Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  I retrieved it and poured him a glass.‘Yup. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers. And what did she want? No fish forks? Shortage of cappuccino whisks?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Nothing much. Nothing to worry about.’

  He drank some wine and began to turn the glass by its stem. ‘Listen, Anna?’

  I yawned. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stay awake if I tried to keep working. ‘What?’

  ‘I had an e-mail from Sam.’

  I leant back in the chair. My eyes were closing. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Fine. Says hi. Anna, are you awake?’

  I opened my eyes. The room blurred and they closed again. ‘More or less.’

  ‘There’s a job in Glasgow.’

  I sat up. He’d stopped turning the glass and was looking at me.

  ‘Glasgow?’ I said. Too far for even Giles to think he could commute from here. Unless he was planning to abandon me with the kids on Colsay while he holed up in some pristine new-build flat all week, somewhere with wooden floors and a shiny kitchen. ‘What about me?’

  He took another drink. ‘It’s for you. A history job. Eighteenth or nineteenth century, interest in family studies, gender or childhood particularly welcome. Rather a plum, I’d say, especially at the moment. God knows how they got the funding.’

  ‘Oh.’ I ran my finger round the rim of my glass. Another invitation to chip away another piece of my self-esteem. I negotiate not getting jobs that aren’t a perfect fit by saying that they probably found someone who really knows about the Grand Tour or the Napoleonic Wars or whatever it is, but not getting the job Giles was describing would mean there is someone else who does exactly what I do better than I do it. Or perhaps just more than I do it, which would not be hard.

  ‘I thought you’d be interested. Sam said he thought of you as soon as he saw it.’

  I wouldn’t get it. There are too many men and childless women who go to the bar after seminars and work through the weekends. I like Glasgow, though. Scottish schools are meant to be good. If we sold the Oxford house – but I have been ‘at Oxford’ all my adult life and I think I might be a different person without that word on my lapel badge, neither the eighteen-year-old who left home by walking down the street to the bus under a rucksack so heavy it was like learning to walk for the first time, ignoring my mother who stood waving in the curved window of the front room, nor the person who is able to hold her institutional affiliation like a secret pregnancy or an invisible comfort blanket. Affiliation, a word holding both filament and filial, the ties that bind. The comfort blanket, which neither of my children could be persuaded to accept as a substitute for my nocturnal attentions, is what I have recently learnt to identify as a ‘transitional object’, a material substitute for or reminder of the absent mother. The university as transitional object for adults whose need for Mummy was never satisfied: discuss. Giles, whose mother sent him to boarding school before he could tie his own shoelaces, flicked his hair.

  ‘So. You should apply.’

  ‘So you can take that professorship at the Highlands and Islands place? You realize everyone in Oxford would think you were mad?’

  He shrugged. I think being that posh equips people with such an implacable sense of self-worth that they can take down struggling democracies, thunder downstairs while the children are asleep and send the lower orders over the top at Ypres without feeling in the least implicated. It should come as no surprise that this also makes it possible to resign from the jobs for which other people would sell their bodies in order to become the saviour of puffins.

  ‘Why would I care? I wouldn’t be there. Come on, Anna. It would be good for all of us. Think about it, OK?’ He stood up. ‘And if you got that job and we moved, you’d be earning as much as I would.’

  I yawned again. Maybe I could just put my head down on the table and sleep here, further from the children. ‘Would you like that?’ I asked.

  ‘You would. Come on, bedtime. You’re falling asleep there.’

  Yes, I would.

  Colsay House, Colsay

  24th Nov., 1878

  Dear Miss Emily,

  No news of the new inhabitant yet! Mrs Grice appears well enough, and though I have forborn to exact a promise I do believe that she may trust me enough to allow my presence when her crisis comes, and I know you will believe me when I say that if I am present I will not allow anything to be done that will harm her child no matter what the superstitions and customs may be here.

  No, I write on a matter perhaps yet more momentous. You have perhaps read or heard of the proposed emigration of the people of Shepsay to Canada. You and Lord Hugo asked me to inform you of what I thought best for the welfare of the population of Colsay, and I would be failing in that promise if I did not say now, before there is thought of the Spring planting, that it is my opinion that the people of this island should receive, and be encouraged to accept, a similar offer. Truly, they are living like savages, like animals, and the sufferings of the women in particular are what no subject of a civilized nation should be asked to witness, let alone endure, in the present century. Emigration of course is not an easy choice, particularly for a people so deeply attached to familiar terrain as the islanders are known to be, but, the first hurdles over, I am convinced that the women who spend their days eviscerating birds and trudging like beasts of burden through the rain and the men who daily risk their lives in the primitive pursuit of seafowl would live to thank you for transplanting them to a place of sunshine and wheat-fields. I know the expense would be great, perhaps even compared to that of erecting and maintaining a school, but, knowing also of your family’s commitment to the best interests of the people entrusted to your management, I am emboldened to explain my views.

  Naturally I have not mentioned this to anyone on Colsay, and if you see fit to investigate my suggestion it would surely be better not to mention my name in this connection, for to do so must jeopardize my work here and thus the lives of those who may yet see a brighter future, for the islanders have that prejudice against the idea of emigration which ignorance and superstition must lead one to expect.

  I will, of course, write again as soon as there is news.

  Yours most sincerely,

  May Moberley

  11

  WATCHING BUT NOT STARING

  In each test the tester, who was well known to the animals, stood close to the cage. In one he offered them pieces of banana; in another he stood quietly watching but not staring; and in a third he dressed up in the mask and cloak and made slight movements.

  – John Bowlby, Separation, p. 163

  ‘It’s very uplifting, isn’t it, all this sky.’ said Judith. She sniffed, but the drip fell anyway. DNA on the wet grass. ‘It must be a real contrast to Oxford. I’m afraid I’ve never liked it, down south. All those hordes of people everywhere. And nowhere to park. Zoe, do you remember driving round and round Cambridge? I thought we’d run out of petrol.’

  ‘You’re a member of the human race as well, you know. One of those hordes. And you keep going on about wanting me to go to Cambridge. Down south,’ said Zoe. ‘Oops, Moth.’

  Judith stopped short. ‘Zoe, I won’t have this rudeness. You shouldn’t be speaking to anyone like that.’

  ‘I like Oxford,’ I said. ‘I miss it. Especially the libraries.’

  Judith set off again. We were walking down to the landing stage because Judith had arranged for herself to be shown around the distillery at Inversaigh and I’d arranged for myself to go back to the archive, in search, this time, of all three lost children: Mary, Alexander and Eve. What could Mary’s mother have written to make her daughter jump off the cliff? I had been back up to the cliff the previous evening, telling Giles I’d been inside most of the day and wanted to feel the wind on my face before going back to my footnotes, which is the kind of thing Giles finds plausible, even after nine years of marriage during which he has had ample opportunity to observe that I am more likely to refresh myself with DVDs of French
films in which nothing whatsoever happens in enviable Parisian apartments. I’d stood closer to the edge than I would consider advisable for anyone else and looked down on white birds mingling and chatting, a few of Giles’s puffins blundering through the air like overloaded planes about to crash and, below them, below the turfs of waving grass and the heather which a falling hand might vainly grasp and the sharp edges which would crack your head and tear your skin on the way down, the sea sparkled in the evening light. I wondered if it would be possible to jump out far enough to go straight into the sea like a plummeting gull, and if so whether I would have to wait for the waves to batter me to death against the rocks or whether some more graceful death would embrace me as I entered the water. I do not think falling is in itself a mode of death, not without a landing, and the water is deep enough that a human body could dive far down and still rise again. (At what stage do the people pushed out of aeroplanes die?) I was not feeling particularly suicidal, but the drop was mesmerizing and there are some opportunities that are in themselves almost sufficient motive for various sins. Maybe especially so for a child with a limited sense of death’s finality. Maybe Mary just wanted to see what would happen if she went closer, and closer again, and maybe then Alexander wriggled in her arms. Maybe she died trying to save him. None of which explained what she was doing up there with the baby in the first place.

  ‘Of course, we’re rather spoilt in Cheshire, aren’t we, Zoe? So much quieter than the South. You know, I really don’t think I could bear to live in Oxford.’

  Brian was staying behind to work, probably unaware that Giles was similarly excused, as if Colsay were a gentlemen’s club. Hôtel du Père, except that I am not sure that Giles or Brian would find the Hôtel du Père noticeably different from daily life. All meals and childcare provided, laundry done, ample opportunity for private pursuits. Why do we do it, Judith and I?

  ‘Maybe southerners couldn’t bear you either,’ muttered Zoe. ‘Maybe you’re so toxic you ought to be banned from anywhere with a population density of more than about two per square mile.’

  ‘Mummy, look, there’s a caterpillar. It’s all furry.’

  ‘Where a caterpillar? Caterpillar ate one apple.’

  ‘Zoe, really. How can you say these things? Do you know how that makes me feel?’

  ‘They don’t really eat apples, that’s just a story.’

  ‘And one slice of salami and one pickle and one slice of Swiss cheese. Moth have a pickle?’

  ‘And if you say one more passive-aggressive sentence before we get to Colla I’m going to e-mail Trinity and say I don’t want my place.’

  There are libraries where no one is allowed to talk. Where, once through the door, anyone may sit in silence and read and think as slowly as she likes. Raph took my other hand.

  ‘Boat!’ Moth ran ahead.

  ‘Mind the stone, Moth.’ I called. He tripped and fell on to the turf, glanced back and began to wail. I ran to pick him up.

  ‘Poor Moth. What a shock. Mummy kiss it better.’

  I made a loud kiss on his red corduroy knee and he giggled. ‘And the other one.’ I lifted him high in front of me and kissed the other one.

  Judith blew out air like a surprised horse. ‘You weren’t looking where you were going, were you, Timothy?’

  ‘That’s because he’s a toddler,’ Raphael explained. ‘They learn by experience.’

  ‘Only if they’re allowed to have any experience,’ said Zoe. Her face was very pale, and blue about the mouth. I caught sight of Judith’s gaze and looked away.

  I pretended I couldn’t hear Judith and Zoe over the noise of the engine. Raph sat in the boat’s nose, where he likes the bouncing and the salt that blows on to his skin, and Zoe held Moth for me. He is not resigned to his lifejacket. As with driving on the motorway, I enjoy the boat as long as I can pretend my children are not in jeopardy. The South, or in this case the Atlantic, calls from far away. You could just keep going, except that people will need biscuits and nappies and a drink of water and, very soon thereafter, will scream until you let them out. I went a bit faster and Raph turned to beam at me. Judith said something.

  ‘Anna, sorry, dear, but you are trained to handle this boat, aren’t you?’ We had come into the lee of the little headland, where cows were artfully scattered.

  ‘Fully certified,’ I said. What was she going to do, insist on evidence?

  ‘Well.’ She pushed her hood down. ‘Only I’m sure it was smoother when we came over with Giles.’

  ‘Less windy then,’ I lied. ‘He’s busy. We both work. I’ve got some research to do in the archives today.’

  The water sparkled in the sun and the grass above us was bright green. The hill on Colsay was purple with heather, and I could see the cliffs where I knew Giles was working.

  ‘Off lifejacket!’ Moth pulled at the collar, designed to cradle a little head in the water. Assuming he was on his back to start with.

  ‘Soon,’ I said. ‘Soon on land.’

  Zoe took Raph and Moth to the children’s section in the library, so that Raph could play with computers without destroying anyone’s work and Moth could enjoy books where polar bears chat to penguins untrammelled by geography.

  ‘You’re sure you’re OK with them?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to exploit our guests as childcare.’

  ‘I’m enjoying it. It’s fine. They’re fun kids. Look, if there’s a problem we can come and find you straight away, can’t we? If it’s much of a problem you’ll probably hear, anyway.’

  I squatted down to talk to Moth. ‘Mummy’s just going to do some work in there, OK?’ I pointed. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Mummy not go away.’

  Raph was already at one of the computer terminals.

  ‘I’m not going away. Just a few minutes’ work.’

  He took hold of my arm. ‘No. Moth come too.’

  I looked at Zoe.

  ‘Look, Moth.’ She held out her hand to him. ‘Here’s a book with tigers in. Grrr, says the tiger. Here’s a baby tiger. Can you see?’

  He let go of my arm.

  ‘And here’s the mummy tiger, up in a tree.’

  He looked at me and walked over to Zoe.

  ‘And here’s a baby lion and a daddy lion.’

  Moth leant on her arm and looked at the book. His hair, I noticed, had at last grown down to his neckline. It feels like stealing, cutting children’s hair. Come back, I thought. I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to renounce thinking. I won’t read another book until you’re five. I walked over to the counter, and was pleased to find that Fiona Firth, although attired in a shiny asymmetric skirt that could not have come from any shop nearer than Glasgow, was absorbed in comparing food processors on Amazon.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Sorry to interrupt—’

  She started and minimized the window. Windows move more slowly when you have something to hide. ‘Anna. Dr Bennet. Sorry. We were so quiet.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I do too much of that. I was wondering if I might be able to see the Parish Record for the wartime years. On Colsay, I mean.’

  She looked past my shoulder. ‘And the children will be all right here while you do that?’

  Surely I am not the worst mother in the Colla and Inversaigh area. There must, statistically speaking, be several children within ten miles of here, within the library’s catchment area, who are beaten and ill-nourished and verbally as well as emotionally abused, which are at least in legal terms worse offences than wishing they would shut up and go away so I can read.

  ‘Zoe’s with them,’ I said. ‘She’s staying with her parents in the cottage.’

  ‘Well, as long as you think it’s all right.’

  She came round the desk and I followed her towards the Local History Resource Room.

  I craned back over my shoulder. Raph was, I guessed, back on the NASA website and wouldn’t have noticed if Zoe had started ritually disembowelling goats on the Little Farm rug behind him, and Moth was sti
ll leaning against her and following a story about a family of giraffes who appeared to live in a rainforest.

  ‘The Parish Record, you said?’ Fiona Firth was busy in a filing cabinet. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular? Because you know the parishes were merged in 1918, don’t you, so it’s the Colla record you want?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. No. Rain began to patter against the window. It is particularly difficult to find out things you should already know. ‘And after that, burials were over here?’

  She looked up. ‘No. We’ve a couple of people here who’ll be buried on the island where they were born.’ She opened another drawer. ‘With the landlord’s permission, of course.’

  Because Giles obviously makes a habit of interfering with the births, marriages and deaths of people he’s never met.

  ‘I thought my husband had made it clear that he expects everyone local to come and go as freely on the island as they do everywhere else. Has he ever suggested that anyone should ask permission to go anywhere?’

  She shut the drawer and handed me a blue document box, secured with tapes. ‘Very kind of him. Look, have a seat. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

  Rain blurred the hillside only a few metres away.

  I didn’t really know what I was looking for. For Alexander, as always. Maybe for Mary, for a sidelight on her life and death that might make sense of the story, at least in my imagination. Perhaps for details of how Miss Bower and Miss Leach felt afterwards, although it seemed unlikely that they would have confided in the Rector. The notebook was bound in crimson leather which had not been properly stored and felt too soft, almost furry, in my hands. The pages were yellow and rough as dry skin.