by Sarah Moss
The boat was inside the bay, almost within shouting distance. Within swimming distance.
‘Go lie on the sofa,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there in a minute. I’ll bring your dad.’
She walked slowly across the grass, bent into the rain, hunched and stiff as an old woman.
‘There’s boat!’ said Moth. ‘Hello, boat!’
He wriggled. I put him down and we walked hand in hand along the landing stage, built and rebuilt by the villagers over a couple of centuries until the last families left. I smiled at Giles, helped Raph on to the stones and put my arm round him.
‘Brian,’ I said. ‘Zoe’s just gone back to the house. She said she needed to lie down. She didn’t look very well.’
Judith snorted. ‘She was all right this morning. I hope she hasn’t been bothering you all afternoon.’
Moth tried to push my hair back into my hood.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She helped me make bread.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Brian. ‘I’m not surprised.’
We stood back as he jogged towards the house with the loping gait of the long distance runner.
‘Is she OK?’ asked Giles.
I squeezed Raph against my side. ‘I wouldn’t have let her go back alone if I thought she was about to collapse. Not that I’d know. Come on, let’s get you two warmed up.’
I left Giles to tidy up the boat and took the children back to the house. Judith followed.
‘Did you have fun, Raph?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Lots. Daddy bought me some chips in the pub and Fiona Firth told me to say hello and she’ll see you soon.’
‘See me soon?’
He shrugged. ‘That’s what she said.’
Zoe was lying on the sofa reading The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch with Brian perched at her side like a seagull. His hand, hairless as my own and tanned, lay on her shoulder. I put Moth down and started taking his boots and suit off.
‘You OK?’ I asked her.
‘She says she won’t let me take her blood pressure,’ said Brian. ‘Zoe, please will you eat something. Or drink something.’
‘I’ve been drinking tea.’ She didn’t lift her eyes from the book. ‘Ask Anna.’
‘Lapsang without milk,’ I said.
‘Zoe,’ said Brian. He stroked her hair. ‘If you collapse, we’ll call out the helicopter. And they’ll take you to hospital, where they’ll put you on a drip. With sugar in it. I really don’t want you sectioned and I really don’t want anything to happen to you without your consent. You’re running out of options, sweetie.’
Yes, I thought, but she needs a reason as well as a method for staying alive and in my understanding Freud himself can offer nothing more convincing than convention. Or maybe love, which is insufficiently sophisticated for a bright eighteen-year-old.
‘Is that what you want?’ Judith stood in the doorway with water dripping from her cagoule on to the floorboards. ‘Well, Zoe? You’d rather be in hospital than with us, would you? How do you think I’d feel, coming to see you on some filthy NHS ward with tramps and schizophrenics and drug addicts? When you could be at Cambridge? Don’t think we’ll go private this time. You’ll get bedpans on a mixed ward instead of Trinity College. And God knows what the admissions tutors will think, I doubt they let people straight into Cambridge out of the psychiatric ward.’
Zoe’s face reddened but she flicked the page. She will need to have her own children to learn that mothers’ fears speak in anger, anger that life does not recognize our children’s glory, that every step into the fallen world is a step away from the inhuman perfection of the newborn’s ten new wrinkled red fingers and new eyebrows sketched on a new face. Her eyes scanned the page. Every morning, Mrs Grinling made a delicious lunch for the lighthouse keeper. And there is freer passage than Judith imagines between psychiatric wards and Oxbridge colleges.
Brian looked tired. I should perhaps have felt sorrier for him from the beginning. ‘Judith, that’s not helpful.’
She sniffed. The smell of alcohol, tentative on the cold air, reached my side of the room. Moth came over and held his arms out. ‘Up!’
‘I’m going away,’ said Raph. ‘I don’t like this.’
Zoe turned another page. Mrs Grinling sent the lunch out to the lighthouse in a basket.
‘Oh, you know what’s helpful to the children, do you?’ said Judith. ‘Because I must not have noticed you around helping for the last twenty years.’
Moth hid his face. Sometimes marriage seems like an alternative to self-control.
Brian stood up. ‘In case it escaped your attention, I’ve “helped” by buying you that house and paying the fees for the schools you chose and clearing your credit card every month. Oh, and saved a few people’s lives every week or so. You’ve kept Zoe dependent on you all these years because otherwise you’d have to face the fact that you’ve done nothing with your life except spending what I earn. And now she can’t handle it any more and you’re drinking because you’ve got nothing else left.’
Judith’s face darkened. Her voice shrilled and I knew she’d lost the argument. ‘You think you know what I’ve done with my life? Raising your children and scrubbing your shit off the toilet and picking your socks off the floor year after bloody year?’
Brian pretended to laugh. ‘Wrong script, darling, you forget you’ve had a cleaner for the last twenty years.’
I checked to see what she might throw. There was nothing irreplaceable immediately to hand. Moth grasped my hair as if he were falling through the branches. I kissed his head and took him upstairs to find Raph. Voices rumbled through the ceiling while I answered questions arising from Raphael’s perusal of the World Atlas and eventually allowed jumping on the bed as an alternative to a ringside view of family break-down. I kept wondering if Zoe was able to get off the sofa, and whether the helicopter could land here in the dark. At last the front door banged and there were footsteps on the stairs. Giles came in as the children bumped into each other and collapsed into a giggling heap. I established Moth on top and looked up.
‘Have they gone?’
‘Judith has. Brian says can Zoe stay here tonight. But that’s not why I came up. There was a letter for you at the post office.’
He held out a crumpled white envelope. A fat, crumpled white A5 envelope from Glasgow, containing more pages than it takes to thank someone for their interest in your vacancies and regret that on this occasion they have not been shortlisted.
‘Oh.’ I took it out on to the landing; I couldn’t face the three of them watching me open it. Dear Dr Bennet, I am writing to invite you— I felt my face flushing.
‘Giles! Giles, I’ve got an interview. At Glasgow. But it’s next week.’
He appeared round the door. ‘See, I told you you could do it. Well done.’
‘I won’t get it,’ I said. ‘They probably just have to include at least one woman on the shortlist.’
‘So they thought they’d pay your expenses from here and hotel there as the cheapest way of ticking the equal opps box?’
Giles has served on Oxford appointments committees and therefore, I suppose, must be assumed to know about ticking boxes.
‘I can’t go overnight,’ I said. ‘What about the children?’
Raph came out to join us. ‘What about us? Where are you going?’
‘Mummy’s got a job interview,’ said Giles. ‘In Glasgow. And if she gets the job, which she will, we can all move up here.’
Raph looked from Giles to me and back. ‘But she said she wouldn’t live here. Can we really? Please?’
Moth came and put his arms round my leg. ‘Where Zoe gone?’
I picked him up. ‘I won’t live here. Not on the island. Well, not unless Daddy wants to stay here with you while I commute to Glasgow.’ I could be the one with the pristine flat. I could use it to eat ready meals and have a clean bathroom and spend my salary on cut flowers that are actually supposed to die and get thrown away and replaced.
‘You can’t do that!’ R
aph came to hold on to me too, as if it might require physical restraint to stop me running for the metropolis.
‘No.’ Giles ruffled Raph’s hair. ‘Mummy’s teasing. No, we’d find a house for all of us. Bigger than in Oxford. And a new school for you.’
‘Moth new school too.’
‘And a new nursery for you.’
‘If I get the job,’ I said. ‘Remember I probably won’t. Anyway, I can’t go overnight. And I haven’t anything to wear.’
Giles grinned. ‘Then you’ll have to go overnight, won’t you, to buy yourself a suit. We can cope, you know, for thirty-six hours.’
There were footsteps downstairs. ‘Hello?’ called Brian.
Giles leant over the banisters. ‘Sorry, Brian. We got distracted. Down in a minute.’
He ushered us all back into Raph’s room. ‘Anna, is it OK if Zoe stays with us tonight?’
‘She can’t sleep in here,’ said Raph. He climbed on to his bed and opened The Way Things Work, which is not as useful a book as the title suggests.
‘Is that because she’s too weak to get to Black Rock House or because he can’t face having her and Judith under the same roof?’
Giles frowned. ‘The latter. He says he thinks she might eat something if she doesn’t have to deal with Judith. He says if he could send her away from Judith without putting her in hospital, he would, but she’s in no state to go anywhere on her own. It sounds to me as if they’ve got a lot to say to each other that Zoe really doesn’t need to hear.’
The last thing Zoe needs is to feel more powerful than she already does. Medieval women who starved themselves were revered for their holiness, their miraculous ability to live without food, which must have made it hard to start eating again. I sighed. The ethos of the Hôtel de la Mère does not encourage taking responsibility for other people’s dysfunctional adolescents. In fact, taking responsibility for other people’s dysfunctional adolescents may well entitle you to a very long stay there. I thought of Zoe walking through the rainforest, singing ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ and deciding that she’d rather be eaten head first. And lying on our sofa because she no longer has the energy to stand up. Judith could probably use a couple of weeks in the Hôtel as well. ‘Oh, all right. I’ll make her some hot chocolate or something. But she has to come to the table like everyone else. I’m not playing handmaid to Zoe’s decline on the sofa.’
‘I’ll go tell Brian. You should look in your wardrobe and think about booking train tickets.’
I already knew what was in my wardrobe (in fact very little; most of my clothes get put back on before they have quite dried and the remainder are draped damp over chairs and heaters in a spirit of quaint optimism). More pressingly, I thought, I should think about what to say, which was more or less compatible with cooking.
The children thought that if Zoe was allowed hot chocolate just before dinner then so were they, and having conceded that point the only reason I could see for not having it myself was that we’d run out of milk sooner and have to brave the Sound again. The wind had risen and rain whipped the windows. We’d probably have to go back to Colla in the next couple of days anyway, to facilitate Judith’s exhaustive investigation of the distilleries of the West Coast. The bread had overflowed again, so I masked it with tinned tomatoes, garlic and some cheddar from which I cut the blue furry bits to construct a form of nourishment inspired by the idea of pizza. Zoe ate more than Moth.
I woke to daylight: 07:08. Moth must be ill. Maybe something fell on him in the night, maybe the ceiling fell in. Maybe he scorned the ‘pizza’ because he was in the early stages of meningitis which got worse while I slept like a pig. Maybe he did wake and cry and I was too sodden with sleep, too pleased with myself, to hear, and maybe he tried to get out of his cot and fell on his head. Maybe I hadn’t sewed that ribbon on to his bear as firmly as I thought and it got round his neck in the night. Giles was still asleep, as if he didn’t care that it was morning and his own son had been silent for nearly eleven hours. I flung the duvet right back and Giles grunted and felt about.
‘Giles! Did you get up to Moth in the night?’
‘What?’
‘Did you deal with Moth in the night?’
He pulled the duvet back around himself, leaving a tuft of hair poking out.
‘No. Don’t think so.’
I pushed the duvet back down and touched the floor with my toes. The last few minutes of normal life before I’d have to find Moth and face what had happened. I went slowly to his door. He was breathing. I went in. He was lying on his front, legs tucked under his bottom as usual, one thumb fallen from his open mouth and the other hand clasping his bear. I touched his cheek. No warmer than it should be. I opened the curtain so I could see if he was pale or blue around the mouth.
‘Mummy. Porridge now?’
He sat up, pink-faced and damp with sleep.
‘Hello,’ I said. I scooped him up and hugged him. ‘You slept all night.’
He frowned at the grey sky.
‘Morning now.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Come and tell Daddy.’
I plopped him down on to our bed. He giggled.
‘Jumping on Mummy’s bed?’
I sat down and tucked my feet under my thighs, feeling the cold seeping through the folds of my nightdress. ‘Find Daddy.’
He crawled over the pillow, pulled Giles’s hair and burrowed under the duvet.
Giles sat up. ‘Bloody hell, what time is it?’
‘Seven o’ clock,’ I said. ‘He slept through. I had to wake him.’
‘You had to what?’
Moth pulled Giles’s nose. ‘Beep!’
‘Wake him. I was worried. Anyway, he wouldn’t sleep after lunch if I let him sleep now. Or go to bed before midnight.’
‘Daddy, beep!’
‘Beep,’ said Giles. ‘Well, are you going to get him up, then?’
I lay down and held out my arms. ‘Cuddle Mummy. No, I thought you could do that.’ Moth crawled over my stomach and rubbed his nose on my shoulder, leaving a shining trail. ‘You’ll have to, won’t you, if I go to Glasgow next week?’
Giles looked down at me. ‘You are going to Glasgow. And of course I can get him up. What are you worried about? You went off to that conference, didn’t you?’
I stroked Moth’s head. ‘They were at school and nursery. And I left you lists.’
‘Do you really not believe I can look after my own children for thirty-six hours?’
I haven’t, I thought, seen any evidence that you can.
Moth poked my eye. ‘Mummy got blue eyes.’
‘I’m sure Zoe will help.’ I intercepted Moth’s next poke. ‘Raph really likes her.’
Giles got out of bed.
‘Mummy not going away,’ said Moth. ‘Moth come too.’
There was a knock on the door while we were having breakfast. Zoe was still asleep in the spare room, on Julia’s old bed with its horsehair mattress and blankets and a silk counterpane that slides off every time you move. She was also still breathing, appropriately coloured and warmer than my hand, although life is, I know, more complicated than that when you’re eighteen.
‘I’ll go,’ I said.
The newspaper rustled. He must have scored a Guardian in the pub yesterday. ‘It’ll be Brian.’
It was Judith, in the Liberty peacock skirt and her cagoule, her eyelids painted the steel grey of the battleships that sometimes pass through the Sound. I stood in the door. Putting Zoe up for the night didn’t seem sufficient reason to deal with Judith before breakfast.
‘I just wanted to check Zoe is all right.’ She looked behind me, up the stairs. ‘I kept worrying about her in the night.’
‘She’s asleep. I checked. She’s warm and pink and breathing evenly. I expect she needs the rest.’
‘Did she – did she eat anything?’
‘Yes,’ I said. The sun was breaking through the cloud and shining white on the sea, and there was the smell of warm grass. A breez
e slipped past Judith and stirred the pages of a book about whales that Raph had left open on the floor.
‘Mummy!’ called Moth. ‘Down! Find Mummy!’
I gave up. ‘Do you want to come in? We’re having breakfast.’
Judith shuffled her feet in their heavy boots. ‘Did she eat what you cooked?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Mummy! Where’s Mummy gone?’
‘Come in, Judith.’
She put her hand on the door. ‘I’m sorry. About Zoe.’
Don’t tell me, I thought. ‘Not to worry. Families are messy things. You can’t control children.’
She started to say something and then stopped. ‘Thank you.’
I left her in the hall and went back to the kitchen.
‘It’s all right, love. Mummy was just answering the door.’
Moth held up his arms to me. ‘No door. No answering.’
The Guardian flapped like a flustered seagull. ‘Where is she?’
Judith appeared in the door. She was wearing pink towelling socks, worn at the toes.
‘Oh God,’ said Raph. ‘Not her again. I’m going upstairs.’
‘Raphael!’
He looked round. ‘Excuse me.’
Moth stroked my cheek. There was porridge on his fingers. ‘Raph gone away.’
‘He’ll come back,’ I said. ‘Judith, tea?’
She looked at the teapot as if it were a hand grenade. ‘Do you have any Earl Grey in?’
‘No,’ I said.
Giles put the paper down. ‘I’ve got work to do. See you later.’
‘Not so fast. I’ve got work to do too.’
He stood up. ‘I need to observe the birds.’
‘I need to write the book. And my presentation.’
Judith was reading a bank statement. I reached out and turned it over.
‘Don’t you have a filing system?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Too busy writing books.’
‘I find it saves time.’
‘No doubt. Giles, I’ll do the morning if you’ll take over at lunchtime. That way you get the nap.’