by Sarah Moss
‘Giles has holidayed here all his life. I’ve been several times since we got married. Giles was coming and going through the spring, getting the house ready. He’s researching the puffins, the effect of climate change and pollution on population levels.’
‘I know a bit about Mr Cassingham’s research.’
Dr Cassingham. Maybe Professor Cassingham, come October. He made it sound as if puffin-counting were a well-known front for drug-smuggling or terrorist plotting.
‘The police take an interest in puffins?’
‘I take an interest in ornithology. But you yourself came last month?’
I nodded. The mothers of young children are the obvious suspects for infanticide. I stroked Moth’s hair and wound the long strands at his nape around my finger. He dribbled on my jeans.
‘Sing a Gruffalo?’
‘Later, Moth. When teaching was over. In Oxford.’
Sometimes the name of the city itself wields a certain power. Do you know who I am?
‘Have you had visitors since then?’
‘No.’ Moth put his finger in my tea. ‘No, love, hot!’
‘Mummy kiss it better.’
I kissed it. ‘Jake’s been. Sometimes he works with a mate. Doug.’
Ian MacDonald nodded. I don’t think Jake spends enough time with his children to develop murderous instincts; he has a wife for that kind of thing. I drank some tea.
‘Surely it’s been there a lot longer than a few weeks, though. Doesn’t that kind of decomposition take years? In turf?’
‘Does it?’ He sipped his tea, his gaze on my Visa bill. £147 plus postage on clothes from a certain Swedish designer.
‘I don’t know, I’m a historian not an archaeologist. I didn’t know anything about that burial, those bones, until I saw them. I mean, if I had, I wouldn’t have been digging there and we wouldn’t have called you, would we?’
I moved the Visa bill. He aligned the Bird Mug with the edge of a brown envelope on which I had drawn a number of cats for Moth.
‘Mrs Cassingham – Anna –I am not accusing you of anything. As you suggest, it is probably a very old burial. But I am sure you understand that we need to rule out any more recent event before we notify Heritage Scotland. There is a team on the way. I trust they won’t inconvenience you.’
I wondered what this was going to do for the cottage bookings. There are, God knows, far more dead than living people on this island. There is a whole graveyard down at the old village as well as a Neolithic mound which has not been excavated but looks, to those who can distinguish one grassy mound from another, a lot like the burial chambers on Shepsay. The island is thought to have been continuously inhabited for several thousand years and the inhabitants are unlikely to have gone somewhere else to die. Maybe the sort of people who think they’ll like seclusion on an island prefer their company dead. Given the choice, I would prefer to holiday in Venice or Vienna or New York.
‘I take it your husband is likely to know most of the people who have been here in the last few years?’
Moth stuck his hand in the tea again.
‘Kiss it better!’
I kissed it and he dried it on my top.
‘Well, anyone can come. Obviously. Giles’s mother will know everyone who was invited if he doesn’t. We can give you the number.’
‘Anyone?’
I met his gaze. ‘We haven’t exactly ringed the place with barbed wire. Giles encourages visitors. As long they don’t upset the birds.’
The wind rushed across the garden and rattled the window.
‘It was last year his father died, wasn’t it?’
‘June.’ I finished my tea. ‘They got probate just before Christmas. The girls were cross that Giles has the island.’
‘Your husband’s sisters?’
Two unmarried women of child-bearing age with ready access to Colsay.
‘Thea and Camilla. I think Thea spent a summer here a couple of years ago. She dropped out of law at Nottingham or Manchester or somewhere.’
‘When would that have been?’
I thought about Thea, who irons her hair and clothes and washes her car and tucks her shirts into A-line beige skirts which make her stomach look as if it’s encased in sausage-skin. I suppose it is possible that someone has had sex with Thea, but I do not think her capable of anything so bohemian as single motherhood. Though we were looking, of course, for someone who was not, in the event, capable of motherhood.
‘A couple of years ago, I think. Before Moth was born. Giles will know.’
Moth wriggled on my lap. ‘Down!’
He approached Ian MacDonald’s jacket, paused to conduct what passes for risk assessment in the toddler mind, and then advanced to poke at one of the shiny buttons. He likes the glass lifts in Debenhams, especially the alarm bell which is glowing and red and within easy reach of the pushchair-bound.
‘Moth pressing a button!’ He ran back to me, glancing over his shoulder as if waiting for the siren to sound. I picked him up.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Not that kind of button. Moth, shall we find your toy phone if you want to press buttons?’
‘No.’
Voices approached the back door. Ian MacDonald stood up.
‘Right. Well, thank you for your help, Mrs Cassingham. We’ll go have another look at the site, if that’s all right. As I said, some of our colleagues are on their way but there’s nothing further that need trouble you for now. We’ll hope to be off the island before dark. We’ll put a tent over the site but we must ask you not to touch anything until we’ve finished here. Is that all right?’
‘Of course.’
‘Bye bye,’ said Moth. ‘Bye bye, man. Off a go. All gone tea.’
Ian MacDonald turned. ‘Bye bye, Timothy. I’ll let myself out, Mrs Cassingham. And – ah – I’ll be back to talk to you again.’
Later, much later, after Raph had spent the afternoon watching from his window as men in white overalls put up a tent and carried things out of it, and Giles had not played with Moth but gone off to see the puffins while I tried to cook a debased spaghetti alla carbonara with toddler help and improbable substitutions for vital ingredients, and I had stared at my computer screen as if the words were in Inuktitut or Japanese while Giles washed up as if he were starring in a film about a dad doing housework, he came to find me in the bath. Especially with electric lighting, it would not have been my preferred venue for conversation. He put the lid down and sat on the loo, regarding the droops of my body as if contemplating a purchase.
‘So what happened earlier?’
‘Earlier as in discovering a body in the garden or earlier as in shouting at Moth? Or maybe earlier as in not shouting at Moth most of last night while you were asleep?’
He frowned at his shoe.
‘Earlier as in shouting at Moth.’
I sat up and drew up my knees. The water was cooling.
‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper but I have had less than five hours’ sleep in the last three days and I was very thirsty and I needed the loo. Not to mention the destruction of my mind and the ruin of my career. And mostly I’m too busy and tired but I do worry about Raph.’
‘Raph will be OK. He’s bright. Are you bothered about the bones?’
I was too tired to be bothered about anything.
‘I don’t like them being taken away. She looked almost asleep there. In the blanket.’
‘She?’
I shrugged. The wind reaching through the old window frame ran its nails down my naked back.
‘Just how I thought about it. Giles, that policeman was asking about Thea. That time she stayed here on her own.’
He looked up and smiled. It was as if the room had got warmer.
‘I know. He asked me. I mean, Thea. Honestly.’
‘You don’t think – I mean, if she had got pregnant, she’s not exactly one to organize a quick abortion or decide that single parenthood has advantages, is she? Wouldn’t she just freeze and hope it
would go away?’
‘Anna! She is my sister.’
I wanted to get out of the bath but didn’t want him looking at me unfolded.
‘Whoever did it was someone’s sister.’
‘I know you don’t like her but you can’t accuse my sister of infanticide. I don’t know why you’re assuming it is infanticide, anyway.’
I wrapped my arms more tightly round my knees.
‘I don’t dislike her. I’m not accusing anyone. Ian MacDonald was asking. As far as I know, Thea dropped out of wherever it was and came here on her own and stayed for quite a while, a few months, and then went off back to London as if nothing had happened.’
He picked birdshit off his shoe and crumbled it on to the bathmat.
‘What do you mean, as if nothing had happened? Nothing had happened. I always thought she’d been dumped.’
‘Maybe she had. Giles, I’m freezing here, I need to get some sleep.’
He passed me a damp towel and left. When I came to bed he was there and he curled around me in the dark, but after he fell asleep the emptiness of the grave lay strange as the vacant belly after birth. I pictured the baby unwrapped, laid on a slab under lights, her bones probed. I was almost grateful when Moth woke, a real child with real needs and warm skin and the vanilla smell of baby sweat. I paced him to sleep through the smothering scent of the hothouses in the Botanic Gardens and the clouds of fallen leaves in the University Parks when the year has turned and it is dark before the library closes, and even when his head rolled on my shoulder and his hands hung like dead flowers against my body I wanted him to breathe in my arms until morning came.
Colsay House,
Colsay
15th October, 1878
Dear Miss Emily,
I write, as promised, to offer you a report of Colsay and my work here. I must thank you again for employing me here; the people’s need and thus my opportunity to do good are great indeed. I only hope I may achieve what we all hope for; I have learnt already that the path is hard.
As I know that you will pass this on to Sir Hugo, I begin with the account he requested of the villagers’ welfare. Sir, I cannot say that all is well. I know it is some years since you were last able to visit the island and assure you that, whatever life was like then for these people, it is worse now. I scarcely know where to begin, for the truth is that these ‘blackhouses’ are insanitary, overcrowded and unventilated, such as must break down the best constitution; the people’s diet is coarse and unvaried, entirely lacking in fruits and vegetables, low in both quality and quantity; if they have been spared serious infection until now it is as a result of climate and natural hardihood, for drainage and sewerage are non-existent and, if you will pardon an indelicate subject which it is too often part of my calling to consider, I have reason to believe that, especially in inclement weather, people perform their natural functions on the floors of their dwellings. It is hard to speak to the welfare of the children because there is but one child under the age of seven, though I am endeavouring to gain access to the next childbed where I am sure that normal modern precautions and practices may at least prevent the babe’s fall to the ‘eight-day sickness’ – although I cannot, of course, guarantee life to any child, much less one beginning its days in this place.
I must add that of the eleven children between the ages of eight and fourteen, not one is able to speak any English or read or write its own name, and I am told that there has been no resident schoolmaster these five years; I believe this to be a violation of the new Education Act (with which my work in Manchester has necessitated some acquaintance) and in any case it is clear that the provision of basic education is the sine qua non of any improvement in these people’s lives. I would almost say, better to educate the children (supposing we can bring any children to school age) than to provide potable water and ventilated houses.
The people are living not so much as they did in the last century but as they must have done eight or even ten centuries ago, barring only the partial introduction of leaf tea and shoe leather, although the older men and women yet sport footwear made of birds with the feathers still on them. The men gather birds and fish (or die in the attempt, which I am assured is all too frequent) and the women, twice a day in all weathers, walk near three miles across the hill to milk the cows and then back, bearing the milk in wooden pails on great yokes and, more remarkable yet, knitting as they go. The food is then distributed in strict accordance with the needs of each household, regardless of the contribution of labour, in the same way as such services as burial and – at least until my arrival – nursing are provided by each according to ability and to each according to need. It is no doubt a noble principle from which many of us have much to learn, but the result, here, is a people endemically hungry, endemically dirty, endemically sick, in which no one has reason or opportunity to improve. Such change is necessary to raise them even to the standards of all but the poorest slum dwellers of Manchester that I find it hard to see how such change might be brought about; at least in Gorton and Cheetham Hill there is the sight and hope of better things to inspire effort, not to mention the work of the schools and societies such as my own. I do not see where the people of Colsay are to find that hope which must be the prerequisite of improvement.
For my own work, I believe I am making progress, although of course the final test will be the result of Mrs Grice’s confinement in December. Eschewing the examinations one would normally conduct, which are likely to cause needless alarm in one to whom the idea of such procedures is alien, I have been visiting her and endeavouring to befriend her and her family. In the course of these conversations, I learnt that the ‘knee-woman’ who has attended all births on the island these thirty years was sick in her bed at the time of Mrs Grice’s last confinement, and also that the child was delivered so quickly that her husband had barely time to call on the village women before the delivery of the afterbirth (you will pardon me these details, but I know you are not without familiarity with whatever affects the health of poor women). I asked who cut the cord, but perhaps I asked too eagerly, for she gave the impression of not understanding my question and I judged it expedient to turn the conversation into other channels. But this part of the tale certainly seems to confirm our view that something done by the ‘knee-woman’ at the time of birth is responsible for these deaths. I asked, of course, for the ‘knee-woman’s’ name but ‘She is just an old body who will be helping us when we are needing her’. Of course it will not be difficult to discover this person’s identity in time. Everything I have heard so far would tend to confirm that the disease is neonatal tetanus contracted through the umbilical cord, either as a result of unclean practices in cutting the cord or through the application of unclean substances to the cut end, such as I have read of among an uncivilized African tribe (where, oddly, it did not have the same disastrous result). Diagnosis, however, may be the easy part of this undertaking; the difficulty is in persuading the people to accept the aid of the modern world, to which they appear to feel a fierce resistance.
I will, of course, continue to inform you of my progress here.
Yours most sincerely,
May Moberley
A SNAKE, HARMLESS
A snake, harmless and about 2ft long, was placed in a box sufficiently deep to ensure that it could not immediately climb out when the top was removed. In the box was placed a small coloured toy. The child’s attention is directed to the box, the lid is uncovered, and the child is allowed to look in; if he raises any questions the experimenter simply says ‘It is a snake,’ and then points to the toy and asks the child to reach in and get the toy.
– John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2, Separation (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 139
The police didn’t come back the next day. The tent sat there, candy-striped as if round the other side there might be a window and a Punch and Judy show, but none of us went to look. Rain fell, and Giles went into Colla and came back with a treasure haul in cardboard boxes so dam
p we brought the wheelbarrow we use to bring them back from the landing stage right into the kitchen. Moth ran around helping to unpack, and twenty feet away the grave lay empty as an old cradle.
Moth put a tin of tomatoes in the washing machine. ‘Thank you, Moth, Moth very helpful!’
‘Giles,’ I said. ‘That last family. The couple your father remembered, in the village. Did they have children?’
Giles was kneeling by the freezer, trying to push cartons of milk into irregular spaces.
‘I have no idea.’ Moth handed him a bottle of shampoo. ‘Thank you, Moth. Anna, it could have been there centuries.’
I opened the child-lock on the flour cupboard and Moth came running. There are sometimes, when I haven’t eaten them late at night, chocolate chips in there.
‘Not that one, love, it would make a horrible mess. It hasn’t been there centuries, not with a knitted blanket like that. I saw it.’ I offered Moth a sealed pot of baking powder in exchange for an open bag of couscous. No deal. ‘Giles, can Thea knit?’
He slammed the freezer door. ‘Anna, stop it.’ The freezer door popped open and he leant on it. ‘Moth, not on the floor, please. There must have been hundreds of women on this island in the last two hundred years and they could all knit. More importantly, I had an e-mail this morning from someone asking about booking the cottage for next month, so let’s concentrate on that. I mean, even one booking this summer might start things rolling next year. You can’t worry about all the burials on the island.’
Moth poured couscous on to my foot. ‘Bugger, couscous on a floor! Mummy sweep it!’
Giles looked as if I’d peed on his shoe. ‘And please stop swearing in front of Moth.’
