The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [74]
“The original couple in the original garden were in a happier state before they learned shame. Come into the house. Tell me about your lectures.”
His voice had a northern tang, which Frank, a child of the Home Counties, could not place. Dobbin knew it came from somewhere quite a way north of his Sheffield.
They padded back in single file, into the house through the back door, Phoebe Methley in the rear with the colander, like some saint’s attribute in a painting. She went into the kitchen, to make tea. Herbert Methley offered the two friends seats in low, slatted Arts and Crafts armchairs. The room was full of a smoky darkness, after the blaze of light in the garden. There was a vase of field flowers on a carved table. Dobbin explained the lecture plan to Herbert Methley, and Frank withdrew into his own mind for a moment, wondering whether to thank Methley for Marsh Lights, or at least to tell him how it had moved him. He decided against this. He found he was annoyed that this robed person, with his electric black hair, was more the owner, so to speak, of the imagined rocks and stones and elder bushes than he, the reader. Readers ought not to meet writers, he thought. They are meant not to.
He came out of his brief reverie to hear Methley proposing a lecture on “something like ‘Elements of paganism in modern art,’ or even ‘Elements of the pagan in modern art and modern religion.’” Frank said that that was exactly what they had hoped for. He then added, with a fake casualness, that he had enjoyed Mr. Methley’s work very much. Mr. Methley said he was delighted. He asked if Frank had read his latest book, Apple-bobbing. He would be happy to present a copy. He found one, and inscribed it, in a neat hand. The man in the dog-collar smiled cautiously at the man in nothing but a robe splashed with crimson peonies and gold and silver chrysanthemums.
As they rode back home, Dobbin said
“The odd thing is, how much more bad-mannered it seems it would have been, to run away. It is really odd that courtesy seemed to mean we had to stand and stare.”
Frank said the world was changing. And he agreed, it would have been much ruder to withdraw than to stand their ground. Dobbin, remembering his brief visit to Edward Carpenter, and his naked air-baths and river-baths in the Derbyshire countryside, asked whether Frank would ever be tempted to take the sun, in that way. Frank said, no. He said, after further thought, that the human body was not lovely, seen uncovered. His face was flushed with the energy of his pedalling. The marsh sheep moved slowly across the marshes, grazing the salty grass. Dobbin said it had been a successful day. Frank said it had, indeed.
II
THE GOLDEN AGE
10
The old dairy was a good shape for a pottery studio. The kiln was separated, in a room that had been a scullery; its chimney protruded through the slate roof. The dairy had slate shelves, with drawers under them, and various cupboards in the wall, as well as an inner larder, where once butter and whey had cooled, and now the pots were left to become leather-hard, or to wait for a glaze to dry. The windows were small and deep-set. There were two, and a wheel stood underneath each of them, one a large wheel with a treadle motor, one a simple hand-turned wheel, with a milking stool and bucket beside it. There were little stained-glass roundels set in the windows. One showed a maned and horned sea serpent on cobalt waves, and one a white sailing sloop, skimming or foundering, it was not clear which. Pinned to the door was a life-size coloured drawing of a Renaissance man, in doublet, hose and gown, all a dark crimson, and a flat velvet cap. He stood beside a large urn.
Philip, very cautiously, set about ordering things. He swept up the debris, and made a neat heap of the reusable parts of the exploded kiln. He was tactful: he knew what things he could rearrange, and what he might need permission to touch. There were drawers containing tangles of metals, used for experimental glazes, which he left as they were. The new clay he put in bins, in a kind