by Anne Fine
‘Daniel! Come on! Come on!’
And so my small world grew a little, day by day, along with the strength in my legs. ‘Soon you’ll be coming with me to the Dame School,’ Sophie teased. ‘We’ll have to fold you up to fit you at a desk.’
‘I might have lived a go-nowhere life,’ I would admit to her. ‘But I am not a know-nothing boy.’
But Sophie didn’t care to learn whether I knew the names of capital cities or river ports. No, she was curious about the other aspects of my life. And though her sisters, Mary and Cecilia, obeyed their mother’s order not to belabour me with questions, no sooner were the doctor and Mrs Marlow out of any room than Sophie would set about me. Had I read this book, or that? Could I paint landscapes and horses? If I was weak from lying in my bed, was I left unattended when I was bathing, or had my mother stayed at my side, and even washed me?
In leaped her sisters. ‘Hush, Sophie!’
‘For shame!’
But she’d ignore their warning frowns and press on with her endless inquisitions.
‘Have you more names than Daniel?’
‘Yes. Thomas.’
She gave the name a moment’s kind consideration, and then pressed on. ‘And what year were you born?’
I told her and she counted on her fingers. ‘Why, then, you’re four years older than I am almost to the day! And less than a year stands between you and Mary.’
I smiled. ‘And so Cecilia outranks us all.’
‘Cecilia?’ Sophie waved a dismissive hand towards her eldest sister. ‘Why, she is almost old enough to take a husband!’
Out tumbled more remonstrances. ‘Sophie!’
‘Button your silly beak!’
But still the questions would persist. One day, while we were sitting by the fire, out of the blue Sophie asked, ‘Daniel, have you a father?’
I glanced at Mary and Cecilia. But it was clear that, on this matter at least, they were as curious as their sister and couldn’t bring themselves to step in and silence her. They simply lowered their heads over their stitching and hoped to hear an answer.
So I did my best. ‘My mother never happily mentioned him. But once, when I pestered her into a flurry, she told me that he had gone off to Glory just before my birth.’
Sophie looked baffled. ‘Gone off to Glory?’
Hastily Mary whispered, ‘That means he died.’
‘Oh.’ Sophie turned back to me. ‘Well, have you no relatives? No aunts or uncles? No cousins?’
I made to shake my head, but something stopped me. What can it be about upheaval, both of mind and body? A drop falls in a tub of water that’s been sitting for years, and it will cause no more than one small ripple on the surface. But drag that tub from one place to another, and you’ll have stirred its depths. For suddenly there rose a memory of crawling along the landing as a tiny child and seeing, through some half-open bedroom door, my mother kneeling in prayer. Into my mind there came a muffled echo of her whispering voice, begging the Lord to keep safe her precious boy Daniel and his Uncle Se—
How had she meant to finish? Now I was so much older, more than one name sprang to mind. Sebastian? Selwyn? Septimus? But in the flash of childish recollection, all I knew was that she had turned to see me in the doorway and, with a face as white as bone, had broken off her prayer at once.
Was this real memory? Or just a fragment of a dream swept back by the disturbance of my removal into this house? When I had asked my mother about our family, she’d always said that we had none. And yet she had deceived me about my health. Why not at other times? And so, to be as truthful as I could, all that I said to Sophie was, ‘I think my mother was a quiet soul from no sort of family.’
‘No family.’ I watched her pondering. ‘But surely, at least, there must have been visitors to your house.’
I thought back to all the knockings on the door before the one that had changed everything. ‘Yes, there were visitors. The butcher’s boy came every Thursday morning. And Martin from the grocery knocked twice a week, and sometimes more if anything had been forgotten. But other than that …’
‘No friends like us?’ There was a look of perfect horror on her face. ‘No proper company at all?’
I grinned at her. ‘Is it so hard for you to think that someone could stay alive without the nourishing company of Sophie Marlow?’
She reached out to tug my hair. ‘Don’t tease! Don’t tease!’
And out more questions came. Did I speak French? And had I ever seen a real live mouse? And did I wish I had a younger sister, just like her?
Now it was Mrs Marlow who came to the rescue, beckoning me out of the room to ask a question of her own.
‘Daniel, now that you’re strong enough to walk to church with us, I have to ask. Are you a Christian?’
I wasn’t quite sure where the answer lay. I knew I said my prayers, and did not steal, and tried not to lie or envy. But as for what she meant …
She saw the confusion on my face. ‘Are you baptized?’
So once again I took the chance to ask the question I had asked a hundred ways in the last weeks. ‘Can I not go and ask my mother? She will know the answer!’
As usual at these moments, kind Mrs Marlow stirred uncomfortably in her chair and offered no response except to say, ‘The parson claims he has no record of your baptism. But he assures me there will be no blasphemy in making sure.’
And so early next morning I was taken into church, quietly and privately, to be baptized. And though I stood like any other supplicant of God’s grace, my eyes were drawn by all the wonders around me: the stained-glass pictures of saints, the huge brass eagle holding a massive Bible on spread wings, statues of angels, vast stone tombs.
How much of life I’d missed! On the walk out of the church I felt Sophie tug me back, out of her mother’s hearing. ‘Now at last we can be assured you are no heathen!’ All the way home she teased. Once we were through the door she snatched up one of my new boots. I chased her up one staircase and down the other, until she threw herself onto a sofa, panting. Hurling the boot at me, she cried, ‘See? You have hunted me round the house so fast I can barely breathe! Oh, how could you possibly have been foolish enough to think you were so ill you had to lead your life locked away?’
It seemed to me the reason was obvious. ‘Because that’s what I was told.’
Sophie leaned forward eagerly. ‘But Father says there’s nothing wrong with you. Even your legs are strong – and will grow more and more so, now that you use them.’
‘Then I expect my mother, even though she was mistaken—’
Clearly she had no time for any explanation of this sort. ‘Your mother? But Kathleen says it’s common knowledge in the town that your poor mother’s insane.’
This was too much for Mary and Cecilia. They rushed to tell their sister, ‘Hush, Sophie! Have more discretion!’
‘And more charity!’
‘But it is true.’ And though Mary caught Sophie’s arm and, with Cecilia’s help, began to pull her forcibly towards the door, their younger sister turned back. ‘Think, Daniel! Why else should she have got it into her head to entomb you?’
I watched the door closing behind the three of them and forced myself to push away unease and tell myself that, though Mary and Cecilia were trying to be kind, truly it was preposterous to drag poor Sophie from the room after so silly an announcement. I could agree my mother had arranged our life in a way that was inexplicable. And it was hard to brush away the creeping realization that all my childhood had been stolen away. Sophie’s had been one big and colourful plum pudding of a life, stuffed with a million sights and sounds and feelings; my own had been thin gruel. And yet my mother and I had not been unhappy. I had been comfortable with her. And though I’d sometimes had the sense she felt bad luck was stalking her, my mother had been comfortable with me.
Could it be possible she was insane?
Insane?
No, not that, surely! Never!
Sophie came ba
ck a short while later, tear-stained and chastened, flanked by her two stern sisters. They stood like guards as she apologized. ‘Daniel, I’m sorry. I had no right to say what I did. It was pure foolishness. I won’t speak out of turn again.’
But how could she help it? It seems the tale of my discovery had been by far the most intriguing story the townspeople had heard for years. Every few days Sophie spooned out more gleanings of kitchen gossip. ‘Kathleen says that the sweep was here this morning. And he was telling her that, though you’ve been with us for several weeks, Mrs Parker is still inventing reasons to visit all her friends and boast to them that she was the first to catch sight of you.’
Over her shoulder I saw her sisters’ gathering frowns. But Sophie was warming to her story. ‘And Mrs Parker says that, though you must have lived in Hawthorn Cottage almost since you were born, it’s not till she was passing by your garden one afternoon last summer—’
‘Stooping to peer through some thin patch in the hedge?’ Mary suggested tartly.
Ignoring the interruption, Sophie kept on, ‘– that she first spotted you, slumped in a wheeled chair in the shade, shrouded with blankets. She thought you must be some young visitor come to stay quietly with Mrs Cunningham until your health was restored. But then she happened to catch sight of you again a few weeks later.’
Just at that moment, Dr Marlow came into the room. Clearly he’d caught the last few words because he too broke in, echoing Mary’s suspicions. ‘Spotted the poor boy through some small hole she herself dutifully bored through the hawthorn hedge, I have no doubt.’
But Sophie was too taken up with telling me the story to be derailed. ‘She thought it very odd. After all, nobody came to visit you. And you appeared to be getting neither worse nor better—’
‘Ah,’ interrupted Dr Marlow. ‘If only I could come to my own diagnoses with as much speed and confidence as Mrs Parker.’
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. It seemed to me, who’d only ever had my mother’s solemn company, that sitting here in this enormous room buzzing with family members rushing in and out, teasing and interrupting one another, scolding and quarrelling and joking, felt rather as if I’d been swept into the pages of one of those books I’d read so often just to pass the hours. I don’t believe I would have been surprised if Dr Marlow had suddenly declared we were about to take canoes and paddle up the Amazon, or pile into a wicker basket under some giant air balloon and set off over the Channel for France.
My laughter quietened when I realized that Dr Marlow was watching me. On his face was that same bewildered look I’d seen in my own bedroom when we first shook hands, and then again quite often since I’d moved into his house. Only a few minutes later, when the girls fell to arguing over a colour match for one of Mary’s silks, he took the chance to beckon me out of the room.
Did he have news for me about my mother? Or had I taken some false step in this, my brand-new life? My heart began to thump. Freshly reminded that I was not safely one of his warm and merry family, I slid off the little fireside stool and made for the door.
Dr Marlow was waiting for me out in the hall. Laying an arm round my shoulders he said, ‘Come to my study. I want to have a quiet word.’
I couldn’t help but burst out with my worries. ‘Have I done something wrong?’
He laughed. ‘No, nothing wrong.’ His tone turned graver. ‘But there is something I’d like to understand.’
So into the study we went, and first he made me comfortable in a chair, then pulled his own closer till our knees almost touched. He seemed at a loss to know how to begin. Finally he sighed. ‘No way to beat about this bush,’ he said. ‘Daniel, I tell you bluntly that there’s something about you that has been puzzling me greatly.’
I waited.
It seemed a good long time before he spoke again. ‘If what I understand about your former life is true, then all these last years you’ve been as good as locked away from health and air and cheery companionship.’
That didn’t seem quite right. ‘But I did have my mother for company.’
He took small care to hide his poor opinion of that. ‘And yet, here in our noisy and disordered household, you seem to fit in well.’
Since I was baffled, silence lay between us.
‘Perhaps too well?’ he suggested after a moment.
‘Too well?’
He smiled. ‘Sophie brings you her rabbit, and you’re lost in wonder, running your fingers through its fur as if you’d never felt the like.’
‘Indeed I hadn’t, sir. Not on a living creature.’
‘We walk with you down to the stream. You stop to stare at every cow.’
‘They seem so huge. So much more weighty than they look in books. And when Sophie leaned across the fence to pat one – why, dust flew out of it!’
He smiled. ‘Sunsets distract you utterly.’
‘I never saw such skies before. My room faced north.’
‘In short, over the past weeks I’ve watched you discovering the world as if you were a child in petticoats: the first rainstorm on your head; the first time you came down the stairs without the aid of the banister. Why, when I caught you peering into one of Kathleen’s pots, watching the porridge bubble, I swear you looked just as entranced as if you stared into the Elixir of Life.’ He spread his hands. ‘Everything’s fresh to you, Daniel. Everything’s new’ – suddenly he leaned toward me – ‘except for people.’
‘People?’
As though embarrassed now, he studied the backs of his fingers. ‘I mean to say, if you’d met nobody, where did you learn so civilly, right from the start, to address a man like myself as “Sir” and my dear wife as “Madam” or “Mrs Marlow”? Where did you learn to hear a tease and recognize it for what it was? Why were you never discountenanced by all my daughters forever rushing out of one door and in another, with Sophie tugging at your mop of hair to get your attention?’ Again he spread his hands. ‘And so, Daniel, stuck in that room with only your mother for company, how did you ever learn to be so comfortable in a family?’
I made a guess. ‘From books?’
But he looked unconvinced. ‘Oh, I can see how reading could teach you to understand the world and how it works. You say yourself that there are cows in books – though nowhere near so weighty and so dusty as the real thing! But people are harder to understand than simple cows. And there is something in the sheer ease of how, from the very start, you fitted in with us, how you spoke up at meals, how you teased Sophie, how you were first to know when Mary was irritated, or Cecilia was tired …’
I loved the man so much already that I was delighted to find an answer for him.
‘Oh, that! Oh, that is nothing. I have always lived that sort of life. Only I lived it all inside the doll’s house!’
The doctor stared at me across the desk. ‘Inside the doll’s house?’
And so I told him everything: how I would wait to see the fringe of light thrown by my mother’s candle flicker beneath my door as she went past at night; how I’d slide quietly out of bed and crawl across to the doll’s house. Sated with sleep all day, I’d often spend the whole of a moonlit night creating dramas in my miniature world, spinning out tales of all sorts, from glorious adventures to small domestic scenes, with everything cut down to size except the passions of my characters. I told him all about Mrs Golightly, carved thin as a wooden peg but dressed in snow-white finery; about Rubiana, the delicate doll with blue eyes and tumbling hair and the beginnings of a pout on rosy-painted cheeks. ‘I’ll show you all of them when I go home.’ Excited by the memory, I carried on, describing Topper the dog – too big and clumsy to fit easily in the doll’s house, worn bald in places, but still good to bark a warning whenever my imagined stories needed it. And Hal, the doll who was a prince until the day I had lost patience with the endless run of royal tales I was inventing, and snapped off his crown.
He smiled. ‘Aha! So young, and yet already a republican!’
Not fully understa
nding him, I took it for a tease and carried on. ‘I didn’t want my mother to know that I’d been out of bed. So the next day I waited till the butcher’s boy was hammering on the door, then, as my mother hurried away, begged her to pass Hal to me. I knew she’d be too flustered to notice any change in him. When she came back I cried that I had dropped him out of bed and broken his crown.’
The memory of my mother sitting close to me, all calm and quiet, swept back in force. I had a sudden longing to be there again, in my old life, safe in my bed. My tears rose, and my stomach gripped so tightly that I could barely breathe. Could this be homesickness – a feeling, up till then, I’d only read about in books?
It seemed ungrateful to tell this kind and generous man how much I wanted to be back with my own mother in my own bleak home. But I did manage to blurt out, ‘And she was good to me! That very afternoon she put aside her own work to crochet a tiny scarlet beret to hide the scar on Hal’s head!’
He sat back, giving me time to brush away my tears before he went on with his questions. ‘So, Daniel, when there were stories in which a young man like yourself could play the hero, this doll called Hal took the part?’
I blushed. ‘Sometimes.’
He shook his head in wonder. ‘And so you learned to live among real people simply from your imagination and a fine doll’s house that your mother bought for you.’
I knew enough about the games boys were supposed to play. ‘The doll’s house wasn’t bought for me,’ I told him hastily. ‘It was my mother’s when she was a child. It’s called High Gates and is a perfect model of the house where she was born. It simply happened to be in the room into which she moved my bed.’
‘So,’ he said dryly, ‘almost a storeroom both in size and in purpose.’
Was he suggesting that my mother had packed me away inside that small back room as if I too were simply some random and unwieldy legacy from her own past? I burned to defend her. ‘She had good reason to move my bed in there! Back when I was a baby, it seems my crib was in the larger room that overlooks the street. But when I asked if I could go back there so I’d have more to see, my mother said that its bay windows made the place “a veritable cave of winds”, and I’d be more at risk.’
