The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [46]
The story books were kept in a glass-faced cabinet in Olive’s study. Each child had a book, and each child had his or her own story. It had begun, of course, with Tom, whose story was the longest. Each story was written in its own book, hand-decorated with stuck-on scraps and coloured patterns. Tom’s was inky-blue-black, covered with ferns and brackens, some real, dried and pressed, some cut out of gold and silver paper. Dorothy’s was forest-green, covered with nursery scraps of small creatures, hedgehogs, rabbits, mice, blue-tits and frogs. Phyllis’s was rose-pink and lacy, with scraps of gauzy-winged fairies in florid dresses, sweet-peas and bluebells, daisies and pansies. Hedda’s was striped in purple, green and white, with silhouettes of witches and dragons. Florian’s book was only little, a nice warm red, with Father Christmas and a yule log.
The project had begun with Tom’s discovery, in his story, of a door into a magic world that appeared and disappeared. The imaginary door was in a real place, in a Todefright cellar full of coal and cobwebs. It was a small, silver trap-door, that would take a child, but not an adult, and it could be seen only by the light of the full moon. It led into an underground world full of tunnels, passages, mines, and strange folk and creatures, benign, maleficent and indifferent. It turned out that Tom’s hero, who was sometimes called Tom and sometimes Lancelin, was on an apparently endless quest to find his shadow, which had been stolen by a Rat, when he was in his cradle.
This tale had been so successful, that Olive had invented other doors, in the fabric of their daily reality, for the other children. Dorothy’s alter ego, a stalwart child called Peggy, had found a wooden door, with iron bolts, in the root system of the apple tree in the orchard. This proved to be a way into a strange country populated by half-beasts, people and creatures who could change their skins and sizes, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, so that you might find that you were a human child one moment, and a hedgehog the next, hiding in dead leaves. There were wolves in this land, and wild boars. Phyllis’s character, a princess who had been changed for a little servant girl, found a crack in a teapot she was being made to wash, in the middle of a picture of a pretty glade, in which ladies danced, with flutes and tambourines. You could make yourself small enough to slip through the crack by chewing a certain kind of Chinese tealeaf, known as gunpowder, which came in hard little pellets and unrolled into leaf shapes in hot water. In Phyllis’s story there were princes and princesses all waiting in castles, frozen or sleeping, for the redeemer to find the clue, and release them. Hedda’s way in was inside the grandfather clock in the dining-hall. You could see the gateway whilst the clock was striking midnight. It led to a world of witches, wizards, woods, cellars and potions, with children roosting in cages like chickens in need of setting free, and wondrous contests in shape-shifting between magical dwarfs and wizards, black ladies and blue gnomes. Florian’s story had hardly begun. It was possible his door was in the chimney, where he claimed to have seen a hefty scarlet figure with a sack. It was also possible that he would grow out of that, and make another world. In the interim, his story was peopled by his stuffed toys, a bear called Furry, a white cat called Snowy, and a stripy knitted snake called Ringary. In the world through the portal they were figures of power, sleek and glossy, Bear, Cat and Snake.
Tom looked into his book. The story had