Mireille was one of those women who is profoundly changed by childbirth – both by the birth and its aftermath. She was brought very low by it. The barriers of language and culture had prevented her from entering into the healing camaraderie of the other new mothers on the ward and she found the hospital regime inexplicable and mean-minded. She spent much of her time there in tears.
She had never in her life suffered inelegant complaints and there, imprisoned in the hospital ward, she had developed piles and constipation. Having no English words with which to describe these conditions, she felt herself all the more exposed and mortified. The nurses rationed the laxatives and engaged in jovial banter about her frequent crawlings to the lavatory.
‘If you keep on pushing and straining, lovey,’ said the ward sister, ‘you’ll find yourself bursting your stitches.’
She was perfectly right, because Mireille burst her stitches. It prolonged her incarceration by another three days during which time the curtains were drawn around her bed so that she could cry without upsetting all the others.
Once she was home, it was feeding the babies that proved to be the biggest nightmare, since Jago yelled for food incessantly and Victor fell asleep at the nipple. Furthermore, he vomited with alarming frequency. The doctors weighed him and prescribed supplementary bottle feeds which only made him vomit all the more. Great splats of curdled milk would project themselves from Victor’s throat as Mireille raised him to her shoulder. They would land in the hairs of the zebra-skin rug, some five metres from where she stood, or they would hurl themselves against the bottle-green walls, between the ugly pictures.
In consequence, the doctors decided to operate on Victor’s stomach. Then, in the aftermath – his nether body afflicted, like his mother’s, with coarse black surgeon’s tacks – he became a victim of constipation. For Mireille, this proved to be a powerful bonding experience. It was one which necessarily excluded her husband and her more robust baby son, whose digestive process could always be relied upon to manage itself with regularity.
Charles had not expected his marriage to become so heavy so quickly. For all that his experience of dating, charming and seducing women was extensive, he had grown up in the absence of a mother, and his resources for coping emotionally with women in distress were very limited indeed. The glow had vanished almost immediately upon his return from southern France, since Mireille, lifted from context, stubbornly ceased to shine. It came to Charles that she was rather like an item of holiday clothing bought looking exquisite on home ground, but showing up strangely dull in the place of its destination. He knew so well that the interaction of colour and unaccustomed light could play havoc with the charm of any item and yet he had failed – damn and blast it – to bear the matter in mind.
Mireille was lonely. In her rare moments of pleasure she walked the babies along Kensington High Street in their wide, well-sprung pram and she bought them new clothes and fortified herself on the benign glances and admiring comments that the babies provoked in Barker’s. But the twins grew fast and they did so without harmony. They fought like cat and dog. They pulled out bunches of each other’s hair, and stole the food off each other’s plates. Whenever they fought, Jago won. Jago was bigger and better coordinated, and it was not surprising that, in response, his mother became protective of Victor. Victor was Jago’s victim, just as she herself was a victim. She identified strongly with him. Victor was Mummy’s boy, Cry Baby Bunting. Jago was Daddy’s boy, bold as brass; ready well before his time to go a-hunting. He was on course from the outset to break the hearts of women.
Jago’s handsome, easy-going father managed a certain resilience in the face of parenthood. He showed no sign of allowing it to modify his way of life. He enjoyed the babies for ten to fifteen minutes each day, during which time he threw them in the air and provoked attractive chortles of infant laughter. He seemed not to appreciate that for his wife the experience of motherhood was proving to be an ever-descending spiral. True, the internal stitching and abdominal complaints had drained her of sexual appetite, and even Charles, who intermittently coaxed her into action, could not quite forget the bleeding mess that had so recently transformed her pelvic floor.
His response was to party incessantly and to dine out more than ever – and it wasn’t long before the nightly return to Mireille’s kill-joy presence in the apartment began to get on his nerves. He felt it as a reproach which, briefly, provoked his guilt, and then, more forcefully, his resentment. His appetite for pretty women had not abated upon marriage and – since his wife was now paler and thinner and less sexually responsive and wholly unwilling ever to go out with him – he felt all the more licence to enjoy himself without her. His solution to Mireille’s problems was to acquire for her a French au pair. Sod it, he thought, the thing was a matter for one of these rent-a-bimbette agencies. That’s what these bloody places were for, n’est-ce pas? And they were two-a-penny round Bayswater.
* * *
For the two summers after the birth of the babies, Mireille took long reviving holidays with the little boys in France. There they were immediately absorbed into her large, extended family, which provided a welcome for the babies and diluted their squabblings until these appeared fairly minimal. Motherhood in this context ceased to be a problem. The babies toddled about half-naked and piddled merrily into the thirsty pink dust. Their laundry was dry within the hour and their daily routine fitted in easily enough with everybody’s work. Even Mireille’s cousin the rugby priest had been known to lend a hand in the fields, wearing one or other of the babies in a sling across his chest.
Yet each time she returned to London, the inertia and the heaviness came back. Charles, who had wholly lost the power to charm her, now appeared to sit like an incubus on her chest. He had become a shallow, contemptible nothing with his nose in the Sporting Life; a stupid, selfish Englishman with unmanly yellow hair that grew from his head in ridiculous corkscrews. In short, she found him physically repulsive. Too much contact with Mr Rutherford senior had given her the means to extract, from Charles’s handsome young man’s face, the beginnings of that jowly, bulldog blubber that had claimed the physiognomy of the older man.
By the time Jago and Victor were two years old, their parents were hardly speaking. Charles and Mireille broke their silences only occasionally and then usually at night when they did so for the purpose of quarrelling. Quarrels occurred whenever Charles made the mistake of returning home not quite late enough to ensure that Mireille was asleep, since her wakeful, hang-dog body language was irresistible to his bullying inclinations. And if the bloody woman was so hell-bent on presenting herself as a victim, he thought, well then, he’d do her a favour and victimize her, okay?
On the day that Charles first hit her, though he accomplished the assault as to the manner born, it was in fact the first time in his life he had ever done such a thing. True, he was not altogether sober at the time – he was not altogether ‘himself’ as he said afterwards – but he was certainly not fall-down drunk. His aim was true and the blow was not slight. It propelled her against the wall and cracked an upper incisor. After that, though the tooth was duly filed and capped, Charles habitually shunned the king-size, fur-covered bed and slept on the chesterfield. And Mireille made a careful point of being asleep when Charles came home. Indeed, she was usually asleep by nine with little Victor fast asleep beside her.
Jago was nearly three when his mother went to France for the third time. But this time she took only Victor with her and she had no intention of returning. The division of the children was strictly equitable and designed to ensure that Charles would not pursue her. Daddy’s boy. Mummy’s boy.
Oddly enough, it had not occurred to Mireille, in her severely reduced condition, how easily she could have walked out on Charles and taken both her children. Charles was rather fond of them, particularly of Jago. And he had simply bawled at her recently, with the meaningless but flamboyant rhetoric of his rage, that she could go if she bloody well wanted to, and she m
ight as well take ‘lover boy’ along with her, since she so obviously got her rocks off on sleeping with him in her bed. Just try taking his little Jamie, however, and she’d have to kill him first.
For a week or two after this outburst, Mireille had focused quite seriously on Charles’s proposition as she brooded over ways of effecting his death. She could wait until he fell into a drunken sleep on the sofa – and then? Then what? Could she pulverize his skull with the elephant’s foot? Pour a solution of caustic soda down his gaping mouth? Wrap him in petrol-soaked rabbit pelts and set him alight?
It was all wholly beyond her. Besides, she was not quite that far gone as to wish the exchange of one form of imprisonment for another. Instinct impelled her to eschew the courts and to have no truck with any system that would embroil her, even minimally, in negotiations with Charles. No custody arrangements, no visiting rights, no alimony payments, no telephone calls over the collection and return of children. She wanted only to cut her losses, to return to France and to take up her life as though Charles Rutherford had never existed on earth.
Charles was out when she made her escape, but she left him a brief leave-taking letter. She also left him Jago.
‘Coming-coming too!’ Jago screamed, panicking too late as he smelled a rat, because, although he had no idea that his brother had been settled in a waiting cab along with his mother’s bags and boxes, Victor’s absence in the apartment had suddenly triggered a red alert within his conscious mind. And his mother was hugging and kissing him with an intensity ill-matched with the careful carelessness of her voice.
‘Next time. Next time, Jerome,’ she said, but Jago clutched so determinedly at her clothes that she was obliged to wrench herself free.
‘This time, this time!’ Jago screamed and he ripped and kicked at the French au pair who had moved forward to peel him off his mother. He tore two buttons off her fine lawn shirt and bruised the girl’s pubic bone.
‘But you must look after Daddy, Jerome,’ the au pair said. Jago saw his mother run from him like the wind and then he heard the front door slam behind her. He threw himself to the ground in rage and yelled until, completely hoarse and caked in snot and zebra hairs, he fell into a wretched sleep.
It took Jago quite a while to sort out what had happened. His mother had not taken Victor out to tea, or to the swings, or to the seaside. She had not gone down to the end of the town. She had gone. And she had taken Victor with her. She had left him behind as compensation for Daddy. He was second-best in her eyes. She had passed him over for Victor, who had always cried more and still wore nappies at night.
‘I think Victor need her more,’ the au pair said, who was a brick in the circumstances, but Jago spat sucked biscuit into her face and hurled his Tonka truck at her head. She did well to last nine weeks. Her charge was a major pain in the rear end, and being alone in the flat with her employer was potentially awkward for her.
When the au pair left, the agency sent another and then they sent another. The turnover was rapid and the girls were always young. They were scarcely out of school and they were very new to England. They were homesick and easy to bully – especially for Jago who, like his father, was something of a natural in this area.
For quite a while after his mother left, Jago refused to eat anything but chocolate and highly sugared breakfast cereal. He refused point-blank to feed himself or to see to his own personal hygiene. Jago spat out mouthfuls of half-chewed food right into the au pairs’ faces and he attacked them with table forks if he saw them touch Mireille’s umbrella, or Mireille’s pinafore. He dropped his turds on the floor of the shower and he reverted to peeing in his underpants. He wet his bed until the year he started school. He was a nightmare in the supermarket, where he squirmed out of his child-seat and ran amok, screaming his lungs out and writhing on the floor if he was not given carte blanche to fill the trolley with anything that happened to take his fancy.
At three and a half he was entered at a playgroup, where he hogged the toddle trikes, committed assaults upon other children which more than once drew blood, and used the plastic play shovels to throw sand into little girls’ eyes. He moved on from there two years later, and raged through the infant class of a small, private day school where, notwithstanding his turbulent and wearing behaviour, he was found to be uncommonly bright.
One of the au pairs had already taught him to read from a copy of La Belle et la Bête, and he had discovered for himself the logic of hundreds, tens and units from the door numbers he encountered daily on his way to and from Holland Park. He had also discovered the concept of negative numbers through a chance altercation with an au pair so new that she had not yet taken on board her employer’s apartment number.
‘We rest at sixty-two, it is not so?’ she said, as she made her way with Jago along the polished chevron wood floor of the mansion block’s wide corridors.
‘You don’t say “rest”. You say “live”, dumbo,’ Jago said. ‘And, anyway, it’s number sixty-eight.’
‘Ah,’ said the au pair, determinedly sweet. ‘So. It is six more ’owses, yes?’
‘Six less “’owses”, turd brain,’ Jago said. ‘Because sixty-eight “’owses” from sixty-two makes six “’owses” less than nothing. Anyway, it’s a flat.’ Then he launched his schoolbag at her boobs. The satisfaction was short-lived, since the au pair deserted him that day. She returned weeping to the agency and implored them to place her elsewhere. But the arithmetical concept which her query had inspired remained with Jago who, that weekend, happened to put it to his father.
Jago had always engaged with numbers; always liked the patterns that they made. A teacher in the infant class had gone so far as to explain to him Pascal’s Triangle. She had done so because he had told her, quite truthfully, that one hundred and twenty-one was the number that he ‘liked best’. And he had often played around in his head with the number on his own apartment door. He knew that seven came between six and eight and that twice seven made fourteen. And that six and eight made fourteen as well – if you added them together. So that when schoolteachers came along and gave him terms like ‘mean’ and ‘median’, and talked about numbers as ‘rational’ or ‘directed’, these were not new concepts for Jago. They were merely new labels to be appended to existing ideas.
‘Daddy,’ Jago said that Sunday. ‘I’m sad.’
‘Why are you sad?’ Charles said.
‘I’m sad,’ Jago said, ‘because I don’t know what to call a number when it’s less than nothing.’
‘Say that again, Jamie-boy?’ Charles said. He was very proud of Jago, who had always behaved well for him. Charles had never patronized the boy with special care and attention and he was very seldom around. He had never removed his son’s soiled underpants, or pushed a swing, or scraped squashed infant foodstuffs from off the kitchen floor. But whenever they were together, Jago had always responded to Charles’s careless, mannish style in a manner that made it difficult for Charles to believe that his son was so much trouble.
He was dismissive of all the school reports and all the weeping schoolteachers; even more of all the weeping au pairs. The accumulated evidence of their ineffectuality made him, as he advanced in age, more contemptuous than he had been of women. They were simply not capable human beings. They belonged to some other, half-way species, not quite properly evolved. Some of the younger ones – before the derrière began to sag – could be a lot of fun in bed. That was all you could say for them. Half-wits, most of them. Heads full of straw. Incapable of exercising authority, even over a five-year-old boy.
So that when the au pairs wept and told tales at the end of the day, his response was always sanguine. He was very much inclined to pat his knee and offer his dimpled smile.
‘Come and sit on my knee, young woman,’ Charles would say, ‘and tell me all about it.’
These were attitudes that were not lost on Jago as he watched the female of the species come and go. Sometimes it was au pairs and cleaning women. Sometimes it was the
shiny, feathered creatures whose giggles he occasionally overheard emanating from the circular, fur-covered bed.
When enough of the au pairs had left or succumbed, or both, Charles, who had not much alternative, hired a full-time, live-in nanny of the old school. A formidable old bat, who looked like a man in a pin-striped skirt. She sat with her knees apart and threatened to warm Jago’s backside with a bone-backed hairbrush. Jago responded to her with spirit. He pushed her dentures down the waste disposal unit and activated the grinder. He made her cups of tea using piddle water from the lavatory bowl. He peed into her bedroom slippers and he drew indelible black moustaches on the photographs she kept at her bedside of her deceased parents and sister.
By the time she finally tendered her resignation, Jago was ready to be sent away to school. He became a boarder at the age of eight. By that time he had long forgotten the reality of his mother, so that when he said, ‘My mother’s French’, as he had done in his sudden defence of Peter Rusconi, he conjured up no faint but lingering image of her, no tone of voice. He had never been taken to see her and he never expected it. The severance was complete.
Once at school, Jago ceased to be Jerome, or even James or Jamie. He became Rutherford. ‘Jago’ was his own latter-day construct and dated from a time when he had happened upon a book about Miguel de Cervantes. He had opted for the name because he liked to imagine for himself a bright congregation of maternal antecedents who, prior to crossing the Pyrenees into France, had fought at the Battle of Lepanto and had been held captive by Moorish slavemasters until they had escaped with valour and guile. He envisaged them as resplendent, armoured pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Santiago. Iago. Jago. James.
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree.
Jago took to boarding school like a duck to water. He thrived on it and shone there like a rising star. He had, by this time, become socialized. His cleverness had brought him to the realization that intellectual rigour provided more long-term satisfaction than a blow to a serving-maid’s shin. And, unlike so many of the children, he felt no need to cry himself to sleep after the lights went out in the dormitory, or to wet the bed, or clutch at mementoes from home under the duvet. He had been through the fire already.
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