by Sarah Moss
‘I want to stay here and read.’
So do I, I thought.
Moth reached for his bowl and spat his popcorn into it. ‘Moth want to stay here too.’
‘Nonsense. We’ll go in the boat and you can see the birds and the waves going splosh, splosh, and there might be seals, maybe a mummy seal and a baby seal!’
Though I think that for seals maternity is merely seasonal.
Raph stood up. ‘I want to stay here and read and I’m going to.’
‘Raph?’ I followed him. He was deploying his father’s tactic and hiding behind the Guardian, which was full of unsuitable tales in which evil is rewarded and good people come to bad ends. ‘Raph, you can bring a book. OK? You don’t have to stop reading. And they’ve probably got a whole section on bridge-building. Come on.’
‘No.’
I sighed. ‘All right then. If you’re not outside the door in your shoes and coat by the time I’ve got Moth ready I’m going to take away your Lego until the weekend.’
The library is a low brick building on the edge of the village, recently built with EU money. Inside, there was a ‘pushchair park’, posters of the characters from children’s books and a purple carpet with red dots. It reminded me of the children’s ward in our hospital in Oxford, effervescent with plastic toys, as if books were a manifestation of the mortality from which the general public, and children in particular, must always be distracted.
Raph rubbed birdshit from the edge of his shoe on to the carpet. ‘It looks like a bloody playgroup.’
I was unpeeling Moth from his waterproof jacket and trousers, which won’t pull over his shoes. ‘I know. But don’t swear. They’ve got lots of books.’
Moth tried to run off and fell over his trousers.
Raph grabbed him. ‘Shut up! Shut up! This is a library.’
I once took Raph to the History Faculty Library when I had to return some books and he was off school. The memory was apparently still vivid for him. ‘It’s all right, Raph. It’s not that kind of library.’
I hoisted Moth on to my hip and held Raph’s hand. There was someone behind a counter in the children’s section.
Moth wriggled. ‘There’s a Gruffalo!’
‘Mummy, can I use those computers?’ asked Raph.
‘Yes. If you must. Why not find some new books?’
The woman at the counter was wearing the kind of understated tailoring last seen on women with BlackBerrys and expensive glasses on the 19.10 out of Paddington. She looked up. ‘Good morning. He’ll need a username and password for the computer,’ she said. ‘Are you wanting to join the library?’
‘If we can,’ I said. ‘Do we count as local residents?’
‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Visitors use the library too.’
‘Oh.’
She’s right, of course, nothing in Giles’s stone-by-stone knowledge of Colsay makes him – or me – less of a visitor. I straightened my back.
‘And I was also wondering about the archives. I’m Anna Bennet, Giles Cassingham’s wife. We’re staying on Colsay for the summer and letting out the blackhouse. I thought I might try to write a booklet for the visitors.’
She typed something into her computer. ‘You know there’s a very good local history. Thomas MacFarland – he was our rector here – when he retired he took a PhD and wrote his book. Published by Birlinn.’
‘I’d like to see that,’ I said. ‘Raph and I have been talking about World War Two, haven’t we, love?’
She pushed her hair back and smiled a teacher’s smile at Raph, who ducked behind me. ‘You know we had an exhibition about wartime here in the winter? The schoolchildren did a bit of an oral history project and we had lots of old photos up.’
I breathed in and out carefully. ‘I didn’t know. Do you still have them, the photos and recordings? Raph would love to see them, wouldn’t you?’
He ground his head against my back.
‘And maybe we could sort out computer access for him?’
She kept her gaze on my face, as if Raph were doing something obscene which she was too well bred to acknowledge.
‘I’m sure we could do that.’
‘Mummy!’ called Moth. ‘Mummy, look! A baby gruffalo! Mummy read it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Raph’s just shy. And of course we don’t see many people at the moment.’
‘Not to worry. When you’re ready I’ll show you and the lads the exhibition, all right? Some of the old ones gave us their photos at the end and we’ve the recordings.’ She paused. ‘I’ll show you something else as well, you might be interested for your booklet. We had a grant to digitize the local paper right back to the 1920s. It’s all there, every word. And I couldn’t honestly say it’s been much used. I’m Fiona Firth, by the way. The archivist.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Really. Thank you.’
The photos had the strangely jovial quality that seems to mark most amateur wartime photography, at least in Britain. Women with shiny curls laughed up at the camera as if the medieval agricultural implements in their hands were cocktails and the wind-scoured fields Californian swimming pools. There were some more serious pictures of men, facing away from the camera and getting on with manual labour with faces shadowed by tweed caps and beards.
‘Mummy? If it was the war, why are they smiling?’
Fiona Firth put a picture of some children down in front of him. I craned to look. Girls and boys together, so probably not the Castle School.
‘Maybe they were enjoying themselves,’ she said. ‘You can listen to some of the people who remember it, if you like. People got to do lots of things they wouldn’t have done without the war, especially the children.’
Raph looked through the window. There were rabbits cropping the grass, and a build-up of cloud to the north. Time to go home soon. ‘There were lots of people dying in Germany. And Poland. I’ve seen pictures. And children and babies.’
Fiona Firth looked round at me.
‘Not here,’ I reminded him. ‘Here children were just going to school and playing and helping on the land the same as always.’
His gaze moved to the gathering clouds. ‘And people holding hands waiting to be shot and all the houses falling apart.’
Moth placed a sticky hand in mine. ‘Moth and Mummy holding hands. Up and see more rabbits!’
I picked him up. ‘We’d better go,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the look of those clouds. Would it be OK to come back, maybe tomorrow, or – or—’ Or the next day, which might be Wednesday or Thursday but I would not be very surprised if it were Friday or Saturday. And on one of those days, the Fairchilds were coming.
Fiona looked at Raph as if he might tear down all the Disney on the way out and replace it with multiple copies of If This Be Man.
‘Oh,’ she said slowly. ‘Oh, whenever you want. Of course.’
She followed us towards the soft play area. ‘Were you wanting the newspaper? If you’ve got the internet out there I’ll give you a password.’
‘Giles? Is there a copy of your family tree here?’
He was washing up, and I was pottering around the kitchen trying to look busy.
‘Almost certainly. Why?’
‘I was just wondering who was around before the war. Who lent the house to that school. That article just says “the owner”.’
His face, reflected in the window behind the sink, was blank.
‘What, before the war? Or during? Because I told Ian MacDonald, remember, it got passed on several times when people were killed.’
‘Before, probably. Or at the beginning.’ I looked into one of the covered bowls in the fridge and looked away again.
‘Those two cousins, they were called Edwin and Nigel—’
‘Of course.’
‘Who inherited but were killed in action in quick succession. There was my Great Aunt Edith—’
‘Every household needs one.’
‘Shut up. Who lived a blameless if anachronis
tic life in Bath for most of the twentieth century. I think she might have owned it after Nigel died, but that was 1942 or ’43. You probably want earlier than that.’
So she would have been roughly the right age to have a baby late enough for the knitting not to have rotted; well into the twentieth century, but before living memory. Before Giles’s parents would have had to have been involved.
‘Tell me about Great Aunt Edith.’
He turned round, water dripping from the popcorn bowl.
‘Are you planning to impress the Fairchildren with family history, or are you about to accuse Great Aunt Edith of premarital sex, secret pregnancy and infanticide?’
I reopened the fridge, as if the covered bowls might have moved on.
‘I was just thinking, if that burial is pre-war it’s much more likely that she was buried by someone who was living in the big house than one of the villagers. I mean, why would you risk carrying a dead baby to someone else’s house? It’d be quite a walk for someone who’d just given birth. So I’m just thinking about who was around earlier in the century.’
He put the pan down and came and stood with his hands on my shoulders as if he’d like to shake me, which Old Etonians don’t do.
‘Anna, stop it. Write your book. Start getting some job applications out, if you’ve got spare time. Teach Raph Latin, or something. But stop accusing people of killing babies, OK?’
‘I don’t know any Latin. State education, remember? Someone did kill a baby.’
His grasp tightened and then he stepped back and returned to the sink.
‘Either someone did, or the child died of something. I don’t know why you’re so sure it was murder. The police might find out, though it seems a lot more likely that they’ll dismiss it as historical. In either case, it’s not your problem. Jesus, Anna, if you want to join the police get a job and make some money out of it.’
‘I have a job, remember? Research Fellow, St Mary Hall?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I remember. Will you go write your book now, please, and let me get on in here.’
I wandered towards the sofa, as if I had time to spare. I don’t know why I’m so sure it was murder, either.
While the brief lives of foundlings and abandoned children are in general beyond the scope of this kind of cultural history [insert footnote – ?Levine book], most of the images of urban life from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attest to the constant presence of the destitute. The children in Hogarth’s satires (see figs. 29 and 30) are well known, but even the painting opposite (fig. 31), commissioned by Lady Alicia Chevalier when her marriage to the Duke of Dorset removed her from her much-loved London home, shows very young children begging in the most glamorous parts of the city. Their presence in this deliberately romanticized image of London suggests the ubiquity of malnourished and homeless infants in cities across Europe, and it has been estimated that approximately 120,000 babies in the first year of life were abandoned each year in western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Where, then, are these children in the conduct and didactic literatures for the young which boomed during precisely these decades?
I heard the voice of Antonia Rivett. ‘Save rhetorical questions for rhetoric, please, Anna.’ Ten years later and I still couldn’t brook her disapproval. I deleted ‘Where, then, are’ and inserted ‘are missing from’ after ‘children’. The wind howled along the beach and through the orchard, throwing rain against the windows. Those eighteenth-century children must not have seemed fully human to the people coming out of Sheridan’s new sell-out success and heading for vol-au-vents and hothouse grapes in rooms the size of swimming pools. They would have been feared a little, small people but, like child soldiers, small people with nothing to lose, children who would do anything at all, and allow anything to be done to them, for money. Or food. I got up to close the curtains. If we did move here, Moth and Raph would be spared all that. The conviction that children are up to no good, guilty until proven innocent, loitering with intent. I shivered. I watch Raph growing up in England with the parallel fears that some less educated child who can spot a naïve geek across the park will knife him because he doesn’t have a mobile phone to hand over, and that he will be arrested and taken away from us for anti-social behaviour because he bares his teeth and growls at strangers. We could keep him safe, here. If Ian MacDonald and the local concern didn’t get to him first.
These children are not, in fact, erased from cultural memory, but they figure exclusively as objects. Objects of charity, fear or scorn, often – like the misbehaving children on today’s ‘reality TV’ programmes – objects of comparison against which the most impatient middle-ranking mother can feel adequate, their subjectivity remains inadmissible, an idea that is almost never entertained. It is a situation that casts a glancing light on the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who may have been distinguished from these most familiar children not by his destitution or even by his unsocialized mind but by his habitat. European cities of the later eighteenth century were littered with children believed never to have learnt to be human. The USP of the Wild Boy, the basis of philosophers’ belief in his possible redemption, was his Alpine backdrop.
It was good, but I wasn’t sure it was true. I could see the Fellows’ red pens scoring through the reality TV and the USP. I ran my hands through my hair, which needed washing, and maximized the Colsay evacuees’ story. I still couldn’t really make it fit the orchard baby, although two tragically dead infants on one small island seemed too much of a coincidence. Or maybe not. Maybe the planet is in fact sown with broken babies. Or maybe Giles was right, the baby was a stillbirth that hadn’t qualified for burial in consecrated ground and had been quietly interred in the orchard. In England at least there was no obligation to register stillbirths until the twentieth century, which I suppose means that, like the result of a miscarriage now, you could bury one anywhere you wanted. Somewhere you could watch over it from your window, where the sea would sound until the world ends. If I had to bury either of mine I would—
I pushed the chair back and went to find Giles. He appeared to be cleaning the sink.
‘What you are doing?’
He turned round.
‘Look, Anna, I can’t keep doing this any more.’ He was going to leave me. He had a secret boat, had been having an affair with someone who is not obsessed with her children and her career. Someone who cares when he is depressed. He looked at the wall above my head. ‘I know what happened. At college. With Moth. And I know you haven’t been back.’
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Secrets at Oxford are about as common as students from the inner city.
‘And?’
‘Oh, Anna.’ He came over to where I stood in the doorway, tried to put his arms round me. I stood stiff. ‘I’m sorry. But I don’t know why you stopped going to college. You must have known they’d notice in the end.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I suppose you don’t. And if you ever mention it again I’ll – I’ll take the kids and leave.’
‘Back to Oxford?’ he asked.
‘I’m going to bed. I’m tired.’
The bathroom door locks with a key, which we hid high up after Raph locked himself in for the third time and had to be rescued by Jake with his ladder. I scaled the bookcase, raising swirls of dust, and then gave up and wedged the ancestral mahogany towel rail, which stains the towels and regularly falls over on Moth, under the door handle. I ran a bath. I brushed my teeth. I read Happy Babies and Children and concentrated on feeling guilty (‘all that your child really needs, now and later, is the absolute certainty that you love and approve of him, that your affection is not in any way conditional’). The bath came out well, just short of the overflow and hot enough to remind me of the point where pain and pleasure merge. I could stay in it a long time and the towel rail would, at least temporarily, frustrate any rescue attempts on the part of Giles.
What happened in college was that a student complained to the Principal that I had
failed to turn up to a tutorial, which I had, because I’d had a phone call from St Peter’s saying that Raphael had been involved in an altercation in the playground an hour earlier and had been hiding under a desk, refusing to speak, ever since. A phone call I’d missed because I’d been in the library with the phone, as it should have been, silenced, and when I came out to cycle up Keble Road to the tutorial I checked the messages, phoned school to find that he was still unresponsive and that they had been unable to contact Giles (subsequently found to have been taking a potential college benefactor out to lunch). ‘A family emergency,’ I told the porter. People miss tutorials all the time, usually because they’ve been asked to speak at something in London, have lost their cat or are hungover, but the Principal was disposed to take this more seriously because he felt that, after a promising start (before the morning sickness kicked in and I began to decline the port), my commitment to the college had been questionable for some time and I needed to understand that a Research Fellowship was not simply a gift from the college to a fortunate individual but a contract between the Fellows and the scholar holding the Fellowship, an invitation, in effect, to join them for a number of years. That my formal obligations were limited not because the College wished to underwrite my domestic interests but because they hoped that the scholar who received the Fellowship would benefit from the freedom to carry out the most demanding research. The Principal hoped he would not find it necessary to repeat this interview and looked forward to seeing me at more of those events where the Fellows gathered, which were the cornerstone of college life.
The water had made a red tidemark above my breasts, which were, I was interested to note, leaking milk which drifted away like smoke from a cigarette. I turned on to my stomach so that my pelvic bones, missing in action since morning sickness wore off two years ago, grated on the enamel. I took a breath and pushed my face under the water. Victorian plumbing noises gurgled in my ears. If Giles came, if Moth cried, if Raphael had a nightmare or an urgent question about bridge pilings, I would not know. I should spend more time with my head underwater.