The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [322]
Olive took to her bed, most of the time, much of the time in the dark. She was not writing. She was depleting Humphry’s stocks of whisky. Her hair straggled on the pillows, turning grey, a rather glossy, metallic grey. Humphry sat with her, and opened the curtains, and told her she had six other children, who needed her. Olive replied curtly that they frightened her. Once, when she had drunk a great deal of whisky, she said “If you know that you can kill a child—”
“You have killed no one. Don’t be absurd.”
Olive shrank back into the pillows. “You don’t know.”
“Tell me—”
Humphry did not really want to hear. She said “You don’t really want to hear.”
• • •
In the autumn of 1909 August Steyning drove over in his new motor car to see Olive. She usually stirred herself when he came, and sat at the tea-table, staring around as though she did not recognise the room. She listened to his account of the continuing success of Tom Underground, and when asked about cuts in the narrative, or changes in the cast, said “Do as you will.”
Violet, coming in with cream cakes on a plate said “Ah” and fell forward, crashing to the ground with her face in the cream, on top of one of Philip Warren’s early Dungeness plates, decorated with seaweeds and umbellifers. The plate smashed. Steyning tried to help Violet, but she did not move and was not breathing. Her cynical sharp face was red and twisted. She was quite dead. She was turned over, and wiped clean. A servant was sent for a doctor. Olive said
“Poor Vi. Not that it’s not a good way to go, when your time comes. But I had no idea hers had. She did not complain. Though it is doubtful I would have heard, if she had.”
This event also was not a story.
After Violet’s funeral, Humphry asked Phyllis into his office and gave her a box, containing Violet’s few pieces of jewellery: a jet necklace, a cameo, a small ring, with a polished bluejohn stone, which Phyllis put on. Humphry watched her in silence. He did not know what to say. Phyllis said
“You don’t need to tell me. I know. She was my real mother. Hedda found out. She likes finding things out. I don’t think I do. Nobody asked me.”
Humphry said “I’m sorry.”
Phyllis said “I think you should be. But it’s too late, isn’t it. I can look after the house, now.”
Her pretty face was like a china doll. She said
“I’d be glad if you’d sack Alma, and get a new kitchenmaid. She doesn’t like me, and won’t do anything I tell her.”
She said “Nobody asked her what she felt, when she was alive. Even I didn’t, because of knowing what I’d not been told.”
Humphry said, almost grumpily, “I asked her. I may have been at fault, but I did—care for her.”
“Yes. Well. It’s too late, now. For everything.”
• • •
Alma was sacked, and replaced by Tilly, who appreciated the finer points of Phyllis’s household-management.
Olive went back into her bedroom.
Humphry went to Manchester.
Life—for the living—went on. Leached of much of its colour, still where it had been full of movement.
Phyllis tended Olive. She could have said, and didn’t, that she knew Olive didn’t like her. Olive could not be sacked. But she could be made to be grateful for kindnesses she did not want. Phyllis persisted.
47
In February 1910 Richard Strauss’s Elektra was put on in Covent Garden. It is a drama of fated royal families stirring violently in bloody passion, matricide and revenge. Elektra took hatred to her bosom as a bridegroom, “hollow-eyed, breathing a viperous breath.” The English critics were divided. The Times said the opera was “unsurpassed for sheer hideousness in the whole of operatic literature.” Shaw diagnosed anti-German hysteria. He said Elektra was “the highest achievement of the highest art.” “If the case against the fools and their money-changers who are trying to drive us into war with Germany consists in the single word, Beethoven, today I should say