The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [83]
Geraint said it all depended on Philip Warren, whether it would last, this time. He had got the kiln going, and designed the tiles.
Dobbin said he was sure Philip would stay, if there was work for him.
And food, said Geraint, and even a living wage. Nobody seems to have thought about that. My family thinks it is vulgar to think about money, they think it is too low a thing for them to attend to—but I know there isn’t any. There really isn’t any. They can’t buy clay, and they’re in debt to the farmer for milk and eggs, and I have to charm the shopkeepers in the most disgusting way to have tea, or coffee, or meat. He brightened. “We might offer the butcher some of the tiles, for his display, in exchange for meat. I am not a vegetarian by choice. I like meat.”
11
In November 1895 Olive Wellwood was great with child. She sat at her desk in her usual flowing robes, which still concealed her condition from visitors and small children, and tried to write. She found it hard to write when she was “expecting;” the stranger inside seemed to suck at her energy and confuse the rhythm of sentences in her blood and brain. Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare’s rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet. She never got used to owning these things, never saw them simply as household stuff. They were still less real than the ash pits of Goldthorpe. They still had the quality Aladdin’s palace must have had for him and the princess, when the genie erected it out of nothing. She kept trying to write a story with the title “Safe as Houses,” which would be ironic, because houses were not safe, like the Three Little Pigs’ foolish constructions of straw and wattle, or the house in the Bible builded upon sand. Houses were builded upon money, and Humphry had quarrelled with his rich brother, and abandoned his solid job amongst the ingots in the Bank in Threadneedle Street. Her ever-inventive mind played like light over Banks and turf banks, straw, sand, wattle and square-cut quarried stone, but the story would not come, it was not ready, and she was not ready to inhabit her fear of dispossession.
She loved Todefright as much as she loved any living being, including Humphry and Tom. When she thought of it, it had always two aspects, its carved and crafted presence, doors, windows, chimneys, stairs, and the world she had constructed in, through and under it, the imagined, interpenetrating world, with its secret doors into tunnels, and caverns, the otherworld under the green fairy hill. She imagined her home standing on terrifying strata of underground rocks and ores—flint and clay, coal and schist, basalt and grit, through which snaked rivers and branching tributaries of cold water and gleaming ores—liquid silver and gold—she always imagined them liquid, like quicksilver though she knew they were not.
All writers perhaps have talismanic phrases which represent to them the force, the intrinsic nature of writing. Olive’s was from the ballad tale of True Thomas, who