by Sarah Moss
‘What did Ian MacDonald want?’ I asked. He was washing dishes and I was moving wet clothes from the washing machine to the clothes airer as if I thought they would dry there.
Washing up stopped. His reflection in the window above the sink stared out into the night.
‘Ah.’
‘What?’ I flapped the creases out of a T-shirt.
‘Well, he was – ah. He was, I suppose, telling me about the DNA test. On the baby.’
Our eyes met in the reflection, faces deformed by the waves in Victorian glass.
‘And?’
He picked up a pan and began to scrub it.
‘It seems to be a Cassingham.’
I dropped a handful of mismatched socks.
‘What do you mean, “seems to be”?’
‘It has our DNA. My DNA.’
I bent down to pick up the socks, feeling sick. Giles? Giles’s DNA? Giles’s baby?
‘Yours?’
He put the pan down and turned round. ‘Not mine, obviously. I mean, not my personal DNA. The family. Cassinghams.’
‘Date? They must be able to tell.’
He shrugged. ‘He didn’t say. He was asking about the post-war years. He’s not stupid, that man. Realizes it’s much more likely that the child never made it on to the family tree.’
I thought about the apple trees, innocent of branches. I have a family tree, too, though no one has ever felt the need to sketch it on the endpapers of a bible or raise a flag in its honour. There were five of Moth’s socks, not one of which matched another. If they had reason to suspect it was Giles’s baby, presumably he would not be washing up but answering for himself in an interrogation room in Inversaigh. I think he has been faithful. I have never harboured suspicions, though I can imagine that discretion in these matters runs deep in his genes. They may even teach it at Eton. But Giles had fifteen years of fertility before he met me. I stretched the socks out one by one. The next size up were still in a box in the loft in Oxford.
‘Is there anything I should know?’
He put the pan on the draining board. I could see tinned tomato stuck to the outside.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, you know. Ruined maidens in the closet. It’s a staple of Victorian fiction: the squire gets the serving-wench into trouble and then runs back to London.’
‘Anna, stop it. That’s tasteless even by your standards.’
I thought about Moth upstairs, breathing quietly in his cot with his bottom sticking up, and Raph leaning on his pillow, intent on Ships and Shipbuilding. We were both scared to hold Raphael when he was first born, a red alien with a head that threatened to fall off, but Giles put Moth into his first clothes on the bedroom floor while I delivered the placenta. I didn’t think about the cells that would have multi plied into another baby.
‘Are you asking me if I have a dead baby I never told you about?’
‘Of course not.’ Yes.
‘So?’
‘Don’t you mind? I mean, doesn’t it worry you? It could be your – your cousin or something.’ Your sister. Your niece. Your aunt.
He swished tomato-stained water around a wineglass and then put it on the draining board.
‘Let’s wait and see, shall we? It’s much more likely to be a lot older than that.’
I don’t understand how he can do this, put his emotions on hold pending incoming data. Though I can see that it must make life more comfortable.
‘But don’t you care? I mean, the earliest it could be is about 1860, because your lot didn’t buy the island until then, did you?’
He picked up another glass. ‘1860 is a long time ago. If I worried about everything my family’s done since 1860 – well, I wouldn’t have time for much else.’
He’s right, of course. A few hungry winters on Colsay, a few mistakes in the Great War which had significant consequences for other ranks, some cousins who seemed perfectly happy in South Africa throughout the apartheid years and in fact rather less so thereafter. Not to mention a lot of voting.
‘You mean there’s so much blood on the family tree that an extra baby doesn’t make any difference?’
‘Oh, stop it, Anna. All I said is that we’ll have to wait and see. If the police thought it was recent, I wouldn’t be here, would I?’
Feet came up the path and someone hammered the knocker on the door.
‘Oh, bloody hell.’
Moth shrieked upstairs and Raph came thundering down as Giles went to the door.
‘Mummy, it’s that Fairchild woman.’
I heard her in the hall. I preferred it when the only people who came calling at night were imaginary.
Giles came back. ‘No nutcrackers,’ he said.
She appeared in the doorway. There was a new drip on her nose and whisky in the air.
‘Good Lord, your children are still up.’
‘They are now,’ I said. ‘Excuse me, I need to reassure Moth.’
She stayed in the doorway.
‘They only scream for attention, you know.’
‘That’s why I attend.’
She didn’t move.
‘They have to learn that they can’t always have what they want when they want it. He’ll be calling for you all night if you go every time, you’ll never get any sleep.’
I didn’t meet Giles’s eyes.
‘Why can’t we have what we want?’ demanded Raphael. He was wearing a pink T-shirt of mine which I hadn’t seen for some time and his swimming trunks, which have fish on them and cannot be passed off as pyjamas to any kind of police.
‘Because sometimes the grown-ups have other things to do. Anyway, life’s not like that, and the sooner you accept it, the better.’
‘Oh,’ said Raph. ‘Mine is.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Bed. And we’ll settle Moth again.’
‘We saw you had a visitor, earlier,’ I heard her say as we went upstairs. ‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’
Night Waking: 02:11
I wake to hiccupping sobs. I’ve been back in bed for twenty-eight minutes. It’s Giles’s turn, it’s been Giles’s turn for weeks. I shake his shoulder and he snorts and turns over. ‘Giles! Wake up.’
He pulls the duvet up around his ears. Moth’s dismay rises a tone. ‘Giles, Moth’s crying.’
I could kick him, I think. I could squeeze a flannel of cold water on to his face. I could beat him up with a mahogany dining chair. But meanwhile Moth is crying. The floor is still cold and still gritty. I wrap myself in Giles’s striped silk dressing gown, which trails behind me. I keep my eyes on the floor as I pass the stairs, and the crying rises. There are wars over oil that will never end, nuclear material in the wrong hands and asteroids the size of Belgium raining into the atmosphere. I pick him up.
‘Mummy!’ He snuffles into my neck and rubs his nose on my collarbone. The crying stops. Mummy is magical, Mummy takes away the sins of the world. Everyone should have a mummy.
‘Shh, love. It’s all right. Mummy’s here.’
I cradle him.
‘Mummy’s love.’
‘Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna buy you a mocking-bird.’
We walk. The island lies quiet outside, holding the Fairchilds in their teak and stone cocoon, the villagers in the graveyard and those older, stranger beings in their stone barrows. And beyond that there is the sea where there are lights that shine all night, automated lights which hold on whether the people wake or sleep, and ships under way for the Far North and for America, and the ships are talking to each other and to the satellites, a web of conversation across the dark water. We are not alone.
‘Mummy sing a Gruffalo.’
‘No, love. Sleeping now.’
I stroke his hair. Above his ear, it is matted with soup.
‘Not pull Moth’s hair.’
‘Sorry. Sleeping now.’
‘A mouse took a stroll. Mummy sing it.’
‘Sleeping now.’
‘Mouse in a
deep dark wood!’
‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good.’
There is a light in Black Rock House, where someone is moving in the full height window with panoramic sea view. Zoe? I can’t see Judith indulging in insomnia. If I were going to run a business devoted to making people happy, to meeting their every whim before it is expressed, if I were, in short, planning to mother adults for money, I wouldn’t try to make Judith Fairchild’s dream kitchen (and anyone who dreams of kitchens should be traumatized until their dreams are more interesting). No, I’d open a refuge for mothers. A retreat. Concrete 1970s brutalism, an anti-domestic architecture without flounces. Something low with big windows and wide corridors, carpets to deaden sound. There will be five or six rooms off the corridor, each with a wall of glass and sliding doors looking on to a cold, grey beach. Each room has a single bed in the corner, a table and chair. You may bring your laptop but there is no internet access and no telephone. There are books with a body count of zero and no suffering for anyone under the age of eight. A cinema where everything you wanted to see in the last eight years is shown at a time that allows you to have an early night afterwards. And the food, the kind of food you’re pleased to have eaten as well as pleased to eat, is made by a chef, a childless male chef, and brought to your room. You may ask him for biscuits at any moment of the day or night, send your mug back because you dislike the shape of the handle, and change your mind after ordering dinner. And there is a swimming pool, lit from below in a warm, low-ceilinged room without windows, which may be used by one mummy at a time to swim herself into dream. Oh, fuck it, I am composing a business plan for a womb with a view. So what? I’ll call it Hôtel de la Mère and the only real problem is childcare. Absent, children cause guilt and anxiety incompatible with the mission of the Hôtel; present, they prevent thought or sleep, much more swimming and the consumption of biscuits. We need to turn them off for a few days, suspend them like computers. Make them hibernate. You can’t uninvent children any more than you can uninvent the bomb.
Colsay House
16th Nov., 1878
Dear Papa,
Your turn, I thought, for a letter all your own! I saw the women’s knitting today and was reminded of your Penelope’s weaving, the soft browns and greys and perhaps also the expression on her face, for the women here have also reason to think of the perils of the sea while their hands are busy, although I cannot think that anyone will compose an epic from the terrible grind of Colsay life.
I had prepared a short lecture on home nursing which I meant to give today to the women of the village, not that I think they have the means nor perhaps even the understanding to put into practice what I might say to them – and I had greatly modified the proceedings I suggest at home, which include such impossibilities as beef tea and clean linen. But I meant to begin a programme of these little talks, hoping to lead from home nursing to hygiene, hygiene to weaning, weaning to infant care and so towards the conduct of confinements. I have tried to be subtle! But of course that way too is blocked; I had offered to speak in the dining room here, thinking that they would find the church no fit venue for such allusions as I would necessarily wish to make and that it would be too much to suggest using one of their homes for this purpose, which in any case have scarce room enough for the beasts and people who must sleep there, and perhaps hoping also that curiosity to see the Big House might tempt those immune, as most of them seem to be, to the appeal of longer and healthier lives. I had specified two o’clock, and knowing that they have no way to know the time did not concern myself that no one came. Half an hour later there was still no one, and at three I betook myself in search of my audience. The street stood empty – no surprise with the rain blowing out of the puddles – so I steeled my nerves and began knocking on doors. I think it is not the custom here, I think they enter each other’s houses without ceremony, but it seems too much for me to adopt local manners in this regard – after all, I would not have them enter my bedroom without warning! No answer at the first two dwellings, not even the tell-tale scuttle away from the window, but at the third I found four women standing huddled, the needles always flashing in their hands around the fire, where foul-smelling steam rolled from a pot suspended on a chain.
I wished them good day, complimented she whom I took for the lady of the house on the rough carving of her dresser, and asked if I might visit with them a little while. I had to take silence for consent and there followed the most awkward afternoon call of my life, myself making all the conversation on both sides so that you would have laughed to hear May discussing the weather with herself, but the knitting proceeded apace the while and so while my mouth gabbled of rain, seasons and the blessings of the harvest or some such nonsense, images of your struggles with Penelope’s work drifted through my mind. Did anyone finish the weaving in the end? I remember Mama saying it would be a waste if the unfinished work were disposed of and that you had no need to make such outlay on wool. I am finding that I miss the sense of things being made here, which is foolish since the women are about nothing else from before dawn to after dusk, but you know what I mean, Papa. I miss your work, miss living in a place where there is always some project in hand, some new object of beauty, and friends coming by to comment and discuss. I wonder how Aubrey’s Icarus is coming along? I should like to see the colours of it, the blue and flame, for Colsay is a scene done all in brown and grey.
Fondest love as ever,
May
10
THE MORE HIGHLY ORGANIZED FORMS OF LOVE
One important instinctual need, that for early attachment to the mother, remains as we know more or less unsatisfied; consequently it may become blunted, which means that the child after a while ceases to search for a mother substitute and fails to develop all the more highly organised forms of love which should be modelled on this first pattern.
– Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Infants Without Families:
The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries, p. 22
Judith Fairchild appeared again while we were having breakfast. She had painted a line in a darker shade of orange across each cheek.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d still be having breakfast. Routines slip, don’t they, when there’s no school? You’re lucky you get such long holidays from the university, though. Must be a huge perk.’
I offered Moth a spoonful of porridge, which he spat out.
‘Go away that woman.’
‘Hush, Moth,’ said Giles. ‘We don’t say that. Can we help you, Judith?’
‘There’s a difference between a holiday and a vacation,’ said Raph. His mouth was full of toast and peanut butter. ‘There wouldn’t be anything to teach the students if people didn’t get time to do their research.’
She looked at me as if she’d been the recipient of the porridge. ‘Shh, Raph,’ I said. ‘Eat your breakfast.’
‘But you always say that!’
‘I hope you had a comfortable night,’ I said to Judith.
‘Why?’ asked Raph.
Moth drew in the spat-out porridge with his finger, which was blotched with what on closer inspection turned out to be red jam.
‘Oh, well, we were a bit warm. It’s funny, isn’t it, you come to the Hebrides and even with all the windows open all night it gets hot – and those duvets are very cosy, aren’t they, for summer?’
‘There’s a special condenser boiler,’ said Raph. ‘It’s meant to maintain a steady temperature. And there’s triple glazing.’
Giles stood up. ‘I’ll come over now and reset the thermostat for you. Easily done. Was there anything else?’
‘We were hoping to do the circular walk from Rothkinnick. Only we’d need a lift over there.’
‘Sure,’ said Giles. ‘When did you want to go?’
‘We should make the most of the weather, really, shouldn’t we?’ She looked pointedly at the sky. ‘While it’s bright. It’s meant to rain late
r.’
‘Whenever you’re ready.’ Giles finished his tea and held the door for her. I could see the puffins flying sadly across his mind.
I lifted Moth out of his chair and began to tidy up breakfast. It would, I knew, be sensible to stop looking for the baby. She wasn’t Alexander Buchan, not unless his mother had had both a wartime affair with Nigel or Edwin and some unimaginable reason for burying him in the wrong place, which was hardly plausible after all the official involvement in Mary’s death. I didn’t really think Julia or Thea would secrete even a stillborn baby on Colsay. Why should they? She could be anyone, any small human, wanted or reviled, lost to anger or accident or despair, any of those brief and unrecorded lives that never got as far as the baptismal font, let alone a first-person narrative on the internet or a journal held in cold storage in a city archive. The Cassingham DNA didn’t really change anything; a late miscarriage, a stillbirth, common enough now and more so in the nineteenth century. I wondered how the world would be different if the accidents of infant mortality had fallen in slightly different places, erasing, for example, Einstein, Freud and Stalin while leaving for articulate adulthood the contemporaries mourned only by mothers and those whom infant mortality deprived of motherhood. Instead of psychoanalysis and general relativity and the gulags, with their own harvest of human potential, what?
‘Moth done a poo.’
I picked him up and held him at the shoulders and knee. Never squash a full nappy.
‘Raph? I’m going to change Moth’s nappy and then we’re going down to the headland, OK? I want to show you something there.’
‘What?’