Ralph’s Children

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Only at uni,’ Kate said. ‘And maybe in Reading, too, if I’m lucky.’

  The old theory about fewer tiny fish in small ponds.

  All her blessings had culminated in the preparation of a feature on Reading Park School, where she had been allocated, as her guide, their modern foreign languages teacher. Rob Turner had seen the young woman with russet hair and earnest eyes and fallen for her instantly, and Kate had crashed in much the same way. Rob was tall, chestnut-haired and blue-eyed, with a warm smile and quick mind. In less than twenty-four hours Kate had learned that he loved children and horse riding, and that his heart had been pretty much smashed to shrapnel when his ex-wife Penny had walked out four years earlier, taking with her to Manchester their nine-month-old daughter.

  ‘How could she do that?’ Kate had been appalled. ‘Why did she do it?’ She felt a need to know, to find out the worst before she lost her heart entirely.

  Rob took a moment. ‘Penny says she only married me to have a child. Not that there was anything so special about me – she just wanted to have a child by someone comparatively “normal”.’ His grin was self-deprecating. ‘Her word, not mine.’

  Kate had said nothing, let him go on.

  ‘Apparently she always planned on leaving when the time was right, because as it turns out she doesn’t particularly like men and was never keen on living with one.’

  ‘When did you find this out?’

  ‘The day she told me they were leaving.’

  ‘God,’ Kate said.

  ‘She was painfully honest about it that day,’ Rob had said wryly. ‘But I suppose if she’d been that frank at the outset, we wouldn’t have had Emily, and I’d rather have my daughter in my life on my ex-wife’s screwed-up terms than not have her at all.’

  ‘She sounds like a monster,’ Kate had said.

  ‘She’s a good mother,’ Rob said.

  ‘Depriving Emily of her father,’ Kate had said.

  ‘I do my best to make sure Emmie knows I’m here for her.’

  ‘But that’s not enough, is it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Kate had put her arms around him then, and Rob had said that if she wanted to, she could speak to Penny, who’d promised to confirm the truth to any woman who became important to him.

  ‘Like a job reference,’ Kate had said.

  ‘In a way,’ Rob had said.

  ‘I don’t need to ask her,’ Kate said.

  She had really believed they were solid.

  For keeps.

  They were so good together. Sharing their home – a pretty gabled cottage between the south Oxfordshire villages of Sonning Common and Kidmore End – confident that they were enriching each other’s lives. For several days each month, Rob sympathized with her darkness and put up with her bitching, and Kate sometimes wished he had some semi-awful habit to match, but there was no side to Rob.

  Life with him was simply good.

  And then it was over.

  Laurie

  Laurie Moon surveyed her best work of the month.

  The most important work, at least. Her gift for Sam. A portrait in vivid acrylic paint of mother and son at the funfair, complete with candyfloss, cuddly bear prize and plastic bag with pitiful goldfish. Happy memories of the ‘best day out ever’. Sam had told her it was the best, so it must have been.

  What Sam said went. What Sam asked for, Laurie did her damnedest to give him. And he asked for so little. Love, mostly. Cuddles. And more time with his mum.

  The one thing she couldn’t give him.

  When it came to her painting, Sam was so easily pleased, her greatest fan. Not so impressed, Laurie was painfully aware, when it came to her role as his mother. There she came about fifth or sixth best, depending on whether, prior to her arrival, his carers and teachers had made him eat sprouts or cabbage or carrots or look at maps. Sam hated green and orange vegetables, but maps really alarmed him. If Laurie arrived on a map or bad veggie day, Sam’s greeting was more fervent than usual, though when she looked into his warm, slightly slanted eyes on those occasions, she saw a touch of desperation that spoke more of relief than love.

  Not that Sam needed saving from anyone at Rudolf Mann House, where he lived and was educated. His care was magnificent, his schooling as fine as it could be. Bought and paid for by his grandparents, Peter and Michele Moon. Pete and Shelly to their friends, who thought them salt of the earth people. And even if Pete’s money had come from a chain of Essex garages, the Moons had moved up in the world long enough ago for few people to hark back to when they had not lived in their handsome red brick house off the Henley–Wallingford road between Nuffield and Nettlebed and run their excellent riding stables less than a mile away.

  They were philanthropic, too, Pete and Shelly, always happy to stick their hands in their pockets or work for charity. Good neighbours with a love for their animals and respect for the beautiful part of the country they lived in.

  ‘We know how lucky we’ve been, simple as that,’ Pete had said many times.

  Everyone agreed. They were a lucky, good-looking couple with a clever son, Andrew, married to Sara, a local girl and qualified accountant, living with their kids over in Moulsford; Andrew in the horse business, too, having brought in a few promising racers as well as Sara, who did the books for the Moons these days. And then there was Laurie, their pretty fair-haired daughter still living at home, and working at the stables too now – though she’d studied art and wasn’t too bad at it according to the locals whose homes she’d painted.

  Laurie had left home for a while some years ago, had gone to stay with relatives in France, painting and – according to Pete and Shelly – doing ‘her own thing’, though there had been a bit of gossip at the time. People had thought she might have got herself pregnant or maybe just involved with a chap the Moons couldn’t approve of – and if they didn’t approve, there had to have been a good reason, because you couldn’t find more tolerant people or better parents.

  ‘You have to know when you’re beaten, sweetheart,’ Peter Moon had said to Laurie at the time.

  Over the breakfast table on a Sunday, both her parents looking uncomfortable but determined, her mother’s bobbed hair shiny as ever, but tension in her eyes and around her mouth, her father’s rimless spectacles part-way down his nose as his brown eyes fixed on Laurie.

  ‘Some things are just too much to cope with,’ Michele Moon had agreed.

  She usually agreed with her husband, not because she was a doormat, but because he was a clever, good man who’d steered their path skilfully through life.

  ‘And that’s why we’re doing this,’ Pete went on, ‘because we love you so much and want the best for you.’

  ‘That’s all we’ve ever wanted for you, baby,’ said Shelly. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Baby.’

  Laurie must have heard her mother use that throwaway endearment a thousand times, but hearing it from her lips at that moment had made her feel as if ground glass was churning deep inside her.

  Throwaway.

  Baby.

  She had fought them, raged and pleaded until her throat felt like sandpaper and her insides like taut-stretched rusting wire, and she’d walked out because she had nothing left to fight with. And then she’d regrouped, sure that if she steadied herself she’d find a way to make them understand and be her kind, loving parents again rather than these new, alien parent-forms that she hardly seemed to recognize. But it had all been to no avail, because she was too young and inexperienced.

  No excuse.

  Too weak.

  More like it.

  Too pathetic.

  A pathetic excuse for a woman.

  A mother-to-be.

  Of a baby. Her own baby. Precious to her from the first shock of pregnancy. She’d hardly been able to believe that release of incredible warmth, of that never-till-then experienced love. The kind her own mum had described to her in the past, the kind Laurie knew, therefore, that Shelly would comprehe
nd in time. And her dad, too. Once he’d got over the understandable disappointment in his no longer perfect little girl, Pete Moon, her adoring daddy, would see how amazing and beautiful it was that she was going to be a mum and make him a granddad.

  But instead, they had wanted her to throw it away.

  It.

  Sam.

  He was eight years old now and living at the Mann Children’s Home because that was where Peter and Michele had decreed he should live, because Rudolf Mann House was like a friendly version of a stately home with acres of land, including a petting farm and sporting facilities and gardens, all safely laid out so that children like Sam Moon could play without too much supervision and still not endanger themselves.

  The Mann was the only home Sam had ever known. Hospital visits, organized outings and Laurie’s days aside, he had spent his entire life there. It was his world, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it; it was a remarkable place, run by good people. The Mann had its own school and ran workshops and training courses for its older residents when they were ready to either leave the Mann altogether or move into one of its ‘satellite’ flats or shared houses.

  They did not all survive, depending upon the condition that had qualified them for residence in the first place. Down’s syndrome in Sam’s case. The most common kind, Standard Trisomy 21, with no additional health burdens; a tendency to chest infections when he was small, but no heart issues, which Laurie knew was a great blessing since the ratio for heart problems in Down’s syndrome children was about one in two or three.

  ‘He’s a lucky little chap,’ her dad had said to her once, when Sam was three.

  Laurie had never imagined she could ever want to physically attack her father, but at that moment she could have beaten him with her fists for his sheer stupidity. It had to be stupidity, she clung to that, because both her parents were kind, even if the Down’s had made them denser than beasts, blinding them to what mattered.

  Sam being Laurie’s son. Her beloved child.

  ‘You can’t really think we don’t know that,’ Shelly had said in an early battle.

  ‘If you do know it,’ Laurie had said, ‘that means you’re wicked, and I don’t want to believe that.’

  * * *

  Her first battle of any substance with her parents had been over her passionate wish to go to art school. Laurie’s only real interest in horses had been painting them, which disappointed Pete and Shelly. They’d have been happy enough if Laurie had wanted to become a lawyer or doctor or, better yet, a vet, but studying art struck them as a total waste of time and money. Still, her teachers felt she had talent, and the Nettlebed School of Art was close to home, so they’d given in.

  Laurie thought she’d put all her strength of character into that fight, and then she’d slept with Mike Gilliam, a fellow student, just after a twenty-four-hour stomach bug which had screwed up the effects of her pill. And Mike had told her very nicely three days after he’d made love to her that he was getting back with his ex, and Laurie was a really great girl, and he hoped she didn’t mind too much, but he couldn’t see her again.

  ‘Of course not,’ Laurie had told him, though she had minded deeply because Mike was sexy and amazingly talented and she’d wanted him for ages, but he was never going to know that, which was the only thing that made it bearable.

  Maybe if she’d got pregnant by someone less special, she might have found it easier to contemplate the idea of abortion, but she doubted that, because she thought it both wicked and cruel. Besides which, that extraordinary warmth, that love, had already taken her over.

  ‘We’re on your side,’ her parents had both said.

  Which was precisely why, they had added, there was only one solution.

  ‘No,’ Laurie had told them. ‘No!’

  Some strength of character left, after all. Enough to make them see that she would die rather than have an abortion.

  ‘I presume this means I’m banished forever,’ she told them when they arranged for her to go away, ‘since if no one’s to be allowed to see me getting fat, then they obviously won’t be allowed to see my baby.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Pete had said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Laurie had asked, then realized it meant they were hoping that either she would change her mind, or that nature might intervene and she would lose the baby.

  ‘God forgive you,’ she had said.

  Her father’s cheeks had grown hot and her mother’s eyes had filled with shame, and Laurie had decided that she had won another battle, because if they did send her to Provence to stay with her Aunt Angela – her mother’s sister – she would take such great care of herself and her baby that nature would not dream of intervening.

  The Game

  The group of four had been drawn to each other even before the book had slipped into their lives and bonded them. Tentative friends until then, faintly suspicious of each other, almost in the manner of warily sniffing dogs, sensing that trust without question was unsafe, unwise.

  Trust, like good faith, was at a premium at Challow Hall Children’s Home, where many of the more troubled children aged between seven and sixteen wielded private agendas and axes to grind, having been brought to the home by a variety of local authorities and courts and feeling dumped, abandoned and generally shat upon.

  Once the residence of a wealthy landowner, Challow Hall stood, a large, grey, weather-battered slab of a stone mansion, in the midst of rolling countryside near the village of Bartlet in Oxfordshire, two miles south of the Ridgeway, the ancient pathway that wound some eighty-five miles over chalk downs from Ivinghoe Beacon in the east of England south-west towards Avebury.

  Living so close to an area of officially designated ‘outstanding beauty’ and historical interest, but without so much as a cinema, let alone an arcade, within miles, meant that the majority of the young inhabitants of the home were constantly yearning for something decent to occupy themselves with.

  Bartlet itself had nothing but a village shop and a church. Swindon, over the Wiltshire border, was the only town worth visiting from the kids’ points-of-view, the only place where a person could play machines and buy a decent burger or bag of chips, where the shops had stuff worth nicking. But that happy hunting ground was six endless miles from Challow Hall as the crows flew – and if you weren’t a bird and had no wheels at your disposal, then you had to trek up and down hills and over bumpy, often muddy paths through acres of wheat and long grass before you even reached a proper road.

  Going to school was, therefore, the best chance of escape for many of them, since the authority saw to it that they were transported to and from their primary and secondary schools, and so, once delivered, they were at least close to a real bus route and could, if they were unafraid of punishment, make a break for temporary freedom.

  Almost any punishment was worth risking when you were bored to death.

  The book had changed everything for the four.

  A dog-eared old paperback found by one of them on the 47 bus and brought back to the home. Finders keepers, especially in a place like Challow Hall.

  In a sheltered corner of what had once upon a time been a thriving vegetable garden, but was now a trampled, brownish grass play area, the finder had read the dedication out loud to her three closest friends.

  ‘For my mother and father,’ she said.

  One of them, a red-haired boy, had snorted rudely.

  ‘If I wrote a book,’ said the other boy in the group, a thin, freckled lad, ‘they’d be the last people I’d thingy it to.’

  ‘Dedicate.’ The finder, mixed-race and tall for her age, supplied the word.

  ‘That’s OK, I suppose,’ said the other girl, who was fair-haired and pretty, ‘if you got a nice mum and dad.’

  ‘Or if they’re dead,’ the thin boy said, and flushed.

  ‘Gotta have parents,’ the red-haired lad said, ‘to feel like that.’

  ‘Is it sci-fi?’ The fair girl leaned across and scrutin
ized the cover. ‘Lord of the Flies. Sounds like that film where all the people went blind and the plants ate them.’

  ‘Triffids.’ The finder shook her head, turned the book over, looked at the back. ‘This is supposed to be a really good book.’

  ‘Do me a favour,’ the red-haired boy said disgustedly.

  ‘It’s OK, I think,’ the finder said. ‘It’s about kids and murder.’

  And then she started reading it out loud.

  * * *

  The thing that surprised them most was that the book was more fun than they’d thought any book could be, and that none of them had any urge to walk away or even yawn. All they wanted to do, right there and then, was go on listening to their friend reading them this tale about a bunch of school kids whose plane had crashed in the middle of some war, leaving them on a desert island without any grown-ups to boss them about.

  ‘Cool,’ one of them said.

  ‘Shut it,’ another told him.

  So the girl who’d nicked the book from the bus and was doing the reading, and who was particularly gifted at doing different voices, went on with it. And though none of them ever read any books if they could help it, this story seemed to fire up something inside them, and when the time came for them to have to stop, they found they were all looking forward to getting back to it again.

  Escaping from their real lives.

  ‘We need a better place to do this,’ one of them said, after two more sessions.

  ‘Somewhere they can’t spoil it,’ another said.

  ‘What about the Smithy?’ the reader suggested.

  That was another thing that had turned it into something special.

  Wayland’s Smithy was a Neolithic burial chamber close to the Ridgeway, guarded by enormous sarsen stones, nearly five thousand years old, yet part of the chamber itself and a passage leading to it still surviving. The children had been taken there earlier that year, groaning through a talk about ancient remains, with some dopey legend about horseshoes they were supposed to get excited about.

  ‘Fucking pathetic,’ had been the consensus.