Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

‘Moth wants ice cream now! Now!’

  I hauled Moth out of his chair so he didn’t bang his head on it. Raph put his fingers in his ears.

  ‘Zoe,’ I shouted, ‘you and Raph finish lunch.’

  She nodded. I took Moth into the playroom, where I passed the time by thinking about my book until the storm cleared.

  *

  Zoe helped me tidy up lunch and congratulated Moth on putting wooden animals into animal-shaped holes in a wooden cube while I loaded the washing machine and put away some dishes which had been air-drying for several days. She offered to play with Raph so I could work when Moth went to sleep, and when the ensuing silence made me peer over the banisters I could see them lying on their stomachs building another doomed Lego metropolis. I went back to my laptop, which was sitting on the bed, expectant as a dog.

  Although it was, in theory, possible to reclaim abandoned children from the Hospital, in fact barely 1 per cent of those given into its care returned to the wider community. The numbers are so small that it is hard to generalize (and it should be borne in mind that 70 per cent of foundlings did not survive their first year in the Hospital during this decade), but in general those who were reclaimed were under six months old, had been at the Hospital for less than three months and were returned to their mothers, many of whom had been forcibly deprived of their babies as a result of sickness, indigence or drunkenness.

  I rolled off the bed and went to the door to listen. I could hear Raphael saying something about fire engines and Zoe laughing. I went along the hall, setting my feet down carefully and avoiding the creaking boards, and sidled down the outside edges of the stairs. When I was little, I used to get out of bed and sneak downstairs to make sure my parents weren’t arguing, which they were. It seemed somehow that by providing an audience I made a boundary for their conflict, ensured that the knots in my stomach and the rawness of my bitten fingers were the manifestations of nothing more cataclysmic than my own fear. As long as I was crouching on the stairs, neither of them would leave. Zoe was building something rectangular with a tower at one end, like a Saxon church, and Raph was readying the fire brigade on the other side of the room. There are places in the world where people have been herded into churches which are then locked and set on fire, but they are not usually places and times for the emergency services. I went back to my room, leaving the door wide open.

  It is, of course, impossible to follow the subsequent lives of these babies in any detail, although study of parish registers (see Kenton and Johnson, 2002, pp. 112–18) suggests that, as one would expect, mortality rates after return were disproportionately high. Whether this is a result of enduring physical problems consequent upon time spent in the care of the Hospital or a reflection of the economic and social problems that caused their admission in the first place is now beyond investigation; the lives and deaths of poor children from this era often appear to elude the most basic records.

  The sky was grey. No particular weather, no birds. I could hear Zoe making fire-engine noises with an edge of self-consciousness in her voice, like a primary school teacher singing hymns pour encourager les autres. I reopened the ‘Orchard Baby’ folder.

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

  Mr Norman and Mr Peterson confirmed that they had lifted Mary Homerton’s body from the water. They had taken their twenty-foot dayboat out to the north end of the island when they heard that the children were missing and that Mary had been seen carrying Alexander past the church in the afternoon, thinking that ‘You’ve a better view of the cliffs from the bottom than the top.’ They saw the searchers on the headland and began to survey the water, following the current where it sweeps round towards Inversaigh. There was a slight easterly wind and no waves to speak of, and they followed the cliff round towards the cave, where they saw something bobbing in the water. They guessed at once what it was. Mr Peterson raised the body with the boathook and both men pulled it in. It had been face-down in the water so they knew there was no point in trying to revive her, but they tried anyway. There was no pulse and they were unable to start respiration. They did not wave and shout to the searchers for fear of conveying the message that Mary was alive. When they were sure she was dead, they spent some time looking for Alexander, but being so much smaller he was harder to find and after an hour or so decided they should return the body to land.

  Dr Welling appeared next. He had been among the searchers and was summoned as soon as the boat was seen. He confirmed that the cause of death was probably head injuries almost certainly incurred in falling down the cliff, followed by drowning; at the time it had been hard to say whether death had occurred before or after entry to the water, although the post-mortem has since indicated that Mary drowned. Grazes on her hands and arms suggested some attempt to arrest her fall, although he did not like to say that this indicated an accident; instinct or perhaps second thoughts had been known to lead suicides who had left quite explicit notes to incur severe lacerations under similar circumstances.

  Mr Webb asked Dr Welling if he felt anything could or should have been done differently to prevent the tragedy. He replied that a secure fence would prevent accidents, and incidentally reduce the loss of livestock on the island, but under present conditions it was clear that such a project would be practically impossible, and no physical impediment will prevent a determined suicide. At this point someone arrived with a message that Dr Welling was urgently required elsewhere; Mr Webb confirmed that he had nothing further to say and the case was adjourned.

  MARY HOMERTON CASE: SUMMING-UP

  Mr Webb concluded the Mary Homerton case today, reminding the court that it is not the role of a Fatal Accident Inquiry to apportion blame in the moral or legal sense but only to make recommendations with regard to what might be done to avoid or reduce the risk of any repetition of a fatal accident. It is in the nature of accidents that they need not have happened and that had events unrolled differently they would not have happened; it was clear in this case, for example, that had the person who saw Mary leaving the village with Alexander asked her where she was going and why, the outcome might have been very different. But perhaps she would have given a plausible answer – perhaps, indeed, she had a plausible reason – and continued on her way. We will never know, and several of those involved have testified to their self-doubt and questionings. These are natural but not useful preoccupations.

  Mr Webb suggested that the Castle School should reconsider the amount of unsupervised free time allowed to girls known to be unhappy or fragile, but accepted that, within reasonable bounds, every institution must find its own balance between the freedom of the many and the safety of the few, and he did not believe that the Castle School’s unusual ethos had been outwith the bounds of reason on this occasion. He would communicate with the Cassingham family with regard to the possibility of fencing the cliffs, but felt there were no grounds for an urgent or formal recommendation at the present time.

  The baby must have survived then, somehow. Mustn’t it? There was a patch of sunlight out to sea and brightness behind the clouds outside the window. A raven came gliding past, and out across the weed-stained stones on the beach, each feather of its wings clear against the pale sky. The cliffs, of course, are still not fenced, and I find it hard to imagine that any barrier would withstand the winter winds. There are traces of a dry stone wall along the section above the church, which means that someone must have balanced there, hefting stones with the sea exploding against the rock face so far below that you can tell a drifting lifebuoy only by its shape (Giles waited for it to follow the tide round into the bay and then went out to check the ship’s name so he could report it to the coastguard, as if Colsay were a fellow traveller subject to the codices of seamanship). Raph and I once saw a lamb fall down the cliffs when they were rounding up the sheep on Shepsay, bounding and leaping vertically in a fast-forward parody of springtime gambols until it lay broken on a ledge.
The lambs were being taken to the mainland for slaughter and we knew that, had eaten lamb chops for supper the previous night, and I knew, but did not tell Raph, that that jolting flight was a better death than the one awaiting it two days later. Still it figures in my dreams sometimes, the way a misstep leads to death. The babies who crawl across the glass cliff into their mothers’ embrace are perhaps right after all: we pass our days on that glass, all of us, and if we looked down we could not move at all. I heard Moth begin to stir and went to him; children need the mother on the other side of the chasm or they stop, suspended between past and future like the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

  I picked him up. He put his arms round my neck and rubbed his face on my shoulder.

  ‘Hello, love. Mummy just needs to finish with her computer.’

  He raised his head. ‘Pooter. Moth press buttons.’

  ‘Not just now.’

  I carried him back into our bedroom. The sun had gone in and the sky was dark over the sea. I closed the computer and took him downstairs, to where Zoe was determinedly rescuing Raph’s Lego churchgoers with a wind-up fire engine driven by a grinning plastic cat.

  While theories about the historical specificity of emotional bonds between parents and children have become deeply unfashionable in recent years, it is hard to find a fully satisfactory alternative account of the rise of boarding schools during this period. The advent of paved roads and the stagecoach network made people of middling rank much more mobile than they had been in the previous century, while the kinds of knowledge that were valued, especially for boys but also to a lesser extent for girls and especially girls from socially aspirant families, were less compatible with the daily occupations of most parents. It is relatively easy to teach a child what you are doing while you do it, but harder, and often economically inefficient, to stop what you are doing in order to teach a child double-entry book-keeping or French grammar. The increased value placed upon these skills in the context of the urbanizing and industrializing world of the mid-to late eighteenth century was in itself a reason for sending children to institutions where such things were known and could be efficiently passed on, while the mechanics of this ‘sending’ were ever easier, but neither seems quite sufficient to explain a shift in what we would now call ‘parenting culture’ of which contemporary observers seem to have been fully aware.

  I was teetering on the edges of an inversion of the outdated view that children became more precious to their parents as their economic use declined. Does it betoken greater affection to keep your children with you, illiterate and limited to a life of manual labour like your own, or to send them away at considerable cost to learn another way of being? It was far from clear to me that parental love is reliably manifest in action anyway, and once you find yourself trying to write the history of love you would probably be better occupied tilling the fields yourself. I deleted the double-entry book-keeping, on the uncharacteristically honest grounds that I do not really know what it is.

  ‘Anna?’ Giles calling from upstairs, where he was reading to Raph.

  ‘What? I’m working.’

  Footsteps along the landing. ‘Can you get the door?’

  I looked up. The grass on the hill was glowing in the light of the low sun, and there was probably a photogenic sunset in progress over the sea. Someone knocked on the door, and regrettably there was no possibility that it was a pizza delivery or even Jehovah’s Witnesses. I saved my work and went down the hall. There was indeed molten pink sky etching the clouds and reflecting off the sea and I felt that, having come so far for the Great Outdoors, Judith could reasonably have been expected to give it her attention.

  ‘Judith. No further problems, I hope?’

  She was wearing a Liberty peacock skirt. I once gave my father a tie in that print, bought on my first excursion to London, but he never wore it and when we went through his clothes after the funeral it was not there.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No’ with the cottage. I’ve been enjoying the view.’ Whisky, again, and her diction blurred.

  ‘Good.’

  She took a breath. ‘Anna. Can I talk to you? I mean, please could I come in? It’s abou’ Zoe.’

  ‘Oh.’ It is in contravention of the spirit of the Hôtel de la Mère to take on other people’s distress. I was willing to exchange houseroom and meals for ad hoc childcare, but counselling was not part of the deal.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

  She followed me down the hall, bumping once against the wall. ‘Do you have mint? Or anything else without caffeine? It stops me sleeping.’

  I stood in front of my glass of claret and put it behind the toaster. My experience is that alcohol will prevail over caffeine, but since she wanted tea I was very willing to give her Giles’s rather than mine.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Giles has a cupboard full of infusions.’

  I gave her the Bird Mug. I leant against the counter and she stood in the middle of the room, legs planted apart, like an estate agent sizing it up.

  ‘You had Zoe with you most of the day.’

  I warmed my hands around my mug. ‘Most of the afternoon, anyway.’

  ‘Was she – was she OK?’

  We both know the extent to which Zoe is not OK.

  ‘Judith, I don’t know her. She seemed happy enough.’ The balance of her mind was not disturbed.

  ‘It’s just – well, I don’t know if you noticed how thin she is.’

  ‘I did. I’m afraid I’ve seen quite a few anorexic students.’

  ‘So I worry about her.’

  I waited, sipped some caffeine. I wondered if she would regret this in the morning.

  ‘And she doesn’t talk to me. We got her to the doctor but she said she wasn’t interested in any treatment and Brian says she’s not sick enough to be sectioned and anyway sectioning people keeps them alive but it doesn’t make them better.’ She looked up and some of the tea jerked on to the floor. ‘Only – you know – she’s my child. I’d settle for keeping her alive. Sorry. I’ll wipe that if you show me where the cloths are.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘These days I count that kind of spill as cleaning. Come on, sit down. Would you like a biscuit with that?’

  There was half a packet of the ginger bribes at the back of the cupboard. I think Giles thinks the children snack on rice cakes and carrot sticks.

  She nodded. ‘Thanks. I shouldn’t really. I don’t have them in the house, at home.’

  And you and your daughter are models to us all. ‘Surely the point is that neither your doctor nor your husband think Zoe’s in immediate danger?’

  She shrugged. ‘It just seems so pointless to wait until she is. In danger. You wouldn’t, would you, if you saw Timothy going towards a river or trying to get the top off a bottle of pills. I’m her mother. And I’ve read about it: sometimes people collapse quite suddenly and it just seems – Anna, it’s such a waste. I mean, they’ve always done so well. Will, my son, you know he’s reading medicine. At King’s.’ She took a slug of tea as if it were gin. ‘And she’s so pretty when she’s not so thin and she got such good A-levels and she was always so polite. All my friends used to be envious, their children were getting into drugs and drinking and not doing their homework and all I had to worry about was that she was working too hard. And then she started going running on the streets, which was a worry, but she let me drive her to the gym instead, every day after school, and then that stupid, stupid idea about going off to Canada. I knew she wouldn’t cope on her own, I told her over and over and she just said I was being controlling and I wouldn’t let her live her own life. And now I’m just having to watch while her whole life goes down the toilet. All those years. Just when we were expecting – I mean, just when you think you’ve done the job.’

  Tears slid down her face. The make-up was waterproof. ‘Maybe she wanted to try it without help,’ I suggested. Maybe she doesn’t like being someone’s job.

  ‘Her! I don’t think she knows how
to use a washing machine or fry an egg. The idea of flying off to Canada …’

  ‘Oh, we all work out eggs and washing machines. I mean, Moth can do the washing machine, he just doesn’t always put clothes in the drum. And you know, she’d do some of that at Cambridge anyway.’

  Unless Judith was planning to book herself into the Hilton for the duration of term. We had one parent who did that, though what really astonished me was that her son accepted it, as if it was entirely natural that his mother had no life of her own, as if he hadn’t noticed that other people’s parents had gone back to their own worlds.

  Judith began to stack our unopened bills. ‘Yes, in college, with people to look after her and me at the end of the phone. I did most of Will’s washing in his first term anyway, and then I think he found a girlfriend.’

  I bit my lip. It was too late for Will anyway.

  ‘Don’t you think if he’s going to practise medicine, domestic appliances shouldn’t be beyond him?’

  She met my eyes for the first time. ‘They appear to be beyond his father, who specializes in cardiothoracic surgery.’

  We heard Giles coming down the stairs.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I only wanted to ask you how Zoe seemed. Since I can’t – can’t get through to her these days. Did she eat anything?’

  I finished my tea and brushed the biscuit crumbs on to the floor before Giles saw them. ‘A bit of lunch. Not much.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Giles. ‘Good evening, Judith. Everything OK over at the house?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. I’m just going back over there. Thanks, Anna. Good night.’

  She saw herself out, banging the door. Giles sat down. ‘Didn’t you have a bottle open? Anna, was she drunk?’