The Bones in the Attic

by Robert Barnard

  “Pot smokers,” said Eddie Armitage under his breath.

  They were certainly different. He wore a crotch-length smock over baggy Oriental-style trousers. Her dress was down to her calves, in similar thin, almost diaphanousmaterial of a muddy color. On good days, and this was one of them, she really did wear flowers in her hair. The children called him Dippy and her Flowery Fay, which was their version of a word Colin’s grandparents had used about her when they had passed the couple in the car. “She’s fey,” they had said. She did indeed have a sort of distant, elfin charm, and was nearly pretty, though in a style that no one would have recognized in the strident sixties.

  The hippies were wandering back home from the grocer’s (Where to ? wondered the grown-up Matt. Where was home?). The children had caught up with them, and chanted at them as they dogged their footsteps, quite unafraid of them. Weren’t hippies dedicated to peace and love? Nothing to fear from them ! Peter and Marjie hung back, and so did Caroline. Eddie Armitage only joined in halfheartedly. Matt had a clear picture of him now, and a fairly clear impression of what he was like. Physically he was short for his age, and slight, and he wore hand-knitted Fair Isle jumpers and short trousers. He gave the impression of being only half formed. He never quite seemed to know what he should be doing. He wanted to be part of the group, yet something held him back. Just like Rory Pemberton, in fact, but nicer.

  The pair were just about to turn off from Raynville Road (turn off where ? into which street?) when the man they called Dippy seemed to take a sudden resolution and turned to face them. The two knots of children stopped immediately. The adult Matt, remembering, felt a kind of fear, mirroring the child Matt’s fear, though he was in the hindmost group with Peter and Marjie. The man’s hair was fair, almost white—the adult Matt realized it must have been bleached—and his eyebrows werebleached too, but not the eyelashes. A wispy brown beard was forming on his chin, under a small mouth, and the eyes were a queer color that Matt had never seen before, and seldom since: a sort of violet, almost as if he’d dyed those too. The adult Matt decided that they were scary, but only because they were the sort of people he as a child had never seen before. He had never come across hippy squatters in Bermondsey. Probably they weren’t common even in Leeds. Children, particularly young children, only feel safe with the known.

  “Is something troubling you?”

  The voice was soft, nerveless. The children swallowed. They had not been expecting to be called upon to speak, answer questions. Only Lily could summon up a reply.

  “No,” she said. But she said it aggressively.

  “Then why are you following us, and shouting?”

  “Because you’re hopheads,” sneered Harry Sugden, his courage returning.

  “Do you know what hopheads are?” asked the young man, still quietly.

  “Druggies. Dope-takers.”

  “They use opium. Hop is opium. We don’t use opium.”

  “Bet you smoke cannabis,” shouted Colin.

  “Now and again. It’s very pleasant, and a lot less harmful than the nicotine most of your dads kill themselves with.”

  “My dad doesn’t smoke,” said Rory Pemberton, but the others just looked disbelieving.

  “So why don’t you go about your business, eh? And let us get on with ours?”

  He looked at them silently for a moment, then turned back to Flowery Fay. They crossed the road, then went upone of the small roads that branched off from the Raynville Road ( which one did they go up? Matt still could not work that out). The children stood there, silent, bewildered by their novel experience. Then Lily and Rory started them off trouping behind the two outré figures—well behind this time. They were only at the junction of the two roads when the pair turned into the gate of a house rather larger than the other narrow Victorian two-story ones. The children could hear a baby crying, and when the front door of the house was opened the cries became louder. Lily looked round, and then began to lead them up the street. She stopped after a few yards, and they all stopped behind her. Flowery Fay had come out through the open door and began to walk up and down the little scrap of front garden, a baby in her arms. It was crying lustily, and the mother was rocking it in her arms and speaking low, crooning comfort to it.

  “Come on,” said Peter. “Let’s go up to Matt’s auntie’s.”

  When they arrived none of the other children said anything about the restricted space or the general air of near-poverty, though Lily Marsden looked around her with a twist of her lip and an air of contempt. Marjie opened bottles and found some glasses, but her chattering on to Matt only emphasized the quietness of the rest: they had had an experience that they were having trouble absorbing. It was, in fact, Matt who broke the taboo on the subject.

  “I was frightened,” he announced.

  “You didn’t need to be,” said Marjie calmly. “They’re just a bit out of the ordinary, that’s all.”

  “He was talking nonsense about drugs,” said Colin, the expert. “If you smoke pot you go on to take other things. My mum and dad know all about that.”

  “Just smoking pot is bad,” said Caroline (Matt still had difficulty getting Caroline’s face in focus). “Look how they went out and left the little baby all on its own.”

  “They’ve got to do shopping,” said Eddie.

  Caroline wasn’t having any. She loved babies.

  “Why couldn’t one go shopping and the other stay at home? Or why couldn’t they take it with them? Other mothers do.”

  “They don’t do what other people do,” said Peter.

  “They probably don’t shop anyway,” said Rory. “They shop lift. They don’t hold with money, the hippies and the flower people. That means they bludge off other people.”

  “You don’t know they shoplifted,” said Peter. “I expect the shopkeeper kept a pretty close eye on them. If you want to shoplift you do best to look like everyone else.”

  Matt absorbed this piece of wisdom, and wondered how he knew.

  “She looked like a good mother to me,” said Marjie.“Rocking the baby and talking to it. A lot of mothers think it’s best to leave a baby to cry for a bit, but not her.”

  “How can she look after her baby when half the time she’ll be stoned out of her mind?” demanded Colin self-righteously. “And he’ll be no better.”

  “At least they’re both with the baby most of the time,” said Peter. “Not many children have that.”

  “That’s because they’re living on the dole, and in a house that they’ve stolen,” said Rory.

  “You shouldn’t be sticking up for them,” said Sophie to her brother. “They’re scum. Just scum.”

  “They shouldn’t be allowed to breed,” said Lily Marsden.

  * * *

  Lying in bed, thinking it over, remembering, Matt pinpointed in his mind the oddity of the last remark. Children never talked in terms of people breeding. Dogs and cats, yes, but human beings? They “had babies” or “had children.” They didn’t breed. That was a word that Lily had been taught by someone else. Who could have taught her that? What kind of person? Someone who liked swimming against the tide, who enjoyed toying with outrageous opinions . . .Matt shifted his position in the bed, and as he did so he heard the stairs creak. One of the children going down for something to eat. Matt never remembered getting hungry in the night, but that was probably due to his playing football all the free hours God sent (they played rugger at his Colchester school, which meant evenings of snatched football with whatever group he could find as long as the light lasted, then skimped homework before bed). Children were different now. Perhaps sneaking down for a quick snack was their young bodies’ way of compensating for a more meager breakfast than he’d had in his day. Or perhaps it was the result of a much more passive lifestyle.

  Breeding . . . “They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.” . . . Best not to make too much of it. It could be someone’s casual remark that had taken root in Lily’s mind, not any conscious attempt at indoctrination.
Not some neo-Nazi mini-Führer taking her over; just someone whose mind-set inclined in that direction. Or in the direction of nineteenth-century eugenicists, all too interested in planning for a finer race in the future. Matt knew that a lot of brains that should have judged better had flirted with that idea.

  Or was it just someone bitter? For example, bitter at a new generation that seemed to bypass all the hard work,the burdensome responsibilities, the sheer grind of life that older people had shouldered and taken for granted. His father, when he heard of Matt’s wage as a football pro—modest enough by present-day standards—used to gasp and say, “Bloody ’ell—you lot don’t know you’re born.” His dad had been fortunate in his Colchester job, but he knew what grind was.

  Matt frowned. He should have heard the stairs creak again by now, as whoever-it-was came up with the purloined goodies. He got up to go to the lavatory, opening the door quietly and pausing on the landing. The light was on in the kitchen, and as he stood there wondering what was going on he thought he heard a sob. He forgot about his need for the loo and tiptoed downstairs, stepping to the side of the third stair down from the turn, which always creaked. On the bottom stair he looked into the lighted kitchen. Isabella was sitting at the little tabletop beside the fridge and freezer, a slice of bread and jam half eaten on a plate in front of her. Her head was in her hands, and she was sobbing into them—a soft but continuous sound that went the more directly to Matt’s heart because it was so surprising.

  He cleared his throat. Isabella straightened, and turned to him a blotchy, grief-stricken face that shocked him. He put his arm around her shoulders.

  “What’s up, darling?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, come on. I’m not an idiot. You don’t sit crying your heart out for nothing. What’s happened? What’s upset you?” Isabella let out a great gulp, and seemed about to burst into sobs again. Was it the bones in the attic and the emerging story of them that had upset her? Mattwondered. He knelt on the floor and took her hands in his. “Come on—out with it. You can tell me, whatever it is.”

  “ When is Mummy coming back?”

  It was the last thing Matt expected. It came upon him as a blow, a criticism, an accusation. He had thought they had all three understood and accepted that.

  “You know I can’t say, darling. We’ve been over all that.”

  “But what if she never comes back? Then we’ll have no father or mother. What will happen to us?”

  “She is coming back, just as soon as she can. And say something dreadful happened: you’d still have me.”

  “But why should you want us? I expect you’d rather be free.”

  “I don’t feel as if you’ve got me captured. You know I love having a family.”

  “But what if they wouldn’t let you keep us? You’re not even married to Mummy.” She looked at him wide-eyed. “We wouldn’t go and live with Granny MacIntosh! We’d rather go into a home!”

  “There’s no question of your going into a home. Your home is here with me—and the squirrels and the fox and the birds. I love you—and you all put up with me pretty well.”

  “We love you! But why should you care about us? . . . Well, all right, you do. But we want Mummy too.”

  “And you’ll have her again soon. She’ll be back as soon as your daddy is well.”

  “Or he dies.”

  “Yes, that’s true. It’s a very serious illness.”

  “What if he does get well and Mummy decides to stop with him?”

  “She won’t do that. She and I are partners now.”

  Isabella looked skeptical.

  “She might do. We wouldn’t want to go and live in South Africa. Why did she have to go and nurse him?”

  “Because there was no one else. Because your mother has a strong sense of responsibility. Because he’s the father of her children—you lot.”

  “Because she’s a Catholic, and if you’re a Catholic you’re married forever.”

  “Well—”

  “That’s what Granny MacIntosh thinks.”

  “Granny MacIntosh is”—a vision of Granny MacIntosh, hatchet-faced in confronting her daughter, whom she treated as a scarlet woman, and her lover, whom she treated as a damned soul, came into his mind, but he refrained from calling her what he usually called her to himself, a foul-minded old bigot, and simply said—“a rather old-fashioned lady.”

  “She’s worse than that, and you think so too,” said Isabella.

  “Well, may be.”

  “The boys don’t remember Daddy,” said Isabella after a pause. “But I do. Please don’t ever send us back to him!”

  Now he held her very close, her wet face against his chest, and he said: “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

  The next day he went with them to Mass at eleven, leaving a roast in the oven. Mass for Matt never got any less rum, but he noticed that Isabella was unusually serious and thoughtful. When they were back home and he was putting potatoes and carrots into the oven he heard Isabella say to her brothers, “You don’t have to believe all they say in church. The priest has to say a lot of it. I don’t suppose hebelieves it. I’m just going to believe what I can believe.” And as he came into the sitting room she said to him: “Isn’t that right, Matt?”

  That was a bit of a poser. He tried to say what Aileen would want him to say.

  “I suppose that’s true of all religions,” he said carefully. “Some of it is true, and some of it is—” He couldn’t quite hit on the word he wanted, so he ended with “fantasy.”

  He wasn’t sure what Aileen would think about his use of that word. He had already decided to ring her that evening and tell her about Isabella’s fears, though he wasn’t altogether happy about doing so. He didn’t want to blackmail her into coming home, but he did very much want her home, and he did feel she should come. The children were more important than her awful husband. Later that day he rang Phil Bletchley, a colleague at Radio Leeds, at his home address.

  “Phil. Matt here. Is there any chance of you giving me another slot on ‘Look North’ tomorrow or Tuesday? A brief one would do.”

  “May be,” said Phil. “Monday’s not usually crammed. Is this the business of the dead baby in the attic?”

  “That’s right. There’ve been some developments.”

  “And you want us to cover them, rather than Liza Pomfret?”

  “You reach a lot more people.”

  “You can’t stand her.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You feel exactly as the rest of us feel. Broadcasters hating Liza is like clergymen being against sin. If they are any longer. All right, I’ll make sure you have a slot tomorrow.”

  “And keep quiet about it. I don’t want her shrieking at me before the event.”

  “You see how she gets what she wants? We’re all shit-scared of her.”

  Matt’s instinct was to tell him to speak for himself, but a moment’s thought made him close the mouth he had opened to protest.

  Ten o’clock was Matt’s usual time for ringing Aileen. By that time her husband was always asleep, and Stephen could be kept up late specially to talk to her. That Sunday he was a bit later than usual, because he wanted the children well in bed and asleep before the call took place. He knew she would be up, because she had told him that late at night was the only time she had to herself. She never gave the impression she felt at ease in rural South Africa.

  “Are the children up?” Aileen asked after the preliminaries.

  “No—I’ve got them to bed,” said Matt in a low voice.

  “Why are you speaking like that? Anything wrong?”

  “Not on the surface,” said Matt. “Or perhaps I should say not that I’d noticed. I’ve been blind, I realize that now. Last night I found Isabella down in the kitchen sobbing her heart out over a slice of bread and jam.”

  “Isabella! But she’s always so sensible!”

  Matt was glad her mother agreed with his judgment.

 
“She’s afraid her mummy’s never going to come home, afraid I won’t want them, afraid they’re going to have to live with Mummy and Daddy in South Africa, afraid they’re going to be dumped on Granny MacIntosh in Morningside—”

  “Not on your life they’re not! Oh, God, poor kids. Are they all thinking like that?”

  “I’ve no evidence of it. I suspect these are all thoughts that she’s been bottling up.”

  “We don’t think, do we? Don’t try to see things as they might be seeing them. Did you manage to convince her it’s nonsense?”

  “I quietened her. Aileen—”

  “Yes?”

  “I think it would help if you got paid help in for Tom and flew back, say for a week or ten days. To reassure them. They’d believe you, where they doubt me. We’d manage the cost somehow. I think they need to see and hear you, touch you.”

  Aileen could be felt considering this.

  “That’s one possibility. But, Matt, there’s a better one: I think my time here may be nearly up.”

  “What? Has there been a turn for the worse?”

  “No, the opposite. And—But I don’t want to talk about it, not in his house. Would it help if you could start giving them the hope that I’ll be home soon?”

  “It would, I’m sure. Especially if I could give them a timescale.”

  “That’s awkward. Anything can happen, obviously. You could say at the earliest in two or three weeks’ time, and anyway not too long after that. That would be better than a quick trip home, wouldn’t it?”

  “ Much better. And I can just about hold out that long too.”

  “What can you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. And Isabella’s not the only one who wonders how a Catholic regards her not-even-in-name-ex husband.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The General Public

  “Matt, your friend in the constabulary rang,” called Phil Bletchley as Matt turned up for duty at midday on Monday. Matt poked his head round the door.“Any message?”

  “Said to ring him. And can we have a chat about your slot tonight? I wondered whether you’d like to man a phone afterward to collect any information that comes in.”