by Bruno Noble
‘Oh! The carrot and the stick is it! Seamus gets the carrot and I get the stick! Go on, spank me!’ Sherah stuck her bum out, provocatively.
‘I don’t like carrots,’ said Seamus.
‘You’ll get more than the stick if you carry on like that,’ said Dad, enjoying Sherah’s pantomime despite himself.
‘Shall I read some more of my report out, Dad?’ I asked.
‘There’s no need. I’m sure it’s very good, as usual,’ sighed Dad. He had one arm around Seamus and held his report in his free hand. ‘Oh, that’s good,’ he said. ‘A two for effort in English.’
‘And a D for achievement,’ squealed Sherah, looking over Dad’s shoulder. ‘Thicko! What would you rather have, Dad, a son who tries hard but is useless –’
‘I’m not!’ protested Seamus.
‘– or a daughter who has Bs for achievement and fours for effort?’
‘Or a daughter who has As and ones?’ I asked, seizing my chance.
‘Who asked you, you swot?’ spat Sherah.
‘Yeah,’ said Seamus.
‘What I would like,’ said Dad, looking at me, suddenly looking drawn, ‘is to have my dinner and for someone to lay the table.’
‘In that order?’ asked Sherah, bending lower to stare provocatively at Dad at eye level.
In reply, Dad put Seamus’s report on the kitchen table and, placing his free hand on the back of Sherah’s head and pulling it down towards him, placed a slow soft kiss on her forehead.
‘Lay the table, Sharon, would you?’ asked Mum.
I laid the table.
Isabella
Papa considered it necessary to say sternly to me of Cosmo, though whether in jest or all seriousness I couldn’t tell, ‘He’s not a doll, you know.’ Of course I knew that. Dolls’ eyes are dead while Cosmo’s were alive with love, laughter and mischief, blue moons to his grandfather’s dead stars in the photograph on the mantelpiece, with pupils like dark pools that exerted a pull on me as I cooed and cuddled him; it was so much more amusing for me to play with him than with my unresponsive, spiritless pretend people. True, I enjoyed lying Cosmo on our deep kitchen sofa and lining my dolls up on either side of him in order of size and addressing him as though he were one of them, or them as though they were many of him, but Cosmo knew that it was just a game of make-believe, as did Mama whose sloshes and plashes at the kitchen sink composed an alto accompaniment to the treble of Cosmo’s gurgles of pleasure. In a matter of months, Cosmo ascended the doll hierarchy to become larger than them all, by which time he had inserted all their toes and fingers into his mouth as well as his own and whatever else he could lay his pudgy clutches on. After Cosmo had achieved his first roll, Mama, for fear that he would roll off the sofa, took to placing him on a play mat on the kitchen rug where Eleanor, Deborah and I would lie on our backs too and amuse him, Mama and ourselves by imitating him – toe-sucking, giggles, goo noises and all.
Eleanor and Deborah were besotted with Cosmo and would look on in envy as he burbled and squealed with joy when I held his hand and traced my finger around his palm before running it up his arm and tickling him, reciting, ‘Around and around the garden, like a teddy bear. One step, two steps and a tickly under there!’ They would shriek louder than Cosmo in request for their turn to tickle him, and would beg their mother for a baby boy of their own.
‘Fat chance,’ would say Mrs Baldock, sitting on a kitchen chair by the back door so she could blow her cigarette smoke outside; and she and Mama would exchange looks and then Mama and I would look down at Cosmo with pride.
I looked on in controlled jealousy as Mama fed Cosmo her breasts, first one and then the other, marvelling at the extent to which they had grown in motherhood. Cosmo ate my mother with a ferocity that would have been frightening had it not been so comic. I never heard him cry other than to summon food or to signal that his nappy needed changing; his cries were more informative than plaintive, expressive of an inclination to communicate rather than complain.
I wondered, did Cosmo have a butterfly in him too? I pressed my ear to his chest to hear a flutter behind the heartbeat, and Mama had to help me prise his fisted fingers from my hair. I looked as closely in his mouth as he’d allow without his sucking the tip of my nose, and saw only the snowy white crests of the milk teeth that lined the ridges of his gums. I peered into his eyes but could only see the adoration that he had for me and, reflected in them, that I had for him.
My butterfly fascinated me. Its species was a mystery to me. Its reflections eluded me; no mirror, no pond reflected it and so I couldn’t see myself, my colouring, my wing shape. I was a clumsy flier, unable to master my wingbeats to fight drafts of air and to hover. I couldn’t quite make it – or her or me – appear at will but could become it when I sought an escape of sorts, when Papa visited me at night on those rare occasions that he could now that Mama was home all the time, or when older, bigger pupils at my school bullied me for no reason other than because they were older and bigger, or when my peer group at school teased me because my breasts had begun to show before theirs. Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me. When I was a butterfly, no one could touch me.
*
In the space of a couple of years, all our relatives had come to see ‘the new baby’ with the exception of Papa’s parents whom, it occurred to me, I never saw once outside the boundaries of their vicarage and garden. We drove Cosmo to them in a second-hand car that Papa had acquired and that served as the excuse for his torrid temper, on account of the fact that he had overpaid for it.
My grandfather cast his grandson a cursory look without so much as inclining his head to better see him and said to me, ‘Golly, you’ve grown.’ His face expressed no surprise but bore a smirk directed at my father, as though in search of plaudits for having so knowingly pronounced a platitude. This was typical of the conversations my father had with his father – exchanges, of a sort, in which all critical information lay between the lines, in which so much was left unsaid; communication comprised of hidden semaphore that only the male members of the family were privy to.
By contrast, like a negative to its print, my mother and her mother-in-law had, whether wilfully or otherwise, a dance in which their eyes never met for fear of what they might reveal; instead, they spoke in code of children, weather, tea and cakes. My grandmother, as usual failing to meet my eyes, said to me, ‘Bless you, my child,’ and of Cosmo, ‘Well, he certainly looks like you,’ but never made it clear whom she was addressing.
My grandparents’ was a house of animate human cadavers and of inanimate lepidopteral ones, a house in which there were always gauntlets of butterfly corpses to be run, in which the temperature was always lower in than out, a house of secrets and of unspoken pain, of clenched buttocks and gritted teeth. It was to me, on that visit, as though the pinned butterflies in the display cases that lined the internal, chill walls of the house had been ripped from former and future generations of Bicourts, and as though my grandfather, despite himself and in spite of his occupation, lived his life in denial of our being so much more than our physical forms.
We sat in the conservatory on rattan furniture and sun-faded cushions, each partially obscured from the others by the fronds of potted palms and other plants. I sipped a sour lemonade grown warm while the grown-ups toyed with fine china cups of milky tea gone cold. Cosmo slept on Mama’s lap. I cradled his feet in my hands.
‘Don’t we all have a soul, Grandpa?’ I asked my grandfather, turning from Cosmo to him abruptly.
‘Of course,’ he replied, surprised a little at my addressing him so directly. Regaining his composure, he went on, ‘And of course you know that the ancient Greek word for the soul and for a butterfly are the same, don’t you?’
‘No!’ I was delighted by this, having not wanted to say soul, but having feared being misunderstood if I had said butterfly. ‘And do you inhabit your soul in the same way that you inhabit your body?’
‘It’s psyche,’ said
Papa, smiling around him at us.
‘I’m glad to see you taking an interest in matters spiritual,’ said Grandpa wryly to me.
‘Surely, it’s the soul that inhabits the body,’ suggested Papa.
‘So, really, you are your soul. Your soul is you,’ I thought to add helpfully.
‘Well, I think so,’ replied Grandpa.
‘So, if someone hurts you, hits you, then they’re not really hurting you, they’re not wanting to hurt you at all, just your body?’
‘What a strange girl,’ observed Grandpa.
‘Strange?’ said Mama defensively, more loudly than she had intended, and Cosmo started in his sleep.
I felt indignant at not being taken seriously. ‘What I mean is, are we two or are we one?’
‘An interesting question,’ noted Grandpa, appearing a little perplexed.
‘Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Matthew, chapter 10, verse 28,’ offered Papa, placatory and pompous.
‘You shall love the Lord your father with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,’ countered Grandpapa. ‘Matthew, chapter 22, verse –’
‘Thirty-seven. Yes, I know, I know,’ interrupted Papa quickly, as though already regretting what he had started. ‘And it’s God, not father.’
I could feel Cosmo’s pulse on the inner side of the ankle, a determined rise and fall below two of my fingers, an affirmation of the body while the mind slept, and I thought to try again. ‘So does that mean that the mind is different from the soul and that we have not just bodies and minds but souls too? And if, as we said earlier, we are our souls, then – oh, I find it so confusing! Does our mind die with our body?’
‘Really!’ exclaimed Grandpapa.
‘What I mean is,’ I said, in an attempt at clarification, ‘are we mind or body? Or…’ – as an afterthought – ‘mind and body? Are we two or are we one?’
‘I suppose this is all your doing,’ said my grandfather to my father resignedly. ‘This is what happens when a theologian has a son who considers himself a philosopher.’ He snorted the last word.
My grandmother, unmoving, hands on her lap and eyes staring into the garden’s middle distance, said, so quietly so that I was unsure whether she was talking to us or to herself, ‘The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. Ezekiel, chapter 18, verse 20.’
My father and grandfather bowed their heads in consideration of this command-turned-aphorism for a moment until my father rose, slowly, pushed a leafy branch aside and stepped out of the conservatory and into the garden where he went for a turn, hands behind his back, stopping occasionally to admire a flower or to reflect. My grandfather followed him out and the two of them ambled along their respective paths, never together and never crossing the other, not once exchanging a word, my grandfather watching my father all the time and my father never once meeting his father’s gaze.
*
The telephone rang. Mama answered it. It was Oma. Opa was in hospital. Mama had to leave for Paderborn at once.
Mama replaced the telephone in its cradle and stood by it, looking around the kitchen with unseeing eyes at Papa, at me, at Cosmo who, exulting in being allowed in the garden in poor weather on condition he were appropriately dressed, had just run in from it, his galoshes’ muddy footsteps following him in, like a trail of clues that led conclusively to a criminal. He stood beneath his yellow, sopping sou’wester that doubled as a sun hat in the summer and in its matching slicker from which rainwater dripped onto the kitchen floor, twigs in one muddy hand and half an old doll in the other, and showed surprise if not disappointment at not having received his usual reprimand.
‘Of course, you have to go,’ said Papa.
‘Of course,’ said Mama, looking sick.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ said Papa. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ he added with forced jollity. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we?’
Cosmo burbled in reply and presented Mama with the muddy, mutilated doll, which she received distastefully with her fingertips. Cosmo’s burbles troubled Mama; she was increasingly concerned about his inability to articulate basic words – to produce little, vocally, besides pops and whistles. His vocabulary wasn’t simply behind that of an average two year old; it was non-existent. And yet he had walked before the age of one and demonstrated the understanding of a four year old when Mama had had him seen by a speech and language therapist. She dropped the plastic torso in the kitchen sink, ran water over it and washed her hands. Having dried them, she leant back against the sink and, in an unthinking gesture that I had last seen nearly three years ago, placed one hand above and the other below her slightly swelling belly. I understood then that she was pregnant again and impulsively went to her and hugged her – her and my foetal sibling.
‘You’ll be all right to fly,’ said Papa to Mama.
‘I’m sorry your opa isn’t well,’ said Mama to me, running her lemon soap-smelling hands through my hair, stopping to work her fingers gently through its knots.
She flew to Germany the following day, after she had made arrangements for Cosmo and me to spend two days and nights with Mrs Baldock.
‘That’s not necessary,’ Papa had objected.
‘If you’re too busy to come to my dying father’s bedside, you’re too busy to have the children under your feet,’ she had replied.
Mrs Baldock spoilt Cosmo and me while Eleanor and Deborah spoilt Cosmo, competing, to his evident glee and pleasure, to dress, feed, play with and generally fuss over him to the point that Mrs Baldock exclaimed, ‘For God’s sake, girls! There happens to be a real person inside there! He’s not a toy!’
‘You should come more often!’ cried Eleanor at dinner. ‘We don’t usually get apple crumble on weekdays!’
‘And cake for tea!’ added Deborah.
When Mrs Baldock escorted Cosmo and me home on the third day of my mother’s absence, she stopped by the front garden gate; from where she said to Papa, who stood by our open front door, ‘So, how is she? Is she back yet?’
‘Soon. Soon,’ said Papa, crouching low to pick his son up by the armpits.
The Oxford don and the hippy eyed each other with a profound antipathy.
‘But you are expecting Brigitte back today, this evening?’ asked the hippy.
‘Oh yes, this evening. Bridget should be home this evening,’ replied the don, the father, the philosopher, the man who held me by the hand and who itched – I could sense it – to be rid of the hippy and to be with his children.
‘Well, goodbye, kids,’ said Mrs Baldock reluctantly.
‘Say goodbye and thank you,’ instructed Papa.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Baldock, and thank you very much,’ I said.
‘Goo,’ said Cosmo, waving.
Mama called in the late afternoon. She was still in Paderborn. Opa was not expected to last the night. She spoke to us in turn, Papa appropriately sympathetic, Cosmo marvelling at his mother’s voice emanating from a Bakelite handset that he gripped with both hands until I took it gently from him, me unable to concentrate on what she was saying, uncertain whether I felt sorry more for my mother for the loss of a father, or for myself for the loss of a grandfather – or for Cosmo and me for the absence of our mother. I handed the telephone back to Papa who concluded the call with, ‘No. Of course not. Not at all. It’s quite all right. Absolutely not. I’m quite capable of looking after my own children.’ I heard him say the same to Mrs Baldock when she knocked on our door ten minutes later, adding, ‘We really can’t exploit your extensive kindness any further,’ and then, as if capitulating, ‘Well, if you really don’t mind, if Bridget decides to stay on after the funeral – I may have to be out of town for a conference so I’ll bring them to you then.’
That early evening, Papa busied himself with some excitement for the arrivals of Professor Rennet and Drs Dearman and Faben. He tidied his desk and drew the study curtains tight and allowed Cosmo and me to
set glasses and beer bottles out on trays and to pour crisps into bowls, withholding any protest when Cosmo ate more crisps than he decanted from the large paper bags they came in, and thrilling him by blowing the bags up and popping them with a slap of his hand. While Papa built the fire, I changed Cosmo into his pyjamas and changed into my nightie, accepting Papa’s rationale that, as I would no longer need to change, I could stay up later than if I remained dressed. The introduction of Cosmo to Papa’s gatherings elevated my status somewhat. An old hand, I bossed my younger brother about to the extent that I could. He and I straightened the oriental rug and the smaller hearth rug and shook the embroidered cushions on the two wicker chairs by the desk, Cosmo copying my every move as precisely as a mirror image. Papa cleared the mantelpiece of mail, keys, rubber bands and other deposits. From his armchair in his garden, Grandpapa admired our work with satisfaction, leaning forward as though hoping to peer round the corner of the picture frame that held him or anticipating a play that was moments from beginning. Henry Moore’s king and queen looked on impassively. Just-married Mama and Papa looked into the future with hope, although not necessarily for the same things. Having lit the fire, Papa placed the fireguard in front of it. Cosmo stood by it, mesmerised by the kindling flames that licked the larger logs. I twirled in my nightie, fanning the fire. The doorbell rang.
Professor Rennet and Dr Faben squeezed into the study one after the other, the latter saying, ‘Hello, hello, who do we have here?’ as he considered Cosmo and me through his thick, black-framed spectacles that almost met his moustache on either side of his nostrils, and the former pulling at his goatee with one hand and at his waistcoat with the other. Cosmo, having absorbed my instruction to offer the crisps rather than eat them, stepped forward, a full bowl in each hand.
To this, Dr Faben said, ‘Hold on! Give a fellow a chance to sit down!’
Professor Rennet, seeing the disappointment in Cosmo’s eyes, helped himself to a crisp, saying, ‘Thank you very much, young man!’ He adopted his usual station by the fireplace only to find that, the fire lit, he had to move to one end of it, much to the satisfaction of Grandpapa whose view, from the photograph, would remain unimpeded.