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By Root 2090 0

” just a desire for independent life. For a moment, at the terrible point when Olimpia disintegrated into a whirl of severed limbs, Olive had done Anselm Stern the justice of simply responding to his art, of feeling simple shock. But then she was away again. Supposing a puppet become a real creature met a doll who refused to be real, who was inert, waxy, complacent? There were dolls who somehow had souls—or characters, or personalities anyway—and there were dolls who resolutely refused to come into being, who simpered and sat like suet. Dorothy didn’t like dolls. Phyllis had a whole cot full of both kinds, the living and the lifeless. Suppose the newly freed puppet walked into a nursery and was attacked by a flannelly array of simulacra—of course, she had got this idea from Olimpia, in the first place, how clever Hoffmann was—you could make a truly eerie tale for children, but you must be careful, she knew, not to overstep some limit of the bearable. She often came close to overstepping it. Indeed, her success as a children’s writer had begun with The Shrubbery, which did come very close to the impermissible, indeed, according to some percipient critics, crossed the boundary. But children liked to glimpse the unbearable, in manageable doses. She herself had had a book, as a child, Hans Andersen’s Tales. Her mother had read to her, “The Princess and the Pea,” “Thumbelina.” She had been filled with horror for the inch-high girl, in the care of the stupid kindly mouse, who was promised to a stout, blind, black Mole who would take her underground to bourgeois comfort where she would never again see the light of day. It was probable, Olive thought, that the whole complicated wanderings of Tom underground had started with her own childish fear of Thumbelina’s mole-tunnel.

She spread honey on her toast, and sipped her tea. Tom had put a little posy of wild flowers on the breakfast tray, heartsease and bluebells, and a few fronds of fern. She felt a movement of nausea as she bit into the toast, which the sugar of the honey alleviated. An unbidden image of the unborn child inside her came into her mind, something coiled in a caul and attached, like a puppet, by a long thread to her own life. She tried very hard to feel neither hope nor fear for the unborn. If she thought of them, it was more in terms of the waxy stillborn, with their closed faces, than in terms of a potential Tom or Hedda. She feared for them, and their presence disturbed her peace. Also, she cared for them, she took care. She bit into the honey and butter and bread, nourishing herself and the blind life she had not exactly invited to settle in her. She turned her mind to the shadowy fugitive underground.

Olive Grimwith was a miner’s daughter. Her father, Peter Grimwith, had been a buttie, hacking away at the coal-face in his stall, under the very ground she walked over, to get to school, or the Goldthorpe shop. Her mother was Lucy, who had been born Lucy Appledore, a draper’s daughter, in Leeds. Lucy was a small, thin, exhausted creature, who hoped to be a schoolteacher, and knew things like the meaning of the name Lucy, which was “light.” There were five children, Edward, Olive, Petey, Violet and Dora, who had been an unexpected baby, and had died with her mother, of pneumonia, when Olive was twelve. Edward and Petey had both gone down the mine at the age of fourteen. Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The