The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [61]
“Promise?”
“Oh yes,” he said, and took up his beaker, and drank whatever was in it.
She put the self-bored stone carefully in her apron pocket, so as no longer to hear the buzzing and the laughter. He had said he would come, quite soon.
As she hurried out of the shrubbery, and saw the sunlit windows of the house, and her eldest daughter with the smallest child, looking out of the door for her return, she remembered the tales of those who visited the friendly folk, and for whom seven years passed like a day and a night.
8
The Fludds drove slowly along the North Downs, and then south-east towards Rye and the Romney Marsh. Seraphita and her children sat in their shabby carriage, and were alternately followed and preceded by Arthur Dobbin, with Philip, in the pony-trap. They came across the Low Weald, skirting the eastern arm of the Downs, through Biddenden and Tenterden, across the Shirley Moor and onto the road that divided the Romney Marsh from the Walland Marsh, heading towards Lydd and Dungeness. The first part of the journey was over rich country, fields full of cows and festooned with hops, along lanes that wound under thick green branches, and along banks of gnarled roots, clutching. Dobbin tried to talk to Philip, and Philip stared around him, distracted. Once they came to the marshes the air changed—it was cooler, and salty, Philip thought, and less still. There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They were a stationary form of violent movement. Things croaked and whistled and wailed. There was no soot.
They drove south through Brenzett and Brookland. Dobbin, who might have been expected to point out landmarks, became silent and brooding. He fidgeted the pony’s mouth, and it shook itself crossly. They went along a lane with high hedges and a green, murky ditch, and turned through a gate, into a driveway. There was a house, behind beech trees, with Elizabethan chimneys. They drove in through a gateway, into a yard full of outbuildings, stables, a midden. Philip smelt burning. It extinguished the smells of salt water and blown grasses. It was woodsmoke. It hung heavy in the air.
Dobbin told Philip to hold the pony, and went in, through a latched door, to what looked like a dairy, or a milking-shed. Philip stood with the pony. Someone came out of a door on the other side of the yard, a short, heavy man, moving fast, shaking his head, waving his arms and shouting.
“I told you expressly never to come back. Get out of here. Go away.” Philip stood. Benedict Fludd took in the fact that Philip was not Dobbin.
“Get along with you. Put the pony in his stall, and scarper. Where did he go?”
Philip had no idea where the pony’s stall was. He stood mute. Fludd cursed him in mediaeval English and strode in through the door through which Dobbin had gone. The carriage rolled into the yard. Geraint climbed down and started to see to the horses. There seemed to be no servants to help him. Fludd came out of the dairy building, more or less dragging Dobbin, and still swearing. He had a thick, upright head of dark hair, a heavy, curling black beard and muscular arms and shoulders. He wore a workman’s smock, heavy cotton trousers and fisherman’s boots. “Get out,” he said, repeatedly, to Dobbin. Geraint led the carriage horse into the stables, and came back for the pony, without speaking to his father or to Philip.
Imogen said to her father
“Don’t be angry. We’re back in time to help with the firing. We can all help.”
“No you can’t. We fired it, Wally and I fired it, while you were gallivanting. Total disaster. Total.”
“Why didn’t you wait?” asked Imogen. Her father said curtly that he’d wanted to control his own firing whilst the disastrous Dobbin was absent, and couldn’t muck it up. But Wally had dozed off in the night, and the fire hadn’t been fed right, and not only the firing but the kiln itself was in rack and ruin. And the carter had come