No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins, any more than it was my decision to bring them into the world. Each of these events was an inevitability, one thread in the fabric of what might be called destiny, for want of a better word – a thread that neither I nor anyone else could have removed without corrupting the whole design. I chose to perform the laryngotomies, if only to halt their constant singing – if singing is what you would call it – that ululation that permeated my waking hours, and entered my sleep through every crevice of my dreams. At the time, though, I would have said it was a logical act, another step in the research I had begun almost four years before – the single most important experiment that a human being can perform: to find the locus of the soul, the one gift that sets us apart from the animals; to find it, first by an act of deprivation and then, later, by a logical and necessary destruction. It surprised me how easy it was to operate on those two half-realised beings. They existed in a different world: the world of laboratory rats, or the shifting and functionless space of the truly autistic.
That experiment is over now. It was terminated, only in order that it might begin again, in a different form. If I know anything, I know this is the true pattern of our lives: a constant repetition, with small, yet significant variations, unfolding through the years. The experiment with the twins was just one variation on a lifelong theme. If it had been a conventional piece of work, I would be writing up the results; describing, in abstract language, an initial problem, a series of hypotheses and tests, a final outcome. Everything would be clearly stated, in scientific terms. But this was not a conventional piece of work. There is no way to describe this experiment without describing everything that has happened, from the morning I first learned to talk, thirty years ago, to the moment I locked the door of the basement room, leaving the twins inside, silenced now, gazing at one another with those expressions of grieved bewilderment that finally made it impossible for the experiment to continue. I switched on the music before I left, but I still had no way of knowing what it had meant to them during their years of isolation. Outside, I put my eye to the observation grille for a last look; they seemed not to have noticed my departure. Quietly, I left them to digest their poisoned meal, went upstairs to check on Karen, then made a pot of coffee and waited.
It seems odd now, this silence. Perhaps it was what I expected all along; perhaps it was what I wanted. This silence is more than the absence of sound. This is something I have earned: now I understand that, without it, I could not have contemplated this account. I had to know what the end was before I started. Now I can begin at the beginning, with Mother in her fine clothes, coming to my room in the evenings to read me stories, Mother in her pearls and beautiful dresses, one of those exquisite parasites which infect and inhabit their host, without ever going so far as to destroy it entirely – and even, in this case, creating the illusion of a natural symbiosis, a mutual nourishment. It is impossible not to admire such elegance.
Not that I would judge her harshly for that. I loved her as much as it is possible to love anyone. Looking back, I can see her faults. I can be detached, even clinical, in my analysis of our life together; yet, even now, I still love her. As a child, I was stunned by the presence of that marvellous being, that woman who had made of herself an object so beautiful that even she would stop sometimes and wonder at her own reflection in a mirror or a darkened pane of glass. As children, we love who we can. My father was shy with me, difficult, wrapped in a cocoon, always afraid that I would enter somehow, and touch him. I think he was more afraid of me than he was of Mother: he was haunted by a possible betrayal, by seeming to be the one who intruded between us, so he adopted the role Mother had prescribed for him, the role of invisible husband.
At some level, I probably always knew how distant Mother was, even from me. She was always working, like an architect, building a house of stories, treating her life and mine as a piece of fiction. I knew she was engaged in an exercise, an invention in the old sense of the word: everything she did was controlled, every story she told was a ritual. Nothing ever varied, and I admired that. Our relationship resembled that of the priest and the altar boy at Mass: she was the celebrant, I was the witness; our roles and offices were divinely appointed, therefore inevitable. Even now, I suspect she was right: because of her stratagems, our life was ordered. We could avoid intimacy without skulking in our rooms, as my father did; by the use of rituals and stories, she created a neutral ground where we could meet, where everything could be kept under control, and nothing would slip beyond the boundaries we set for ourselves.
When others were present, we were formal, perhaps even cold. It was my father who opened up to guests, telling them stories about his early years in the business, his time in Palestine, his clumsy courtship of my mother, inviting his listeners into a form of collaboration, while she regarded him with a remote, almost contemptuous expression. His favourite story was the one about their first meeting – how, walking a country road, in the summer twilight, he encountered a beautiful young woman with curly brown hair, lugging a parcel along Blackness Lane. He was in uniform at the time. He stopped and offered to help, and that was how they met: a man in uniform, home on leave, visiting a friend from a neighbouring village, and the pretty girl who let him carry her package, then hardly said a word to him all the way home. Mother would listen while he told this story, then interrupt, towards the end.
‘It was nothing like that,’ she would say to the guests. Then she would turn to my father and say, in seeming mock-annoyance, ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell such ridiculous stories.’
Mother insisted on my presence at these gatherings; she wanted a witness to my father’s folly and I fulfilled the office to the best of my ability, which only made my father more awkward with me later, after the guests had left. At the time, I suspected his stories were true – I even understood his bewilderment – but they failed to meet Mother’s standards, not of truth, but of correctness, a standard that might be applied to a piece of fiction, or a portrait. I see now how I resemble her. Sometimes, standing in the kitchen, I look out at the dark, and I see her face, gazing back at me from the shrubbery. It’s my own face, but it only takes a minor trick of the light and I see her in myself: the same eyes, the same mouth. It’s an easy resemblance to find, but it has taken me till now to see that I also resemble my father – how I am just as weak as he was, and how it was that weakness that caused the experiment with the twins to fail. Something in my spirit is irresolute. Everything should be taken seriously, in the spirit of a game; I should have carried out this experiment with the same unwavering attentiveness that is demanded by a puzzle, or a good story. That is the essence of scientific endeavour. My problem was that I failed to play; I was solemn, rather than serious. I didn’t think enough. I failed to translate the intention into the act.
Later, when I went down to the basement, the twins were dead. They lay on the floor near one of the speakers; they were huddled together, embracing one another in a way that reminded me of young monkeys, the way they cling to anything when they are frightened. I waited a long time before I opened the door. I think, even then, that I was afraid of them, afraid they were tricking me in some inexplicable fashion, afraid they were not really dead, but pretending, hoping to catch me unawares. Yet what harm could they have done me? They were small children, after all. I opened the door and crossed to where they lay: they were dead, of course, and it seemed they had died without too much suffering. Certainly their pain would have been minimal, compared to the agonies Lillian had endured, in those few days after they were born. I was glad of that. It seemed appropriate to bury them next to her, in the iris garden, and that was what I did, working all afternoon to prepare the grave, then carrying them out, one by one, in the evening twilight, and laying them out, side by side, face to face in the wet earth. Now it is midnight. Karen Olerud is upstairs, still asleep in her soft prison. I am, to all intents and purposes, alone. Now, at last, I can begin again.
From the moment I first learned to talk, I felt I was being tricked out of something. I remember it still – the memory is clear and indisputable: I am standing in the garden, and Mother is saying the word rose over and over, reciting it like a magic spell and pointing to the blossoms on the trellis, sugar-pink and slightly overblown – and I am listening, watching her lips move, still trying to disconnect the flower from the sound. I was already too old to be learning to talk – maybe two, or getting on for three. For a long time, I refused to speak – or so Mother told me. Though I appeared intelligent in other ways, I had problems with language. She had even gone to the doctor about it, but he had told her such things happened, it was quite normal, I would learn to talk sooner or later, in my own time, and I would quickly make up the ground I had lost. He was right. When I did begin speaking, it was a kind of capitulation, as if a tension in my body had broken, and I spoke my first word that afternoon, the word rose, meaning that pink, fleshy thing that suddenly flared out from the indescribable continuum of my world, and became an object.
The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony. But if words distance us from the present, so we never quite seize the reality of things, they make an absolute fiction of the past. Now, when I look back, I remember a different world: what must have seemed random and chaotic at the time appears perfectly logical as I tell it, invested with a clarity that even suggests a purpose, a meaning to life. I remember the country around our house as it was before they built the new estates: a dense, infinite darkness filled with sheltering birds and holly trees steeped in the Fifties. I remember the old village: children going from house to house in white sheets, singing and laughing in the dark, waving to us as our car glided by. I remember those months of being alone here, after Mother died. At night, when the land was quiet and still, I would take off my clothes and go naked from room to room, then out into the cool moonlight, wandering amongst the flower beds like an animal, or a changeling from one of Mother’s fairy stories. The garden is walled on all sides; no one could see me, and the house was so far from the village that I would hear nothing but the owls in the woods, and the occasional barking of foxes out on the meadow. Sometimes I wondered if I was real – my body would be different, clothed in its own sticky-sweet smell, a smell like sleep, laced with Chanel No. 19 from Mother’s dressing table.
When I was a child, Mother would come into the bedroom and tell me stories. It was a ritual she performed, without variation: I had to go up to bed, and she would follow five minutes later. I would hear the clock strike nine as she climbed the stairs. Sometimes she brought a book, but quite often she told me the stories out of her head. Whether she made them up, or had them by heart, I couldn’t say, but she never once hesitated or faltered. I had the impression, then, that she knew every story that had ever been told, and all she had to do was think of one for a moment, and every detail came flooding into her mind, instantly. It was Mother who told me the story of Akbar: how he built the Dumb House, not for profit, or even to prove a point, but from pure curiosity. Nobody knows how long it stood, or what happened to the children who were locked inside with their mute attendants. Nobody knows because the story of the Dumb House was only ever an episode in another, much longer story, an anecdote that had been folded in, told in passing to illustrate the personality of Akbar the Mughal, the dyslexic emperor whose collection of manuscripts was the richest in the known world. Later I realised that most of the details of the story were embellishments that Mother had added herself, to spin out this single episode that I liked so much. In fact, the original story of the Dumb House was simple and fleeting. In that version, the Mughal’s counsellors were debating whether a child is born with the innate, God-given ability to speak; they had agreed this gift is equivalent in some way to the soul, the one characteristic that marks out the human from the animal. But Akbar declared that speech is learned, for the very reason that the soul is innate, and the soul does not correspond to any single faculty, whether it be the ability to speak, or to dream, or to reason. Surely, he argued, if speech came from the soul, then there would be only one language, instead of many. But the counsellors disagreed. While it was true that there were many languages, these were simply the corruptions of the original gift, implanted in the soul by God. They knew of incidents in which children had been left in isolation for years, or raised by animals: in such circumstances they had created a language of their own, that nobody else understood, which they could not have learned from others.
Akbar listened. When the counsellors had finished speaking, he told them he would test their hypothesis. He had his craftsmen build a mansion, far from the city: a large, well-appointed house, with its own gardens and fountains. Here Akbar established a court of the mute, into which he introduced a number of new-born babies, gathered from the length and breadth of the Empire. The children were well cared for, and were provided with everything they could possibly need, but because their attendants were dumb, they never heard human speech, and they grew up unable to talk, as Akbar had predicted. People would travel from all over the kingdom to visit the house. They would stand for hours outside its walled gardens, listening to the silence, and for years to come the mansion was known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House.
Mother would come to the bedroom and tell me this story in the evenings. Naturally, her version was different; she barely touched upon the controversy over the innateness of language, or the nature of the soul. Instead she described the Gang Mahal in sumptuous detail: the orange trees in terracotta pots, the jewelled walls, the unearthly silence. I lay in bed listening, watching her lips move, intoxicated by her perfume. I used to wonder what had happened when those children grew up; how they thought, if thought was possible, if they ever remembered anything from one moment to the next. There are people who say speech is magical; for them, words have the power to create and destroy. Listening to Mother’s stories, I became enmeshed in a view of the world: an expectation, a secret fear. Even now, nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creates the impression of order: the naming of things after their true nature; the act of classification; the creation of kingdoms and genera, species and sub-species; the designation of animal, vegetable or mineral, of monocotyledonous plants, freshwater fishes, birds of prey, the periodic table. This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else. What disturbs me now is the possibility that language might fail: after the experiment ended so inconclusively, I cannot help imagining that the order which seems inherent in things is only a construct, that everything might fall into chaos, somewhere in the long white reaches of forgetting. That is why it is imperative for me to begin again, and that is why Karen was sent here, after all this time, to fulfil her true purpose.
I lived entirely in the presence of my mother. Even when she wasn’t there, I was aware of her, somewhere, and I was always conscious of myself, I always behaved as if she were with me, watching and listening. My father, on the other hand, seemed barely present. Most of the time, I disregarded him, just as Mother did. He seemed peripheral to our existence, irrelevant to our enterprise and, at the time, I thought he preferred it that way. Often, he was away on business. When he was at home, he would make an effort to play the game of father and son, but we were always awkward together. He knew I belonged to Mother.
Not that I was ever disrespectful. When he asked me to take a walk with him, I always assented readily, and we would go out, pretending there was some purpose to our excursion. Usually, he would ask me to go fishing. He had no idea of how fishing was done, but he must have thought it was appropriate, the sort of thing fathers do with their sons. We would carry our rods and baskets to the river, then sit on the bank in silence, watching the water flow over the dark weeds. I was certain the place we usually chose was wholly unsuitable. I never saw a fish there, in all our visits.
We would spend a couple of hours like that, then we would gather up our equipment and turn for home. I think my father enjoyed being near the water. It set him at his ease and, on the way back, he would seem more relaxed; he would make efforts at conversation, asking me questions about school, or what books or music I liked. I would answer as well as I could; I think I wanted to be friendly, but the questions were too simple, too closed. Then, as the conversation petered out, he would fall back on his favourite stand-by, which was to ask if there was anything I wanted, anything I needed. To begin with, I must have thought these questions were nothing more than conversational gambits, and I told him I was fine, there was nothing I could think of. Eventually, when I saw how disappointed he was with this reply, I began naming things, just to keep him happy, and perhaps also to see what would happen. I was surprised to begin with, then later, slightly irritated by the fact that he always remembered what I had asked for. Inevitably, the requested item would arrive: without ceremony, it would appear in the hall, or on the table in the breakfast room. There would be no gift wrap, no tags or ribbons, nothing to say who had sent it. Most often, these gifts were delivered to the house, and usually when my father was away. Mother must have been aware of the parcels, but she made no comment. It was as if they had been delivered to us by accident.
In a spirit of loyalty, I tried to ignore them, too; but I have to admit there were times when I was pleased. My father’s interpretation of even my vaguest request would be uncanny. No matter what I asked him for – a bicycle, a new violin, a tennis racquet, a fountain pen – no matter what it was, it would always be the size, the style, the colour I would have chosen. Yet I never felt these objects were gifts as such, because I never felt they were entirely mine. I used them the way I would have used something borrowed, taking care of them the way you might care for something that, sooner or later, would have to be returned. Occasionally I asked for things I didn’t really want, to see what he would do. Yet still, no matter what it was, he only chose the best, and I would be embarrassed, as if I had been caught out in a mean practical joke. Sometimes I even forgot what I had asked for. I would just say the first thing that came to mind, to give him something to think about as we made our way home across the meadow. But he always remembered. Whatever I requested would appear, in its plain packaging, like a bundle of exotic flotsam, washed up on the doorstep. Most of the time, he wasn’t there for me to thank him. I think he arranged it that way, to avoid any difficulty. Looking back, in spite of his seeming collaboration with our regime, I see that he was secretly and perversely trying to find some way into the world I shared with Mother, and these gifts were his crude attempts to win my confidence. I feel sorry for him now, in retrospect. He must have been lonely; it must have pained him to know he was little more than a stranger to us, someone we treated with courtesy, but whom we regarded, essentially, as a guest in our house.
Nevertheless, I felt guilty sometimes, when the parcels arrived and I stripped them open to find some expensive object that I couldn’t use, glittering in the morning light. Occasionally I would go to the river alone and stay there all day, as if paying a forfeit, or enduring some kind of penance. The river seemed different when I was by myself: it was a mysterious place, whose strangeness I was interrupting. Sometimes I took my rod and pretended to fish, for my father’s sake. I wanted to tell him I had been out there while he was away, carrying on where we had left off. Sometimes I even convinced myself that I would catch a fish. It would have been good to have something to show him on his return. Most of the time, though, I just took off my shoes and socks and waded out into the cold, quick water, to feel the long streams of riverweed against my shins. My feet would be chilled to the bone, but I still felt the current on my skin, and I would stand for as long as I could, letting the cold sink in, trying to become another element of the river, as natural, as neutral, as the silt and the water. I looked for fish, but I never saw any. I remembered a story Mother had told me once, about an ancient water spirit who lived amongst the weeds in dark ponds and rivers. The spirit was called Jenny Greenteeth, and I suppose, in the book, it was meant to be a woman, but I imagined it as a near-hermaphrodite, part-woman, part-man, part-fish, something wired into the sway of the water, aware of the least flicker or ripple. In my mind, it possessed that special fish-sensitivity where even rainfall is a tapping at the spine; it knew the difference between ordinary disturbances of the surface, and the steps of a child, or the tug of a probing stick. In the book, it was shown as a wrinkled, bone-and-hair fiend, surging from the water, its long nails and jagged teeth coated with weed and moss. But on those visits to the river, I would imagine something subtle, almost invisible. Quick as a pike, it would rise to its prey, then disappear into the depths, but there would be no cries, no blood, no immediate horrors. A deceptive calm would return to the river: birds would sing again, the sun would break through the clouds. The victim would be unaware of what had happened. After a while, he would grow bored, and return home, where no one would notice any change. Yet the change would have happened under the surface, behind the appearance of normality. That child would never be the same again. He would grow into something dark and cold, something that belonged to the river. He would see possibilities that others missed, and he would act upon them. People would begin to see him as a monster, but as far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than phantoms. His world was different from theirs. In his world, their thoughts, their actions, their judgements were immaterial.
In the holidays, when I was home from school, Mother would take me out looking for corpses. To begin with, it was her idea: she wanted me to see how things looked when they were dead, and she got me to come by making a game of it, an odd form of hide and seek. She said every animal had a place of its own where it would go to die if it could; wild animals wanted to be alone when they were sick or dying, and they would crawl away into the undergrowth, to be out of the light and the wind. The only dead things I had seen until then were pheasants and hedgehogs on the road to the village, but Mother had a gift for knowing where to look: animals I had only ever encountered in books became real as corpses, life-size, as it were, with hard claws and tiny, blood-threaded teeth, flesh I could prod and turn, fur I could stroke, disturbing the flies, drawing the cold or the warmth of decay through the palm of my hand. As we searched for fresh bodies, we would revisit the sites of earlier finds. There was always something new to see, something strangely beautiful – not only in summer, when the bodies imploded slowly and the smell was dark and sickly, but also in autumn and winter, when they lay for weeks, cold and untarnished, frozen voles laid out on the grass, small birds lying under the hedges with their legs stretched, their eyes clenched and wrinkled. It was odd, but as I followed the process of decay, there seemed to be something curative in it all, as if the animal was being renewed, or purified, leaching away in the rain, drying in the sun, vanishing slowly, leaving behind only a faint yellowish aftermath in the grass, in which form was implicit, with a half-life of its own.
After a while, I started going out on these hunts alone. At some level, at the level of an undercurrent, I had begun to think it might be possible to be incorporated into this process in some way; or rather, I began to form a primitive, superstitious notion that I could make it work for my own purposes, propitiating it with small offerings, vague gestures of rehearsal and assent. At school we performed an experiment with moulds, sealing a piece of moistened bread in ajar and leaving it in a warm place to see the lime-green and ochre life-forms growing on the surface, and I repeated this experiment at home, unscrewing the lid of the jar each day for the sweet perfume of new life arising from decay, probing the black and silvery hairs, watching them blossom and collapse in their hundreds. I varied the contents of the jar: lemon rind, scraps of meat, cabbage leaves, egg-yolk – everything had its own way of becoming something new, and I made my own private catalogue of implosions and seepages, ergots and mildews, sickening odours, twitches, vanishings. One afternoon I loosened a tangle of hair from Mother’s brush, wrapped it in tissue paper and buried it out in the garden amongst her irises, so the freshening rain could wear it down and make it new, irresistibly, in the cold earth. That same year I began to collect the skulls and bones of the animals I found, laying them out on beds of sawdust in old shoe boxes, giving each its own label to show the date and place where it had been found. I think even then I knew what I was doing, but at the same time it had the quality of a game – as if I were preventing myself from fully understanding that these rituals, these clumsy flirtations with death and renewal, were really my childish attempts to prevent Mother from dying. I remember that there was an afternoon, around that time, when it first came home to me that she was mortal. Of course, I must have known before then that she would die, but there had never been real understanding, the idea of her death had always been vague, lacking in intimacy.
I think there are places in the mind where nothing changes: a garden shed, the space beneath a bridge, the urine-scented steps to an old air-raid shelter littered with rags and broken glass. It may be that what happened in those places are the moments you would choose to remember clearly if you could, the scenes you erase without knowing you have erased them, the events that populate your dreams in muted form, which you abandon in waking, a deliberate yet poignant loss. If only you could remember, something would be whole again; even if the memory was difficult to accept, it would be better than the not-knowing which has defined and limited you for years, making you weak and irresolute, a creature attuned to fear, incapable of fully assenting to your own life. This is a psychologist’s cliché, and yet I accept it, almost unconditionally. I have no clear idea of what happened to me, one summer’s day, out hunting in the grass. I picture a man in a grubby business suit, strangely out of place amongst the cow parsley and wild geraniums. I picture him taking hold of me, pressing me to a fence, and fumbling at my groin – but this is all there is for sure, an imagined act, no more convincing or immediate than a scene from a book or a film. I have one clear memory of an overwhelming powerlessness, of being unable to move, or struggle free. As far as I recall, he did not speak: whatever it was that happened, took place in silence. Then I remember running home across the meadow – and this memory is perfectly clear – I remember finding the door to our walled garden locked and thinking it was part of a conspiracy, thinking someone inside the walls was in league with the man who had caught me out there. I shouted and hammered desperately at the locked door until Mother came and opened it. She stood looking at me quizzically, with her secateurs in her hand, slightly mocking, as if she wanted me to understand, of my own accord, that I was making a fuss about nothing.
‘What is it?’ she said, after a moment. ‘You’re all dirty.’
‘The gate was locked.’
‘Well, there’s no need to get upset. You only had to knock.’
‘I was locked out,’ I repeated. I could hear how loud my voice was, how unacceptably vehement.
She shook her head.
‘Go and get cleaned up,’ she said. ‘You look like something the cat dragged in.’
She didn’t seriously enquire as to what had happened and I think, even then, I was already beginning to erase what it was from my mind, forgetting for her sake, as much as my own. She looked so clean, so untouchable, yet at the heart of that perfection there was something soft, something she preserved by an effort, as the shellfish preserves its soft white body, by continually renewing its shell. It was then that I first understood how vulnerable she was, and I felt sorry for her, as if I had caught her out, not so much in a lie as in a pitiful act of self-deception.
For months afterwards I was afraid she would become ill and die. I watched her carefully for symptoms: if she fell asleep in the evening, sitting in her chair, a book or a garden magazine sliding to the floor as she drifted away, I woke her immediately. At night I would stand outside her bedroom, to hear if she was still breathing. In the daytime, when I was at school, I carried a pair of her gloves in my coat pocket, taking them out from time to time to make sure I still had them. It was one of those games children play to cheat fate – if I lost the gloves, Mother would die, but as long as I kept them, she would be invulnerable. In addition to these rituals of deceit and propitiation, I gave myself the task of listing by name all the flowers in her garden: first the irises, which she prized more than the others, then the lilies, the pinks, the roses, the shrubs and climbers, the fruit trees trained against the walls. When that was finished I moved on to something else, compiling lists of scientific terms and place names in special notebooks that I kept hidden under my bed, alongside the shoe boxes full of animal skulls.
Perhaps my anxiety was justified. For some reason, that was a year of surprising and unexplained deaths. During the spring term alone, three children in my school were buried. It was strange to know people who were dead: I remember feeling their ghosts around me, buttoned-up and freshly combed, ghosts of the daylight, coming home from school in raincoats and fur-lined boots, mysterious for having failed to live that far: Alana Fuller, who died in her bed one night, tucked-up and quiet; Stuart Gow, run over in the street in front of the whole school at home-time; a Polish boy whose name I forget, who died from the injuries inflicted by his father one night in a drunken rage. Then there were the strangers: the men who died in a mining accident; the little unidentified boy who was found strangled and half-naked in a ditch on the road to Weston. The one that fascinated me most was the death of a woman who lived on the other side of the village. When they broke into her house, they found her decaying under a veil of blowflies. She had been there for days, as still as her strange keepsakes: the box of hair in the tallboy, the Indian miniatures, the bedside drawer full of confetti and flakes of paper snow. I remember thinking how wonderful it would have been, to walk into that room and find her there, with her whole life gathered around her.
But Mother did not die, not that year. Some time in the autumn, though, she became ill. The doctor was called, and I started making my lists in Latin rather than English, because Latin gave me a sense of time as intimate and continuous, all history only a moment away, something I could see from my own house: a movement in the fields beyond our garden walls, a soft, deep sound, like damsons falling in the dark, falling continually and melting into the wet grass. There was nothing mystical about the world as I experienced it; there was no supernatural, but there was something mysterious there, a force that could be recognised, and with which I felt I could negotiate. That was how Latin operated. It dispelled the idea of the supernatural, but it retained the sense of the mysterious; it defined and classified, but it did not limit. Perhaps the strategy worked: though she was ill for several weeks, Mother recovered, and life went on as before.
Later, when she did die, I found myself repeating those rituals, to no real end, other than to resurrect the past. In the evenings, when it was cool, I would go out alone, poking among the nettles and balsam along the riverbank, crossing the meadow where the owls hunt, but I had less success than I had when Mother was with me. Most of the time, I just went out for the sensation of being in the open, touched by the wind, feeling my body cool after the day’s warmth. On other days I would drive out to the graveyard and look at Mother’s headstone. When she first died, I still felt that she was close: the house contained her perfume and the other scents and textures I associated with her, honey, steamed fruits, various powders. Even as I added to this web of smell and colour, I was still the keeper of her ghost; nothing I did replaced any part of that phantom’s complex presence. It was as if she was still there, on the air. But later she grew remote and I began to feel it was the stone that had caused the change – as if by setting in place this permanent marker to her life I was actually erasing it forever, letting her slip away to the dry, limitless space of the fairy stories she used to tell.
I have no clear memory of the moment when the idea for the experiment came to me. It was written into my mind from the start, as much a part of me as the love I bore for Mother, as much a piece of my soul as her scent or the sound of her voice, reaching back through my existence to a point before memory, to the very origin of being. If I had to explain it, I would say this: I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew what I was expected to do – by other people, by myself, it didn’t matter. Every time I found myself making decisions, it was because I had to reconcile the two – the desire and the expectation – and the desire always won. It’s laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision. No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible. All the time, I knew where I was going, the elements of my fulfilment or ruin were always present; I only had to work my way into that seam of desire and find the hidden vein of dross or gold. It’s not a question of predestination, it’s just that free will and destiny are illusions, false opposites, consolations. In the end, they are one and the same: a single process. You choose what you choose and it could not have been otherwise: the choice is destiny. It was there all along, but any alternative you might have considered is an absurd diversion, because it is in your nature to make one choice rather than another. That is identity. To speak of freedom or destiny is absurd because it suggests there is something outside yourself, directing your life, where really it is of the essence: identity, the craftwork of the soul.
So it seems as if I remember one afternoon, not long after Mother died, I was driving home from Wales, when the thought came to me – how do we know the experiment would have ended as it did, in the silence of those children? There was no scientific account, and all the other stories of such ventures were badly documented or unreliable. For a while after Mother died, I was addicted to travel. I would make long journeys for no reason, usually stopping overnight in some village off the main route, some place I had never visited, that had no significance other than its position, or its name – Peas Pottage, Ready Token, Woodmancote. I would see a road sign, or glimpse a steeple in the distance, and I would turn off at the next junction. The villages were usually quiet when I arrived. Sometimes a girl would be sitting on a bench outside the post office, like a memorised image from a daydream, dark-haired, slender, faintly ethereal in her school blouse and pleated skirt. Or a boy would be playing football under a streetlamp. No matter how remote the place, no matter how unlike my own village, there was always an element of homecoming in these arrivals, finding the church or the green in the gold light of the late afternoon, entering a child’s landscape and finding its landmarks as if I had studied the maps for years. Often these strange villages seemed more familiar than my own. Sometimes I would stop in the square; sometimes I drove on till the road narrowed and disappeared into a barley field or a stand of alders. I would sleep in the car, if I could, then drive on the next morning.
There was no purpose in any of this. By moving from one place to the next, never speaking more than a few words to anyone, choosing my stops at random, eating and sleeping only when necessary, I managed to create an illusion of floating, of being detached from the human world – a casual visitor, not necessarily of the same species. I could say that this was the illusion I needed at the time, and I understand people who think that way, working things through, considering their motives and needs and making informed decisions. But it all seems too deliberate, put like that. I would rather imagine some force guiding me on a specific and inevitable course towards the Dumb House. I am not even sure if this force should be seen as external, or even if the question is relevant. All I know is that, during those weeks when I was on the road, I was changing. I was becoming capable of carrying out my plans, however vague they were at the time. Happiness, or fulfilment, or whatever else you choose to call it, seems to me to consist of a glimpse of the world as a patterned and limited whole. Or to put it more simply, order comes from without; it is not imposed, not forced. All I wanted was to accommodate that guiding energy, to let its undercurrent work, as if it were a shadow in my body, at a physical, nerve and bone level.
Things rarely happen by chance. That afternoon, on my drive home, I stopped at Silbury Hill to look at a new crop circle that had appeared in a field, directly to the south of the mound. It was a clear day; the path to the hill was narrow, overgrown in places with tall grasses and wild geraniums. I walked around the base, looking for a gap in the fence where I could get through. Then, slowly, I climbed into a new region of wind and light. It was amazing how different it was up there: swifts wheeled and turned overhead; even before I had reached the halfway point, the world below had dwindled and flattened, like the country on a map – cattle and jackdaws wandering in the grass, the cars on the road small and distant. People were sitting in twos and threes on the summit, smoking and drinking orange juice or beer. Most were New-Age travellers, but some were ordinary passers-by, who had stopped on their way to somewhere else, intrigued by the possibility of a new intelligence. One man had driven that morning from Port Talbot. He started telling me his hypothesis about the circles, a mixture of chaos theory and arcane beliefs. The figure itself was intricate and mysterious – not a circle at all, but an elaborate design, like the pattern in old Celtic jewellery or rock carvings. At the head was a large, perfect ring, surmounted by a crescent shape, like the horns of a bull, or a pagan god; to the west, this form was joined by a fine straight line to another structure, composed of four identical circles in a round, and completed by a long, incurving tail. The travellers were calling it The Scorpion.
I was at ease there. I understood what those people wanted; they were tired of the world they had been obliged to accept, a world of facts and limits. They wanted something that was open to interpretation. Each one probably had his or her explanation of the circles, like the man from Port Talbot, but there were no certainties, there was always a space for mystery. That was probably the explanation for the fanciful or incomplete nature of their theories – it was a game they were playing, and part of the game was to avoid the factual, to flirt at the edges of the absurd. While I was there, I felt there was nothing to stop me from getting into the car and driving away, back towards the west, moving from one crop disturbance to the next, pretending I was solving the mystery, growing into it, vanishing from the world I had inhabited all my life. I could have become someone else as easily as that; maybe I could even have become the person I had suspected all along, less clearly defined, but also less contained. I could make a game of my own life, like those people I had read about in magazines – the woman who disappears on her way home from work; the man who steps out one summer morning to buy a newspaper, or a loaf of bread, and never returns. He is an ordinary man, quite sane, no known problems – or nothing serious at least. He cannot have gone far, dressed as he is in a shirt and a pair of jeans; he only has five pounds in his pocket, but nobody ever sees him again.
That was when the idea of the experiment began to form in my mind. For the first time, I understood the possibility of making something abstract into a real event. I had no clear plan, but the sense of freedom was unexpectedly powerful. It was like a religious conversion: suddenly the hypothesis, the shadow, the distant image, had become a presence, as tangible as flesh and bone. It would have been easy to mistake this sensation for a thing of the moment, a sudden and spontaneous decision, but the idea of the Dumb House experiment had been waiting to form all my life. Even when I first heard that story, I recognised its importance. Maybe at first it was just the image that attracted me: a house in the desert – a palace really – silent, luxurious, filled with crazed or ecstatic children, locked into a world that was permanently mysterious, a whole world of things that they could not describe or define. When God made Adam, he told him to go into the garden and give names to the trees and the animals, and when Adam returned, God saw that these names were good. Presumably the names had not existed before Adam created them. So the children of the Dumb House knew the world as God did: their Eden was always newly-created, as it was in the beginning.
On the other hand, what if the names Adam had chosen were exactly those that God had used, when he summoned the rocks and trees and creatures of the world from nothingness? If that were so, these names would be the nouns of an original language, something that was lost after the Fall, and if those nouns could be rediscovered, they would give a new meaning to the world. Everything, then, would be inviolate, and inviolable. Peace would return to the earth. There had been people who believed this in every age, just as Akbar had believed that language was learned. There was a story about James IV of Scotland, who kept a child in a lonely hut, away from the court; according to Herodotus, the Pharaoh, Psamtik I, had conducted a similar experiment, deciding that the children he had deprived of language were capable of speaking the original tongue, the innate speech upon which Akbar’s counsellors had founded their faith.
As far as I was concerned, these stories were misleading and childish. But the story of Akbar and the Dumb House held my attention; I formed images, not only of the house itself, but of those who had initiated the experiment, those who had to live with its consequences. The story does not tell us what happened to the children, and we know nothing of how the counsellors responded when they heard that their faith in the innateness of speech had been undermined, but I could picture a tidy and ordered world crumbling around them. It is easy to understand why they wanted language to be indicative of something divine, an essential and transcendent soul. They had only to look around at the sheer number of people in the world to know that grace, or art, or power – any of the achievements of any one individual – would be insignificant, in the context of that mass of humanity, unless there was something more to reckon with. For religious reasons, their tendency would be to link the soul with the intellect, and the single most significant indicator of intellect is the ability to speak. They might even have believed that thought and language were interdependent, that a being without language would be incapable of thinking. Akbar’s answer to the question, and his proposed method of proof, must have struck them as an unimaginable horror – they must have been confident that the Mughal would be proven wrong. So later, when the children were found to be incapable of speech, the counsellors must have considered themselves responsible, in some part, for an appalling act of torture, as they witnessed the infants, empty-minded and soulless, wandering helplessly in an unnamed world. They must have asked themselves what kind of world that was – how terrible, how beautiful, how frightening in its autonomy, in its refusal to be defined. In the end, they must even have regretted the experiment for their own sakes. For surely their faith must have foundered on the outcome. Perhaps it would have decayed slowly, over months, or even years of lingering doubt, but eventually it must have died. It would have been a personal tragedy for each of those men to be parties to an act whose consequences they did not understand.
Yet what they accepted as the final outcome was not a conclusion at all, but a new beginning. That was what Mother had made me see. She had shown me the horror of the children’s predicament, through the counsellors’ eyes; at the same time, she had let me understand the beauty of the experiment, through the image of the Dumb House itself: perfect, inscrutable, shining in my mind, like a proposition in geometry, or one of those logical paradoxes that, by itself, can open up a whole new field of thought.
For the first few days after I stopped travelling, I worked in the garden and thought about what I wanted to do. I had left the iris beds and rose borders to fend for themselves ever since Mother’s death, and the whole place was untidy and overgrown. Now, as I worked, the plants reappeared, complete with their names – and with them emerged my basic plan. I would begin by collecting all the information I could about language learning and deprivation. I would research speech disorders, elective mutism, the wild boys and wolf children of legend, the creators of secret languages and scripts. I would add to the body of research myself, perhaps, trawling through specialist publications and the general press for case histories, anecdotes, hearsay – anything that would help me find what I was looking for – and I would place an advertisement in the local paper asking for personal, previously undocumented experiences. I would leave the wording deliberately vague, to encourage a wide response.
Naturally, though, I still felt something was missing. I knew that the only way to test the hypothesis was to repeat the experiment and, from the beginning, that was my true intention. Nevertheless, I telephoned the County Herald and placed an advertisement. I deliberated for some time on where it should be printed, but in the end there was no alternative but to put it in the personal columns, among the Tarot readings and lonely hearts, the exclusive massages and the appeals for information about people half-met in palm houses and tea rooms. There was something about the Personals – something in the language used – that suggested autumn: I had probably read too many books where the lovers come splashing through fallen leaves in scarves and winter coats. It is always Sunday afternoon, there is always a lamp burning in the middle distance, probably even a smell of toast and warm butter, or the sound of a violin being played in some rented room in the backstreets. I liked the idea of my clinical, tersely-worded piece appearing there, as a form of rebuke, a cold, sharp instrument amongst the love hearts and the bad poems.
Meanwhile, I began visiting the reference library in Weston, to collect what information I could not find in books from Mother’s study. The historical evidence was apocryphal. The earliest language experiment I could find was that recorded by Herodotus: in his second history he describes how Psamtik gave two new born babies to a shepherd, to keep hidden among his flocks. He told the man that no one should utter a word in the presence of these children, but they should live by themselves, in a lonely place. It was the shepherd’s task to keep them fed, and ‘perform the other things needful’. Psamtik commanded these things, said Herodotus, because he desired, when the babes should be past meaningless whimpering, to hear what language they would utter first. One day, after two years had passed, when the shepherd went into the children’s house, they fell down before him and cried becos, and stretched out their hands. The shepherd brought the king to see the children, and they repeated the word becos which, in Phrygian, means bread. Herodotus concludes his account by saying that the Pharaoh was forced to accept that the Phrygians were the oldest race on earth, and not the Egyptians, as he had previously maintained.
It was an amusing story, but it was pure fairy tale. Other accounts were similar, for example that of James IV’s Hebrew-speaking child. In some cases, the children did not speak, or they simply died from loneliness and neglect, as in the experiment conducted by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. None of these accounts had the simple beauty of the Akbar story, but it was interesting that the theme had fascinated historians throughout the ages. There were cases of wolf-boys, calf-children, infants raised by gazelles, pigs, bears and leopards. The stories came from as far afield as Japan and Germany, India and Ohio. The two best-documented contemporary accounts – the cases of Genie and the Kennedy twins – were utterly contradictory. Genie had been kept isolated in a small room by her parents, who thought she was retarded. Her father had built her a chair, a little like a commode, which allowed her to be kept confined all day, without doing herself harm. At night she was strapped to a bed. She existed like this for the first thirteen years of her life. As far as anyone could tell, she had never been exposed to language and, most of the time, she had been alone.
When Genie was discovered, the linguists and grammarians were very excited. The accepted wisdom – the Lenneberg hypothesis – stated that a child deprived of language between the age of two and puberty would never learn to speak grammatically. They might learn individual words, but they would not be able to string them together to form meaningful sentences. Considerable resources were expended in teaching Genie first, sign language, then speech, but she never progressed to sentence formation, and, for legal, rather than scientific reasons, the experiment ended in confusion, with Genie confined to an institution.
As far as I could tell, the problem with the Genie experiment had been as much a lack of history as a lack of control. From the first, the researchers must have known that they could never collect enough useful data on Genie’s early life to support a hypothesis: the very name they chose for her gave them away, for what was Genie but a creature who emerged, fully-formed, from the darkness? She had been sealed in a bottle for years, but nobody knew what had happened inside the bottle; nobody knew if she was subnormal, as her rather had claimed, or even how far she had been exposed to language. In her thirteen years, she must have heard something. Nobody could say why she had never developed speech: they assumed that, because she had been kept in isolation, she’d had no opportunity to do so. Yet, when Grace and Virginia Kennedy were found, after being confined for several years (for the same reason as Genie, because their parents had considered them retarded), they had created their own, relatively sophisticated language, even inventing names for one another. They called themselves Poto and Cabenga. Was it because they had each other; was it the case that what mattered wasn’t so much exposure to language as the possibility of a listener? Did Genie fail to talk because she’d heard almost no speech in her formative years? Or was it because she had nobody to talk to?
The few examples I found of Poto and Cabenga’s speech fascinated me. The language they had invented was strangely beautiful, and I studied it carefully, convinced it was authentic. However, the books in the library contained only fleeting and tantalising references to these histories. In each case, the children themselves disappeared into a kind of limbo, where I could not follow. The Kennedy girls were probably in their early thirties, if they were still alive. Genie was discovered in 1970, at the age of thirteen. What happened to them? And how many more children might there be, hidden away in damp rooms, shackled to their beds, or strapped into homemade commodes?
For the first week after I placed the advertisement, I heard nothing. Then, when replies did start coming through, they were mostly irrelevant, or sarcastic, sometimes even obscene. But there was one that looked promising. I remember the letter clearly, the pale-blue paper, the deliberate, overly ornate script. It came from a woman who lived nearby with her seven-year-old son. The boy was mute, she said, but there was no physiological cause; the woman had been to doctors, speech therapists, psychologists – she told me all this in that first letter – but it had made no difference. To begin with, I was suspicious. There was something in the tone of her letter that suggested she imagined I was offering a cure of some kind; a solution, or at least an explanation. But after a while I understood that all she wanted was to tell somebody else her story, someone who had never heard it before. She gave an address, but no telephone number; she lived in Weston, just twelve miles away. She suggested I call on her, on any weekday evening, between five and eight thirty. Her name was Mrs Olerud; her son’s name was Jeremy.
I tried to picture the woman from her letter. I supposed the name was Scandinavian; certainly, there was something about the way she wrote – an openness, combined with an odd formality – that suggested a foreigner. I read the letter several times; it ran for several pages, and was mostly a history of the boy’s life, his illnesses, his school grades, the minor accidents he had suffered. Each doctor he had seen was mentioned by name, as if she expected me to be familiar with his specialism and methods. There was no mention of the boy’s father; it occurred to me that the man might disapprove of her opening up to a complete stranger like this, or perhaps he was simply unaware that she had written to me. Whenever she talked about the boy, I had a distinct impression of distaste or unease. It was if she was afraid of her own child; or of someone else whose view of the child differed from hers, someone who was looking over her shoulder all the time. There was too much respect. Yes, that was it. She never used pronouns in her descriptions of the boy; she always referred to him by name. There was a kind of awe that overwhelmed her whenever she mentioned her son. I think it was this, as much as anything else, that roused my curiosity. I wanted to see this child. I wanted to see him because the letter had suggested to me that his mother was afraid of him, and I wanted to know why a grown woman would be afraid of a seven-year-old.
Twenty-six, Hartskill Road was one of a set of pebble-dashed former council houses at the end of a short terrace. I was surprised when I eventually found it; I had expected a much better neighbourhood. The other houses were grey-brown, but Mrs Olerud’s was painted white, so it looked like a piece of wedding cake left out to crumble and dry in the evening sunlight. None of the gardens was well-tended, but number twenty-six was particularly untidy, overgrown with bindweed and huge patches of Yorkshire Fog, it looked like a patch of waste ground. There was even a bed of nettles against a fence; the only sign that this piece of land had once been a garden was the odd clump of pinks, or a mildewed rose, struggling to exist amongst the weeds. The front door was blistered and cracked, as if someone had been stripping the paint and had given up half way through the job, leaving a sticky white skin of undercoat to the hazards of sunlight and frost. The window frames were intact, but the blue paintwork was scabbed and broken in places; one of the windows was cracked, and the doorbell did not ring. I knocked; waited.
The woman who opened the door was quite out of place in this house. She was wearing a fine-quality print dress and white, high-heeled shoes; she looked as if she had just come home from a wedding, or a garden party. She was wearing make-up, and I caught a hint of a good, not inexpensive perfume. Ten years before, she would have been considered pretty; now, with the lines around her mouth and the stain of persistent disappointment in her eyes, she was almost beautiful. Her eyes were bright blue, with the pure mineral colour of precious stones.
‘Mrs Olerud?’
‘Yes.’ Her manner was formal, a little remote, as if she suspected she should remember me from somewhere.
‘You said I might call.’ I said. ‘In your letter?’
Her face remained blank.
‘I would have telephoned before I came,’ I continued, ‘but I don’t have a number for you.’
‘I haven’t got a telephone,’ she said. ‘Is this about Jeremy?’
‘Yes.’
Her expression altered. There was still no sign that she understood who I was, but the fact that I was calling about the boy had obviously broken through her defences.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said.
Inside, the house was tastefully decorated, if a little sparsely furnished. The sitting room contained two armchairs, a low coffee table, a high bookcase with open shelves covered in photographs in plain silver frames. It was evident that the woman had a modicum of taste, and that she preferred to buy nothing at all if she could not afford something decent. She offered me a chair and I sat down, next to the fireplace. On the wall above the mantelpiece what looked like an original water colour of a woodland landscape was hanging in a simple, black and silver frame. It was well-executed, though a little too pretty for my taste. I knew immediately, from the expression on her face, that the woman had painted it herself.
She sat down in the chair opposite and looked at me closely. She was totally lacking in self-consciousness: she studied my face, my clothes, my hands, as if she was trying to read my character, or my intentions, from my physical appearance. She stared at me for a minute, perhaps longer. I sat still, returning her look, trying to seem unperturbed. It occurred to me, now I was in her house, that I had no idea of how to proceed. She probably expected questions, perhaps something official – a form, or a questionnaire. Without the necessary qualifications, how would I explain my interest without seeming morbid, or a little mad? I waited for her to speak. If she asked questions, I would make something up – a study, a doctoral thesis.
‘Would you like some tea?’ she said, at last.
‘That would be nice,’ I answered.
‘Please make yourself at home,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’
I felt uneasy. I was excited by the unexpected appearance of this beautiful woman, in such unlikely surroundings, but I wasn’t altogether sure what to make of her. There was something unsettling about her. On the one hand, she was formal, even exaggeratedly polite in her speech, yet the way she looked at me, the way she moved made it seem that I did not really exist in her eyes, or at least, that I did not exist enough for her to feel she should adapt her behaviour to my presence. By now, I was certain she lived alone with her silent child. There was no Mr Olerud – perhaps there never had been – and after years of solitude, she had forgotten how to act in the presence of other adults. She knew the words and the gestures, but the meaning had disappeared.
I walked over to the bookcase, with its rows of photographs in silver frames. Mostly they showed Mrs Olerud, either alone, or with an elderly couple I took to be her parents. The older photographs – those taken around ten or twelve years before – showed a much brighter, more attractive version of the woman I had just met. The eyes were just as blue, just as penetrating, but there was a look of amused expectation that made the young woman in the photograph appear exquisitely desirable. I noticed there were no pictures of children.
Mrs Olerud returned, with a tray of tea things: a bone china teapot, some cups and saucers, and a small, rose-patterned plate of shortbread fingers.
‘I hope you like lemon,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got any milk.’
‘Lemon is fine,’ I answered, smiling.
She did not return the smile. She put the tray on the coffee table and began to pour. The tea was transparent, almost colourless.
‘I’m afraid it’s not very strong,’ she said.
‘That’s fine for me,’ I replied, still smiling. This time she smiled back faintly, as if to apologise for the weakness of the tea.
. There was an awkward silence. It was as if she was waiting for me to speak, to explain myself, and I realised I had nothing to say. I had made no preparation for our meeting; I had no idea what I would do when I met the child. I had no props, no credentials; in all likelihood, she would take me for an impostor, or worse. I tried to think of something to say, something technical, something scientific. My mind was blank. Finally, to break the silence, Mrs Olerud began asking me questions: how far I had come, what work I did, whether I had any children of my own. The manner in which she presented the questions suggested a system, as if she had read a guide on how to make small talk; I might have imagined she was interviewing me, except that she hardly appeared to register my answers to her questions and I was sure, if I had asked her to repeat what I had said, ten or twenty minutes later, she would have forgotten everything. She seemed apprehensive; I had the impression that she was nervous about letting me see the boy. The talk was a diversion, nothing more. She asked no questions about my intentions or my method of working. She asked for no identification, or credentials. She didn’t even mention the child. I was beginning to think she had forgotten why I had come, or perhaps that she had changed her mind, and would send me away without seeing her son, when she stopped talking and looked at me sadly, the resignation in her face quite undisguised.
‘I imagine you’d like to see Jeremy now,’ she said.
‘If it’s convenient.’
‘Of course. I’ll fetch him. I keep him upstairs in the evenings.’
She smiled – that same faint, apologetic smile – and went out to fetch the boy. I wondered what she meant by keeping him upstairs. Was he confined in some way? Bedridden? Bound? I listened, but I heard nothing out of the ordinary: footsteps on the landing, a moment’s pause, then more footsteps, descending the stairs. I drank some tea, and tried to look neutral, like a casual visitor, when the boy entered the room – though it occurred to me that casual visitors were probably scarce in that house, and for a moment I had a fleeting thought that neither the child nor the woman had seen anyone in months, even years. But that was absurd; if he was seven years old, he would go to school. His grandparents would visit. He would have doctor’s appointments, trips to the dentist, a normal life, like any seven-year-old.
As soon as I saw him, I understood why Mrs Olerud was afraid. He was thin and pale, small for his age, with wild, yellowish hair, like Struwelpeter in the old children’s story. His eyes were as blue as his mother’s, but they were hard and opaque, like metal. He walked quickly into the room and stood looking at me in surprise. I was struck by the overwhelming sense of something animal in his presence, an unbelievable tension; he was like a black hole, an intensity that drew energy from everyone around him, and gave back nothing. I glanced at Mrs Olerud. Once again, I had an image of the child in a cage, or locked into the midden of his room, squatting on the floor, crunching on bones like the feral children in legends. Yet he was reasonably clean and, except for his hair, he looked presentable. He was wearing a pair of dungarees over a red and blue striped shirt. They were good enough clothes; his mother had probably chosen them carefully, to set off his light colouring. Nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable. There was something in the boy’s manner that suggested an almost unbearable dread, a sense of horrified anticipation.
They stood in the doorway for some time. Mrs Olerud said nothing. I felt she was simply showing me the boy; he could have been a leopard or a wild dog, some dangerous creature that had somehow come to live in her house, and she was letting me see it, so I would know what she had to endure. I wanted to say something, to break the tension, but I could not bring myself to speak directly to the child.
‘Can he hear me, if I talk to him?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Sometimes he seems to understand, but he never does anything to show it. He doesn’t – respond.’
The way she spoke the last word underlined how inappropriate it seemed to be talking like this in front of her son. Then she shrugged almost imperceptibly.
‘I thought you would like to see him,’ she said. ‘But he ought to go back now. It’s easier if he stays upstairs in the evenings.’
She touched the boy’s shoulder and they left the room without a word. The child did not look back. I heard them climbing the stairs, crossing the landing. I wanted to call them back, to see more of the boy, but I was too surprised to speak.
When Mrs Olerud returned, she seemed relieved. She sounded brighter; I thought she was making light of things.
‘Your tea must be getting cold,’ she said. She was matter of fact, but she could not altogether hide the effort.
‘What did you mean?’ I asked. ‘When you said it was easier if he stayed in his room – what did you mean exactly?’
She looked uncomfortable, as if I had caught her out in a deception.
‘He gets restless,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t sleep well at the best of times. Any excitement in the evening only makes it worse.’
‘But you told me to come in the evening. You ought to have suggested another time, if this was inconvenient.’
She looked puzzled for a moment, as if she was surprised at what I had said.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Today has been difficult. Perhaps you could come again, another time.’
‘Does he go to school?’
She did not answer.
‘He must have special needs,’ I persisted.
‘Yes.’
‘Which school does he go to?’
She looked at me sharply.
‘I have to be getting on,’ she said quickly, in a near singsong. ‘I have to get him ready for bed. Would it be convenient for you to call again some time?’
She stood up, to make it clear that she wanted me to leave. Evidently the questions had annoyed her, and it occurred to me again that she had something to hide. I had no choice but to comply with her wishes, but I was in half a mind, as I left, to give up on this case before it even started. The boy was probably retarded, or emotionally disturbed. The causes of his speech problem were almost certainly buried in the past, and I doubted Mrs Olerud’s willingness to help uncover them. I think she sensed this; as she was showing me out, she stopped and laid her hand on my arm. I was struck again by the shadow of the beauty in her face.
‘Do come back,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about tonight. It’s just that today has been difficult.’
I nodded.
‘You will come again?’
We were standing in the hallway, at the foot of the stairs. It occurred to me that the boy could hear us, if he was listening, and I wondered if he understood. All of a sudden I realised why Mrs Olerud had responded to my advertisement. She had no expectation that I would be able to help her son, and no real interest in my studies. She had written to me because she was lonely, and too proud to go out looking for help or companionship of her own volition. This way, I had come to her, and now she was afraid of losing that contact.
‘I’m not sure,’ I answered. I was still annoyed. ‘I’m not sure I know why you wanted me to come. It’s not as if I can help. I’m just doing research – do you see?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do, truly.’ Her voice was too high, too sincere.
‘I can’t help you,’ I repeated.
‘I don’t want help. I want to help you if I can. With your – studies.’
She hesitated, watching me. Her hand was still clutching my arm. I could see she was trying to think of something else to say, to put me at my ease, so I would come again.
‘Come on Saturday,’ she said. ‘In the daytime. It’s easier in the daytime.’
She was animated now, almost desperate. When I had arrived, she had seemed not to know who I was, or why I had come. She had been distant, almost indifferent. Nothing had passed between us, except small talk; she had shown me the boy, then told me to leave, more or less unceremoniously. Now she was pleading with me to return. I might have been angry with her: her behaviour had been rude, and unnecessarily mysterious. Instead, I was intrigued. Karen Olerud possessed a quality that I recognised, even at that first meeting.
‘Saturday,’ she said again.
‘Perhaps,’ I answered. ‘If I can. When would be convenient?’
‘Two o’clock?’
‘Fine.’ I wanted to sound noncommittal, as if I still hadn’t decided whether to keep the appointment.
‘I’ll expect you at two then,’ she said, and as she opened the door, her expression became neutral again. It was as if, with her anxiety, something else was bleeding away, and the last picture I had of her was the image of an empty, impassive face, a contrived and practised absence, a kind of nothingness.
I returned the next morning. At seven thirty I parked the car at the end of the street, so I had a clear view of the house, and waited. I wanted to see Jeremy leave for school and what Mrs Olerud did when she was alone. I did not trust what she had told me in the letter – I had no evidence, other than her word, that the child really was dumb. He might be disturbed, but it was just as likely that his mother was the one with the problem. The boy might have chosen his silence, or he might have had silence forced upon him. I told myself that that was my motive for being there; yet, at the same time, I have to confess that I was less interested in the boy than in his mother. Something had passed between us the previous evening. I had lain awake half the night, thinking about her, remembering her face, and the feel of her hand on my arm. I think, from the first, I guessed what was about to happen. I had brought her flowers from the garden; even though it seemed quite inappropriate, I felt sure she would accept them.
It was a damp morning. It had rained in the night and the gardens were still wet. As soon as the sun came up, everything began to steam; clouds of vapour unfurled from the larchlap fences, a fine mist formed on the hedges and lawns. Soon it was warm. The light streamed through the gaps between the houses, catching on car mirrors and headlamps, investing the run-down estate with a ghostly and transient beauty. There was no sign of Mrs Olerud or her son. Other children appeared on the street, girls in blue dresses, boys in uniform. One or two saw me and peered into the car, but mostly they passed by without noticing, oblivious to everything but the small miseries and joys to which the school day condemned them. I remembered that sensation from my own school years. I remembered the care I had to take, not to stand out among my classmates. I could have gone to another school, but Mother wanted me to stay close to home, which meant I had to attend the village school, with children who were poorer and less bright than I was. It was an effort not to become a target, especially with the older boys. But I managed quite well. I never put myself forward, never volunteered; in games, I waited to be chosen, in class I waited to be asked. I always seemed to do my best, but I was careful to get the odd question wrong, to seem foolish on occasion, to let the others laugh at me from time to time. I thought I was being smart, but now I see that it was so easy to behave that well because I felt nothing but contempt for most of my classmates.
The one exception was a boy in my class called Alexander. He was locked into a shell of isolation: because he was deaf, his speech seemed odd and amusing to the other children. All the teachers treated him with a special, condescending kindness, which he obviously hated. I made some efforts to become his friend, with almost no success. He regarded everyone with suspicion. Sometimes I would see him, out in the fields, standing with his head thrown back, staring up into the sky, as if he could see something there that nobody else could detect. I wondered what it was like to live like that. I had imagined that deaf people were locked into a calm and steady silence, but when I looked it up in a book, I discovered there was noise inside their heads, monotonous and ugly, like the space between channels on the radio. I wanted to ask Alexander how he thought: if he could see the words, instead of hearing them, whether he thought in words at all, or whether there were long gaps in his mind, when absence took over. I know, for certain, that he was looking for something. He would find telegraph poles and stand with his arms wrapped around them, his chest and face pressed to the wood, as if he could feel or hear something, coursing through the wires. Maybe he could. If I could have had a friend in school, it would have been him. If I could have asked one question, I would have asked Alexander what it was like to be how he was, but I imagine he would have found it impossible to answer.
Mostly, I was alone. At lunch-time, I would sit in the library with my favourite book. I remember it clearly, even now: it was called The Junior Dictionary Illustrated. The cover showed a girl lying on the grass in summer, reading, and an ideal schoolmaster handing a book to an ideal boy, while another girl stood by, holding her own book like a pet or a baby. The first page bore the legend ‘We Live in a World of Words’, and showed a variety of objects in boxes, with captions for their names, and the country in which the names had originated: bantam and tattoo, from the South Seas; rose and mutton from France, bungalow and jungle from India, marmalade and cobra from Portugal. I loved that book. I loved its pictures of rhododendrons and rabbits, and perfect children skating on perfect ice rinks. I loved its simple definitions, the sense it gave that everything could be classified and explained, and I took what it said at face value: we live in a world of words, things exist because of language, and language could as easily change things as keep them fixed in place.
Mother drove me to school in the mornings. In that school no one else travelled by car, and it set me apart from the others to glide by, and have them see me, sitting in the front alongside a woman who was always expensively dressed and utterly remote. Every now and then she took it into her head to offer a lift to some child who took her fancy, which only made things more awkward. After school, I insisted on walking home by myself. It was nearly three miles, but the road was straight and there was little traffic. It ran out of the village past the houses, skirted a row of allotments, then passed a farm. The farm always seemed deserted: I remember the yard, and a grey metal hopper blotted with rust, tilted over a hedge like a shipwreck. Sometimes a herd of muddy, black-haired cattle stood by the fence, watching me pass; sometimes a dog ran to the gate and barked, but mostly the yard was empty, a pile of logs against the barn, an old tractor marooned in a pool of weeds, rusted remains of farm machinery propped against the walls, like the remnants of a forgotten civilisation.
In winter it would be almost dark by the time I reached the farm. For the next mile, there was nothing but fields on both sides. The silence was heavy and thick, like velvet, broken only by an occasional splash in the ditch beside the road, or a car swishing by on its way to Weston. There were no lights on that stretch of road, but that did not bother me till I got to Laurel Cottage, about half a mile from home. I never saw lights at Laurel Cottage, but I knew the foreign woman was there, watching me the way she did in the summertime. That bothered me. The people in the village said the foreign woman was mad. Nobody knew how she lived. Sometimes she would be sitting in her garden when I passed by, and she would be knitting, or reading a book. People who had seen inside the cottage said she had hundreds of books, all piled on the floor in the sitting room. Once I saw her standing at her door, eating an apple, and I plucked up the courage to say good afternoon. She looked at me and smiled, but she did not reply. I was intensely curious about her. I wanted to know where she had come from, and what it was that had made her mad.
She wasn’t mad all the time. The people in the village said she took fits because of something that had happened to her in the war. I had seen her myself, on occasion, standing in her garden, talking to the trees, when the fit was on her. She would walk round in circles, talking in some language that no one else understood. At first I thought it was Polish or German, because people in the village said she had come from Germany as a refugee after the war. Later, Mother told me it was not a real language at all, but something the woman had invented. As far as I knew, she only ever spoke this language to the trees in her garden.
Her fits would last for hours at a time. To begin with, she seemed excited, even happy: she walked quickly around the garden, sometimes reaching out and brushing a tree with her fingers as she passed. She would talk constantly in a kind of singsong – there was no structure, no syntax. The words seemed to merge, one into another, yet there was no doubt that they meant something to her, that she intended something by them. Then, about an hour after she began, her voice would change. Now there were spaces between one word and the next, everything began to collapse inward, into a kind of slow motion. Eventually she turned her back on the tree she had been talking to, and walked away. Whenever that happened, she always looked disappointed, as if she had failed in some task. Once, when I was out hunting for animals, I hid in a bush near the cottage and watched the whole thing. It was beautiful in its way, and I was curious about her private language. I wanted to know what it meant to her, what it was she thought she was saying.
Once I was walking home in the springtime. It was late afternoon, still light; the rain had been falling all day, heavy and loud on the windows at school. Now it had stopped but the fields and gardens were still wet. The world seemed abnormally still, after the violence of the rain. As I approached Laurel Cottage, I thought I saw something move – or rather, I had the feeling that someone, some person had moved a moment before I looked, and was now standing amongst the bushes, hushed, waiting for me to pass. Nothing was visible, but I had that sensation you sometimes get, playing hide and seek, when someone gives himself away by trying too hard to stay hidden. I knew it was not an animal I sensed there, but a human being, though I could not have said why. Then, just as I reached the front gate, the foreign woman stepped out from amongst the leaves and stood there, stark naked, streaming with rainwater, and laughing softly to herself. She was so close I could almost have touched her. She was looking straight at me, but I do not think it was me she saw. She was playing a game with someone else, perhaps with someone who had died years before, or it might have been someone she had invented, but it was not me.
I had never seen a naked woman. She was thin, but her breasts and hips were large, and the sight of her thick, dark pubic hair excited and frightened me. I could not take my eyes off her. As we stood there, face to face, I had the idea of touching her wet skin, of stroking the hair, but I hurried on, walking backwards so I could still see her, afraid to turn my back on her white body.
I waited outside Mrs Olerud’s house for three hours. It’s strange, how a neighbourhood changes when the people leave. A silence falls; the arrival of a delivery van becomes an event; animals appear and move through the gardens in virtual slow motion. It always seems something has just happened, moments before, but when you look there is nothing.
I didn’t notice the boy at first. Like one of the animals, he seemed to emerge from nowhere. I hadn’t seen the front door open, but he might have come from the back of the house. He was standing on the path, looking towards the end of the road, as if he was expecting someone. I was sure he hadn’t seen me. I got out of the car, clutching my bouquet of flowers, and walked over to the gate.
‘Hello, Jeremy,’ I said.
He looked angry. It was obvious that he remembered who I was and didn’t want to admit it.
‘Is your mother home?’ I asked.
He moved his head almost imperceptibly. I leaned down to open the gate and he retreated a few steps, holding his arms out, as if he could prevent me from entering by sheer willpower. I noticed he was holding something in his left hand.
‘What have you got there?’ I asked.
He looked at his hand. It was shaped in a loose fist, cradling something that must have been breakable, or precious to him. Slowly his face broke into a half-smile. He took three steps forward, looked up at me and, holding out his hand, turned it over and unclenched his fingers, like a conjuror performing a trick.
He was holding a baby mouse. It was tiny, almost bald, and quite motionless.
‘It’s a mouse,’ I said, in my best adult-to-child voice. He gave me a look of contempt. He didn’t want my kindness. Showing me the mouse had been some kind of trick on his part, some act of deception he alone understood. I held out my hand.
‘Shall I take it now?’ I asked him.
He pulled away his hand and stepped back.
‘But it’s dead,’ I said softly.
He shook his head.
‘You know it is,’ I said. ‘It was only a baby. You should have left it in the nest.’
I thought he would cry. His expression showed that I was responsible for the death, that the mouse would have remained alive, warmed in his clenched hand for hours, if I hadn’t turned up, to tell him otherwise. He lifted the animal to his face, and stroked the naked body against his cheek. Then he turned, ran back across the lawn and vanished around the corner of the house.
I had no intention of following. I pushed open the gate and walked in. Now I could see that the front door was open, and slightly ajar. It might have been like that all morning, but when I knocked nobody answered.
I walked around the side of the house to look for the boy. The garden at the back was dark, overgrown with deep weeds, the kind that ran and trailed through the trees, old man’s beard, bryony with its red, venomous-looking berries, tall stands of dock and nightshade along the fence. It was still wet. The sun hadn’t risen high enough over the roofs to penetrate this far and, even if it had, the air here was dark and heavy and it was probably never dry at the far end, where it had once been planted with shade-loving plants, aucuba and holly and elaeagnus. I felt that, if I walked to the end of the path, I could disappear, just as the child had done. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was there, crouched in the centre of his own private wilderness, watching me.
The back door was wide open, but I was certain he hadn’t gone inside. He belonged to the garden, not the house. I had a momentary image of him hunting for small rodents and insects, his fingers and mouth caked with fresh soil, mouse bones cracking between his teeth.
I thought of leaving. Then it occurred to me that something might have happened to Mrs Olerud. She had seemed on edge the previous evening, almost despairing at times; now the thought passed through my mind that she might have done something to harm herself. A few days before, on the radio, I’d heard how a couple had committed suicide in a holiday cottage in Wales. They had killed themselves with alcohol and sleeping pills and their two children, aged four and eighteen months, had been left alone with the bodies, too frightened to go out. It had been several days before anybody noticed something was wrong. When the police forced their way into the cottage, they found the children in the kitchen, huddled together behind the door. They had been living on corn flakes.
I stepped into the kitchen and looked around. No one was there. I called out. Nobody answered. When I went through to the sitting room, I found Mrs Olerud, laid out on the sofa, in a floral-patterned dressing gown. She appeared to be asleep, or perhaps unconscious. On the coffee table, a bottle of gin, a glass, still half-full, a large plastic bottle of tonic, now empty, were the only objects that looked out of place in the clean, well-ordered room. I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece; it was eleven thirty. Lying there, with one arm raised, half-covering her face, Mrs Olerud was obviously drunk. The dressing gown was covered in large, dark flowers, it reminded me of something Mother had worn, years before, on summer afternoons; as far as I could tell, the woman was naked under the thin satin. I stood over her. She looked impossibly moist and soft; I could see her breathing and I imagined how warm she would be if I touched her, how smooth the skin would be on her neck and shoulders. The dressing gown was knotted loosely at the waist with a wide belt, in the same red and white material; it had fallen open just above the knee, where her legs were bent slightly; though her arm was raised to half-cover her face, I could see her mouth, and I was tempted to run my fingers over her full, red lips. I was struck again by how beautiful she looked; for a moment I was almost overcome by a feeling akin to grief, a mixture of longing and despair that surprised me. I set the flowers down carefully on the edge of the coffee table.
‘Mrs Olerud?’
I stood waiting for her to respond; then, when she made no move, I sat down on the floor next to the sofa and rested my fingers, gently, on her ankle. I could not see her eyes, but I could tell she wasn’t so much asleep as unconscious. Her breathing was slow and shallow, somehow academic, like the breathing of an automaton, like the waxwork Sleeping Beauty I had once seen in a museum. I slid my hand lightly along her leg, past the knee, to where the thigh filled out, smooth and warm to the touch. I was excited. Looking at her like this, at rest, I could see she was all roundness, perfect in proportion, and I wanted to touch her everywhere at once, to have a thousand hands, to explore and describe the entire surface of her body. At the same time, the idea began to form in my mind that she was not unconscious at all; or at least, that she was half-aware of what was happening, and was only pretending she was asleep, to see what I would do next. I lifted my hand gently – it seemed what might disturb her, or make her take fright, wasn’t so much the moment of contact, as the moment’s withdrawal – and I found where the belt was knotted around her waist. She lay still. I teased the knot loose, slowly, taking pleasure in the way I was able to contain my desire, then I let the belt fall and turned back the gown so her hips and breasts were naked. I bent towards her. I could feel the warmth off her body; I could smell that sweet mustiness of sleep, mingled with her perfume. I could almost taste her hair, her wet mouth, the salt of her skin. Her breasts were a little smaller than I would have expected, and her belly was a little rounded; she had an old-fashioned body, like the figure of Eve in one of those medieval paintings that showed the Expulsion from Eden. I ran a fingertip along her arm. It was soft, warm, covered in fine down. Still she did not move. I reached out and stroked her softly, running my fingers lightly over her breasts, belly and hips. I was afraid she would wake at any moment; at the same time, I wanted her to know I was there, to respond, to pull me towards her, into the moist warmth of her flesh.
Suddenly I was aware of something and turned. The boy, Jeremy, was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching me. I hadn’t heard him come in; he was quite still, quite silent, and I realised he’d been standing there for some time, literally holding his breath, curious to see what I would do. That was what I’d heard – that soft intake of breath – though something else was suggested, a slight turn of the head, as he scented the air, like an animal. Yes, that was it, he was scenting me, taking me in fully, perhaps for the first time. Now, seeing that I’d noticed he was there, he smiled, softly, conspiratorially. I pulled back the hem of the dressing gown and stood up. I thought he would run to his mother and wake her, but all he did was stand there, frowning slightly, disappointed, or puzzled by something, as if I had just given him some task to perform that he did not understand. I noticed that his hair and clothes were wet, and his hands were dirty, crusted at the knuckles with scabs of loam, as if he had just been digging.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘She’s only sleeping.’
I was aware of the defensiveness in my voice, the note of guilt, and it irritated me, that I had felt the need to explain myself to a child. Yet there was no sign that he understood, either what I had said, or what he had caught me doing. I backed away from the sofa, towards the door that led to the hallway.
‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘I’ll call back later. When she’s awake.’
He shook his head fiercely, like a dog, scattering drops of water everywhere. Then he turned and ran out, leaving a trail of muddy footprints across the kitchen floor. Mrs Olerud stirred then, or perhaps she only moved in her sleep, and I left quickly, leaving the front door ajar, just as I’d found it. As I walked away, I had the idea that I knew her in a way she would understand the next time she saw me, like the idea that sometimes comes when you touch someone in a dream then see them the next day, on the street, or in a shop, and you’re sure they remember the same dream, the one they had the night before, where you touched them and they responded, surprised by their own complicity, amazed by a moment of unexpected surrender. At the same time, I felt Mrs Olerud had intended it that way, that she had somehow contrived the whole thing.
I returned at precisely two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, as we had agreed. Once again, Mrs Olerud was dressed impeccably, and she was as remote and polite as she had been at our first meeting. Yet the thought remained that she half-remembered everything that had happened, that a secret complicity existed between us. Once again, I brought her flowers: before I arrived I had half-expected her to refuse them, but she accepted the gift naturally, and carried the bouquet into the kitchen, to put it in water. I noticed, then, that the flowers I had brought on my previous visit were standing on a shelf to one side of the fireplace, carefully arranged in a bright-blue ceramic vase. At that moment, I knew Mrs Olerud had been aware of me the previous day. She had allowed me to touch her, to explore her skin, and there was no doubt in my mind that she would have allowed me to go further. The flowers were a signal of that fact.
On this occasion, however, we were polite and formal. We discussed the weather. Mrs Olerud served me tea, as she had on my first visit, apologising again that she had no milk, and asking if lemon would do. There was a ritual quality in everything she did, as if she had to perform every action exactly as she had always done. She served tea as if enacting a ceremony, as if she were Japanese; every movement was controlled, every word, no matter how trivial, seemed calculated. It was as if she was afraid of letting something slip, of giving something away. When it came time to fetch Jeremy, she managed to conceal her anxiety, and he was produced from upstairs, like an exhibit in a museum. As on my first visit, he was clean and well-dressed enough, but now he was sleepy, almost groggy, as if he had been drugged. He seemed not to recognise me, and showed no signs of the wildness I had seen in him before. I tried half-heartedly to attract his attention – I knew by now that he understood what I was saying – but he remained withdrawn and, after about ten minutes, his mother led him away. I was mystified. Mrs Olerud appeared to be entirely in control of her strange child, yet she could not quite hide her fear of him. I had seen evidence of a near-animal quality in his behaviour, but that could easily have been the result of loneliness or neglect, and it certainly wasn’t enough to explain her discomfort. Was she afraid the child would harm her in some way? Or was she afraid of what she might do to him?
When she returned, we sat a while, making small talk. I was beguiled by her beauty, just as I was bored by our conversation. She asked about my interest in what she called ‘speech therapy’ and I explained as well as I could. Occasionally we lapsed into silence and I sat watching her, looking for any sign she might offer, that she remembered the events of the previous day. I knew she did, but she gave nothing away, and after what felt like a respectable time, I left. As before, she stopped me at the door; this time her suggestion that I visit her again was almost casual. I immediately agreed, and we set a date for the following week. I knew she understood that I would come before then, that I would not be able to stay away so long. There was a promise between us, even if nothing was said.
This pattern established itself over the next several visits. On some days, I would arrive in the morning and find her in a kind of trance, wandering about the house in her floral-patterned gown, or lying on the sofa, as if waiting for me to find her there. Sometimes she had been drinking, but not always. Sometimes the child would be playing in the garden; often he was nowhere to be seen. I would knock at the front door, and she wouldn’t answer; then I would walk around the side of the house and go in through the kitchen, carrying whatever gift I had brought, a bunch of flowers, a box of chocolates, a bottle of wine. The first few times this happened, I tried talking to her, asking where Jeremy was, and if she was all right, but her only response was to wait, silently, while I loosened her belt and slipped back her dressing gown. Her eyes would be closed, but she wasn’t sleeping, and I was certain she was aware of everything that was happening.
Her body was astonishing. She was always damp, very warm – as if feverish – yet she smelled sweet, and her skin was smooth to the touch, almost incredibly soft. When I kissed her, her mouth would be very wet. Sometimes I would have her on the sofa, in the sitting room, with the back door open and the child somewhere outside. I wondered what he understood, if he knew I was there, if he was watching. Sometimes I would force her on to the floor and take her violently – there was something in her passivity that demanded it – and it gave me pleasure then, to think that the boy might see. I would raise her legs and bend back her knees, so I could pin her down and drive into her. I did whatever I liked: she was always utterly compliant, lying with her face pressed to the floor, sometimes crying out or moaning softly, plaintive, and oddly childlike. Sometimes I had to go looking through the house before I found her. Once, she was lying face down on the bed, and she did not move or make a sound all the time I was there. It was like having sex with a corpse – yet I was certain she was aware of me, and of what I was doing. No matter how I found her, no matter what I did, she never spoke, except to utter those odd little sounds. When I was finished, I left her and went home without a word, with her smell on me, warm and sweet, like a mingling of honey and blood. Every time I went to her house I was excited: I wanted her so violently it was almost painful, and taking her was a mixture of pleasure and exquisite relief.
Afterwards, though, I would feel slightly disgusted, as if I had been exposed to some kind of contamination, as if I had deliberately allowed myself to be sullied. There were days when I was angry with her, for being so powerless, so available; yet on the other days, when she would be fully-dressed, formal, almost excessively polite, pretending nothing had ever happened between us, I wanted to pull her to the floor and take her by force. I might have had her the day before, there might still be bruises under her clothes, but she acknowledged nothing. We would sit in the living room, drinking tea, then she would fetch Jeremy, and I would offer him little gifts, to win his trust, to break through his suspicion, though by now I was only going through the motions. The child accepted the bribes, but he gave no sign that he recognised the giver. Mrs Olerud – I always called her Mrs Olerud, never Karen, though I knew that was her name – would encourage him, trying to make him open up, as if I were a doctor, or an expert of some kind, come to administer a cure. If anything, this assistance was counterproductive: Jeremy seemed to regard her with as much suspicion as he showed me. He was never badly behaved. He came when he was called, and stood stock-still while I talked to him; he ate the sweets I brought him, one after another, though with no sign of pleasure. He wasn’t really there; perhaps he was nothing more than the alert animal he seemed, at home in the wet undergrowth of the garden, like some wolf child. He was fascinating to watch, in his state of limbo, utterly incommunicado, but I knew, no matter what I did, I would never understand him. I kept going back, but not to see him. I wanted those mornings when Karen Olerud was lost in her trance, naked under her dressing gown, waiting for me, or for some imagined other, whose place I was assuming, briefly, without acknowledgement.
Certain rules were understood. As soon as I had finished with her, I knew I had to go. I would dress quickly and leave the way I had come, without a backward glance. I knew I should not talk to her, as if she were a sleepwalker who must not be wakened. I could do anything I wanted, as long as I did not talk. I also knew that it was part of her game that I must never speak about or show any sign of remembering what happened between us on the trance days. It was a ghost life she had. I was using her, but she was also using me. It was her privilege to invent the rules: they were in place before I even arrived on the scene. I simply followed them. I might have been taking part in a ritual she had evolved with her husband, or some other man she had known; I might have been fulfilling a fantasy she had built up, over years of isolation. At the time, I didn’t care. In spite of everything, in spite of the moments of self-disgust I felt, when I drove home with her smell on me, I wanted her.
One afternoon, I found her naked on her bed. She had been drinking; she did not move when I lay down beside her; she did not respond when I began moving inside her, and I became more and more excited. Her passivity enraged me at such moments. I was convinced she knew I was there, and I was trying to provoke her, to make her acknowledge me, but nothing I did made any difference – she lay still, silent, motionless.
Finally I must have fallen asleep beside her, though only for a matter of minutes. When I woke I was aware of a sensation, something like a memory, though it was a memory I couldn’t place: a mingling of warmth and scent and a faint biscuity smell, a feeling of utter detachment, as if nothing could ever matter: nothing that had ever happened, nothing that was happening now, nothing that might happen in the future. But it was more than that. The sensation I was experiencing was more than the sum of its parts. I looked at Karen Olerud and I felt a surge of violence and desire. I wanted to possess her, once and for all; I wanted to split her body open and suck out her essence; I wanted to drink her, to assume her. She lay with her arms by her side and her legs apart, like a doll that someone had dropped there, as if she couldn’t have moved of her own volition. She seemed to be asleep now. I moved over to her, and slipped my hand between her legs. She was still wet. I raised the hand to my face and sniffed; the smell was so sweet, so unlike any other, and I was certain, if I could have peeled away the surface she would smell like that inside, everywhere I touched and tasted. I parted her legs and moved inside her. I wanted to have sex with her one last time, then, as I was coming, I would cover her face with the pillow and hold it down, feeling her struggle for life then give up and fade away, while I moved inside her. I felt certain that, if I did so, something would be released, something I could take into myself.
She was still sleeping. As I raised the pillow, she stirred and turned her head; at the same time, I became aware of a noise, like someone banging softly and repetitively somewhere in the house. It was a moment before I came to my senses. I wanted to go on moving, to finish what I had started, but I was afraid Mrs Olerud would wake up, or Jeremy would come running into the room and find us. I hadn’t seen him earlier, when I’d sneaked in through the back door. I had assumed he was outside, playing in the garden, crouched under a shrub or crawling through the weeds along the fence, hunting for mice. Now he must have come inside. The bedroom door was still open – perhaps he had climbed the stairs and seen us, naked on his mother’s bed. Perhaps he had hurt himself and was trying to attract attention, lying in the hallway with both legs broken, banging his hand against the baluster.
As I dressed, the noise stopped. I walked to the far end of the landing, the child’s door was open, but the room was empty. Then, after a moment, the banging began again, a little louder than before. It was coming from downstairs, from the kitchen. I hurried down.
Jeremy was sitting on the floor, surrounded by food – sliced bread, bright puddles of orange juice, cuts of meat oozing water and thin blood. The fridge was open; it appeared that he had just sat down and pulled out everything he could reach, scattering it around him, rolling bottles across the floor, letting the cartons burst as they fell. It was warm, and the fridge had already begun to defrost; I could see fish on a willow-pattern plate, in a pool of rimy water, splashes of yoghurt, trickles of thaw on the bottles and jars. Now he was banging a tub of margarine on the wet lino, splashing milk and fruit juice and meltwater all over his face and clothes.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
He looked up at me. His face was a blur of grease and blood, and I realised he had been eating raw food off the floor, gouging out handfuls of butter and meat from their containers, lapping up the spilt milk.
‘You were hungry,’ I said, more to myself than to him.
He made a soft snuffling noise, and pointed at the midden on the floor. He looked like an animal. Once again, I was struck by the thought that he didn’t belong in a house. He should have been kept out of doors, digging for grubs and worms in the shrubbery, sucking the matter out of birds’ eggs. At the very least, he should have been kept in a pen, in one of those wire runs for rabbits and chickens.
I watched, as he lowered his face and began lapping up orange juice from a puddle on the lino, and it occurred to me, then, that the boy was acting: he knew exactly what he was doing, and he was doing it for effect, just as his mother knew what she was doing, when she sat naked in her bedroom, swigging gin and waiting for me to arrive. Now, all of a sudden, I was tired of these games. I was tired of the child, and of his comatose mother; I was tired of the ornaments, the silver frames, the floral dressing gown. I was tired of the whole affair. I turned to go and that was when I saw the knife, the smallest glimmer at the edge of my vision, an apparition of silver through the litter of broken eggs and bloodstains. The boy almost caught me with it, slashing at my leg with a sudden, neat swing of the arm. I managed to twist away and turn, as he came again, reaching out, snatching his hand in mid-air, more by luck than by judgement. For a moment I looked at his face in surprise; I expected a signal of some kind, a flicker at least of anger or hatred, but there was nothing. I held on to his hand as I twisted the knife loose and let it fall. The child’s face was empty: there was nothing there, no fear in his eyes, just as there had been no anger. He simply gazed at me, coldly, and I knew his attempt to cut me had been a deliberate, calculated act. I held him tightly, locking his forearm in my fist.
I remembered all the times he had stood watching me, while I talked to him, or offered him sweets; watching me, like some animal from the woods, puzzled by the very fact of my existence. I realised then that he had been watching me all along: even when I hadn’t seen him, he’d been there. He must have felt betrayed when he’d seen his mother pull me down on to the sofa, when he’d seen us disappear into her room. He must have listened to her little cries and whimpers and wondered what I was doing to her, and now he was trying to take his revenge. He hadn’t lost his head for a moment; he had worked out a plan of sorts and set a trap for me. I smiled.
‘You’re quite clever, really,’ I said. ‘You’re not as stupid as you pretend.’
He watched me. I think I saw a flicker of contempt then, as if he had guessed what I was going to do before I even knew myself. If he had, he still wasn’t afraid: he kept his eyes fixed on my face as I took his thumb in my left hand and, with an effort I found quite exhilarating, twisted it back and felt it snap.
His face showed the pain, but he made no sound. He didn’t cry out, he didn’t even struggle, he only whimpered a little, towards the end, as I broke each finger in turn, gripping his arm tightly and holding him up as he began to slump, his face white as death, his eyes glazed, his legs giving way beneath him, as if he were suffering from vertigo. When I had finished I let him fall, and he lay still in the puddles of orange juice and egg yolk. I believe he must have fainted. I stood over him, listening: there was no sound from upstairs, no sound except his breathing. For a moment I was dizzy with the sheer immediacy of it all – the sweet-sickly smell, the boy’s gold hair, his broken fingers, the thought of the woman upstairs, still sleeping, warm and damp and vulnerable. The thought passed through my head that I might go back up and finish what I had begun, but I pulled myself together and left, slipping out the back way as always, moving invisibly through the garden and out into the gathering darkness.
I got home just after sunrise. I had been driving around for hours; now the light was like silt on the walls, building up then shifting softly, forming slowly then crumbling away. The garden was still, but I could smell urine at the edge of the lawn, where a fox had come in through a gap in the wall. The shadows were deep, black and substantial, like blankets stacked under the pear trees and cotoneasters; the sun was already bright, but these dark patches would stay for hours, like trapdoors into a night that would never wholly dissolve, some limbo that was cold and damp and incomprehensible. I opened the back door and paused as something fluttered away – only a leaf, and not what it might have been, not the ghost I hoped for every time I returned. I passed on through the hall and into the kitchen, looking for a sign of that otherlife the house contained whenever I was away, but all I found was the table spotted with crumbs and the cups and plates stacked on the draining board, just as I’d left them. Sometimes, coming home in the early morning like this, I’d imagine things had altered while I was absent: a knife on the bread board that I didn’t remember leaving out, a book face down on the table, a cup brimming with tea and dishwater in the sink. The evidence I wanted didn’t need to be too elaborate or detailed. I could have constructed an entire afterlife from a half-moon of lemon rind or a small blister of jam on the tablecloth. It would have taken so little to convince me that Mother was still in the house; that, even if I could never see her, she resumed possession of this space when I was gone, fingering the spines of her favourite books in the library, or sitting in the conservatory, drinking tea in the dawn light, the way she’d always done when she couldn’t sleep. In spite of her death, in spite of the fact that I can never find evidence of her continued presence, Mother is still the only person who is completely real for me. In life she had been bound to the fabric of the house, wearing into it, taking on the same colours and textures, like those prints on the walls and the curtains she’d hung years before as a young bride, fading imperceptibly in the sunlight, becoming subtler, assuming an evenness of tone, a homogeneous quality.
I made a pot of coffee. I couldn’t eat, and I felt anxious, as if there was something I’d missed, something important that I’d failed to take into account. I was trying to work out what it was, to pin it down – I was sure it had something to do with the boy – but instead of finding an answer, I kept returning to an image I had, something to do with a mouse, something to do with the kitchen, the early morning, the first sunlight. It took a while for the memory to form, then it became clear, though I couldn’t see the connection with what had just happened. It had been years ago, when I was about eight or nine. It was just after breakfast; I must have been ill, or maybe it was just one of those days when Mother decided I didn’t need to go to school, that she would set me some work herself. She had taken my things away and I was trying to read. I liked to sit at the dining room table to study, rather than the big desk in the library, where I couldn’t see the garden. The books Mother gave me were difficult: she always set me tasks that were too advanced for my age, partly because she overestimated my ability, partly because she felt I needed to be pushed and challenged in order to grow. It was typical of her tangential generosity, this refusal to believe that I might be stumped and give up, and she was often right: no matter how difficult it was, I usually learned something new. It was a good feeling, sometimes, sitting at the wide table, bent to my studies, half-aware of something that began to materialise in the room whenever my attention was focused elsewhere, a form composed of scent and shadows, a presence I came to expect, created from the smells of cake and upholstery, from the spices on the kitchen shelves and the faint must of aspergillus in the books that had stood on the library shelves for years. This familiar of the house was elusive and mysterious, even a little sinister in the way it waited till everyone was occupied before it emerged, half-formed, into the light. As soon as I looked up, it would disappear, explaining itself away as it went. I would keep my head down, and try to become half-aware of it, without giving it my full attention, the way you try to look at something at the edge of your vision, knowing it will vanish if you focus. I liked knowing it was there. I liked having a secret and I liked the way it changed everything, how it revealed new details in the books I was reading: the skeletal diagrams of birds’ wings and lizards, the names of polyhedrons and angles and the ages of geological time combined to form a vague text-book mass, part-algebra, part-taxonomy, that loomed in my dreams whenever I fell asleep in the chair then woke again, only minutes later.
Maybe I had drifted off that morning, then started awake, not quite sure of where I was. All I remember is turning slightly and seeing the mouse – no form to begin with, only a slight, spastic motion at the edge of vision, the kind of small, almost involuntary movement that immediately captures your attention. It was as if the mouse had betrayed itself by its very desire for secrecy. I slid down from the chair and walked over to where it lay on its side, twitching and gazing up at me – its body was caught in the poison, the movements were quite automatic, quite involuntary. Only its eyes were alive. Mother had explained how such poisons worked: they destroyed the internal organs, and it took some time for the animal to die, as the liver broke down in a series of haemorrhages. The poison was designed that way, to provoke internal bleeding, and avoid mess. As I stooped, peering down at the thing, I was struck by the knowledge that, in spite of its pain, in spite of its near-paralysis, the mouse had not given up, it seemed unable to accept that death was inevitable. When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn’t so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death: for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality.
I stood there for some time, bent slightly towards the mouse, trying to figure out how much it knew about what was happening, and whether it was aware of me. Most of all, I was waiting to see it die, to see what happened when the life seeped away; whether it was a gradual process, or if there was a moment when the animate thing became inanimate, when the light went out, as it were. It took a long time. It had probably been there for a while before I saw it; even so, it was still moving twenty minutes later, though by then there was a blankness in the eyes, a lack of awareness, that surprised me. I had imagined the body died first, then the mind faded away, glowing for a while like a cigarette butt as it burned out. Now it seemed that the mind was the first to go, and the body kept going, trying to hang on to something that wasn’t there any more.
From that moment on, I lost interest in the road-kills and the dead birds I found in the woods. From that moment on, I wanted to study the living. There is something beautiful in the stillness of death, in its irreversibility. But, after a time, I wanted more than entry to a corpse. I wanted to open up the living creature, to see the heartbeat and how the blood worked; I wanted to act as witness and celebrant in a ceremony of some kind, to feel the pulse in the organs, to watch the life seep away in the eyes of my chosen subject. I believed there would be a moment when the spirit ebbed, and I wanted to know how that happened, how that moment looked. I wanted to see what it was like when the life dissolved, leaving nothing but inert matter.
It was a natural progression to substitute the living for the dead. Mother never found out what I was doing, of course; I kept these experiments secret, performing them in the woods, or in one of the abandoned barns further along the road, where the old Baker farm had been. To begin with I wasn’t quite sure how to go about the dissections. I knew the mechanics, but I was shy of the live animals and birds I managed to capture. I had fair success with the home-made traps I had learned to build from a book on taxidermy in the public library. I would set them up in the strip of woodland behind the house, then revisit them later, perhaps the same evening, or early the next morning, when nobody else was about. Often they were empty, but now and again I found a mouse or a vole, scrambling about in the little box, trying frantically to escape. Sometimes the animal was dead. If it was a bird, it might have damaged itself, the wings spread and tattered, the feathers ruined. I only caught birds once or twice, and I let them go immediately. The idea of dissecting a bird revolted me.
My first live dissection was a large mouse. The pleasure of opening it up, and knowing it was still alive, knowing the life was bleeding away through my fingers was almost overwhelming. I had studied methods of dissection in the library books: most concerned the opening of corpses for taxidermy, but one I had found in the biology section described in detail methods that could easily be adapted to living creatures: gross dissections, for larger animals, that could be performed with everyday kitchen knives; fine-scale dissections, for the removal or display of organs and glands, using mounted needles and fractured glass edges; and normal-scale dissections – involving everything from dogs to earthworms – which required scalpels, dissecting needles, forceps, blunt seekers and scissors – the kinds of tools that were easily found in a biology student’s dissecting kit. It was no trouble to get my father to buy me a set. A few days after I made my request, the postman presented me with an elegant wooden box, which contained all the instruments I needed, and more. They were so beautiful, I would take them out and handle them for the sheer pleasure of it.
It took a great deal of practice to reach the point where I could open an animal and hold it a moment, before I felt its life seep away. Rabbits were best: they lasted longer, and they were easy to catch. As I worked, I experienced a higher form of grace, a plugging in to something, a connectedness, when the blood flowed back along the blade, seaming my fingers and palms, spilling out over the board and drying, the dark electricity bleeding away almost immediately, long before the organs darkened and congealed. Now I had it right, the meat parted cleanly from the bones, and there was something exciting in it all, like the shedding of a veil, an involuntary revelation. Pinned to the dissecting board, and drugged with spirits from my father’s drinks cabinet, the animal barely struggled. I was touched by the strange gravity of the flesh; I was drawn in by a dark attraction, an interplay between my turning wrist and whatever it was – spirit, life, élan vital – that was suspended there. Sometimes I managed to open a living body carefully enough to be able to see the heart beating, to see the lungs still full of air, to see the feeling in the eyes. It lasted only a short time, but it was a near-perfect moment. Later, when I was disposing of the body, I would bury the animal behind the outhouse and lay a stone on the grave, as a mark of respect. It had given me something it could never have understood; for a moment, I had looked into life itself, and I knew that, one day, I would discover its essence.
I stayed at home for a long time. I didn’t know if Karen Olerud would report me to the police. I thought she might not have done, to avoid embarrassing questions as to why I was in her house, but I couldn’t know for sure. For weeks it felt as if time had stopped. The garden lay still and silent under a thick blanket of early snow, and the waiting made it worse, but nobody came and I was left alone. Everything was as it had always been: Mother’s room locked and still, a virtual presence behind the door; the library full of books; the rack in the hall festooned with her coats and scarves. It was something I did, as the seasons changed: in summer I put out her shawl and the light raincoats she would wear for gardening; at the end of October, I’d carry out her heavy winter coats and scarves, and I’d leave her gloves on the shelf in the hall, as if she were still there, and might need them. I knew she was gone, but that was no reason to forget her. It was one form of afterlife, at least, her life in my mind, her existence preserved in small rituals and gestures. It was the one thing of which I could be sure. That and the weather. It’s an odd thing, but I’ve always believed that the dead are somehow connected to the weather, as if they were the ones who made it snow, as if they were present, somehow, in those gusts of wind that blow in from the distance, seeking me out, like spirits trying to communicate.
It was the wettest summer in years, during those last few months when Mother was dying. She seemed to enjoy the damp weather; it was as if it sealed her off from the rest of the world, as if the village was further away than ever. When the rainfall was heavy and dark, we could barely see the end of the garden, much less the road and the fields beyond. Sometimes it rained all day and the quality of time changed: the secret life of the house was resumed, a slow life of sootfalls and woodlice and the possibility of ghosts on the stairs. Mother would ask me to prop her up in bed, and she would sit reading, sneaking glances at herself in the mirror when she thought I wasn’t looking – watching herself die, I suppose. I believe she found the process interesting, even as it horrified her to observe the transformation from the woman she had been into the grotesque shadow she was becoming. I could see her noticing the changes in her appearance, but I felt obliged to act as if she simply had a bad cold, and I would come and go all day, bringing her books, bringing her tea and lemon biscuits and trays of sandwiches that she left to dry and curl on the bedside table. During the last several weeks, I had to help her to the bathroom, where she would wash carefully, then return, in her silk gown, to sit at the dressing table, choosing her perfume, applying a little make-up, combing her hair. I had to be careful not to look at her in the mirror, not to see what she was seeing. It was another fiction we created together. If I looked her straight in the face, I was looking at the woman she still felt she was, underneath the illness, but if I looked at her through the mirror, I was seeing the woman she saw: that worn, pinched face, her sunken eyes, the blackness around her mouth. I felt guilty when she caught my eye, as if I had deliberately betrayed her. To distract her attention, I would talk about the garden; the flowers that were still out, the birds I had seen in the apple tree.
I had never imagined Mother as a child till then. I had never thought about her as she was before she was married. The woman my father described in his stories seemed unreal to me, if only because Mother herself denied that woman’s existence. But now she was dying, I was curious. I would ask her questions and sometimes she would answer; she was happy to talk about her childhood, or reminisce about times we’d had together. But she never spoke about the early years of her marriage. Mostly, her conversation consisted of vague, random memories, out of sequence and incomplete, so I never really knew how true it was. Nothing she told me felt any different from what I remembered of my own childhood; it was all part of the same continuum, snow in the woods, a hard, spare whiteness, a poignant sense of home, of its lights and warmth as illusory, or at best, irredeemably local. It was all sealed in the past, a purely mental phenomenon. I think she felt that too, and it troubled her. Meanwhile the doctor came and went, prescribing new drugs, stopping in the hall to make conversation and ask how I was – without a word, he had been forbidden to discuss this illness with me, just as I had been silently forbidden to ask him questions, or to express concern. Nothing would have offended Mother more than to have us talking in whispers outside the bedroom door, feeling sorry for her, admiring her courage, or plotting to put her in a hospital. It was hard to believe she was dying: it was her body that was ill, and it showed – black circles formed around her eyes, and her skin smelled darkly sweet, with a hint of softness, as if there was nothing there, under the surface, as if she would have collapsed inwards if I had touched her. But that was physical. I couldn’t find it in my heart to believe her death would result in a complete annihilation; I think I accepted her body’s death from the beginning, but there was another part of me that believed her mind, or her spirit, or something else that could not be defined, would never really end. Years before, she had begun paring down her life: she had barely spoken to my father in the two or three years before he died; later, she had become even more still and remote, as if she were enclosed in ice, or glass. In a matter of weeks, she severed all her connections. The people who had come to the house when my father was alive, people who had been her friends as well as his, were excluded now. They took it well; I imagine they thought she needed to be alone with her grief. But the truth was, she did not grieve. If anything, she seemed relieved at my father’s sudden absence, as if it that was what she had been waiting for all her life. What she wanted was to be alone, to strip away everything that had accumulated over years of marriage and social life. By the time she became ill, she had condensed herself into an essence, and it seemed to me impossible that this essence could be lost.
During the illness, we developed a routine. I would bring flowers in from the garden; I would set pitchers of iced water by the bed, bowls of fruit, each day’s selection of the books I thought she might want. I would rise early, take her breakfast up, help her to wash, then clear away her things while she put on her make-up. I understood that I had to be very businesslike in the mornings. The process had to vary as little as possible, otherwise the illness might have forced us into awkward moments of physical intimacy that we would both have found quite unbearable. We talked a good deal while all this was going on: we played games with one another, making puns, telling lies, referring to ourselves in the third person, anything to create a space, to resist the force that was pushing us together. Still, I had to be quick. Mother was always a very fastidious person – that was the quality I most admired in her – and I knew what torture it was for her, to be handled, even by me, to be washed, to be physical. I would leave her for an hour or so before lunch – our days were structured around meal-times, though neither of us ate very much – then I would carry trays up for us both and I’d sit opposite her, at the dressing table, remembering the times I had sat there as a child, watching her get dressed, admiring her perfumes. In those days we had played a different game with the mirror: the people in the glass were strangers, and we would talk to them, across one another, like conspirators, flirting with them lightly, the way married people sometimes flirt with strangers at a party, testing themselves, always keeping one eye on their real partners. I missed that time, but I never tried to revive it: the mirror was dangerous ground now, and we worked around its silvery field, as if it were some trap, waiting for us in the corner of the room.
As the summer advanced, we spent all our time in that one space. I began to feel we were being laced together by the sticky-sweet fabric of death that had begun to form. Our conversations, our carefully measured gestures and movements had become seamless. There was no longer any telling us apart. At night, when I went back to my own room, I could still feel her there, in the darkness, and the world outside was suspended, silent, like a closed cinema. By the end, I was afraid of becoming too accustomed to our mingled warmth and smell, of waking at exactly the same moment she woke, knowing what she wanted, of hearing her voice, even before she spoke. It was as if the cocoon that was being spun around her for some absurd and elaborate transformation had accidentally included me. There was even a complicity with the process in the house itself: objects became part of the event, the Chinese bowls in the hall, the books in the library, the boxes of glass and tinsel in the attic, the cutlery in the kitchen drawers – everything seemed brighter and heavier, more fixed, like pieces in a game of chess or the instruments of an arcane ritual. When I was alone, preparing meals or passing the time while she slept, I felt part of a process that had become irreversible. It felt as if I were being sealed up with her, that we were being laid down, like fossils, compressed under centuries of water and silt, compressed and simplified, reduced to our basic forms.
For some weeks, she deteriorated quietly. We continued as well as we were able, ignoring what we could. One afternoon I left her sleeping and went for a walk in the woods. I hadn’t been out of the house in days and the fresh air was an exquisite and guilty pleasure. I didn’t go far; I would never be more than a half-mile’s walk from the house. It was a warm day, and I followed an old route, stopping in some of the places where we’d made our most interesting finds. I couldn’t have been gone for more than an hour, but when I returned, the downstairs study was a mess: there was a broken bowl on the floor, several books had been pulled from their shelves, one of the candlesticks on the mantelpiece had fallen into the hearth. I thought someone had come in, and I ran upstairs to see if Mother was all right. She was lying on the floor next to the bed, clutching a book; when I went to lift her, there was an odd biscuity smell on her dressing gown. She was asleep, or unconscious. I got her on to the bed and covered her up. Her face was damp; her body smelled sweet and floury still but underneath there was a current of something else, the kind of warm smell you get in a pet shop or a zoo, a subtle mingling of egg and spoor. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it bothered me, and I felt it was a sign of something, the first indication of a new state of being, an eventual transformation.
She slept a long time and when she woke she looked much worse. All of a sudden, death was fully present in the room and it couldn’t be ignored any longer. Until that moment, I had failed to register what was going on. I had imagined her changing, becoming someone new, or exchanging presence for some subtler state, but from that day on the smell of death became stronger, till it filled the room, tainting the water in her jug, bleeding into the sheets. I brought fresh flowers every morning: all the petals had fallen by the middle of the afternoon. From now on, too, she was in visible pain. For the first time, in utter bewilderment, I considered killing her. I had read about mercy killings and I did not want to be found wanting, if that was what she required. I watched her closely for any sign of an appeal; it would have taken no more than a word or a gesture for me to have placed a pillow over her face and held it down till she stopped breathing. But she gave no signal. Some part of her, I am sure, was appalled at the way her body kept on living, unable to let go, like all those animals I had watched as a child, her eyes fixed on something beyond me, something I could not see.
One morning, as I was clearing her breakfast things away, she pointed at the mirror.
‘Cover it now,’ she said. Her voice was still alive, still clear, the only part of her being that had remained undiminished.
I stared at her in surprise.
‘I don’t want to see myself like this,’ she said. She was cool; as usual, she showed no emotion. ‘Cover it up.’
I shook my head.
‘You look fine,’ I said. ‘You’re just tired today.’
She smiled.
‘I’m tired every day,’ she replied. ‘Cover it up. I want to think of myself as I am. Not like that.’
I nodded.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it now.’
I carried her tray down and took some twine from the cupboard under the stairs; then I found an old shawl, and used it to cover the mirror, binding it with the twine, unable to shake the idea that we were still there, frozen on the surface of the glass, in a last glance. Now the room was darker; perhaps it was this dimming of the light that effected the change, but from that day on, she began to slide, losing touch with me, drifting in and out of something that resembled sleep, but was heavier and less permeable. I’d sit by the bed and watch her. She was already becoming hazy, less clearly defined; as she slept, I could feel her seeping away.
The last thing I remember clearly was the morning of the day she died. She had been asleep for a long time – or rather, she had been floating under the surface of the drugs the doctor had left for her, floating free like an underwater swimmer, drifting with the tide, becoming the current. Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked at me. Sometimes, when she woke from the drugs, she seemed surprised to see me, as if she couldn’t quite work out who I was. But that day, she knew me immediately; she reached out her hand and brushed my forearm, as if she was trying to get my attention.
‘Tell him when you see him,’ she said, in a clear voice, without the least trace of a slur.
I nodded.
‘Tell who, Mother?’ I asked.
She shook her head.
‘Just tell him,’ she repeated. Then she made a sound – a kind of sob, though it was more than that, more deliberate, almost articulate, like a word in some foreign language that I didn’t understand, rooted in some dark, wet place, the beginning of decay perhaps, the beginning of annihilation. Whatever it was, it transcended the woman I knew. There was nothing personal here. She tried to pull herself up, but she couldn’t; a moment later she cried out, twisting her body round in an effort to shake herself free. She lay like that for minutes, it seemed, straining to be loosed from something – and I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t act, I simply watched till she collapsed back and dwindled into absence.
It was eleven o’clock. I pulled the sheet up over her face, and went outside. I stood in the hall for several minutes, trying to decide what to do, then I went out for a walk. It was raining. The road to the village was covered with dark, oily puddles, and the cattle in the fields stood huddled for shelter under an oak tree. I didn’t see anyone on the road and, for a moment, I felt certain that Mother and I were the last people in the world. I walked as far as the edge of the village, letting the rain trickle through my hair and run down my face, cleansing me of something, of some last vestige of ordinary being. When I got back it was lunch-time. I changed into dry clothes, then made some sandwiches and took them upstairs, with a glass of milk and an apple, to keep Mother company.
Late that afternoon I drew the curtains and sat beside her in silence. I caught myself listening, as if I imagined she would speak, as if she would resume one of her stories from years before, in that tone of voice she had when she had been obliged to break off, when my father had come in and interrupted her, or the telephone had called her downstairs – the tone of voice that told me the story was infinitely repeatable, that it could always be resumed, in exactly the same place, and nothing could bring it to an end. The petals had fallen from the flowers I had set by the bed – they had been fresh the day before, now they were scattered across the table and the floor, still soft, still almost living.
When the time came, when I felt ready, I took off my clothes and draped them over the chair by the window. It was beginning to get dark. Mother lay still, the way I had arranged her, with her arms by her sides, the sheet pulled up now, over her face. I switched on the lamp so I could see the bottles on the dressing table, glittering in the gold light. Mother had built up this collection of perfumes over years: she had added new varieties as they came on to the market, but she had never finished anything, never thrown anything away. There were fragrances that had gone out of fashion years before I was born, as well as timeless classics that had never gone off the market. I had always been fascinated by that table. Once, when I was a child, she had found me there, in front of the mirror, my face dusted with powder, my mouth a gash of lipstick, splashing Chanel on my neck and wrists. I have no memory of that afternoon; she told me years later that I’d looked like a baby vampire, with blotches of lipstick glistening on my teeth, like fresh blood. She said she’d been surprised to see my reflection in the glass: by rights, there should have been nothing there, only a gap where my face should have been, a metaphysical absence.
Now I stood, naked, in front of the wrapped mirror. I picked up each bottle in turn and anointed my body, reading the labels and choosing each scent carefully – one for the crook of the elbow, another for the collarbone, yet another for the skin between the index finger and the thumb, or the angle of the knee. To begin with, I could smell each one distinctly, but after a while, they all blended one into another, with the warmth of my body, till I felt I myself would evaporate, becoming a scent, a pure vapour.
I lifted the sheet. Mother’s face was quite discoloured now, and it seemed, already, that something was missing – not just the colour, but the life, the expression and vitality that made her recognisable. She was like the animals I had found by the road, smaller than lifesize, already going to waste from the first moment she had stopped breathing. I brushed her hair and applied some perfume. I thought about make-up: a little lipstick, perhaps a touch of powder. Those things seemed appropriate, just as I knew she would look better for her best pearls and those classic, single drop pearl ear rings. I hesitated a long time before I could bring myself to remove her night-dress, but I knew it was needed for the ceremony. I wanted her to be naked on this, our last night together. In the morning, I would begin the normal business of doctors and funeral directors, but for now, in the silence of our locked house, I wanted to lie down beside her and sleep, under the white sheet, warming her with the blood-warmth of my living body, equals before death. After I had finished making her up, I applied the same thin film of lipstick and a dusting of powder to my own face, then I lay down beside her, my arms by my sides, my eyes closed. It was utterly still in the sickroom, but outside a bird called, and a gust of wind tumbled through the holly tree. For a long time I lay there, listening, waiting for the story to resume, or to reach some natural end. When I woke, it was morning, and I knew that I had dreamed, but whatever it was I had seen, I remembered nothing.