by Sarah Moss
‘But animals don’t wear cloth.’
He reached towards it. I stopped his hand.
‘Best not to touch, love. Would you go get Daddy?’
He stood up. ‘It’s not a rabbit, Mummy. There aren’t any, remember? Daddy said. And no mice.’
‘It might be a badger. Or maybe someone had a cat here once. Daddy will know. Just go get him, OK?’
He looked back at me as he crossed the lawn. I waited until the back door closed and then dusted the earth away from the cloth with my fingers. It was knitted wool, stained brown. I scraped at the soil above Raphael’s cut and there, where I expected it, was the eggshell arc of a very small human skull.
Colsay House,
Colsay
12th October
Dearest Allie,
Thank you so much for your last, which reached me yesterday by a circuitous route that I don’t pretend to understand! You can’t know how much it meant to me, especially the enclosure. I pictured you going down to the postbox in your new hat (only I suppose even so far south as Manchester it may be allowed to rain in October enough that you would not chance the new hat) and maybe meeting Pippa on the way back and being summoned in for tea and helping the children set fire to the toast over the fire. I cannot hope you will receive this as quickly as yours found its way here (spirited by the Others, for all I know, for it turns out that the Others, otherwise Trows or Grey People, still thrive on Colsay), though Mrs Barwick undertakes to pass it into the right hands at the right moment.
I cannot quite pretend to be delighted by your decision, for I know how much you will be missed at home and I know (and you don’t, but you will) what a Scottish autumn is, but I know also that we will all be so pleased and proud when you succeed, as you will. It will be a hard fight for you, dearest Al. Not the work – believe me that you are possessed of the necessary brilliance six times over – but you have chosen hard ground to plough and I fear will encounter much opposition. I hope you know how far some doctors will go to prevent women joining their ranks, for they know how poor feminine souls shrink before the very idea of their ministrations, and how much of their practice they will lose as women turn to their own kind for healing. I want to tell you both that you must not allow anyone to turn you from the road on which you have set your foot and that I would go far to protect you, my dearest sister, from the treatment meted out to those few brave women who precede you. Only be sure, Al, be very sure, that it is truly your own wish to become a doctor and not just the realization of Mama’s hopes. And if so, God speed! Maybe some day, when you are all set up in practice and basking in fame and glory, you will let me come and work for you. I dare say the bodies of those poor beings who must content themselves with my services are not so different from the fashionable belles and anxious mamas who will call day and night on your expertise that I will be quite useless!
Though I fear that so far I have been little better than useless here. My lack of Gaelic is a far graver handicap than I had understood – had I known, I would have made some effort to learn before coming, at least enough to show willing. And yet Miss Emily says she has never addressed them in anything but English and has always been perfectly understood! Even so, there is one woman, Mrs Grice, whose child is expected, she says, at Christmas, although the most cursory visual inspection suggests to me an earlier date. I have not asked to examine her and learnt early that it is rarely wise to cast suspicion on a lady’s interpretation of her dates (nota bene I do not suggest that in this case there is any reason for such delicacy). I went into Mrs Grice’s house (a courtesy term; in truth they dwell like primitive Man in stone huts filled with smoke and paved with what I hope is not worse than animal ordure) and she allowed me to sit while she plucked fowl. Do not from this imagine a cosy domestic scene: her youngest child sat on the floor dabbling its fingers in what flowed apparently unstaunched from its lower clothes and the fowl, far from being a comfortably clucking barnyard creature, was some great white bird, a kind of goose-like swan, whose head trailed on the ground at one side of her lap and its feet near the fire on the other. Its neck and strange eyes seemed to glow in the firelight so that it looked quite alive, although from the angle of the head swinging off the neck it could not have been, and Allie, there was a tall heap of such birds beside her, and her pale hair hanging over her face and casting the strangest shadows in the firelight.
Not wishing to appear to pry, though I don’t doubt they all know why I am here and what is my work, I began by asking her about the killing and preparation of these birds. She told me, in a hesitating English with the odd word I did not understand and a lilt that I found hard to follow, what Mrs Barwick had already explained: at certain seasons the men pass their time hanging off the cliffs at the north end of the island on ropes, catching such creatures in nets that they manufacture for that purpose. These birds, she added, gesturing, come from the sea and can be netted by night, and so are valued the more because the men do not chance their lives for them. I cannot, I confess, imagine it – how could anyone stand upright in the waves by dark while containing a great frightened bird in a net? Each wing was the size of the child on the floor, who was perhaps two years of age and well grown (Mrs Barwick later told me, the last infant to survive birth on the island and also the first in four years; something must have been done at this confinement that was not done, or done differently, at all the others). I gathered that the birds, like everything else here, which means principally fish and eggs, are boiled in a great pot suspended over the fire on a chain, and indeed there is no other means of preparing food except in the Big House, where I subsist tolerably well on gruel, oat and barley bannocks, and dark and fishy-tasting fowl about which I make no enquiries whatsoever. I ration myself to two pieces of Cook’s fudge each evening, and, alas and alack, I finished her fruit cake last night. I pretend to believe another may yet reach me here, but it is in truth a hollow dream.
As Mrs Grice began to work on the bird’s wings, I praised the child on the floor, hoping to lead up to the circumstances of its birth (for the matted hair and colourless clothes gave no indication of the child’s sex). It came over and began to fondle the ribbon edging on my skirt with its blackened fingers, a liberty to which you can imagine I took secret exception! It occurs to me that the Grey People may in fact be just what they are called. I said she was fortunate indeed to have such a fine baby and that in years of work in a great city I had rarely seen such a bonny one, and indeed he has his mother’s great blue eyes and would doubtless look well enough after scrubbing and fine-combing. The look on her face suggested that I had perhaps gone a little too far, so I spoke to the child, asking if he liked to eat fowl such as his mother was plucking (a foolish question, for he might like it or starve). He began to cry and ran to his mother, and soon after that I made my excuses and departed into the rain.
When I told Mrs Barwick where I had been, she laughed and said aye, there was reason this should be the first Colsay child delivered by a stranger, but when I pressed her she said I must ask The Family about that. It is none of my business, of course; here as at home it is my part to deliver the babies and not to question their origins. You will say that it is not the lack of Gaelic but the lack of tact that hampers my work, and you are probably right, but how to engineer not merely presence but intervention at this most crucial moment in a woman’s life? At home I have the work of the Society and the respect given to my training to ease the way, but Allie, these woman have no want of me, have never heard of Manchester, much less the Princess Alexandra Nursing School, and probably would not care if they had. And yet they must, surely, prefer living to dead children?
I am sorry to burden you with a letter of this length. I am so discouraged I seem to have more time for writing about life here than I do for living it! But I may yet have two months to ingratiate myself with Mrs Grice, and who knows but she will allow me the great honour of presenting her with a healthy baby like to live.
I’m sorry to be so gloomy. Pray sen
d me an account of Mama’s meetings and Papa’s latest glory and Elsa and the Twiggses and Hettie’s young man, oh and whether hats continue to grow like sunflowers and indeed what is happening in the world, for even at Inversaigh the papers I saw pre-dated my departure and here, for all we know, the monarchy has been overthrown and the Empire in open revolt and Europe aflame with revolution (and wouldn’t Mama enjoy that). I suppose Mrs Barwick might be mildly interested but most of them know little and care less, just so long as there are birds in the sky and fish in the sea and peat on the ground. I am glooming again. Good night.
Love as ever,
May
THE CHILD’S CURIOSITY
In place of an emotionally charged, sometimes very stormy family atmosphere which stimulates the child’s curiosity, the average institution confronts its inhabitants with a set routine.
– Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Infants without Families: The
Case For and Against Residential Nurseries
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1944, 2nd ed., 1965), p. 80
I will know next time I suspect the presence of pirate raiders that the police, even when assured that the victim has been dead some years are, at least during office hours and with favourable wind and tide, able to reach us with gratifying speed. We couldn’t find a phone book and couldn’t get online, so in the end Giles stood on Raph’s bed to call our friend Dan in Oxford and got him to Google the Highlands and Islands Police phone numbers. We knew it wasn’t an emergency, but I stayed with the baby as if it needed a companion until we heard their boat closing in on us and Raph came running to say that they had waders and were bringing the boat right up on to the beach. He stood at my shoulder and peered into the hole. The baby’s face was turned away, into the earth, the way they turn away in sleep.
‘Mummy, that’s a baby, isn’t it?’
We’d told him we thought they might be people bones from long ago, and made reference to the Picts and the Romans. He knows perfectly well that there is no reason to involve the police in the discovery of long-deceased domestic animals.
I looked up at him. ‘It looks small to me,’ I agreed.
‘What would you do if Moth died?’
He was looking towards the house, where a door banged and there were male voices.
‘If either of you died it would be the worst thing in the whole world to me. I don’t want to think about it because it makes me feel so sad.’
They were opening the back door, Giles with Moth on his hip and two men in uniforms with hats which would have blown off if they’d worn them on the boat.
‘Would you cry for your whole life?’
I reached up to put my arm round his waist. ‘Yes. Parents don’t ever feel better if their children die.’
He pulled away from me. They were nearly with us.
‘Even though you could sleep then?’
I stood up.
‘Mrs Cassingham? Can you keep the child away from the scene, please?’
‘I’m Dr Bennet. Or call me Anna. It was Raphael who found the bones and neither of us have touched it since we realized what it was.’
The taller one squatted down, gloved hands flat on the ground as if he were leaning in to smell the baby. The other one looked at Raph. ‘Shouldn’t the lad be at school?’
Raph clung on to my clothes as he used to when I took him to birthday parties.
‘We’re home-schooling for a few months.’
The tall one stood up and held out his hand.
‘I’m Ian MacDonald and this is Rory Sutton. You were right to call us, Mrs Cassingham.’
I shook his hand. It was like holding a seal’s flipper.
‘They didn’t look like animal bones. And the wrapping—’
I looked down at Raph, who had put an arm round my waist and was leaning heavily against me.
‘The wrapping?’
‘People don’t knit for animals.’
Raph muttered into my ribcage. Ian MacDonald raised an eyebrow.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. I detached Raph and bent down. ‘What is it, love?’
‘Maybe the mummy knitted a blanket.’
The eyebrow stayed up.
‘Maybe she did.’ I stroked his hair.
‘I gather you found the body, Mrs Cassingham. Perhaps we could go inside and you could tell me exactly what happened? And, Ralph, is it? Ralph, would you and your dad like to go with my friend Rory and look at a real police speedboat?’
Raph didn’t move.
‘Raphael,’ I said. ‘Raphael as in the archangel. Raph, I need to talk to Mr MacDonald. You could go do some bouncing or you could build some more of that town.’
‘I couldn’t. The town was raided by the Serbs when you went off to the beach and all the people got killed. Even the babies.’
I began to think it would be quicker, although perhaps only slightly quicker, to tell Ian MacDonald that I had delivered a baby, knitted it a blanket and then buried it in the back garden than to wait for Raph to incriminate me.
‘Raph,’ said Giles. ‘Come on. Let’s go and see how Jake’s doing with that roof. He’ll be going home any minute.’
Not, I thought, when he sees the police launch on the beach, and scents dirt on the lord of the manor.
Raph took Giles’s hand. ‘Daddy, if you could travel forwards or backwards in time, which would you choose?’
‘Not now, love,’ I murmured.
‘Jake?’ asked Ian MacDonald.
‘Builder,’ I said. ‘We’re doing up one of the old blackhouses for a holiday cottage. To rent to visitors.’
He smiled. ‘Of course you are. Rory?’
Rory nodded. ‘I’ll just have a quick word with Jake myself, Mr Cassingham.’
Moth lurched into my arms and the three of them went off to give Jake the basis of many free drinks in the Black Sheep in Shepsay.
I made a pot of tea, deciding to raid the rose pouchong rather than expend my dwindling supply of Yorkshire Tea and advance the end of the milk. Ian MacDonald sat at the table. One might just as well give people access to our bank accounts, medical records and curricula vitae as sit them at our kitchen table (in fact, it may be the only place where it is possible to access much of this information). Moth sat on my hip, subdued, I hoped, by the sight of strangers rather than by the trauma of his mother’s abuse.
‘So, you were planting trees?’
I kept my back to him, adjusting the quantity of tealeaves in the strainer. Moth, who likes the tea strainer, leaned in to help.
‘Timothy, this one, was asleep. I’d tried to plant the trees with him around but he kept wanting the spade or going off and licking stones and things—’ I stopped, poured water. My inability to combine manual labour with childcare is a shame and a disgrace but not, yet, a police matter. ‘Anyway, so yes, we were planting trees.’
‘But you said it was your son who found the bones?’
Moth took a mouthful of my hair and leant away.
‘Ow.’ I tickled his chin. ‘He was helping me dig. We both saw them, I suppose. He said first.’
‘And then?’
‘I tried to tell him they were animal bones. He looked properly and saw the blanket. I sent him to get Giles.’
‘The blanket?’
‘I looked, after he’d gone. It looked hand-knitted. And I knew the bones were small.’
I put the tea in front of him, translucent as amber, and waited to see if he knew not to ask for milk. Or sugar. Giles and I, in rebellion against opposite ends of the English social spectrum, meet over refusal to deploy a sugar bowl. I would, if asked, deny owning one, though there is one in each of the two silver coffee sets we were given as wedding presents. You should have had a list at John Lewis, my mother said, and I told her I’d rather have asked people to buy wells for Somali villages. I lied.
‘Thank you, Mrs Cassingham. Anna. Now, Anna, as I expect you know, it’s not uncommon for people to turn up human remains on the islands, and we nearly always find it’s t
he archaeologists we need to call. But not, of course, in every instance. I need to ask you some questions.’
‘Of course.’
I sat down, settled Moth on my lap. He pointed to my mug. ‘Hot, hot tea. Mummy got a flower mug.’
He pointed to Ian MacDonald’s tea but was unable to formulate words for a man in a suit given possession of one of our household gods in the form of the Bird Mug.
‘You have just the two children?’
My stomach lurched.
‘Yes. We used to think about a third one but—’ Stop it. There is no legal obligation to have three children.
‘But?’
‘Just the two.’ Oh, and the one I buried in the orchard, obviously.
‘So you have had two pregnancies?’
I looked up at him. Moth pulled himself up by my hair and licked my chin like someone sampling a strange fruit.
‘Is that necessary information, Mr MacDonald?’
‘Old MacDonald,’ said Moth. ‘Old Macdonald had a farm.’
Ian MacDonald shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Mrs Cassingham, at this stage. I would be interested in your answer.’
My hand, gripping the straps on Moth’s green cord dungarees to hold him when he overbalanced, was suddenly damp with sweat. Ian MacDonald’s gaze rested on Moth’s shoulder as if there were a rare butterfly there. I took a mouthful of tea. Moth turned and I gulped; it was too hot.
‘It’s not relevant,’ I said. ‘Everyone who needs to know my medical history knows it.’
Ian MacDonald watched the grass blowing in the wind outside and sipped his tea, but I didn’t say anything more.
‘Read a Gruffalo now?’ asked Moth.
‘You and Mr Cassingham have been here, what, a month now?’