by Olivia Fane
‘I should like that very much,’ said Dr Fothering.
‘Your son and I are already acquainted,’ said Bolt.
Gibson and Josiah had been hiding all afternoon in the greenhouse. They were warm and conspiratorial together, Gibson like a great big bear, Josiah, his cub. Fortunately, only Eve could fit in there with him. She shut the door behind her and crouched down with them.
‘Gibson darling’ she whispered, and kissed him, giving him her hand to hold, as she customarily did. ‘Josiah, dearest,’ she said, gazing at him tenderly. ‘There are these men in our garden, did you know?’
Gibson nodded, squeezing his wife’s hand.
‘I’m going to get rid of them, don’t you worry. You stay here just ten minutes longer, that’s all it will take.’
Eve emerged from the greenhouse as elegant as a duchess.
‘I’m afraid the baby’s sleeping,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t think it’s fair to disturb babies when they’re asleep, do you?’
‘Does he normally sleep in the greenhouse, Eve?’
‘Don’t be silly, Dr Fothering! He quite often sleeps in his crib! Oh damn, damn, damn!’
Both men followed her sheepishly back into the hall.
‘Now, I’m afraid you’ll both have to go,’ insisted Eve, as she opened the front door.
‘But I’ve only just arrived!’ exclaimed Dr Fothering indignantly. ‘I’ve driven all this way to see… my godson!’
‘You’re right. Roger, you can go at least,’ said Eve, flatly.
‘But we’ve not had a chance to chat!’
‘Yes, we have. I tell you what. Do you have a card or something? I could pop by if I have any problems.’
Bolt handed Eve a card with the Social Services address on it.
‘That won’t do,’ said Eve, dismissively. ‘I want to visit you at home. It’s a chat you wanted, not an interview. If I’m not mistaken?’
‘I’ll be seeing you, Eve,’ Bolt said, nodding politely at her, and he saw himself out. The door clicked behind him.
‘That idiot is out of here at last,’ declared Eve, ‘Thank God for that! Let’s drink to it. Beer or claret, Dr Fothering?’
‘Please call me Michael,’ pleaded Fothering.
‘A drink for St Michael, what can I get you?’
Fothering followed her into the kitchen and caught sight of Gibson still crouching in the greenhouse.
‘What about Gibson? Won’t he want a drink?’ he said.
‘Gibson is as patient as an ox’, said Eve, dismissively. ‘I want a few moments alone with you, like the old times. I miss the time we spent together, don’t you?’
‘That would be nice,’ said Fothering, anxiously.
The two of them went back into the sitting-room with a bottle of wine. Eve patted the empty space beside her on the sofa. ‘Sit next to me,’ she said.
Dr Fothering took off his tie and did so.
‘So Eve, how are you doing?’ he asked her, as she poured him a glass.
‘I’m very, very happy,’ she said, but there was something glassy about the way she said it, as though her statement had no roots.
‘So everything in your life is completely as it should be? You have no regrets about anything?’
‘I have one regret,’ said Eve solemnly.
‘Yes?’ enquired Dr Fothering, grateful to feel he still had a role in her life.
‘Look at this. I’m just so stupid. I’m lop-sided. I have one brown arm and one white, one brown shoulder and one white.’
‘What are you trying to say?’ said Fothering, desperately trying to eke out the metaphorical meaning.
‘Use your eyes, Michael! Look at me!’
Eve unpinned her orange sarong so that it fell to her waist. She looked like a Greek goddess in a cypress grove, a shaft of white light falling diagonally across her fine form.
‘You look all right to me.’ Fothering finished his glass of wine.
‘Josiah is punishing me for not breast-feeding him. I still have incredibly tender breasts,’ said Eve, by the by.
‘Please put your dress back on,’ said Fothering, coolly.
‘How can you call it a dress, Michael? These saffron robes are of deep religious significance. And they set me back a thousand pounds. In fact, all my worldly riches. But the widow’s mite and all that. You reap what you sow, etcetera, etcetera.’
‘A thousand pounds?’
‘Money is such a fearful responsibility, don’t you find? Anyway, the lad was raising money for his community. There now, godliness with the frock thrown in for good measure. And he was quite happy. And so was I till I realised I was lopsided.’
‘Oh Eve!’ sighed the long-suffering Dr Fothering. ‘I despair of you! Think of your baby! Your future! What will become of you all?’
Eve was suddenly very serious. ‘I love my baby, Michael. And it’s true, he won’t receive the most conventional of educations, but you should see dear Gibson with him. He’s taught him the names of at least thirty flowers. He sticks his nose into the petals, and he says, ‘mint, jasmine, rose, carnation’ – you’ve never seen anything so touching. To teach by smell! Isn’t that a perfect, holistic approach to the teaching of the young? Now, Michael, how shall I persuade you? Here, let me take your hands in mine like so. I love my husband, Gibson. I love my son, Josiah. Us three, we’re all good for each other. I once had a teacher called Gilbert who told me the definition of love. He said it’s when two and two equals five. Michael, darling, in this family two and two equals five. Let other families go plod plod plod and fill themselves with childcare logistics. But I’m not into that. I’m not into routines and sticking to the book. But I’m good at playing. Josiah and I shall dress up together as St George and the dragon, and I shall be the best of all mothers. I shall utterly commit myself. A dragon is what I shall be.’
‘I believe you,’ said Michael.
Then something happened in spite of himself. A mechanism snapped, something gave way, the claret got to his head. For Dr Fothering and his patient kissed, deeply and tenderly, for the first time. They knew each other and were, in an important sense, indebted to each other. It was a kiss which signified not a beginning but an end, a seal between them rather than the precursor of more to come.
Such nuances, of course, were missed by one particular observer. Not Gibson, who was still patiently waiting in the greenhouse, but Roger Bolt, the unchosen one, who was waiting malevolently on the other side of the hedge in front of the house.
Chapter Four
SEVEN YEARS ON EVE AND GIBSON were still in possession of their son, and indeed, each other. Less surprisingly, Roger Bolt had long since been taken off the case; for he found the information he had gleaned that early summer evening in 1984 to be too good to keep to himself. His senior, June Briggs, had been as eager to learn what the psychiatrist had been doing to his patient, as Bolt had been to divulge it; and June’s senior in turn, Head of Social Services in Cambridgeshire, no less, had demanded more and more detail ‘to make a case against him’.
There were various inquiries set up to establish whether this was a bona fide case of professional misconduct (after all, the misdemeanour occurred when Eve was no longer his patient). Roger Bolt made numerous pleas for a paternity test (unanswered, thanks to the intervention of the British Medical Council), but the net result was that Dr Michael Fothering resigned his post as a consultant psychiatrist in Hull even before the case had been made against him, and retrained as a General Practitioner. Two years on, he attached himself to a surgery in a suburb of Leeds, where it was his destiny never to find another Eve, either as a patient or a wife.
But while Roger Bolt occupied his sleepless nights plotting against Dr Fothering, the indefatigable Eve spent hers scheming against the carbuncle himself. And so it came to be that Bolt’s downfall swiftly followed that of Fothering’s: she accused him of trespass, to begin with; of looking at her lustfully, of being a peeping Tom. At first he was simply taken off her case;
but when the letters continued, when she threatened to take her complaint to the police as the Social Services were so slow to respond to it, and when, finally, Bolt confessed to climbing over their garden fence to gain access to their property (and June Briggs told him he was a ‘moron’), everyone realised his time had come to move on. So his wife and children welcomed him back in Darlington, and his prospects drew to a close: a residential worker in a home for the mentally handicapped was his ignominious fate, for which he was paid little more than four pounds an hour.
Meanwhile, there were other social workers to fill Roger Bolt’s shoes: a series of women, coming one after another in merciless succession. Just as Eve thought she might be left in peace, there would be another introductory letter, in which another hopeful would say how much she was ‘looking forward to meeting her.’
Of course, it would have been easy for Eve to be out, to have simply avoided contact with ‘the termites’ as she called them. (Gibson enjoyed it when she railed against ‘the termites’ – it made him laugh nervously.) But the truth was, there was a way in which she enjoyed venting her resentment at their intrusion. She would smile, inviting each of them into her home, give them cups of tea. Then she would sit them down and ask them what seemed to be the problem.
‘Now, tell me everything that’s on your mind,’ she would say, pleasantly. ‘Don’t leave a stone unturned.’ And when the poor woman hesitated, she pressed,
‘I’m all ears. Now, don’t be embarrassed.’
And when the social worker tried to put the record straight, with some inane comment such as, ‘We’re here to help you,’ Eve would lean forward, smiling pleasantly, and ask, ‘Could you explain? Who is “we” in this instance? Are you married? Do you mean your husband and you?’
‘No, I mean, “our team’’’.
‘I’m sorry to sound so dense,’ said Eve, disingenuously, ‘but does that mean you play a sport? In which case, which sport?’
‘You know what I mean by “team”,’ huffed the social worker.
‘Well, no, no I don’t actually. Tell me about your team and I might get the idea.’
‘Now, Eve. I have come to talk about you, not me. We’re concerned about you.’
‘Oh yes?’ Eve would reply vaguely.
‘And your baby. Now, where is your baby?’
How vainly these women tried to take the reins! How vainly, indeed, did they write ‘unco-operative’ in their files, always forgetting to add the ways in which she did not co-operate: if they had done, they might have discovered some pattern in the way Eve manipulated them. So one by one, these women would ask Eve where her baby was, and Eve would try, try ever so hard, to remember.
‘Now, where did I see him last?’ she liked to muse.
‘Might he be in his cot?’ the social worker suggested, helpfully.
‘Good idea! Let’s take a look, shall we?’
And when the bedroom was empty, Eve would open the linen cupboard door, and express surprise that he wasn’t there either.
‘Oh where, where, did I put him?’
‘This isn’t necessary, you know, Eve.’
‘You’re right. But it’s fun, don’t you think? Wait, the last time I saw him he was in his highchair eating breakfast!’
And the pair would race back down the stairs into the kitchen only to find the highchair quite empty.
‘Damn,’ Eve exclaimed, good-humouredly.
At this point the social worker might catch sight of the baby in the garden with his father, because, come fine weather or foul, morning or dusk, that is where they would always be. Or Eve, both bored and irritated, and desiring this alien female to be out of her house, would clap her hands and declare she had just spotted him near the greenhouse.But each social worker was too humiliated to report back Eve’s little ruse, doubtless because they would also have to cast themselves as the butt of it; rather, after two or three visits, they would complain of a ‘lack of trust between us’ or simply ‘lack of progress’. Were they ever worried about a ‘lack of care’, on the other hand? They all agreed they’d seen worse, far worse. Yet they couldn’t leave the case alone. In the same way as Eve had managed to remain a patient at Fulbright for twenty months, she also managed to remain a ‘client’ of the Social Services, and the games went on through the seasons, through the years, with only the slightest modifications, until Josiah reached the age of seven. There was something about her which made the challenge: quagmire I might seem, but stay with me and one day you’ll reach solid ground. And to that extent, Eve was irresistible to them.
Josiah grew into a good-looking boy, and seemed in robust health. He had wavy blond hair down to his collar, and deep blue eyes, which would confront his interlocutors with a brazen stare. His clothes were old-fashioned, button-up shirts and corduroy trousers, his shoes Start-Rite sandals. Yet this was barely the stuff of childcare proceedings, despite the fact (as those women inevitably observed) that his hands were always dirty and there was mud under his fingernails.
‘There is something not quite right about the boy,’ wrote a social worker. For Josiah didn’t like it when the social workers leaned over to pat him on the head, and he didn’t like the look of their large smiling faces when they squatted down ‘to have a chat’. Nor did Josiah ever give them the relief of one ordinary child-like sentence to prove that his personality was unscathed, that it had somehow survived his parents.
Neither Eve nor Gibson had ever bought him toys, not as a deliberate strategy, nor even as an economy, but rather because it simply didn’t occur to them that Josiah would want toys. And probably they were right: when Josiah was four a social worker took pity on him and produced a sack-load of puzzles, bricks, dinky cars and even an old garage, stuff that her own children had grown out of; but each time she visited (and this particular woman lasted a full six months), she found the toys untouched in a corner of Josiah’s bedroom. She wrote a report describing such behaviour as ‘disturbing’ and ‘unnatural’. To be four and never to have said ‘brum brum’ to a car! The boy wasn’t thriving, it was all she could conclude; but frustratingly, there was no positive evidence of abuse.
Josiah was by nature as silent as his father, and as alert and suspicious as his mother, so it should be of no surprise that he never bothered to answer these women. ‘What do you really like doing?’ they would ask him, but why on earth should he tell them? What would they know about gardening? For by the age of four, Josiah had a passion for growing seedlings.
Josiah and Gibson used to go in search of good earth, by bus. Neither of them was too interested in the views through the filthy windows; rather they waited, eyes locked ahead, in mute anticipation of what was to come. At the stop beyond Wilbraham, they would begin an hour’s walk deep into the fen. On the way out Josiah would sit on his father’s shoulders until they were well out of sight from the road, and then Josiah would help him fill two large sacks of the richest fen soil, chosen by the feel of it sticking to their fingers. Gibson showed his son how to feel the soil, and understand the consistency of it. ‘A good wetness’, he used to say, when satisfied.
That a seed should contain so much within it and yet be so small and tight and dry, and that he, Josiah, should be the medium by which it might receive life, lovingly separating the seed from its brothers and laying it in its own private bed, filled him with a sense of gratitude and mystery. How his assessors were to mis-diagnose the contempt on his six-year-old face when they showed him how sand runs through the spokes of a plastic windmill! And how those same assessors, with their eye solely on Eve’s spectacular performances, were to miss the one true centre of Josiah’s existence.
For how dull they all found Gibson! And how extraordinary that Eve should have married him! Amongst each other (but not in their reports) they discussed the possible sex-life these two might have, and those who bothered to read up on the beginnings of the case found themselves hugely drawn to Roger Bolt’s thesis that Eve’s psychiatrist had used Gibson to cover an illicit affai
r, and indeed Gibson wasn’t Josiah’s father at all. How sympathetic they felt towards Bolt when they learnt of his demise, how angry they felt on his behalf when they read how the BMA had refused a paternity test, how aggrieved they were that the courts had never been involved… though of course, even if they had been, these kind of people always closed rank when it mattered. Even if Fothering had been proved to be the father, some paternalistic law of some bygone age would have been summoned to protect him. The injustice of it all, the unprofessionalism!
And meanwhile, poor, poor Gibson. ‘Heavy-going’ wrote one; ‘never says a word’ wrote another; ‘kind’ wrote a Mrs Bird, who was a kind woman herself. But Mrs Bird took herself off the case after she’d foolishly consented to Eve reading tarot cards for her; inevitably, Mrs Bird discovered that she was soon to meet death after strangulation by a snake, which didn’t do her joie de vivre much good a week before setting out on safari to Kenya to celebrate her silver wedding.
No-one was ever sure whether to offer help or deliver threats to the Nelson family; no-one was ever sure whether Eve was mad or pretending to be mad. Manipulative, yes; provocative, yes; uncooperative, a million times yes: but the social work ‘team’ could never agree upon a strategy to pull the Nelson family into line. The senior who considered it her duty to do so was Miss June Briggs; ‘Miss’ despite being married and ‘June’, despite being unmitigatedly frosty. And if Eve was determined not to be defeated, Miss June Briggs was triply determined to defeat her. For she had solemnly watched a veritable army of her ‘team’ marching into the Gibson household, only to withdraw, shaken and bowed, within a few months. So hers was the fury, the determination, the unfinished business; and at last she had observed a breach in the Nelsons’ battle-line: they had repeatedly refused to send their son to school. In other words, they were breaking the law.
Now, there is also a law of the land which allows parents to deliver an education of their own, and what a great and privileged freedom it is that we should be able to mould and shape our children in our own image; or, more pragmatically put, teach our children to read and write ourselves. But the fly in the ointment is that we have to prove it, we have to prove that our children are actually learning as much as they would have been at school, and that means more than knowing how to plant a seedling or two. And Josiah was quite as hopeless as his parents. On being asked to read a passage from a book, his pretty mouth set into a grimace. On being asked to count up to twenty, he positively scowled. It was quite reasonable, therefore, that the powers-that-be assumed the poor boy knew nothing.
