The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [313]
“Has anyone seen Tom?”
No one had. Violet repeated that he didn’t like crowds, and would turn up.
Tom put on his overcoat and slipped out of the theatre, where the enthusiastic audience was spilling out into the lighted Strand. He began to walk. He walked along the Strand and down Whitehall, and came to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge. He walked on to the bridge, and stopped for a moment, leaning his head on his elbows, and squinted down at the river, which was high and on the turn, black, glinting, moving fast. He remembered Hedda, in the theatre, saying one was always tempted to throw oneself over, or outwards. He looked at the black surface—he didn’t know how long. Then he moved on, over the bridge, and turned south. He walked along well-lit streets, and shady ones. Now and then an electric tram passed him, making a groaning sound and full of yellow light, but he did not think of boarding one. It did not matter where he went. All that mattered was to move, to be on the move, to use his body and not his mind. He wove erratically across the south of London. He found himself crossing the flat expanse of Clapham Common, with its ponds sullen in the meagre light, and its trees black. You knew you were out of London when the bark of the elm trees ceased to be thick with soot. London was a creature that grew busily and decayed busily: terraces and houses went up and came down. Cranes stood skeletal against the glow of the streetlights; there were huts in the road for the diggers of drains and of channels for cables. The air was nasty in his lungs. He went on, and came to Dulwich Village, which was pretty, though encroached upon by the tentacles of the city. He headed for Penge, avoiding Croy-don. He did not have a plan. He meant to get out of the dirt, and the noise, and the dense population, and head for the North Downs where he knew where he was. At this point, he thought he was heading for Todefright, and home. Where else should he go? He went fast, in a long, loping, even stride. I am, he thought to himself, an expert in not thinking.
• • •
Olive and Humphry read the reviews over breakfast in London. They were ecstatic. The Times pointed out that like Peter Pan, Tom Underground had used old theatrical forms—the pantomime, the ballet—in new ways. Peter Pan was a children’s play with hidden depths revealing hidden truths about childhood and motherhood. Tom Underground was for grown-ups, although its form was that of old fairytales, the places “Under the Hill,” combined with images taken from Wagner’s black dwarves and from contemporary coal-mining. This play had the magic of Peter Pan combined with something dark and Germanic, the bright black intentness and craziness of the world of the puppet and the marionette. The reviewer even quoted Kleist’s essay on the superiority of the marionette and its pure gestures. Something of that had been experienced that evening by a bewitched audience.
“You are a heroine,” said Humphry, and kissed her.
“I wonder what happened to Tom.”
“He’s always going off on his own. He doesn’t like crowds. He’ll surface.”
“I think so, yes.”
They went back to Todefright, by train.
Tom had reached the edge of the city, at dawn. He saw the stars, as he saw the edge of the London pall of smoke, and passed beyond it, and saw the sun come up, over the North Downs, as he began to climb. He knew the drovers’ paths, and the wooded abandoned roads of the Downs and the Weald. He stopped beside a horse trough, and filled his hands, and drank. The water was very cold: it was early in the year, but there was no frost, and the ground was dry, not clagged with mud. He was on the