The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [317]
It was late afternoon. He sat down, still in his theatre-going shoes and coat, both now dusty and clogged with clay. In his head, the white pilgrim sat down on a creamy couch of pebbles.
What now? said Tom to the pilgrim, though he knew the answer.
He would sit until the sun went down.
He examined some pebbles. A broken one with a marbly sheen on its fragmented facet. A pale one that was almost perfectly round. One with a hole—these were, or once were, magic, you could see the unseen world through the hole. It was a lumpy stone, mottled grey with rust-coloured stains and pale, bald patches where the chalk still adhered. Inside the hole was fretted like a beehive, and also chalky. Tom picked it up and looked at the sea through the hole.
The sea at Dungeness is not a placid sea. The pebbles shelve down and down, and the waters of the English Channel come whirling and whistling in, throwing up breakers, crowned with fine spray, that whip back and are sucked back through the pebbles they rattle. The water was noisy, the wind was noisy, the pebbles were noisy. Tom sat in the noise and stared at the waves—the tide was coming in—which were, like the pebbles, all like and unlike each other.
Under the waves is a current like a whirlwind, that sucks and drives, round the point, out into the English Channel.
Tom watched the sun go down, over the land towards Beachy Head, into the Channel.
The stars were indeed innumerable, like sand, like pebbles.
He had tried very hard to exhaust himself and stop thinking, and had not quite, not yet, succeeded.
He did the next thing. He thought in an animal way, puzzled, about his overcoat and shoes. They would muddle it. They would drag. He took them off, and put the shoes on the coat. He didn’t know whether the tide would come in and take them. He didn’t mind what it did.
He started walking again. He walked down the shingle and on, without hesitating, into the waves and the lashing wind, the flying froth and the sinewy down-draft. He was still walking, in his socks, on the pebbles, soaked to the skin, when he slipped, and the wave threw him into the current. He didn’t fight.
45
Dorothy and Griselda had both come to Todefright. Dorothy had told Griselda that Olive was anxious about Tom. She told her about the Tree House, whose fate, irrationally, made Dorothy herself anxious about Tom. Griselda said they had been invited by Wolfgang to go backstage after the performance, and see the complicated machinery that worked the puppets and marionettes. There would be another time, said Griselda. Dorothy thought, not for the first time, that Griselda seemed to know more than she did herself about Wolfgang and his doings, although he was Dorothy’s brother. Half-brother, like Tom.
When they got to Todefright, Olive was pacing the hall, backwards and forwards, like a shuttle in a loom. Be still, said Humphry, watching. Violet made tea for Griselda and Dorothy. Everybody in the house was on the move and watching from windows: Hedda perambulatory, Violet in the kitchen, Phyllis and the younger boys in the nursery. Griselda, in a fading voice, said to Olive that the reception of the play had been extraordinary.
Olive said “What did you mean about the Tree House?”
“When I was last here, I said, let’s go to the Tree House. He didn’t tell me it was all cut down. He just took me there. I thought—I thought it was unkind of him.” She paused. “But like him.”
“Very like,” said Olive.
Hedda said “There’s a motor car in the drive. There’s a driver, and another man, and a woman with one of those veils. They’re getting out. It