by Sarah Moss
‘OK. No deal.’
‘Giles! I shouldn’t have to bargain with you to look after your own bloody children for one hour.’
Raphael put his head round the door. ‘We’re not bloody children.’
‘No, love, you’re lovely. Sorry. I’m tired.’
‘I should think so.’ He disappeared again.
I yawned. Sleep closed in on me.
‘All right,’ I said to Giles. ‘Fine. If you want bought sex you can have it. Wake Moth now. Don’t wake me before half-past three and hang the laundry up or you won’t have any clean pants. And I reserve the right to lie still and think of the Bodleian Library while you do all the work.’
He stood up and patted my bottom as I went by. ‘Excellent news.’
I will sell myself, it turns out, not for tenure but for an hour’s sleep.
It was dark when I woke, and the house was silent. The sea was breaking rocks on the beach, audible even over the rain on the windows, and there was a warm hump at the other side of the bed. I turned my head cautiously, hoping the night might still be young with many more hours of potential sleep ahead. 11:57. I stretched out and lay watching the voile panels wavering like ghosts. No one was asking me to do anything and it was possible that no one would ask me to do anything for several hours. I arranged my hair more comfortably off my neck. The idea that Giles had managed to feed and bathe both children and put them to bed was like discovering that a house plant (which we do not have, I do enough damage to my children without having plants to neglect as well) had made a cake while I was at work. It had potential. Unless, of course, he had not fed them, bathed them and put them to bed. I slid out from under the duvet, managed not to moan at the shock of the cold floor under my feet. Giles had forgotten to wrap whichever item of clothing came to hand around the doorhandles to muffle the latch, which can wake Moth. At least if he woke I’d know he was alive. I eased our door open, stepped over the creaky floorboard and sidled up to Moth’s room. Yes. A small shape under the blanket, a fan of dark hair on the pillow. I went in and rested a hand on his shoulder. He snuffled and shifted and I froze until his breathing lapped gently on the shore. I unbent slowly and followed the choreography for leaving the room.
Light fell on the wall of the landing in a way I couldn’t remember having seen before. I shivered, managed not to glance behind me despite the sudden certainty that I was being watched. The stairs gaped into the darkness of the hall. I wanted to go back, to guard Moth.
Raphael used to sleep through engineering works carried out on the railway line outside his open window in the small hours of the morning. I went in and sat on the bed. He lay as if he’d been dropped on top of the duvet, the array of engineering textbooks around him counter-evidence of a gentler passage to sleep. There was food around his mouth, something red, and garlic on the air. Fed, if not washed. I stroked his hair and shoulder, surprisingly warm, and sat there watching him breathe, the curve of his cheek against the pink trelliswork of the pillowcase, his ribcage, the bones formed in my body, rising and falling. I lifted his hair and kissed his forehead, rested my cheek against his face. I am never sure about the legitimacy of these stolen caresses, taken like sexual harassment for my pleasure rather than his. I touched the back of his neck, where there is a seam of red-gold hair that women will, in later years, want to kiss. It is a pity that by the time our children wake up we love them less.
I crept back along the hall. A board creaked in the floor above. The bedroom door snicked as I closed it.
‘Hey, you.’
Damn.
‘Thanks for letting me sleep.’ I got back in and huddled in a ball.
‘Cold? Come here. Did Moth wake?’
‘No. I was just checking on them. Did you lock up?’
He folded himself round me. I shivered again.
He stroked my shoulder, muffled by an anachronistic fabric known as flannelette. ‘I am capable of putting them to bed, you know.’
I straightened out, and regretted it as my feet dipped into the half-frozen pond that seems to form in the lower half of the bed. ‘How on earth would I know? You never do.’
He ran his hand down to my waist. ‘When you went to Montreal I did. Hell, Anna, it’s not gravitational physics, putting children to bed.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, it wouldn’t be, would it? I mean, women have been doing it for centuries. It can’t possibly be hard.’
His hand moved down. ‘Don’t start that.’
I pushed it back. ‘Don’t start that.’
‘You said we could have sex.’
I pulled my nightdress down and wrapped my feet in it. ‘I changed my mind.’
He started to kiss the back of my neck. I had forgotten about that. He lifted my hair and blew on my ear. I shivered. His fingers traced my collarbone and I turned my head.
‘So why should I believe you next time?’
His hand came round and began to work on the buttons, of which there are many.
‘Next time I might not change my mind.’
He spoke into my belly. ‘Not when you remember this time.’
Night Waking: 03:11
Moth is screaming. The ten steps to his room pass too slowly, the hall still dark as the grave. He is standing, rigid, grasping the bars. I pick him up but he is too stiff to cuddle and his sleeping bag is damp with sweat. Maybe he has a fever. Maybe he has meningitis. We’ll need the helicopter. I can’t go to a hospital in a helicopter wearing a stained nightdress. Pack his teddy. And lots of books. I pat his back.
‘Come on, love. You’re all hot. Let’s have your bag off. Sit on Mummy’s lap.’
The room is full of grey light and colours are coming back. Freed from his sleeping bag, he wraps his arms and legs round me and snuffles into my neck.
‘Mummy sing a Gruffalo.’
Maybe not meningitis. I stroke his hair.
‘Gruffalo sleeping. Night time.’
‘Mummy sing a Gruffalo!’
Maybe not even spectres.
‘Not now. Moth sleeping.’
His face is cooler.
‘Bag off. Morning time!’
I could, actually, get up, having had more time asleep, or at least in bed, than I have since before Raphael was born. What time would Giles have put them to bed? If I get him up now, he will sleep later and I will be able to work. On the other hand, if I get him up now he will want to get up at four for the next three months.
‘Come on, love. Back in your bed. Night time.’
‘Gruffalo!’
I lean over the cot and begin again. ‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep, dark wood …’
I remember earlier and certain muscles contract. I had forgotten what it is like with Giles. We should do that more often. And he should put the children to bed more often. I would win on both counts.
‘Owl, Mummy. Owl but no.’
‘I’m going to have tea with a gruffalo. A gruffalo, what’s a gruffalo? A gruffalo, why, didn’t you know? He has …’
Do I love Giles? A question, I have thought for some time, best not asked once there are children at stake. What am I going to do, leave? With my fixed-term contract and a salary that barely covers childcare? I once defined love as meaning that you would die for the beloved. Not a chance. The children would cope better without him than without me. Do, in fact, cope without him. We all know that sex and love are not the same, although in marriage, it occurs to me, sex might be an adequate if unusual substitute. I used to know I loved him because I spent time on things – fresh figs with Parma ham from his preferred delicatessen, removing hair from my big toes, getting his photographs of Colsay framed – intended to please him and, giving no thought to reward, was happy that he was happy. He used, come to think of it, to bring me flowers on Fridays and maintain a supply of my preferred, expensive bath salts, the last of which ran out some time before Moth was born. I don’t do things for him any more and if I did it would be by prior negotiation and I would want to be paid back in
childcare. Would I cry for the rest of my life if he died? (It is almost light enough to read now, but Moth is pretending, perhaps to himself, to be asleep.) No. No, I wouldn’t. I murmur my way through The Gruffalo one more time and make my way downstairs.
The wind had fallen, but waves were still lumbering on to the beach and water that was not quite rain hung in the air. The sun stood over the horizon, papery and provisional, as if it had not yet been glued in place. My laptop case banged on my legs as I tried not to spill my tea on the wet grass. The cottage, at least on the inside, was beginning to look like something out of one of my mother’s magazines, and I could see that we would have to ban the children from its glossy floors and white curved walls. I settled on the floor in front of the full-height corner window from which we were encouraging visitors to ‘watch the wild Atlantic rolling on to the beach at your doorstep’. The satellites, or whatever they are, were auspicious and the computer had connected before I’d got bored of watching the column of seagulls over the village. I was planning to read through chapter three for the last time, but first I went to EBSCO and searched ‘Colsay + World War Two’. Nothing. I tried again with ‘Colsay + wartime’. Something about naval charts. ‘Colsay + evacuees’. Nothing. And surprisingly little about evacuees in general. I put the laptop down and straightened my legs. Outside, a sparrow-sized bird with black and white Finnish designer plumage pecked an invisible breakfast from the stones, its legs so thin that they must be made of something finer than bone. I wondered if evacuees were under-researched, whether anyone would fund the kind of project a historian of childhood might undertake. I could travel around the country on my own and interview old ladies over cups of tea and cake, and maybe some of them, in between extolling the re-use of dripping and the moral benefits of aerial bombardment, would tell me how to raise functional children and sustain marriage without resentment. The bird hopped closer to the window and peered in like someone with doubts about a restaurant. I’d need a tape recorder, of course, or the hi-tech equivalent, which meant it was really a sociology project. Historians are people who are more comfortable in the company of the dead.
Colsay House
1st Nov.
Dear Miss Emily,
I write in some excitement, having just heard from Mrs Grice an extraordinary tale. I went to her house this afternoon as I have been doing from time to time, and found her somewhat distracted with three children under her feet, her house in greater disarray than usual and what had no doubt before the children seized on them been careful piles of dead birds about the place, each with its neck broken and the heads swinging crazily as the two older ones, who are, I think, her sister’s children, tossed them about. I have often found at home that help at such times can elicit confidences sturdily withheld by mothers over weeks and months of visiting at more orderly moments, so I scolded the children and asked if they were not ashamed to treat their mother so in her condition, assuring them that in the civilized world any child who behaved so would be soundly punished. I do not know if they understood my words, but they certainly received the general import and slunk out into the rain, no doubt in search of further mischief. ‘They have done their work,’ Mrs Grice said sullenly, as if I had chided her. ‘It’s not so bad if the bairns have high spirits sometimes.’ I took the bird from the youngest child, who was fingering its eyes and opening and shutting its beak while the tail draggled excrement on to what one might hesitate to call his clothing, and offered him instead a pasteboard book of the sort that I often give to the slum children at home. Mrs Grice sat down, appearing, as much as I could tell in the low light, drawn and grey. She allowed me to take her pulse, which was fast, and to bring her a drink of water. I asked her to instruct me in the plucking of fowl, which is not, as you may well believe, a task in which I have any expertise! It was of course uncongenial work, but worth the result.
She disclosed under careful questioning that the ‘knee-woman’, whose name she still refuses to confide, has certain rituals or tricks carried out both before and after the birth. Neither mother nor child may be left alone until after the infant is baptized, for the ‘trows’ or – but I may have misheard – ‘hildufolk’ will cause the mother to die and exchange the baby for one of their own if they find them unguarded (apparently the hildufolk have particular need of young mothers to suckle both trow and changeling children). A ‘trowie’ child is hard to feed, cries incessantly, may have strange features or physical peculiarities and, if not returned to its natural parents, will usually die in the first year of life (God knows I have seen enough such in Manchester – would that the Grey People were the only cause of such infant misery!). I asked if those who died from the eight-day sickness were trowie babies and she shrugged; some might be, some not – it is still possible for carefully guarded infants to die. I asked what is done to prevent these exchanges and she showed me a knife or dagger stuck into the wooden lintel over the door; trows will not pass an iron blade, and, for extra security given their particular predilection for the new-born, the ‘knee-woman’ brings with her an effigy of a child, which the mother nurses while her neighbours care for the real infant in the days after delivery, the idea being that the trows (who are clearly not possessed of much intelligence despite their startling powers) will take the doll. Before confinement, the pregnancy must not be spoken of or referred to in any way lest the Grey People overhear. It is unfortunate that I did not know this earlier, for it is a rule that I have inevitably broken in the course of my work, and it seems cruel indeed, especially to women awaiting their first confinement who suffer greatly from the denial of experienced advice (I have several times assisted at childbeds where it became clear that the young mother did not understand how the child would leave her body until the process was complete). I gather this is also one of the reasons why it is not customary for the expectant mother to prepare little clothes, lest the hildufolk see her at work and understand what she awaits, but then surely it should devolve on the neighbours to make these preparations on her behalf?
I took up another bird, she having taken the first from me after plucking six or seven herself, and asked if the need to keep the child from the Grey People required any particular treatment of the cord. No, she said. The knee-woman will be doing nothing but what is natural and necessary and now it is time to be preparing the meal for the men will be cold and hungry when they return. I took the hint (!) and made my way back here, where indeed Mrs Barwick had my supper on the table – it is dark so early now that one quite forgets the time, but I suppose that must be just the same with you in Edinburgh as here, though at least you have the gaslights and of course the city clocks. I believe the clock on the mantelshelf here to be the only one on Colsay, and would you believe when I arrived it had been stopped for years, with no one knowing the time at all!
I am not sure quite how to take these tales of ‘trows’ (trolls?). Can it possibly be the case that, while we can govern an empire on which the sun never sets and bring education and rational thinking to poor people from India to the New Zealand savages, there are still British subjects going in fear of elves? But I suppose that as long as they live in dark, unventilated stone huts and remain illiterate there are no depths of superstition that should surprise us, and truly, the conditions of life here are distressing to observe.
I remain yours most sincerely,
May Moberley
THE ABILITY TO DEFEND ONESELF
It is a known fact, though perhaps not sufficiently stressed, that the ability to defend oneself develops later than the ability to attack.
– Anna Freud, Infants Without Families: Reports on the Hampstead Nurseries, 1939–1945 (New York: International Universities Press, 1973), p. 570
The kitchen seemed brighter than usual, as if someone had adjusted the resolution of my screen, and I thought I would deal with the piles of paper after Giles had gone out. And phone the library and local archive centre in Colla to arrange a visit, and maybe clean the fridge, especially the salad drawer, whose con
tents had reached a stage where they could be emptied straight into a flowerbed without need for an interlude on the compost heap. And cook something proper for supper, maybe even the kind of thing normally accompanied by potatoes, and then some child-centred project of the sort that I used to pay nursery to do, papier mâche (out of Giles’s Guardian archive), or a collage of leaves and feathers, or gingerbread men, though the first and last time we tried gingerbread (ecologically sound Christmas tree decorations) it stuck so resolutely to the baking sheets that I hid the whole lot in next door’s bin and bought new baking sheets on my way home from work the next day. We could make paper dragons out of Julia’s hoard of used wrapping paper, or accelerate the next trip to Colla by printing with the potatoes, or – the rain being not quite heavy enough to fall – I could take the children round the village and explain eighteenth-century life, or even to the headland and pass on my new-found knowledge of Neolithic burial practices. Not being tired was almost like not having children, or like taking recreational drugs, in terms of imagining creative and educational experiences we might share. I began to stack papers, as if aligning the edges were the first step towards order.
‘What would you like to do today?’ I asked.
Raph looked up. ‘Can I play on your computer?’
Moth handed me Lucy and Tom’s Day. ‘Mummy read it.’
I took the book. ‘No, Raph.’
‘Why?’
I put the book down and picked up another pile of paper. It would, I thought, be much quicker to recycle them all than to make the usual subsidiary piles, which after all only sit very slowly decomposing on the kitchen table.
