“She’s been—so very kind. You all have.”
“We have our beliefs,” said Violet. “About what the world should be like. And some of us have experience—like yours—of what it shouldn’t be.”
The moon was caught in the branches of the trees round the cottage. He was solaced by learning the lines of the network of twigs, which was both random and ordered. He didn’t point this out to Violet, but thanked her again, as he took his candle, and made his way into his cottage. He feared she might try to kiss him goodnight—he could not predict what these people would do—but she simply stood, and watched him take his candle up the ladder.
“Sleep tight,” she called.
“Thank you,” he said, yet again.
And then he was alone, with a brave candle, in a cottage. This was what he had wanted, or part of it. There was a nightshirt, laid out on the clean sheets of the wooden bed that was temporarily his. He looked out of the window, and there were the branches, lit by the moon on a dark blue, cloudless sky, with their fish-shaped leaves overlapping, and just trembling. He translated the shapes into a glaze, and puzzled over it briefly. It was too much. He wanted to cry out, or to weep, or, he understood, to touch his body—his body washed clean—as he had only ever been able to do furtively, in dirty places. He must not leave marks, that would be shameful. He finally contrived a safety-pad of the handkerchief he had been given or lent. He could rinse it, subsequently, under the pump.
He lay back, and took himself in hand, and worked himself into a rhythm of delight, and a soaring wet ecstasy.
Then he lay still, listening to the sounds in the silence. An owl called. Another owl answered. A big branch creaked. Things rustled. The pump below dripped in the stone sink. How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.
The next day, they prepared the Midsummer Party. Violet gave Philip a breakfast of eggs, toast and tea, and told him he was co-opted to make lanterns. The garden would be full of them. He was to go up to the schoolroom, where the lanterns were being made.
The imposing staircase took an interesting turn as it went up. In an alcove, at the turning, standing on an oak coffin stool was a jar. It was a large earthenware vessel, that bellied out and curved in again, to a tall neck with a fine lip. The glaze was silver-gold, with veilings of aquamarine. The light flowed round the surface, like clouds reflected in water. It was a watery pot. There was a vertical rhythm of rising stems, water-weeds, and a dashing horizontal rhythm of irregular clouds of black-brown wriggling commas, which turned out, inspected closely, to be lifelike tadpoles with translucent tails. The jar had several asymmetric handles which seemed to grow out of it like roots in water, but turned out to have the sly faces and flickering tails of water-snakes, green-spotted gold. It rested on four dark green feet, which were coiled, scaled lizards. Or minor dragons, lying with closed eyes and resting snouts.
This was what he had come to look for. His fingers moved inside its contours on an imaginary wheel. Its form clothed his sense of the shape of his body. He stood stock still and stared.
Olive Wellwood came up behind him and put an arm about his shoulder. She smelled of roses. Philip resisted shrugging. He disliked being touched. Especially at private times.
“It’s an amazing pot, don’t you think? We chose it for the pretty tadpoles—they go with our idea of Todefright. The little ones love to stroke them.”
Philip could not speak.
“Benedict Fludd made it. He works in Dungeness. He’s invited to the party, but he probably won’t come. His wife will. She’s called Seraphita, though she was born Sarah-Jane. The boy’s Geraint, and the girls are Imogen—she must be about your age—and Pomona. Pomona’s Tom’s age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name—so dangerous, don’t you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts. Pomona isn’t very appley—you’ll see—more a pale narcissus.”
Philip was interested only in the potter. He managed to mutter that the pot was extraordinary.
“He has religious fits, I’m told. They have to hide the pots, to prevent him smashing them. And he has anti-religious fits.”
Philip made a strangled, noncommittal sound. Olive ruffled his hair. He didn’t flinch. She led him up to the schoolroom.
“Schoolroom” to Philip meant a dark chapel annexe with long benches, and a heavy atmosphere of unwashed bodies, baffled thinking and prickling fear of the cane. Here, in a room full of light, with pimpernel chintz at the windows, everyone was at work in his or her own space. The girls wore bright aprons, like coloured butterflies, Dorothy butcher-blue, Phyllis deep rose, Hedda scarlet. Florian had a cowslip-yellow smock. The long, scrubbed table was covered with coloured papers, glue pots, paintbrushes, paintboxes, jars of water. Waste-paper baskets overflowed with crumpled, rejected efforts. Violet presided, helping with a snip here, a finger on a knot there.
Tom made room for Philip to sit next to him. “No,” said Phyllis, “next to me.”
Phyllis had hair the colour of butter, slick and shiny. Philip sat down next to her. She patted his arm, with a gesture that belonged to a child younger than she seemed to be. Or a gesture you might use to a pet, Philip thought unjustly. He remembered his sister Elsie, who had never had her own space in any room, and fought a constant battle with nits in her pale hair.
They showed him their lanterns. Tom’s had hunched crows on flame-colour. Phyllis had put simple florets, daisies and bluebells on grass-green. Dorothy had made a pattern of skeletal hands (not human, Philip thought, maybe rabbits) on violet. Hedda was slowly cutting out a silhouette of a witch on a broom. Phyllis said
“We told her that witches are for Hallowe’en not Midsummer. But she got good at Hallowe’en witches, she got the knack of the hat and bristles—”
“Witches don’t stop being, in midsummer,” said Hedda. “I like witches.”
“Help yourself to paper, Philip,” said Violet Grimwith, “and to scissors and paste and paint. We are all curious to see what you will do.”
He felt better the moment he had his hands on solid things. He took a large piece of paper and covered it with the pattern of tadpoles from the master pot, which he needed to remember. Then he made another with the long sly snake flickering round it, grass-green and gold on blue. Violet took these away to make into lanterns. Philip had another idea. He painted a dull red horizon, with shadowy grey forms rising high above it. There were squat cylindrical forms, and tall bottle-shaped forms, and shapes like hives and casques. There was a flowing festoon of flame and tongues of pewter-grey smoke from the summits, the skyline of Burslem, made elegant as a party lantern.
“What’s that, what’s that, then?” asked loud Hedda.
“That’s where I come from. Chimneys and bottle ovens, and furnace flames, and smoke.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Hedda.
“Aye, on a lantern,” said Philip. “In a sense it is beautiful, as it is. But horrible, too. You can’t breathe rightly.”
Dorothy took the lanterns and ranged them with the other finished ones. Phyllis said
“Tell us about that place. Tell us about your sisters. Tell us their names.”
She nestled closer to him, so he could feel the warmth and weight of her body, almost leaning on him, almost cuddling.
“They are Elsie and Nellie and Amelia and Hope,” said Philip reluctantly.