The Cuckoo's Child

  “The name on your birth certificate—and none of us wanted it, remember, except Mother—is . . . Rue. Rue Tribulation,” he finished in a rush.

  “Rue? As in the herb?”

  “Well, more like ‘you’ll rue the day.’”

  “Oh, I see. And Tribulation too. Can I take it my grandmother wasn’t too smitten?”

  The sound Uncle Magnus made wasn’t really a word, but it was eloquent. It was part sigh, part groan, a sad, resigned acceptance of the way things were, a melancholy commentary on the nastiness of some, on the waste of lives, on his own ineffectual contribution, a wry shrugging of the shoulders as if to say, “What’s the good, when all’s said and done?”

  “Why? What was wrong with me? You’ve got a story to tell as well, haven’t you?”

  Uncle Magnus heaved himself out of his chair.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I hope you’re taking this in, Stephen, wherever you are. We’re coming to the part of the story that smacks of dream worlds, of lurid Gothic emotion, the stylized excess and lunacy that hangs about the subconscious and peeks out in nightmare.

  All the more dramatic for me, recounted as it was in my uncle’s slow countryman’s voice while we ambled through the Eden that is his kingdom. We started off by entering another walled garden—and isn’t that what the source of the word Paradise means?—and strolled the outer circular path past the fruit trees heavy with buds, the currant and gooseberry bushes, the espaliered fruit clutching the brick, and the glass house on the south side that sheltered the white peaches.

  The order and abundance formed the backdrop to Magnus’s account of his youth. He told me about his father, Adam Goodman, who was also the head gardener like his father before him, and about his mother, Esther, as we sat on the parapet of a large pond at the centre of the garden and dangled our hands in the water. Big goldfish, used to being fed, rose lazily to the surface and sucked on our fingertips while Magnus told of his mother’s autocratic rule and her fearsome religion that branded everyone a sinner and admitted very few to salvation.

  “Primitive Baptist she is,” he said. “I don’t hold with all that miserable nonsense, not after what happened, but I had to wait till I was grown to get away from it. Hale us all to chapel, she would, two, three times a week sometimes, so we could hear just how wicked we were. No hope for sinners like us, I can tell you! And Sundays! What a misery. No going out, no games, no hobbies, no books even, except for the Bible. We used to sneak out when we could and play in the woods, but then we were even more damned and got sent to bed without our supper to pray for forgiveness. Worth it, though, just to get away from the house, and Dad used to creep upstairs with apples and bits of bread when he could. He didn’t like it, but those days raising children was the woman’s job—he was too busy putting food on the table to interfere, and he got the sharp edge of her tongue when he did, anyway. He were a quiet soul, my dad. I expect he reckoned she were a good woman and couldn’t do no harm. Besides, he were fond of her for all her waspish ways. It were just easier to leave things be.

  “My two sisters had the worst of it. None of us had friends, couldn’t really, when we weren’t allowed out, never went anywhere. None of us ever thought about bringing anyone home from school for tea or anything like that. And all this for a playground! Wicked, that was. But I used to go with Dad sometimes, fishing, shooting pigeons, out to the market, just working. She allowed that because I was a boy, and that’s what the men did. But the girls! They might as well have been nuns for all they saw of the world.

  “And that was part of the trouble, of course. She thought she was keeping them safe, I don’t doubt, but when you’ve no experience, that makes you an easy target for all the things she was so busy keeping them from. Trusting, they were, both Susanna and Sarah, could recite the Bible, chapter and verse, but knew as much about the world as babes in arms. Murphy come to the door one day, selling brushes. Sarah took one look at him, curly hair and enough sweet talk to rot your teeth, and that was that. I don’t know how she arranged it, but she went off to Bible study with Susanna one evening and only the one came back. Next we know, she was writing to say she was wed and living in London. I don’t know if Sarah ever really got married, or whether she were just saying that to make it look better when the baby arrived. Murphy didn’t stick around for long anyway; he run off after the war, and we never heard another word.”

  We had wandered past a rose garden and herbaceous borders, the plants neatly pruned and mulched, the ground raked smooth and absolutely weed-free, and were now approaching a lawn. I let out a muffled “Oh!” for at the far side appeared the house and the dovecote from Miss Hoar’s book. As if on cue, a cloud of white birds circled and landed in front of us. They were fantail pigeons, and as we watched, some of the males puffed out their breasts like spinnakers, spread their tails fully, and ran to and fro in front of the females as if they were on wheels. They reminded me irresistibly of overweight Italian tenors, throbbing with unrequited love and high Cs.

  “We’ll go this way,” said my uncle. “Lordy’s home.”

  “Who?”

  “His Lordship. Lord Sharrington. He lives here.”

  I had a sudden thought.

  “Is he a very tall thin man with a brown face, looks as if he spends a lot of time outside? Shabby clothes and hazel eyes?”

  “That’s him.”

  “We met,” I said. “I thought he was a gardener. He called you the boss.”

  “Likes his little joke, does Lordy. Though mind you, he’s here so seldom, maybe it’s no more than the truth.”

  “It explains the Rolex.”

  We came out of some trees to find ourselves back on the slope where the artificial stream carried the water down in a long series of pools and steps and followed it right down to a large lake surrounded by trees. A small island floated a short distance from the shore, covered with tall trees whose tops were full of untidy bundles.

  “That’s the heronry,” said Magnus, and even as he spoke a large grey bird, neck coiled like a teapot spout and long legs trailing as gracefully as a ballerina’s, flew across our line of sight and made an awkward landing on one of the bundles, thrashing its wings until it secured a firm foothold on the nest. I heard a familiar noise too and round the corner of the island came a flotilla of Canada geese, honking sociably to one another.

  “Some fellow countrymen,” said Uncle Magnus. “Used to come just for the winter when I were a lad, but they stay year-round now.”

  We found a place to sit by the water.

  “Susanna loved this place,” he said. “This and the summer house were her boltholes.”

  He stared out across the water, unseeing. I watched a freshwater clam trudging through the mud in the shallows, leaving a wandering trough behind.

  “Go on,” I said. I wanted to know how Susanna met my father, if her life was so circumscribed. Who was he? Another travelling salesman? But I didn’t dare prod too hard. My uncle was obviously finding it hard to speak of his dead sister; I was tearing open old wounds. Press too hard and he might retreat as effectively as the clam, which had half buried itself in the mud and would soon disappear altogether.

  Uncle Magnus sighed as if he were weary and got to his feet again.

  “We’ll go this way,” he said. “I’ll show you the hothouses.”

  He set off round the shore, and soon we crossed a small bridge where the stream entered the lake and made our way up a slope to a large building with columns and tall windows all round. A white peacock stood on the steps, and as we approached, it swelled and shivered its tail into a fan.

  “This is the orangery,” said my uncle. “The peacocks roost here sometimes. We shut them in when we can’t stand the noise.”

  As if to demonstrate, the peacock opened its beak and uttered a piercing cry. It repeated this several times, and from a distance we heard another one answering.

  “Mating season,” said my uncle. �
�No holding them.”

  We left the orangery behind, but the thought seemed to linger with Magnus as we crossed another lawn and returned to the rose garden, skirting an elaborate sundial and passing under a long pergola draped with the canes of ancient ramblers.

  “Full of romantic ideas she was, your mother. Chit of a girl, her head full of daft stories, well, I thought they was daft, being a boy, all about love and getting married and such. I used to tease her something fearful, I’d say, ‘Who’s going to marry you then? Old Ted down the village?’ Old Ted, he were the local daftie, no harm in him, just simple. And she’d say, ‘You wait, he’ll come one day, and then I’ll be off, you see if I don’t, and I’ll live happy ever after.’ Poor girl.”

  “What happened?”

  Magnus scowled.

  “Pastor Lewis Selby happened, is what. Worst day ever dawned on this family when he arrived.”

  “How come?”

  We had come full circle back to the yard with all the greenhouses. Magnus opened the end door of one and urged me to enter quickly. The atmosphere inside was thick and steamy, cloyingly earthy and wet. The place had an unruly, faintly menacing quality, as if it caged young delinquents bursting with vitality or hungry predators on the prowl. The plants were not confined to the benches or pots. There were woody vines thick as anacondas that climbed posts and crawled across the skylights, waxen gardenias, orchids thriving on rotting logs, and in one corner a banana tree with bright green leaves like the banners Japanese armies used to carry in the time of the Shogun. I saw petals thick and matte as suede; large fleshy leaves polished to a high gloss so that beads of moisture skittered over their surface like ball bearings; stems and branches writhing to the light, clinging grimly with invisible claws. Everything was excessive: too tall, too vigorous, too gaudy, too strange.

  “Here, I wanted you to see this,” said Magnus. He pointed to a creeper covered in small trumpet-shaped flowers, waxy as the gardenias and giving off an intoxicating smell.

  “Your ma, she were very fond of this one. That’s stephanotis. The seeds you got must have come from this plant. My old dad planted it. She always said she’d put the flowers in her hair when she got wed.”

  “And did she?” I prompted, knowing the answer even as I asked the question.

  “Never got the chance, poor lass. Pastor Selby put paid to that.”

  “How?”

  “Got her in the family way, didn’t he? Not as he’d ever admit it, but it stands to reason. There she was, all the time at the chapel for Bible classes, and helping the pastor with this and that, and him telling Mother that Susanna was one of the Saints, buttering her up, making her believe our Susie was something holy, just so she’d be allowed to spend all her time with him, no questions asked. But then even I noticed Susie went quiet and pale as a dish of milk, and then of course she got big and the fat was in the fire and no mistake.”

  We were silent for a while. I thought about my young mother, artless and afraid, carrying her secret about with her for the months before the inevitable discovery. She lived at a time when an illegitimate baby was a hideous shame, when people would whisper and point fingers and label her as a trollop, no better than she ought to be. Did she go on hoping the man would come to her aid? She would have no other resources, no friends, a sister who had escaped in similarly improper circumstances, and a mother obsessed with sin.

  “How did your parents take the news?”

  “Lord love you, I’ve never seen the like! Dad and me, having our tea quiet as you please, then Mother bursts in, dragging Susanna by the arm fit to tear it off, and Susie crying, begging her to stop and saying she was sorry over and over. We sat there with our mouths agape I shouldn’t wonder, then Mother shouts at Dad over all the din, ‘Here’s your whore of a daughter! Ask her what she has to say for herself!’ and Dad just manages, ‘Now, Mother,’ before she cuts him off again with her harlots and Jezebels.

  “My poor sister can’t speak for sobbing, so it’s Mother tells the sorry tale, and there’s no pity, I can tell you. You’d think my sister were the Antichrist, to hear her. And Dad’s face got longer and longer, and he looked as stern as I’d ever seen him, worse than when he caught the Macken twins boring holes in the beeches and filling them with copper. It scared me. God knows how Susanna felt.”

  “But didn’t she say who was responsible? Surely they’d have been angry with him then, rather than her?”

  “She did in the end. But it made things worse, if anything. Mother wouldn’t hear a word against the pastor. She would have it that a man of God would never do such a thing. She said it just showed how steeped in wickedness Susanna were that she’d dare to make such an accusation. And Dad turned to Susie and said, ‘You disappoint me, girl,’ and she wept as if her heart had snapped in two.”

  “I’m not surprised. What a betrayal! Everyone she trusted turned against her.”

  Magnus’s face was heavy with remembered emotion.

  “She were on her own, right enough. She had to stay in her room, out of sight, only allowed to go out for a walk at dusk, so nobody would see her. I had to take her meals and set them outside her door, and I’d whisper to her and tell her things and smuggle up the odd pencil or book or piece of paper. Those were Mother’s rules; ‘If there’s sin in my house,’ she would say, ‘I don’t have to let it run free to spread its poison.’ I think Dad would have come round, especially when the baby arrived, but Mother—you might as well have set a stone in water to soften, she were that rigid.”

  “Didn’t anyone say anything to the pastor? Ask him?”

  “Didn’t have to. He knew. Came to the house even, ‘ministering to his flock,’ he called it, ‘bringing succour to those in need’—I can hear him saying that even now, standing in our kitchen with his back to the window so his face was all in shadow but his hair lit up from behind so it stood up all round his head like flames, and I said to myself, I know what the Devil looks like now, never mind the cloven hooves and horns in all the pictures. And he didn’t say a word to Susanna, just prayed over her, begged the Lord to forgive her great sins.”

  “He had red hair?”

  “Indeed he did,” said Uncle Magnus. “Bright red.” He looked at me consideringly and grinned. “Very like your own, I’d say.”

  “Wasn’t that a giveaway, when my hair grew?”

  “Like enough. Even I noticed, though Dad shut me up when I made some remark about it. But Mother! She didn’t have quite so much to say about our holy Mr. Selby, and she let Susanna out and about a bit more, but she’d never admit she’d been wrong, not in a million years, and if you want to know, I think it made her take against you all the more. Rubbing her nose in it, you were, with every curl on your head. And she couldn’t take it out on the real culprit anyway because at about the same time as you were born, he vanished.”

  “So you don’t know what happened to him?”

  “Enlisted, so they say, and killed in the war. Far as we were concerned, he just disappeared.”

  “Do you know where he came from?”

  Magnus paused, his hand on the doorknob.

  “He were a bit of a mystery. Our old pastor fell ill, and this young rip come to take his place. One minute there was the old man, same as always, and the next, there he was, causing a right flutter, I can tell you, just swooped in and caught us all up in his hellfires and damnations. He were a rare preacher, give him that. Mother thought he were the Second Coming, I reckon, but you asking—it just dawned on me we never heard a thing about his past. ’Tweren’t something you’d ask, somehow; it’d be like asking the wind where it came from, what it’d been doing. If you’d asked him, he’d probably have said it didn’t matter, what mattered was that he was here, now, and he’d fix his gaze on you and clasp your arm, as if you were the only other person in the world. There was something about him, some force, no denying it. It made me squirm, and my dad didn’t take to him, but there were plenty as did. Some of those women would’ve laid themselves down in
the mud to save his boots getting mucky, I reckon.”

  My father a Manson? A Jim Jones? A Maharishi? Or just a hypocritical little con man, forced to exercise his talents within the straitjacket of a Calvinist sect? I suppose I shall never know which is closer to the mark, but I can’t help a sneaking preference for the former. If I can get no closer than fantasy, a colourful monster who could have been a cult leader has more to offer than a latter-day Uriah Heep.

  Magnus ushered me out of the hothouse, and we trudged back across the muddy yard, past cold frames and compost heaps being excavated by busy starlings. The young man I had met before came toward us, his arms pulled long by a laden wheelbarrow, and nodded as he passed.

  “Just put a cuppa in the office, guv,” he said. “There’s one for the lady too.”

  Magnus grunted. He’s not best pleased I’ve got a reason to stay, I thought. He’s not sure what comes next. Or perhaps he is, and wants to put it off, pretend it’s not going to happen, can’t happen, because it’s too alarming, too unpredictable, and he’s too used to being in charge of his little world to welcome something so far out of his control.

  I crunched over the gravel beside him, trying to visualize his life: the comfortable round of the year, measured in change, endless cycles of seedtime, nurture, and harvest, unswerving as the course of the planets. Day after day, he juggled the powers of earth, wind, and rain, and the kindly fire of the sun, and out of this elemental play came beauty and order. If He exists at all, I thought, God has to be a gardener, and people like Magnus, His lieutenants.

  But a gardener with a taste for practical jokes and an Olympian disregard for their consequences. To the ordinary mortal kind of gardener, like Magnus, I was the infestation of beetles, the killing frost in May, the Dutch elm disease, the anomaly that can never be planned for or guarded against that can wreck everything.

  I knew what he didn’t want to hear. I waited until we were back in his office and he was passing me a mug of tea and carefully unwrapping a half-eaten McVitie’s Jamaican Ginger Cake he took out of a drawer marked ESCHOLTZIA in the cabinet. As he extended a moist dark slab toward me, skewered on the end of his penknife, I asked the question.