Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  ‘No nap,’ said Moth. I frowned at him.

  ‘I never expected Brian to look after the children.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well. It was different for your generation, wasn’t it? You could manage a mortgage on one salary. And no student debt.’

  She sniffed. ‘We were careful with our money.’

  ‘I’ll be back later.’ Giles left.

  I hugged Moth a moment, letting time pause as it does when adult conversation leaves the building.

  ‘Moth, will you help Mummy tidy up?’

  He looked disbelieving. ‘Tidy up?’

  ‘Oh, never mind. Can you find the ark? And the animals?’

  ‘No.’ He clung to my leg.

  ‘See if you can find a fire engine. A noisy fire engine.’

  ‘No.’

  I reached over and unhooked the steel pasta pot.

  ‘OK, play at cooking. Here’s a spoon.’

  He sat down, turned the pan over and began to bang it with the wooden spoon. If toddlers didn’t have such an uncomplicated relationship with anger you’d have thought he was engaging in some kind of primal therapy. I reckoned even Judith wouldn’t compete with that. The house is so solid it seemed unlikely to wake Zoe.

  Judith was reading our post again.

  ‘Sit down,’ I shouted over the din. ‘Or go wake Zoe.’

  She sat down. I stacked plates.

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did Zoe eat?’

  I ran the hot tap.

  ‘Some hot chocolate and some dinner.’

  ‘What dinner?’

  No wonder the girl starves herself.

  ‘A kind of pizza thing.’

  Judith frowned.

  ‘Can you get mozzarella from that shop?’ she shouted.

  Moth redoubled his efforts.

  ‘No,’ I shouted back.

  ‘What, frozen pizza?’

  ‘No.’

  She frowned again.

  ‘What kind of hot chocolate?’

  I put the scrubbing brush down.

  ‘Judith, do you think she might be happier if you were less … curious?’

  ‘What?’

  I crouched by Moth. ‘Moth, love, can we take that in the playroom? It’s noisy.’

  ‘No playroom.’

  ‘If you take it in the playroom you could use the jingle bells as well. Come on. And the maracas.’

  I came back. The cacophony was greater but further away.

  ‘Don’t you think if she’s anxious about what she eats, feeling watched all the time will make things worse? I mean, I eat more when I’m on my own. Don’t you?’

  Wrong rhetorical flourish. Obviously she does or she wouldn’t be the size she is.

  ‘No. I can’t say I do.’

  I went back to the washing up. ‘Well, maybe Zoe would. I would.’

  Judith jabbed at the pad of her forefinger with her thumbnail.

  ‘I don’t know why she came back from Canada. If I’d had my way, she’d never have gone.’

  ‘Have you asked her?’

  The sun was stronger. Shadows appeared on the grass outside.

  ‘She says I wanted her to fail all along.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Of course not. But I knew she wouldn’t cope and I told her so.’

  I waited, but Judith was not alive to the advantages of self-reflection.

  ‘And now she’s got herself into such a state I’m not sure she’ll cope with Cambridge either.’

  ‘She might be better there,’ I said. ‘I’ve certainly taught students who’ve been more settled at university than at home.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Zoe’s home life. My son is doing very well indeed. Reading medicine, at King’s.’

  ‘I know. You told me. So did Zoe. Look, Judith, I’m not trying to upset you. I thought you were asking what I thought.’

  I finished washing the plates and started on the knives.

  ‘She was a lovely little girl,’ said Judith. ‘So pretty. We used to go shopping together. Now she says I was dressing her up like a doll but she doesn’t remember what it was like, she loved every minute of it. And everyone used to say what good manners she had.’

  ‘You said.’ I wondered where she had learnt the manners. ‘She’s lovely,’ I said. ‘She’ll do well at Cambridge. She’s old enough to go to Canada and come home and go to university and be rude or polite all on her own. She has good qualities, even if they’re not the ones you wanted for her. She’ll be fun to teach. But maybe you’ll have to let go of her.’

  Judith looked up. ‘Hardly. She won’t eat enough to stay alive. Her clothes are awful, I had to force her into a suit for her Cambridge interviews. She couldn’t cope with Canada and she’s appallingly rude. Honestly, Anna, she’s not ready to leave. I’m amazed she could even manage the flights on her own. We got one of Brian’s colleagues to pick her up in Vancouver. God knows what people in Cambridge will think.’

  I dried my hands. Moth had gone quiet. ‘Maybe you need to trust her. Or at least behave as if you do.’

  ‘She’d kill herself,’ said Judith. ‘She’d be dead in six weeks.’

  It wasn’t clear to me that Zoe’s life expectancy was significantly longer than that under the current regime. There were slow footsteps on the stairs, as if the ghost had finally decided to make an appearance.

  ‘Here she comes,’ I said. ‘I’m going to find Moth.’

  He was sitting on the floor, leafing through one of Raphael’s more basic science textbooks.

  ‘Moth, love, are you all right?’

  He looked up and held out the book. ‘Mummy sing a stars.’

  Many of the stars that you can see in the sky at night are actually bigger than our sun. They are so far away that we measure their distances in light years.

  ‘Mummy sing twinkle twinkle.’

  I took him on my knee and began. He joined in, and behind our disharmony I heard Zoe greet her mother.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

  Judith’s chair scraped.

  ‘I was worried about you. Zoe, I just want you to be well, and happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.’

  That’s all any of us want for our children, but since we can’t achieve it ourselves it seems an unreasonably heavy burden to place on the next generation.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Moth. ‘Let’s find Raph and go see how those apple trees are doing in the garden.’

  4th Dec.

  Since I am hardly about to ask Mrs Barwick the favour of sending this at the moment, I have kept it open. Well, the child is sick. I tried to visit again today and was again denied at the door, but when I met Mrs Gillies at the stream and questioned her she agreed that the babe, a girl, cannot feed and lies screaming as if in the throes of pain, which it no doubt is. I could hear the screams from the ‘street’ outside, and when I peered through the door the child lay in a box on the table with no one near. It appeared to be wrapped in a meal-sack and I saw no sign of our layette.

  I meant to walk on up the hill, perhaps along the clifftop from where it is sometimes possible to see the ships bound for America and Canada, but although the morning was clear enough I soon found the wind so hard that I was forced to turn back. I had thought that winds strong enough to strike an adult to the ground were a mere figure of speech, or at least a reality known only to those who make a point of presenting themselves to the least hospitable climates on the globe, but it is not so; I turned back when a certain gust laid me flat on the turf, albeit with more damage to my dignity and my hooped petticoat (frequently, I find, closely related to each other) than any other part of my anatomy!

  It was as well that the local people have more sense than to offer themselves to such inclement elements and so my disarray went unwitnessed, though from the look Mrs Barwick cast towards me on my return you would think she had spies in the very rocks to report on my foolhardiness and its consequences.


  You can imagine Mrs Barwick and I are living on fine terms now. I have had no clean linen since the confinement and not even the luxury of a bannock to vary the dried fish and oatmeal – think of me as your Christmas preparations progress! (Don’t fret, I am not really hungry, only bored by a monotonous diet which will do me no harm and probably much good in the general scheme of life.) I would write to Miss Emily in complaint at Mrs Barwick’s insolence – except that it is beginning to cross my mind to doubt whether my letters to her are being sent.

  14

  THIS HAPPY PARTNERSHIP

  But this happy partnership between mother and child is not destined to last. As the child grows older, the mother’s attitude changes, often very abruptly, the child’s exhibitionist advances are rebuffed, and nagging and criticism often take the place of the former admiration, which is then shown to a younger member of the family. Consequently the child itself turns against its own wish to show off, represses it or turns it into the opposite.

  – Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Infants Without Families:

  The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries, p. 66

  There was still some light in the western sky at ten o’clock, and no movement in the branches of the tree outlined against it. I stretched, and wondered about going out again, wandering up over the turf, now sequinned with dew, to visit the anchorite for a while. When we get back to Oxford, I will probably wish I’d spent more time up there with her and less failing to write my book at the kitchen table.

  It had been a windless afternoon, and we’d spent all of it outside, with the sun glittering on the sea and the turf buzzing with insects, but being out alone at night is quite different. The scents on the air are layered: sea, and flowers, but cold stone also, and an Arctic breath on the wind, an intimation of winter. If you travelled west in a straight line from here, you would land not in Boston or New York but Greenland. Our summer afternoons are brought by the Gulf Stream, a warm ocean current cheating our real latitude. For now. Raph alternates his prophecies of a frozen or a burning end to European life.

  My screen gave up waiting for me to add to my book. I flipped through to the Elastoplast I seemed to be using to mark my place in the history of Colsay.

  The arrival on the island of the families from Inversaigh seems to have passed remarkably smoothly. The Rev. Adamson, who organised the transition and allocated the orphan children among the incoming families, records that ‘at the end of the Weeke I did conducte a Service of Thanksgiving whiche all attended with good Hearte’. Land at Inversaigh was poor and there was little fishing because the nearest safe landing in most winds is at Colla, which is now a ten-minute drive from the site of the Inversaigh village (which was cleared in 1838 and is now one of the more atmospheric sites in the west Highlands), but was then a difficult climb across hard terrain. The new islanders may well have been grateful for the relative plenty of Colsay, for at the end of the first year there the McColl estate received full rent for the first time in nearly a decade.

  Antonia Rivett would not have thought much of the Reverend’s writing, but I was grateful to be reminded that the Cassinghams were not responsible for all the hardship and misery on Colsay over the centuries. Giles’s great-great-whatever-grandfather bought it from Julius McColl, who was selling everything to pay off his dead father’s debts. There are still McColls living locally, and I wondered if they too felt their bloodline tainted by their great-grandparents’ greed. We would all rather be descended from victims, whom we confuse with the innocent, which is inconvenient because it is aggressors who tend to survive. The last innocents on British soil were (possibly) the Picts, who leave a few place-names to the language and no distinct trace in the population. Guilt runs in all our veins.

  The dead baby was a Cassingham, her oppressors’ DNA infusing the Colsay ground in which she lay. But she was not, of course 100 per cent Cassingham. Even Cassinghams are not capable of parthenogenesis.

  ‘Giles,’ I said. ‘Did the police ask you for a DNA sample?’

  He looked up. ‘You’re meant to be writing your presentation.’

  ‘Yeah. But I’m not. Did they ask you for a sample? Because they didn’t ask me.’

  He saved his work and looked out into the night. We’d taken the children into the garden in their pyjamas to see the stars come out and Raph had told me three things I didn’t know about astrophysics.

  ‘I wondered if you’d ask that.’

  ‘I’m asking.’

  Giles fiddled with the flex for his laptop. ‘It’s not terrible. I mean, it’s not my dark secret.’

  There is, of course, the national database of DNA. Which includes, as far as I can remember, everyone who has been arrested since the early 1990s, even if they were not prosecuted or were found innocent. I remembered reading about it and being outraged on behalf of my sons, who, being boys in an urban environment, are very likely to come into contact with the police sometime in the next fifteen years. I’ve also read about women who discover their partner’s violent history only when he repeats it.

  ‘Giles?’

  ‘Before we met. I’d just left school.’

  ‘Gap year?’

  He nodded. I waited. ‘Jesus, Anna, I’m not about to tell you I’m actually a convicted murderer.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I came here with some friends. A kind of last fling before we all went off.’

  ‘To find yourselves,’ I murmured. ‘Which friends?’

  ‘Bertie’s the only one you’ve met. And someone called Charles.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And – and a couple of girls.’

  ‘Careless not to bring one each.’

  He grunted, the public school way of expressing annoyance with one’s wife.

  ‘Thank you. Mostly we stayed on the island. It was good, actually. Good weather. We swam, a bit. Had bonfires on the beach. Bertie had been here before, he came with us a couple of times for summers. Pa sent a case of wine. And then we decided to go to Colla. One of the girls thought it would be fun to meet the locals.’

  My computer whirred and went to sleep.

  ‘And it wasn’t?’

  ‘We went in the evening. You know, it was light so late. We had a couple of drinks in the pub. I mean, I knew people were listening but we weren’t being loud. Only Pippa—’

  ‘Pippa?’

  ‘Pippa thought the accents were sweet.’

  ‘Bet that went down well.’

  ‘Yeah. So we were trying to get her away. She was – you know, kind of blonde and she had that sort of laugh and she kept laughing. She didn’t usually drink but she was – she was kind of trying to show Charley and she’d had a few. Anyway, we got her down to the harbour and we were getting the boat and she sort of sat there doing this impersonation. There was no wind. You know how voices carry. We were trying to shut her up but it was sort of funny and we’d all had a couple of pints. And we’d had some wine earlier. And Bertie’d brought some weed.’

  ‘So you shouldn’t have been in the boat anyway?’

  Giles rubbed his foot against his trouser leg. ‘If it’s the worst our boys do I’ll be happy.’

  I saw Raph and Moth, formed in my womb and held in my arms and fed with my milk and tucked up nightly by me, trying to cross the Sound in a small boat while high and drunk.

  ‘No way. Not my babies.’

  ‘We weren’t babies. And our parents were hundreds of miles away.’

  ‘I’m not letting them go anywhere until they’ve got enough sense not to do that.’

  Giles looked at me. ‘Isn’t that what Judith said?’

  The Milky Way was scribbled across the sky, a sign of human insignificance. But my children on my island on my planet in my solar system are still the centre of the universe.

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Some boys came. Younger than us but more of them. It got – you can imagine. It got a bit rough. Someone fell in.’

  ‘Someone?’
<
br />   ‘One of the boys. He was drunk. The lifebuoy was missing. You know. They always are.’

  ‘So he drowned?’

  Giles looked up. ‘No, of course not. Charley jumped in and held him up and someone went for help. But the police came. We all got arrested. Drunk and disorderly, breach of the peace.’

  ‘Locals too?’

  He shook his head. ‘Pa got really cross about that. No. Just us. They took us to the station at Inversaigh. Kept us in overnight. And then Pa and Bertie’s dad arrived next day and took us home. No charges.’

  ‘Bertie’s dad the QC?’

  ‘That helped. Kind of. But I didn’t come back for three years. And I didn’t go back to the pub until we started renovating.’

  I’ve been into the pub only to use the ladies’, which has the swirly carpet and cigarette-scarred toilet seats of unreconstructed pubs across the land.

  ‘And how was that?’

  ‘Fine, actually. I mean, it went a bit quiet when I went in. I bought a round and asked some people’s advice. When I took Raph in the other day they let him pull pints.’

  ‘Giles!’

  ‘He liked the hoses. Don’t worry, I let him taste some and he hated it. Put him off for years.’

  ‘What if he’d liked it?’

  ‘He didn’t. No one likes beer first time.’

  ‘Doesn’t stop them trying again.’

  ‘Pa was giving me port after Sunday lunch from when I can remember. He’s not about to start on a career of pre-teen boozing.’

  ‘Then don’t give him alcohol. I’m serious, Giles. He’s too young.’

  We looked at each other. I shouldn’t have been tired, having once again slept for seven unbroken hours. I’d imagined since Moth’s birth that sleep would transform me back into the slimline research machine I vaguely remembered from before the kids, but it didn’t seem to be working. Maybe the brain damage of childcare is permanent.

  I yawned.