God. Religion. Even her stepfather crawled to church on high days and holy days for confession. Diana is furious with herself for so nearly falling for the smoke and mirrors, on her knees praying for forgiveness; she even took the arrival of Valerie’s bit of stuff as the angel Gabriel. Enough. The boy is quite defeated, he complies with an early bedtime and lies like a rag doll.
‘I know you’re sad,’ she reassures him, ‘but he’s not a good man. He only wanted money. Your mother always went for the bad apples. Now he’s back behind bars, there’s no use you hoping for anything else. Or anyone else,’ she adds. ‘That isn’t how this is going to end.’
The next morning she decides she’ll be the one who goes to church. Monty is a good enough babysitter, the boy is busy in the nursery and he’s never going to try to escape. She assumes he’s too frightened. He’s hardly left Wynhope apart from going to school and he’s certainly made no friends in the neighbourhood, adult or child.
Following the narrow path across the meadows, she puts her feet in their footprints, taking possession of their pilgrimage, through the brittle grasses scratching her bare legs, on past the lake which is stagnant and stifled by algae. The key to the chapel is easy to find. Intent on desecration and revenge, she barges inside like a drunk in a library, but stops short: there is no wealth to lay waste to, no sanctity to spoil, only a stained tablecloth on a makeshift altar and bird mess splattered on the pulpit. Edmund lights these candles, one, two, three; of course, the third is for Valerie and she feels indescribably sad for him, for them both, for all of them, clutching at false gods, grasping at straws, as Edmund might say. Shaken, she sags down onto the hard pew and weeps: such highs and lows, one minute all energy and fight, the next the drabbest of women, drained. Damp and dust and fungus sap her energy until an incomprehensible restlessness and the suffocating breathlessness of the place force her to her feet. She walks the walls. The faint inscriptions and his ancestors’ epitaphs are impossible to decipher, even the leather on the front of the Bible on the lectern is marbled by mildew. The pages cling to each other, they weigh so much more than she expects. She heaves them from Genesis to Deuteronomy, Kings, Psalms. Here is number 137. By the rivers of Babylon, just like the little girl sewed.
O daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Like a kite snagged on barbed wire, she gets caught on that verse. Tearing the page from the Bible, she folds it and slips it into her pocket; she doesn’t understand why, but destruction is on her mind. The scratch of the crow in the rafters drives her from the chapel.
Back in Edmund’s study with a glass of wine, she takes inspiration from a text of a different sort, the framed cartoon on the wall showing a despairing man with his mouth gagged, his hands tied behind his back and a pen untouched on the desk in front of him. The caption reads: ‘For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”’
Like a bee, the unthinkable, once thought, loses its sting. Rivers of Babylon. Daughter of Babylon. The psalm in her pocket offers her another line: ‘Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’
Who would have guessed the Bible is so full of answers?
The other useful thing is the fishing map of the river. Edmund doesn’t need to refer to it, he knows the lie of the river better than he knows their own bed, but he’s dug it out of his estate paperwork recently for Michael. It shows every beat and bend and the average depth of every pool. She thinks of him now, casting around for the truth in Outer Mongolia.
The pretence is walking Monty. In the orchard, she picks up a small hard apple which has fallen too early from the tree. She knows it will be sour, but she bites into it anyway and then spits. The river is like a magnet, it draws her through the park, late summer low water, stones showing their skulls and wigs of green hair above the dribbling stream and islands joining hands with the bank. The putrid smell is that of a puffed-up body of a drowned lamb, but that’s upstream and she’s paddling downriver to the first pool, a favourite of Edmund’s. Last year she brought a bottle of wine down, which they shared on the wooded banks as the sunset transformed the water into liquid gold. She doesn’t understand the river like Edmund, everyone knows that. She tosses the bitter apple into the water and studies its journey; as Edmund says, the river carries everything away. Accidents happen, like if the boy had fallen from the window, for instance, no one to blame, just one of those dreadful things. Late evening would be best, with the mist whispering up the river, muffling the cries, blurring the lines. Here is a ledge where anyone might sit, squirming their toes in the stream and summoning the courage to swim, where anyone might lean over to count the trout, a ledge where anyone with a slip of a step and a scream might slither skinny-dipping deep, out of their depth while their aunty prepares the picnic.
This isn’t so much a plan as a thing which might happen. She can sort of see it as it is when it has happened; her comforting Edmund as he packs up the circus animals in the attic, the two of them planning to spend Christmas in Cortina d’Ampezzo to get over it all, but the actual happening, that is divorced from her agency. Other things she tells herself as she treads carefully over the cattle grid on her way back, minding the gaps, holding tight to the rails: this child is never going to grow up and be happy; he is doomed to a lifetime of secrets and lies, of depression and self-loathing, because even if Edmund can create some false childhood idyll for him now, it will not last, not through the guilt of adolescence, not through the replayed pain in adult relationships. The truth is the rest of his life will draw on an infected tap root which will feed the sap with parasites and poison. If he could kill himself, he probably would. Like Valerie, who unlike her never got away, Michael is caught in a cycle; all she will be doing is setting him free.
The boy does not come downstairs the whole of the rest of the day. She hears him carrying things down from the nursery, but what he is doing or why is beyond her. She leaves a tray with his favourite toast and strawberry jam, a banana and a glass of milk outside his bedroom door, watched over, but left untouched by the loyal dog. When she wakes in the morning, it has gone.
All of the next day will have to be lived, with the Spotless Angels in the house, the contract mowers in the garden. The intolerable hours might wear away her stone resolve. The solution is a day out; she can upload pictures of the boy and her enjoying themselves and message them to Edmund for when he comes back from the wilderness and into range. They will form his memories and her defence.
In contrast to her wired enthusiasm, the boy sulks about the visit to the wildlife park.
‘I’ve been there before,’ he lies on his board.
‘Go,’ urge the cleaners. ‘Get fresh air. Your aunty very nice to take you out for day.’
‘You’ll like it when you get there,’ insists Diana, winking at the cleaners.
‘Monty?’
‘No.’
Oh, and what a thing she makes of it, popping little treats into a bag for the journey, promising pocket money to spend in the shop, saying he can take a photo on her phone so he can send a picture to his uncle. For most of the journey, Michael lies flat on the back seat so she can’t even see him in the rear-view mirror, and in retaliation against his passive-aggressive stance Diana assumes a position of false jollity and sings loudly, working her way through her limited repertoire of children’s music, getting louder as they get nearer, the one about the zoo, zoo, zoo and for he’s a jolly good fellow and so say all of us, and so say all of us and Humpty Dumpty who even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put back together again. Even she recognises the mania sitting on her shoulder, joining in with the chorus. Once she’s stopped and switched the engine off, the silence is intolerable. She flings open the door so that the car can fill up with the everyday hum of the outside world, but inside, Michael slumps like an imbecile, kicking his trainers against the back of her seat. There are sideways glances from the family parked next to them, their children jumping up and down as children should.
‘It’s change, I’m afraid.’ Diana sighs to the mother. ‘Children with his difficulties find it very hard.’
The other woman softens, peers into the back of the Range Rover and encourages Michael – look how her children are excited, what fun it will be when he sees the animals. In response, the boy slides from the car and Diana whispers her thanks with the apparent gratitude of a harassed carer doing her best in difficult circumstances. It isn’t that far from the truth. The day, her plan for the evening, her vision of the rest of her life with Edmund, it is all within her control and she is so credible, everyone believes her, there is nothing she cannot do. If anyone were to be asked if they saw anything that day, the family in the next car would bear witness to her dedication, her first and last day in the role of loving mother.
‘Don’t cry, love,’ says the woman to her. ‘It’ll be all right once you get in there.’
Is she crying? Diana thought she was laughing.