The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  ‘Yes,’ came an answering, yawning shout.

  ‘Come on down here.’

  Mealy Izzard came slowly down the stairs, pulling a Chinese dressing-gown with a yin and yang sign over his spotted pyjamas.

  ‘What’s cooking?’ he asked. ‘Kippers?’

  ‘Never mind that. This young lady … this ungrateful girl … this viper in our nest, Simmy … she says she brought us a parcel last night and I say what parcel? What do you say?’

  Izzard rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s get this straight. I heard the word parcel?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Is she saying we have, in some manner, made away with a wrapped object that she transported to these four walls?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Then I say to her one word.’

  ‘What’s that, Simmy? What is your one word?’

  ‘Fist.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a terrible word. I hope you won’t have cause to use it in this house again.’

  She turned to Marie, suddenly all smiles once more. ‘You see, dear? You must have been mistaken. There was no parcel. You must have dreamt it. You were ever so tired. Why not go and have another little rest? You must be gentle with yourself.’

  ‘I’d like my clothes, please.’

  ‘Now come along, dear. Your clothes are dirty. I’m putting them in the wash. Rub-a-dub-dub.’

  Strangely enough, though Marie was almost crying with frustration she was also conscious of a sense of pleasant fatigue beginning to steal over her, like a child at bedtime. She allowed herself to be led upstairs.

  ‘Fist,’ she kept saying, ‘fist.’ It was a silly word. It made her laugh.

  ‘Where were you thinking of going in your clothes?’ asked Mrs Izzard as she tucked her up.

  ‘The police,’ smiled Marie, and fell asleep.

  ***

  Marie was once more a captive: not in the same manner as her previous captivity under the watchful eye of Brickville and his minions, in the luxury of a millionaire’s playground, but in the sense that she was a prisoner of her own body. Of course, that is what we all are, she thought, but she was not just locked in by her normal frame; she was shackled by the womb. The extra bump of her shape, let alone whatever sedative it was that Mrs Izzard kept giving her, made it hard to contemplate the necessary exertions for escape. Stealth and speed were becoming impossible.

  Yes, she thought sleepily, looking at her ballooning belly in the mirror the next day, ponderous was the word. Just one day of food and rest seemed to have blown her beyond any memory of yesterday’s body.

  In the days that followed, eerie days of dreams and food shot through with occasional glimpses of lucidity, she wondered whether she would have been able to escape anyway. Mrs Izzard watched her minutely, keeping her dressed only in the most ridiculously fluffy maternity nightwear which made her look like an ostrich, a big body on top of two spindles.

  ‘Why are you keeping me here?’ asked Marie one day, as Mrs Izzard brought her breakfast in bed. ‘I want my clothes. I want to go now.’

  ‘Keeping you here? Whatever next? You can go this minute if you like. I won’t ask where you propose to have our poor baby.’ Mrs Izzard had taken to calling the child ‘our’.

  ‘I … I have friends…’

  ‘And money? You got money?’

  She had six pounds.

  ‘I didn’t find any money in your things,’ said Mrs Izzard. ‘Still if you want to go, you’d better be off. The only thing is, I burnt your clothes.’

  ‘Burnt?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know where you’d been, did I? I didn’t want lice. They smelt of old fish. We don’t like the smell of old fish, baby and I. Mr Izzard doesn’t like the smell of old fish, do you, Simmy?’

  Izzard was passing on the way to the bathroom in his dressing-gown.

  ‘I can’t abide the smell of old fish, and that’s a fact. I won’t have it in the house. When Mother cooks a kipper, we wrap the leftovers in foil.’

  ‘Costly,’ interjected Mrs Izzard.

  ‘Very costly. But that’s how strongly we feel about it. How did we get on to old fish?’

  ‘Her clothes. They smelt, remember?’

  ‘To high heaven. You must have been sleeping on a haddock in that hut.’

  ‘We burnt them. It was the only thing to do.’

  ‘The only thing. Does she want clothes, then?’

  ‘She wants to leave us, Father.’

  ‘I say,’ said Mr Izzard. ‘Oh dear me, bit sudden, isn’t it?’

  ‘You could borrow mine,’ said Mrs Izzard. ‘But I think you’d find them too small. Bust size we might do a match on? Fancy trying one of my bras?’

  It was the last thing Marie fancied trying. There was, beneath all the prettiness and fluffiness, something faintly fusty about Mrs Izzard.

  ‘She wouldn’t get far in a bra,’ observed Mr Izzard. ‘Not in those peekaboos you favour.’

  ‘Oh, Simmy,’ giggled Mrs Izzard. ‘Take no notice, dear. Now I can see you’re feeling tired. You just relax and don’t worry your head about clothes. Time enough for clothes when Baby’s born. What we should be worrying about is baby clothes. I’ve already started a layette.’

  ***

  One afternoon, Marie woke up early from her after-lunch sleep and more alert than usual. She could hear voices out in the front garden. Drawing her frilly nightie around her, she wandered over to the window.

  Mr and Mrs Izzard were talking to a man in a Mercedes who had parked in the road by their driveway. They seemed to be engaged in some intricate discussion. Marie had by now almost forgotten who she was, what her life had been, and any future seemed totally unfathomable; but her instinct for escape was still strong.

  Now, she thought, this is my chance. She pushed on the ridiculous fluffy slippers, slipped on the frilly dressing-gown and crept down the front stairs, peeping out of the little round window on the landing to see that they were still talking. Reassured, she continued on her way.

  She had prepared herself for the back door in the kitchen being locked but, by some carelessness of the Izzards, today it was open. Outside it was very cold and a light drizzle, half-sleet, was falling. There was a gate in the yard leading on to a small passage that served the little group of semi-detached houses for the removal of dustbins.

  Marie had never heard much from the house next door, but she knew it was inhabited and now she could see through the steamed-up windows of its kitchen someone in blue moving about at the sink.

  She was so cold in her pathetic little frilliness that she could imagine the baby nuzzling up inside her. Her feet were almost as blue as the slippers. Cautiously, she raised the gate latch and moved into the yard. She could hear a radio playing inside the house. She launched herself at the door and beat it urgently.

  ‘Coming, coming,’ said a voice.

  The door opened. Marie was so cold that she couldn’t even look up. All she could do was hunch and shiver. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ she said. ‘Please. I’m being kept against my will … next door … police…’

  Sensing a silence, she forced herself out of her rictus of shivering and opened her eyes.

  An enormous knuckle was almost blotting out the light, the hairs on its fingers pricking her skin as it slowly advanced.

  ‘F-f-fist,’ she said.

  ‘You remember me, I see,’ said the fist.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  The first struck her three times, very softly, on the forehead. It hurt.

  ‘Get back where you crawled out of,’ said the fist.

  She turned and ran back, into the kitchen, up the stairs and into her bedroom. The Izzards were still talking to the man in the Mercedes. She saw the man Tarber go out to join them. They all turned and looked up at her window as she ducked.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ she asked Mrs Izzard when she came up.

  ‘Naughty Mummy, she’ll catch her death.’ The woman fussed and fluttered, tucking her up and bringing her b
iscuits.

  ‘What do you want?’ Marie asked again.

  ‘We want our baby,’ Mrs Izzard said at last.

  ‘No.’ Marie’s reaction was instinctive. Though she knew she could not possibly keep the child herself, she couldn’t bear to think of it being brought up in Buddleia Close by the Izzards.

  ‘You don’t want us to keep the child?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mummy. We won’t.’

  ‘Oh. Thank God.’

  ‘We sell children here.’

  ‘Sell?’ Marie wanted to be sick.

  ‘There’s a very good price for babies. People all over the world want a nice British baby. You’d be surprised. What you casually got yourself into is a very popular concept.’

  ‘Oh my God…’

  ‘So just tuck up nicely, lots of rest and you’ll be out of here in a trice, carrying on with your life. No one will be any the wiser.’

  ‘I’ll be the wiser. My baby will be the wiser. It’s in the blood, isn’t it? You can’t change that. It’ll be mine. Always.’

  ‘Baby will be oblivious, dear. Baby will find a new mummy. Blood doesn’t matter. It’s upbringing that counts.’

  Suddenly Marie wanted to tell the woman exactly who she was, exactly what was in the blood, but she was afraid she might harm the baby, even kill it if she knew. So Marie kept quiet and took her tea, which tasted just faintly bitter, and chewed her ginger biscuit while slowly the seeds of something hard and unforgiving and monumental – a redwood among emotions – started to grow within her. She would remember this day, confused, frightened, humiliated though she was, as being the one where she began to see the essential strangeness of her situation as though she were somehow picked out by fate, the game of life’s Snakes and Ladders unfairly slanted against her… Much was still to happen to her, she thought. There would be many mischances, dejections, fallings from fortune, cruelties, hurts, even desolations, but she would meet them as a combatant not a victim. It was the least she could do for that last surviving blood relation inside her.

  Meanwhile she lay and endured the hard softness, the cruel kindness, the oxymoron that was life at Buddleia Close. It was like being a prize cow, or a Strasbourg goose. All she had to do was lie there and fatten.

  ***

  The baby was born, appropriately enough, on the first of June, 1964, just short of Marie’s nineteenth birthday. It was a girl and she was the most beautiful thing in the world. She was fair as is the rose in May. It was not a difficult birth, but it was made unusual by the fact that Mrs Izzard had declined to call a doctor.

  ‘I’ve midwived a dozen babies in this house,’ she’d said, ‘and never lost one. What do we need a doctor for? Men! If we do need one – I’m not saying we will, but if we do – we’ll get old Dr Gaythorne who owes us a favour.’

  ‘What about the birth certificate and things like that?’ asked Marie in between contractions.

  ‘Never you mind about them. Mr Tarber has friends in the right places. Documentations is the least of our worries. Now just you lie up here like a chicken. Open your legs and only press when I tell you.’

  The baby popped out in due course. Mrs Izzard cut the cord and bustled round professionally.

  ‘May I hold my baby?’ asked Marie, later. She felt very weak and happy and tearful. The baby had something of David’s look even though she was a girl.

  ‘You may hold our baby. You have done well enough. But don’t get too attached. If you persist in having babies outside wedlock – babies that Mr Izzard and I have not yet allowed ourselves – if you persist and you have no means of supporting the said baby … why then! You must not get attached to it. This baby … who does not have a name … Baby Buddleia 14 we shall call her … her naming will be the privilege of the proud new parents. They will be coming in six weeks to take her away. Before then, you will have gone.’

  ‘Gone? But what about Lily?’

  ‘Lily?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘You mean Baby Buddleia 14.’

  ‘I mean Lily.’

  ‘I advise you not to persist in your churlishness. The matter is out of your hands. You do not now have your condition to protect you. I hope I may not have to call Mr Tarber and tell him to bring the word which begins with an F over next week.’

  It was strange how Mrs Izzard’s fluffiness had fallen away from her once the child was born. Now she seemed what indeed she always had been: a corrupt midwife with a pulse for a heart.

  ‘A tiny baby needs looking after. I need to feed her.’

  ‘Feed her you shall for seven days. Then she must be weaned. Modern milks are excellent for baby. Some say even better than mother’s.’

  It was a sweet and bitter pain for Marie to suckle the child. The fact that she looked a little like David brought back to her how much she had loved him in that other world under the herb-scented stars. On the other hand, the child carried in its veins the reason why the affair had been doomed from the start. It made it an almost impossible contradiction for her. She had schooled herself not to want the child; just to have it born, as her (albeit lapsed) faith demanded, and then to bestow it safely was enough. She was too young to be a serious mother. She had only just grown up herself. Apart from anything else, family history didn’t cut her out for motherhood. To give the infant its upbringing as well as its blood would be tilting the balance too much. Take it away from her and the child might learn gentleness and normality, shake off her diluted monsterhood under some benign, untainted roof.

  But now, with the baby in her arms, the idea of parting was intolerable. A thought struck her.

  ‘These people who are coming?’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘What sort of people?’

  ‘What sort? People who want a baby, of course. Whatever next?’

  ‘Are they good people?’

  ‘Good? What sort of question is that? They are rich people that’s for sure.’

  ‘Where do they come from?’

  ‘All over. Not from this country, of course. There would be complications. But … America … South America … Canada …Australia … France – I’ve had one or two from France – even Turkey…’

  ‘I don’t want her to go to Turkey.’ It sounded too foreign.

  ‘It’s not up to you, but I can set your mind at rest. Baby Buddleia 14 is going to California.’

  ***

  The pain of parting from little Lily was too much for her. She cried all night and was up at cock-crow, red-eyed as the dawn. She cried not simply at the prospect of parting with her little friend but at the sheer pointless, futureless vista before her. She suddenly understood the old-boot-toughness of older generations of Aunt Bertha’s. They were brought up to put feelings far down in their priorities. It didn’t do to complain or feel sorry for yourself. Life was bloody but you had to get on with it. Society did not ask mopers out to dinner.

  Perhaps, thought Marie, I too will grow into an old boot; I thought I was tough but I’m just a soft slipper at the moment. Of course, it was true that the Aunt Berthas often had big houses and long traditions behind them, which gave them a sense beyond themselves – of duty, service and words like that which the nuns at school had been so fond of.

  But she, Marie, had been dispossessed. She was an exile, on the run, freed perhaps from Brickville, but condemned by her own hand. Somewhere out there the Law would still be looking for her. What had she done to deserve all this? She felt like Job: ‘Lord, lord, why persecute thou me?’

  She had been born, that was where the mistake lay. If the mother she had never known had been alive, she would have chided her about it. Her other mistake looked up at her and made the little ‘ooo’ shape with her mouth that meant she was hungry.

  She smiled and cried and fed her. It was the sweetness of things that made life’s bitterness so hard to take.

  Later they came and took her away. Marie spent the rest of the day in bed under sedation. Mrs Izzard was good at sedation
.

  Next day, still slightly drugged, she was given some shapeless clothes and her old coat (so they hadn’t burnt everything) and escorted from the house by Mr Tarber with Mrs Izzard waving them on. Marie didn’t bother to ask where her Fabergé watch might be. She knew the answer: what watch? Which watch? There was no watch. Did you see a watch, Mr Tarber?

  ‘For those who have nowhere to go,’ Mrs Izzard told her on the doorstep, ‘we have a nice quiet place where our guests can recuperate. It is all part of the service.’

  ‘What about my baby? Where’s my baby?’ Marie demanded. She had been saying it all morning.

  ‘What baby?’ asked Mrs Izzard, wide-eyed. ‘She keeps talking about a baby, Mr Tarber.’

  ‘I think she’ll find that a fist in the face adjusts everything, Mrs Izzard. Wonderful what it can do to a wandering mind.’

  ‘I’m sure she won’t need that, Mr Tarber. Why, it makes me quite nervous to have it in the house.’

  She shooed the fist out as if it were a wild animal.

  Marie followed Tarber down the drive, across the arterial road, through the industrial estate and into the wilderness of the docks. It was a damp, cold June day – summer was late that year – and she shivered as she went. Threading their way past warehouses, they came at last to a little creek near the entrance to the harbour mouth. Here Tarber took her aboard an ancient hulk which they sometimes used, he said, as an office. They climbed down a hatchway into a small, dim, draughty cabin furnished with a table, two chairs and an old stove.