The Child's Child

by Barbara Vine

  Andrew phoned to say he and James had to pick out one of the men who attacked Bashir, at an identity parade. They did it separately and both picked out the man called Kevin Drake. Later, from another lineup, they’d go to see if they could pick out the one who kicked Bashir in the head. Both of them hated doing this, though they knew that the man they had to identify killed someone for no more reason than that he was homosexual.

  They failed to identify the man called Gary Summers and were relieved they had failed, but were now responsible for a man being charged with murder, and James particularly dreaded having to be a witness in court. That wouldn’t happen when Kevin Drake came up before the magistrate that morning. He would plead not guilty and be committed for trial to the crown court. Both Andrew and James would probably be required then, and though Andrew said he was sure that when the time came he could face it without too much angst, James, who had more imagination than my usually cheerful brother, said that if he was cross-examined, if for instance some barrister asked him if his testimony had been influenced by “the kind of books he writes,” he might find himself unable to speak or else burst into tears.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Sis,” Andrew said to me. “You’re thinking that if he does, that the judge will feel that these queers are all the same. Crying, struck dumb, they’re all the same.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that. Don’t you ever think that since your guesses about what’s going on in other people’s heads are always wrong, you might stop guessing?”

  I was having lunch with Sara that day. She was just back from her honeymoon and now she knew she was pregnant. She’d had the test. Of course she knew this or was pretty sure before her wedding, but now it had been confirmed and she and Geoff were overjoyed. Both of them had got an idea in their heads that they couldn’t have children.

  I asked her why she thought this, and she said because they had both had relationships before “without issue,” as she put it, giggling.

  “But you were on the pill, weren’t you? And no doubt Geoff and his previous girlfriends were using something.”

  “Oh, yes, I know. And as soon as I stopped, I got pregnant. But I suppose I don’t really trust these things.”

  “You will now,” I said.

  In Verity’s day there were pregnancy tests, she once told me. I was amazed. I thought early detection had come about in my own lifetime. But, no, the woman who thought she might be pregnant had a sample of her blood injected into a rabbit, and if she was right, the rabbit died. I think that’s how it was. Doctors didn’t much like having this done, and one woman Verity knew was told to wait and see because “you wouldn’t want to kill a poor little rabbit, would you?” There was still a long time to go before you could buy a home pregnancy test over the counter.

  TALKING TO the police, being questioned, and facing the possibility of a court appearance had a bad effect on James. He couldn’t write. He was starting a new novel and was pleased with it, but now he had a kind of writer’s block, something that had never happened to him before. When he closed his eyes, he saw the killing of Bashir all over again. He heard the man’s desperate cries and saw the blood spouting from a stab wound. Things were very different for Andrew, who was coming to accept what had happened. It was terrible, it was meaningless, but it was in the past now and they had to get over it.

  James said, “How long, O Lord, how long?” meaning when will people accept homosexuality, all of them, as just another lifestyle, and I told him—unnecessarily and pointlessly—that prejudice targets others who differ from the norm, ethnic minorities and the disabled, members of certain religious bodies, the overweight and even redheads.

  “It’s not the same,” James said. “When did you last hear of a woman who hasn’t got a husband being set upon by thugs because she’s had a baby? When? It never happens.”

  I couldn’t argue with that because he was right. I had never heard of a single mother being attacked because she was unmarried, though maybe they were seventy or eighty years ago. But James was off in telling me I should find a worthier cause to support than “little bastards and their mums,” God knew there were plenty. I didn’t support them, I told him, they didn’t need anyone’s support, they were not persecuted. Ever optimistic Andrew started laughing at us, telling us—he had got hold of statistics from somewhere—that homophobic attacks were becoming less frequent. The assault on and murder of Bashir was the first in a long time. Still, he was sympathetic to James in his way, though I was not sure that telling a fiction writer he’s got too much imagination for his own good was the best way to go about it. For his part, once they’d got past the trial, Andrew would teach himself to forget the whole affair.

  Meanwhile, I had begun to write. There was more reading to do, but the writing had to begin and I was asking myself if, considering the subject I had chosen, it was possible not to get emotionally involved. How to convey the hope, the dread, the panic, and the horror and finally the absolute, beyond-a-doubt confirmation. This was the point at which so many young girls decided that they preferred death to disgrace and drowned themselves. Of course, I’m not writing fiction, I am writing about fiction. I should be detached, I should be objective. It was easier for a man. He could stand outside the issue because he could only experience an unwanted pregnancy vicariously and often not even then, but I am not a man.

  I had told myself that this was the point at which, the research virtually finished, I would begin The Child’s Child. It was weeks now, a couple of months, since I had brought the book home from Martin Greenwell’s house, and I was starting to feel guilty about it. Lying on this table or that in this big house, it seemed to reproach me as I came into the room where it was, its bright, tasteless cover eyeing me and telling me I was neglecting it. So I sat down and wrote a letter to Toby Greenwell—the first letter as against an e-mail I had written for years—apologising to him for not as yet having started on the book and pleading pressure of work. No reply came from him, and that made me feel worse. Andrew, who came in briefly to tell me how unhappy James was at the prospect of appearing in court, said I should remember that I wasn’t an agent, I wasn’t being paid for doing this—what was wrong with me?

  5

  IN THE end I tucked the book under a cushion on Verity’s chaise longue so that it was out of sight. There it remained while I worked on the thesis in solitude. It really was solitude for I had hardly seen anything of Andrew and James since the day my brother told me about the Bashir al Khalifa murder. That they were there I knew from the faint hum of the television from Andrew’s living-room across the hall, a sighting of him turning at the top of the stairs to wave to me. As a result I had lost my fear of James’s coming to live at Dinmont House and of our all being able to share without constantly bumping into each other. I might almost have been the sole occupant for all I saw of them.

  Until that evening it hadn’t been important. I assumed that by this time Andrew had cured James of his fears and all was now well. In which case we could perhaps all meet and have that supper together which had been refused last time. I didn’t just walk in; I thought discretion might be better and knocked on the door. Instead of calling to me to come in, my brother opened the door and said, “I thought you were the ghost.”

  “The ghost?”

  “James says there is one. It knocks on doors.”

  James was half-sitting, half-lying in an armchair, staring at the ceiling. I could tell by just looking at him that his fears were still with him. He didn’t speak but turned to me a small, rueful smile and that in itself seemed very unlike him. Andrew said he was going to get the two of them something to eat and did I want to join them? James didn’t move.

  For the first time I was glad our circumstances made us share a kitchen. Andrew got smoked salmon and cream cheese and a loaf out of the fridge while he talked. While he was resigned to appearing in court and answering searching questions put to him by Kevin Drake’s counsel, for James this had become not just an unpleasant pr
ospect but a kind of doom. He could see nothing beyond it. The date of the trial, set for November, had become his death date. It was an absolute finality. He had become ill, couldn’t write, and scarcely went out.

  He sat, Andrew said, or more likely lay down, upstairs and he barely ate. Andrew had to go to work but he said that he devoted more time to James than to work.

  “I’ve never before come across anyone so imprisoned—for that’s what it is—in fear.”

  These words were so uncharacteristic of my brother that I found myself turning away from the pain in his face. He truly loved James, I could see that. “I won’t join you,” I said. “Better not.”

  He gave me one of those uncharacteristic kisses. “Good night, Sis.”

  Next day, when his lover was in a sedative-induced sleep, he told me how James had become humble and curiously meek. He constantly apologised. Over and over he said he was sorry, but he couldn’t help himself. Andrew said that in the days before witnessing the murder, James never spoke like that. Andrew had never known him to say he was sorry. James was a different person, he said, the smoothness, the sophistication, and the sexiness (Andrew’s words) all gone. Sometimes, when James had taken one of the doctor’s sleeping pills and I was taking a break from the thesis, Andrew and I talked it over in my living-room or Verity’s study. What were we to do? How could he ever be actually got to court? Could he somehow, by legitimate means, avoid this ordeal? Was there some let-out? There are all sorts of reasons for getting out of being a juror; do the same rules apply for avoiding being a witness in a murder case? Our mother, Fay, said not when she looked in later, and she should know. She didn’t understand what was wrong with James and put it down to what she called “affectation.” No one was going to be unkind to him. Counsel might and likely would say that he was mistaken and try to show he was not a reliable witness, but he wouldn’t be called a liar.

  “Ah, diddums,” she said when Andrew was out of the room to check on James, “no one’s going to make him cry.” She had read James’s first novel and said she couldn’t understand how anyone who could describe such vicious acts and write such penetrating dialogue could be so feeble.

  “You know what he’s most scared of?” Andrew said when he came back. “One of the things. He’s afraid counsel for the defence will ask him about gay men’s lifestyle. What were two highly educated men like him and me doing in a club like that in the early hours of the morning?”

  “He or she may ask that,” Fay said.

  “Would you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not likely to be in that situation. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’d ask a similar question of a comparable man and a girl in a similar club at the same sort of time.”

  “James will never see it like that. He’ll see it as being singled out because he’s gay. The trial of Oscar Wilde may have been more than a hundred years ago, but he says things haven’t changed that much. The public may tolerate gay people, but they don’t want to know what we do, and if their attention is drawn to it, as the jury’s will be, they’ll all be disgusted. I’m telling you what James believes, not necessarily what I think.”

  “Necessarily?” said Fay.

  “Not what I think, then.”

  “That fantasy of his is meaningless. Things have changed enormously. The law has changed. Ask him if he thinks you could have discussed this subject with your mother even fifty years ago.”

  When Fay left, Andrew told me he was afraid James might kill himself before the trial. He talked about this relative of his, his grandfather’s brother, whose friend committed suicide, the people The Child’s Child is based on. Andrew thought it was because people found out the man was gay and abused him for it. I asked Andrew what James felt about Kevin Drake. I mean, James picked him out from a line of men and had no doubt about it, this was the man he saw repeatedly stab his friend Bashir. Did he have no feeling of the rightness of bearing witness against Drake for Bashir’s sake?

  “I don’t know. I’ve tried that argument with him, but he says he doesn’t want to talk about it, yet this case and the trial and Drake and the other man are all we ever do talk about. You’ll say try to steer him onto another subject, and I’ve tried, God knows I’ve tried, but he never will, or if he’ll say a few words about something else, he’ll bring it straight back to this. D’you know what he calls it? My doom, is what he calls it. ‘Kevin Drake is my doom,’ he says.”

  I asked if James was serious.

  “Dead serious. He’s got no religion, as you know, but he talks about Kevin Drake being sent to be his doom. Drake was sent to kill Bashir because he was gay, and James says we were sent to witness the killing and that’s his doom.”

  I asked about this ghost James had invented and which knocked on doors. It seemed in the same league with dooms.

  “It’s so absurd,” said Andrew, “that it’s funny. Or it would be if the whole business wasn’t so wretched.” He took a great swig of the whisky he’d fetched. “I’m drinking too much as no doubt you’ve noticed. It’s what keeps me going. I dread he’ll kill himself, and of course I do my best to stop that.”

  He couldn’t kill himself, I said, if he never went out and he hadn’t got the means in the house.

  “What makes you think he never goes out? He goes out when we’re out. I’m sure he watches us and goes out. He used to use the hard stuff, not heroin, never that, and he stopped before he met me, but it’s prescription drugs now, mainly oxycodone. He’s collecting it now from this dealer he knows. It’s for his doom, to make his doom happen.”

  MY THESIS PROGRESSED—for good or ill. Good, I hoped. I was concentrating now on how the culture has changed out of all recognition, not the physical facts. None of those young women in the nineteenth-century novels went near a doctor, still less a hospital, when pregnant. Their periods stopped, I supposed, so they knew the worst had happened. But even if these girls had asked a doctor to examine them, what could he have found? Perhaps that the foetus was alive, but not much more than that. No scans in the middle of the nineteenth century, none in the middle of the twentieth, come to that. No means of measuring blood pressure. The interesting thing here, though, is that all of them belonged to the working class. They were all servants.

  Are we to take this as showing that middle-class or upper-class girls never had babies outside marriage? Surely not. It has to be that the working-class ones were more often the victims of middle- or upper-class men because they were maids or children’s nurses or even governesses in landed families. Also that servants abounded in their thousands in cities and the country. The middle-class young women were accorded respect and in any case never left alone with a man. Impossible to imagine an Anne Elliot or a Dorothea Brooke ever putting herself in a position to be seduced. It seems that only in cases (such as in Trollope’s Lady Anna and Dr. Wortle’s School) where a women finds herself bigamously married through no fault of her own can a middle-class woman have a child who turns out to be illegitimate. In fact, of all Victorian novelists, Trollope is the most rigidly on the side of married virtue. He seems to shock even himself with his invention of Mr. Scarborough, the landowner who has two sons; though both were born while he was married, he forges documents to prove his perfectly legal marriage, which took place before the birth of his elder son, in fact happened after it, then contrives to marry his wife again before the birth of the younger. And all this to enable him to by-pass an entail in the event his first son is a bad lot and his second a pillar of virtue. One wonders what he would have done if the latter had been a girl.

  But in reality unmarried middle-class women did have babies. I thought of the two I knew of, Rebecca West and Dorothy Sayers, giving birth respectively in 1914 and 1924. In reality too, away from fiction, Fay said many people of her age have an aunt or a great-aunt who had a child outside marriage who was brought up by its grandmother as her own. So were West and Sayers unusual only in that they were middle-class? Carla would remind me not to get emotionally involved if she kne
w what I was thinking about, the terrible unhappiness of these women, forced by society to hear their children call a grandmother or an aunt “Mother.”

  6

  SOMETHING HAPPENED I never foresaw and wouldn’t have believed possible. Two things really, because the first and the minor happening was the ghost. It was in the very early morning, I suppose about four. I only say “about four” because my bedroom was in total darkness when there should have been pale green light on the bedside table. My digital clock had gone out. I reached for the switch on the bedlamp, but before my forefinger touched it, there came a soft knock on the door. Now I should have realised that this was a power cut and that either Andrew or James had knocked on my door because there was a power cut. But I who don’t believe in ghosts, of course I don’t, thought of what Andrew had told me and lay in bed, rigid and, for some mad reason, terrified. The clock suddenly leapt into life, its blinding lime-green digits flashing on and off. I got up to reset it, put on the bedroom central light to check all was well, and at last opened the door. No one was there. But it must have been ten minutes since the knock, so ghost or man, there hardly would have been.

  The other thing, of far greater significance, of earthshaking moment you might say, was the next day in the afternoon. I had heard Andrew go to work at about eight, closing the front door infinitely quietly as was his new habit. I went off to the university, which all my students call the uni, to take some of them for a tutorial, the ones who had bothered to produce essays. They knew quite a lot about nineteenth-century women’s fiction and women’s poetry, but nothing, it seemed to me, of nineteenth-century social history. One of them thought it was quite usual to possess a car in the 1890s, and another that divorce was much as it is now, easily and quickly obtained and the wife having custody of the children.