“BUT THERE ARE angels, Mummy. Miss Sowerby says there are. She says they have wings, too, and bright lights round their heads. Ever so bright! As bright as the headlamps of Daddy’s car, Miss Sowerby says!”
I sighed. Bother Miss Sowerby! And bother Daddy, too, for that matter!—if Philip wanted his son to be brought up in his own humanist-rationalist opinions, then where was the sense in sending him to an old-fashioned little village school, where the last of the world’s Miss Sowerby’s are bound to be still quietly flourishing? But of course I would never argue about it: right from the moment of marrying him, I had resolved never to argue with Philip about Simon’s upbringing. The important things for a six-year-old—or so I reasoned—were consistency—continuity—stability. The task of a new stepmother, it seemed to me, was to keep things going for the child as nearly as possible as they had always been. No change was as important as no change, if you see what I mean; and this had been my policy throughout these first, difficult months.
And difficult, indeed, they had been. It would have been easier if Simon had been, quite simply, a more attractive child: if he had been a bouncing, handsome, extrovert little boy, who could be made happy by treats, and toys, and ice-cream: a little boy with muddy knees and football boots and lots of noisy little friends. I had come into my marriage all set to be tolerant about that sort of thing; to smile as I patched torn dungarees, swept mud off the carpets, and accustomed my ears to the clatter and yells of Cowboys and Indians up and down the stairs and in and out of the back door.
But Simon isn’t like that at all, I am sorry to say. He is a pale, mopish little creature, who reads a lot (yes, at six he reads voraciously, fluent as an adult), and his eyes are always red-rimmed, sometimes from eyestrain, sometimes, I suppose, from crying. Personally, I think he oughtn’t to be allowed to read so much; but, as I say, I never interfere; I keep my opinions to myself. If he was my child—that is to say, if I was his real own mother, and didn’t have to be so careful all the time not to upset him—I would insist on him going out more, and leading a more active life. I would take him for long walks whether he liked it or not; I would invite little boys to tea myself, and make him play with them. I just couldn’t endure to see a son of mine so pallid, and unsociable, and full of fancies. But since he isn’t my son, and since Philip seems to see nothing amiss, I let him go his own way, and just try to be very, very kind to him. I think I can honestly say that in all these months I have never once slapped him, or even raised my voice in anger. All my friends say it’s marvellous, how patient I am with him, even when he is at his most whiny and tiresome; and I am glad to be told this, because, believe me, I don’t always feel patient! There are times, there really are, when Simon would try the patience of an angel, particularly when he is in one of his argumentative moods. Of course, I know that six-year-olds are always argumentative—I’m not complaining of that—it’s right and natural that they should be. But with Simon it’s different. With him it’s not the normal, aggressive, “I’m right and you’re wrong!” sort of attitude, that is typical of bright little boys. On the contrary, it’s as if he doesn’t want you to be wrong—is afraid of it, somehow—and he’s all twisted up with anxiety to put you right.
Like this angel business, for instance. They have Religious Instruction on Friday afternoons, and it seems that on this particular Friday Miss Sowerby had seen fit to stuff the kids’ heads with even more fairy-tale nonsense than usually goes under the heading of “Religion”. Of course, it should all have slid off him like water off a duck’s back as soon as the lesson was over—that’s what happens with any normal child. But Simon is not like that. Perhaps for the very reason that he has been brought up in an atheistic household, all this religious claptrap actually means something to him. He actually listens, I mean, and thinks he is learning some new and extraordinary fact about the world: a child from an ordinary religious home would never dream of paying that much attention.
And so then, of course, being Simon, he comes home all het-up and anxious about it, and lets his tea grow cold, and the nice hot-buttered toast that I always have ready for him on winter afternoons congeals on his plate, while he worries at the topic like a terrier with a bone.
“But Mummy, they’ve got great wings, Miss Sowerby says, as—as big as right across this room! That’s how big they’d have to be, to fly an angel right off the floor!”
His eyes were round with awe as they took in the size of our sitting-room and visualized the wing-span that would reach from wall to wall. This solemn, objective assessment of such a piece of fairy-tale rubbish made me want to laugh; but of course I was careful not to do so; one should never laugh at a child.
“No, Simon,” I said gently. “You’ve got the wrong idea. Miss Sowerby didn’t mean there really are such things as angels (she did, of course, the silly cow, but what else could I say?). She just meant that—well—that you can imagine such creatures, as symbols of goodness. You know what a ‘symbol’ is?”
He did, of course. Simon always knows the meanings of words. I sometimes think he’d be a more lovable child if he didn’t—and a happier one, too. Already that irritating little nervous pucker was coming and going on his forehead as he talked—a sure sign that he was working himself up into one of his states. I don’t ever let him see that it irritates me, of course, because I know he can’t help it. So I just smiled at him reassuringly and said: “That’s all angels are, Simon, just a fanciful way of talking about goodness! You mustn’t start thinking about them as if they were real.”
But Simon wouldn’t let it go—he never will. He gets his nerves wound round something, like a spider’s web round a fly, and there is nothing you can do.
“No,” he said, with his own special air of anxiety-ridden obstinacy. “That isn’t what Miss Sowerby meant. She meant there are angels. She says you can see them sometimes. People who are very, very good, they can see them, she says. Am I very, very good, Mummy?”
I sighed. I could see that it was hopeless.
“Of course you are, Simon, dear,” I said brightly—and I wasn’t lying, either. He is a good little boy—too good. Naughty little boys are more lovable, to my way of thinking.
“Of course you’re good!” I repeated reassuringly. “Very, very good! We’ll tell Daddy how good you’ve been, shall we, when he comes in?”
“No!” Astonishingly, the little pallid face was puckered almost into tears, and I was filled with a familiar, baffled irritation. Here I was, trying my hardest to be nice to him, to show approval, and all he could do was to look as if I’d kicked him! “No, don’t tell Daddy that!” he begged, clutching at my sleeve with his weak, damp little fingers. “Please don’t tell Daddy I’m good! Please, Mummy!”
When you can’t understand, the thing to do is to smile, and be very, very kind. So I patted the perverse little creature’s head—his hair is always a little greasy, and unpleasant to the touch, however often I wash it—I smiled my brightest, and suggested a game of draughts before bedtime. It’s a boring game, made even more boring for me by the fact that I always play so as to let Simon win; but it’s the sort of sedentary game that seems to suit him, and as I’m only playing for his sake anyway, it doesn’t matter that I’m bored.
Well, his bedtime came at last, and he went off meekly enough and Philip came in, and we had dinner; and it wasn’t until we were sitting over the fire drinking our coffee that a sudden shriek of “Mummy! Mummy!” sent me racing up the stairs.
Believe it or not, it was the angels again! Apparently that fool of a Miss Sowerby had told the kids that if they were good children an angel would watch over them at night while they slept! And Simon—trust him! — had managed to convert this hackneyed drivel into a vision of terror! It seemed that he had had a dream—or had let his imagination run riot in the darkness, there was no way of telling which—but anyway, he had opened his eyes and fancied he saw a circle of light in the half-open doorway, and had heard a rustle of wings.
“It was coming up the stairs, Mummy!” he gasped, half in and half out of his nightmare; “It was coming in the door! It was all bright, like a headlamp, and I could hear its wings rustling!”
I soothed him as best I could; and then Philip came up and talked to him too, telling him all the comforting Rationalist doctrines about things not being real unless scientists have measured them and taken photographs of them and that sort of thing; and gradually Simon became calmer, and presently he fell asleep, a secure, cared-for little boy, with one of his parents on each side of his bed, just as it should be.
The Tightness of this picture struck both of us; and when we got down to the sitting-room, Philip put his arms around me and told me how marvellous I was with Simon. “He’s ours now, isn’t he?” he said, covering my face with kisses. “Not just mine. Our son! And did you notice how he called ‘Mummy!’ tonight? Not ‘Daddy!’? It’s you he wants now when he’s frightened. He has really accepted you at last!”
It was true; it really was a step forward. At the beginning, Simon had balked at calling me “Mummy”—it almost seemed that he must still remember something of his real mother, who had died when he was three. We hadn’t forced him, of course—that would have been wrong. We had simply and firmly referred to me as “Mummy”—Philip in talking of me in his presence and I in referring to myself, and at last Simon had got used to it. And now, here he was calling to “Mummy!” for comfort in the night! It was one of my moments of triumph.
But I have to admit that as night followed night, this sense of triumph began to wear a little thin. Because it turned out that Simon’s nightmare that evening—or hysterical fancy, or whatever it was—was not just an isolated little episode, to be laughed off and forgotten; it was the beginning of a long and worrying obsession which was to try my patience to the limit. At first it was just in the evenings. Around nine o’clock, just as it had been the first time, the cry “Mummy! Mummy!” would ring down the stairs; and I would have to leave my coffee, or my book, and run up to calm him down. Over and over again, evening after evening, I found myself mouthing the same soothing rigmarole: “But Simon, dear, there can’t be such things as angels, because….” “No, dear, there wasn’t an angel standing by your bed when I came in….” “No, dear, it isn’t true that anyone has ever seen one, it’s just a story…. No, I can’t hear a rustling sound, only the wind in the trees; and no, that light isn’t coming from the stairs, it’s only the moon outside the window … and no, it isn’t getting brighter, of course it isn’t….”
Each night it seemed to take longer before he settled down; each night I had a harder struggle to hide my impatience and irritation. And my scorn, too, really; a boy, even a little boy, should surely have more pride than to give way so helplessly to such idle fancies? Not that I ever suggested such a thing to the child, or urged him to be “a brave boy”, as I would have done if he had been my son, and I had needed to be proud of him. I knew, you see, that he couldn’t help it, he’d been born with these morbid and cowardly tendencies, and all one could do was to be sorry for him, not angry or reproachful. Anger, or any sort of disapproval, would only have made him worse, the poor spiritless little thing.
But it was a strain, and I don’t mind admitting it; and instead of getting better as the days went by it got worse. Presently he began waking up in the night too, as well as in the evenings. I would have to drag myself from my bed and go in to him at one in the morning, or two, or three. Shivering in my dressing-gown, half dead with drowsiness, I would stand at his bedside and recite the familiar sentences almost in my sleep…. “No, Simon, dear, there can’t be such things as angels…. No, there isn’t a rustling noise coming up the stairs….”
Sometimes, to give me a rest, Philip would go to him instead of me; but all that happened then was that Simon would go on crying “Mummy! Mummy!” until finally I had to go. Quite often, actually, he would do the same with me—I mean, he would go on crying “Mummy! Mummy!” after I was already there, and doing my best to soothe him! It was puzzling, this: but Simon is a puzzling child, as I am sure I have made clear by now.
Time went by, and my nights grew ever more hideous with weariness and broken sleep; and now Simon’s obsession began to spill over into the daytime as well. He began searching our bookshelves for references to angels, and one evening, coming on a picture of an angel in some book or other—a book on medieval history, I think it was—he said something so odd that it really gave me quite a shock.
“Look, Mummy!” he exclaimed, bringing the book over to me “Look, this one hasn’t got a beak!”
“A beak?” I said, mystified; and it turned out—would you believe it?—that he had all this time been imagining that angels had beaks! Because they had wings—that was the connection in his mind—and he’d pictured their beaks as huge and curved, like a vulture’s. He thought they had vulture’s eyes, too—hooded eyes, peering out from among their haloes and gauzy draperies and whatnot! Oh, and claws, too, where their hands should be. Can you credit it? An intelligent child of nearly seven!
Well, you might suppose—you who don’t know our Simon—you might suppose that the discovery that angels don’t have beaks and claws would have dispelled the nightmares. But Oh, no! He decided—with his usual obstinacy—that the picture was wrong!—just as he’d decided that we were wrong in saying there weren’t such things as angels at all. It was no use arguing—it never is, with him: and, to be fair, I have to admit that people who say there aren’t such things as angels are on rather shaky ground when they start saying also that angels haven’t got beaks.
So the nightmares continued; and the crying out in the night; and the daytime obsession grew, if anything, worse. He began about this time to make dreary little attempts to be naughty—Miss Sowerby’s fatuous assertion that it was the “very, very good” children who were liable to see angels at their bedside—this seemed to be fixed in his mind for ever, and nothing would dislodge it. So he took the (admittedly logical) course of trying to be naughty. I say “trying”, because he was far too timid and anxious a child ever to bring it off. He would take a cup, sometimes, or a saucer, and tap it feebly against the kitchen floor trying to break it—but not daring, you understand, really to break it, by banging really hard. Or he would play truant from school—for five minutes, hanging about in the lane—and then run in, crying, and not even late for prayers!
And still—though I say it myself—I kept my temper with him. Philip said I was marvellous, an angel of patience; it was only his praise and encouragement that made it possible for me to carry on, I feel sure of that. Thanks to him, I stuck it out, night after night, shivering at Simon’s bedside, swallowing down my impatience and resentment; never letting it show in my voice, or in my face, or in the gentle touch of my hand as I stroked his hot little forehead and his horrid, greasy hair.
One night, after Simon had called me up three times, it seemed silly to go to bed again; he would only call me up again. So I went downstairs and sat by the dead fire, with my head in my hands, and my dressing-gown pulled tight around me against the cold. My head drooped with weariness, my eyelids were heavy like two stones; and upstairs—asleep, I hoped—lay the little slave-driver who had established the right to keep me from my rest for ever. The sickly, neurotic little beast: the morbid, loathsome little milksop: the apple of his father’s eye….
“Mummy! Mummy!”
The cry woke me: that’s how I knew that I had been asleep. They were only dreams, then, those dark, unruly thoughts, which ordinarily I would never think. I still seemed to be half-dreaming as I stumbled up the stairs; my eyes seemed dazzled, as if by a great light; and yet everything was in darkness. My dressing-gown had grown longer, somehow, and heavier; it rustled stiffly behind me, catching softly on the steps of the stairs as I went up and up.
“Mummy! Mummy!” Yet more urgent came the cry. “I’m coming!” I called in answer, and began to summon up the soothing, comforting smile which I always try to force on to my face for Simon.
But why wouldn’t the smile come? What was this stiffness where my lips should be? I tried to open my mouth to call out again; but it was not my mouth that opened; it was a great beak, jutting out of my face, cruel and curved like a bird of prey; and I knew now that my eyelids, so heavy with lack of sleep, were heavy and hooded, above my yellow vulture’s eyes. My robes were gauzy and beautiful, floating round me like a mist, and my great wings quivered restlessly, ready for flight. The dazzle in my eyes grew brighter, and now I knew that it came from within; my beaked face was blazing, bright as the headlights on Daddy’s car, and in that awful radiance I could see that my hands had become claws, yellow and crooked as they clutched the banisters. They looked eager, somehow, as they pulled me upwards and onwards, compensating for my useless clawed feet that clattered and slithered on the polished stairs.
“Mummy! Mummy!”
“I’m coming, dear, I’m coming!” I called—but how harsh and eerie the words sounded as the beak mouthed them, clumsily: so I tried again.
“I’m coming!” I squawked; and, with a final clumsy spurt I slithered and rattled on my claws across the landing. With a rustle of half-raised wings, I swooped into Simon’s darkened room, and leaned over his little bed, just as I always do, to comfort him.