Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Mrs …?’

  She raised a hand, like the Queen Mother. ‘I’m just telling him, now. And this man, Henryson, he bled the people here dry. The children were going to school with empty bellies and the little ones, like your brother there, crying for brose, which was all the food they knew, and not getting it. And a bad business trying to have the place cleared and everyone sent off on a boat to Canada and enough places round here left deserted already. Anyway, what I’m telling you is when at last the old bugger died and they came to bury him, the people said they wouldn’t have him here along with those he’d starved to an early grave and thrown out of their homes. And the Rector said he was a Christian man and he’d lie in Christian soil like the rest of us and it would be up to the Lord to pass judgement on his life.’

  ‘Old bugger,’ said Moth appreciatively.

  ‘Only they wouldn’t hear of that in Colla, and come the funeral there was a bit of a shindy in the kirkyard, and old Virginia Grice from the island, she made a curse and she said that people would come from miles around to piss on his grave. So you’ll see, young man, it’s a place where you can be angry as well as sad.’

  ‘Were people angry with Hugo Cassingham?’ asked Raph.

  ‘It was different then—’ I said.

  She interrupted. ‘Aye. They were. He stayed down there in London and knew nothing about what was being done in his name up here. Or worse yet, he did know. His sister knew, from what I’ve heard.’

  ‘Emily?’ I asked, remembering the family tree. Had Emily Cassingham spent time here, in Colsay House? Before she married?

  ‘Emily. Terrible interferer, my gran used to say.’

  Moth pulled on my hand. ‘Moth wants a snack. More chocolate?’

  ‘We don’t usually give them chocolate. It was just a treat, wasn’t it, Raph?’

  ‘Can I see the grave? The one people peed on?’

  ‘Moth pee on a grave?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Certainly not.’ I am quite adequately embarrassed by Cassinghams already.

  We followed her round the corner of the church. Henryson’s grave was the incarnation of another type of Victorian bad taste, the kind with flying buttresses and stalagmites of fungal stone.

  ‘It looks like one of those loos in Paris,’ said Raph. ‘Remember, Mummy? The ones just for men.’

  ‘Pissoirs,’ I said. ‘They were more restrained.’

  Our local sybil laughed. ‘I’ve seen them. My nephew lives there, Paris. I’m off to my Robert’s grave now. You can say hello to your dad from me. He came to my house once, you know, when he was about your age. Though he’ll not remember it now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him.’

  ‘You do that.’ She glanced down at Raph, who was tracing engraved letters with his finger. ‘I heard you’ve been finding things in your garden.’

  ‘Bones,’ said Raph. ‘People bones from long ago.’

  ‘We had to call the police out.’ I stroked Moth’s hair. ‘It must happen a lot, round here. Archaeological remains.’

  ‘Aye. Not usually the bones, mind. But you keep an eye on what comes up when you’re building. Giles will have told you about Andrew MacDonald?’

  ‘Andrew MacDonald?’ I asked.

  Raph turned back to us. ‘Who’s your Robert?’

  ‘Robert a pig,’ muttered Moth, remembering a fictional pig who falls into a duckpond.

  ‘Robert was my brother, Raphael. Dead four years and I’ve still things to say to him.’

  ‘Oh.’ Raph wandered round the other side of the stone.

  ‘Your Giles pushed Andrew MacDonald into the harbour. Ten years gone. Or more like twenty. Did he never tell you?’

  ‘Is Andrew MacDonald related to Ian? To the policeman?’

  ‘Brothers,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d know. I doubt Giles knows who’s who. Bye-bye now.’

  So it wasn’t about me, or my mothering, at all, only a battle in which I have been caught. Another battle in which I have been caught. I don’t find the harbour-pushing incident very likeable, either.

  I straightened my back and took hold of the children’s hands. ‘Come on, now. I’ll buy you chips in the pub, OK?’

  Raph rubbed my hand against his cheek. ‘Sorry I kicked the flowers, Mummy.’

  I kissed his hair. ‘I’m sorry I pushed you. Chicken or burgers with your chips?’

  That’s what abusers do, they apologize and buy treats and then do it again.

  However, within a generation the population of this small island suffered another serious blow through shipwreck. One of those lost was James Grice, one of the children who had rowed across the Sound after helping his sister to bury their mother, and the loss of fourteen of the twenty-one men between the ages of sixteen and fifty was a serious blow for the island.

  The summer of 1769 was glorious. Iain McColl, writing from Inversaigh to his sister in Edinburgh in June of that year, recorded, ‘The People say there is no memory of such Fishing in these Parts these Ten Years and more, the Herring almost leaping from the Water into the Boats, and the Fishing stopped at Nighte lest the Boats founder under the Weight of their Riches and the Women working all Daye and Nighte at the Salting.’ The people of Colsay, not traditionally fisherfolk because of the lack of safe landing place, participated in this bounty, leaving the farming even more than usual in the hands of women.

  The Reverend Mitchell, who had taken over from Rev. Adamson the previous year, noted that he had twice had to reprove the men of Colla for taking their boats out on a Sunday, and on 3rd July he devoted his sermon to the subject. He appears to have been a fire-and-brimstone preacher of the old sort and the sermon was no doubt stirring to hear, but regrettably not as stirring as the thought of the schools of herring churning the water below the old church.

  The following week, most of the Colsay men rose in the early hours of that bright summer night, before their more devout elders left their well-earned rest, and took the larger of the island’s boats some way north of the usual range of these small craft, where the more practised fishermen of Inversaigh were reporting huge catches of mackerel. The men of Inversaigh were beginning to take their sixeens far out beyond sight of land, navigating by cloudscapes and the course of seabirds in flight and occasionally finding themselves within sight of the Norwegian coast, and perhaps the Colsay men were inspired by travellers’ tales heard at ceilidhs on summer evenings. No one survived to explain what the men were thinking when they left their sleeping wives, mothers and children.

  The weather on Colsay remained calm and clear as it can sometimes be at that time of the year, and hope lasted for some weeks; perhaps the men had been blown off-course (supposing them to have had a course in the first place) and were making their way back down the Norwegian coast, or perhaps they had been picked up by a westbound ship and were working their passage home. As the autumn storms began some families could no longer deny their concern, although there were other cases where men returned years after going missing, and indeed the mother of Matthew Dunnet went to her grave twenty-two years later murmuring that ‘Matty will be home soon.’ But in fact nothing more was ever heard or seen of any of the men who set out that day, and the consequences for the island are still felt today.

  I sipped my wine. The clouds were turning pink and the hill glowed in the evening light. The more I read about the island’s past, the more it seemed an insult to be installing a rain-mist shower and slamming doors when the electricity went off, like the woman I once heard complaining about the quality of the coffee in the café at the museum of the Jewish ghetto in Venice. Well, said Giles, they do sell coffee and actually it’s not cheap coffee, and why would drinking nasty coffee in any way counteract historical anti-semitism? It’s an offence against aesthetics, that’s all, and you, Anna, take those much more seriously than mere violations of the commandments. Admit it, now, you would sooner commit adultery than own a big television or a lace curtain. That would depend, I
said, looking up at him, on whom you are proposing as my accomplice, and after a little more conversation along those lines we went back to the hotel, he apparently forgetful of the fact that he was taking to bed someone who grew up with lace curtains and whose mother had recently bought the big television. And he has been very careful, Giles, to commit no aesthetic offence in the renovation of the blackhouse, much more careful than any of his forebears were about not stealing land and starving children … I stood up and rolled my shoulders, wandered over to the window. Zoe was sitting on the beach.

  She looked round as my feet scrunched over the pebbles.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’ I sat down next to her. The waves were dark blue, their foam catching the sun’s pink. A fleet of white birds surfed the breakers. The stones weren’t arranged for sitting on. ‘Don’t the pebbles bruise your bottom?’

  She shrugged. ‘No.’

  ‘Medieval monks and nuns used to put stones in their shoes and beds to mortify the flesh.’

  Zoe watched a raven flap across the sunset. The flowering grasses running down to the water were back-lit and a path of copper light began to form, leading west over the sea. ‘Like the opposite of the princess and the pea.’

  ‘Yes. Though some of the holier ones started off in rich families. I suppose self-denial’s less fun when it’s compulsory.’

  The raven drifted on to a rock and stood surveying its domain with a critical eye.

  Zoe pulled her sleeves down over her hands and shivered. ‘You think I’m a princess.’

  Her shoulder blades poked through her stretched jumper. I touched her arm. ‘I don’t think you’re a holy woman. Did you have a good day today?’

  She shook her head. ‘I fought with Mum. I’m cold. Can we go back to your place?’

  I cast a last look at the sea and sky. ‘Come on. The kids are in bed. I’ll make hot chocolate.’

  She nodded. ‘Thanks.’

  I tipped half a pack of gingernuts on to a plate and put it between us. The cocoa was too hot to drink and I dribbled it from my spoon back into the cup, watching the reflection of the overhead light break into concentric rings as miniature chocolate waves spread across the mug. I took a biscuit and dipped it.

  ‘Have you been thinking about what you’re going to do next year?’ I sound so much like a parent these days.

  Zoe’s hand moved towards the plate and then back again. She warmed it on the Bird Mug. ‘I’m not going to Cambridge.’

  I heard Giles’s tread on the stairs. Giles refuses to creep around the house like a burglar, has no map of creaking floorboards and clicking door-handles engraved on his heart.

  ‘Hi, Zoe.’ He peered into my mug. ‘Did you make any for me?’

  I looked up. ‘I thought you preferred more sophisticated refreshments.’

  He stroked my hair. ‘If you’re offering.’

  ‘It’s in the playroom. Behind my laptop. Would you bring my glass?’

  Zoe was eating a biscuit.

  ‘But you don’t want to stay at home, do you?’ I asked her.

  She shrugged. ‘Do I have a choice?’

  What I would do with a free year. Grape-picking, with the sun on my back and the smell of the dark leaves on my hands. Paris: ladies in scarves with small dogs under manicured trees in the park, and the way even the rain falls differently there. The overnight train to Venice, not for the golden menagerie of Piazza San Marco but for the mist oiling the stones along the back streets and the frescoes flaming out high in dark churches. And then on, why not, to Prague, Budapest, Istanbul, Sana’a, as the leaves in Vienna and Munich turn gold and the trees of London and Paris stand naked under streetlights.

  ‘Oh, Zoe. You could do anything.’ Giles handed me a glass of wine and I drank most of it.

  ‘Zoe? Half a glass?’

  She shrugged again, sipped her chocolate. ‘Maybe later.’

  Giles sat down and took a biscuit, which he turned over as if it might have the mark of Satan on the underside.

  ‘It’s from Spar,’ I said. ‘Own brand. Glucose and hydrogenated vegetable fat and some e-numbers.’

  He bit it. ‘So, Zoe. How’s it going?’

  Giles, of course, has students too, and I am probably wrong in imagining that fledgling ornithologists are less given to complicated distress than our hair-flicking historians.

  She drank some more cocoa and took a second biscuit. Her shoulders had relaxed and her skin tone was that of someone more recently alive. ‘Anna was about to tell me what to do next year.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘No such thing.’

  Giles finished his biscuit, grimaced, and drank some wine. ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I wanted to go to Canada.’

  ‘You did go to Canada,’ I pointed out. ‘Do you mean you want to go back?’

  She shook her head. ‘Never.’

  ‘What are the parameters?’ asked Giles. ‘You’re going to Cambridge next autumn, I take it, all being well. Do you need to earn some money?’

  ‘Dad was going to pay for Canada. I think he’d probably cough up for anything that keeps me away from Mum.’

  Giles and I exchanged glances.

  ‘Where would you really like to go?’ I asked. ‘If you could do anything at all, anywhere in the world?’

  She put her mug down. ‘I know I’m supposed to be excited about all these opportunities and I’m really lucky and everything, but I mean, just look around you. Open any newspaper. What am I supposed to do that will make anything better?’

  I finished my hot chocolate. Found an institution, I thought. Ban the Bomb or Stop the War or End Poverty Now. Votes for Women. Decide what matters most and work out what you can do about it. That’s how people abolished slavery and extended the franchise and provided universal education and healthcare. Maybe Zoe’s problem, and even Raph’s, is satiety. I hoped I wasn’t going to spend my old age answering to committees of despairing youth for my carbon footprint in years gone by. ‘Well, it might be fun. More fun than waiting for the apocalypse with your mother.’

  Giles refilled my wineglass. ‘Anna, do you remember Peter Freidmann?’

  ‘Your Keble physicist?’

  When I first met Giles, he used to get up in what felt to me like the middle of the night to cycle off to the river and row up and down while a bird-like Austrian woman called Clara shouted instructions at him and seven other men with beguiling shoulders (long since, at least in Giles’s case, gone the way of my flat stomach and upward-looking breasts). Perhaps, I thought, Zoe could be a cox. Peter Freidmann was Clara’s husband, thin from a vegan diet and vague from long hours in a field of physics that was never adequately explained to me.

  ‘He’s just got a Chair in Vienna. I was in touch with him because they’re building a house that’s meant to be carbon-neutral. Growing their own fruit and veg, and I think hens. They’ve got three kids and Clara’s just gone back full time. It’s a bit of a struggle.’

  Zoe was watching him as if he’d just galloped in with good news from the western front. ‘Do they want an au pair?’

  Giles drank some more wine. ‘He said they were wondering about it. I can find out, if you like. But Zoe, I have to tell you that no reasonable family is going to want an au pair who passes out from hunger on a regular basis.’

  She looked down and her hair swung across her face. She pushed it back. ‘I didn’t pass out. Please ask them. It sounds totally cool. And I’m OK with kids, aren’t I? I did German. I’d like to speak German again. Can you e-mail them? Or call? You can use my phone.’

  So maybe a carbon-neutral house outside Vienna was less totally fucked than wherever her mother happened to be at the time.

  ‘What would your parents think, Zoe?’ I asked. ‘Would they approve?’

  ‘Oh, Mum’ll say it’s like skivvying or something. Probably that your friends want cheap childcare. And that I wouldn’t know one end of a vacuum cleaner from the other and can’t be trusted with kids.’

&nb
sp; ‘But would they mind my making enquiries for you?’ asked Giles.

  She finished her third biscuit. ‘I’m over eighteen, aren’t I? I don’t need their consent to ask someone to e-mail a friend. Please. Honestly, I know I’d be better there.’

  ‘OK,’ said Giles. ‘OK. I can ask. But two conditions: I’m going to be up-front with them about the food issues and if Peter and Clara are interested you negotiate directly and you sort it out with your parents, OK? And if they’ve got any sense, which they do, and if they take Anna’s and my advice, which they will, your going and staying will depend on your health. So you’ll need to address that, Zoe, if you don’t want to end up back home with your mother.’

  She brushed the crumbs from her fingers. ‘OK. It’s a deal. Promise.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it yet,’ I muttered, though I remembered quite well setting off for my year in Paris knowing even less about the people to whom I was confiding my welfare for the next ten months. There must be an annual tide of teenage girls sweeping across Europe in the belief that other people’s families are kinder and more reasonable than their own. And who knows, maybe some of them are right; I was.

  6th Dec.

  The screaming has stopped now, which is no good sign, and still I am not permitted to attend. Of course it is too late for me to intervene in any way, and has been almost certainly too late since the ‘knee-woman’ cut the cord, but I have laudanum and could ease the sufferings of both mother and child while they await the inevitable end of this sorry tale. I have not left the house and have made no effort to see anyone – there is really no point when they are so set on death and destruction. Really, that ‘knee-woman’ is no better than a witch. I do not know if it is the same person, but apparently there is also a woman here who will sell ‘good winds’ to anyone about to make a journey and cure people of certain sicknesses by means that my informant would prefer not to describe. For all there is the church at the end of the street and they spend three hours huddled there being shouted at by the minister every Sunday the weather lets him over the Sound, these people are really barely so much as medieval.