The Cuckoo's Child

  “Sooner the better, if you ask me, before she has a chance to change her mind. Can you make it tomorrow?”

  I said I could and would.

  “I’ll be seeing you then,” said Magnus. “Just don’t expect too much.”

  The three ladies were eagerly waiting to hear what had happened. Once again they launched immediately into plans to convey me to Hescot Park.

  Late that night I phoned Neil.

  “Oho,” he said, “going to beard the Minotaur, are you? Make sure you take a ball of string!”

  Before I went to bed, I slipped the photograph into my purse. And although I was keyed up and my head whirred with speculation, I fell instantly into a sleep so profound I was aware of nothing until the starlings woke me next morning, shouting to one another in the top of the tree.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Once again, the stately journey in the old car, floating through a landscape blushing green and greener as leaves clotted the skeletal arms of trees and solidified the walls of hedges. Once again, the ladies deposited me at the side of the road and waved as they drove off, and I stood and felt the stillness wash back as the car sailed round the corner.

  I was on my own this time. The cows had moved to another pasture, and there was no sign of life in the far fields, not even a cry from a hidden cuckoo. The rotting net still drooped from its post, and the water lay dark in the pools, trickling sluggishly over the steps, but I was in no mood for elegiac reflection and hurried through the wood and the stable block, anxious to meet Magnus.

  Black clouds were massing, marching up from the southwest, swelling importantly as they came. The louring sky darkened the interior of the greenhouse, giving it a green underwater cast. Magnus sat in his office waiting for me, a shadowy bulk in the dim light.

  “Right on time then,” he said. “Well, let’s get this over with.”

  He led me through an archway to a grassy area bordered by a row of stone cottages. They were old and charming, sunsoaked stone, slate roofs neat as fish scales. Each cottage resembled a child’s drawing of a house—symmetrical windows, front door in the middle—but there was a balance and grace of proportion that spoke of an earlier age with a thoroughly adult taste for elegance, even in the humblest things, such as dwellings for labourers.

  We approached the middle cottage, which had a lattice porch wreathed in the canes of a climbing rose, already covered with tiny pink-edged leaves. In front of the house stood a fruit tree just coming into bloom. On one side the tree had pink flowers, while the other half was a delicate drift of white.

  I stopped to admire it as Magnus fumbled his door key out of his waistcoat pocket.

  “My old dad did that, back when he and Mother married. It were a wedding gift, I suppose.”

  “What are the two plants?”

  “He grafted a flowering cherry onto a damson. Did a good job, didn’t he? He were a dab hand at grafting, my old dad. I try my hand at it too, but you can never be sure it’ll take, or last. The graft’s always the weak spot, no matter how old it gets.”

  I clutched at the image of the pied tree as he held the door open. Can you see why? It was the first evidence I’d come across that anyone in this new family of mine indulged sentiment, and I wished I had known this grandfather who expressed his feelings in living symbols. What a beautiful declaration of love, of confidence in the union, that brought together two disparate entities, quite perfect in themselves, and out of them created an astonishing third. It was the perfect metaphor for the ideal of marriage. Had he been disappointed when the reality fell short, for I had no doubt it had from what Magnus told me? Did the tree then become a daily reminder of the frailty of humans, of the way ideals are eroded? The lovely innocence of my grandfather’s act tugged at me; in it I thought I could feel a link between generations, passing from his tree and his craft to my mother’s love of poetry and her flight, then on to the importance of images in my own life, my search for patterns in the natural world and my place in them. I can tell you, I needed the reassurance of connection at that moment. I feared what was coming.

  I was in a dim cave. There were stone flags underfoot, and through a door that stood ajar, I could see into a pantry with black slate shelves. What light there was came in two shafts from the windows, which weakened as they penetrated farther so that although the walls were whitewashed, they reflected little, and the recesses of the room were shadowed and mysterious.

  A large table, blond with years of scrubbing, stood in the centre of the floor, with ladder-backed chairs ranged about it. A tray holding a silver teapot, milk jug, and slop basin and three china cups and saucers stood ready. The cups were square, and I wondered briefly how one drank from them. Behind the table loomed a large oak sideboard and china cupboard, a range of blue-and-white plates, and two copper pots winking against the sombre wood.

  On one end wall was a fireplace with a coal fire quietly glowing in the hearth. To one side of it crouched an old leather armchair, sagging in the seat and highly polished where heads and hands and backsides had rubbed against it. A small table stood alongside, and I deduced from the clutter of pipes, ashtrays, and a large box of Swan Vestas that this was my uncle’s chair. At the other side of the fire, with its back to the window and a standard lamp behind it, was a large Windsor armchair, upholstered in nubbly brown tweed. The Holy Terror filled it.

  Magnus urged me to sit down, and I pulled out one of the wooden chairs and perched on the edge of the seat, keeping a substantial piece of the table in front of me. While my uncle laboured through an introduction that produced no reaction, I stole a first glance at my grandmother.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Well, I do. Movies and cartoons have equipped us well to imagine villains. I expected a monster, massive and overbearing, ugly and menacing, wearing her malevolence openly on her face. Jabba the Hutt in a dress, perhaps. What I saw was so ordinary, I was disarmed. Looking back, though, that unremarkable exterior was what made my grandmother doubly terrifying.

  What I saw was an old woman who looked exactly what she was: a countrywoman at the end of a long life, white-haired, toil-worn, and plump. She sat very straight in the armchair, hands clasped loosely in her lap, thick legs mummified in elastic bandages beneath opaque stockings planted solidly on a small footstool. Her hair was looped off her face in graceful snowy curves like the wings of the fantail pigeons and skewered to her head with long silver pins. Her cheeks were pink from the network of tiny veins broken in a lifetime of exposure to the elements, but the skin was soft and faintly furred like a peach.

  She wore a dark blue long-sleeved dress, the bodice tucked and buttoned up to the uncompromising square neckline. An old locket, also square and heavily chased, hung around her neck. Her torso was a tightly packed cylinder, rigid under the cloth, as if her flesh had solidified over the years into something dense but slightly yielding. Rubber, perhaps. I suspected old-fashioned corsetry, pink and laced and stiff with whalebone.

  The hands lying still in her wide lap were large and ugly. They spoke of days plunging sheets and clothes into laundry tubs, baking the week’s bread, scrubbing the stone floors, stripping the feathers and guts from chickens, sewing long seams, waging war on flies and ants and dirt, grubbing in the earth, and clambering up ladders into the trees to pick bushels of fruit, then enduring steam and spitting pulp and boiling syrup as she put it up in jars of preserves that glowed like jewels on the cool slate shelves of her still room. Even now they showed calluses and rough, cracked skin on the fingertips, but lumpy veins squirmed across their backs, and the joints were swollen and contorted, making useless claws of the once nimble fingers.

  I was so swayed by these images that I said the first thing that came into my head as I met the old lady’s eyes and Magnus ground to a halt. There was a silence. Magnus was mutely urging me to fill it.

  “Grandmother,” I said.

  The effect was immediate. The pale eyes behind their wire-rimmed glasses were clouded and rheumy, but for a second
they glistened like wet stones. A red tide swept up her throat to her face. Apprehension clutched my throat.

  “What did she say? What did she call me? The sauce of it!”

  Magnus weighed in hurriedly.

  “Now, Mother, you know what I said. You are her grandmother. I’m quite sure of it. I told you all the things she has. How else could she have them, if she weren’t Susanna’s girl, eh? Come on now.”

  She steamrollered over the voice of reason.

  “Don’t you tell me to come on! You’re a simpleton, Magnus, daft as a brush, taken in by a chit of a girl with a silly story. Anyone can make up a story about some old pieces of rubbish!”

  I felt I had to interrupt.

  “Why would I want to do that? It’s not as if I’m laying claim to a fortune or anything.”

  “And short shrift you’d get if you were, miss,” my grandmother snorted. “You’d have to get past me first, and I’m not so easy to fool.”

  “Mother,” Magnus insisted, “this is silly. She has Sarah’s address on a scrap of paper I tore out of your address book and gave to Susanna myself. It fits exactly. Want to see for yourself? How in the world would she have that if she hadn’t been with my poor sister when she died? Why would anyone else in the entire world be interested in that address? And how did she come to have that seed packet with Dad’s writing on it? And the gas mask with our name on it? Don’t tell me she found the lot in some junk shop and just decided to make the whole thing up. What in God’s name would she want to do that for?”

  “Blasphemer!” shouted Grandmother, but I could tell her reply was automatic, a cover for rapid thought. “She’s no granddaughter of mine. How can she be? You don’t have any children, do you? Never found a woman to take you on, as far as I know.”

  “But you had two daughters as well,” I objected before Magnus could speak. But I had given her the opening she wanted.

  “I have no daughters,” she crowed.

  “How can you say that? You had two: Sarah and Susanna.”

  “There were girls, oh yes, but they were no daughters of mine! Shameful hussies, the pair of them, sunk in their shameful wickedness. So how can there be grandchildren, tell me that, eh?”

  “You can disown them all you want, but you can’t erase them just because you didn’t approve of them, and expect everybody to go along with you. They existed! Sarah died just a few weeks ago! I’ve talked to her daughter, Deirdre, your other granddaughter, by the way. Was I hallucinating? She looked pretty solid to me.”

  “Jezebels! Harlots!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Born to sin and darkness, turning from the light in their wilful wickedness, the filthiness of their walk and conduct!”

  The leather chair creaked as Magnus stirred uneasily.

  “Mother,” he warned, “you said you wouldn’t upset yourself now.”

  The old woman ignored him. Her small mouth worked, radiating wrinkles as if it had been pulled tight by a drawstring. It reminded me of an anus.

  “Look,” I said hurriedly, pulling my mother’s photograph from my bag, and holding it close to her so that she could see it clearly. “Does this look like a Jezebel? She was a child. She was your child, for heaven’s sake. And I’m her daughter.”

  “Flesh-pleaser,” my grandmother hissed at the picture and, snatching it from my hand, hurled it at the fire. The frame cracked smartly against the grate and shattered. Magnus leaned forward with a grunt and rescued the photograph, already curling in the heat of the coals.

  “Flesh-pleaser?” I asked. “What . . .”

  “The body of the saint is the temple of the Holy Ghost!”

  “Well, that may be, but . . .”

  “Polluted it, she did, with her filthiness. Wasn’t that committing the sin of Zimri in the presence of the Holy Ghost?”

  “Zimri?”

  My grandmother’s voice was taking on a rapt quality, as if she were hypnotizing herself with the borrowed rhetoric. Certainly she was launched on a well-worn path, and I was lost already. I could no longer tell where her own words ended and quotation began.

  “She gave herself over,” she intoned, “just like her sister, carnally minded. They that are in the flesh cannot please God. So they cast themselves out. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned!”

  Rage and a sort of fascinated horror had strangled me, but a brief pause as the old woman heaved in some air broke the spell and I managed one protest.

  “She needed protection, and you turned against her because she was a sinner? What would you call yourself?”

  It sounded impotent even to me. Grandmother continued as if I hadn’t uttered a word. Her oratory moved up another notch beyond any kind of rational discourse. Her bun was slipping from its moorings, and wisps of white hair haloed her congested face, giving her an unsettling air of wildness. She’d become one of the more misanthropic Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah perhaps, in mid-rant, the seventeenth century pouring from her mouth as if she were helplessly speaking in tongues, yet all the time with an appalling vindictiveness. I could feel the hair standing up on my arms.

  “In the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. He who is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Would I not cut away the contagion? If your limb is mortified, do you not sever it? Shall those who are in spirit with Christ be in body one flesh with the vilest of the vile? She put away her faith and made shipwreck.”

  My grandmother’s mouth was flecked with spittle, and a fat purple vein stood out on her temple. My God, I thought, she’s foaming at the mouth, she’s barking mad, I should stop this, she’s an old woman, she’ll never change. But I couldn’t let her retreat into a mumbo-jumbo of self-serving quotation and imagine she had won. Magnus was unhappy, but we both ignored his feeble attempts to break in and defuse the situation, she with the ease of long practice and I with the callousness that a duel to the death brings on.

  “Having an illegitimate baby in that day and age was punishment enough. Why did you have to add to it?”

  She was waiting for me.

  “Many sorrows shall be to the wicked,” she proclaimed.

  I exploded.

  “Being seduced by a hypocritical lecher is not wickedness! Wickedness is making a prisoner of your child and her infant, ostracizing her, and driving her away with your hatred and your cruelty and your loveless religion to struggle on her own in the middle of a war. What happened to ‘suffer little children to come unto me’? Where was ‘God is love’? At the very least you sentenced her to poverty and hardship; as it is, you sentenced her to death.”

  “Hold on now,” protested Magnus, but his mother overrode him.

  “What is the wages of sin?” she asked the air and answered herself with a hideous glee. “The wages of sin is death!”

  “But that’s my point! There was no sin on her part. She didn’t deserve her death.”

  “She made her choice and turned away from the light! I said to her, Walk ye in the light of your fire and in the sparks ye have kindled, you and your bastard, the child of a bond-woman. It’s death to be carnally minded because the carnal mind is enmity against God.”

  Her voice was powerful and steadily rising, her face almost purple with intensity. I could feel myself recoiling instinctively from her otherness. She was terrifying.

  “You walk in darkness, I said, because you hate the light, and the Father will not raise you up on the last day. For you have turned your back, and the Father will not draw you to Him, but cast you out to be consumed in the fire. Kindle your fire, I said, and compass yourself about with sparks and at last lie down in sorrow.”

  At this point she heaved herself onto her feet and pointed a shaking finger at me.

  “Coming here, expecting me to welcome you in! Spawn of whores, work of darkness, swine’s blood upon the altar, polluting my house with your
wicked godlessness! Defiling a man of God with your vile and baseless slurs! Cleanse your hearts, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. But you have no faith and walk in wickedness; where will you be at the last day?”

  Her voice had grown thick and rough, as if all the blood vessels in her throat were dilating and squeezing her larynx shut, and her last question came out as a hoarse wheeze. Magnus was on his feet, but she flailed at him with one impatient arm as she gathered herself for a final effort.

  “God now laughs at his calamity,” she croaked, “and mocks when his fear cometh.”

  At which she tottered sideways, caught her foot in the footstool, and crashed like a felled tree into the hearth with a fearful clatter of fire irons. One hand flopped into the coals and stayed there.

  “Oh, my God, my God, Mother!”

  My uncle’s distress and my horror made us clumsy. We jostled each other, wasting valuable time treading on each other’s feet, trying to step over my grandmother’s inert bulk, both of us manoeuvring for the best position in the confines of the hearth to snatch the motionless hand from the fire. The hand was hissing and there was a dreadful smell that caught at some fear deep inside and turned my gut to water. With the strength of panic, I hauled my uncle aside as he slowly tried to bend, seized my grandmother’s sleeve, which was just starting to smoulder, and wrenched her hand out of the coals.

  I tried not to look at the blackened skin, split like a roast pepper, as we struggled to lift her out of the fireplace to lie more comfortably on the hearthrug. She was unconscious, her face grey and sweaty. Her glasses had broken in her fall, and a thin worm of blood wriggled from the edge of her right eyebrow into the hair above her ear. She was drooling, and her face looked oddly askew and uninhabited. I felt for a pulse and found a thready faltering beat at her throat.

  “She needs an ambulance, quickly,” I said. Magnus nodded and heaved himself up from his knees. “Where can I find blankets?” I asked. He gestured toward a door in the far corner of the room and lumbered to the telephone.