by Sarah Moss
I sat up, put the book carefully down on the towel, and added more hot water. There is a well above the church, almost certainly later than the seventeenth century, but there is also a spring by the anchorite’s cave and several patches of luminous green velvet moss where fresh water can’t be far to seek. How would little boys bring water down from a steep rock in any useful quantity, unless they spent most of their time going backwards and forwards with goatskin bottles (not, I reflected, a bad idea at all, but not particularly probable either). It seemed possible that Tabb’s informants were enjoying his credulity.
I lay down again. William Tabb found the women of Colsay ‘most ill-favoured and dirty, for indeed they have but few Opportunities of washing Themselves or their Cloathes, and the great Hardnesse of their Life must necessarily make them old before their Time’. Neither he nor the Reverend MacFarland showed any interest in how the women spent their time or what they thought about their way of life. They alleged that the children ‘live in such a State of Filthe that it is impossible to discern Faces, and are allowed to perform their Natural Functions upon the Floor or Wherever they may be, like unto brute Beasts’.
If so, they were the first people I’d ever heard of to do so, and many ‘brute Beasts’ display a level of control in these matters. I wondered if William Tabb had seen a toddler or two pee on the floor without immediate sanction and concluded that this was an unsocialized society, the kind of world that Anna Freud thought young children might inhabit if left without training in the inhibitions of civilized life. I turned to the front of the book, where there was a table showing variations in population over the centuries. The Rev. MacFarland guessed, on what basis I was not sure, that there were around fifty people on Colsay in the 1640s. It is a constant challenge to social restraint to have seven people living together on this island, even with an internet connection and a boat and more rooms than people. If there were fifty in one-room huts and they weren’t fighting each other to stow away in William Tabb’s boat, they knew things we don’t, things about the relationship between individuals and communities.
‘Are you coming to bed soon? It’s nearly midnight and you said you were really tired.’
I can see no painless way of telling Giles that marriage does not preclude knocking on doors. Giving birth in front of someone is not a permanent abrogation of dignity.
‘Soon I am. But if I go to sleep next thing I know Moth’ll be screaming again. I get to have some time off.’
He sat down on the edge of the bath. I pulled my stomach in. ‘I didn’t say you didn’t. What are you reading?’
I hoped the Malteser wrapper hadn’t rustled. ‘Oh, just a local history. The librarian thought I’d be interested.’
‘I thought you hated local history.’
I once spent quite a lot of the three hours it took to drive home from one of Julia’s drinks parties explaining to Giles the depth of my scorn for a retired lawyer in a brass-buttoned suit who believed that his self-published work on the history of Monckton Parva qualified him to discount the development of women’s history.
‘It has its place. There were some great books in the ’60s. By proper historians.’
Night Waking: 05:24
Not Moth but Raphael. I wait a minute. It is keening, as if it all happened long ago and nothing is better. It is light outside, light enough for anything, and the attic stairs are full of pale sunshine.
‘Raph?’ He’s sitting up, wrapped in his duvet as if it’s cold. ‘What’s wrong?’
I touch the tears on his cheeks but he doesn’t look at me.
‘Raph? Why are you so sad?’
It’s as if he doesn’t know I’m here.
‘Raphael, love. Why are you crying?’
He shudders, stares at the wall.
‘Is it the baby again?’
He nods and leans into my arms and I cuddle him as if he were Moth with a bumped head.
‘There, love. It’s all right. It was long ago.’
His hair smells of shampoo and he appears to be fully dressed.
‘I saw the bones,’ he says into my shoulder. ‘I saw them in the ground and now I wish I hadn’t. And one day I’ll be in the ground and so will you and so will Moth and we’ll all be dead.’
‘Not for a long time,’ I say, as if that makes any difference. In the end, I make him lie down and I sit on his bed and read Little House on the Prairie in the gentlest monotone I can muster, and at last his breathing softens. Then I slip along the landing and look round Moth’s door. He is still there, his nest of blankets still rising and falling, starfish hand clutching his bear.
*
There is no point in going back to sleep after 5 a.m. I inch down the outside edges of the stairs, avoiding creaks, open the front door, which Giles has failed to lock, and step out into the morning. The shadow of the hills behind the house reaches across the garden, over the beach and out to sea, but beyond it the waves glisten ice-white. I shiver. There is someone moving down on the shore, someone running as if the Vikings are after him with drawn swords. Brian, keeping his heart in good order.
Colsay
28th Nov.
Dear Aubrey,
I violate all etiquette and advice to young ladies (for I have still had no letter from you) under only the most pressing circumstances: I have seen the Northern Lights! Does that not fill you with envy for my diet of oats and seafowl, my evenings with only a small fire and some decidedly amateur knitting to counter the effects of the eldritch tales Mrs Barwick likes to tell, and my work harder in the accomplishment even than your Medusa (for at least that battle was between you and your Muse, a lady far more open to reason than those on whose assent my achievements here must depend)?
I was on my way to bed when I saw the Merry Dancers (a further violation of etiquette: I am sure correct young ladies have nothing so improper as beds when they take it upon themselves to write to young gentlemen), and paused to adjust the curtains, which tend to stir disconcertingly at the hands of what I do really know to be the draught from the window. You will smile when I confess that it has become my habit to assure myself on retiring that there is nothing unseemly behind the drapes or under the bed, only it does save time when Mrs Barwick’s tales come to mind if I chance to wake in the early hours! Anyway, on this occasion the precaution was justified, for outside the window, and indeed stretched right across the sky, were great swathes of green light, wavering and flickering as if shaken by the hands of Atlas himself. I went out, of course, although Mrs Barwick had already bolted the door and made no pretence of concealing her disdain for my proceedings, and stood at the garden wall trembling with cold and then, as the lights seemed to swoop lower and lower over my uncovered head, also with a kind of fear. It was as if the sea and the bare hillside were being swept for mortal sinners, as if the God of the Old Testament were returning with signs less ambiguous than the burning bush or even the Flood. For after all a tree may take fire and rain is not unnatural, whereas sheets of green light are decidedly – strange.
Anyway, having confided this sight I shall forthwith reassume the guise of the correctly-brought-up young lady, and cease this unauthorized correspondence forthwith. But I do think of you, Aubrey, and remain, after all,
Yours affectionately,
May
12
IRRATIONAL EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS
In reality it is not the absence of irrational emotional attachments which helps a child to grow up normally but the painful and often disturbing process of learning how to deal with such emotions.
– Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Infants Without Families:
The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries, p. 50
I was not surprised when Zoe reappeared while I was still tidying up breakfast.
‘Hello! Do you mind if I come in?’
‘Sure.’ I filled the porridge pan with water. I believe in leaving things to soak.
‘Zoe?’ Raph looked up from The Discovery Guide to Space Trav
el. ‘Zoe, did you know that people’s bones get weak when there isn’t any gravity?’
She sat down beside him. ‘Hello, Moth. Yes. So do muscles. We need something to work against.’
Raph watched me find my hairbrush under Freezing Ahead (not polar exploration but cookery), the current British Journal of Social History and a drawing by Moth alleged to represent a big boat and a spade.
‘How do people brush their hair in space?’
‘I have no idea. Moth, can you come out of that cupboard, love? No, could you put that back, please?’ I gave up on the hair-brushing. ‘Moth, look, play with this instead.’
‘Oh bugger flour,’ said Moth. He sat down, raising a small cloud.
‘No, love. Not playing with flour.’
I picked him up and he screamed. Raph put his fingers in his ears and went on reading.
‘Moth?’ said Zoe. ‘Look!’ She picked up an oven glove from under a two-week-old Guardian and made the gloved hand chase the other one across the table. Moth giggled. The oven glove seized an envelope from Her Majesty’s Tax Inspectorate and began to eat it, growling.
‘More!’ said Moth.
I started sweeping the floor.
‘Do you know if you’ll be wanting the boat again today, Zoe?’
She shrugged. The oven glove scuttled towards Moth.
‘I won’t. I should think if my mother thinks she can cause inconvenience by wanting it she will. You could say no, you know.’
I swept the flour into the bin. ‘You’re our visitors, Zoe. We advertised a ferry service. She’s quite right.’
‘No she’s not, she’s a whiny bitch who wouldn’t say what she means unless you held a gun to her head. Which I would.’
‘That doesn’t mean she’s never right.’ I put the brush away. ‘No, love, see if you can find the blue tractor. You seem very angry with her.’
Moth pottered off towards the toys and the oven glove wilted on the table like the dying swan.
Zoe tossed her hair back. ‘She hates me. She’s always hated me. She only liked me when I was a baby and she could make me do anything she liked.’
I looked into the playroom, where Moth was driving toy cars on to Noah’s Ark. Noah’s roll-on, roll-off high speed Ararat service.
‘You can’t make babies do anything you like,’ said Raph. ‘You can’t make babies do anything at all.’
Zoe sniffled. ‘She’s always hated me, anyway.’
Raph looked up. ‘She’s your mummy.’
‘People can feel very angry with their mummies sometimes. But no, love, you’re right. Mummies don’t hate their children.’
‘She does,’ said Zoe.
I frowned at her.
‘Well, she does.’
‘I’d say she loves you and she’s angry with you.’
Raph pushed his chair back and went upstairs, still reading.
‘Sorry.’ Zoe turned over the Journal of Social History. ‘Do you need to go after him?’
‘No. He’ll tell me later if he’s bothered.’ I sighed. I was going to have to hear about Zoe and her mother sometime in the next week and at least in my own kitchen I could combine counselling with cookery.
‘So why are you on holiday with them?’
I opened the cupboard quietly, so as not to alert Moth to the availability of messy play. Zoe fiddled with her hair.
‘They wouldn’t let me stay at home. And I don’t have anywhere else to go.’
‘Grandparents?’ I asked. Mine were a great refuge when nuclear family life became overwhelming.
She shook her head. ‘Dead or demented.’
‘Oh.’ I poured flour into the bowl. I wondered if she’d considered paid employment as a possibility. ‘Where exactly was your gap year?’
‘Clayoquot. Vancouver Island. Have you been?’
I nodded. Annual Conference of the North American Women’s History Alliance, 1999, University of British Columbia. A display of eye-opening knitwear and artisanal jewellery. ‘Around there.’
I ran the tap until it was lukewarm and filled a jug. I hoped Raph wasn’t halfway up the stairs, listening. His puberty, it occurred to me, could be as little as five years off.
‘My friend was going to go help at a school in Kerala and I wanted to go too, but Mum said they’d only pay for me to go to university if I didn’t go off to “some disease-ridden Third World country with bombs going off on every corner”, by which she seems to mean anywhere outside Knutsford. And maybe Wilmslow. So I was like, fine, I’ll take loans instead and she said, fine, in that case you can start paying your own way now and they hadn’t worked all those years so I could throw all my opportunities away and I was like some parents would be glad if their children wanted a job and she said only poor people want their children at the till in Tesco instead of revising.’
I stirred in the yeast and peeped at Moth. Noah was driving a fire engine and the animals were grazing inside the toy hospital, except the giraffe which was jammed up the lift-shaft of the garage.
Zoe put the oven glove back on. ‘Sorry, am I being boring?’
‘Not at all. I worry when Moth goes quiet. He’s fine.’ I added a handful of linseeds, said to contain vital nutrients which might compensate for my failure in sourcing organic meat for the children. ‘So you went to Vancouver Island?’
She shrugged. ‘Mum said I’d hate it. Because I was going to work on a conservation project in the rainforest and I don’t like gardening. And she said only a spoilt teenager would imagine that manual labour could be liberating, and I was like, you think manual labour involves a trug and wellies with pink roses on them and she was like—’
‘What about your dad?’ I put the yeast in the window, where watery sunlight made the closest I could come to the ‘warm place’ required by the recipe. ‘You haven’t mentioned him at all.’
The oven glove undulated. ‘Oh, Dad.’
Moth was talking. I peered into the playroom to see him holding Lucy and Tom Go to School upside down and declaiming The Gruffalo’s Child.
‘Dad just, like, works. All the time. It’s like he fathered us and then plugged himself back into the office and he’s been there ever since. Mostly that’s where he actually is, but sometimes Mum can make him go on holiday as long as he’s got the internet and he can pretend he’s still at work. Mum totally fell for it, she acts as if it’s him working that – that stops the sun crashing into the earth or something. It’s totally just an excuse for hiding from Mum and surfing the net. He always seems to have read most of the world’s newspapers. Why, were you wondering if she’d tipped him off the cliff?’
‘Of course not. It’s just we’ve barely seen him since you arrived. And you don’t mention him.’
‘No. Well. He doesn’t do anything worth mentioning. Unless you’re into the world of cardiology. Will once said it wouldn’t make any difference to us if Dad was dead as long as the life insurance was good. He thinks he’s so important he can’t even take time to stop Mum emotionally abusing me.’
I suspect we are all guilty, of emotional abuse. I suspect most relationships between humans are emotional abuse. The alternative would be to become an anchorite. And anyway, I could entertain the idea that conducting heart surgery might reasonably take priority over saving Zoe from her mother’s pressure to eat enough to stay alive until the beginning of term.
‘Will’s your brother?’
She shrugged. ‘He’s doing medicine at King’s. What a good boy.’
The yeast showed a bubble or two. I reckoned it could finish rising in the dough later, when the children weren’t entertaining themselves, and poured it into the flour.
‘Do you miss him?’
Her hair swung down. ‘Yeah. We used to fight a lot but at least he was there.’
There was a crash from the playroom. ‘Oh bugger a books.’
I went through. The last few books slid off the shelf. ‘Moth? Do you want to come and help Mummy knead the dough?’
I balanced him o
n my raised knee while I washed his hands. ‘Oh bugger a water.’
‘Oops a daisy water.’ I put him down and he stood on my foot. ‘Up, up and see!’
I picked him up again and he lunged at the bowl. Kneading bread is one of few culinary procedures I have not learnt to conduct with a toddler on one hip. ‘Moth, let me mix it and then you can have a bit, OK?’
I tried to put him down and he swung from my neck. ‘Ow. Moth, do you want a biscuit?’
He gripped my waist with his knees. ‘No. Not today biscuit.’
‘Moth,’ said Zoe. ‘Look, it’s an oven glove fish!’
‘No,’ said Moth. ‘Not today oven glove. Cuddle Mummy.’
I nuzzled his face, which was sticky.
‘OK,’ said Zoe. ‘Why don’t you cuddle Moth and I’ll knead the bread?’
I could see all the bones in her hands.
‘It’s quite energetic,’ I said. ‘Cooks used to be great big strapping women with muscles.’
‘Yeah, well. I’ll burn off some calories. Seeing I can’t go to the gym here.’
Moth and I rubbed noses. ‘Raph’s working on it.’
We put the bowl on the floor so Moth could see what we were doing and I showed her how to push and turn, push and turn, until the sticky heap became cool and silky.
‘Have you always made your own bread?’ she asked. ‘Mum used to do it but she stopped when Will hit puberty and started eating a loaf a day.’
I held Moth’s hands as he climbed up my lap. ‘No. I think it’s a criminal waste of time. People weren’t expected to make their own bread anywhere in Europe until women got shut in kitchens in the nineteenth century. That’s why there were medieval bakers’ guilds, as opposed to soup makers’ guilds or turnip boilers’ guilds. Everyone who could bought ready-made bread because it was too much hassle to make at home. Well, and most of them didn’t have ovens. But Giles won’t let the kids eat the processed stuff from Spar and he’s probably right about the additives, though God knows he ate enough of them at boarding school, and anyway if I can’t be working I might as well make bread. At least I’m producing something. What’s your mum doing for bread?’