The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [44]
He had come to Lydd by accident. Like many of his kind he had changed his life as a result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe. Carpenter, with his working-class friend George Merrill, lived a life of studied simplicity, cultivating the earth, wearing homespun and homemade sandals, sunbathing and windbathing naked to the elements. Dobbin had heard Carpenter lecture, in Sheffield, on the evils of civilisation, and the way to cure them. Dobbin had responded violently to the anarchist saint’s reasonable charisma.
He was the plump son of a doctor’s widow. He was dutifully studying medicine, as his father would have wished, and continually failed the medical exams. He imagined, timidly, passionate friendships with fellow students, but was almost pathologically dumb with embarrassment. When he heard Carpenter, he knew that the only answers were a complete change of life, or self-slaughter. He thought he was not imaginative. He had no idea where to look for a new life.
Some of this he managed to mutter to Carpenter, over the convivial beer and smoke after the lecture. Carpenter recognised him for what he was, and invited him to visit Milthorpe.
There he enjoyed George Merrill’s salmon pie, and watched the two men quietly knitting. The house was occupied by a shifting population of seekers, idealists and the lost. There were Cambridge men and farmworkers, emancipated women and unsatisfied clerics. Dobbin gave up medicine and got a job in a pharmacy. At Milthorpe one summer he bathed naked in the stream with a gipsyish wanderer called Martin Calvert. Calvert had trained for the priesthood and given it up. He had been a lay member of a religious community in Glamorgan. He had learned to weave at a Crafts community in Norfolk. When Dobbin met him, he had decided to be a potter. To work with the stuff of the earth itself, he said. Dobbin was immediately taken with this idea of an art of the earth. They noticed, blushing and laughing as they bathed, that their members were erect and swaying in the water—“like charmed snakes” Martin laughed, and Dobbin was charmed.
They went on a walking tour, in search of a master of ceramics. They went to the South Kensington Museum and saw vessels made by Benedict Fludd. Martin Calvert said that this man was a master, and they might try to find him. Dobbin saw the perfection of the pots, through Martin’s eyes, as Martin described them, the proportions, the subtle glaze, the authority.
They walked south, in search of Fludd. They found him in Purchase House, a partly derelict Elizabethan manor, hidden in woodland in the flat marshy plain beyond Lydd. Martin spoke for both of them, with engaging enthusiasm. Fludd was in an expansive mood, and accepted their offer of help with a firing. The firing was a disaster. Fludd’s mood darkened. He cursed them. Dobbin was almost sure that he uttered a formal curse, out of a commination service. The next morning, Martin was not there. He had taken his pack, crept out before dawn and disappeared.
Dobbin stayed where he was, and waited for a message, which did not come. He avoided Benedict Fludd who was now in semi-retreat—and tried to be helpful to Seraphita and her family. He couldn’t make pots, but he could cook. He cooked fresh fish, and vegetable pasties, and custard tarts. The Fludd women could not cook, and they were at the time too poor to employ a cook. They accepted him. His heart was broken, but he was too genuinely humble to make much of it.
This continued for six months or so. Fludd mostly pretended not to see Dobbin, and Seraphita gave him small sums of money to do shopping and repairs. One day, he went into the village church. The