Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  Mr Webb asked if Mary had shown any signs of being upset or unhappy. Mrs Buchan said that she knew Mary didn’t like her new stepfather and was angry about her mother remarrying so soon after her father’s death, but nothing had been said on this occasion. Mary had shown Mrs Buchan her mother’s letter earlier in the week and ‘had a good cry’ but seemed quite absorbed in the baby on this occasion and had in fact said little directly to Mrs Buchan. Mary had often played with Alexander while Mrs Buchan was busy about the croft, but had never taken him out before and at first Mrs Buchan was reluctant to let him go. However, she was very tired and expecting more teething troubles in the evening, and she knew Mary to be a sensible girl, so she said Mary could take him down to the shore and back, knowing that she could easily carry him there and be home in three-quarters of an hour. She helped Mary wrap up the baby and went to lie down, and when she awoke it was nearly four o’clock. She knew at once that Alexander was not in the house and ran down to the beach to find them. When they were not there, she ran to the school and the search began.

  Mrs Buchan had been composed until this moment. Mr Webb assured her that there was no need to recall the rest of the day. He said he must ask her a difficult question and asked if she would like a moment to prepare her mind first. Mrs Buchan said she would prefer to continue, and he asked if she felt anything should have been done differently to avoid the tragedy. Mrs Buchan looked up and spoke clearly, saying that of course she regretted having let Mary go and would never forgive herself for putting herself ahead of the children’s safety, but she did not think the school had done anything wrong and, having spent a great deal of time remembering Mary’s behaviour that afternoon, could not see any sign that the balance of her mind was disturbed. It was her belief that the fall was an accident, although she could not say why the children had been at that end of the island in the first place.

  Mr Webb again thanked Mrs Buchan, and said that the inquiry would hear from Jamie Norman and John Peterson in the afternoon.

  I pushed the laptop back and went quietly up the stairs. Moth was in his cot, bottom up, face down, breathing evenly. I held the back of my hand against his cheek, which was slightly sticky, and he sighed and murmured. Warm but not feverish, breathing deeply but without pauses, sleeping and not unconscious. I half closed the door and tiptoed across the landing. Raph was lying on a heap of dirty laundry reading Raising Happy Children: A Parent’s Guide to the New Generation. Shipwrecked Tupperware drifted in the bath, which was fit to be seen only by candlelight. I went back downstairs and re-read the page.

  I couldn’t believe Mrs Buchan’s was the testimony of a woman whose baby had been taken away and killed. How could she care about Mary if Alexander were dead? But if he was not dead, why would she need to be spared the recollection of the rest of the day? Maybe he had been injured, found smashed on a ledge, and died in her arms before bedtime. Mrs Buchan’s story was a parable for mothers: the price of rest and solitude, even for forty-five minutes, is your child’s life. She seemed too collected, too clear-voiced, too ‘composed’ for Alexander to be dead. If someone did that to Moth, took him away from me and— I went back upstairs. I could have had ten more minutes to myself, but I picked him up still sleeping, eased myself into the armchair and leant back while he slept on my chest.

  ‘Mummy! That policeman’s coming over the field.’

  Raph appeared over the banisters. I was trying to make a casserole with some meat from the bottom of the freezer, of unknown vintage and provenance and thus, I thought, best subjected to high heat for a long time. The onions had sprouted, the stock cubes were out of date and I was increasingly sure that everyone would be better off if I spent the rest of the afternoon in meaningful interaction with the children and served beans on toast for dinner, except that we were low on bread and I didn’t think even Moth would eat beans on crispbread.

  Moth pushed a plastic sheep on to the chopping board. ‘Policeman say baa in a field. Sheep wants a onion.’

  ‘More than anyone else does,’ I said. ‘But it would probably prefer carrot.’ I handed Moth the sheep and a bendy carrot and washed my hands, although Ian MacDonald would probably be pleased to find me with fingers soiled by honest toil.

  ‘Raph? Do you want to go read upstairs? I expect this is going to be very boring.’

  I looked out. The sky was hurrying east and Ian MacDonald was passing the gap in the wall. I reckoned the chances of Judith Fairchild failing to observe the presence of the police were remote.

  ‘No,’ said Raph. ‘Of course not. I expect it’s going to be rather interesting.’

  I went to the door and opened it before he could knock.

  ‘Mrs Cassingham. Is your husband around? We have some news about the remains.’

  ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘I was just starting some supper. Giles is at the puffin colony. Our first visitors have arrived, at the cottage.’

  ‘The Fairchilds.’ He stood in the hall. ‘I know. The boys are OK?’

  ‘Come in and see,’ I said. ‘Do you want some tea?’

  Come and see how normal I am. He looked up the stairs as if Lady Macbeth were standing at the top waiting to confess.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I wiped soup off the table and sat him in Giles’s chair, hoping he’d notice the signs of domestic labour.

  ‘That Daddy’s chair,’ said Moth.

  ‘Hello, Timothy. Hello, Raphael.’

  ‘Daddy’s chair.’

  Raph didn’t look up from Discovering Earthquakes.

  ‘So.’ I was conscious of him watching me fill the kettle. Surely even Victorian physiognomists didn’t think there was a criminal way of filling a kettle? I wanted proper tea enough to share it. He waited until I’d turned round.

  He looked at me. ‘You’re quite sure there’s nothing you can tell me?’

  ‘About what?’

  He looked round. ‘Raphael, I brought you one of the maintenance guides for the police boat, but I think I must have put it down when I stopped to put my jacket on in your field. Would you go get it? It’s in a clear plastic bag.’

  Raph stood up. ‘Go on, love,’ I said. ‘Put your coat on.’

  We watched until the door closed behind him.

  ‘About anything you might consider relevant to the discovery of a baby’s remains in your garden. Anything at all you might have heard, or wondered about.’

  I turned round to pour the water into the teapot. The teabags rose and bobbed like overturned boats. The grass outside bent in the wind. What if a storm came up and Ian MacDonald got stuck on the island? I suppose he’d get the helicopter out. Provide Raph with the thrill of the year.

  ‘I was wondering – I mean, I’m sure you’ve thought if it – and it wouldn’t be, really – but – it’s not the one that – that went over the cliff, is it?’

  I went over to the fridge. The milk bottle was stuck to the shelf. Giles, who never cleans anything, quotes a tabloid statistic about people cleaning the fridge less often than the toilet, which seems to me perfectly intelligent since, even in our house, people do not poo in the fridge. Ian MacDonald was waiting.

  ‘The one that went over the cliff?’

  I passed him the tea. ‘The wartime one. Mrs Buchan’s baby.’ My hand shook. Mrs Buchan, it occurred to me, could still be alive.

  ‘I see. No, we don’t believe it was Alexander Buchan.’

  ‘Oh.’ I squashed my tea-bag against the side of the Star Mug. Giles likes it so weak he reuses them. ‘So she’s a girl?’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘I presume that’s how you know it isn’t the Buchan baby? Though I suppose the skeleton of a newborn doesn’t tell you the sex.’

  He watched me. ‘It seems to have told you. A newborn?’

  ‘A small baby. I don’t know.’ I filled my mouth with tea to stop myself talking. He watched me swallow. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. The mother. How she could have kept going. I want to know the story, that’s all. I know it wasn’t me. I
know you don’t but I do. Or maybe you do. And if it wasn’t Alexander Buchan and it wasn’t me and we’re discounting the idea that anybody could have landed at any time and buried anyone or anything here, then it’s almost certainly pre-war and certainly not so far pre-war that the knitting wouldn’t have lasted, and I don’t know much at all about textiles and rates of decay but I’d have thought that made it no earlier than the late nineteenth century.’

  He sighed and moved his cup. There is a border between criminal and historical investigation but I don’t know where it is.

  ‘Do you know when it first became obligatory to register a stillbirth? Because I did think that someone could have perfectly legitimately buried a stillbirth there, or a late miscarriage.’

  ‘That would not be legitimate, Mrs Cassingham. Do you have experience of miscarriage?’

  I could feel my face reddening.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t. There was no obligation to register nineteenth-century stillbirths. It was a loophole that a lot of infanticides were accused of exploiting. I don’t know when the law changed.’

  He drank some tea. ‘Indeed. I’m going to go see your husband in a minute and I suppose you’re wanting to get back to your children. Or your work. Can you give me a copy of your husband’s family tree?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But he will. He can probably draw it on a rock if you take him some chalk.’

  It seemed that the police were on the trail of the Cassinghams.

  *

  I have never taken much interest in the Cassingham dynasty. The first thing Giles does in a hotel room in a new city is look for Cassinghams in the phone book, hoping for a long-lost cousin or branch of the family who thought they’d escaped, although he is embarrassed when people ask, as they do, if he is related to whatever Cabinet position Guy holds now. A distant cousin, he says, and political affiliations are not genetic. Liar. In each pregnancy I have enjoyed suggesting to Hugo and Julia that the baby will have my surname. Giles brought the Family Bible with us up here, a leather-bound Victorian folio wrapped in another of the linen cloths. Maybe they’re shrouds. Small shrouds. That Bible probably exists in a category other than ‘books’ for him, ‘ritual and votive objects’ for example, or ‘ancestral gods’, so I started looking in the carved oak chest at his side of the bed rather than on the bookshelves. Giles’s old toy cat, the one that his dormitory prefect threw out of the window on his first night at prep school, was at the top, and I handed it to Moth.

  ‘Mummy cat. Mummy cat got a penis?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘Have a look.’

  The chest is where he’d keep his secrets, if he had any, but I was so sure that Giles’s secrets leave no evidence that I felt no shame when Raph came in.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘There’s a mummy cat. Where’s a baby cat?’ asked Moth, poking Giles’s cat into my lap.

  ‘Looking for the Family Bible.’ Some ivory collar-points fell out of a blue leather box. ‘I thought you could draw a family tree. And then we’ll see what we can find out about your ancestors.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Spare shoe-trees, wrapped in crimson felt. A piece of heavy fabric wrapped in tissue paper so old it was disintegrating.

  ‘Baby cat in a box?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  I unrolled it. It was a flag with the Cassingham family crest in yellow on a blue background, with yellowed white toggles and loops. Raph craned out of the window to see the flagpole on the roof.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I muttered. The family flag.

  ‘Some people don’t like it if you use words like that. Can I hoist it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The Queen’s not in residence. And you might fall out of the window.’

  ‘Mummy find a baby cat!’

  Though it might be worth it to annoy Judith Fairchild. First the police and then a family flag. It was beginning to look as if Giles’s secret fantasy was being a Victorian paterfamilias.

  ‘Are these Daddy’s?’ asked Raph.

  A pair of worn crimson velvet slippers, embroidered with the Cassingham crest in gold. I realized what this collection meant.

  ‘No. These are Grandpa Hugo’s, aren’t they? Grandma Julia must have given them to Daddy. This is all Grandpa Hugo’s. I haven’t got a baby cat, love. Isn’t there one in the toybox downstairs?’

  ‘But he’s dead,’ said Raph.

  ‘I know. I suppose that’s why Daddy likes having his things. To remind him of his daddy.’

  ‘And a daddy cat?’

  Had Giles been poring over them, Grendel fingering his treasure, while I was working, or when I got up early with Moth? There was a flat package at the bottom wrapped in modern tissue and sealed with the sticker of the bookbinder on St Michael’s Street.

  ‘Was Grandpa Hugo Daddy’s daddy?’

  ‘Daddy cat gone to work.’

  I looked up. ‘Oh Raph, you knew that. Moth, maybe that is the daddy cat, and the mummy cat’s gone to work.’

  Moth clasped the cat to his stomach. ‘Mummy cat not go to work. Mummy cat look after a baby cat. Where baby cat?’

  I tore the tissue around the seal.

  ‘Ought you to do that?’

  ‘I’m part of the Cassingham family too, you know.’ No.

  Inside was a blue cardboard folder, the sort used in libraries to protect rare books. I unwound the strings and there it was, the red leather binding I remembered Hugo showing me in his panelled study when he added our marriage and then the birth of each child. Giles Hugo Fitzwilliam Cassingham, m. Anna Louise Bennet, 1) Raphael James Bennet Cassingham, Oxford, 2) Timothy Miles Bennet Cassingham, Oxford. He’d left space for several more children.

  ‘There’s me!’

  ‘There you are.’

  Moth came to see. ‘And me. And Moth.’

  Raph leant on my shoulder. Thea Clementine and Camilla Beatrix. There was a line leading off the page and some extra sheets of paper, but at the top of our tree was the marriage of the first Hugo Giles Cassingham, b. Bringham Hall 1820, to Esme Fitzwilliam, b. Chatton Hall 1833 and d. Bringham Hall 1854, younger than me and leaving a three-year-old son, Hartley, and a daughter born three days before Esme’s death. Hartley grew up, and eventually married Adeline James, b. 1879, leading to issue in the form of the prematurely deceased Edwin and Nigel, two daughters, Violet and Clementina, and another son, who had issue 1) Giles’s grandfather (also Hugo) and 2) Great Aunt Edith of Bath. At least I didn’t let them name Raph, Hugo. They weren’t as bothered about Moth; I think Julia still thinks of him as the ‘spare’. I put my arm round Raph’s shoulder. The tree in the garden rustled and sighed in the wind.

  It could have been any of them, Great Aunt Edith in a youthful indiscretion that left her unmarriageable; either of her aunts, both of whom married young; or indeed any of the men, sowing their wild oats in their feudal island. A seduced or violated local girl hiding her shame, or maybe a daughter of the aristocracy dispatched to a remote island to conclude her scandalous pregnancy, who dies in the course of delivering a stillborn infant. Standard fodder for sensational fiction, although usually the infant survives and, disowned by the aristocratic family, grows up beautiful and virtuous amid the wilds of Romantic Scotland and eventually saves the fortunes of the fallen house of Cassingham, after which it turns out that the parents were secretly married after all and our heroine is, in fact, the legitimate heir. Whereupon she marries a cousin and they all live happily ever after, shame about the dead mother.

  ‘They have funny names,’ said Raph.

  ‘Most of them have the same names. Anyway, yours might sound funny in a hundred years.’ My son is not the only Raphael at St Peter’s Primary School, Oxford.

  ‘What does the “d” mean?’

  ‘It tells you when they died.’

  He stood up. ‘You mean they’re all dead?’

  ‘Raph, they lived long ago. The dead ones.’

  ‘Grandpa Hugo didn’t live lon
g ago.’

  Giles had added the date of Hugo’s death. The King is dead; long live the King.

  ‘He did. When he was born there were no computers and very few people even had cars.’

  ‘There were still steam trains.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Raph began to direct 757s again. ‘All you really need to make steam an environmentally friendly technology is a way of burning things you might put in landfill without making the toxins go into the air in smoke. There’s a train in Sweden that burns rubbish, but the problem is you still can’t use plastics.’

  I turned over the pages in the Bible. Inside the rubbed edges, it was pristine. Votive object, not for reading. I wasn’t sure I had learnt anything. I began to put things back in the chest.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘Mummy?’

  I closed the chest.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mummy, if Grandpa Hugo died and he was Daddy’s daddy, does that mean Daddy will die too?’

  The presence of the Fairchilds, I realized, left Giles with a choice between spending his evenings outside in the dark with sleeping puffins or in our house with me. It meant he would probably wash up but also made it harder for me to be asleep by the time he came to bed.