom put his head further into the cradle of his arms.
The orchestra arrived, and shifted and shuffled and made the usual discordant scraping and peeping tuning noises. Then they played. The music had light-footed dances in it, and whirlwinds scattering leaves, and a kind of dark, downward sucking drift from the clarinets and bassoons. The curtains with their floating bats and spiders drew back, and revealed a walled garden in the sun, on which an artificial sun shone brightly and evenly, across which a man-size rat scampered and danced to flute and drum music, carrying in its teeth, which were sharp and glittering, a limp smoky-grey web, which it spread out, using its forepaws, to reveal an elongated human shape, uniformly ash-grey, lifeless. And it rolled it up and jumped out, over the wall.
And the shadowless boy came into the garden. He sat on a bench, and played a recorder. He sang a ballad. He was a woman. Tom was disgusted. She wore doublet and hose, and had shapely legs. She had a cropped cap of silver and gold hair. She had red lips and polished fingernails. She moved her hips like a boy but they were women’s hips. Another boy—a real one—came into the garden, and they played, and talked and the second boy said “Look at my shadow,” and threw it across the lawn. And then Tom, its name was Tom, discovered it was single and had no shadow.
The story wound on. Tom knew, and didn’t know, the story. His skin crawled. The Elf Queen came—she too had no shadow—and talked to Tom. The scene changed. It was a bare heath, with a crack which was a door in a wall of rock which was the backcloth. Red light poured blood from the wings. The orchestra played bloody sounds. Tom remembered Loïe Fuller in Paris. He refused grimly to suspend disbelief. The woman-Tom was up to the knees in the bloodlight, and staggered dramatically.
Tom cradled his head in his hands. Phyllis tapped him reproachfully on the shoulder. “You’ve got to look,” she hissed. “I am looking,” Tom mumbled. The dark cavern swallowed the woman-Tom. Cardboard, Tom thought, and lantern-slides, and smoke puffed with bellows. He did not think it out, but knew he was undergoing a trial or test. He must not for one moment, not for one second, believe. The test was not to be taken in by glamour, by illusion. The Tom-thing found something like a stalactite or stalagmite, a white pillar in the dark, which whispered incomprehensibly, to muted drumming from the orchestra in the rhythm of a heartbeat. The boy-woman and the person personating the Gathorn found a crack in the pillar and pulled. The stage was full of billowing white scarves. Flutes and piccolos shrilled. The Silf came out of her wrappings, whiter than white, with outstanding white hair. She danced,