by Sarah Moss
Seconds dripped away. He looked at me.
‘I think I’ll stay here and mind Moth. Thank you.’
Jake was, as I had known he would be, having lunch, smoking and ogling the twin engines on the police launch down on the beach. I perched on the stairs and the computer found the network and connected immediately. Messages to All Fellows about porters’ annual leave and the need to submit library requests before the beginning of term, a bulletin from the British Association for Eighteenth Century Studies, notice of a conference in Boulder, Colorado, that the organizers thought I might like to pay several hundred dollars to attend. I have been to only one conference since Moth was born. I stopped breastfeeding so I could go, thinking to relaunch my career after maternity leave, and then spent most of my time asleep, in the hotel pool or reading Canadian newspapers in cafés on the harbourfront. I bought slices of pizza and pots of ice cream and lay on the bed eating them and reading detective stories. I did give a paper, one I’d cut-and-pasted from my book during the flight on my usual assumption that no one listens to my papers with more attention than I listen to theirs, which means that most of the audience most of the time is wondering what to have for lunch or deciding whom they would choose if they had to have sex with one of the people in the room. If it’s a keynote speech, or I’m not hungry, I decide which of the men in the room I would sleep with in exchange for tenure and/or a book contract with Yale University Press (although, it occurred to me last time, if the men I’m ogling are playing the same game they will observe a lot of very toned female graduate students at American conferences. I am no longer sure that access to my person, so thoroughly rummaged by five midwives, a registrar and a sequence of metal implements, has much exchange value on the open market). I deleted the e-mails and had thirteen minutes in hand before I needed to wake Moth. I stood up to look out of the window. No plumes of smoke. I logged into J-Stor and searched for articles containing the key words ‘infanticide’ and ‘Scotland’, glanced out of the window again and saved the more promising titles, mostly relating to Neolithic archaeology and nineteenth-century legal proceedings, to the hard drive.
‘What’ve you done with your lads?’
Jake stood in the doorway, dressed as usual in tattered tracksuit bottoms and a tight black T-shirt with a washed-out picture of something aggressive across his belly and a scattering of dandruff on the shoulders. He seems impervious to cold. Jake’s wife does a little secretarial work at the school during term now the youngest child is six.
‘Hi, Jake. How’s it going?’
‘Well enough. Where are your lads? Not with their dad, I saw him go.’
I looked back at the screen. I employ Jake, I reminded myself, and not as my conscience. ‘I’ve settled Moth for his nap and left Raph doing Lego. I needed to check e-mail and you know the signal over there is crap.’
His glance fell on the computer as if he’d caught me downloading pornography.
‘And download some articles to read next time I get the chance.’
He reached up and held on to the lintel, blocking the doorway with the light coming through his red hair as if he were an avenging angel.
‘I’d gi’e my wife the back of my hand if she treated ours the way you treat those little lads.’
The wind flattened the grass at his feet.
‘What?’
‘I’ve work to do.’ He picked up a tool and started to make a noise with it.
I turned back to the window, feeling as if he had indeed hit me. Does he abuse his wife? My instinct for argument wrestled with the desire to call the police and have him arrested for making threats, though I could imagine whose side the police would be on and in any case he was not threatening his wife, who had not left her children while she checked her e-mail, nor me, since I am not his wife.
‘Jake?’ I shouted.
The noise stopped. ‘Well?’
‘I’m doing my job, Jake. What I get paid for. Imagine if you had to finish this job and your wife was out eleven hours a day looking at puffins. What would you do with your kids?’
‘She’s not, though, is she? I wouldn’t let her.’ He started the noise again. There is no point in arguing with people who want to make a noise.
Moth should have been woken three minutes earlier. I ran back across the rough ground to rescue my evening’s work from jeopardy.
‘Mrs Cassingham.’ Ian MacDonald was sitting at the kitchen table, his hat balanced on one of the piles of paper. He didn’t appear to be doing anything.
‘You made me jump,’ I said. There was no sound from upstairs, nor any indication of where Raph might be.
‘Mrs Cassingham, are you in the habit of leaving your children alone?’
I started to twist my fingers and stopped myself. Oh yes, I leave them alone and I swear at them and I push their faces into the mattress when they won’t go to sleep, but for all that I don’t want you take them away.
‘You were here,’ I said. ‘You were here, and anyway Moth was asleep. Raph knew where I was. It’s an island, for Christ’s sake. It’s not exactly crawling with heroin addicts and sex traffickers.’ I stopped. My stomach turned. ‘Why? Where are they?’
Ian MacDonald waited, and there was no sound from the space hopper or from Moth’s room. He spoke, at last, to Moth’s bowl of congealed porridge on the table in front of him.
‘There are sensitivities on these islands, Mrs Cassingham, to profane language. If you prefer not to cause offence, you might find other ways of expressing yourself. And I would imagine that I know more than you do about the levels of criminal activity here, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘The children are all right,’ I said. I bit my lip.
‘Yes. I looked at Timothy a few minutes ago and my colleague has taken Raphael to see our boat. But Mrs Cassingham, the Highlands and Islands Police are not here to provide you with childcare, and while I cannot say what view Social Services might take of your leaving them, I’m sure we can agree that it would be better if there were no need to involve other agencies. Whatever your professional commitments, I suggest that you and your husband arrange care for your children as the first priority. You are not the first English family to come here with the idea that the islands are a refuge from your responsibilities.’
‘I didn’t—’ I stopped. ‘I was only gone a few minutes. I just needed—’ I took a breath. ‘I’m going to go find Moth now.’
I hope I got far enough up the stairs that Ian MacDonald couldn’t hear me crying. I picked Moth up and held him tightly, still fast asleep, feeling the warmth of him and the reverberations of his heartbeat while I wept into his hair. I cannot do this, motherhood. I should not have had children.
I took notes, I don’t know why. I opened a new file and called it ‘Orchard Baby’, and sat curled on the sofa with my laptop on a cushion and a glass of the claret Hugo left in the cellar at my side. At a Neolithic chambered tomb in Westray
four neonates are among the latest burials at the site and are concentrated in the first two compartments. Two further separate burials of neonates in the cairn matrix occurred at a time when the monument was in an advanced state of decay and collapse. It has been suggested that the use of this somewhat derelict site for the disposal of neonates may indicate that some of these infants are, in fact, infanticide victims and that such sites were used for the burial of a specific category of ‘unwanted dead’.
– Nyree Finlay, ‘Outside of Life: Traditions of Infant Burial in Ireland from Cillin to Cist’, World Archaeology,
Vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 407–22
I found I had not only electricity but a flicker of internet access. I lifted the laptop on to the sofa’s arm and the signal strengthened enough for me to follow the citations. Excavations of Neolithic and Bronze Age tombs across the islands, from Skye to Orkney, are ongoing. There is the tomb here, out on the headland at the other end of the island, over the crest of the hill where it is not visible from anywhere except the beach below. Even the anchorite took up
her station along the cliff, where her view of the sea was uninterrupted by matters of life and death. I took Raphael to our barrow two summers ago, when I was pregnant with Moth and content to have a holiday somewhere cooler than Oxford that didn’t require flying, and we had a picnic and listened to the waves and the wind. It was a sunny day, so warm that we went paddling later, and we sat on the turf mound and talked about death while Moth pushed his feet into my hip joints and jabbed at my pubic bone.
I sipped my wine. The house was quiet and the police had taken the tent down, leaving a much bigger hole. Don’t fill it, I told Ian MacDonald. We’ll go ahead and plant a tree for her. We don’t get the baby back for a proper burial, he told me when I asked. Not unless we turn out to be her closest living relations, he added thoughtfully. There are nothing like as many bodies in tombs on these islands as there were living inhabitants, suggesting that many of the dead are somewhere else, out to sea or lost, but it seems that Neolithic babies were mostly buried in the ‘liminal spaces’, at the edges and in the passageways, of tombs which served the whole community. Sixty per cent of the bodies in the one on Westray were newborn babies. They were stuffed vertically into gaps in the rubble that loosely covered the bodies of adults, which were bound in the foetal position and showed signs of having been subject to a series of rituals over several decades between death and what became, but perhaps was not meant to be, their final inhumation. The lead archaeologist commented in print that ‘the place must have stunk when it was in use. With all those dead bodies, decomposing under loose coverings of stone and rubble’ (Orkney Archaeological Trust, Annual Report 2006). There is speculation that such a high percentage of neonates among the dead indicates the widespread practice of infanticide. Several of the Neolithic tombs have staircases leading down into the earth, at the bottom of which there are signs of feasting, as if people used to go there to share their festivities with the dead. There were photos of the stairs, one with a cramped archaeologist in raingear peering up from the bottom. Our broch has never been excavated, although it is on Heritage Scotland’s register. I remembered only curving turf and scattered pebbles, but I guessed that, if there had been a staircase, later residents would probably have blocked it. They go both ways, staircases, and who would want things creeping up and out into the night?
More wine. Darkness had fallen and I got up to draw the curtains. I used to mock Julia for the curtains, wholly unnecessary in rooms where no one sleeps and one can place absolute confidence in the absence of passers-by, but seeing myself and my electric light wavering over the wind-whipped orchard I saw the appeal of lined velvet. I went and stood in the hall, listening, repressed the urge to bolt the doors, and went back to the sofa. Bronze Age islanders, after the people who built the chambered tombs, lived in roundhouses. The things they left on the floors suggest that the occupants of roundhouses moved round them through the day, sleeping on platform beds of turf and heather in the northern half where small children’s pee left traces that endure to this day, and working with food and leather goods and textiles in the south during the day. They seemed to have left the north-east quadrants empty, which made a kind of sense when human bodies, mostly those of babies and small children, were found under floor level in this section of each house. The Bronze Age people were not burying their children under the floor but building them into their houses; the bodies were interred after the walls were built but before the floors were laid. I thought again about the rough ground and scattered stones of the orchard, the stones in the wall that marks its edge. Building materials get reused all the time on these islands. Any of those stones might have been used in any number of dwellings over the centuries, handled by any number of long-gone hands. Maybe we had come upon the rearranged remains of a Bronze Age roundhouse. Some of the children’s bodies found under roundhouses seemed to have been stored in bags between death and burial, as if their families were keeping the body until they needed it for a new house, but others, particularly newborns, were buried immediately after death. Not, perhaps, so much the unwanted dead as the usefully dead.
Something fell, somewhere in the house. A stone down the chimney, one of the rubber ducks which have recently moved into Moth’s cot on to the floor. I looked over my shoulder and then wished I hadn’t, although there was nothing there, nothing even in the heavy Victorian mirror over the mantelpiece which meant that anything standing in the dark hall might see me before I saw it. I pulled my cardigan around me. I was sure the police must by now have some idea about the age of the bones, but I supposed there was no reason for them to confide in us. The problem with the Bronze Age idea was the blanket. None of the articles explicitly excluded knitting from a list of roundhouse activities, but I was fairly sure that if we’d found a Bronze Age knitted blanket we had reconfigured prehistoric archaeology at a stroke.
There were footsteps on the path and the front door opened.
‘Giles?’
‘No, a door-to-door mop salesman. Of course it’s me, who were you expecting?’
Small wraiths from prehistory, of course. It had been raining for hours but his waxed jacket was almost dry.
‘Giles, you haven’t been with the puffins, have you? Where do you go?’
He stood in the doorway and looked at me as if he were an MP and I were a journalist.
‘What do you mean, where do I go? Where do you think I’m going, to the pub?’
‘Somewhere dry. Somewhere, at a wild guess, with lights. Either you’ve found a cave and you’ve got a secret stash of candles or it’s the cottage. Jesus, Giles, what are you doing in there?’
He sat down in the armchair as if someone had cut his string.
‘It’s only been a couple of evenings. I’m working on it.’
He was talking to the hearth rug, which still had dog hair on it from Julia and Hugo’s last visit. I stroked the stem of my glass.
‘On it or in it?’
‘Does it matter?’
My head began to hurt. We have had this conversation too often. ‘It matters to me.’
He stuck his chest out. ‘So you want me to stop doing my job? You are writing your book, aren’t you?’
He tilted his chin at the laptop.
‘I’m trying to. I’ve been awake for nineteen hours and I’m still bloody working because it’s the only chance I get, even though I know Moth’s going to wake up any time now and that’s it for another day. I can’t do this, Giles, I can’t keep going.’
I keep saying that, meanwhile providing evidence that I can. Giles paused by the door but did not turn round.
‘I’m going to bed. I had another e-mail from that woman. Judith Fairchild. She’s asking for three weeks at a fifty per cent discount. Says it’s called a soft opening, or something. So they can tell us what needs improving for people paying full price.’
‘Sounds a bit of a cheek.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not as if anyone else wants it. And she might be right, at least this way she can’t complain if we have overlooked something. Anyway, if she takes it they’ll be here in two weeks.’
Colsay House
15th Oct.
Dear Aubrey,
I know you will forgive my writing again when I say that, without any postal deliveries these three weeks, I cannot tell if you have answered mine or not, but in any case the illusion of your paper company is a comfort to me as I sit here, wrapped in a blanket at the fireside, my feet almost too hot on the fender. I have a peat fire, a clear glow without the tricksy flickering of coal and wood, which is perhaps as well, for Mrs Barwick has been entertaining me with weird tales of selkies and the Grey People. Did you know about the selkies? Sometimes at the full moon, men have seen women dancing naked on the skerries (so far as I am aware, there is no still on the island and I have certainly witnessed no drunkenness but since I am, I fear, considered a Cassingham emissary it is not likely I would know if there were). If you were to approach these visions, you would find sealskins shed on the beach, and if you were to take
one of these skins, one of the dancing women would become yours and would clean your house and bear your children and obey your every word (this seems to be the extent of feminine glory in Mrs Barwick’s mind, but don’t tell Mama), but if ever you were to be so careless as to leave her skin where she might find it she would creep back to the beach, perhaps leaving her human infants crawling the stones and crying for her, and return to her natural husband and children in the deep. Don’t tell me your imagination is unaroused by this tale. Do you not long to paint the dancers, perhaps with the Northern Lights (which remain obstinately invisible) providing discreet illumination?
Colsay must have been a very different place when you were here; the sea is dark and angry now and it is a mere article of faith that the heavens above Scotland are blue, for Colsay has been swaddled in grey since my arrival so that it is not even possible to see across the Sound, which is, I believe, a scant two miles across. For all I know we are quite alone in the world here, me and this people who do not want me. Forgive me, Aubrey, I am tired and a little discouraged, for it is a greater challenge to help these fiercely independent islanders, who seem to have no aspiration to anything different or better than the hardest of my work at home. I would not want you to think I find no pleasure in the task you have set me, however; there is beauty here, if not the beauty of sunlight and heather in bloom, and I know that when I succeed the pleasure will be in proportion to the endeavour. I remember that you have faith in me.
Think of me here, won’t you, as you go about your life? I hope the new colours for the St John window are as we hoped and that Mrs Henderson likes herself as Penelope! What do you think of Alethea’s decision? I am sure Mama is delighted but I will confide to you that if they all knew more of hospital life I believe they would at least reflect seriously on the step she is about to take.