The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [88]
He saw what he had been led to betray, and took in his wife, and the dissipated heap of letters. He smiled his foxy, intent smile, interested in Olive’s reaction.
“Touché,” he said. “You of all women should know better than to read private papers. It’s not serious, you know that. Nothing to do with you and me, which is why you shouldn’t stoop to reading private papers.”
He put out a hand to caress her, and Olive slapped it down.
“It is to do with me, it is deeply to do with me, we shall lose Todefright unless we earn some money, and don’t do things which create more dependent mouths. I work and work, I have to keep Todefright going by myself, and I am sick and anxious and should be resting—”
“Money,” said Humphry. “Money, or sex relations, which comes first, which is more certain to cause arguments and harm marriages? An interesting problem.”
“It isn’t an interesting problem, it’s my life—” cried Olive. Up to that point, it had not been clear to either of them whether a monstrous row was going to happen, or could be avoided. Now it was clear that it was to happen, it had to be gone through with. Olive clasped her hands round the unborn infant, and began to shout, like an operatic fishwife. Humphry could have tried to calm, or apologise—in any case he had to abandon his attitude of detached amusement and calm certainty. He was never defensive. When threatened, he attacked. “Listen to yourself,” he said. “How can a grown-up woman make such a racket? I thought you had become a civilised being, but no such thing, you rant like a skivvy, like a washerwoman—”
There were various shapes the rows took, various cycles of reproach and counter-reproach, various sabre-slashes at the whole fabric of the marriage. This row was long, and bad.
Tom and Dorothy and Phyllis stood on the stairs, listening, ready to scurry up to the bedrooms before they were caught. They heard the sentences they always heard.
“I have always tried to love all your children equally, you cannot say I have not. It has not been easy, though you may think it has. You do not thank me.”
“I might say the same. You cannot claim I distinguish your children from my own. All of them have their place, equally, equally, you must admit that.”
Dorothy put her face in her hands. She was the one interested in the human body. She had a clear idea of how children came into the world. It was easy not to know who your father was. It was much harder not to know who your mother was, though it could happen, Griselda had suggested ways in which society women slid changelings into families. Some village families had complicated structures where grandmothers, mothers, aunts and elder sisters were indistinguishable, where children grew up supposing their mother was their sister, and their grandmother their mother. People had babies at ages hardly older than she herself now was, this she knew. But here, who, how? Violet liked to say she was their “real mother” but as far as Dorothy could work out, she liked to say this precisely because she was not, she offered free mother-love from the position of not-mother, of maiden aunt. You could see who was somebody’s mother, you could see the unborn child growing.
It was odd, it was certainly odd, that there was a family habit of sending everyone away before the arrival of new babies. She hadn’t been at home at the moment of anyone’s birth. She had been with Griselda, or on holiday at the seaside with friendly families. Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.
• • •
Tom did not think clearly. He felt his world was threatened, and his world was Todefright, woven through and through with the light from the woods and lawns, summer and winter, golden and frosty, and also woven through and through with the web of his mother’s stories, stories