The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [54]
Dorothy could hear Violet’s thoughts, as she had heard Philip’s. This was not the first time Violet had spoken this way. She said, turning to science for help,
“It’s just natural instinct. For the cuckoos, in their way, and the willow-warblers in theirs.”
“It’s the kindness at the heart of things,” said Violet. She stabbed at the sock with a needle. Charles said, in an audible undertone,
“Lots of people aren’t really their parents’ children, don’t really know who their real parents are, you hear about it all the time—”
“You shouldn’t be listening to such things,” said Violet, with a return of force. “And folk shouldn’t be telling you.”
“I can’t help having ears,” said Charles.
“Then you’d better wash them,” said Violet.
Hedda took up her shoe-dolls. “All these have no father or mother, only a shoe. They are mine to look after.”
Something had become very uncomfortable. Tom put his nose in his Latin. Griselda proposed to Dorothy that they go for a walk in the woods. Charles said he would come, and Tom.
“Cuck,” said the cuckoo in the wood. “Cuck, cuck, cuck.”
“It’s funny,” said Dorothy, “how it knows it’s a cuckoo when it comes to flying to Africa, it goes with the cuckoos. I wonder what it thinks it is, when it goes. It can’t see itself.”
They went into the woods, two by two, two boys, followed by two girls, all four clothed in shabby, serviceable Todefright clothes in which trees could be climbed, and brooks could be forded. They were going to the Tree House, which was a secret, hidden place, which very few people knew about or could find. It was woven into the tentlike lower branches of a Scots pine, which was the central roof-tree, stitched together with cord and strings, thatched with heather and dead bracken, disguised with more random branches. It had two rooms, with spy-hole windows. It was possible to lie out on its roof, amongst the arms of the tree, and there were couches of heather, and wooden box tables inside. It was Tom’s favourite place on earth. Inside, and wholly hidden away, he was himself. He thought of the Tree House as his place, although the designing intelligence, the solidity of the construction, were Dorothy’s. Dorothy liked to bring things to it, to study them—small skulls, and unusual plant forms. She also liked to go into it with Griselda and talk intensely for hours. Tom assumed that they talked, for he had the grace not to go with them. And because he left them together, they in turn left him his long periods of solitude, when the house was his hiding-place. There was always the problem of Phyllis, who insisted on tagging along, if she noticed they were going there, and was unwelcome both because she tried to “play house” in it, with mummies and daddies, and because Tom, Dorothy and Griselda knew that she was the weak spot in their tissue of silence. She might tell, she might enjoy telling, and had to be both threatened and bribed.
Charles was allowed to come because he was not very interested in tree houses—he was urban by nature—but suitably admiring of the constructive skills that had gone into the building. Tom had wondered whether Philip would like the house. He thought he might, since he had been found in a hidey-hole. But Philip had already gone to the marshes in the carriage with the Fludds and Dobbin. Tom had also wondered whether to show it to Julian. Julian might not see how special it was. And Dorothy might not like Julian’s dominating presence. It was altogether too early to have views about Julian.
They sat down on the heather couches, which were covered with blankets, and Tom offered them all apples and toffees, from a store he kept in a box.
“What did you mean,” Dorothy asked Charles, “when you said lots of people aren’t their parents’ children?”
Griselda said that her friend Clementine Burt was always being teased because she didn’t look anything like her father, and then people pointed out