Daniel Auchoum was born the year Eleanor’s parents left their house in Scotland. He was named Auchoum after it, and was all she had left of the place where she had grown up. Before the baby arrived, Va Va helped Eleanor fill a wicker basket with soft blankets. Arranging her favourite pink glass poodles around the cradle, Va Va prayed that this baby might be a girl. She yearned for a sister with ringlets and rosebud lips. Not a gun enthusiast, not a football-player, but someone to dress in frills like a giant doll. Someone of her very own.
She needed an ally. The nursery she still shared with Brodie and Flook offered no peace for her to read at night. Flook rolled from side to side for an hour after bedtime, droning ‘Dilute to taste, dilute to taste’, and Brodie built armies and flung them across the floorboards and into Va Va’s no-man’s-land bed. She turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes. When the girl baby came, everything would be different. There would be white socks and shiny buckled shoes next to a lacy cot. The guns and soldiers would retreat before swarms of dolls and handbags, earrings and hairslides, and Eleanor would call the Girls and the Boys in for supper, instead of the Boys and Va Va.
Patrick woke them early on a still summer morning. ‘Darling hearts, you have a new baby brother.’ Va Va burst into tears. Her mother had betrayed her, the infant had deceived her. Brodie and Flook bounced out of bed. ‘Can we call him Pansy?’
Va Va sobbed. ‘Daddy, we all wanted a girl baby. Are you sure we haven’t got a girl?’
Patrick sat down. ‘Angel, this tiny new baby needs you all to look after him. He’s longing to meet his big brothers and sister. We can’t make him unhappy with tears, can we?’
Dan came home from hospital a day later. He was big and placid, and he smiled straight away, flaunting his happiness in his new world. By the time he was six weeks old he slept through the night, his appetite was huge, and Va Va was reconciled to his maleness. He looked like a Renaissance cherub, sturdy, dimpled and golden. Eleanor called him Angel Delcare and basked in the radiant ease of his infancy. Va Va dragged him around by the neck and called him her baby.
Dan was a golden boy. Va Va, Brodie and Flook, uniformed in red boiler-suits like miniature Chinese workers, had big knees and long mud-daubed legs. Black hair tangled down their backs and their smiles were gap-toothed in filthy faces. Dan, round and brown, haloed with yellow curls, was their delight. He wore a red baseball cap rakishly askew and rolled on the lawn while Patrick lay reading beside him.