Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  James Logan, Schoolmaster

  You are the schoolmaster at Colsay? How long have you been there?

  Five years.

  Have you taught in other places before this?

  Yes. I was under-master in Lennoxtown outside Glasgow.

  And would you say that your scholars here are better or worse than there?

  I am afraid that they are worse. They are for the most part very slow children.

  Is Gaelic used in the teaching in the school?

  No. I have no Gaelic.

  But the children speak English?

  They appear to understand it very well.

  Are they able to speak it?

  Most of them can say enough when they wish.

  They are able to speak as they do in Gaelic?

  I cannot speak to that, for I have no Gaelic myself.

  Do they write in English?

  A little. They are slow enough.

  And to what do you attribute this?

  To native habits. Laziness.

  Have the parents expressed any desire for their children to learn in Gaelic?

  They should rather be grateful that the children learn English.

  Do you have such apparatus and equipment as you need? Maps, compasses, books and the like?

  It is good enough. The children are not very apt for these things.

  Do you see signs of poverty in the children’s clothing? Do they have shoes?

  Their clothing is mostly very dirty.

  They have shoes?

  They go barefoot.

  In winter also?

  Yes.

  In snow?

  Yes.

  Does this trouble you?

  They are hardy enough.

  Do they seem to you well nourished?

  I cannot say. I do not see them at table.

  They bring no lunch to school?

  Perhaps they may. I suppose they must, for it is too far for them to go home to dinner.

  But you do not see their food?

  It is not my position to meddle with such matters.

  Would you say that they are, in material terms, better or worse off than the Lowland children with whom you are familiar?

  The Lowland children are not so hardy as these and could ill endure what these have been accustomed to from birth.

  You would not have your own children live as these do?

  I could not say. I am not a married man.

  There were more houses now, concrete bungalows scattered along a single-track road, some of them edged with barbed-wire fences to contain rusting bits of agricultural equipment, car chassis and barking dogs. Sheep grazed between the lots. Giles, I think, might understand crofters’ relationship with ‘their own land’ better than I do. They had an alternative. Why, for their children’s sake, did they not take it? There is something about land and human rootedness that I am not equipped to understand.

  John Barwick, Crofter

  You have been delegated by your neighbours to attend this commission. You have heard this morning’s evidence; is there anything you would like to add?

  Only about the jetty or slipway. And I recall the nurse.

  It was my mother was charged with her board and lodging.

  What is it that you wish to say about the jetty?

  Only that there is a place where one could be built so we could be landing the fish. Many a time the men have spoken of it.

  And have you discussed this with the landlord?

  With his factor. And we were told it would not be worth the money.

  Were the villagers offering to pay or were you asking the landlord to fund the works himself?

  We were offering our labour. There are stones enough, it’s only the cement would be wanting.

  It would cost something to bring the cement in, would it not?

  Yes. But we would bring it from Inversaigh ourselves if we must. It is not much we are asking for. And the fish would help us all to live.

  You wanted to speak of the nurse?

  Only to say that she did not help us. My mother, who is something of a nurse herself, although of course not trained in any way, spoke of her sometimes. She did not visit the women.

  She was sent by Miss Cassingham, is that correct?

  Yes. But she left after a few weeks and could not tolerate island life. She was drowned out in the Sound, along with the men she tempted beyond their judgement to take her across for the steamer.

  Did the people call on her at all? Were her services required during the period of her residence?

  I believe not. She was sent mostly to help the women in childbed but my mother told me that there were no births while she stayed.

  She was never asked to treat any injuries or tend any sick children?

  She did not stay long. There was little sickness that year, and of course the people preferred to consult my mother who had tended to them for many years.

  It was suggested that the people’s reluctance to avail themselves of her services resulted from the landlord’s threatening rent rises or eviction if they did not comply. Have you heard anything about that?

  My mother used to say so. It was believed the nurse was sent partly to see if we should be cleared to Canada or Australia. To report back.

  And did she in fact make any such report?

  No. Not that we knew on the island. If she had told Hugo Cassingham we should be evicted, I doubt we would all be here now.

  So is it the belief of the present islanders that they would now welcome a trained nurse?

  I cannot say. It is often the doctor is needed and cannot get to us.

  It would perhaps be better to have a trained nurse living among you?

  Perhaps if it were one of the island women. Not someone sent among us from outside.

  You want the landlord to pay for the training of a local woman?

  No, Sir. If we had our own crofts and our own land we could choose and pay a girl ourselves, do you see? Sir, we no more want to be always asking for things than Mr Henryson wants always to be giving; we want only to run our own affairs and spend the result of our own labours as we find best.

  You wish to be able to buy the island from the landlord?

  Of course we cannot do that. We would never be able to do that. We only wish to say, that we are not wanting to be given things for free, only to live on our own lands in our own way as people do throughout the kingdom.

  Outside the window, the fields gathered speed.

  ‘This service is now coming into Glasgow Queen Street. Please make sure you take all personal belongings with you when you leave the train.’

  I looked up. My back and shoulders had stiffened as they used to stiffen when I was regularly allowed to sit still and work for hours at a time, and I realized the last landscape I’d admired was somewhere west of Fort William, when I’d eaten the last of the crisps. I slid my laptop into my bag, checked that it wasn’t crushing the padded envelope full of Victorian letters that I shouldn’t have brought with me, and stood at the door watching as the city slowed down around me. People stood waiting on the platform, people with whom one could have conversations, people with heads full of ideas and worries and hopes and wild imaginings, people carrying computers that were also full of hopes and fears and fantasies, and books written by old people and young people in Paris and New York and Istanbul and Dakar, people listening to music from Detroit and Delhi and Iceland, eating food grown in China and processed in America and shipped through Germany. I threaded through the crowd, brushing suits, silk jumpers, football strips, and out to the road where buses jostled in the sun, taking people home to high-rise flats with lino floors, Victorian terraces gentrified and otherwise, 1960s concrete bunkers whose desirability is yet to be recognized in north London, bay-windowed ’30s semis where, thirty years ago, mothers in aprons and fluffy slippers threatened their children with inventive forms of violence and humiliation which were legal at the time. I pushed my sleeves up, felt sunshine on my skin,
and inhaled the dusty smell of the city in summer. Somewhere out there, also, was the house we would live in if I got the job, an eventuality that seemed more probable than it had when I boarded the train. They had sent a map with the letter inviting me for interview, as if the candidates weren’t expected to have the kind of mobile phone that makes such skills as map-reading redundant, but I was in no particular hurry. I turned left and set off, following the crowd, who presumably had reason for going that way.

  I found my hotel in good time to shower, change and lie on the bed watching television before going out to meet the interviewing panel and the other candidates over dinner. Oxford is useful for some things: the idea of competitive dining held no particular alarm. There was suddenly no further pleasure to be gained from standing in silence under hot water paid for by somebody else, even inhaling the shower gel that someone else had chosen for my use, and I climbed out on to a clean bathmat to wrap my hair in one clean towel and dry my body with another. I dropped both of these towels on the floor, choosing clean linen of one’s own over polar bears every time, and then, remembering that the chambermaid probably never had her laundry done for her either, picked them up again. It would perhaps be even worse than being the only woman if the other candidates were child-free women who came from places with hairdressers. I wandered round the room naked, cooling down. Is it worse to meet or imagine the competition? I turned off the lights over the mirror and reminded myself under no circumstances to mention the children at dinner. The Hôtel de la Mère will have few mirrors, perhaps none at all.

  There cannot have been many mirrors on Colsay, at least until the final decades of habitation. Our house probably contained the only one in the nineteenth century. Probably the same mirror now over the fireplace in the sitting room had reflected the deeds of Giles’s great-grandfather and his factor. I looked at the bedside clock. Giles should be getting the children’s supper ready. I had left a pasta sauce in the fridge to save Giles having to juggle cooking and childcare. I picked up my phone and put it down again. Later, so he doesn’t try to answer the phone while draining the pasta and answering questions about where Mummy and the software required to move 757s around the Himalayas in formation. I took my new, tissue-wrapped clothes out of their string-handled paper bags and decided against taking the tissue paper back to Colsay for arts and crafts projects. They were the kind of clothes to which price-labels are attached with thin satin ribbons rather than plastic tags, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the ribbons. I stroked a cream silk shirt, which could never be worn within twenty metres of a child. I will, I thought, put my make-up on and straighten my back and imagine myself suspended by a hook on my head as instructed by the Pilates teacher, and perhaps I will not be invisible, will not be erased by the ghost of the pram in the hall. I had even bought a new bra, as if planning adultery rather than employment.

  I wandered back into the bathroom to blow-dry my hair for the first time since the Canadian conference, hairdryers being, like vacuum cleaners, rather more distressing than ethnic cleansing in Raph’s cosmology. Then I turned back the bedclothes and lay back to watch an episode of Sex in the City which I thought I might have seen the first time around, when laptops had square edges and mobile phones were big enough to make a plausible weapon. The lighting in the bathroom had also shown some faint scribbling at the corners of my eyes and the blow-drying revealed wings of grey under my temples that weren’t there when we left Oxford. I opened the complimentary biscuits and thought that anyway, being middle-aged would probably be more fun than my early thirties have been; I couldn’t possibly have less sleep, our marriage would either get better or go away, and the children would without doubt get older. And perhaps I was about to usher in a new era of financial equality, which I would use to leverage all kinds of bargains. The wrinkles were not unbecoming and it is possible to have very elegant long grey hair. I would, I decided, standing up, taking my new tights out of the packet – the first tights for two years that would not have me hobbling with the astonishing pain of a big toe protruding through a hole all evening – without doubt rather go forwards than back. Which was just as well. I slid my arms into a charcoal coatdress with black ruffles at the wrists, a dress so serious that it came with its own padded hanger and a silk lining that felt like scented oil on skin accustomed to Shetland wool and the scratching of irate children, met my own gaze in the mirror, and went out.

  Next morning, I followed the secretary down the corridor. My heels on the wooden floor made a grown-up sound effect that I wasn’t sure I could fulfil. I touched my hair, which I had pinned up in keeping with my decision to age with the grace of Virginia Woolf. Having abandoned my PowerPoint presentation, I had placed myself, wrinkles, new tights and all, in the spotlight. I was perhaps trusting too much to my hairpins. Virginia Woolf’s knickers, I reminded myself, once fell down on Oxford Street and she stepped out of them and kept going, perhaps in the same spirit as, thirty years later, she walked into a fast-flowing river and did not swim. I tugged on my skirt, which was not tucked into my tights, and walked through the door and up to the lectern.

  ‘I had planned to give you a version of the paper on children, class and social space that I gave at the History of Childhood conference in London last year. However, during the summer I have found myself working on a different and unexpected project, and as it came to fruition in the last few days it seems to me now that this work, albeit unpolished, is the best example of my future research.

  ‘I want to talk to you about an episode in the history of Colsay. As I know most of you know, Colsay is a small island to the south of the Inner Hebrides, inhabited from far prehistory until the early 1960s. The island was never cleared, but relations with the English family who have owned Colsay since the mid-nineteenth century have always been vexed. Colonial arrogance and native superstition have both been blamed for the practices that killed eighty-five per cent of the babies born on Colsay between 1860 and 1880 before they were a fortnight old, and the fact that both readings are possible offers a sharp illustration of the impossibility of untangling history and ideology.’

  Zoe was right; there is nothing that has more impact on the terrors of the next generation than the way we tell the stories of the past. I heard myself talking about the politics of Scottish historiography. They were listening, though I hope I look as if I’m listening when I’m actually wondering if I should pick up more nappies on the way home. The head of department was making notes, though I sometimes write shopping lists while casting attentive glances at the speaker. Maybe it was a mistake, not to use PowerPoint. Too late now.

  I told them, avoiding the first person, about how Eve’s body was discovered, about the DNA test and the historical limits of the police investigation.

  ‘The Cassinghams maintain a family tree which did not produce a baby of the right age at the right time, suggesting an illegitimate and perhaps covert birth. Nevertheless, there were a great many dead infants on Colsay during these years, as a result of infant tetanus, which was endemic on Colsay, as on St Kilda, the Westmann Islands to the south of Iceland and some villages in the Faroe Islands. All of these remote North Atlantic communities endured infant mortality rates in excess of sixty per cent for periods of several decades between 1840 and 1900. The two medical historians who have investigated this phenomenon remain unsure of the cause; these were all societies that relied heavily on the harvesting of seabirds, which were stored and butchered around the home, and the first doctors to work with these communities believed that the instruments traditionally used to sever the umbilical cord were contaminated with blood from the birds, or that the cord stump might be anointed with fulmar oil, but in fact testing of artefacts and dwelling sites found no tetanus from these sources. The best we can say is that something that was done at birth, almost certainly involving the treatment of the umbilical cord, on these islands and not elsewhere, caused the disease from which up to ninety per cent of newborns died slowly and painfully within the first ten da
ys of life. The Parish Record shows a burial immediately following every birth on the island from 1871 to 1878, when a baby lived until the influenza outbreak of 1881.

  ‘None the less, these were public tragedies, resulting in public burials in the churchyards. There was no reason why, in the ordinary course of things, a child who died of neonatal tetanus should be interred in an unmarked grave in the landlord’s garden. Further research uncovered later tragedies involving babies on the island, but nothing that could plausibly result in this particular body in this particular place. And then a parcel of letters was found, hidden in the chimney of Colsay House.’