To Room Nineteen
Page 68
Again she put him on the back seat under the blankets, and now she drove on the main roads home. She got there at about eight. The children would be sitting around the kitchen table. And David would be with them: he would not have gone to work.
With Ben a mound of blankets in her arms, his face covered, she went into the living-room, and looked over the low wall to where they all sat around the big table. Luke. Helen. Jane. Little Paul. And David, his face set and angry. And very tired.
She remarked, ‘They were killing him,’ and saw that David would not forgive her for saying this in front of the children. All showed fear.
She went straight up the stairs to the big bedroom, and through it to ‘the baby’s room’, and put Ben on the bed. He was waking up. And then it began, the fighting, the heaving, the screaming. Again he was on the floor, rolling around on it; and again he flexed and bent and thrashed, and his eyes were pure hate.
She could not take off the strait-jacket.
She went down into the kitchen, and got milk and biscuits while her family sat and watched her in total silence.
Ben’s screams and struggling were shaking the house.
‘The police will be here,’ said David.
‘Keep them quiet,’ she commanded, and went up with the food.
When Ben saw what she held, he became silent and still, and his eyes were avid. She lifted him like a mummy, put the cup of milk to his lips, and he almost drowned as he gulped: he was starving. She fed him bits of biscuit, keeping her fingers clear of his teeth. When what she had brought was finished, he began roaring and flailing again. She gave him another jab.
The children were in front on the television, but were not watching it. Jane and Paul were crying. David sat at the table with his head in his hands. She said softly, for him to hear, ‘All right, I am a criminal. But they were murdering him.’
He did not move. She had her back to him. She did not want to see his face.
She said, ‘He would have been dead in a few months. Weeks, probably.’ A silence. At last she turned. She could hardly bear to look at him. He looked ill, but that was not it…
She said, ‘I couldn’t stand it.’
He said deliberately, ‘I thought that was the idea.’
She cried out, ‘Yes, but you didn’t see it, you didn’t see –!’
‘I was careful not to see,’ he said. ‘What did you suppose was going to happen? That they were going to turn him into some well-adjusted member of society and then everything would be lovely?’ He was jeering at her, but it was because his throat was stiff with tears.
Now they looked at each other, long, hard, seeing everything about each other. She thought, All right, he was right, and I was wrong. But it’s done.
She said aloud, ‘All right, but it’s done.’
‘That’s the mot juste, I think.’
She sat down beside the children on the sofa. Now she saw they all had tear-stained faces. She could not touch them to comfort them, because it was she who made them cry.
When she at last said ‘Bed,’ they all got up at once and went, without looking at her.
She took supplies of suitable food for Ben up to the big bedroom. David had moved his things to another room.
When Ben woke towards morning and began his roaring, she fed him, and drugged him.
She gave the children breakfast as always, and tried to be normal. They tried, too. No one mentioned Ben.
When David came down, she said, ‘Please take them to school.’
Then the house had only her and Ben in it. When he woke, she fed him but did not drug him. He roared and struggled, but, she thought, much less.
In a lull, when he seemed worn out, she said, ‘Ben, you are at home, not in that place.’ He was listening.
‘When you stop making all that noise, I’ll take you out of that thing they put you in.’
It was too soon, he began struggling again. Through his screams she heard voices, and went to the banisters. David had not gone to his office, had stayed home to help her. Two young policewomen stood there, and David was talking to them. They went away.
What had they been told? She did not ask.
Towards the time the children were due home, she said to Ben, ‘I want you to be quiet now, Ben. The other children will be here and you’ll frighten them screaming like that.’
He became quiet: it was exhaustion.
He was on the floor, which was by now streaked with excrement. She carried him to the bathroom, took off the jacket, put him in the bath and washed him, and saw that he was shuddering with terror: he had not always been unconscious when they washed him in that place. She took him back to the bed, and said, ‘If you start all that again, then I’m going to have to put that thing back on you.”
He ground his teeth at her, his eyes blazing. But he was afraid, too. She was going to have to control him through fear.
She cleaned his room while he lay moving his arms about, as if he had forgotten how to do it. He had been in that cloth prison, probably, ever since he had been in the institution.
Then he squatted on his bed, moving his arms and staring around his room, recognizing it, and her, at last.
He said, ‘Open the door.’
She said, ‘No, not until I am sure you will behave well.’
He was about to start again, but she shouted at him, ‘Ben, I mean it! You shout and scream and I’ll tie you up.’
He controlled himself. She handed him sandwiches, which he crammed into his mouth, choking.
He had unlearned all the basic social skills that it had been so hard to teach him.
She talked quietly while he ate. ‘And now listen to me, Ben. You have to listen. You behave well and everything will be all right. You must eat properly. You must use the pot or got to the lavatory. And you mustn’t scream and fight.’ She was not sure he heard her. She repeated it. She went on repeating it.
That evening she stayed with Ben, and she did not see the other children at all. David went up to the other room away from her. How she felt at this time was that she was shielding them from Ben while she re-educated him for family life. But how they felt it, she knew, was that she had turned her back on them all and chosen to go off into alien country, with Ben.
That night she locked the door on him, and bolted it, left him undrugged and hoped he would sleep. He did, but woke, screaming in fear. She went in to him, and found him backed against the wall at the end of the bed, an arm up over his face, unable to hear her, while she talked, and talked, using reasonable persuasive words against this storm of terror. At last he became quiet and she gave him food. He could not get enough food: he had really been starving. They had had to keep him drugged, and, when drugged, he could not eat.
Fed, he again backed himself against the wall, squatted on the bed, and looked at the door where his jailers would enter: he had not really understood he was at home.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
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A Flamingo Modern Classic 2002
Previously published in paperback by
Triad Grafton 1979 and Flamingo 1994
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1978
‘Twenty Years’ first published in 1994 in the Daily Telegraph
Copyright © Doris Lessing 1953, 1954, 1957, 1963, 1969,
1971, 1972, 1994
This edition copyright © Doris Lessing 2002
Preface copyright © Doris Lessing 1994
Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual p
ersons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental
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Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
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EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007322275
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