The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [6]
Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.
“I should need to change it a great deal.”
The scholar and expert in fakes looked briefly displeased.
“It is so strong as it is,” she explained. “It has no need of my imagination.”
“I should have thought it calls upon all our imaginations, the fate of those lost works of art and craft…”
“I am intrigued by your toads and snakes.”
“For a tale of witchcraft? As familiars?”
At this point the door opened, and Julian led Philip Warren in, followed by Tom, who closed it.
“Excuse me, Father. We thought you should know. We found—him—hiding away in the Museum stores. In the crypt. I’d been keeping an eye on him and we tracked him down. He was living down there.”
Everyone looked at the dirty boy as though, Olive thought, he had risen out of the earth. His shoes had left marks on the carpet.
“What were you doing?” Prosper Cain asked him. He didn’t answer. Tom went to his mother, who ruffled his hair. He offered her the story.
“He makes drawings of the things in the cases. At night he sleeps all alone in the shrine of an old dead saint, where the bones used to be. Amongst gargoyles and angels. In the dark.”
“That’s brave,” said Olive, turning the dark eyes to Philip. “You must have been afraid.”
“Not really,” said Philip, stolidly.
He had no intention of saying what he really felt. This was that if you have slept on one mattress, end to end with five other children—a mattress moreover on which two brothers and a sister had died, neither easily nor peacefully, with nowhere to remove them to—a few old bones weren’t going to worry you. All his life he had had a steady craving for solitude, hardly even named, but never relaxing. He had no idea if other people felt this. On the whole it appeared they did not. In the Museum crypt, in the dark and dust, briefly, this craving had been for the first time satisfied. He was in a dangerous and explosive state of mind.
“Where are you from, young man?” asked Prosper Cain. “I need the whys and the hows. Why are you here, and how did you get into a locked space?”
“I come from Burslem. I work in t’Potteries.” A long pause. “I run off, that’s it, I ran away.” His face was stolid. “Your parents work in the Potteries?”
“Me dad’s dead. He were a saggar-maker. Me mum works in th’ paint shop. All of us work there, one way or another. I loaded kilns.”
“You were unhappy,” said Olive.
Philip considered his inner state. He said “Yes.”
“People were hard on you.”
“They had to be. It weren’t that. I wanted. I wanted to make something…”
“You wanted to make something of your life, of yourself,” Olive prompted. “That’s natural.”
It may have been natural, but it was not what Philip meant. He repeated
“I wanted to make something…”
His mind’s eye saw an unformed mass of liquescent mud. He looked around, like a baited bear, and saw the flaming de Morgan lustre bowl on the mantelshelf. He opened his mouth to comment on the glaze and decided against it.
Tom said “Won’t you show us your drawings?” He said to his mother “He used to show the lady students, they liked them, they gave him bread…”
Philip undid his satchel and brought out his sketch-book. There was the Candlestick with its coiling dragons and poised, wide-eyed little men. Sketch after sketch, all the intricacies of the writhing and biting and stabbing. Tom said
“That’s the little man I liked, the elderly one with the thin hair and the sad look.”
Prosper Cain turned the pages. Stone angels, Korean gold ornaments for a crown, a Palissy dish in all its ruggedness, one of the two definitely authentic specimens.
“What