Summary
Penny and Primrose return to London. Primrose’s father is killed late in the war while serving in the Far East. Penny’s father dies as a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service while trying to put out a fire in the East India Docks on the Thames in London. Both find it hard to remember their fathers after the war. Penny’s mother isolates herself in her grief, while Primrose’s mother remarries and has five more children. Penny studies development psychology at university. Primrose has little time for education because she is busy taking care of her siblings. After working odd jobs, she discovers a talent for storytelling and begins entertaining at children’s parties and local shopping malls as Aunty Primrose.
The mansion house is turned into a living museum. People can come to see old portraits of royalty, antique furniture, and reproductions of famous paintings that were kept safely in the house during the war. There are photos of the house’s time as a military hospital, but no evidence of the time the child evacuees were kept there. In 1984, Primrose and Penny meet again at the house. They have both come, coincidentally, at the same time. They split off from a tour group and walk around the room ignorant of each other. Neither knows their mother both died in the spring. Primrose wears pink while Penny wears black.
Both women are drawn to an old book left open to an illustration of a knight raising his sword to slay a figure left in shadow. They recognize each other as they both lean close to the glass that covers the book, hoping to decipher the text that explains the image. They breathe each other’s names and then, with trembling knees, read about the Loathly Worm. According to legend, it infested the countryside and had been killed multiple times by different scions of the house. Like a regular garden worm, it had the capacity to sprout new heads if divided, so that two worms replaced one. This is why it was killed so many times.
Primrose and Penny have tea together in a tearoom in a converted stable on the grounds. Over scones, jams, and clotted cream, the women catch up on the lives they have lived since the war. Primrose says wartime rationing made her permanently greedy. Penny agrees that clotted cream is still a treat. Eventually, they find their way to the subject of the thing in the forest. They both agree that they really saw “that thing” from the book. Penny says she has never for a moment wondered if they “really” saw it. Penny says it was a horrible thing, and there isn’t a bit she can manage to forget. Penny says she has never told anyone, because who would believe her?
Primrose says the memory is stuck in her mind like a tapeworm in the gut. She and Penny agree that the experience did them no good at all. Penny says she thinks there are things that are “more real than we are,” but that we mostly don’t cross their paths. Only during very bad times do we notice we have gotten into their worlds, or them into ours. In a childlike voice, Penny says she sometimes thinks “that thing finished [her] off.”
Primrose nods vigorously and speculates that the Thing finished off Alys, who wasn’t anywhere to be seen after the thing passed. Primrose says she wonders sometimes if they made up the girl, but Penny confirms her name, and that it was spelled with a y. They remember the disgusting mess the creature left, and how there was no sign of Alys in its wake. Primrose eventually shrugs and concludes that they are not crazy, and it wasn’t a delusion. She says it’s good they met again because now they can confirm they’re not “mad” and “can get on with things, so to speak.”
The women arrange to have dinner the following night. During the day, Primrose goes on a local bus tour. Penny takes a long, solitary walk. The weather is grey; there is a fine, spitting rain. They return to their bed-and-breakfast rooms with headaches. Both wonder, with a swirling giddiness, what they might discuss. But at seven thirty, neither woman leaves their beds to meet for dinner.
The following day is sunny. Over their breakfasts, the women separately think about the woods where they saw the Thing. Confirmed by a feeling of determination in her body, Primrose decides she will go there. She takes a bus, separating from the other tourists to take a path toward the forest. Her body takes her on a different route than she took as a girl. She is distracted by flashes of birds and flowers. Her breathing becomes labored; she does not like the sound of her unfit body struggling. The sight of a red squirrel brings to mind the stuffed animals her mother would give as gifts when she was a child. It was a breath-taking blow to learn that Santa didn’t exist and that her mother made the animals herself. The magic was taken away.
Primrose follows the squirrel as it leaps deeper into the forest. She decides it will take her to the center, and that she must reach the center. As her clothing gets dirty from vegetation, she tells a story in her head: the story is about “staunch Primrose, not giving up, making her way to ‘the center.’” The squirrel stops in a clearing. Primrose decides this is the center. She sits on a mossy mound she thinks of as throne-like. She narrates this action to herself. Now what? she thinks.
Primrose remembers the creature’s blank, miserable face, powerful claws, and body of accumulated decay. She has returned to the forest not because she wants to confront it or look at it again, but because “it was there.” Primrose has known all her life that she was in a magic forest, and that forest was the source of terror. She reflects on how she never frightens the children who listen to her stories with tales of children lost in forests. In her stories, forests are “sources of glamor, of rich colors and unseen hidden life, flower fairies and magical beings.” Primrose knows the brilliance of the forest is the source of both this enchantment and the horrible stinking thing she saw.
Analysis
Through a swift accounting of the girls’ lives following their separation, Byatt continues building on the themes of lost innocence, trauma, and unprocessed grief. Living through eerily similar circumstances, Penny and Primrose both return to London to witness firsthand the devastation of the war. Having lost their innocence that day in the forest, they suffer the mounting misfortunes of bombed-out neighborhoods, skies full of fire, food rationing, interrupted education, and dead fathers.
The casual way the narrator lists the troubles conveys the resignation to which the girls, and everyone else living through the war, succumb. Rather than respond to their losses with commensurate sorrow and anger, the social atmosphere of wartime Britain means the girls are implicitly encouraged to accept their new reality and move on with life. This collective denial results in a society haunted by unprocessed grief, and the girls are forever affected. Because their encounter with the miserable Thing destroyed their innocence, they both go through life lacking the vitality that would allow them to take part in society. Each remains emotionally isolated, never marrying or starting families of their own.
It is only when Penny and Primrose see each other again in 1984 that they address the trauma of the war and of encountering the Thing. In a chance meeting, the women simultaneously discover an old text that describes the creature they saw in the forest. The book’s description of the local legend of the Loathly Worm only differs from what the girls saw in the household detritus it contained in its body. This suggests the girl’s Loathly Worm is a more modern version of the mythological being.
Over tea, the women discuss, in a somewhat roundabout way, the trauma of seeing the Thing. Penny acknowledges the impact of the encounter on her psyche by saying that it “finished [her] off,” effectively dooming her to a life spent wondering about the real and unreal. Although both women have always questioned whether they imagined it, in their hearts they know they saw it. Running into each other confirms, as Primrose says, that they are not crazy. However, seeing each other again also threatens to draw each woman out of the isolation in which she has been trapped. It is because of this fear of having to process the grief and trauma they have been repressing that both women skip the dinner they agreed to meet for.
Remaining isolated from each other, Penny and Primrose independently make the same decision: to return to the forest clearing where they saw the Thing. Fearing what she might encounter, Primrose encourages herself with a story in her head, narrating her actions as though she is a determined heroine. In this way, she mentally occupies the realm of fairytales to ease her entry back into the realm of the unreal. Arriving at what she decides is the center of the forest, Primrose doesn’t encounter the Thing, but nonetheless processes some of her fear, concluding that the forest is the birthplace of both terror and magic, two forces that carry equal weight in life.
