The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [329]
They went down to supper, one behind the other on the shallow steps with their worn carpet. The dining-room had pretty wallpaper and flowery curtains. Elsie sat up straight as a ruler, and clenched her hands in her lap. She chose mushroom soup, and roast leg of lamb with green peas, and plum tart. So did Charles/Karl. He said
“That fellow, Methley, is an ass.”
“He doesn’t write about the real world, that’s for sure.” She looked at her plate. “He takes people in, though.” She said “Mrs. Methley, she was very good to me, along with Mrs. Oakeshott and Miss Dace. Women who might have been prim and nasty. They saved me, really.”
Charles/Karl said “All sorts of things are changing.” He wanted to say something personal and reassuring about her past disaster, but did not know what. He saw she knew that. The soup came, and bread, on little plates painted with flying storks and rising storks and feathery reeds. Charles/Karl asked if there was wine, and was brought a short wine-list and ordered a bottle of white Burgundy. Elsie said
“Minton. The storks. My mum—my mother—used to paint the storks. We got one or two seconds. They weren’t her favourite. Japanese-style, she said they were, and the storks were for long life. For babies, she said, in England, and she had too many of those.” She paused. “She died of white lead. She were an artist, was an artist, if she could have had the opportunity. Philip got it from her. She died o’ white lead and too many children. We had a daft song.”
“Yes?” said Charles/Karl.
“Seven in a bed and one of ’em dead” said Elsie on a sort of rush. “Philip and me made it up. There was nowhere to—to put me brother when he died, so he had to stay there, wi’ all of us coughing and like to go as well.”
She said “I’m sorry.”
“What for? I want you to talk to me. Tell me things.”
“They’re not nice things for this good meal on these pretty plates. It brought it back. You’ve been good to me, like Mrs. Methley and Mrs. Oakeshott. I’m grateful.”
“You are saying that,” said Charles/Karl, “to emphasise—to act—the class difference between you and me. Which we ought to forget.”
“There’s real cream in the soup. Just the right amount. That’s an art, too. We can’t forget the difference.”
His mind was full of a picture of seven—dirty—people, crammed coughing into one bed, and one of them dead. He saw Elsie, wielding her soup-spoon, neatly. It was a strong face, indrawn with self-control, alert with curiosity. It was alien, partly because of the class difference, because of what she had lived, and what he had not lived. He said
“I love you, when you look cross like that, and set your shoulders.”
The firm face quivered. “Don’t make me cry. It would be embarrassing. I should embarrass you.”
There was a silence. The lamb came and was eaten, whilst they talked of the summer school lectures and Elsie said Mr. Shaw could imitate anyone’s accent and then iron it out. She talked about Shakespeare. She talked about Rosalind and Viola, dressed as men, having to take charge of things, full of hope. She asked Charles/Karl “How did he know?” and said there was no other man who wrote so well about women, so you believed he knew them from inside, so to speak.
“And then, there’s Lady Macbeth, who suddenly says she has given suck to a baby. That’s the only mention. She don’t—doesn’t—seem like a woman who has a baby and she only mentions it to say she’d tear it away from its feeding. It’s terrifying. He meant it to be.”
They analysed Cordelia, and Goneril and Regan, and enjoyed their talk. The plum tart had a delicious custard. Cream, again, said Elsie, good rich cream. Thickened with eggs and cream, not just cornflour.
There was no one in the world whose company gave him such pleasure. But he could not say,