The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [338]
Because she knew what she had to do, she also knew that she had to do it, or it would not have come to her. It came out of the true tale she had been told as a child, of the boy who had hidden in the basement in South Kensington—a tale told by Tom, and by Philip himself, of the way in through the van-loading bay, and the watching plaster casts, and the tombs. A woman could hide down there, and come out with stones, when all was quiet, and smash the cases with the cold gold and silver, and smash the metals to chips and dust.
She didn’t have real friends. It must be done on her own.
There was no real need to smash anything.
There was an imperative call.
It was May 1914. She had sharp stones. She had gone on flint-collecting picnics with other WSPU women. Out of rage with her past life, which would now end, and the dreamy, comfortable, unsatisfactory muddled order of Todefright, she quite deliberately took a collection of stones—some of them rare, some of them collected from the endless shingle at Dungeness—old flints and chalk from the Weald (including one or two Stone Age knapped hammers), a chunk of Etna pumice (too light and springy to do any damage), a rugged chunk of the White Cliffs of Dover. These stones were in a big, stoneware bowl Philip Warren had made, which stood in Olive’s study in lieu of a bowl of fruit. In amongst them—put there apparently casually, to get lost amongst its semblances—was the Dungeness stone with a hole that had been found in Tom’s overcoat pocket on the beach. She took it deliberately, knowing that to take it would hurt Olive, and half-understanding that Tom had meant to—be revenged on Olive, evade Olive, free himself from Olive and being written about? Olive had been mildly in favour of the suffrage, as part of the atmosphere of Fabian lawns and Fabian firesides; she had not approved of the violent acts. She would take Olive’s stone with the hole and throw it at the golden bowl.
She did nothing more, for days. She was afraid. She did not know how afraid other suffragists had been. Her teeth ached with fear and she dreamed that they all fell out and stuck in her breakfast porridge, like bloody pebbles. She waited for a sign and knew she had it when she read that Sylvia Pankhurst had drawn, on a prison slate, an illustration to
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.
She wasn’t well. When she breathed out, she could smell her breath. She knotted her hair grimly, packed her bag, which looked like an artist’s bag, and set off.
The way in was as Philip had described it, still accessible as it had been before Sir Aston Webb’s lovely new curves and clinical new spaces had been opened. She slid in behind two men wholly preoccupied by a heavy crate, straw-stuffed and unwieldy. She passed like a black spectre behind a white forest of plaster casts. She went on, and in, past tombrails and brass fenders and suddenly came on the Russian tomb where Philip had slept on the empty plinth, under the doves and acanthus leaves. Here she stopped and rearranged her possessions, the bag full of stones, the packet of buns. When Philip had hidden there, there was no electric lighting. Now, as the light died in the roundels of windows, she saw switches and systems of wires. She sat in the twilight, and then in the dark, letting her eyes grow used to it. She had bound her hair in a dark scarf. She looked around for the staircase with the iron rail, and did