by Sarah Moss
It is the logic of amateur cake decorators and sock knitters across the land, that production of any kind is by definition a moral way of spending time. As if more stuff is what the world needs. Giles, in the days before children, when cooking could be a creative performance rather than the industrial-scale generation of spills and leftovers and was thus something he was willing to undertake at weekends, once made his own tortellini. I timed him from my desk, where I was writing an article on eighteenth-century fashion journalism and its relation to early industrial gender ideologies, and worked out that each pork-and-mushroom-filled pasta ear represented about twenty-five minutes of his time, or around £18 after tax and National Insurance, not including the ingredients. Some of them fell apart when he boiled them, which doesn’t happen to the ones from plastic packets. He said that what I was doing wasn’t any more useful, and may have had a point.
Zoe knelt and shoved the dough down. Her knuckles looked as if they were about to come through the skin. ‘I’ve no idea, I don’t eat with them.’
Dear Professor James
I am writing to apply for the Lectureship in Modern History recently advertised in the Times Higher Education Supplement. I completed my doctorate, entitled The Unformed Clay of Humankind: theorizing British childhood from 1760 to 1820, at Oxford in 2006, and since then have held a Research Fellowship at St Mary Hall. I daily expect to be summarily dismissed for flashing my breasts at the Principal, an error which I have compounded by moving to Outer Scotland, and trust you will understand that the gaps in my publication record result from two episodes of maternity leave and its attendant disruptions rather than a dereliction of intellectual duty. I can assure you that I do not enjoy the practice of motherhood and would be very happy to focus my energies instead on your department, where I believe it is possible to stare out of the window and consume hot beverages at will, and furthermore that research seminars and the like may occasionally afford reason to miss the children’s bedtime.
I regretfully deleted everything after the second sentence and started again. I wanted to compose a resignation letter, or maybe two resignation letters, one from college and one from motherhood, and in fact maybe one from marriage as well, although I might be willing to go on having sex with Giles. Computers have memories, somehow accessible to the police even though Computer Services have no means of recovering documents that one has not deleted but only failed to back up. I told the computer to empty the trash can, but I don’t know where it empties all these cancelled thoughts and wisely unsent letters. Is there a municipal dump somewhere on the internet? Show me your deleted documents and I’ll show you who you are. And who you don’t want to be.
I sipped some tea and looked along the table at Giles. His face was somehow unfamiliar in the glow of his laptop, his eyes intent on something that wasn’t there. His puffins, his mysteriously absent puffins. When numbers drop it’s obvious to assume they have died, but they might just have gone somewhere else, in which case there is probably a reason, a reason which ornithologists imagine to be accessible to the human mind, although it seems to me arrogant to assume that we can think like birds. Fiona Firth’s book says that the islanders killed tens of thousands of puffins, some for food but most for use as manure. I wonder if Giles would eat one? Sing a song of sixpence. I used to care about things like that, about the imminent extinction of tigers and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and you’d think having children would have made me care more. You’d be wrong. I refreshed my e-mail and found a new message.
Dear Anna, just wondering if you had plans for the evening. With much love from a secret admirer.
I looked up. He was so intent on his screen he looked as if he was reading the Guardian online. I e-mailed back.
For admiration, I could change my plans. What did you have in mind?
His face didn’t change as he typed. I blushed. ‘Giles! This is my work e-mail.’
‘So?’ he said. ‘Turn it off. Come on.’
‘Hang on a minute. I need to delete that. What if the Fellows saw it?’
He lifted my hair and kissed my neck, hard. ‘The Fellows are still using carrier pigeons.’ He reached round me. ‘There. Gone.’
I paused on the landing. All the lights were off in Black Rock House. I imagined Judith standing on the barrows on the headland, casting spells into the dark, and remembered Zoe’s dead-looking face on the boat. And Brian with the blinds down in his virtual office.
Giles put his hand on my waist. ‘You OK?’
I rolled my shoulders. ‘Yeah. A bit worried about Zoe.’
‘Is she as much of a mess as she looks?’
‘I think she’s probably pretty when she’s well. But yes, I think she’s got a bit stuck. And I’m not short of people with needs.’
He took his hand away. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘The children. Obviously.’ And Mary Homerton. And the dead baby. ‘Are you going to sweep me off my feet or what?’
A baby cough came scuttling across the landing. We froze. ‘Shh.’ A stronger cough.
‘Mummy! Moth wants a drink!’
‘Ah, fuck.’ I leant against Giles.
‘I’ll go,’ he said.
‘Really? You want a shag that much?’
‘Go to bed. I’ll be there in a minute.’
The voice of inexperience.
The clouds had cleared and there were stars, and moonlight strong enough to cast the shadow of the window frame and the fingered branches of the tree across the bed, though not, I decided, strong enough to show that white worms of elastic were hanging out of my bra straps. I pushed Giles’s pillows off the bed and stretched out my arms and legs. Maybe the Hôtel de la Mère should offer double beds after all, just without the marital hint of two sets of pillows. Maybe half the room should be a bed, inviting mothers to sleep like toddlers, sprawled as they lay when the final rendition of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ petered into longed-for silence. I wondered what additional services the Hôtel might offer. Not massage, no ‘pampering’ or ‘beauty treatments’. Button replacement, shoe-polishing. Dry cleaning, to return to service all those milk-stained jackets that have padded the bottom of the laundry basket for months. Perhaps a hairdresser. Marriage guidance, divorce law, careers advice, CV workshops. Financial planning, an explanation of pensions. What do women want? (The equal distribution of responsibilities as well as rights, failing which utopia equal pay for equal work would be an acceptable starting point that oddly eluded Freud, and sadly is not in the gift of the Hôtel either.) I remembered Rebecca the post-natal depression counsellor, sitting in her over-heated office overlooking the bus stop and listening to me saying that I would never read or write again. Feminists have much for which to blame Freud but the advent of psychoanalysis does at least mean that people now sometimes listen to madwomen. When they are paid to do so.
I turned over. I could hear Moth singing ‘Old MacDonald’ and Giles murmuring in disharmonic counterpoint. In the name of God, shut up and go to sleep. God seems oddly plausible in the watches of the night, when we entertain the possibility that a Being immune to the despair of Palestinian children, the Ogoni nation and the grieving mothers of Bihar might intervene to our advantage in the matter of toddler insomnia. I suppose there are other beings, in Whitehall and the White House for example, who might reasonably be expected to take responsibility for the bigger cock-ups on the planet, but, as Raphael points out, it would take omnipotence to make a baby go to sleep. Which Giles does not possess. I took off the bra, whose underwires slipped their moorings several washes ago, and pulled a nightie from the dirty clothes pile at the foot of the bed.
Night Waking: 03:56
Raph, again. Making a noise that is not, or not only, a demand for attention. I slide out of bed, the memory of certain moments earlier in the night inspiring unusual solicitude for Giles’s undisturbed rest. Summer is passing on and, although there is a grey brightness behind the hill to the east, there is no light in Raph’s room, where
I have to feel for his shoulders and hair to find his face deep in his pillow. He doesn’t want to be held, doesn’t respond to stroking or his own baby endearments, which haven’t crossed my lips in years. I sit on the bed, the draught from the window snaking round my shoulder, and wonder if he would rather I went back to bed.
‘Raph. Is this about the baby again? We have to stop worrying about her, you know. She’s been dead a long time and I’m sure people cried then. She’s not our baby, Raph.’ Not exactly, anyway. You’ll have enough to grieve for in your life. There are deaths waiting for you, and if there are not it is for a reason that I cannot contemplate. My hand tightens on the cords of his shoulders, runs over the wings of bone on his back. ‘We’re all alive now, and for a long time to come. Raph?’ I don’t know who I am comforting, if the death I am addressing is general or particular. There is no response, and I sit there, rubbing and patting his back as I did when we spent our nights walking the room and crying.
Colsay House
2nd Dec.
Dearest Allie,
The child was born last night and I was not called. Oh, Al, all the women were there, even Mrs Barwick was there and not I! I have not been allowed to see it – I went there with the baby clothes you packed, as soon as I had finished breakfast when Mrs Barwick told me – but no doubt if it is not already failing it soon will. I had to leave the little clothes with Mrs Barwick, who was already there, and actually came to the door to tell me that Mrs Grice would not have my company. (I also gave the shawl I have been making – it is no fine thing but could at least serve to ensure that the child’s few days of life are not tormented by cold as well as pain, and no better knitter has seen fit to make a similar preparation.) When she at last came back to the house I upbraided Mrs Barwick, I could not help myself. She knows that I am the one person on this island who could have brought Mrs Grice a living child and I left explicit instructions that I was to be called the moment her pains came on, day or night. Mrs Barwick says yes, Miss May, I ken that, but a woman can surely choose her own company at such a time and, forgive me, Miss May, but she did not choose you, and not for lack of offering. I’m afraid when she said that I left the room and banged the door. It is just wicked, to kill a child like that, and Mrs Grice and those evil women have killed this infant as surely as if they had strangled or drowned it. What will Miss Emily say? And Aubrey? I did my best but I could hardly watch every night on her doorstep in case labour began, and if I had I could not have been sure of being admitted. All these horrible weeks here, and to fail now! And nowhere even to hide myself, for if I want my tea I will have to go down the stairs and face Mrs Barwick again. I hope Lord Hugo sends them all off to Canada under the most unfriendly conditions; I have heard of one place near here where the people were rounded up with dogs, like sheep, and packed into the boats and not allowed even on to the deck until they were far on the way west. Even animals don’t kill their own young, and what ingratitude to those who have sent me to them with no motive beyond easing their grief!
I don’t know whether to cry or throw things around the room, and don’t tell me, even in my mind, that neither will help. As Mrs Barwick would say, I ken that very well.
How can I go on here now?
13
THE CHILD’S NEEDS
It is the mother’s task to be attentive to the child’s needs (for food, sleep, warmth, movement, comfort, company), not to misunderstand them, or to confuse them with each other, and to fulfil them, not according to her own speed and rhythm, but by adapting her actions to the child’s.
– Anna Freud, Indications for Child Analysis and Other Papers (London: Hogarth Press, 1969), p. 591
There were two major crises on the island of Colsay during the eighteenth century. In 1724, a schooner sailing out of Glasgow ran adrift in a heavy fog on the skerries to the north-east of the island. There were rumours, persistent into this century, that the islanders’ interest in the cargo of the John Frederick overcame their humanity with regard to the survivors and particularly to the bodies of the majority of the crew, who did not survive. These rumours are now impossible to substantiate or disprove, but what remains sure is that the people of Colsay soon had reason to regret any contact with the fated ship. Smallpox broke out—
‘Oh,’ said Giles. ‘You’re busy.’
I looked up. ‘Sure am.’
‘Is that the book?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s the book, Giles. I’m producing deathless prose which will change the face of eighteenth-century historiography and redeem my career from the morass of nappies and spat-out biscuits into which it has fallen.’
‘Oh.’
The space hopper stopped and Raph appeared behind Giles at the back door.
‘So can I come too?’ he asked.
‘Judith and Brian need a lift to Colla.’ Giles leant on the door jamb. ‘I was hoping to finish some data collection.’
I glanced up to where the rising dough was pushing against the tea-towel over the bowl. SAVE CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, though the tea-towel did not elaborate on the threat from which Canterbury Cathedral needs to be saved.
‘Judith doesn’t like my driving. And the bread’s going to need shaping and baking in the next hour or so, after Moth wakes. Why don’t you take Raph to the library? Fiona Firth said she’d get some more space books for him. And we’re nearly out of olive oil, I forgot to order so it’ll have to be the best Spar can provide.’
He stood up. ‘OK, OK, we’re going.’
‘And another pack of baby wipes, just to tide us over. And if you want a salad tonight you should get lettuce. We’ve still got avocados.’
‘Come on, Raph. I’ll take you to the pub for crisps if you like.’
‘And don’t get drunk and push Judith into the Sound!’ I shouted after them.
and, although no eye-witness accounts survive, it is clear that there were few adult survivors. The vulnerability of small island populations to infection is well documented, the obvious comparison here being the ‘boat cold’, which invariably afflicted the inhabitants of both St Kilda and Pitcairn Island on those rare occasions when they had contact with people from elsewhere. None the less, the death of almost all resident adults is surprising, and particularly so when we consider that even two hundred years ago, Colsay was by no means isolated. Colsay Sound is a treacherous and unpredictable stretch of water, but only in dense fog is it impossible to see the island from the mainland and vice versa, and, although few would wish to make the crossing daily, most of the inhabitants of Colla were probably almost as familiar with the geography of Colsay as with their own outfields. This seems to have been a particularly virulent strain of smallpox, from which the people of Colla also suffered very badly, reporting a mortality rate of around 60 per cent, and perhaps deaths on Colsay were higher because the epidemic came in March, towards the end of the ‘hungry season’ when the people’s resistance must have been particularly low.
Antonia Rivett would have given up on the Reverend. Clearly, probably, must have been, seems to have been. ‘Reserve your energies for explicating what you actually know.’ She had no truck with theories of history suggesting that we don’t actually know anything at all, regarding this epistemological flaw – perhaps rightly – as a disability common to most human endeavour and one that, if not regarded in the proper spirit, would bring us all to stupid silence. Like death. Wilful stupidity is the basis of intelligent thought. Ignore the chasm beneath your feet.
An earlier predecessor of my own, the Rev. Adamson, who was the incumbent of Colla from 1718 to 1732, was alerted to the sorry state of affairs on the island by the arrival of James and Elizabeth Grice, aged eight and ten, in one of the community’s small fishing boats. He noted in the Parish Record that ‘These Children brought a Tale so chilling that at first they were scarce believed, but they soon convinced us of the Tragedy that had visited the Island, where they were themselves but just come from interring their Mother in a
shallow Grave, there being none other to do them that Service.’ Reverend Adamson had some trouble finding healthy men who were willing to accompany him back to Colsay with these unfortunate children—
‘Anna?’ Zoe, framed by the door. ‘Oh, sorry. You’re working. I thought Moth would be up by now.’
14:37. ‘Oh fuck. You’re right, he should. He’ll never to go bed now.’
I pushed the book into my laptop bag and rearranged the pile of monographs that should have been absorbing my attention. ‘Sit down, if you like. Make some tea. I’ll be down in a minute.’
Moth was sleeping as if far out of sight of land, adrift wherever it is that the toddler unconscious needs to go. In the end I picked him up limp with sleep and took him downstairs to be woken by the novelty of Zoe.
‘I made you some tea,’ she said. ‘And I think the bread’s overflowing; do you want me to knead it again?’