The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [47]
The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless. They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit onto the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning. There were tributary plots, that joined the mainstream again, further on, further in. Olive plundered the children’s stories sometimes, for publishable situations, or people, or settings, but everyone understood that the magic persisted because it was hidden, because it was a shared secret.
All of them, from Florian to Olive herself, walked about the house and garden, the shrubbery and the orchard, the stables and the wood, with an awareness that things had invisible as well as visible forms, including the solid kitchen and nursery walls, which concealed stone towers and silken bowers. They knew that rabbit warrens opened into underground lanes to the land of the dead, and that spider-webs could become fetters as strong as steel, and that myriads of transparent creatures danced at the edge of the meadows, and hung and chattered like bats in the branches, only just invisible, only just inaudible. Any juice of any fruit or flower might be the lotion that, squeezed on eyelids, touched to tongue or ears, would give the watcher or listener a way in, a power of inhuman sensing. Any bent twig might be a message or a sign. The seen and the unseen world were interlocked and superimposed. You could trip out of one and into the other at any moment.
Tom delivered the heap of books to his mother in her nest of quilt and counterpane. She asked him if he had peeped. Of course, said Tom, of course he had peeped.
“Who do you think is running in front of them?”
They made the plot between them, some of the time.
“A lost boy. A boy who fell in by accident, down one of the shafts?”
Olive considered. “Friend or enemy?”
Tom was not sure. He said he thought the intruder was not sure. He could turn out to be either. He still thought he could get out quickly, Tom told his mother, he hadn’t learned how hard it was to get out.
“I’ll work on it,” said Olive. “Now go and do your Latin.”
Olive was sometimes frightened by the relentlessly busy inventiveness of her brain. It was good and consoling that it earned money, real bankable cheques in real envelopes. That anchored it in the real world. And the real world sprouted stories wherever she looked at it. Benedict Fludd’s watery pot on the turn of the stair, for instance. She looked casually at the translucent tadpoles and had invented a whole water-world of swimming water-nymphs threatened by a huge water-snake, or maybe by that old terror, Jenny Greenteeth, lurking in the weeds and sifting them with her crooked fingers, before she reached the landing.
Yesterday’s events had also transmuted themselves into story-matter, almost as fast as they had happened. She had watched Anselm Stern’s version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale with glee—her response to any performance, any work of art, was the desire to make another, to make her own. She was in that world, watching, not in flat dailiness. The gliding movement of the puppets, the glitter of the limelight on their silk organza dresses, the half-visible strings, like spider-silk, had transmuted into other figures in other lights in her head, almost before they had performed their own sequence of movements. Suppose a puppet managed to free itself and come to life, and strut and nod amongst clumsy humans, with their thick, fleshy fingers? It wouldn’t be like Pinocchio; the creature would have no desire to be a “real child,