Ben sometimes whined and grizzled when John went off.
Now Harriet went down to a certain café—“Betty’s Caff,” as it was known—where she knew he hung out, and found him there with some mates. This was a gang of unemployed young men, about ten of them, and sometimes there were a couple of girls. She did not bother to explain anything, for by now she knew that people understood very well—that is, if they weren’t experts, doctors.
She sat among these youths, and said that it would be two years, perhaps more, before Ben went to school. He wasn’t suitable for ordinary nursery school. She looked at John deliberately, in the eyes, when she used the word “suitable,” and he simply nodded. She would like Ben taken care of during the day. The money would be good.
“You want me up at your house?” John asked, saying no to this proposition.
“It would be up to you,” said Harriet. “He likes you, John. He trusts you.”
He looked at his mates: they consulted each other with their eyes. Then he nodded.
Now he arrived most mornings about nine, and Ben went off with him on his motorbike: went exultantly, laughing, without a look back at his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters. The understanding was that Ben should be kept well away from his home until supper time, but often it was long after that when he arrived. He had become part of the group of young unemployed, who hung about on pavements, sat around in cafés, sometimes did odd jobs, went to the cinema, rushed about on motorbikes or in borrowed cars.
The family became a family again. Well, almost.
David came back to sleep in the connubial room. There was a distance between them. David had made and now kept this distance because Harriet had hurt him so badly: she understood this. Harriet informed him that she was now on the Pill: for both it was a bleak moment, because of everything they had been, had stood for, in the past, which had made it impossible for her to be on the Pill. They had felt it deeply wrong so to tamper with the processes of Nature! Nature—they now reminded themselves they once felt—was at some level or other to be relied upon.
Harriet rang up Dorothy and asked her if she would come for a week, and then begged David to go off with her on a holiday somewhere. They had not been alone, ever, since Luke was born. They chose a quiet country hotel, and walked a good deal, and were considerate with each other. Their hearts ached a good deal; but then that seemed to be something they must live with. Sometimes, particularly in their happiest moments, they could not stop their eyes from filling. But at nights when she lay in her husband’s arms, Harriet knew this was nothing like the real thing, not like the past.
She said, “Suppose we do what we said we would—I mean, go on having children?”
She felt how his body tensed, felt his anger.
“And so it all never happened?” he asked at last, and she knew he was curious to hear her: he could not believe his ears!
“Another Ben wouldn’t happen again—why should it?”
“It’s not a question of another Ben,” he remarked at last, and he was keeping his voice emotionless because of his anger.
She knew that what he could have assaulted her with was exactly what she always tried to conceal from herself, or at least the worst of it: she had dealt the family a mortal wound when she rescued Ben.
She persisted, “We could have more children.”
“And the four we have don’t count?”
“Perhaps it would bring us all together again, make things better.…”
He was silent; and against that silence she could hear how false her words had rung.
At last he enquired, in the same emotionless way, “And what about Paul?” For it was Paul who was the most damaged.
“Perhaps he would get over it,” she said hopelessly.
“He is not going to get over it, Harriet.” And now his voice vibrated with what he was suppressing.
She turned away from him, and lay weeping.
When the summer holidays were due, Harriet wrote careful letters to everyone, explaining that Ben was hardly ever in the house. She felt unfaithful and treacherous doing this: but to whom?
Some of them came. Not Molly, or Frederick, who did not forgive her for bringing Ben back; nor would they ever, she knew. Her sister Sarah came with Amy and with Dorothy, who now was Amy’s support against the world. But Amy’s brothers and sisters went to stay with their other cousins, Angela’s children, and the Lovatt children knew they would not have company for the holidays because of Ben. Briefly, Deborah was there. She had been married and divorced since they had seen her. She was a spiky, elegant, increasingly witty and desperate girl, who was a good aunt to the children, in an impulsive unskilled way, with expensive and unsuitable presents. James was there. He said several times that the house was like a large fruit-cake, but this was kindness. There were some grown-up cousins, at a loose end, and a colleague of David’s.
And where was Ben? One day, Harriet was shopping in the town, and she heard the roar of a motorbike behind her, and turned to see a creature like a space-age jockey, presumably John, crouched low over the bars, and behind him, clutching tight, a dwarf child: she saw her son Ben, his mouth open in what seemed to be a chant or yell of exultation. Ecstatic. She had never seen him like this. Happy? Was that the word?
She knew he had become a pet or a mascot for this group of young men. They treated him roughly, it seemed to Harriet, even unkindly, calling him Dopey, Dwarfey, Alien Two, Hobbit, and Gremlin. “Hey, Dopey, you’re in my way.” “Go and fetch me a cigarette from Jack, Hobbit.” But he was happy. In the mornings, he was at the window waiting for one of them to come and fetch him; if they failed him, rang up to say they couldn’t make it that day, he was full of rage and deprivation, and stamped bellowing about the house.
It was all costing a good bit of money. John and his gang were having good times at the Lovatts’ expense. Not only, these days, at the expense of James, Ben’s grandfather, for David was doing all kinds of extra work. They did not scruple to put the screws on. “We’ll take Ben off to the sea, if you like.” “Oh good, that’d be lovely.” “It’ll be twenty quid, then—there’s petrol.” And the roaring machines went off to the coast, crowded with young men and girls, Ben with them. When they returned him: “That cost more than we thought.” “How much?” “Another ten quid.”
“It’s very nice for him,” a cousin might say, hearing that Ben was off to the seaside—just as if this were a normal thing, a little boy being taken off for a treat.
He would come in from a day of safety and enjoyment with John and his mates, where he was teased and roughed up, but accepted, and stand by the table, where his family was, all looking at him, their faces grave and cautious. “Give me bread,” he would say. “Give me biscuits.”
“Sit down, Ben,” Luke, or Helen, or Jane—never Paul—would say, in the patient, decent way they had with him, which hurt Harriet.
He scrambled energetically onto a chair, and set himself to be like them. He knew he mustn’t talk with his mouth full, for instance, or eat with his mouth open. He carefully obeyed such imperatives, the energetic animal movements of his jaws confined behind closed lips, waiting till his mouth was empty before saying, “Ben get down now. Ben wants go to bed.”
He was not in “the baby’s room” now, but the one nearest to his parents on the landing. (The baby’s room was empty.) They could not lock him in at night: the sound of a key turning, the slide of a bolt, made him explode into screaming, kicking rage. But the last thing before they slept, the other children locked their doors quietly from inside. This meant Harriet could not go in to them to see how they were before she went to bed, or if they were sick. She did not like to ask them not to lock their doors, nor make a big thing of it by calling in a locksmith and having special locks fitted, openable from the outside by an adult with a key. This business of the children locking themselves in made her feel excluded, forever shut out and repudiated by them. Sometimes she went softly to one of their doors and whispered
to be let in, and she was admitted, and there was a little festival of kisses and hugs—but they were thinking of Ben, who might come in … and several times he did arrive silently in the doorway and stare in at this scene, which he could not understand.
Harriet would have liked to lock their door. David said, trying to joke about it, that he would, one of these days. More than once she woke to see Ben standing silently there in the half dark, staring at them. The shadows from the garden moved on the ceiling, the spaces of the big room emptied into obscurity, and there stood this goblin child, half visible. The pressure of those inhuman eyes of his had entered her sleep and woken her.
“Go to sleep, Ben,” she would say gently, keeping her voice level because of the sharp fear she felt. What was he thinking as he stood there, watching them sleep? Did he want to hurt them? Was he experiencing a misery she could not begin to imagine, because he was forever shut out from the ordinariness of this house and its people? Did he want to put his arms around her, like the other children, but not know how? But when she put her arms around him, there was no response, no warmth; it was as if he did not feel her touch.
But, after all, he was in the house very little.
“We aren’t far off being normal again,” she said to David. Hopefully. Longing for him to reassure her. But he only nodded, and did not look at her.
In fact, those two years before Ben went to school were not too bad: afterwards she looked back on them gratefully.
In the year Ben was five, Luke and Helen announced they wanted to go to boarding-school. They were thirteen and eleven. Of course this went against everything Harriet and David believed in. They said this; said, too, that they could not afford it. But again the parents had to face how much the children understood, how they discussed, and planned—and then acted. Luke had already written to Grandfather James, Helen to Grandmother Molly. Their fees would be paid for.
Luke said, in his reasonable way, “They agree it would be better for us. We know you can’t help it, but we don’t like Ben.”
This had happened just after Harriet had come down one morning, Luke and Helen, Jane and Paul behind her, to see Ben squatting on the big table, with an uncooked chicken he had taken from the refrigerator, which stood open, its contents spilled all over the floor. Ben had raided it in some savage fit he could not control. Grunting with satisfaction, he tore the raw chicken apart with teeth and hands, pulsing with barbaric strength. He had looked up over the partly shredded and dismembered carcass at Harriet, at his siblings, and snarled. Then Harriet saw the vitality die down in him as she scolded, “Naughty Ben,” and he made himself stand up there on the table, and then jump down to the floor and face her, the remains of the chicken dangling in one hand.
“Poor Ben hungry,” he whined.
He had taken to calling himself Poor Ben. He had heard someone say this? In the group of young men and their girls, had someone said, “Poor Ben!”—and he had then known it fitted him? Was this how he thought of himself? If so, this was a window into a Ben concealed from them, and it broke one’s heart—broke Harriet’s heart, to be accurate.
The children had not commented at all on this scene. They had sat themselves around the table for breakfast, looking at each other, not at her or at Ben.
There was no way Ben could get out of going to school. She had given up trying to read to him, play with him, teach him anything: he could not learn. But she knew the Authorities would never recognise this, or acknowledge that they did. They would say, and rightly, that he did know a lot of things that made him into a part-social being. He knew facts. “Traffic lights green—go. Traffic lights red—stop.” Or, “Half a plate of chips, half price big plate of chips.” Or, “Shut the door, because it is cold.” He would singsong these truths, imparted to him presumably by John, looking at Harriet for confirmation. “Eat with a spoon, not with fingers!” “Hold on tight going around corners.” Sometimes Harriet heard him singing these slogans in bed at night, thinking of the delights of the day to come.
When he was told he must go to school, he said he would not. Harriet said there was no way around it, to school he must go. But he could be with John at weekends, and on holidays. Tantrums. Rages. Despair. Roars of “No! No! No!” The whole house resounded with it.
John was summoned; he arrived in the kitchen with three of his gang. John, instructed by Harriet, said to Ben, “Now listen, mate. You just listen to us. You’ve got to go to school.”
“Will you be there?” asked Ben, standing by John’s knee, looking trustfully up at him. Rather, his pose, the set of his lifted face, said he trusted John, but his eyes seemed to have shrunk into his head with fear.
“No. But I was at school. When I had to be.” Here the four young men laughed, for of course they had played truant, as all their sort did. School was irrelevant to them. “I was at school. Rowland here was at school. Barry and Henry were at school.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” they all said, playing their parts.
“And I was at school,” said Harriet. But Ben did not hear her: she did not count.
It was finally arranged that Harriet would take Ben to school in the mornings, and that John would be responsible for picking him up. Ben would spend the hours between school’s end and bedtime with the gang.
For the sake of the family, thought Harriet; for the children’s sake … for my sake and David’s. Though he seems to come home later and later.
Meanwhile the family had—as she felt it, saw it—fallen apart. Luke and Helen had gone to their respective boarding-schools. In the house were left Jane and Paul, who were both at the same school Ben was at, but being in higher classes would not see much of Ben. Jane continued solid, sensible, quiet, and as able to save herself as Luke or Helen. She seldom came home after school, but went to friends. Paul did come home. He was alone with Harriet, and this, she thought, was what he wanted, and needed. He was demanding, shrill, difficult, often in tears. Where was that enchanting, delicious little child, her Paul, she wondered as he nagged and whined, now a lanky six-year-old, with great soft blue eyes that often stared at nothing, or seemed to protest at what he saw. He was too thin. He had never eaten properly. She brought him home from school and tried to make him sit down and eat, or she sat with him, and read, and told him stories. He could not concentrate. He mooned restlessly about, and daydreamed; then came to Harriet to touch her, or climb on her lap like a smaller child, never appeased or at rest or content.
He had not had a mother at the proper time, and that was the trouble, and they all knew it.
When he heard the roar of the machine that was bringing Ben back home, Paul might burst into tears, or bang his head on the wall with frustration.
After Ben had been at school for a month, and there had been no unpleasant news, she asked his teacher how he was getting on. She heard, to her surprise, “He’s a good little chap. He tries so hard.”
Towards the end of the first term, she was summoned on the telephone by the headmistress, Mrs. Graves. “Mrs. Lovatt, I wonder if you …”
An efficient woman, she knew what went on in her school, and that Harriet was the responsible parent of Luke, Helen, Jane, and Paul.
“We all find ourselves at a loss,” said she. “Ben is really trying very hard. He doesn’t seem to fit in with the others. It’s hard to put one’s finger on it.”
Harriet sat waiting—as she had done, it seemed to her, far too often in Ben’s short life—for some kind of acknowledgement that here might be more than a difficulty of adjustment.
She remarked, “He has always been an oddball.”
“The odd man out in the family? Well, there’s usually one, I’ve often noticed it,” said affable Mrs. Graves. While this surface conversation went on, the sensitised Harriet was listening for the other, parallel conversation that Ben’s existence compelled.
“These young men who come and collect Ben, it’s an unusual arrangement,” smiled Mrs. Graves.
“He’s an unusual chil
d,” said Harriet, looking hard at the headmistress, who nodded, not looking at Harriet. She was frowning, as if some annoying thought were poking at her, wanting attention, but she did not feel inclined to give it any.
“Have you ever known a child like Ben before?” Harriet asked.
This risked the headmistress saying, “What do you mean, Mrs. Lovatt?” And in fact Mrs. Graves did say, “What do you mean, Mrs. Lovatt?” but quickly, and then, to stop Harriet telling her, she funked it with “He is hyperactive, perhaps? Of course that is a word that I often feel evades the issue. To say a child is hyperactive does not say very much! But he does have this extraordinary energy. He can’t keep still long—well, a lot of children can’t. His teacher has found him a rewarding little boy because he does try, but she says she has to put more effort into him than all the rest put together.… Well, Mrs. Lovatt, I’m glad you came in, it has been a help.” And as Harriet left, she saw how the headmistress watched her, with that long, troubled inspection that held unacknowledged unease, even horror, which was part of “the other conversation”—the real one.
Towards the end of the second term, she was telephoned: Would she come in at once, please? Ben had hurt someone.
Here it was: this is what she had dreaded. Ben had suddenly gone berserk and attacked a bigger girl in the playground. He had pulled her down, so that she fell heavily on the asphalt, bruising and grazing her legs. Then he had bitten her, and bent back her arm until it broke.
“I have spoken to Ben,” said Mrs. Graves. “He doesn’t seem to be remorseful in any way. You might even think he doesn’t know he did it. But at that age—he is six, after all—he should know what he is doing.”
Harriet took Ben home, leaving Paul to be picked up later. It was Paul she wanted to take with her: the child had heard of the attack, and was hysterical, screaming that Ben would kill him, too. But she had to be alone with Ben.
The Fifth Child Page 10
