by Sarah Moss
Yours in faith,
May
ANXIOUSLY PREOCCUPIED WITH OTHER MATTERS
When compared with the children in a control group, more of the injured children are found to be unwanted and unloved and/or to have a mother who, currently, is anxiously preoccupied with other matters, e.g. illness in herself or in others in the household, younger siblings, elderly relatives, or her own pregnancy. Similar findings for children who sustain burns are reported by Martin.
– John Bowlby, Separation, p. 175
There was a film of mist between the window and the sea, and the garden wall was dark with damp, the moss between the stones a rainforest shade of green.
‘Mummy read it tiger!’ Moth pushed the tiger book into my hand.
A seagull made wartime siren noises close by. My eyes closed.
‘Mummy read it tiger!’
‘One day,’ I said. ‘A little girl and her mummy were eating cake, because in those days you were allowed to give children cake every day and it helped to pass the time. Suddenly there was a knock on the door—’
‘Big furry stripy tiger!’ Moth wriggled with glee.
‘Mummy, that’s not what it says. Mummy, when I build the system so the visitors can store their own energy from the gym, yeah, do you think I should make a meter that tells them how kilojoules convert into kilowatts?’
My head began to tip and I sat up. The seagull screamed of Messerschmidts over the white cliffs.
‘What?’ Warmth and darkness settled around me like a shawl.
‘Mummy! Stop going to sleep. Would you like a meter that shows you how kilojoules make kilowatts?’
‘More tiger!’
‘“Good morning,” said the Tiger. “I’m here to symbolize the excitement and danger that is missing from your life of mindless domesticity. May I have some of your cake?” “Please do,” said the little girl’s mummy. “Sit down.”’
‘Mummeee! You’re getting it wrong, that’s not what it says. I’ve worked out how to make the meter, only it’s going to have quite a big carbon footprint, yeah, but I could set it so the first people have to make enough energy to offset that before they start being able to use it.’
‘More tiger! Straight now!’
‘And when everyone’s got one, they can switch off the National Grid, yeah?’
‘More tiger! Turn a page! Now!’
‘Mummy, would you rather go forwards in time or back?’
Warmth again, and the womb-like pink behind my eyelids.
‘Mummy! Stop sleeping like that. I can hear a phone.’
‘More TI-GER!’
‘Shh, Moth, it’s all right. So the tiger came in and sat in Daddy’s chair—’
‘Mummy, there is a phone.’
‘And the little girl’s mummy said, “Take me, now.” No there isn’t. Not for about five miles.’
‘Mummy, I can hear it.’
He was right.
‘Never mind, it’s only Daddy’s mobile. They’ll leave a message.’
Raphael looked around as if we’d heard a mosquito.
‘It’s on the dresser.’ Giles’s phone has better reception than mine. Raph climbed on to a wooden multi-storey garage to reach it. ‘Hello, this is Raphael Cassingham. Oh. Hello. Sometimes she goes out to do her work but she’s here now. Mummy, it’s that policeman you don’t like.’
He passed me the phone, which was sticky.
‘Moth press a buttons! Moth phoning!’
‘Mrs Cassingham, this is Ian MacDonald. I’d like to talk to you and your husband this afternoon, please. Around two o’ clock.’
‘Moth press a buttons!’
I leant away from Moth. ‘I have no engagements. I’ll do my best to locate Giles.’
‘We’d be grateful, Mrs Cassingham.’
Surely they don’t tell you if they’re coming to arrest you? Wouldn’t they just show up, probably in the middle of the night when they may imagine we’d be asleep?
I put Moth down and stood up. ‘Come on, we’d better go find Daddy.’
‘Moth done a poo.’
I changed Moth’s nappy, compelled Raphael to put on his shoes and socks, persuaded Moth into his waterproofs by ceasing to sing a customized version of ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ every time he stopped co-operating and told Raphael that I recommended a cagoule and waterproof trousers but he was at liberty to get wet if he preferred, which he did. The puffin colonies are at the other end of the island, between the village and the headland, where even our Vorsprung durch Technik pushchair can’t handle the terrain. I went back into the kitchen and sacrificed a private hoard of chocolate biscuits against the moment Moth, who had used most of his breakfast to paint the table, recognized that hill-walking in heavy rain is a violation of the toddler’s charter.
By the time we got there I was carrying Moth, whose crying was muffled by wind and rain, and hoping Giles would come straight back with us. The village women, like my eighteenth-century subjects, could go only where they could carry their children, a limitation that seemed less outrageous as cold water seeped down my boots and shoulders and Moth’s face reddened with rage. There would be advantages to being house-bound.
‘Come on, Raph. The slower you go, the longer we have to be out here.’
The village women would have had no waterproofs, either. No Gore-Tex, no Velcro, no zips, just woollen skirts becoming steadily heavier and woollen shawls wet around their faces. Moth’s fingers on my collar were turning blue.
‘Raph, will you hurry up. Moth’s freezing here.’ I shifted Moth and pushed Raph forward. He stumbled against the heather and twisted away.
Then I saw Giles. He was lying on the ground at the edge of the cliff as if he’d already fallen from a height. I hadn’t brought his phone, would have to leave him there and get the children back to the house, and once Raph saw him he wouldn’t want to leave. We should have made wills. The island in trust to Raphael, the house in Oxford mine, back to nursery, sleep, the end of the war, I the only grown-up left standing. A life of single parenthood, of evenings of silence and hot chocolate, beckoned. We could eat fish fingers and tinned peaches without sin. How could I ever remarry with body and mind destroyed by small children?
‘Daddy!’
Giles moved his head, waved like someone uninjured. An English gentleman to the end.
Raphael ran past me. ‘Daddy! The police want you! And Mummy!’
Giles rolled over and stood up. ‘What?’
I made lunch, cheese on toast, tomatoes and the end of the cucumber, apple slices and yoghurt. We were at least going to go to prison well nourished.
‘Giles?’ I tried to pick the skin off an apple slice. ‘What would happen if we just got in the boat and went away? Over to Shepsay, I mean, or somewhere, and then when they’d gone we could get to the airport or go home or something.’
He frowned and looked at Raph, who was reading Alternative Technologies for Family Homes and crumbling his bread with the other hand.
‘They’d think we’d done something that was worrying us, I presume. Are you going to get that child to sleep?’
Moth buried his head in my lap. ‘Moth tired. Mummy’s love.’
I picked him up and felt him soften against me. I stroked his cheek, still pink from the wind and rain, and he pressed my hand against his face. I’d been intending to ask Giles to settle him so I could brush my hair and find a top without baby snot and tomato seeds stuck to it to impress Ian MacDonald. I carried him upstairs.
Ian MacDonald was at the table by the time I came down. Giles had found the cafetiere and made coffee, and decanted milk into Julia’s milk jug. I wondered if he also had access to her sugar crystal mine.
‘Sorry to trouble you again, Mrs Cassingham. I was just explaining to your husband that we’d like to hear all that you know about who’s been on this island.’ He sipped his coffee. I heard the space hopper slapping on the wet flags outside.
I sat down. ‘When? There’ve been people here for thre
e millennia.’
He exchanged glances with Giles as if they were the grown-ups.
‘We don’t usually concern ourselves with anything over seventy years old, Mrs Cassingham.’
‘I’m not Mrs Cassingham.’ I’d meant not to antagonize him, not to be taken away from my children in the back of a police motor launch. Which, come to think of it, would be relatively easy to capsize once we got out into Colla Sound.
Giles looked out of the window, where Raphael’s hair flew in and out of shot. The rain had nearly stopped.
‘The head of my family bought it in the middle of the nineteenth century. I can check the exact date if you want. The McColls had to sell it to cover some debt and my’ – he counted on his fingers – ‘great-great-great-great-grandfather had just made a lot of money on the railways. It should have gone into another branch – my grandfather was a younger son – but his brothers were both killed in the war. I think the younger one maybe owned it for about a year, but he was somewhere in north Africa and I doubt he ever saw it. Then towards the end of the war I think it was used for children’s holiday camps or evacuees or something, and then it came down to my grandfather and then to Pa and now me.’
Giles makes good coffee. My thoughts were beginning to lose the underwater quality of extreme tiredness. ‘Children’s holiday camps?’ I asked.
It seemed unlikely. Even in peacetime, getting the huddled masses of Glasgow out to Colsay would be almost as difficult as feeding them once they were here, and in any case the journey would pass a great many more suitable locations for fresh air and communal jollity where bombs were no more likely than here. The North Atlantic was no haven.
Giles frowned. Ian MacDonald’s pen waited.
‘I really don’t know any more about it. Only that the house needed some work after they left. The evacuees, or whatever.’
‘I take it your grandparents have passed away?’ Ian MacDonald rolled the pen between his fingers.
‘Thirty years ago. My father and his father both had children late in life.’
Ian MacDonald made a note. Admits to being a late baby.
‘Institutions have records,’ I said. ‘Always.’
Institutions have also sometimes allowed people to dispose of inconvenient individuals, even – or especially – small ones.
‘I could find out.’ I slid my fingers into the handle of my cup. Julia’s cup, actually, bone china, so thin you can see the coffee from the outside, the ornate handle a tight fit for two plebeian fingers. ‘Giles, do you know anything more about it? Where they were from? How long they stayed? Who let them stay?’
‘Thank you, Mrs Cassingham, we will make our own enquiries. And after the war, Mr Cassingham? Your family used the island as a holiday home, is that right? After the local people left.’
Ian MacDonald was looking at his notebook. His shoulders were set. I sipped my coffee.
‘Local people, Mr MacDonald?’
His shoulders twitched. ‘Those who were born here.’
As opposed to Giles, presented to the world under sterile drapes in a private maternity home in Sussex. Giles gulped coffee. It would be interesting to see the Old Boys of Eton lined up and held to account for their ancestral sins of colonialism. There would be a trove of vacant Oxford Fellowships.
‘Yes,’ said Giles. ‘We used it for holidays.’ His face reddened. ‘There is still no mains gas, sewerage or telephone here, Mr MacDonald. The younger people had been leaving since the nineteenth century. There were only a couple of households left by the end of the war, weren’t there? That’s no way to live. And one family went to Australia – paid for, I might add, by my grandfather – and my father remembered the last couple here. He liked them. He thought they liked him. And he didn’t take any rent. And of course when the husband died in the early ’70s his wife went to live with relatives. She didn’t want to be here alone. My father discussed it with her. Made sure she knew she could stay on if she wanted to. And her children, if they wanted to come back.’
She wouldn’t have been alone, not with the chambered cairns and the churchyard with its names and dates and the baby in the orchard. She could have stood out on the hillside and heard the wind singing and looked across to the nearest living people in the matchbox houses at Colla. She could have slept as if she were dead.
‘I know that, Mr Cassingham. The lady was Mrs McAlpin and the family who went to Australia now own a catering business in Melbourne. The daughter was back here last year. And then?’
‘You’d have to ask my mother for the detail. My parents married in 1969. There are photos of them here, before I was born, and we came at least once a year from when I can remember.’
‘You were born in 1971? And you’re the first child?’
Giles leant back in his chair. ‘As your informants have told you, clearly.’
The bouncing outside stopped. I waited for the front door. Julia? Could Julia, who had not allowed us to share a bedroom under her roof until we were married, have slipped up? If she had, it would be in character that she would give birth silently and equally silently dispatch evidence of the offence. But, unless I went for a complex scenario in which Julia was secretly pregnant by someone other than Hugo before marriage and managed to conceal the fact until delivering and silencing the baby on honeymoon, the time during which it would have been disastrous for her to be pregnant was the time before she had access to her husband’s island. Raph had still not appeared.
‘Excuse me. I just want to check what Raphael is doing.’
Ian MacDonald lifted his coffee cup. ‘I am glad to hear it.’
I stood on the doorstep. The air was clear and smelt of sea. The space hopper was rolling in the wind, incongruous as a party balloon against the stones and wind-bent trees.
‘Raphael?’
I went round the corner. He was sitting at the edge of the grave site.
‘Raph, what are you doing?’
He looked round. ‘Thinking about death.’
I squatted down next to him. ‘And what were you thinking?’
‘Nothing. Like being dead.’
‘Oh.’ The burlap from around the saplings, come from Iceland on our promise, blew across the field. I remembered what the good mother is meant to say to elicit further confidences. ‘How does that make you feel?’
He shrugged. ‘Probably not dead, because dead doesn’t feel like anything, does it?’
Alas, poor Yorick. Raph’s wrists, sticking out from his favourite pink and blue striped top, were mottled purple.
‘Raph?’ I touched his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry I pushed you. When we went to get Daddy. I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘You hurt me,’ he said.
The wind lifted my hair and rain began to spatter the apple trees, which still looked like dead sticks.
‘I’m sorry. I was tired and anxious but I should have controlled myself.’ I say this kind of thing as if it makes me a better parent than my mother, who did not – does not – apologize or admit weakness or error. But I fear it only makes me a different kind of bad parent, a weak and apologetic kind.
I hesitated. My mother told me, when I asked, that dead people turned into angels and celebrated with God in Heaven. I imagined a kind of soft-focus birthday party taking place on a cloud, where winged blonds dangled their feet over the abyss like the lunching construction workers in the poster and ate cheese and pineapple cubes and chocolate fingers under the gaze of God the albino Santa Claus. We are not parents who have been able to be convincing about Santa Claus, and Raph – perhaps as a result – is less gullible than I was. It was probably too late to attempt such a tale about death, even if I thought I could be convincing.
‘Raph, you know some people think being dead is another kind of being alive, don’t you?
He looked up. ‘Yeah. But they’re wrong. You said there aren’t any ghosts.’
‘No. They’re just in stories.’ Raph doesn’t like stories, doesn’t see the point of fiction. Rain drip
ped off my hair onto my eyelids.
‘Why don’t you come inside and do some more work on that generator? The carbon-neutral gym?’
He stood up. ‘It’s not carbon-neutral because of the manufacture. You can’t actually make something like that carbon-neutral, you just have to design it so it puts back more than it takes out over a certain number of years. Is that policeman going to take you away?’
He sounded almost hopeful. We made for the back door. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not. Whatever made you think that?’
If Ian MacDonald took me away, it would be to somewhere I could sleep. I could lie on a pallet under a fluorescent light and sleep, or on a concrete bunk beside a toilet and sleep. Ian MacDonald had gone. It was time to wake Moth and change his nappy and read simple tales of women brought to inanity by the systematic denial of economic independence and hang out the laundry if the rain stopped and hear a monologue about fuel-injection systems and change Moth’s nappy and wipe down the kitchen counters and cook a meal and throw most of it away and wash everyone’s hands and wipe the counters. There were five hours and three minutes before I could take Moth for his bath, six hours and thirty-three minutes until Raphael could legitimately be denied any further conversational opportunities until morning.
‘Giles? Is there any chance at all you could look after the kids for an hour and let me sleep? Just an hour? I’m so tired I keep cutting myself, look, and I was dropping off on the floor this morning, wasn’t I, Raph?’
Raph wasn’t there. I showed Giles the cuts on my fingers where I’d kept missing the tomatoes before lunch. He raised an eyebrow, ran his glance down my jeans. He looked round for Raph.
‘Only if you’ll have sex with me later.’
‘I need to work. You know I do.’
