by Sarah Moss
‘Mummy? Moth splash a forks! Moth helpful!’
‘Splash’ usually means ‘throw into the toilet’. The cutlery drawer was open. I went to investigate, relieved, at least, of the decision about which bit of my contracted world I should address first.
Giles came back late, his trees losing hope as they lay among the budding daffodils. Moth had been asleep some time and I had done about as much of the washing up as seemed necessary to tread the line between present martyrdom and the promise of life-long domestic servitude.
‘Good day at the office?’ I flourished a tea-towel I had no intention of using.
He sat down. There was rain on his shoulders and his hair was slicked off his face in a way that gave a regrettable resemblance to Prince Charles in the early 1980s.
‘I don’t know. How’s the home front?’
‘Oh, a hotbed of intellectual productivity, obviously. Jesus, Giles, when precisely do you imagine I might write this book?’
He shrugged. ‘You’ll be fine. It’s almost done. Can’t you ever take a holiday?’
‘If I were going to take a holiday, believe me, I wouldn’t spend it doing wall-to-wall childcare in a house without central heating or a dishwasher, hundreds of miles from my friends.’
He put his head in his hands, which is all very well for people who have had the entire day to themselves.
‘You agreed to come. Don’t make it sound as if I kidnapped you and took you into slavery. You said it would be good for the children. You said you needed a break from the Fellows.’
‘Yes, well. I was wrong. There’s no supper. I gave the children beans and yoghurt.’
He looked up as if a strange smell had crossed the kitchen. ‘What, together?’
‘Yeah, it’s the latest in molecular gastronomy. It was in the paper. Baked bean sorbet and strawberry yoghurt foam. What do you think?’
I left him in the kitchen. The sun was setting and the grass glowed in the slanting light, but Giles stayed with his back to the window.
‘Raphael?’
He was in the playroom. The American city playmat that Giles brought back from a conference when Raph was young enough to be expected to play with these things, to play at parking in car parks and refuelling at petrol stations and stopping at red lights, was in the middle of the floor, and he’d built two Lego towers nearly as tall as himself. I didn’t even know we had that much Lego. The planes were on the windowsill.
‘Raph.’ I stroked his hair. ‘Come on. It’s past ten o’clock. You should go to bed.’
His glance flickered towards me. ‘Not yet.’
I wondered when his hair had last been washed. Bruised knees poked through the holes in his tracksuit bottoms.
‘Are you waiting for something? Is there some trigger for the – the impact?’
He positioned a small metal car near the base of one of the towers.
‘Not yet, Mummy.’
‘Can I watch?’
He froze.
‘OK. I’m going to come back in five minutes and then I want you to go to bed, OK? When the sun goes down.’
I went back to the kitchen. Giles hadn’t moved, so I went outside and picked my way down to the sea, where I sat on a rock with my back to the house and watched as the sun, smooth as a coffin gliding through the curtains in a crematorium, slid behind the sea. The swans came honking out of the sky, as if they were late for a sunset curfew, and rearranged themselves on the water, fussy as young children sitting down on a train, refolding their wings, shaking out their tails, changing places. The last rays picked out the pile of stones marking the alleged home of the anchorite on a ledge at the top of the cliff. She had decades of peace and quiet, the anchorite, a possibly mythical thirteenth-century hermit who roosted up there in holy resistance to wind and rain, which repaid her by coming at her call when raiders were seen in the Sound. The ability to invoke storms and drown people is an odd gift of God. She was also famed for living on water from the spring and an occasional crust, which was considered as further evidence of divine favour, though one might think a diet of mead and honeycake more convincing evidence of His special affections. I imagine her sitting quite still, watching the play of wind on the water and the passage of the sun across the sky, noting the comings and goings of birds and boats and the shapes of the clouds while her hair flutters around her face and her homespun robes pull against her body. She knew what she was doing when she answered her call to stay up there.
Light leached out of the cliff. The swans, calm now, drifted into their bay, and I went back to find Raph, to compensate by night for the constant attention exacted by Moth by day. He had already gone to bed, and when I followed him upstairs he was curled on the duvet under his window, reading an engineering textbook. I sat on his bed.
‘Hello. I’ve just come to say good night.’
He didn’t look up.
‘Mummy, do you know how they tense the caissons on swing bridges?’
‘No. Did you have a good day today?’
‘I’m going to build us a bridge to Colla, but it can’t be a high bridge and there’s not much shipping here, so it won’t be a swing bridge. Cable bridges need cables at the bottom as well so they don’t swing, but I think we’d like one that swings.’
I stroked his shoulder. He wasn’t wearing pyjamas.
‘I think the swinging sounds fun, but I suppose it might swing a long way. We wouldn’t want to get tipped off. Imagine, with all the shopping.’
I used to hate pushing the pram along the riverbank in Oxford. What if I misjudged the slope of the path, failed to engage the brake when we fed the ducks? What if a cyclist came round the corner too fast? Jump in, of course, but I don’t think I could support the weight of our old-fashioned jumble-sale pram for very long, certainly not in a fast-flowing river with one hand while undoing the harness with the other. Send Raph for help, at least so he doesn’t have to watch.
Raph’s hands began to circle. ‘I’d put a steel net to catch us. Like for those trapeze people. With special girders and pockets for food in case we had to wait a long time, but it would have lights and an emergency signal that went off if anything heavy fell in it. Not to be set off by birds.’
The sky stays light for so very long. Bedtime retreats like a parent’s promise. It was still quite bright enough to plant trees.
‘And you could have ladders up the girders and a boat at the bottom so we could still get ourselves home, but the boat will be self-righting in case it’s stormy and you can seal up the cabin like a lifeboat so Moth would be safe even if it tipped over.’
‘Raph, where are your pyjamas?’
‘And some of those strobe lights, because none of us have epilepsy.’
‘Raphael? Pyjamas?’
He made eye contact, briefly, but it was as if there was nobody there.
‘I haven’t got any pyjamas. I bet there are less carbon-heavy ways of designing lifeboats, especially the inflatable ones.’
I kissed his cheek.
‘Raph, love, go to sleep. It’s late. I’ll leave the light so you can read a bit but one of us will be up in a few minutes to turn it off, OK? Get some rest.’
Giles wasn’t at the kitchen table any more. I wondered about making him some supper, but a scan of the fridge suggested that any such effort was more likely to provoke anger than penitence. I thought about finishing the washing up but couldn’t see why I should. I could have got my laptop out, sat at the kitchen table wondering how I had ever managed to weave paragraphs around quotations from the eighteenth century. I found some nasty chocolate in a variety box Giles had confiscated from Raphael on grounds of health and ideology, and stood at the window eating it.
‘Anna?’ Giles was in the playroom.
I shoved the chocolate into one of the paper avalanches.
‘What?’
‘Look. Raph’s at it again.’
I went through. Giles was cross-legged on the floor, his head level with the Cantor Fitzgerald floors at
the top of the second tower.
‘I know. It was the Paddington rail crash earlier. I didn’t even know he knew about it.’
Giles ran his finger down the lower floors, the restaurants and retail opportunities.
‘Can’t you stop him? Distract him somehow? Give him something else to do?’
Darkness had nearly fallen, but I could still see the sea rolling and glinting out there.
‘He doesn’t want to do anything else. I try. He just torments Moth. Anyway, why don’t you distract him?’
‘I’m working, Anna. It’s a short season. I can’t just do bits in the middle of the night or nip off for an hour, we need a proper statistical picture.’
‘OK, but then don’t criticize how I look after the children.’
He sighed and began to trace the one-way system with his finger. There was puffin shit on his shoes. He leant over and picked up the plane on the windowsill.
‘Look. Here we go. Wheeee. And here comes the other one. Wheeee. Crash.’
I knelt down and took a fire engine in each hand.
‘Nee-nah, nee-nah. Here they come.’
‘No,’ said Giles. He was still holding the planes, noses touching the Lego, leaving the real catastrophe for Raph to complete in the morning. ‘Too fast. It took them a while to believe it was really happening.’
Colsay House,
Colsay
1st Oct., 1878
Dear Aubrey,
Only a line to tell you of my arrival. This place is so beautiful that I know that whatever happens I will be glad I came. It is misty and wet today and I watched the waves coming out of the fog and breaking on the stones from which you brought Papa’s rockery. I have never seen quartzes so round and smooth before and only wonder that you were able to resist sending half the beach! We see winter coming closer day by day now and sometimes the dark days seem to loom over me like the first intimation of a sickness, and as with a sickness sometimes I doubt my own strength for the struggle ahead. But after all, there is no fighting with the seasons; my part is at worst to endure and I am certain of my capacity there. For now, in any case, the cliffs are still great tenements of shrieking birds and the beasts are passing their days in the fields – well, on the hillside – for another week yet, though by night they make bedfellows for the poor people! Mrs Barwick tells me that there used to be a Holy Woman living up there on the cliffs, and I thought such a figure would make a fine subject for you, but whether she speaks of an early Celt, perhaps a female counterpart to Cuthbert and Aidan, or some more recent eccentric, Mrs Barwick cannot tell.
I have not made much progress with the islanders yet, but of course it will take time to win their trust and learn their ways, and I hope by the year’s close to be able to send the news you are hoping for and give you the satisfaction of having been the means of saving not just the lives of individual innocents but the future of the community here. Think of me, won’t you, and write if inspiration should spare you a few moments? I do not forget what was said that last afternoon at your house, with the sun coming down through the leaves. I hope I can be worthy of your trust.
Fond regards,
May
FEARING TO HANDLE A KNIFE
She retained a great affection for the child, at the same time even identifying the instrument that she would use to destroy it, fearing to handle a knife even at mealtimes.
– Mark Jackson, ed., Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder
(London: Ashgate, 2002), p. 177
On days when I was this tired on maternity leave, we used to go out. The advantages of out are that Mummy is unlikely to fall asleep on the job, and the presence of witnesses means that Mummy is not afraid that she might succumb to the urge to use one of the black-handled Sabatier knives in the beech block on the kitchen counter or a blunt object such as the playdough-stained rolling pin to bring about a few minutes’ peace. There was always the chance of meeting another adult with whom I might be able to exchange complete sentences while the baby fretted in the pram. I used to feel, outside on those days, as if I’d come out of my burrow at the wrong time of day like a rabbit with myxomatosis, blinking in the glare of the intelligence of people who slept at night and did not think about infant bowel movements by day.
‘I’m taking the children to the beach this morning,’ I said.
Giles looked over the Guardian. Either the news had come round again or he was re-reading, but in either case I didn’t like the look of it.
‘But we’re on the beach.’
‘We never go. I mean, do you take them? Paddling, exploring rock pools? Seal watching, for God’s sake. Remember how much we paid to go seal watching in Vancouver Island?’
‘Seal washing?’ asked Moth.
Raph rejected a blackened crust. ‘Watching, not washing. Even Daddy doesn’t wash birds. Though sometimes people have to after an oil spill. Did you know they’re developing bacteria that will eat spilt oil? Only no one knows what the side-effects will be yet.’
‘That’s good,’ I said.
Raph pushed his chair back and stepped in the porridge. ‘Mummy, I don’t want to go to the beach.’
‘Come on. You can enact disasters later. Only for the morning. I just want to get Moth really tired so I can do some work.’
He looked at a point above my head. ‘Take Moth, then. I don’t have to be tired so you can work.’
The tea I was pouring missed the mug, setting a bank statement afloat on the table. ‘I thought you’d like it. We can look for crabs in the rock pools. I bet Daddy knows of lots of things we might find.’
I fear that this tone, this voice in which ‘I would pay someone a five-figure sum to take you away for a week’ comes out as ‘Come and spend the morning on the beach with me,’ will ring through everything I say for the rest of my life. I will say, ‘I thought we could go have a lovely time at the tapas bar tonight’ when I mean ‘This marriage died years ago and I want a divorce.’ ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ will mean ‘For some years I have spent every waking moment thinking of ways to die.’
Raph walked out, and a moment later I heard the space hopper begin its Morse code in the cobbled yard. SOS.
‘Have you looked at the weather?’ asked Giles.
I drank some tea. Toast was too much effort, and eating only means having to cook again.
‘It’s not been on the back page for years.’
I scooped some porridge into Moth’s mouth when he wasn’t looking.
‘I mean the actual weather.’
The window was sequinned with rain.
‘The sky’s only white. It’s not torrential. I thought you approved of outside.’
The Guardian flapped. ‘No odds to me. I’m afraid I’ll be at the rocks all day.’
When we got to the beach, after passing half the morning in negotiation about putting on shoes, Moth walked into the sea and then had a tantrum because it was wet, and Raph stood with his back to the waves talking about potential uses of hydroelectricity on oil rigs. I sat on a rough rock, my arms wrapped round Moth as he drummed his heels on my shins and tried to bite my arms, and remembered the staircase in the Bodleian Library, the ecclesiastical smell of dusty stone and furniture polish, the way the leading on the windows turns the quadrangle below into a watery mosaic, the thickening silence as you ascend towards the muffled door and the airless warmth, the opposite of fresh air, that waits to take readers into its chloroform embrace at the top. I decided that if I made Moth walk the whole five hundred metres back to the house he might take less than forty-five minutes to go to sleep after lunch and, if I didn’t rush him at all, stopped to inspect every pebble and touch each flowering grass, it might almost be time to start putting together an early lunch when we arrived. I left Raph in situ, orating to the grass, which bent before him in the wind like the audience of a state-organized rally.
The wind was rising and the power went off again before I finished cooking the children’s supper. Neither child likes eggs
so the cooking was only symbolic in the first place. I poked at the pan, hoping residual heat would finish off the salmonella. Moth took one look and threw his plate on the floor.
‘Mummy? Aren’t you going to pick it up?’
Raphael had scraped off the egg as if he knew it was contaminated but was nibbling along the edge of the bread, my home-made soda bread. I could save myself a lot of time by buying raw ingredients, throwing them away and getting on with my book.