The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [53]
There were pursuers, of course—the authorities, the master to whom Peter was to be apprenticed—Peter lay hidden in a ditch and saw their boots go past—
It was in fact Violet who suggested, one Christmas, when Olive was on a brief visit to Auntie Ada and her family, that perhaps they should run away.
Violet was covered with bruises which Olive had only half-noticed. Her mind on Peter Piper, and the road to the seashore, she asked Violet where they should run to.
“London, I should think,” said Violet. “We could get work of some sort there. I’ve saved up enough for one train ticket. We’ll have to take the money for the other out of her purse.”
And so they came to be in the audience of Humphry Wellwood’s English Literature lectures, dressed in blouses, skirts and hats made by Violet, who had found a good job in a dressmaking shop, and had found work for Olive, too, in plain-sewing, nothing fancy.
Violet had thought this might be a good place to find, as she put it to herself, a step up and out.
Olive found Humphry, and the rhythms of Shakespeare and Swift, Milton and Bunyan, which she thought she had craved all her life without knowing it.
They stepped up, and out.
Whilst Olive wrote her stories, Violet instructed the smaller children on the lawn. It was a hot, bright day. The servants were finishing clearing the end of the party. Violet was settled in a sagging wicker armchair, her workbasket beside her, darning socks, pulled neatly over a wooden mushroom, which had been painted like a fly-agaric, scarlet with white warts. Phyllis, Hedda and Florian were doing “nature study” with a collection of flowers and leaves they had collected. Tom and Dorothy, Griselda and Charles, were lying around on the lawn, half-reading, half-listening, half-making desultory conversation. Tom was supposed to be doing his Latin. Robin slumbered under a sunshade in his perambulator. A cuckoo called, from the orchard. Violet told them to listen.
“In June he changed tune,” she said.
“Cuck,” cried the cuckoo abbreviated.
Violet told about cuckoos.
“They make no nests. They borrow. They lay their eggs secretly in other birds’ nests, among the other eggs. The mother cuckoo picks the foster mother carefully. She lays her eggs when the foster mother is fetching food. And the foster mother—a willow-warbler, maybe, a bunting perhaps, feeds the stranger fledgling as though it was her own, even when it grows much larger than she is, even when it is almost too large for the nest, it cries for food, and she answers …”
“What happens to her real children?” asked Hedda.
“Maybe they leave early,” said Violet vaguely.
“It pushes them out,” said Dorothy. “You know it does. Barnet the gamekeeper showed me. It pushes the eggs out, and they go splat on the ground, and it pushes the fledglings out. It goes round and round and shoves with its shoulders, and tips them out. I’ve seen them on the ground. And the parents go on feeding it. Why don’t they know it isn’t theirs?”
“It’s surprising what parents don’t know,” said Violet. “It’s surprising how many creatures don’t know their real parents. Just like Hans Andersen’s ugly duckling, which was really a swan. Mother Nature means the baby cuckoo to survive and fly away with the other cuckoos to Africa. She takes care of it.”
“She doesn’t take care of the willow-warblers,” said Dorothy. “If I were the willow-warbler, I’d let it starve.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said Violet. “You’d do what comes naturally, which is feed what’s crying out for food. It’s not so easy to decide who are your own real children.”
“What do you mean?” said Dorothy, sitting up.
“Nothing,” said Violet, retreating. Then, almost sotto voce, she said to the