by Sara Banerji
Mrs Lovage went to the Plague House ten times that day, begging to be let in, for she had no pride when it came to Elizabeth.
She raised the letter-flap and tried shouting things like, ‘Don’t worry about the baby, ducky.’ She could even smell the baby, milky, earthy, a bit sour, a bit sugary.
On the second morning, when Elizabeth still did not respond, she looked into the basement and saw George sitting in a deckchair.
She rapped on the cobwebbed glass. ‘It’s only me, ducky. Open the window, dear. I’ve got a suggestion.’
George stared frozen.
‘Come on, ducky,’ urged Mrs Lovage. ‘I only want to help you.’
George came cautiously over. ‘I love kiddies, and I love little babies best of all,’ soothed Mrs Lovage. ‘I’d be able to give you a hand, bath the little nipper, change its nappies, take it for walks in the pram, that sort of thing.’
A gust of hope surged through George as he got a vision of Mrs L, looking after Lump, while he and Sissy fucked.
‘Now you let me in, ducky,’ said Mrs Lovage, ‘and I’ll sort everything out with your dear mother. She’s no need to be ashamed.’ She gave George a sly wink and said, ‘And I’ll find the fellow who did it to our Sissy and see he gets punished. Men like that need their willies chopped off!’
The colour faded out of George’s face and, with a violent slamming of the window, he vanished.
‘Well, I never,’ Mrs Lovage murmured, feeling disappointed, for she thought she’d been getting somewhere and could not understand what she had said.
Elizabeth tried to carry on as usual, doing her embroidery, listening to her records, but could not help hearing cries, grunts, even small sneezes from the Hairy Petal Bedroom.
When she heard George shout, ‘Lump’s drinking really well, now. The coat’ll be tight quite soon,’ Elizabeth realised that the creature was not declining but thriving.
In that moment she made her decision.
She flung open the French windows, went down into the garden, and to the shed where she had locked Sissy’s confiscated raft.
Elizabeth cut her hand as she dragged the plank, twine, and bottle construction out. Cobwebs and mouse droppings clung to it.
George, at the Hairy Petal Bedroom window, said, ‘Mother is going rafting.’
‘Really?’ said Sissy, craning to see over the top of sucking Lump’s head. ‘How typical of her to go and do fun things just when we are busy and can’t join in.’
‘I am not busy,’ said George.
‘I am feeding your baby and you hanker to go boating with Mother,’ cried Sissy.
‘I don’t want to go at all. I want to stay with you,’ gasped George. It was the sort of thing you had to say when you thought Sissy was going to get angry.
‘Go! Go, then! Fat lot I care!’ screamed Sissy, bouncing so hard with indignation that the nipple popped out of Lump’s mouth. Lump shrieked.
George gloomily sat down again and at once Sissy seemed to forget his presence and concentrate only on the suckling creature.
He had another peep, and saw his mother had reached the moat, ducks scattering and squawking as the clutter of tins and bottles approached.
‘I hope she knows there’s a nest just where she’s going to shove it,’ said George.
Sissy looked up accusingly. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve still got your attention on Mother in the raft,’ she cried. ‘I’d have thought that, just for this once, you’d be concentrating on me.’
‘I am. I am,’ swore George, firmly putting his back to the window so he wouldn’t be tempted.
Elizabeth prised a sliver of glass from one of the broken jars and, clutching it carefully between thumb and forefinger so the sharp edge should not cut her, thrust the raft out on to the water with her toe. Then, wobbling, got on to it. She closed her eyes and lay, palms up, the winter sun’s warmth on her wrists, while ducks watched her suspiciously, for not even the children had come so far into their territory before.
George, peeping swiftly, said, ‘Your raft is keeping up in the water really well, Sis, in spite of the broken bottles.’
This time Sissy did not get cross but looked up from caressing Lump’s cheek with a bent knuckle, smiled brightly, and said, ‘I thought it would.’
‘Then why haven’t we been using it?’ demanded George with irritation.
Globules of reflected light began to bob on Elizabeth’s closed lids. ‘I will pull this sharp glass lightly across my wrists,’ she whispered, and the sound of her breathed sentence sent a water rat, with a soft hiss, paddling back among the rushes.
‘Blood will flow. Life will run out of me. It will all be over. I won’t have to think any more.’
It is, she supposed, the thinking that people want to escape from when they try to die. But then she found herself forced to wonder if she would really stop thinking. Suppose she didn’t. Suppose the thinking became even worse when your body was … my God … rotted away. She, who had always been so gracious and slender and had planned to be beautifully old. But then she visualised the slobbering monster for ever in her house, growing, spilling over the sides of the bed, letting out horrid sounds that the people of the village would hear and comment on, needing things, vast cobbled dishcloths to encase its bumps in, having to boil gruel for it herself because, as with the rabbits and the puppy and the white mice, the children had grown tired of it and stopped feeding it.
The raft stopped and juddered and the water rat regained its confidence and came close again.
She realised that she had never, in spite of all her hysterical protests, really thought of dying except in a being alive way. Until now, in her mind, even after death she continued to experience and benefit from other people’s compassion and guilt, but she now saw these were only available to the living. When she was dead, she thought, the world would cease to exist and there would be nothing to give pain or joy as far as she was concerned. She would be like … then the idea came into her mind, ‘like the Lump before it was conceived.’
For some reason, instead of depressing her, this idea made a warm feeling start to grow in her, and she began to feel lazy and slow and wondered if perhaps she had aleady slit her wrists and the life was now flowing out, for she had read somewhere that the last moments before bleeding to death were warm and comfortable. But when she raised her arms she saw that the skin of her wrists was whole and unsullied.
She fell into a dreamlike state in which she began to feel like a cold cup being filled up with golden liquid, and, inexplicably, the knowledge came to her that she was experiencing the prebirth sensations of the Lump. She gave her body a shake in an effort to stop its dwelling on the disgusting thing but still the feeling, like someone else’s memory, persisted. She tried to put a stop to this crazy thinking, to bring herself back to the nasty facts of the present and of Lump, but still, deliciously, the golden sensation lingered.
George, looking from the window, said, ‘The ducks and the willow trees have all gone a golden colour, Sis.’
‘Oh,’ said Sissy.
‘Mother’s turned sort of shiny,’ said George.
Sissy said nothing.
The lethargy that pervaded Elizabeth’s limbs and the feeling of warm honey running through her veins made her incapable of action and she drifted over the moat with the weak sunlight on her skin feeling like the kiss of a lover. She sighed and for a while seemed to be alone with herself, not resting on anything, not doing anything, feeling that at last she had understood the meaning of life. Being.
After a while the thoughts came seeping back, gentled in some sweet way by the deep suspended experience she had just undergone, and she became once more aware of the dagger of glass shining in her hand. Opening her fingers, she let it slip into the water. It was swallowed by the mud without a sound.
She was disturbed by a sudden shout and the rat and the ducks and the dragonflies went scuttling floating flapping squawking away.
‘Yoo hoo! My dear! You are sinking!’
A splash, a surge of water as though a body had dived into it, water sliding darkly over Elizabeth’s face, dribbling into her mouth, stopping up her nostrils, hands on the side of the raft, tilting, a wild, excited face, with round blue bulbous eyes and dishevelled grey hair.
‘The bottles are cracked and they’ve filled and are sinking you,’ said Beattie.
Beattie pushed Elizabeth all the way back to the bank, shoving the raft ahead of her like a butler carrying a tray, and wading thigh deep.
When they reached the side, Beattie bent over, put her arms round Elizabeth’s body, and lifted her off the raft. Because Elizabeth was so full of the sweet gold kiss she expected to be very heavy, but Beattie seemed to have no difficulty. Beattie carried Elizabeth up the muddy bank and on to the lawn and putting Elizabeth down, said, ‘Pity about Sissy’s raft not being seaworthy. If it had been strong enough I’d have come on with you. But anyway I’ve got the pony cart tied in the front. It’s a lovely day for a drive. Let’s go, shall we?’
‘Mother and Aunt Beattie are going for a drive in the pony cart together now,’ said George, looking from the window.
Elizabeth and Beattie sat side by side, very upright, like two country ladies, and went spankingly through the frosty countryside that sparkled and glittered with shafts like broken glass. Elizabeth did not feel like talking, so kept her eyes on the pony’s bouncing black shining bottom.
After a while Beattie said, as though there was nothing extraordinary in the outing, ‘Shall we go to my cottage for tea? I’ve got jam. With real fruit. Not coloured turnip. And real pips. Not wood.’
They passed Mrs Lovage’s cottage. The charlady saw them. ‘She doesn’t feel so bad about the baby now she knows I’m not shocked. She’ll be asking me round to work tomorrow, you’ll see!’
When they arrived at Beattie’s cottage a young woman brought them tea and scones. Putting down the tray, she said to Elizabeth, her accent French, ‘Beattie risked her own life to rescue my son and me from the gas chamber.’
‘Oh, Rosa! So silly!’ laughed Beattie, going red.
‘You can’t count how many she has saved. When the war is over everybody will know about Beattie,’ Rosa persisted.
Beattie poured tea and said, ‘Sometimes I feel that we see things from so close up we aren’t able to understand their meaning. That which from our lowly level appears to be absolute disaster, to the gods may be a marvellous development.’
‘Deformity?’ burst out Elizabeth. ‘Someone hopelessly wrongly made?’
Beattie shrugged. ‘Who among us can judge what is wrong,’ she said.
‘You know what a person should be like,’ Elizabeth burst out. ‘Arms, legs, eyes, that sort of thing, the right shape. In the right place.’
Beattie shrugged once more. ‘Have another scone,’ she said.
‘There are certain things that have to be wrong,’ cried Elizabeth.
‘That’s only cultural, dear,’ murmured Beattie soothingly. ‘Take incest for instance and think of the Pharaohs of Egypt.’
Elizabeth gave a start and wondered if Beattie knew about Lump or was thinking about herself and Tim.
There fell a long silence during which each sipped their tea, then Beattie said, ‘Have you noticed how often that which is a sin for one generation is a virtue for the next. Take pride for instance. Nowadays we go to Heaven not to Hell for our pride.’
Sissy fell asleep in the end and George sneaked back to his cellar, though even there he now felt nervous and insecure because of Mrs Lovage’s terrible threat.
When he saw his whisky bottle he became more depressed than ever. ‘Not enough to numb a fly,’ he moaned. He had not even had time to sip this, however, when he heard Sissy calling him, saying she was hungry. He had never known anything like Sissy’s hunger since Lump was born and began to feel like the mother of a baby cuckoo. Sighing and groaning, he tried to get up, but could not. After a while, and several more calls, he heard her on the stairs, then things being moved in the kitchen.
All his troubles, he saw now, would vanish if Lump didn’t exist. He would be spared ceaseless trips to feed Sissy, be able to fuck her whenever he wanted, and would no longer be in danger of going to prison for twenty years or, worse still, having his willy chopped off.
No matter what Sissy said, George did not think Lump was all right.
How strange that another person should take it on himself to decide whether I would be happier existing or not existing. Stranger still because, wise and ancient though I am, I don’t even know myself. Once I knew everything, but flesh is hampering me and dimming my bright thoughts. I am tired. I am about to be lost in sleep, though I used always to be aware. Perhaps the stressed people of my family are draining me, instead of me filling them with glory.
George swallowed the last of his whisky straight from the bottle. Once Lump was gone he would not need the whisky half so much, and anyway he would have the energy to steal more. From under old newspapers he drew out a tin of paraffin that he had been collecting through the winter, draining it from a paraffin heater his mother had bought for the hall.
Mrs Lovage had said, ‘I’ve never known such a heater for consuming. I think you ought to complain, mum,’ but even she never suspected George.
Filling the bottle with paraffin, he slipped it under his jersey and set off. His energy had returned.
As he passed the kitchen he heard Sissy cooking. George went on silent feet to the Hairy Petal Bedroom.
Lump was asleep in the centre of the bed. Very softly, George trickled paraffin over the bed curtains, ceremonially laid Teddy’s lighter on the bed, then took out his last match.
It was the most perfect match he had ever had. He had even examined it through the magnifying glass that Elizabeth used for her finest sewing and had found no blemish in it. The head was round and glossy and the wood unsplintered. It was a fitting match for Lump, he thought.
Just as his fingers tightened for striking, Lump woke and looked at him. And smiled.
Later it occurred to George to wonder what smiled, for the child’s hideously distorted features seemed incapable of such a muscular contortion.
I have approached his mind directly and breathed into it, and that is better than any smile of the lips, for it cannot lie.
For a moment George felt as though his heart was being warmed by the fanned fire of the blacksmith’s forge, forgot his hurry and just stood, smiling back goofily, the unused match forgotten in his fingers.
‘Hello, dear,’ he said sillily at last.
And he could have sworn that, inside his heart, he heard a small gruff voice that made his nervous system vibrate.
‘I came to save the world,’ said the little voice in George’s heart.
George, hesitated, pinching the match of death. Then he heard voices. With the blood draining from his body, he recognised five of the airmen who had been at Elizabeth’s dinner, whose laps he had ignited. They had come to get him! Terror driving out sense, he rushed to the window, climbed out and hid, shivering, behind the chimney.
Chapter 19
The airmen had not come for George at all. They were drunk, and felt angry with Elizabeth. That morning they had stood among the pillars of the Plague House porch offering, out of admiration and gratitude, her favourite scent. Even after the work on the shattered dining-room had been completed they had continued to visit, and sometimes Elizabeth would invite them in for sherry. They would have liked the company of Sissy, too, but there always seemed to be some reason for that to be impossible … gone to bed, doing her lessons … out with her brother …
In exchange for the welcome episodes of graciousness, the airmen did little jobs around the house, helped Elizabeth with the worst of the garden, and brought her gifts. This morning’s had been Chanel, acquired with great cost and difficulty. Elizabeth had taken the package with barely a glance, her attention apparently behind her, inside the house. She had seemed nervous and there was dismay in her eyes. They were gi
ving her something their own girlfriends would have loved and all she said was, ‘Thank you so much,’ as though she did not know them, adding, ‘I’m afraid I will not be able to ask you to visit me again. For some considerable time, perhaps.’ Then she had closed the door on them.
Toppling into increasing drunkenness in the mess, they decided to go back to the Plague House and extract proper gratitude.
Sissy, when George had not responded to her cries of hunger, had run straight downstairs, not bothering to put her clothes on. She was standing naked by the stove, stirring porridge for her supper, when she heard the sound of slurred men’s singing in the garden and, leaving the saucepan to boil over, went to the window. She rubbed the misted panes, pressing her hot, milk-packed breasts to the cool glass, filled with tingling anticipation, feeling sure that, whoever it was, it would be exciting. Then, just as the great bell began resounding, she remembered she was naked and began rushing in little whimpering darts, grabbing at dishcloths, tea cosies, table napkins, to wrap round herself.
By the time the five young men had forced their way into the house, she had managed to remember what composure was like and mimic it. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, hand graciously extended in a gesture of welcome, squat body leaning forwards in anticipation, and wound in a tea towel just too small.