Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  ‘Mummy! It’s Zoe. Can we have biscuits?’

  I went into the hall. ‘Hi, Zoe. No, Raph, no biscuits. I think there are some crumpets in the freezer you could have when it’s snacktime.’

  ‘Moth have a biscuit?’

  ‘There aren’t any biscuits, love.’

  Raph frowned. ‘There were yesterday. I saw them.’

  Zoe and I exchanged shifty glances.

  ‘Well, today there are crumpets. It’s not good for people to eat the same things all the time.’

  ‘Is Giles with the puffins?’ asked Zoe.

  The knife I was using to prise frozen crumpets apart grazed my palm.

  ‘Again. Though to be fair he changed the sheets this morning.’

  Zoe fiddled with the wrapper of the block of butter on the table. ‘I don’t think my dad’s ever changed a sheet in his life.’

  I deposited a crumpet in each slot of the toaster. ‘Without in any way condoning biological determinism, I have yet to meet a man who can put a duvet into a duvet cover. But I expect it’s just social conditioning. Or coincidence.’

  ‘Daddy tried but he ended up in the duvet cover himself,’ said Raph. ‘Mummy, if there isn’t any honey can we have golden syrup like when you were a little girl?’

  I told Raph once that I used to have margarine and golden syrup on white toast when I got home from school and he has never quite got over the thrill.

  ‘There is honey. Look.’

  Moth came in with The Flopsy Bunnies. ‘Mummy read it sleepy lettuce?’

  ‘Mummy’s making your snack.’ Zoe held out her arms to him. ‘Zoe read the sleepy lettuce.’

  ‘Did you know people eat rabbits?’ asked Raph.

  ‘I don’t.’ Zoe lifted Moth on to her knee, the muscles in her arms standing out like ropes. ‘I don’t eat meat at all.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s bad for the environment. If everyone was vegetarian, no one would be starving.’

  ‘Really? Not the babies in Africa?’

  The crumpets popped up, but they were still cold as death. I pushed them down again.

  ‘I wanted to do that,’ said Raph.

  ‘Sorry.’ I forced the lever up again and he came to press it down.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ I said. ‘There are more than enough calories in the world for everyone anyway. There’s a global food surplus. It’s about distribution, not supply.’

  ‘It takes ten times as much land to produce a beefburger as it does to produce the same amount of protein in beans,’ said Zoe. ‘Not to mention the methane.’

  Raph stood on tiptoe to see into the toaster. I have been known to set crumpets on fire. ‘Daddy doesn’t let us eat beefburgers. Mummy, can I be vegetarian?’

  ‘Oops,’ said Zoe. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Zoe read it sleepy lettuce!’

  ‘When Benjamin Bunny grew up, he married his Cousin Flopsy. They had a large family, and they were very improvident and cheerful.’

  ‘Yes, if you want to,’ I said. The crumpets reappeared, only a little black at the edges.

  ‘What, really can I?’

  I ran a jammy knife from breakfast under the cold tap.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned. I don’t like cooking meat anyway. You’ll have to push the environmental argument with Daddy.’

  ‘I do not remember the separate names of their children; they were generally called the “Flopsy Bunnies.”’ Zoe sniffed. ‘He needs to think globally.’

  I started rubbing lumps of cold butter into the crumpets. ‘No salami, you know. No ham or sausages, or roast chicken.’

  Raph scooped a globule of butter off one of my burnt offerings and ate it. ‘I don’t mind. I don’t like things being dead. I don’t like them in my mouth.’

  I offered the plate to Zoe and she took one. ‘Things will still die.’ I fanned the air with a crumpet, to cool it for Moth. ‘Only you won’t eat them.’

  The population of Colsay, like that of many other marginal communities along this coast, was in fact swollen by the Clearances of the 1840s. The island itself was not cleared – at least until the last permanent inhabitant left in the 1960s – although threats and the rumours of threats persisted throughout the nineteenth century. Half the families from Rothkinnick were rehoused on Colsay in the wake of the loss of the Helga, though within ten years four of the six households had left for Glasgow and Canada. Three or four landless cottar families came to stay with crofting relatives on Colsay after evictions elsewhere and stayed for many years, apparently accepted into the broadly egalitarian life of the community there. Other settlements forced to accommodate the dispossessed in this way suffered very badly for it as hunger became endemic rather than seasonal and what we might now call environmental health problems relating to sanitation became acute, but on Colsay these consequences were to some extent offset by what some outsiders felt able to call a divine limit on population increase, ‘ordained by God that the people of this sea-girt isle might never exceed its bounty’. For most of the nineteenth century, infant mortality on Colsay was well in excess of 50 per cent, peaking between 1865 and 1880 at around 85 per cent.

  There has been no modern research to confirm the views of unqualified Victorian observers, but comparison with the histories of other North Atlantic islands (particularly the Westmann Islands to the south of Iceland and the Faroe Islands) as well as contemporary anecdotes suggest that the likely cause was infant tetanus. The majority of infants affected died in the first eight days of life, being unable to feed, listless and then racked by muscle spasms which left their bodies unnaturally distorted. The islanders seem to have been schooled to accept these losses as God’s will, although the nearest thing to a contemporary record of their views is contained in the report of the Highland Commission, which heard the testimony of a generation who had lost the majority of their cousins and siblings within days of birth but had no first-hand memory of these brief lives, nor of the characteristically ham-fisted response of the Cassingham family.

  The Highland Commission records suggest that Emily Cassingham, the unmarried sister of Lord Hugo, visited the island and felt the need to intervene in the ways of birth and death. Emily, who remained childless herself, became increasingly devoted to charitable endeavour in later life and sponsored three child health clinics in Edinburgh. Even at this early date, she seems to have taken maternal and infant welfare as her pet cause. Rather than having a local woman trained in nursing and midwifery, Lady Emily chose to send an English girl who had no Gaelic at all. The islanders were placed under great pressure to accept this unknown outsider’s participation in the most intimate moments of their lives in the name of progress and modernity, threatened with rent rises and even eviction if they continued in the old ways.

  Perhaps fortunately for all the islanders but the hapless infants at the centre of this conflict, the nurse did not stay long. She drowned with three of the six men whom she bribed to row her to the steamer, against their better judgement, for her passage home for Christmas in December 1878, and no births took place during her time on Colsay. If they had, it seems possible both that the women would have refused the alien nurse’s attendance and that the Cassingham family would have carried out their threats, setting a new standard for the shameful behaviour of English landowning families in the Highlands. Sir Hugo and later Hartley Cassingham were convinced that the islanders were mired in foolish superstition and needed, for their own good, to be forced into the modern era.

  If we consider the Victorian habit of comparing Highland people to ‘savages’, the roots of this attitude become easier to understand; the people of these islands were merely another group of ignorant natives to be bribed and threatened into the industrial age. Neither can we exonerate the patronizing charity of Lady Emily, a Victorian lady who, without a young family of her own, devoted much of her life to interference with the home lives of those less fortunate than herself.

  I pushed the book away and stared
out into the night. A full moon hung over the sea, and the garden wall and the rocks on the shore reflected its stony light. Lady Emily was only trying to help, I found myself thinking, and who is the Reverend to say that she had no life of her own, just because she didn’t marry? In any case, there was no reason for burying any of those babies in our garden. Especially if it was a mark of orthodoxy to refuse the care that would have saved them, the children would have been laid to rest in the graveyard with whatever passed for full honours under the Nonconformist ministry of the day. If I had been allowed to choose at the time, I would certainly have sent away the midwife who oversaw most of my first labour, who held my legs down with her elbows as I twisted and cried out on the bed and Giles turned away in embarrassment. Who left me afterwards for half an hour still splayed and helpless in stirrups with a drip in my hand, unable to reach the baby, while she ran some errand, Giles slept in a chair and a cleaner wandered in and out. If I saw her drowning now I would watch and smile. It is no wonder women’s careers collapse after childbirth; the image of ourselves exposed and whimpering on hospital beds reappears in our minds as we ascend the podium or open the meeting. I had no trouble understanding why the women of Colsay would send an English nurse packing. I remembered also the final weeks of my own pregnancies and the conviction, which took root and grew in my mind until my head was as full of death as my belly was of life, that I or the baby would die, that the reality I could no longer postpone was the end and not the beginning of life. And when the moment came the second time and I began to labour, it seemed at last that birth and death were not that different, that perhaps in the best of both cases one would know what one was doing and submit, as grass submits to wind or sand to water.

  Maybe it was like that for those mothers, maybe their babies’ deaths were the same elemental process as their births. There must have been an interim period, a few days when those small beings, not yet human, hung between the womb and the grave. Would you, I wondered, make little clothes, prepare a cradle? Or would you wait awhile, gathering your strength, to see if God wanted the new creature now or later? I did not let Giles assemble the cot until each baby was old enough to have presents, middle names, guests, the outline of a place in the world, and even then it seemed that these things were there to keep the baby with us, to stop it turning back to its own place among those who are not alive. And there were moments in the first weeks of both children’s lives when I believed I would have been happy to see them die, to restore a world that did not revolve around the baby’s mouth. The newly born and the dying are not like us, and our love and hate for them are stories we tell ourselves to help us through the night. Only anchorites find a way of getting through life that does not depend on the daily and hourly denial of death. I saw, for a moment, out of the corner of my eye, why the mothers on Colsay might have chosen their children’s deaths, and their reasons had nothing to do with ignorance or stupidity. But they also brought no need for secret burial.

  There were footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Giles. ‘They’re both asleep. Or at least silent. What are you reading? I’m afraid that bloody bird is still in there, I’m going to have to take the ventilation plate off and get it out.’

  I felt as if someone had switched the light on while I was still dreaming. ‘What?’

  ‘The bird. It’s quieter but it’s still in there. Can’t really leave it another night.’

  Wings beating the brickwork, reptilian feet scrabbling against plaster.

  ‘No. I’d rather it was gone. But Giles, what if it gets out? Flies around the house?’

  Bashing itself on windows, banging against lights, spattering faeces on beds and Persian rugs.

  He looked surprised. ‘Well, I won’t let it, of course. Stay down here, if it bothers you. I’ll shut the door.’

  I opened the book again. ‘And the children’s doors, please.’

  However strong the islanders’ sense of Hugo Cassingham’s failures as a landlord, there was no joy when his son Hartley took over the responsibilities of the estate as the old man began to decline in the late 1880s. There had been ugly rumours about Hartley Cassingham’s conduct towards local girls in his youth, and gossip – admittedly among those who had much more obvious reasons to hate and fear the family – that he expected droit de seigneur in exchange for rent relief during the hungry years. It is unlikely that there was serious foundation for these suggestions, for allegations of rape would have been a grave matter even for Lord Cassingham’s son, and there is no reason why the most dissolute young man with access to all the drawing-rooms and back alleys of London and Edinburgh would have found it necessary to complicate the family position by sowing his wild oats among the rigorously Calvinist and malnourished virgins of Colla and Inversaigh. Nevertheless, Hartley Cassingham was a man of whom such things could still be said a hundred years later—

  The front gate clicked and Judith bulked like Frankenstein’s monster in the moonlight. It was half-past ten.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I murmured to my laptop. ‘We didn’t advertise a holiday counselling service.’

  Though, come to think of it, we’d probably make a profit if we did. Tackle your compulsions in the peacefulness of this ancient isle! Let the spirit of our anchorite watch over your addled teenagers! Twice-weekly therapy sessions an optional extra. My parents fought so intensively over planning holidays that the travelling itself became almost redundant. We would spend two weeks on a series of interchangeable Greek and Spanish beaches, where my mother followed the holiday routines described in the magazines with which she kept the doctors’ waiting room supplied and my father marched the countryside as if he were part of a defeated army in hiding from the legions of women uniformed in swimwear and wielding pink novels, slinking back across the sand-scattered tiled floor sunburnt and blistered in the late afternoons. It was too late to hide, but I was still annoyed that Judith ignored the front door and tapped at the window as if she were Catherine Linton, who is allowed to behave like that only because she is fictional and dead.

  ‘I saw you were still up,’ she said. ‘Is it all right if I come in for a quick chat?’

  ‘I was working.’

  She looked in at the laptop, my glass of wine inky in a pool of light, the tower of monographs on eighteenth-century history. ‘Sorry.’

  It was the second time I’d heard her apologize. ‘Never mind. I’m not making much progress anyway. Go round, I’ll open the door.’

  I drank the rest of my glass and hid the bottle in the flour cupboard before I let her in.

  ‘Thanks.’ She stooped to take her shoes off, and noticed that I was wearing mine. ‘Should I take them off?’

  ‘Not to bother. Come in, Judith.’

  ‘Sorry. Your evenings are precious, I remember that. Though of course Brian was out at work all day.’

  I followed her into the kitchen. She didn’t seem drunk, smelt of nothing more sinister than pink perfume. Mutton dressed as buttercups. ‘Giles is out on the cliffs a lot. That’s why I work in the evenings.’

  She sat down, and the chair creaked. ‘I made a point of spending the evenings with Brian when the children were young. When he wasn’t too busy. I mean, the marriage is the basis of family life, really, isn’t it?’

  I filled the kettle. Outside, the moon had moved round behind a tree and clouds were muffling the stars in the west. ‘That’s a very historically specific idea,’ I said. Judith was picking at the dried porridge on the table. ‘And I’m not sure it’s done anyone much good. Anna Freud found that some children did better in intelligently run institutions than in families.’

  ‘Anna Freud?’

  ‘Sigmund’s daughter. Specialized in child psychoanalysis. Wartime and post-war, especially interested in what happened to child development when mothers went to work. Or ran away.’

  She turned round a letter from the Inland Revenue so she could read it. ‘Not much, I should think.’

  I made the tea, Giles�
�s lapsang souchong. I had no intention of giving her a biscuit.

  ‘How’s Zoe?’ I asked.

  The porridge came loose. Judith shrugged. ‘She’s – she’s still thin enough for it to be dangerous.’ She looked up. ‘We put her in hospital before. When she was sixteen. She won’t even see a doctor now, and legally we can’t force her. I’d have her sectioned.’

  ‘She doesn’t seem crazy to me.’

  Judith pushed her tea away. Some slopped on to the table, over the porridge. ‘Sorry. Anna, she’s starving herself to death.’

  Not actually to death, just close enough not to have to take responsibility for life. Rather like the anchorite, hovering on her cliff between the world and eternity, or like the nineteenth-century mothers of Colsay, who could see more urgent issues than individual living and dying. I mopped the table with one of the bibs Moth has always refused to wear. ‘People can do that without being crazy. Hunger strikers. Suffragettes. People fasting for God. Maybe she needs to work out what she’s protesting against. I mean, her generation have grown up being told that if they don’t consume less than we did the planet will end on their watch, haven’t they? And that they’re all obese? It’s a logical response.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if it was one of yours.’

  Would I? Raph with every bone in his face shadowed and his jumper draped over his ribcage, Moth – but I couldn’t imagine Moth as anything but his chubby, milk-scented self. ‘I can’t tell that. I know I’d be very anxious. I can only tell you what it looks like when she’s not mine.’

  ‘It’s not about logic. It’s not that abstract.’

  ‘You’re worried it’s about you.’

  She pulled the tea back and ran her finger round the rim. ‘I gave up everything. I’ve got a degree, you know. Geography. I’d have liked a career. But I couldn’t, not with Brian being a doctor, and they worked much harder twenty years ago. On call and up all night. He worked and I did everything else. It’s not just arranging flowers. I sorted out insurance and got the cars serviced and dealt with all the house moves and bought birthday cards for him to send his mother and took her food when she stopped cooking for herself. And he did complain, if I didn’t get things right. Because he was working so much and I was just at home. He expects a certain – standard.’ She glanced round the kitchen, seeing it, and me, through Brian’s eyes.