The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [315]
He saw a hawk overhead, and that made him briefly happy. He didn’t ask himself where he was going. It didn’t matter. He was not going home. The Downs were empty and he was empty. He was possessed by energy and even thought of running.
Olive sent a letter to Dorothy. She persuaded Florian to cycle to the railway station to make sure it went quickly.
I wonder if you have seen Tom? He went out of the theatre after the play—everyone was talking, he doesn’t like crowds. It seemed quite natural he should slip away but it’s now three days and he hasn’t come home. I remember when he disappeared before, you found him in a sort of hiding-place you had in the woods. Do you think he could be there? When can you come home? It has been very exciting here, with all the commotion about the play, but I’m worried about Tom. I hope your work is going well.
She sat and chewed her pen. She wrote
I should say, and haven’t said, how much I admire your determination and hard work. You said you got it from me. I should like to be able to believe that.
She sat a little longer. She stared out of the window, at the quiet lawn.
She wanted to say why she was so worried about Tom. Dorothy was the only person who knew Tom. But she could not tell Dorothy that she had not told Tom the whole truth about the play. He had nodded and closed his face when he saw the title of the play on the programmes and then on the posters, but he had come along quite quietly to the opening.
He was doing what he always did with difficulties, persuading himself they didn’t exist if he didn’t name them. She knew him, he was her beloved son. It was she who had named Tom Underground.
It was only a fairy story.
It wasn’t.
• • •
Dorothy answered.
I don’t think Tom can be in the Tree House, in fact I know he can’t, because he took me there and showed me, the gamekeeper had cut it down and made it into logs. He didn’t seem upset, but then, he never does.
I haven’t seen the play yet. We got the tickets you sent, and I was going at the weekend with Griselda and Charles and Julian Cain and a medical friend of mine. But perhaps I had better come home instead. What do you think?
Olive answered. “Please come home. There is still no sign of Tom. Violet says it is a storm in a teacup but then she would say that.”
She sealed the letter, and wrote several answers to letters from friends and the public about the originality of Tom Underground.
Tom had got onto the heights of the North Downs. He walked. He found himself crossing what he believed must be the London Road—he went across, looking neither to right nor to left, and saw a slow cart going south, and a sputtering, grinching motor car, with its heavily veiled and scarved passengers, going north. He came to a junction with a signpost, faded, and hard to puzzle out. It said he could go down Labour-in-Vain Road, to Labour-in-Vain. He liked the words, so set off along the track, to what was hardly a settlement. It took him a little further south, and then he went east again and found he had met up with the Pilgrim’s Way, the old path where the Canterbury Pilgrims had travelled to the shrine of the murdered Thomas à Becket. That pleased him too. He tramped north-east and then followed the Way along the Downs until he came to Charing Hill and Clearmount. The Way then ran along the south side of Frittenfield Woods, at the end of which he turned south-west, seeing a sign that said Digger Farm. From there he went towards Hothfield Common and Hothfield Bogs. This brought him to the railway that ran from Sevenoaks to Maidstone. He scrambled down the cutting, and stood for a moment on the line, between the shining tracks. He heard a train, coming from the north. He thought he could simply stand there, and let it. Then he found himself on the other side, and waited to watch the engine, with its steam, and fiery grit and busy, clattering piston. He remembered all the talk about the end of Stepniak. He could.
He went on, crossing the Weald, south-west. Hothfield, common and bogs. Across