The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [38]
“I saw you enchanting those men. You can’t help it. The German and the don, the playwright and the soldier from the Museum, you gave them all a look—”
“There’s no harm in that. Whereas it really isn’t proper to tell little girls like Griselda, that green dresses were for prostitutes, because they were tumbled in the grass.”
“Did I do that? I have seriously drunk too much. I shouldn’t think Griselda knows what a prostitute is. She doesn’t live in reforming circles.”
“Well, Dorothy knows, she can hardly help it. So I imagine Griselda does.”
“Etta Skinner will be enrolling them to promote pro-prostitute leaflets.”
“You have drunk too much.”
She was plucking the wilting wired flowers, one by one, from her hair. He stepped out of his clothes and stood naked, slightly aroused, reaching for his nightshirt. This was white cambric, embroidered by Violet with bulrushes and arum lilies. She had made him a nightcap, with gold chrysanthemums. He never wore this, but it hung on the bedpost, and perhaps Violet supposed that he wore it.
“I drank too much because of Basil. He knows, now. He always knew, I suspect, but it wasn’t in the open. According to his lights what I wrote was not honest.”
Olive said, easily, “You did what you thought right.”
“I don’t know. I did what I felt I must do. Now, you know, I think I shall have to resign from the Bank. For noble and ignoble reasons, both. I think I must. I don’t know how we shall pay Tom’s school fees.”
“And what will you do?” said Olive, pausing in the act of unbuttoning.
“I shall write. I shall use my pen. I shall write for journals. I shall write books. I can get things done, in the world.”
Olive resumed her unbuttoning. She stepped out of her underwear.
“I shall write harder. I am doing better than adequately. I shall work harder.”
“You like that idea. The woman as breadwinner.”
“I do like it, yes. We both do, I think.”
“We make a good partnership. Fortunately.”
Olive had put on her nightdress, white and not embroidered by Violet.
“Maybe too good. This is the wrong moment, but I have to tell you. There will be another little open mouth. I am almost sure.”
Humphry tilted his beard up, laughed, and embraced his wife. She could feel him erect, under the bulrushes.
“Clever girl. Clever Humphry. How good we are at what we do, isn’t it so, creamy Olive?”
“You needn’t be smug. You know it has dangers. You know it will be an expense. It won’t be so easy for me to win bread.”
“We’ve love enough for another. We’ll find a way, we always do.”
He stroked her flanks, smiling.
“I expect you’re so pleased, because you’re still drunk. How shall we manage?”
“Violet will take over. You will rest and write. And I shall change the world, one of these days.”
From his moonlit room, leaning on the windowsill, Philip could see their forms, moving across their window-pane, graceful, obscurely occupied. He did not know them. He was outside, peering in. That suited him. He watched their lamp go out, and stood still for some time, looking at the moon. Then he took his towel, and lay down, and pleased himself again, shivering with brief delight in his solitude. Then he was limp, and drifted into sleep.
6
Nutcracker Cottage, like many English things, appeared at first sight to be an instance of pure whimsy, but was in fact more complicated. It was a restored labourer’s cottage, with new thatch, and small recessed windows in thick white walls. The front garden had long beds along a flagged path, thick with flowers—hollyhocks, delphiniums, foxgloves and pinks, sweet williams and bachelors’ buttons, with a haze of self-sown forget-me-nots. The front door opened directly into the parlour, with walls covered by what William Morris had called “honest whitewash, on which sun and shadow play so pleasantly.” The parlour had been made by knocking two rooms into one. At one end was an alcove-study papered with Morris’s pink and gold honeysuckle, and containing a plain