The Lost Child

by Caryl Phillips

  “I don’t mean now, Julius. Look at us, we’ve got to get out of this room first and get ourselves a bigger place. I just mean later on. In time.”

  “Later on when?” He slammed the whisky down on the coffee table and woke up Ben, who began to cry. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  He stood now, the toes of his bare feet curling into the mangy rug and his face radiating anger, the source of which was not understandable to her. She picked up her son and tried her best to comfort him in her arms, but she continued to stare directly at Julius. After a minute or so her agitated husband began to finally relax, and he reached behind himself in order that he might master his balance as he sank back down onto the settee.

  “For Christ’s sake, Monica, why do you insist on provoking me in this way?”

  She continued to rock Ben in her arms and waited for him to finish.

  “You know I couldn’t give a fig about the television set, don’t you?”

  “I know.” She paused. “I know.”

  “We don’t have the money for another child, you know that, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  When their second son was born, Monica considered asking Julius if he minded if they named him William, after her favourite poet. However, they left the understaffed local hospital and returned to their disheartening bed-sitting-room with their new child still nameless.

  * * *

  Outside, the snow continued to fall gently, while two men sat in the window seats of the café nursing cups of tea that had long ago gone cold. She looked down on them and could see that one man had on a khaki jacket that looked like part of an army uniform, but nothing else about him brought to mind the notion that he might have any familiarity with military discipline. His short hair was uncombed, his shoulders were hunched, and occasionally he would slap his gloved hands together and then tuck them back into his armpits. His friend was swaddled in an overcoat that was clearly two or three sizes too big, and his face was half hidden beneath a trilby hat that was set at an improbably jaunty angle. An overstuffed shopping bag occupied the third chair, but it wasn’t immediately apparent to which man it belonged. The ashtray was full and looked as if it hadn’t been emptied all day, but it was pushed to one side, for neither man showed any inclination to smoke. Without warning, as though receiving a prompt from the wings, the man in the overcoat produced a folded newspaper from inside his coat and with a pencil began to circle various items before tossing the newspaper down in front of his friend, who displayed no interest in the offering. The gesture seemed designed to goad his companion to please look for a job—or perhaps a room—but the colder man hugged himself and stared out of the window, where a light drizzle had begun to fall and was already making an icy grey soup of the thin layer of snow that had settled overnight. The more generous man stood and slowly buttoned up his overcoat. As he left the café, it became clear that the shopping bag belonged to the military man, whose head didn’t move, but whose cold, rheumy eyes followed the tall man out onto the street and then tracked him as he flicked up his collar and began to trudge away from the café.

  Standing by the bedroom window and looking down at the two men in the café had kept Monica busy for most of the past hour while her two boys slept peacefully on the bed behind her. Last year, after three problematic years in the cramped bed-sitting-room, she and Julius had finally scrambled together enough money to move one floor up into a one-bedroom flat that offered the same view over the café, but this time from both a bedroom window and a window in the living room. At night the two boys slept head to toe on the settee in the living room, but during the day, if they needed a nap, she let them lie out on the double bed. She sometimes worried that the acrid fumes from the paraffin heater might be harmful, but she assumed not or somebody would have written an article in one of the posh Sunday papers, which was most likely how she would know. She moved across to the bed and looked down at the boys, but they both seemed alright. She remained unconvinced that she would ever grow comfortably into the role of a mother, for the speed and ease with which her body had dealt with pregnancy suggested a lack of any real engagement with the process. And of course, part of defining herself as a mother involved watching and appreciating the role of the father, but not only did Julius continue to behave indifferently towards his wife, these days he also appeared to be increasingly removed from his two children.

  Monica passed quietly into the living room and felt sure that the two men seated on the settee would have some understanding of the scene in the café, but she also knew they would have nothing to say to her on the matter. Were she to try and describe the situation, Julius might glare to let her know that she should be quiet, but the other man would most likely be insulted that a relatively young Englishwoman was addressing him, and of course, offending this man might make life difficult for them all. Their talks were not going well, this much she knew, but Lloyd Samuels seemed unconcerned. There was an air of quiet arrogance about him that didn’t match up with what Julius had told her when he returned from the trip he had made back home. His supposedly charming and charismatic school friend had funded Julius to fly out and deliver a full report on the situation in England, but the conceited man sitting in their living room was definitely smaller and more rotund than the man Julius had described. Furthermore, Julius never mentioned Lloyd Samuels’s insecurities, but from the moment she had opened the door and welcomed him into their flat she could see vulnerability in his darting eyes.

  Once again the snow was falling, but this time it was not settling. The café was closing up, but the semiuniformed man was still sitting at the table with the two discarded cups in front of him. He must have picked up the newspaper, for it was now jutting out of the top of the shopping bag like a chimney pot that was about to topple over. Julius stood up and snapped on the lights, which made it challenging to see out, and she realized that the few hardy souls wandering the snowy streets could now look up and enjoy the theatre of their lives. As she pushed back the sleeves of her cardigan, her full attention returned to the window, where she found herself longing to see a flower or a tree. Gardens were the missing factor, and she thought of her childhood friend Hester Greenwell, whose family had a large spread of a garden behind their detached stone house, but her father was the local doctor, so such extravagance was to be expected. Her own father always seemed uncomfortable whenever she went around to play at Hester’s, making it clear that she couldn’t stay for tea because Hester’s mother insisted on calling it supper. “Invite her over to our place,” he said. “After all, we’ve got a garden too.” And so Hester started to visit Monica’s house, and more often than not she would stay for tea.

  Monica sat down at the table and tried to busy herself so the men wouldn’t think she was eavesdropping. Thanks to Julius, there was now enough light to read the newspaper she had bought last weekend when she took the children to the park. If there was a match on, she would go to the top of the hill and look down into the distant football ground and try to convince Ben to remember the names of the players and take a general interest in the game. She knew it was the kind of thing that a dad should be doing, but there was no point bargaining on this from Julius. However, because there was no match, she had sat apart from everybody else by the playground and watched Ben enjoying himself on the slide, while she let Tommy hurdle over her knees and pass from one side of the bench to the other. Her attention was suddenly seized by the wind combing through the trees, and then she looked up to the heavens and watched an aeroplane drawing a desperately slow line against the sky. Almost imperceptibly, she could feel herself striking out on one of her puzzling journeys into make-believe, and she knew she had to get a grip on herself. As Ben left the playground and began to run towards her, she saw he was in danger of being swallowed up by a group of Japanese tourists who were chatting incessantly and taking photographs. They parted abruptly and opened up like a river flowing around a protruding rock, and once they had passed on their way they left behind he
r bemused son all fresh and clean and standing before her.

  “Of course, I understand.” She listened to Julius trying gently to press his own case. Now that the island appeared to be moving closer to independence her husband wanted the promise of a government position, or a title of some description, but this was beginning to seem unlikely. As Monica stood and moved back to the window, a quick glance revealed that the men were now angled towards each other on the settee, but she once again gave them her back.

  She heard Julius laugh unconvincingly. This was the second time that Lloyd Samuels had visited their flat, but unlike earlier in the week, when he had scarcely crossed the doorstep, this time it was clear that he intended to stay awhile, and Julius had asked Monica if she would make coffee for them both. She thought that the men might talk for an hour or two before moving on to the pub and then go on from there to their evening meeting, but she now found herself wondering if their meeting had been cancelled because of the weather. It was perfectly possible for her to make more coffee, but she concluded she should wait until asked, for these were men who didn’t like to be interrupted.

  “If the two parties merge, and you take the deputy seat, will you be in a position to offer me a role?”

  She could hear unease in Julius’s voice.

  “My friend, these people are better funded, they have resources, and there is no need for the opposition to be split like this. We must seek and greet consensus.”

  It was typical of Julius to be so caught up with himself that he was ignorant of what was going on. She already had a powerful intimation of her husband’s fate, for she felt sure that his vain, overweight friend was the type of man who would happily go to the grave in his own embrace. A third visit would be unlikely.

  As Monica continued to stare down into the street, she thought again about the upsetting truth that Julius had never once offered to take her and the children across the road to the café as a treat. In fact, since she’d had the boys, he had never exercised himself to take her anywhere, and she suspected that it embarrassed him to be seen in public with her. The poor man had probably exaggerated his knowledge of women, and while she couldn’t claim to have a great deal of experience with men, she knew enough to be aware that his colleague Lloyd Samuels was once again stealing clumsy glances at her. Her legs were bare, and her slender feet encased in tight pumps that were neither slippers nor shoes, but she fancied they made her movements appear graceful. When she bent over to look down out of the window, her cardigan rode up and exposed a thin band of flesh that drew the man’s eyes in. She could feel the inelegant weight of his gaze, but as long as he respected the fact that she was not available to him, and never would be, there was really nothing for her to do except adjust her cardigan, which she did.

  “After Notting Hill,” said Julius, “it’s just one problem after another.”

  “And the police?”

  “The police and the teddy boys are as bad as each other.”

  Her husband was chased once, but he would never speak with her about what had happened. It exasperated her now that she could hear him talking about the incident to this man. She had held his head over the sink and dabbed at the cut on his cheek and stopped the blood, but he wouldn’t even make eye contact with her. That night a morose and wounded Julius had had the same abject look on his face as the poor man who had spent the greater part of the afternoon sitting alone in the café with only the shopping bag for company.

  She turns, having decided that she should once again go and check on the children. As she steps towards the bedroom, she sees that their guest has begun now to use his hands as he speaks, but he has modified his voice, which suggests that they have moved on to some new issue that makes them both feel a little more at ease. However, this new sense of comfort with each other will be only temporary, for Julius has told her that this evening he will ask for more money to help with the children. He will tell Dr. Samuels that it is no longer possible for him to manage in the absence of a proper wage and without guarantees of some sort. She closes in the door to the bedroom behind her and can see that her two children are still sleeping peacefully. Then she turns off the lights and goes and stands by the bedroom window and looks down at the now shuttered facade of the café and waits for the snow to stop falling.

  * * *

  Shortly after the talks between the British government and the delegation from his country collapsed, Julius applied for a job as a lecturer at the institution that had awarded him his bachelor’s degree. There was no need for him to inform Dr. Lloyd Samuels, for relations between the two of them had finally broken down one wet Monday night in the lounge bar of London’s Grosvenor Hotel. That night, despite his obvious distress at Samuels’s duplicity, Julius remained in the hotel bar long after his former friend had cleared off and downed one drink after the other. He knew there was no way he could share the news of their falling-out with his wife and give her the satisfaction of being proved right. If it had just been he and Monica alone, he felt sure that they would have put an end to their misery a long time ago, but the presence of the sullen-looking boys seemed to elicit some unspoken guilt in them both, so they had lingered on across months and years in their cramped flat with little money, and without any coherent idea of where life was taking them. But that night, alone in the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel, Julius looked around, and it finally dawned on him that he had no real interest in giving anything to this country that had now been his home for over a dozen years. After all, what had he received in return from these people? A late-night beating from some hooligans, and the problem of an increasingly sloppy wife who insisted that the children call her Mam as opposed to Mommy, or even Mama, and who long ago seemed to have relinquished any appetite for improvement or accomplishment.

  To begin with, Monica had given him security and purpose as he struggled to finish his dissertation, but she had never really shown full appreciation for his reciprocal gift of marriage. For some reason, she seemed to have grown to resent him, and over the years she had made no effort to claim a role and had simply deposited herself as a burden at the centre of his life. Whenever he tried to talk to her about what she might do, she stared abstractedly at a point somewhere over his head. Of course, what really infuriated him of late was her new habit of using the children as a shield behind which she hid from any real discussion with him. “Please, Julius, keep it down. You’ll wake the children.” The one time he proposed that she seek help, and even consider some kind of a reconciliation with her parents, Monica snapped at him that he didn’t know what he was talking about—which was true, but at least he was trying. As he paid for his drinks at the hotel bar and reached for his coat, he knew full well that things between them could no longer go on in this fashion. If she and her boys wanted to begin a new adventure with him, then he was willing to continue to make an effort, but only if she assured him she would start to pull herself together.

  * * *

  Julius had received a short, enthusiastic telegram in response to his application for the lecturer’s job, and he now held in his hand the official letter confirming his appointment. It was an early spring day, and he and Monica were sitting together at the living room table. The opportunity to go home and make a contribution, and perhaps try again to revise his dissertation and turn it into a book—this, he told her, was his true future.

  “You still have faith in the book, don’t you?” He moistened his dry lips with a quick circle of his tongue.

  “Julius, it’s some time since I read the manuscript.”

  “Well, what are you saying? Do you feel I should write a new book?”

  “Who knows what you should do?” Monica began to laugh and ran both hands back through her stringy hair. “In fact, who knows what you will do from one moment to the next.”

  He watched her closely as she poured some milk from the bottle into a teacup and then lifted the chipped vessel to her lips. Having drained the cup, she fumbled at her blouse and undid the top button, for the we
ather was unseasonably warm. Monica had started to buy presliced white bread, and so she thought about toast, but almost at once the idea seemed too complicated. She put her feet up onto a chair and proudly exhibited her unpolished toenails. Julius seemed confused.

  “Can I have some milk?”

  Monica poured some milk into the same teacup and passed it to him.

  “Back home we drink Carnation milk, but I know you’ll soon get used to it.”

  “No, we won’t.” Again Monica laughed, and she began to push up her sleeves, first one arm and then the other. “You’ll be going by yourself, Julius. I’m moving back north.”

  “To do what?”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  Monica stared at this sad dreamer of a man she had married, and shook her head. Did he truly imagine she was going to just sit around for the rest of her life waiting for him to make all the decisions? Really, just who did he think he was? After the break with his friend, he started to have a go at England, which she knew was just another way of getting at her, but that was it. She knew that she had to take the boys away and make a fresh start. Wake up, you spaz, I’m not going to follow you around. We don’t have much money, only what I’ve been able to save up from the housekeeping, but I’ve got myself a job, and we’re off, okay? I came to you, Julius, because I thought you might be a better kind of man than my father, but you were never really interested, were you? I’ve made a bit of a twat of myself, haven’t I?

  “Listen, Julius, tomorrow morning I’ll be taking the boys and leaving, okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay. Leaving to go where?” He looked angrily into her face. “Why are you doing this to me? To us?”

  She pointed to the open window. “Please keep your voice down.”

  “For crying out loud, you cannot tell me what to do.”