by Sarah Moss
All that we learn, I thought, all that we learn is that humanity is acquired from our parents, and can be lost, that people can be so badly damaged that they lose the capacity to be fully human. The Wild Boy never acquired language, never learnt to play or to love or even to sleep through the night. Because his parents threw him away. I deleted the first homo economicus and tried to think of a synonym.
‘Mummy?’
‘What?’
‘Miss Towers at school said we should say pardon.’
‘She was wrong. What is it?’
‘When we get this eco-gym set up, yeah? Do you want it to power the TV over there as well?’
‘There isn’t a TV.’
‘No, but there could be, yeah? Because if they were powering it themselves, it would kind of counteract the late capitalist cultural imperialism?’
‘Raph, stop saying “yeah” all the time.’
The clock on my laptop is slow, but even so I’d been gone over an hour and it was time Moth was waking up. Giles leaves him to sleep, not so much, I hope, because he thinks the nights are my problem as because he is incapable of acting now to change something six hours in the future.
‘Come on, let’s go wake Moth.’
Colsay House,
Colsay
30th Sept., 1878
Dearest Allie,
I had hoped to find a letter from you at Inversaigh as I am told that it may be some weeks before anyone finds it convenient to cross the Sound again, but no matter. I hope all is well at home and that Papa’s Muses are behaving themselves? I keep imagining nine little girls erupting from the studio in a state of undress and Mama’s ladies deciding to catch them and train them to be rational women and then won’t Miss Horton be cross! Do write soon, darling, won’t you? I had a very pleasant letter from Miss Emily, assuring me of whatever supplies and advice I may need, and enclosing one from Sir Hugo himself. He asks that I tell him my impression of the community here on Colsay, attending especially to those hardships that personal knowledge may allow small funds to alleviate. Which hardly seems the sentiment of an oppressive landlord!
My journey was largely uneventful, although you were right that I should have kept more reading material about me, and I felt so conspicuous in the Edinburgh hotel on my own that I was quite unequal to the great dining room and found myself, for my cowardice, subsisting on buns from a nearby cook-shop, which I indulged myself by consuming in bed since there were no witnesses! After a somewhat queasy passage, I arrived here two days ago, and since then have passed my time in unpacking the big trunk, walking around the hamlet and along the shore and attempting to befriend the housekeeper. I suppose I must begin my work tomorrow, somehow. I have only glimpsed the people and have had rather the impression that they have no desire for a closer encounter – the women had been talking together in the ‘street’ (a roughly cobbled area between the houses, quite unfit for wheeled traffic, which is of no consequence because there is, I think, no conveyance of any kind here) but somehow they sidled back to their houses at my coming. Perhaps that is just the impression of my fatigue during the first days in a new place.
I am to stay in the Big House (so called, though in fact it might just house the library and Papa’s studio at home) and, comfortable though it appears by comparison with the dwellings in the village – can you believe some of the people are still living and eating with their animals? – I wonder if it won’t prove a hindrance in the end. Everyone knows, I suppose, that Miss Emily brought me here and pays me, but none the less I wonder if my work wouldn’t be easier if I could live among the people I am here to serve; the Big House is set away from the village and its fields, back from the sea, as if to show that its inhabitants have no need of field or net to stock their table. Although I must say that the feather beds and iron stoves of the Big House would be hard to leave, especially for what I have seen of the village dwellings! Do not picture to yourself an ancient castle such as to delight Papa’s heart; if there are ghosts here, they must be those newly born of the poor and sick, for I gather that Sir Hugo’s father tore down the old abode of Highland maidens and Prince Charlie’s young henchmen when he bought the island, replacing it with a neat modern lodge that has no ideas above its station, room enough for either the family or a fishing party but nothing at all to compare to the Cassinghams’ Edinburgh house. Don’t tell Papa, but in truth I cannot much mourn a flagged floor and arrow-slits while I have a sash window and a nice little fender to toast my feet when the wind scrabbles under the eaves and rain pelts roof-slates brought across the sea for Cassingham comfort (though I would share his distaste for the tiled hall, which looks like a municipal baths and one would expect better of even a new-made aristocrat).
I have a small room at the side of the house, where the girls used to sleep when the Cassinghams spent their summers here before Sir Hugo remarried. I asked when the family had last visited the island; apparently there is a son, Hartley, who spent several weeks here in the Spring but seems to have won no favour by doing so – the hotel keeper at Inversaigh says ‘the islanders are not accustomed to the ways of modern young people and there were many thought he should have been knowing better than to be causing such trouble for his father’s tenants’. I observed that I should think the opportunities for sin on Colsay were few and far between and he replied in Johnsonian style that salvation is independent of one’s residence, which is hard to contest! He showed a not unnatural curiosity about my own business here, for surely few enough English ladies show a disposition to visit Colsay, but when he understood that I am a trained nurse and no leisured lady commented only that it was a shame the Cassinghams had not felt able to do more earlier on. I pointed out that it is Sir Hugo and his sister who sent me here, out of pure philanthropy (in as much as philanthropy can ever be found to be pure), but this conversation is my first intimation of the bad feeling in these parts of which we read so much. It seems rather hard that politics must stain poor Miss Emily’s charity.
I gathered from the innkeeper’s more garrulous daughter that the second Lady Hugo has refused to come here, preferring Nice, and looking out of the window where I see precisely nothing because it is raining hard from cloud so low that the stone walls of the garden are obscured, it is not difficult to understand why. It’s strange to think that Aubrey’s paintings show the same place, but not even he could invent that light on the sea. I do hope I can do all that he hopes of me here. I wish I knew what Aubrey said when he recommended me to Sir Hugo, and sometimes I cannot help but wonder why he so wanted this post for me – it feels like a test, but whether of my affection for him or of my character or professional capacities I cannot say. In any case it seems that everyone has placed a great deal of faith in me and I admit I am a little shaken by my reception so far. Miss Emily has charged a woman called Mrs Barwick, who comes from Colsay but was trained up as her personal maid and continued so until she married a childhood sweetheart and came back here to live, with the housekeeping and such services as I might require. I gather from her dress that Mrs Barwick is widowed, though for all I know it is merely the custom of the older women here to wear black, but Mrs Barwick’s clothes do not appear of local manufacture. Apparently I may need to call on her services as an interpreter as well as cook/housekeeper for I gather that many of the women have very little English and of course will be even more inclined to use their native tongue at the moments of greatest importance!
I went down to the churchyard today (well wrapped indeed, with the mackintosh cape from Miss Emily over all), expecting to see too many little mounds, but when I got back Mrs Barwick, who must have watched my unsteady progress from a window, commented that it is ‘not worth the work to make a new digging for every babe born’ and that at the last burial there were two caskets in the grave already, not to mention old James McGillies. I did not enquire if Old James McGillies were the original occupant or the digger of this uneasy resting place!
Anyway, my candle is burning low and if I am to begin to ea
rn my wages tomorrow I had best retire now. Do write to me soon, and tell Mama to do likewise – I won’t ask Papa to leave his Muses, for who knows what they might do unsupervised (inspire poor Hettie, perhaps, or distract Cook into the production of sonnets instead of soufflés, and then wouldn’t Papa be cross …).
Love to all, as ever,
May
NOT FOR THERAPEUTIC USE
It is even significant in which manner a small boy plays with his railway: whether his main pleasure is derived from staging crashes (as symbols of parental intercourse); whether he is predominantly concerned with building tunnels and underground lines (expressing interest in the inside of the body); whether his cars and buses have to be loaded heavily (as symbols of the pregnant mother); or whether speed and smooth performance are his main concern (as symbols of phallic efficiency) … deductions of this kind are not for therapeutic use; or, to express it more forcefully even, they are useless therapeutically. To make them the basis of symbolic interpretation would equal ignoring the ego defences which are built up against the unconscious content …
– Anna Freud, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, p. 26
Night Waking: 01:17
I remember the Pilates I used to do, back when the local population included Pilates teachers and many other middle-class mothers who had looked in the mirror once too often but couldn’t quite summon up the self-loathing to go to the gym. Try to feel your vertebrae easing along the string of the spinal cord, the teacher used to say. (This is not, in fact, a comforting image, since surely we rely on the vertebrae to protect the spinal cord? Stiff shoulders seem a small price to pay for cognition and motor skills.) I have been bending over the cot, my index finger locked in Moth’s sticky grasp, for thirty-six minutes, during which time I have made four escape attempts, sung ‘Hush, Little Baby’ end to end sixteen times and convinced myself that the pins and needles in my hands promise an early, if slow, release by mercy of a neurological degenerative disease. How many years of my life would I give for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep?
It depends on how long my life will be. Of a hundred years, I would give ten. I think about how much reading I might be able to do between being ninety and a hundred. I would be at liberty to live in what my mother used to call All This Mess and upon KitKats and salt and vinegar Hula Hoops. I’ve always fancied sheltered accommodation. I used to cycle past some flats when I took the children swimming or went to Pilates, and I’d peer in and see old ladies with flowery wing armchairs and kitchenettes reminiscent of the Barbie playhouse I never had, reading or watching television in the middle of the morning. When they were in those kitchens I bet they were baking cakes for themselves, and sometimes some of them gathered in a sitting room with panelling and occasional tables like a costume-drama eighteenth century, where there were flower arrangements and tins of chocolate biscuits and a piano. No, I’m not giving up a decade of sugar-fuelled self-indulgence, even for sleep. I try to move my finger and Moth snorts and opens one eye. OK, five years of a hundred. As long as the sleep is in solitude and somewhere soundproof and I know that Giles is on call for the children.
Moving to a global scale, what would I pawn for sleep? Would I, given the choice, have peace for Palestine or twelve hours in bed? Clean water for the children of Africa or a week off motherhood? The advent of carbon-neutral industrial processes or a month’s unbroken nights? It’s a good thing Satan doesn’t come and chat to the mothers of sleepless toddlers in the middle of the night.
Moth’s grasp loosens. Millimetre by casual millimetre, I pull my finger back and, holding my hand above his so as not to change the shape of the shadow on the cot or the current of his exhaled breath, I begin to straighten my back. He turns over.
‘Mummy stay!’
I bend down again, offer the other hand so I can move the numbed shoulder.
‘No. Unner hand.’
How many years would I give now? Right this racked moment? If I don’t get to go back to bed and to sleep this instant I am going to walk out of the house and over the stones to the sea and I will keep going until the island is merely a blot on the shining waves and the cold water rises in my lungs.
I don’t.
‘You could leave him to it.’ Giles, who must have asked Jake to bring him a copy of the Guardian from the end-point of the English newspaper network on the mainland, looked up over Sports. I caught sight of the front page, where a mother in a headscarf cradled a limp child.
‘For goodness’ sake don’t let Raph see the news. We’ve been here. Moth can scream for longer than I can listen to it. He has an ultimate weapon and I don’t. We’ve already established that he thinks it’s quite funny if I sob and bang my head on the wall.’
Giles put his coffee down on an older but unopened letter from the Child Tax Credit people. ‘I wish you wouldn’t. It’s not exactly setting a good example, is it?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Giles. You try hanging over the cot for three hours, staring into the dark and praying for death.’
‘Fuck sake,’ said Moth, banging his bowl on the table.
‘Anna!’ Giles hates it when the children swear.
‘What? You’re worried he’s going to embarrass you in front of the neighbours? Shock the seagulls with profane language? Why don’t you piss off to your homosocial bonding session in the eco-conversion while I clear up breakfast and try to plant your bloody trees again.’
‘Piss off,’ said Moth to his spoon. ‘Bloody trees.’
Giles stood up, not too distraught to remember to take the Guardian with him. ‘It upsets me when you talk like that.’
I poured tea. ‘Yeah, well. It upsets me when I’m awake all night and you pretend to sleep through it and then my day is consumed by housework and childcare and I’m not getting any time to write while you prance about counting birds and having tea with Jake.’
He began to retreat. ‘Anna, I’m not counting birds. I’m trying to work out why the puffin population has dropped by twenty-five per cent in the last four years—’
‘So you have counted them.’
‘And as for housework, all I can say is, if your day is really consumed by housework then you’re not doing a very efficient job.’
‘I’m a historian, remember? I’m the Rackind Fellow at St Mary Hall? If you wanted housework you should have married one of those Clarissas your mother kept scattering at your feet. And you’d have to keep her in paddocks and rare-breed Labradors and probably parlourmaids as well.’
He went.
‘Labbadores,’ said Moth. ‘Labbadores fierce?’
‘Yes. Savage.’ I drank some of the tea, which was cold. ‘Come on, let’s find your brother.’
Raph had gone back to his disaster games. He was lying on the floor of the playroom, a parlour with wedding-cake plasterwork on the ceiling, which had been, until Giles inherited Colsay, the dining room in which his parents replicated the napery, crested silver and gravy of their life in Sussex. It was not Giles’s mother but his Italian girlfriend, the one for whose abandonment I consoled him, who taught him about food. Her risotti were without the charnel-house notes of my rare attempts at home-made stock, English tomatoes bloomed with flavour under her slim fingers, and after a while she was beamed back to the land of wild boar salami with fennel seeds and porcini. Probably. Giles is too chivalrous, to them as well as to me, to discuss his ex-girlfriends. Anyway, when Julia sees her dining room carpeted with acrylic rugs featuring urban plans with roundabouts and emergency services, adorned with Raph’s diagrams of nuclear-powered popcorn makers and hydro-electric helicopters and furnished principally with Duplo, she will like me even less than she does.
‘What are you making, Raph?’
‘Trains!’ said Moth, wriggling on my hip. ‘Down.’
I tucked him more firmly against me. I can see that the last thing a person re-enacting apocalypse needs is a toddler making things worse. Raphael must have been up for hours. He’d used all our wooden train track in a system which lef
t no extra pieces and no loose ends, without cheating by using the plastic links that convert female to male connections. This is a feat which has evaded several teams of Oxford academics towards the end of the third bottle of wine.
‘Nothing.’
There was a particular arrangement of parallel tracks near a station, where a small train waited. A bigger one with InterCity livery was poised under the window.
‘How do you know about the Paddington crash?’
‘Crash!’ said Moth. ‘Big crash.’
‘I’m not doing any harm. Please will you go away.’
‘I know you’re not doing any harm. I’m just surprised you know about it. Were you even born then?’
‘Mummy, please take Moth away. He’s going to knock it all over.’
I wondered about making a third assault on the trees, but it wasn’t me who spent £500 and then left them in sacks. I looked at the landslide of paper threatening to engulf the half of the kitchen table that is, if not precisely clear, at least level enough to form a resting place for abandoned cups of lapsang souchong, but I knew that at best I’d make the landslide into heaps of rubble. Action this day, later, too late, compost, and file. Then a dark river of new paper fills the valleys and we’re back where we started, except that this time I know there is archaeological evidence of human intelligence somewhere under there. If I didn’t take action regarding laundry I would not only be reduced to knickers requiring a safety pin, but the stuff washed two days earlier and still in the machine would develop a mildew which does not come out in repeat washes, or at least not in low-temperature repeat washes with environmentally friendly detergent. I fantasize, sometimes, about the boil washes and bleach of my childhood, the pink fabric softener that smelt of hyacinths and blended with the Bisto fumes of my mother’s cooking as the clothes stayed damp on the airer that was always in the way. She cannot understand why I, who could afford a tumble dryer, choose not to have one. And nor, sometimes, can I. I fantasize, alternately, about Joachim, whom I did not marry and who is now a doctor in Copenhagen and who would give me an apartment with beech floors and a steel kitchen and a Baltic view relieved by the swoops and assertions of the Malmo bridge which encourages thousands of people to surmount the estranging sea in the name of civilization on a daily basis. I am, I find, increasingly in favour of bridges.