by Sarah Moss
Giles stops pretending to be asleep. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Sorry but no. Setting a precedent.’
And reinforcing fear, I think. All the parenting books, eighteenth-century and modern, warn against appearing to take your children’s irrational anxieties too seriously. I have, myself, yet to experience a fear assuaged by the brisk application of common sense.
Raph looks into my face, as if in a mute plea to be pulled from the current.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Come on. Moth and I will sleep in your room.’
I am wrong, of course. Raph sits up in bed keeping watch and Moth potters about messing up Raph’s Lego and singing an approximation of ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ until the sun rises and I give up. Prisoners awaiting execution, I am sure, greet sunrise with less enthusiasm than I do, but most days I would put myself forward with some confidence against people facing dental treatment or driving tests.
*
Later, we went over to make a final check on Black Rock House while Giles took the boat to Colla to collect the Fairchilds. There were clouds, but high and white. Innocuous, although moving faster than I would have liked, their shadows sailing across the hillside behind the house. The waves had turned white since breakfast and we watched as Giles reached the open water and began to lurch from one crest to the next. The boat would be sitting lower with three extra bodies and groceries for six, and I hoped the Fairchilds were as beguiled by the great outdoors as by the rain-mist shower.
‘Put Moth down!’
He landed as awkwardly as a seagull.
‘OK, but we have to walk to the cottage.’
‘Moth go a beach!’
Raphael ran after him.
‘No, Raph, don’t grab him. Moth, we need to go to the cottage now. Beach later.’
‘Later’ is a concept with about as much meaning to your average toddler as ‘new historicism’ or ‘neurophysics’.
‘Go a beach, now!’
‘Later. Cottage now.’
‘Come on, Mummy.’
I picked him up again. ‘Come on. Mummy will be a horse. A-gallop, a-gallop.’
‘Do you think we should put some flowers?’ I asked Raphael. ‘Well, some grasses or something? In a vase with some pebbles.’
He looked at me as if I’d suggested a pleasing arrangement of socks or tin openers.
‘Why?’
Moth was playing with the washing machine again.
‘Oh, never mind.’
I wandered around, half listening to Moth’s conversations with domestic appliances. The ‘arts and crafts packs’ were inadequately represented by some pencil crayons in which Raph had never shown any interest and some watercolour paint and a block of artist’s paper acquired by me in a rare moment of optimism before Moth was born. But there was a home-made soda loaf charmingly wrapped in one of Julia’s linen cloths (technical purpose unknown), and a basket of soap made by a woman whose husband farms sheep outside Colla. There is some connection between the sheep and the soap which I do not wish to contemplate in any detail.
There were now roller-blinds with child-strangling cords which didn’t matter because the house is officially unsuitable for children anyway, and I’d come over the previous night when the goblins that control Giles’s USB thing weren’t in the mood at home to check e-mail and wipe the fingerprints off the full-height windows. There was loo paper and cold-pressed olive oil and green tea. Giles, briefly distracted from the puffins by the vicarious gratification of gastronomic fantasy, had ordered smoked salt from the smokery at Shepsay and two kinds of pepper. When they came I could see him salivating over imaginary menus, although I have never seen a recipe calling for smoked salt. There were tea-towels with birds on them from the website of a shop on Marylebone High Street and there were plates in two sizes and mugs and bowls from the pottery at Eynvik where Giles once bought a vase for my birthday. We could send the children to boarding school and step straight into a new life.
‘Oh dear, soon dry Moth. Never mind.’
‘Moth?’ I said. ‘Mummy just needs to go to the loo, all right? Just for a minute.’ I did, but mostly I was succumbing to a sudden longing to be the first person to use a pristine bathroom, to sit on a toilet seat that not merely by good fortune but by definition hadn’t been peed on by anyone else, to wash my hands with new soap and dry them on a new towel.
‘No.’ Moth reappeared. There was water all down his dungarees. ‘No. Mummy not go a loo.’
‘I’ll only be a minute.’ I set off into the hall.
‘Mummy! Moth come too!’
‘Mummy, what are you doing?’ Raph called from upstairs. ‘You can’t leave Moth here.’
‘I’m not bloody leaving him, I’m trying to pee, for Christ’s sake.’
Raph put his head over the banisters. ‘Why do you need to swear about peeing?’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’ I strode down the hall. If I’d been able to get the door shut before Moth joined me, I’d have locked it and left him banging and screaming outside.
‘Moth helping,’ he said happily, placing a cold hand on my upper thigh. The underfloor heating was off, but the slate tiles were clean and smooth and the walls gleamed. A panoply of towels hung at right-angles from the heated towel rail. I got up. Giles had bought nicer loo paper than we use ourselves, whether through ignorance or romance I didn’t know. I helped myself lavishly, with only the briefest thought for the small luxuries of my past, in which toilet paper played no part.
‘Mummy.’ Moth was standing in front of me, peering up as if I were performing an interesting surgical procedure he wanted to learn. ‘Mummy, where Mummy’s penis? Where it gone?’
He was younger than Freud says boys should be when they ask this question (though I doubted, somehow, that Freud had personally been called upon to answer it). I wondered about anticipating subsequent acts of psychological destruction, which are after all what parenthood is for, by telling him Daddy had cut it off. Raph put his head round the door.
‘Mummies don’t have penises. Mummies are women and women have vaginas.’
They both stared at me. I pulled my knickers up.
‘What, in there?’ Moth pointed.
‘Yes,’ said Raph. ‘And daddies put their penises in to make babies.’
Moth looked from me to his brother and back. I thought Raph had forgotten this unlikely tale before Moth was born.
I ran the tap. ‘Right. Time to go home.’
The wind was too high for us to hear the boat’s engine. There were voices in the hall. Having flicked through some of Giles’s holiday magazines (‘Penelope, Rupert’s wife, came to greet us in a waft of cinnamon and a pristine apron’), I’d decided to be found in the kitchen doing something rustic with the children about my feet. I’d had to settle for assaulting a lump of frozen soup which I’d forgotten to get out of the freezer the night before, while trying to explain to Raphael why the Titanic ended up in two pieces.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I hope you had a good trip. I’m Anna.’
Three of them. A large woman with dyed mahogany hair and the kind of orange make-up that makes you want to scratch it to see what’s underneath, wearing a small but high-spec waterproof jacket; a man in aggressively trendy glasses with grey hair razor cut in a manner unknown to Oxford academics; and a teenage girl in damp jeans, hiding behind her pale hair and hollow as the people in Raph’s book about the liberation of Amsterdam in 1944.
The woman stuck out her hand. There was a drop on the end of her nose.
‘I’m Judith. I must say, I hadn’t thought the boat would be quite that small. I mean, not so small that people’s luggage gets wet. But I suppose it’s an unusual place, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry your luggage got wet. I’m afraid we hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. I mean, my husband was a bit worried about his laptop but I’m sure it’s fine. Those cases are very good, aren’t they?’
The husband cleared his throat. ‘It’s not a
problem. Good to be on the water after all that time in the car. The way things have always been round here, isn’t it? Brian, by the way.’
Moth peered from behind my jeans. ‘Mummy not got a penis.’
I hoped this remark was so extraordinary as to be incomprehensible. The corners of Judith Fairchild’s lips twitched.
‘This is Timothy.’ I patted him. ‘And Raphael.’
‘Hello, Timothy. And how old are you, Raphael?’
‘Mind your own business.’ Raph disappeared back into the kitchen.
‘Raphael!’ I said. ‘Sorry, we’ve been here all summer, they’re not used to visitors.’
‘It was perfectly reasonable,’ said the girl. She shook her hair back. ‘Mum, you wouldn’t like if it the first thing someone said to you was “How old are you?”.’
‘Don’t be so aggressive, Zoe. I expect he’s shy.’
Zoe slouched. ‘You’d have smacked me if I’d spoken to someone like that. You never let me be shy.’
Giles rubbed his hands together. ‘Parenting fashions change, don’t they? We had a nanny who used to hit us with a garden cane. Anna’s working on children’s history, you know.’
Judith looked me up and down. ‘Are you? You’re lucky to find the time, with two boys.’ She smiled at Moth. ‘I expect you keep Mummy on her toes, don’t you?’
He looked at my feet, puzzled.
‘Why doesn’t Giles take you over to the house?’ I asked. ‘I do hope you’ll like it.’
The drop fell on to her stomach and rolled down the white Gore-Tex. ‘Thanks. Would you like me to keep a list of snags?’
‘We stayed in a cottage in the Lake District last year.’ Zoe fiddled with a yoghurt-smeared bowl on the table. ‘And it didn’t have a coffee grinder. Mum had to improvise.’
Giles did not meet my gaze. The nearest coffee grinder in private hands is probably in Glasgow, along with the nearest coffee beans. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘If you need anything that’s not there you can always come and find us and we’ll do what we can.’
‘We will,’ said Judith. ‘Best to find out now, isn’t it?’
We were finishing lunch when Giles came back. The soup seemed to be mostly cabbage and was worse than usual. I felt sorry for him for the first time in years.
‘Jesus, Giles, how did you manage not to push them into the sea?’
He sat down, looking as if a mink had eaten all the puffins.
‘The real question is why that girl has come on holiday with her mother. They hate each other. Not one civil word. Poor bloke.’
I passed him a bowl. ‘Makes me feel like a decent human being.’
He looked up. ‘You are a decent human being.’
I buttered bread for him. ‘Not always.’
Giles went back to the puffins when Moth went to sleep, taking a well-earned break from human beings. I set Raph up in the bathroom with a sequence of plastic pots and toy boats and asked him to write down which ones were most seaworthy and why, which I thought I could probably count as part of home education if the parenting police ever stopped by. I took my tea into the sitting room and woke up my computer. The bibliography was still not in alphabetical order and the simplicity of the job appealed to me. I scrolled through and began to cut and paste from a document entitled ‘Books to Find’. Many of my colleagues will look only at the bibliography and the index and will be content with the book if they find their own names there. I wondered if I could be bothered to check the publishers’ guidelines about alphabetizing anonymous publications – by title or under ‘Anon’ – and then thought I might just glance at the Colla and Inversaigh Free Press Observer.
Fiona Firth must have got a major grant for the project, the kind of grant that would put my CV on to the smaller pile when I apply for jobs. I searched for ‘Colsay + Castle School + accident’ between 1940 and 1945 and was immediately rewarded. On 10 June 1943, ‘On Thursday, the body of Mary Homerton, a pupil at the Castle School, was pulled from the water under the cliffs at Eyness Howe. A Fatal Accident Inquiry will follow.’ No more? What about the baby? I clicked the next link, to an issue five months later.
MARY HOMERTON CASE: FATAL ACCIDENT INQUIRY OPENED The Fatal Accident Inquiry into the death of Mary Margaret Homerton, whose body was found in the water below the cliffs of Colsay in June of last year, opened at Inversaigh Parish Hall yesterday. Mr Robert Webb is Acting Sheriff. The dead girl’s father died on active service last year and her mother, who remarried shortly after the accident, has not travelled north to attend the inquiry.
Mr Webb began by hearing from Miss Leach of the Castle School, who explained that Mary Homerton had stayed on the Buchan croft last year because Colsay House was not big enough for all the girls. Asked if it was wise to billet out the younger children in this way, especially when it was known that Mary had recently lost her father under distressing circumstances, she replied that on the contrary, she had thought it better for the child to be in a family environment and that in fact it seemed that leaving Mrs Buchan had caused Mary more upset than going there. She had left when Mrs Buchan’s condition made it advisable for her to do so, but had remained fond of both Mrs Buchan and the baby and visited them often.
Miss Leach was asked why Mary had not been in lessons on 7 June, and replied that Mary had been much upset by a letter from her mother received earlier in the week and had been unable to apply herself and sometimes distracting to other girls. Miss Leach and Miss Bower, in accordance with the principles on which the school is run, decided to ‘respect her feelings’ rather than requiring the child to conform to the usual rule. Miss Leach agreed that since they were two adults in charge of thirty girls this meant that Mary was effectively unsupervised during the day, although she added that the girls had been told to keep away from the cliffs and that there had been no previous difficulties relating to their licence to wander the island.
Asked if she knew the contents of the letter, Miss Leach produced the original, which was found among Mary’s possessions, and read aloud the pertinent part, to the effect that Mrs Homerton intended to remarry, had sold the family home and would be living in her new husband’s residence when Mary returned from school for the summer holidays. It appeared that Mary had had no previous intimations of her mother’s intentions and was particularly unhappy with her mother’s choice, alleging that Mr Barker had been her mother’s companion before her father’s death and that he did not like Mary and resented her claims on her mother.
Mary had received permission to go visit Mrs Buchan and had agreed that she would return to the school for four o’clock tea. When she did not do so, Miss Leach was irritated but assumed that Mary had been offered tea by Mrs Buchan. It was only when Mrs Buchan herself appeared shortly after four o’clock, saying that Mary had taken baby Alexander for a walk two hours previously, that the alarm was raised.
Mr Webb asked Miss Leach to consider whether, in retrospect, she felt that anything could and should have been done differently. Miss Leach said that naturally she and Miss Bower had given this question a great deal of thought and discussion, usually concluding that the only way they would have been aware of the extent of Mary’s unhappiness, since she was not a confiding child, would have been to read her letters, and that even in retrospect they could not regret allowing the girls their privacy.
Mr Webb pointed out that at most English schools it is customary to read the pupils’ letters, if not the parents’ replies. Miss Leach said that this was precisely not the kind of school she aspired to run, adding that she and her partner have always held that children treated as intelligent and sensible beings are likely to behave as such.
Mr Webb adjourned the inquiry until tomorrow, when he will hear the evidence of Mrs Buchan.
I listened for Raph upstairs, wanting to go and make sure that Moth was still there, that he hadn’t been quietly removed by Mary’s ghost, but also wanting to finish the story. I went and stood in the hall. Water swished in the bath. John Bowlby describes an experimen
t called ‘the glass cliff’ in the 1960s. The psychologist arranged a room on two levels, using wooden boards and fabric to make a vertical drop of a few feet look much longer, and covered the apparent chasm with clear, non-reflective glass. Then he placed a sequence of newly mobile babies at one side of the chasm and asked their mothers to call them from the other side. Three of the babies under one crawled over the edge of the ‘cliff’ without a flicker of concern. Young toddlers were more likely to pause and cry, but could be persuaded to keep going. The two-year-olds refused outright (I wondered if the experimenters had allowed for the tendency of two-year-olds arbitrarily to refuse outright any request on grounds that have nothing to do with judgement. I wondered also if they had given any thought to the fact that the experiment, while acceptable to the ethics committee of the day, taught its subjects that crawling over the edges of cliffs brought no alarming consequences). I was not sure this experiment meant that Mrs Buchan’s baby had died without fear; young babies may be immune to the fear of heights but they have some self-preserving instinct, albeit one that comes by definition too late, in the form of a grasping reflex which any careless parent can trigger in the course of a bath or nappy change. His final seconds would have been filled with terror, and then pain.
MARY HOMERTON CASE: FATAL ACCIDENT INQUIRY CONTINUES Mrs Buchan gave evidence today at the inquiry into the death of ten-year-old Mary Homerton on Colsay last June. Mr Webb, Acting Sheriff in the absence on active service of Douglas Henryson, began by thanking Mrs Buchan for attending and reminding herself of highly distressing circumstances. He asked her to give her account of 7 June.
Mrs Buchan said that until teatime the day was quite ordinary. She assumed the court had no interest in the earlier part of her day, before Mary’s arrival at the cottage, but the baby had been awake a great deal of the previous night, perhaps troubled by teething, and although she had risen at the usual time to feed the hens and get the washing out, she had been exceedingly tired all that day. Mary arrived while she was giving the baby his lunch and asked if she could feed him. Baby Alexander was fond of Mary and Mrs Buchan was happy to sit and eat her own meal, so Mary gave him some pease pudding and then an egg custard. Mary had had her own lunch at school, the teachers being good about making sure the girls were no burden on the islanders’ ration books. Afterwards Mary helped to tidy the house and wash up the meal, and then asked if she could take Alexander for a walk, suggesting that Mrs Buchan could sleep for an hour or so.