by Sarah Moss
I caught the packet from Moth, who stamped on my foot. ‘No snatching, Mummy!’
‘Moth, is it still raining out there? The police aren’t worried about all the burials on the island. When they start asking me how many babies I’ve had I think I’m allowed to take an interest.’
Giles paused in his assaults on the freezer. ‘They think you did it?’
‘You haven’t read enough detective fiction. They always suspect the person who found the body. And you don’t know enough women’s history. It’s young mums who commit infanticide.’ Women who can see no way forward and cannot undo the multiplication of cells and go back.
He stood up and the door stayed closed. ‘You’re not that young.’
‘Thanks. But Thea was, you see. It’s also mostly single women with unplanned pregnancies.’ Mostly.
Raph spoke from the door.
‘What’s an unplanned pregnancy?’
I deployed the ‘walking off without explanation’ technique after inveigling Giles into changing Moth’s dirty nappy after lunch (‘That nappy needs changing. I’m just going to the loo’). I had used the last of the baby wipes on yesterday’s poo and forgotten to tell Giles to buy more, Raphael was on the space hopper and not monitoring my movements, and so I reckoned I could probably be settled in the village and a hundred words in before they realized I’d left the house.
Case studies reveal the vulnerability of the most utopian institutional projects to entropy and abuse, although they also attest to the possibility of subsequent redemption. Christ’s Hospital is an obvious example of this trajectory: a foundation for the rescue and nurture of indigent urban children, intended to provide the skills and self-discipline necessary to independence and a measure of social mobility, which became, according to some of the more lurid accounts of Coleridge’s contemporaries, a place where de Sade’s fantasies were reified and realized at the cost of children who had forfeited all protection when the institution took over their care. I hope to show in the following studies how the twin possibilities of salvation and destruction are worked out in other, more obscure institutional histories.
It’s always good to get ‘reification’ in. It’s a word I encountered late and have only recently begun to use in print. I deleted ‘entropy’ as outworn and put it back as a formality that might counteract the personal note of ‘I hope’. Only the more daring academics risk an occasional use of the first person and it is still considered by the Fellows to be bad form. One is supposed to pretend that academic prose is written by an omniscient and nameless consciousness like God himself.
I looked up at the young man in uniform, sepia and blotched with damp. For my grandfather, the war brought liberation from the confines of working-class Newcastle. He volunteered before he could be conscripted, and the navy put him through his accountancy exams, taught him to ski (for reasons that continued to elude the rest of us) and flew him round the world, although he’d made the mistake of marrying before he left and therefore spent his life with a woman whose horizons were comfortably contained by her postcode. Maybe the sepia man had gone to London for the first time, met people who didn’t believe it was a sin to laugh on a Sunday, eaten ice cream and drunk red wine. Maybe he’d seen terraces of olive trees rustling in a summer breeze, touched the bloom on dark grapes and tasted oranges warm from the sun. As well as learning again the precise extent of human inhumanity. Maybe he’d met a French girl and fallen in love, realized that subsistence farming in some places is a matter of peaches glowing under dark leaves and cows with long eyelashes in a cool stone dairy (we will ignore the water shortages and insects). Maybe the old couple left not for a few years of porridge and saving money on the gas in Inverness but for dark-eyed grandchildren in white cotton and siestas with the shutters closed against the sun. I skimmed chapter three, which attempts to present the new forms of writing for children as cognate with the late eighteenth-century interest in institutionalization.
The parental status of children’s authors takes surprisingly literal form in the trope of text-as-milk, where the (female) writer compares herself to the nursing mother, nurturing the reader on the most wholesome moral fare. This metaphor works to legitimize the work of these women writers in moral terms, appearing to collapse the distinction between intellectual and reproductive labour which continues to vex our own culture in relation to motherhood, but it also, less obviously, reconfigures both reproductive and domestic labour in economic terms. In the eighteenth century, mothers’ milk, like books, was for sale.
I deleted ‘which continues to vex …’. It was true, but I could hear the voice of Dr Marjorie Owdon: ‘One is not writing for the Daily Mail, my dear. There is no need to appeal to the housewives.’ As if being mindful of the housewives revealed one’s own dirty secret of domesticity. The Fellows nearly all ‘lived in’, adult lives distilled into bed-sitting rooms, with shared kitchens and bathrooms distinguished from those of the undergraduates only by coloured paint on the walls and less food but better wines in the fridges. The Fellows took their meals in Hall and elections to the Food Committee were fought with a fervour born of routine subjection to boiled ox tongue. Members of the Food Committee – who were usually, like most of their kin, given to factionalism and wars waged for years over the placement of a biscuit tin or folding of a napkin – collaborated gleefully in the occasional treat of planning the dinner given as part of the interview of candidates to join the Fellowship. The point was to devise an obstacle course of etiquette that would weed out any undesirables sufficiently adept at disguise to penetrate the British class system as far as shortlisting for an Oxford Fellowship. Cherry pie with the stones left in, as traditionally practised by All Souls, had long been a cliché. Olives would have been an obvious substitute had the chef been willing or able to venture so far towards the Mediterranean. The Bursar would never have countenanced the expense of shellfish – being a former women’s college, St Mary Hall had to count its pennies as the more generously endowed foundations did not – and in any case I think the required impedimenta were considered bourgeois. Spaghetti was too bohemian a challenge, one that would have been proudly failed by the majority of the Fellows themselves, and so they were reduced to placing large discs of hard caramel on top of blancmange and presenting small fish whole. It was possible to avoid both of these by declaring oneself vegetarian and preferring fruit to pudding, in which case an apple appeared on a plate, followed, enough minutes later to trap the unwary, by a fruit knife and fork on a salver and napkin. I should, really, be more grateful to the Cassinghams for training me in matters of fish-knives and eating apples with a fork, since I may owe them my Fellowship for it.
‘Mummy?’
Raphael, again. I would have to inspect the other cottages for a new secret office, although I knew none of them had such a complete roof.
‘What? I’m working.’
He came in and stood rubbing the floor with his shoe.
‘You weren’t writing.’
I straightened my shoulders.
‘Raph, I’m allowed to think as well, OK? Writing isn’t just typing.’
He looked at the photo above my head. There was ink on his hands and black dirt, like the soil we had been digging, under his fingernails.
‘Sorry.’
I reached towards him and stroked his shoulder.
‘Sorry, Raph. It’s just I get so little time. And if I don’t get this book finished I won’t get another job.’
He watched his foot scraping the floor.
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mummy?’
I sighed. ‘What is it, Raph?’
‘Mummy, why did the baby die? In the ground?’
I saved my work and closed the file.
‘Come here.’ I put my arm around him. ‘You know that long ago, the people who lived here couldn’t always find healthy food? And they didn’t always have clean water?’
His face cleared a little, recognising a familiar narrative.<
br />
‘Like children in Africa?’
Rain hit the window like a handful of stones.
‘Like some children in some parts of Africa. And in some parts of the US, actually. When people don’t have healthy food, their bodies can’t deal with illnesses. And when they don’t have clean water, they get ill. Babies’ bodies haven’t had any practice at getting better so babies get more ill than other people and sometimes they died. Now we’ve got good food and clean water and if babies do get ill there are lots of ways of helping them to get better.’
‘In hospitals?’
He was remembering someone in his class in Oxford, whose very premature sister died in hospital.
‘Sometimes. Sometimes, if babies come long before they are ready, even in hospital people can’t make them better.’
Raphael is not readily distracted. We had a well-rehearsed story about baby Olivia’s birth and death and he’d heard it before.
He ran the hem of his T-shirt through his fingers.
‘Why did they bury the baby by the house? Why not in the graveyard? With a stone with her name on it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Tell me what you think.’
‘I don’t know, Raph. It was long ago. Things would have seemed different then. People thought differently.’
‘Tell me what you think.’
I shut my laptop and put it in the plastic bag from Blackwell’s of Broad Street that I use as computer rainwear and talisman.
‘It might have been buried there before the house was built, you know. Our house is the newest building on the island. Come on, shall we go make some supper? Daddy brought lettuce, we can have a salad.’
Moving here has made both children, and indeed their parents, come to view salad as a treat. We could, Giles says, if we were more organized, grow our own. We could do a lot of things if we were more organized.
Raphael began gesturing to his invisible planes.
‘If I had a baby I would put it in a special tank and I would filter the air and I would feed it with a special tube that was sterilized and I would have machines to tell me it was breathing properly and then it wouldn’t die—’
‘Raph?’
‘And there would be a machine to keep it warm and the mummy and daddy could pedal on a sort of exercise bike to make the energy for it—’
‘Raph? That’s just for when they’re early—’
‘And if it was somewhere hot I’d make a machine to keep it cool, but it’s harder to do that without using lots of energy because you have to convert heat into coldness—’
‘Raphael, I’m going to go make supper. Come and help. You can spin the lettuce.’
Night Waking: 03:11
I surface, this time, a moment before the screaming begins. The house is silent, and there is enough moonlight to show the lines of our four-poster bed, a movement in the voile panels with which I have replaced Julia’s unwashable Victorian drapes, and the outline of Giles cocooned in more than his share of the duvet. The wind wails around the corner of the house, scudding past the Punch and Judy tent. There is no preliminary whimpering. Moth screams as if the skeleton’s mother, her hands still shaking from wringing her own baby’s neck, is reaching into his cot. I find myself beside him and snatch him from her grasp. He clings to my hair and claws at my shoulder and I stroke his warm back. I kiss tears from his temple and he curls up so I can hold him the way I held him when he was new and we were not separate.
‘It’s all right, Moth. Mummy’s here. Go to sleep.’
We walk. Down Parks Road, where Keble glows like a lava lamp in the setting sun and I have a sudden vision of what the Victorians might have done with neon. The leaves are turning and they eddy around my feet as we pass the University Museum, within whose portals dinosaurs sleep, and behind which lurk the shrunken heads and colonial guilt of the Pitt Rivers. Visitors may open all the little drawers under the display cases but risk their dreams in doing so. Over the scuffed stone kerb, watching for bicycles, and past the high walls of Rhodes House. Roses swarm over the stones, and behind them the library drifts like an upturned boat. Moth’s breath catches and I begin to rub and pat his back. The wind howls again, rain spatters, and out in the dark the tent flaps over a shallow bed. If I take Moth back to our room, where I would like him to be, Giles will go to the sofa as if I persist in introducing toads to the marital bed. Across the road under the gaze of Hertford and in through the hobbit hole cut into the wooden door of the Bodleian quadrangle. We approach the cot and pause. Moth’s breathing changes as I lower him.
‘Mummy!’
I put him back on my shoulder and we saunter across the quad in the sun, taking the last breaths of sunlight before leaning on the heavy glass doors which grant provisional admittance. Through the shop, where visitors buy things to confirm that their feet have also touched the stones where Oxford scholars tread. At the side of the cot, I listen again to the house. Nothing stirs, which is not to say that it is not there. I lower him as if he were a Grecian urn. He murmurs, turns over, reaches for my hand. I am tethered. I rest my head on my arm along the top of the cot. After a few minutes my hand goes numb.
*
The police came back in the morning, six of them in two boats. Giles had gone off to the puffins, I was trying to hang the laundry on a clothes airer positioned over a turned-off heater in the superstitious belief that the ghost of winter’s warmth might dry the clothes, and Moth was helping by taking the clothes off and putting them back in the washing machine. Ian MacDonald appeared at the back door.
‘Mr MacDonald. Did you find out how old the burial is?’
He looked around. Raphael hadn’t had breakfast yet so I hadn’t cleared the table, and the deposits of yoghurt around Moth’s chair made it look as if birds had been roosting there. It is not a criminal offence not to have brushed your hair.
‘It can take a while, Mrs Cassingham. We’d like to have another look at the site, if that’s all right.’
And if it isn’t, I presumed, they return with warrants.
‘Of course. When do we get the garden back? We need to finish planting the trees.’
Although I suspected that the trees were already dead.
‘We’ll let you know, Mrs Cassingham. It’s only the parts we’ve cordoned off that we’d ask you not to touch. And perhaps I could have another word with you, later?’
Moth pottered over and offered him one of my less appetizing pairs of knickers.
‘Moth! No, bring that back to Mummy.’ I grabbed it, and then caught Moth’s head as he flung himself at the floor. I lowered him and stood back. There are times when it feels as if he is lying on the ground screaming and kicking on my behalf. The police watched. I used be area representative for Youth CND, an easy way of annoying my mother that came with the possible bonus of saving the world from nuclear holocaust, and we went to workshops on Non Violent Direct Action where we exchanged ideas about raising public consciousness and winding up the authorities that none of us was prepared to implement, I because I was scared of the police and most of the others because they were planning to do law and didn’t want a criminal record. So instead of blocking motorways with stolen police cones in the middle of the night we performed home-made plays about nuclear winter in the High Street. Enter Cockroach, stage left. Toddlers, clearly, would have been the solution. A campaign of co-ordinated tantrums in the corridors of power would effect political change faster than any more traditional protest.
‘Mummy, is Moth all right?’
Raphael, wearing his favourite pink flowery pyjama bottoms and nothing else, with a green bruise on his shoulder. I picked Moth up and he hit my face and drummed his feet on my ribcage.
‘No hitting, love. Raph, do you want to get some clothes on? You must be cold.’
He scratched his bottom. ‘No.’
The police were still standing there.
‘Feel free to get on whenever you’re ready,’ I said.
‘How did th
e lad get that bruise?’ asked Rory.
‘Raph?’
Moth relaxed against my chest and waved. ‘Hello, man!’
‘I don’t know. He bruises easily. Raph, did you fall off the space hopper?’
‘No.’ He wandered off.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well. I’m going upstairs. The back door’s open.’
One can, I presume, trust the police in one’s kitchen, and I was rather hoping they might go through the papers on the table and learn that we are, in theory, innocent.
The police were still there when Moth went to sleep after lunch. I hadn’t checked e-mail for several days and was beginning to need internet access more than I needed sleep. I wasn’t waiting for anything in particular, exactly, but there were a couple of articles under review and there is always the theoretical chance of an e-mail that will change one’s life, although the exact form of such a missive is unclear to me, especially since we all delete without opening the news that we have won a million pounds in much the same way as we section people claiming to be the Messiah.
‘Raph?’ He was building what looked like an airport. ‘Raph, I’m just going to pop over to the blackhouse. I want to check e-mail. Do you want to come? See how the roof’s going?’
He looked at the window, as if I were standing in the garden. ‘What about Moth?’
I glanced up the stairs. Moth never wakes at lunchtime until I wake him. He would like nothing better than to sleep all afternoon, refreshing himself for the night ahead. The garden was full of custodians of the law.
‘He’s got half the Highlands and Islands Police on duty. I’m only going for a minute.’
Raph fitted the sails from a Lego windmill that I’d bought in an attempt to interest him in heritage domesticity to the top of the control tower. Radar.
‘What if there’s a fire?’
‘Nothing’s switched on. There’s no reason for a fire. Raph, come on, decide, I’ve not got long.’