Her Living Image

by Jane Rogers

  The next scream was louder, Christopher’s fist gouging at his eye sockets.

  “Oh God, the light. I’m sorry Chris, I’m sorry. All right, come on, let’s go back.”

  Alan took him back into his bedroom and walked up and down with him mechanically, trying to soothe him. The crying diminished to a monotonous weary complaining level. Alan sat in the armchair, setting Chrissy on his knees. “Would you like a drink, Christopher, eh?”

  “Dink! dink!” The crying stopped a moment.

  “Good boy. Good boy. I’ll get you one. Look, you’ll have to sit here and wait for me, all right? You wait here while Daddy gets you a drink.”

  “Dink – DINK!”

  As Alan sat him in his cot and left the room, Christopher began to howl in earnest again, interrupted by spasms of coughing which left him breathless. Frantically, Alan searched the kitchen for the feeder cup. It wasn’t in the cupboard, the sink, on the draining board – was it in his room? “Hush, Christopher, drink’s coming, coming in a minute.” He found it on the floor by the armchair, rinsed it, poured it half full of milk. “All right Chrissy, here we are, here we are, it’s coming now.” The child was still crying as Alan sat down with him, but he grasped greedily for the milk.

  “Here you are then. Hold it yourself. Steady – steady now –”

  Christopher gulped at it and started to choke, spluttering milk all over both of them.

  “Oh Christopher! Here, give it to me. Come on, hey, hey, steady now.” He patted the little boy gently on the back. Chris started to cry again for the drink. Alan gave it back to him, but when he had had two mouthfuls he let it drop.

  “Christopher? Come on, drink up. Don’t you like it? Come on old boy.”

  With a peevish cry Christopher pushed it away.

  “Well what do you want? What are you going to drink, Chrissy? D’you want some juice?” Christopher wriggled around on his lap, rubbing fiercely at his eyes. Alan remembered that Carolyn had mentioned bathing them.

  “Shall we wash your eyes – hmmn?” The blanket was useless, as Christopher wriggled and threshed. “Stop it – look, you’ll get chilled. Better put a jumper on – here, come on.” It was a fight to get Christopher into the jumper. He struggled and cried, his arms as bendy as rubber. Alan left him howling in the cot again while he went for a bowl of water.

  With water, cotton wool and towel laid ready on the chair arm, he lifted the hot screaming creature out of the cot and sat it on the chair. “Christopher – shush. I’m going to make your eyes better, stop crying.” He dipped the cotton wool in the water and dabbed at the livid puffy eyes. The cries changed in tone, rising, terrified. Christopher jerked back and kicked, and the bowl of water spilt into the chair, over his legs and over Alan. Alan dabbed hurriedly at him with the towel and picked him up. “Hey–ey, I’m sorry Chrissy, shush, shush –” He joggled him up and down, but the in-earnest high screams, punctuated with shuddering gasps for breath, continued remorselessly. “Would you like – look, here’s your teddy, look, d’you want him to do a dance – Christopher?”

  Alan tried in vain for the ensuing limbo of time to distract and comfort Chrissy. The little boy was settled into a continuous breath-jerking crying, his eyes no more than slits now. Alan imagined Carolyn detained; lost, run over. What would he do? Christopher hadn’t even had any breakfast. He hadn’t been changed or taken his medicine. Alan thought of the little scene he had witnessed the previous night. He even tried repeating the bee. “Bzz, bzz, what did he say to the dog?” But the slit-eyes looked through him as if he did not exist. Which he didn’t, he realized sharply, for Chrissy. Chrissy’s howls were those of someone abandoned, utterly desolate. Alan could be of no use to him. All he wanted was Carolyn. “Christopher! Stop it! I’m here, what d’you want? A drink? sweet?” The screams continued unchanged. “I’m going to put you back to bed if you don’t stop it. D’you hear?”

  Alan put him back in his bed and Chris continued to scream hoarsely, with no increase or lessening of force. Alan stood outside the door, arms by his side, fists clenched, listening. Gradually the intensity of sound diminished. There was a moment’s silence, broken by sucking noises. He was sucking his thumb. Within a few minutes of shuddering breaths, hiccups, and desperate sucking sounds, silence fell. At last Alan gently pushed the door open, to see that Chris was slumped against the bars of his cot, bent double, his thumb rammed into his mouth. Bitterly Alan pulled the blanket up around him, and went to the kitchen. What had settled his son at last was sheer exhaustion, and Alan’s absence.

  Chris was still asleep when Carolyn came home, and she was relieved to hear that he had been fine while she was out. Over the next few days he made a remarkably swift recovery. Soon they were laughing over the melodrama of it; how quickly he had seemed to arrive at death’s door, and how absurdly soon afterwards he was stuffing his face and bouncing with health.

  “It’s like a speeded-up version of an adult illness,” said Carolyn, who still looked white and exhausted, two weeks after Chris was fully recovered. They were in the kitchen, sitting over cups of coffee, reluctant to move to do the washing up. Chris was asleep, and outside in the dark, snow was falling silently. They found themselves both staring out, at the flakes which fell within the window’s patch of illumination, large and white against the blackness.

  “It’s so soft,” Carolyn said after a long silence. “The flakes are almost floating.”

  Alan moved to the window. “Soft it may be, but it’s sticking. It’s already covered the lawn. I bet you roads’ll be blocked in the morning.”

  “It seems incredible,” she said dreamily, hypnotized by the slow constant motion.

  Staring out at the dim white lawn, through the close-up falling lines of black and white, Alan said quietly, “You love him more than me, don’t you?”

  “Christopher?” She did not seem surprised. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  There was a silence.

  “He needs me more than you do,” she said, as if that was an explanation.

  Alan waited. Outside, the snow blotted out the last irregularities in the flowerbed, making it one with the lawn.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she said, rousing herself. “Surely it’s natural – don’t you feel the same? He’s completely dependent on us. It’s nature’s way of making sure we look after him properly, I suppose.” She stood up, beginning to stack the plates. “After all, you’d survive if I disappeared, wouldn’t you? It would be harder for him.”

  “Yes,” said Alan. “I suppose so.”

  A snowflake touched the glass, stuck there for a moment then melted. He turned to help her clear the table.

  Chapter 13

  Caro got off the near-empty Sunday bus and walked quickly through the light drizzle towards her parents’ house. She was laden with presents from the garden: lettuce, spring onions, radishes, and a large bunch of sweet peas. There was not a lot of point in bringing these gifts, since her father’s allotment kept them well supplied with fresh vegetables (although he did not grow sweet peas, considering them more trouble than they were worth). But she brought them because it salved her conscience to bring something, and she had not been for two weeks now. In the three years since her father had first called so unexpectedly at the Red House, she had made an effort to see her mother most Sundays. It was rare for her to have missed two in a row, as now. She had had to work the first Sunday. There had been the usual final frenzy to get the parks ready for festival week, and various people had been smitten with untimely summer flu. She had ended up, ludicrously enough, supervising the planting out of the county coat of arms in tiny flowering plants. And last Sunday had been Clare’s birthday, and Clare’s only day off that week. They had got up early and gone for a swim in the reservoir, which was deserted and silk-smooth, with a pearly mist hovering a clear foot above its surface. She had planned to get over to her mother’s by the afternoon, but the day had been so rare that neither of them could bear to finish it. Only three or four tim
es, in the whole of the past three years, had they actually had the luxury of a whole day together. Both of them (for different reasons) were anxious about seeming to exclude the rest of the household, each of them still (even after so long) unsure of her claims on the other. Fear, on Clare’s part, and a natural fastidiousness on Caro’s, kept them from ever spelling out their relationship.

  As she flicked over memories of the day – embracing in the cold silken water, under that mysterious layer of white mist which cut off the sky above yet gave clear vision to the other side, a quarter of a mile away – the sense of wicked escape, as they laughed together in the empty lunch-time pub . . . she decided that she would tell her mother she’d been working both Sundays. There were many things it was not possible to discuss with her mother.

  The estate seemed small and sad in the rain. How she hated these arid little gardens with their square yard of grass and ugly bare borders, the nasty little brick wall surrounds. The design and planning that had gone into these places was minimal. And yet people were glad to live here. Grateful for “a garden”. She would sweep the lot away; if no more land was available, at least knock down all the petty walls and create a line of planting to lead the eye along the (not unpleasing) curve of the road; use shrubs and bushes, plan for mature growth on a large scale. Lined with trees, shaded by trees, how different this road might look. She narrowed her eyes to send the close out of focus, and painted in broad splashes of border colour – a bank of lupins there, clumps of huge red poppies over here.

  She sighed as she turned in at her parents’ tasteful wrought-iron gate. They wouldn’t like it anyway. They were all happy to have their own tiny enclosed plot of garden, and to labour to keep it nice and bare. That was really seen as the crowning achievement, keeping your garden clear of weeds – not what you managed to grow in the space. Even her father, for whose gardening abilities she now had a deep respect, did not deviate from the norm. Although he grew beautiful flowers for competition in his tiny greenhouse on the allotment, he was content for the front garden to consist of a small shaved lawn and empty flower bed with two statutory rose bushes and a border of tedious alyssum.

  She caught a glimpse of her mother watching for her through the window, before the net curtain dropped. But she knew Meg would wait for her to knock, and then take her time coming to the door – pretending, of course, that Carolyn’s arrival was a complete surprise.

  “Hello Mum!”

  “Haven’t you got an umbrella? Your hair’s soaking wet.” Meg wished she hadn’t said it before it was out of her mouth. “Come in, come in. How are you love? We’ve missed you these last two weeks.”

  “I know, I’m sorry Mum. I’ve been working. It’s been really frantic this summer. But things should quieten down a bit now, that’s the end of the festival fuss.”

  Meg nodded. Caro knew she wasn’t listening. She handed over her bag of vegetables, which Meg put away in the kitchen without examining. She took them for granted, of course. Arthur brought them every week. But Caro couldn’t help feeling snubbed that her mother had not given the lettuce a little squeeze, to see how good and hearty it was, or commented on the size and perfect shape of the radishes. Caro began to arrange the sweet peas in a vase.

  “Here, dry your hair, you’ll catch your death. Leave those, they can wait.”

  Meg fussed around her with a towel and hairdryer. “Haven’t you got any better shoes than that? They’re not very practical for this weather, are they?”

  Caro looked down at her battered pumps and wished she’d remembered to change them.

  “Take them off and let’s get them dry, you can borrow my slippers for the time being. Eeh, I’m beginning to think those legs of yours have disappeared, it’s so long since I saw them. Haven’t you got any skirts any more?”

  Caro had ironed a clean pair of jeans especially for this visit.

  “Skirts aren’t very practical, in my line of work, Mum.”

  “No, I don’t suppose they are. Funny sort of thing for a girl to be doing. But when you start your course you won’t be grubbing about in the soil all the time, will you? Shall I buy you a skirt for the beginning of term? Would you like that?”

  Caro turned on the hairdryer and saved her answer for a couple of minutes, which gave her time to make it tactful.

  “You know what I’d really like, Mum? Remember that big sloppy jumper you knitted me when I was in the sixth form – that maroon one? Would you make me another?”

  Her mother’s face lit up. “Well that’s easy enough. Of course I will. Just plain? What colour would you like?”

  “Oh – the same – or, is there anything nice in green? A sort of deep green, bottle-green?”

  Meg reflected. “There might be, in the new chunky that’s just come in. I’ll have a look on Monday. What size are you now?”

  Caro repressed a sigh. “I’m just the same size I’ve always been, Mum. Thirty-two.”

  Meg shook her head decisively. “You’re never a thirty-two now, my girl. I don’t know what you eat but it’s certainly not very nourishing. You look as if you’ve been in a concentration camp – you do! and that’s the truth. You’ve never got up to your proper weight again since the – since – since you – you know.”

  Caro had noticed before the way her mother always avoided referring to the accident and Caro’s time in hospital, almost as if it were something obscene.

  “Come along now and get some dinner inside you, if that hair’s dry. It’s on the table waiting.”

  Caro went into the dining area. “Dad at the allotment?”

  “Mmn.”

  “I’ll pop down and see him after dinner.”

  “He’ll be up for his tea.” Meg’s tone was injured.

  But he doesn’t say anything when he comes in here, Caro told her mother silently. I like to go to the allotment. We can compare the growth of our peas and beans, and moan about the weather.

  “We could both wander down, perhaps, if the rain stops. It’ll be nice and fresh.”

  “Hmph.” Her mother put a huge shepherd’s pie on the table. It was a bad idea, her mother would complain about the mud and her father would say nothing.

  “Now, get some of this inside you and you’ll look a bit more like. What do you eat for your dinners?”

  “I eat a lot, Mum. Stews, curries, salads, all sorts. Honestly.”

  Meg said nothing, but continued to ladle more food on to an already impossibly large helping.

  “Stop – stop, please, that’s enough.”

  After they had eaten, her mother let Caro make them both a cup of tea.

  “Tell me a bit about this course of yours, love. Jean was asking me the other day, and really, you’ve told me next to nothing. I felt a bit of a fool.”

  Caro clenched and unclenched her toes in her mother’s too warm slippers.

  “Well, it’s just what it says, landscape architecture. Learning about landscape design, you know – using natural features, hills or rivers or whatever – and improving on it. Like – you’ve heard of Capability Brown?”

  Meg had heard of him, and Caro saw it was what she wanted to hear. Her mother so much wanted her to be doing something prestigious, Caro thought bitterly, something she could boast about to her woolshop cronies, after all that dreadful “grubbing about in the park”. She had been appalled by Caro’s first job, lowly assistant gardener in Limetree Park, riding across the lawns on a great smelly mower, digging out dead bedding plants and dragging pruned branches to bonfires. “It’s no sort of job for a girl,” she had complained. She said she wouldn’t go in the park any more, she would be too ashamed if she met Carolyn, covered in muck and wearing dirty overalls, doing some filthy job. Caro had been so delighted by the job (spotted by Sue, an advert in the local paper) that she could feel no sympathy for her mother’s whinings, and the Sunday visits had been stiff with hostile silences.

  Caro supposed her mother had got used to it, as Caro got better at the job and was given a spell of green
house work, then offered day release to improve her qualifications. She’d been taken on by Harman almost as – well yes, his protégé really. He’d encouraged her to look with his eyes – a planner’s eyes – at the scope of the whole thing; to raise her sights from the individual plant in the bed, to the design of the whole park, and the needs and expectations it must fulfil. So she had applied, at last, for the course. With Harman’s blessing they were seconding her. She had been lucky. And at last her mother was coming round, seduced by “landscape” and “architect”, nice clean professional words, nothing to do with grubbing around in the earth. Let her enjoy it, Caro told herself; seldom enough you please her.

  Outside, the drizzle continued. The afternoon was passing appallingly slowly. Caro washed up and her mother dried, making her usual little jokes about how Carolyn couldn’t dry because she must have forgotten where everything went, by now. Then came the routine questions about the household, and “those poor children”, by which her mother meant Robin and Sylvia. She had visited the Red House once only, at Caro’s invitation. Caro had spent the preceding day cleaning and tidying, but her mother had come determined to disapprove and did so easily. She pretended (Caro was sure it was pretence) to be particularly worried about the two poor fatherless children, and always asked after them. And yet she’s jealous if I want to see Dad on my own, Caro thought. She would have been quite happy to have fatherless children. Was that fair? It was certainly hard to see much in her parents’ relationship; it seemed to Caro now a sad empty thing. They looked after each other, that was all, as each of them might have cared for a pet and been solicitous for its well-being.

  When Caro made her escape after tea it was with all the usual feelings of guilt and frustration; with her mother suggesting brightly, “Just let me measure you for that new jumper before you go, Carolyn,” and, “Did I show you the new suite we were thinking of getting, in the catalogue? Just a minute. . . .” and finally, “Well, I expect we’ll see you when you’ve the time,” as if she only visited them twice a year.