She had only let Gordon near her once that year, after three Martinis and lemonade in the Earl of Cambridgeshire. She didn’t normally drink but it had been Ida’s leaving do. Joyce and Ida had been neighbours for years. Ida was going to Australia. Now she was gone and Joyce’s well-ordered life was in tatters. Another baby. It was a disaster.
When the new baby was due, Joyce went to All Saints, mid-week, as she liked to do. She attended the sung Eucharist with the children every Sunday but she also liked to go when the church was empty, on Wednesday afternoons usually. She liked to have God to herself for an hour or so.
Her pregnancy had hardly shown for most of it. Then, all at once, she had ballooned. Her first two had been high. She had had terrible heartburn. This one seemed small and low, squatting on her bladder, compressing it like a deflated bicycle tire. She had put on more weight than usual. As she walked down Church Passage, she could feel her thighs grazing together with a synthetic slither. The squeezing of her internal organs was a hot sensation. Her breath was short.
She paused by the noticeboard in the church porch. There was a meeting, that Saturday, to discuss the latest edict from the Liturgical Commission. The vicar would be in attendance. Joyce didn’t care for him much. He was too friendly. He signed his letter in the parish magazine, ‘Your friend, Canon Jonathan’. Joyce had much preferred the old vicar, Reverend Savage, who was suitably obstreperous and ended up in a wheelchair with a tartan rug over his knees, as all vicars should.
Joyce thought that it would be nice to go along to the meeting and give her friend Canon Jonathan a piece of her mind but the baby would probably be out by then. The last two had been on time.
The noticeboard also had a programme of musical events for January and February, something to fill the post-Christmas void now that carol concerts were no longer appropriate. It wasn’t just organ recitals these days. The County Minstrels were doing a selection from Gilbert and Sullivan. Whatever next?
She lifted the iron latch and swung the oak door open, stepping carefully over the wooden lip. As she clunked it shut behind her, the noises from the street disappeared and she was left with the brown echoey air and the layered scent of incense. God’s talcum powder, her mother used to call it.
The church was empty, as usual. The air held a bitter chill, but even though she could no longer button her coat she didn’t feel the cold. She rocked slowly down the aisle, dragging her feet on the flagstones. Her feet and ankles were so huge that she could no longer fit her heel into her shoes. Instead, she had broken the backs of them and had to shuffle everywhere, like a madwoman.
She eased herself into the second pew, her veined hand clutching the fleur-de-lys-shaped post for balance. She always sat in the second pew. It seemed impertinent to sit in the front, as if she were gentry. ‘Know your place,’ her father had told her, several times a day, throughout her childhood. It was the secret to happiness, knowing your place.
In front of her was the brass lectern, a huge thing in the shape of an eagle, wings spread to form a resting place for the Word of God. Its head was turned to one side and its beak agape. It had a single eye fixed upon her. Beyond the eagle was the altar, the small crucifix on the white cloth, and rearing above it the huge stained-glass windows – the shapes of Jesus and the disciples in brilliant blue and red.
Was any red so livid as the red shine of that glass? God was big and colourful, that was what kept her coming. Somewhere in her life, amidst the greys and browns of motherhood, there was a corner that was bright and hard.
She could no longer kneel comfortably. It was all right once you were down. It was the getting there and back up again that was the tricky bit. Anyway, she didn’t feel all that humble. She rested both hands on the pew in front of her, her face raised.
Dear Lord, she said to herself, silently, although she hissed her thoughts with such resonance it seemed the same as speaking them out loud. I do not think You have been fair. I have been racking my brains and have finally come up with it. I was wrong to be so pleased with myself about how I had organised my life but You have got the punishment out of all proportion. I understand how this could be very easy to do, after all, there is a lot of wickedness to punish and it must be easy to get carried away. Killing the first-born son in every family, for instance. I think we can all agree that was a little unnecessary.
Joyce’s God was very much an Old Testament God. She even preferred his old name, Yahweh. The word God meant so little these days – or so much. It had shattered into a thousand different Gods, each one peculiar and individual. Yahweh, on the other hand, was not open to interpretation. Yahweh knew his own mind. He had long pointy fingers and a stern brow. (He was the one that was a jealous God.)
Maybe it is just that there is something going on here that You have not yet seen fit to reveal, Joyce continued. I know that You could not be doing something like this to me without a good reason but You have left me to carry on all these months without giving me a clue as to what it might be. You brought Your only son into the world so that He might be sacrificed on a cross and we could all enter Your kingdom but that is likely to be some way off for me and anyway, I’m hardly Mary and Gordon’s hardly Joseph, is he, forgive the levity. I know I should be praying for the soul of Nixon and everyone in his wicked, wicked country. I know that Mrs Moore round the corner whose husband stepped in front of the train on Boxing Day probably thinks I pray for her but at this particular point in time you might understand that I am thinking about myself. After all, in this condition, all you can do is wait. It’s hard to do anything at all, except wait. So this is just to tell you, I’m waiting.
She paused, sitting up straight. There was a movement from inside her abdomen, a turning. The baby had not been doing much recently – things had clearly got a bit tight in there. She shifted her torso a little, to one side, then the other. There was also something else, a dull presentiment of pain in her lower back, a sensation both mild and ominous.
It was then that the voice came, cold as water, clear as stained light. She located its source before it finished speaking, even though it only spoke two sentences.
Wait, Mrs Akenside, and I shall show you what to do. You are the scourge of all evil.
She sat back in the pew, eyes wide, face pink with gratification. Yahweh had heard her, after all.
The eagle had spoken.
The new baby was different from the others. It was milky-eyed, opaque. Joyce knew there was a personality lurking in there somewhere – every mother knew that – but this baby seemed intent upon concealing it. It slept a lot, as though it couldn’t be bothered to complain.
She had breastfed Alison and Andrew until they started teething. Andrew had drained her six times a day, putting on weight with such speed that his body grew in alarming disproportion to his tiny baby features. By six weeks, he had looked as though she had blown him up with a bicycle pump. In contrast, Alison’s suckling had been demure. While she fed, her small grey eyes would gaze around the room. Once in a while, she would break off and look up at Joyce quickly, checking she was still there, as if someone else might have sneaked into her mother’s place – Harold Wilson, say.
The new baby made no fuss about feeding. It simply wouldn’t do it. It did not scream or kick the way babies who refused the breast usually did. It simply kept its lips clamped shut and turned its head away. They put it onto bottles and took away the water jug by the side of Joyce’s bed so she would stop producing milk. She lay there with a raging thirst and breasts like party balloons for five whole days, until they let her home. Still, it saved a lot of fiddling with nursing bras.
Incubus and succubus. It was a trick. The baby thought if it refused to suck, maybe Joyce wouldn’t notice. Perhaps it thought that clutching a bottle and puffing its little cheeks like bellows was endearing. Joyce wasn’t fooled. She held it as it pulled at the bottle’s latex teat and gazed down at the tiny, furry head, where a small rug of cradle cap nestled amidst the fine brown hairs. I am cleverer
than you, she thought, because whatever you are, you are still a baby.
All babies were psychic. It was always possible to communicate your displeasure at them, providing you had the necessary skill and vehemence. Andrew, for instance, had been a terrible sleeper. He rummaged around in his cot all night long, even when he was swaddled, wriggling from one end to another like a desperate, human-headed slug. She would go in and grip the side of his cot and glare at him in the half-light. She always lit a nightlight and put it on the window-sill, then left the curtains open. That way, when the nightlight burned out in the middle of the night, there was still some light from the streetlamp. The alternative was to leave his door open and the landing light on but then she and Gordon were kept awake all night by his crying. She put up with it when he needed night feeds, but when he was big enough to go through until morning she thought it best to ignore him.
With the door open, the single bulb from the landing would shine dimly from behind her, throwing her bulging shadow over his tiny squirming form. Let . . . me . . . sleep, she thought, the words thundering in her head in fierce monosyllables, the consonants so clipped she was convinced that he could hear them even though she never spoke a word.
Faced with her anger, the pitch of Andrew’s crying would at first increase, but if she slammed the door behind her after she left, it gradually subsided to a moan. Ten minutes later, he was asleep. Ever since then, she had realised that you didn’t have to hit a child, just make them afraid.
A bitter January ended, folding into a February that was dark and mushy grey. Alison and Andrew were back at school and Joyce was alone with it, still waiting. She had stopped going to church. Mrs Moore round the corner had noticed and knocked on the front door one afternoon, invited herself in and said she had just come to check that Joyce didn’t have the baby blues. Joyce had given her short shrift. She had no intention of going back to church until God got His act together and gave her some clue about what was going to happen. She told Mrs Moore she had a trapped nerve and the sour old dear pursed her lips with sympathy as Joyce levered her out of the door.
February died. March marched past. Still there was no sign.
Then, the evening came when she was on her own in the house with the children. Gordon had started on a spell of nights at the pea-podding factory just over the border, towards Grantham. It meant he was around getting under her feet during the daytime, but they needed the money.
At least she had the evenings to herself. She would let Alison and Andrew play in their rooms as long as they didn’t disturb her – they put themselves to bed quite often these days. She bathed them in the mornings.
She was downstairs, in the lounge, feet up on the leather pouf which had been their only sales purchase that year. They hadn’t had one before and she had been getting an inordinate amount of pleasure from it on the few occasions she had sat down.
She was on page four of the newspaper when it began, the unconvincing complaint of the baby. He had started doing it in the evenings, just in the last week or so. She had put him to bed less than an hour before.
She went upstairs, letting her feet thud lazily on the stairs, just to warn everybody she was coming. The door to the baby’s room – the room that would have been her room – was on the right of the landing.
She stood over the cot.
It wasn’t even crying properly. Its eyes and mouth were open but the sound that came out was ghostly, unreal, a pointy mewling like the Siamese kitten that Gordon’s mother had bought, then promptly given to a neighbour because she couldn’t stand the noise.
What was wrong with it this time? It couldn’t be hungry – it had taken a whole eight ounces just before bed. It wasn’t wind – it had croaked like a bullfrog all the way up the stairs. It wasn’t the nappy either – after the feed Joyce had pinned a new terry tightly around its pale stomach, tucking the waistband of the plastic knickers over to prevent seepage. There was absolutely nothing wrong.
She gazed down at the baby. Its face was twisted with distress. Its eyes were half-closed and its arms flailing as it made clumsy, hapless efforts to put itself back to sleep. It turned its head from side to side, tormentedly. She watched.
Suddenly, it came to her, with all the clarity and brightness of the red light through the church’s stained-glass window. That was it, of course. There was nothing wrong. That was why it was crying. She bent low and peered at it, moving the nightlight nearer the end of the window-sill so that she could look more closely at its inauthentically screwed-up face. It was a lonely little face, the face of someone who has realised that they are quite singular, and that they always will be. It was the face of a creature distressed by its own perfection.
And all at once, Joyce Akenside was overwhelmed with love for her baby, her second little boy, her James. She had believed him to be evil – and now she saw that the opposite was true. He was too good. She had thought that everything was wrong with him – and now she was certain he was too right. His tiny form would always be as unprotected as a snowflake. Snow-baby, she thought, gazing at him in the nightlight’s cold, undimming glimmer. My perfect child.
She thought of all the things that would befall him, listing them in her head. How many wasp stings could a person expect to receive in one lifetime? How many grazed knees? How many sicknesses? Why was it not possible to bundle all these mishaps up into one and get them over and done with all at once? She knew that everybody had to suffer, because of original sin, but surely all the agony and unhappiness could be squeezed into one intense but finite period, when you were too young to remember it – then, perhaps, a life could be happily lived. Why could a mother not do that for her child, especially a child such as this?
This baby was too perfect. She knew that now. She stared down at it.
The Holy Spirit had spoken through the eagle in the church. Now she prayed that the Lord might show her what to do.
Suddenly, the baby stopped crying, and opened its eyes wide, wider than it had ever opened them before. It stared up at Joyce, and she saw Yahweh in that stare. The white, ovoid flame of the nightlight was twinned in its pupils. She drew in breath.
Could she succeed where Abraham had failed? Abraham had been let off the hook because he was a man. Typical. God couldn’t have relied on Gordon to perform a ritual sacrifice on a burning pyre on a mountain in the land of Moriah. You couldn’t trust Gordon to put the cat out.
Joyce straightened above the cot and closed her eyes, briefly. If, when she opened them, the baby had gone to sleep, she would leave the room.
When she opened her eyes, the baby was still looking at her.
She reached out a slow, purposeful hand. Its shadow passed over the cot, like a distant raven, but the baby did not blink. Silently, Joyce picked up the nightlight and moved it to the edge of the window-sill, within an inch of the open curtain. As she moved it, the flame bent and wavered, the tip clinging to its original position, as if it was unwilling to be displaced. She took a step backward. Who knew what would happen now? It was in the hands of God.
Already, the heavy weave of the curtain was beginning to crumple and darken.
She turned, thinking, Andrew and Alison are in their rooms. I must make sure they are both downstairs.
Andrew was not in his room, nor was he downstairs. He was standing in the open doorway of the baby’s room. He was watching her. The landing light shone from behind and above him, so although she could tell his face was gazing up at her, she could not decipher its expression; except that the eyes were dark.
She strode roughly towards him, grabbed his shoulder and turned him round, pushing him out of the room. Then, without looking back, she closed the door behind her.
7
Multum in Parvo
Rutland’s county motto
I made a detour on my way back from Market Overton, going via Cottesmore and Exton, then down Barnsdale Avenue, the old Viking Way. It feels like an invader’s road, that road. It is straight, purposeful, and lined with huge
trees that seem to grow towards each other and form a tunnel, a slipway to another time.
Pre-Christian hordes trampled all over this county. In the churchyard at Braunston there is the stone carving of a pagan fertility goddess. Nobody noticed for centuries that she was there. All that time, God-fearing folk had been strolling past her as they went in to worship.
I joined the A606 as it took a rash dive towards Oakham. Rutland Water twinkled flatly on my left. On the right, the green of Burley Wood bulged over the landscape.
Just past the brow of the hill, there is a lay-by, a patch of stony ground in front of a five-barred gate. The woodlands are private and there is a big sign with red lettering saying NO PUBLIC ADMITTANCE. Burley Wood is officially designated Ancient Woodland. As I parked the car, I thought about all the stories of woods which I remembered from my childhood; Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, the tales of Narnia with deer that talked and deer that didn’t talk. (It was okay to eat the latter but not the former, I recalled.) There was one book, I remembered, about a young princess who was lost at night. The goblins in the wood were out to get her, lurking in the undergrowth by the side of the path. To stay safe from them, she had to walk very calmly and not be afraid. Not being afraid was important. If she broke into a run, they would get her.
I parked in the lay-by and got out of the car, leaving the door open. I was only going to take a quick look and I wanted to stay within sight of it. I told myself that I couldn’t be bothered to lock the car and needed to keep an eye on it but I think it was more that I wanted it to be able to keep an eye on me. It was a modern object. It had acquired reassuring qualities.
On the opposite side of the road, the fields swooped down to the white and grey expanse of Rutland Water, glimmering so convincingly it was hard to believe it was a man-made reservoir. None of the water in it ends up in Rutland homes – it all gets piped to East Anglia. There was a big fuss when it was built, back in the seventies. Some prime farming land disappeared under all that water, along with a hamlet of several cottages. It was demolished, but I still think of it as being under there somewhere, a tiny English version of the Lost City of Atlantis. I remember Mum telling me about a Lions trip she went on, to look around the excavations, and how she thought, where will they get all the water from? How will they stop it draining away? Maybe she thought they would put a huge plastic tarpaulin underneath – weighted down with boulders, perhaps.
Honey-Dew Page 10
