The difficulty in using reality as a criterion lies, not in there being no reality, but in our imperfect capacity to comprehend it. That a child has an imperfect capacity to comprehend what is or may be truly dangerous is usually taken for granted. That the capacity of an adult is greater often by only a small margin tends to be forgotten.
– John Bowlby, Separation, p. 186
Two days later, we all went over to the cottage. There was sun bright on our faces and when Moth rolled on the turf he found it was warm, so we all sat there for a while, watching a trawler pull across the sea, black against the sparkling water. I looked back at Colsay House; on the bluest summer day with the air smelling of honey from the sun-baked grass, it still looked as if it had been built by Calvin to remind sinners of the tomb. Moth was eating grass. A raven flew gleaming overhead and landed on the roof.
‘Mummy?’ said Raph. ‘Have you ever seen a baby raven?’
‘They nest on the cliffs.’ Giles lay back, hands behind his head, and closed his eyes. The Cassingham nose in all its splendour shone in the sun. ‘They don’t want people to see their babies.’
‘I found a worm,’ said Moth. He held it up, squirming. ‘I eat it. In my mouth.’
I stood up and held out my hand to him. ‘Put it down, love. The worm wants to wriggle in the ground. They don’t like the sun. And we don’t eat them, do we? Shall we go see the cottage?’
The painting was finished and it was the first time I’d been there without feeling Jake potentially or actually peering over my shoulder. Telling me what I deserved. Giles had been right about the white paint. Sunlight spilt across the floors and the walls glowed like tanned skin. It was almost hot; perhaps we should have thought about blinds. Raph lifted his face as if there were a nice smell.
‘I like it in here.’
He lay down in the middle of the floor, his copper hair spreading across the boards. He looked like an installation in the Tate. Fallen Angel. Moth pattered over.
‘No standing on Raph, no not.’
‘No, love, that’s right, no standing on Raph. Come and see the seagulls.’
Raph flung his arms wide. ‘Can we live here?’
I looked at Giles. We’d discussed it, of course, all those evenings when we spread the architect’s drawings in the two-up, two-down behind the station where we could hear the neighbours closing the cupboards in their kitchen, built for Victorian navvies and now inhabited by City lawyers and academics with hereditary wealth, and graced with organic paint and a hanging basket of (long-dead) geraniums.
‘Instead of the big house, or instead of Oxford?’
He rolled over and lay propped on his elbows as though reading. ‘Instead of Oxford of course. Could we, and never go back to school? Please?’
Giles turned back from the window. ‘Raph, there’s a difference between moving to Colsay and not going to St Peter’s, you know. You have to go to school wherever you are, it’s the law.’
‘No, it’s not. Paul’s home-schooled. He doesn’t go.’
‘Moth, come away from the stove, please,’ I called. ‘Paul’s mother doesn’t have anything else to do. No, Raph, absolutely not. We’re about a hundred miles and four hours from the nearest copyright library. Moth, leave that alone, please, love. Moth!’
‘You wouldn’t need a library if we lived here,’ said Raph. ‘You wouldn’t need to work. You could look after me and Moth like Jessica’s mummy. And Marcus’s mummy. And Edward’s mummy.’
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘No. I’m not that kind of mummy.’
I am the kind of mummy whose absence, at least some of the time, is good for you. Giles turned back to the window. The views are better from the cottage, closer to the beach and built for seeing rather than being seen. There’s a research group at the University of the Highlands and Islands that has been courting him, and he’d make enough money for food and books. We’d need a much better boat to get the children over to Colla for school, and we’d need a better internet connection and a more reliable electricity supply, which it would no doubt be Raph’s pleasure to design. Maybe I could commute weekly to Oxford, pick up the sleeper at Inverness. The sale of the Oxford house would fund a few years of that. Assuming, of course, I had anything to commute to Oxford for.
‘Anyway, we’d all miss our friends,’ I said. ‘There was a reason why everyone left Colsay, you know. But we’re lucky to have it for summers. Come on, let’s get it ready. They’re arriving in a few days.’
‘Yeah,’ said Giles. ‘You know, maybe some of those reasons have changed. With the internet.’
‘When the Bodleian Library is on the internet and you can get internet childcare we’ll talk about it. Meanwhile, I expect the Fairchilds would like sheets.’
Raph didn’t move. Moth poked his ear.
‘Fairchildren,’ said Raph. ‘I’d like to live here.’
‘There are universities closer than Oxford, you know.’ Giles opened a drawer, which contained knives and forks gleaming like mirrors and heavy as guns, and watched it slide silently closed. ‘You’d be able to pick up sessional teaching. Make some contacts.’
Raph rolled over. ‘I thought you hated college anyway.’
‘Mummy likes institutions,’ said Giles.
I felt as if I was being circled by wolves.
‘I think they’re interesting, that’s all. Go on. You and Daddy do the beds. And no, OK? No.’
Giles took the sheets, which were only slightly damp, up the open-tread stairs. It’s one advantage of having been sent away to prep school at six: he can make beds the way he thinks they ought to be made, with linen sheets that should be ironed and hospital corners. After some experiment, I engaged the child-lock on the washing machine and stopped bothering to convince Moth that it wasn’t hungry and didn’t want a banana. I started trying to break into the parcel of books I’d ordered, which soon became interesting enough for Moth to abandon his passionate interaction with the pedal bin.
‘Ow! Bloody Amazon.’
‘Bugger amazons,’ agreed Moth.
‘No, no, not a good idea. Damn. Giles? Giles! Have we equipped this place with scissors?’
‘Kitchen drawer,’ he called.
Moth ran ahead of me. ‘Sharp, Mummy. Careful.’
It was hard to choose the books. We’d agreed that I wasn’t just going to buy what I wanted to read and then borrow it, but I was determined to offer something more local than people were likely to bring with them. I’d provided Walter Scott in deference to the Heritage Experience approach to holidays, George Mackay Brown for those who like their islands whimsical, and a selection of the more accessible literature on the Clearances so that liberals could have the pleasures of indignation and conservatives could be reminded how they got here. Then I’d realized we had no women, and actually nothing I particularly wanted to read myself, so I’d added Margaret Oliphant’s ghost stories and rather more contemporary Scottish women’s poetry than perhaps took account of ordinary reading habits.
‘Stand back, Moth. This is very sharp.’
I took the bread knife to the carapace of glued cardboard. He came over to investigate the result of all this knife-wielding and strong language.
‘More books.’
‘Books for the visitors,’ I told him. ‘Moth, we’re going to have visitors. People coming to the cottage.’
He prodded the bubble wrap. ‘Go away people. Moth not like visitors.’
Giles went back to the puffin colonies after lunch. Moth wasn’t particularly tired but I was particularly determined and eventually he went to sleep. Violating the bad news blackout for the sake of my work, I’d given Raph a graphic account of the end of Pompeii over lunch and suggested that, if he worked outside, he could collect some of the darker sand from the far end of the beach to represent lava. I tried to connect to the internet from the sofa and found again that I could, so I settled there where I could see Raphael building Pompeii out of Lego while consulting Life in Roman Towns.
I logged into J-Stor and ran a search on ‘women’s history’ and ‘infanticide’. Bones might outlast history but I’ve never heard of a prehistoric textile. Wet wool rots fast. But a baby dead even as much as a hundred years would be relatively tolerable, and there was a lot of infanticide in the nineteenth century, when ‘funeral clubs’ in the most deprived areas paid out on the death of a child. The clubs were meant to provide insurance against children’s funeral expenses for parents who could barely afford to eat, and so, in practice, paid desperate families to neglect or even kill their youngest members. You had to provide a death certificate to get the money, but you didn’t have to have a funeral. I skimmed the results. All the infanticides that make it as far as the secondary literature – a subset which necessarily excludes all that were successfully concealed, which this might have been – were carried out by unmarried girls who denied their pregnancies, delivered alone and subsequently claimed that the baby was stillborn. Which, as juries tended to agree, they could have been. The bodies were usually found under the bed or in the privy, and it seemed that in the cases of most of those buried outside the house the mother had had what the courts took to be an accomplice, although it seemed to me that he was more likely to be the killer. Newly delivered women are rarely capable of going outside and digging a grave. Those were also the babies who tended to have had their throats cut – I remembered the Wild Boy of Aveyron – or been hit on the head. Mothers acting alone usually went for suffocation, or sometimes strangulation with the umbilical cord. Raph’s cord was cut before I saw it because, without my consent, they’d injected me as he was born with drugs that shouldn’t cross the placenta, but I remembered Moth’s, disconcertingly alive, a grey snake throbbing with blood, and my dismay when the midwife held it out to be severed. It should have hurt, that cut. The bloody ends looked like eighteenth- century images of guillotined necks.
‘Mummy! Look, I’m putting under-floor heating in the baths!’
I opened the window. It wasn’t exactly sunny outside, but you could see where the shadows would be when the clouds moved.
‘That’s lovely, darling. The baths had lots of rooms, didn’t they?’
I found a table showing the ages of infanticide victims at death. More than 80 per cent were under one week, the rest divided between those killed by fathers and childminders who couldn’t stand another minute of screaming – odd, but perhaps in evolutionary terms not surprising, that mothers, who are after all exposed to more noise with less sleep than anyone else, in fact rarely resort to this means of procuring a moment’s peace – and those suffocated by mothers who couldn’t feed them and didn’t want to watch them starve. One such woman told the judge, ‘My husband left me with five under ten. I knew the baby was like to die anyway, having lost three already, and I couldn’t find food for all. He’d been crying three days with hunger. The two older boys are already working and need what we can give them. I couldn’t find it in me to watch him die so slow.’ The judge drew the jury’s attention to the defendant’s extreme thinness.
‘Mummy, did they have some kind of air-conditioning for the caldarium? It’s hot in Naples.’
The wind ruffled his hair. There were more freckles on his face, but I cannot bear to subject Raph to the physical force necessary to apply sunscreen.
‘I expect they were just good at designing buildings to be cool. With lots of marble.’
He sat back on his heels. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know, love. Let me get this work done, OK?’
‘Sorry, Mummy.’
I tried to remember the size of the orchard baby, and the size of newborns. I could hold Moth against me on one arm, his head in my hand and his feet tucked under my elbow, and he was a kilo heavier than Raphael at birth. I looked out at Raph, who was waving his feet in the grass as he attempted a curved archway. He’s probably as tall as a lot of nineteenth-century Scottish adults already, although the islanders fared better on fish and oats than the teeming poor of Glasgow on adulterated bread and jam made with sawdust. What we saw of her skull was small, more of a shell than a coconut, but the long bones were at least big enough to be recognizable. I remembered newborn arms and legs as largely decorative appendages to the twin spheres of head and stomach, seeming to be there more as signs of human form to come than for any present use. Whereas the orchard baby – call her, like so many female skeletons, Eve – had bones that looked functional. Maybe all bones look functional. I’d rather, on balance, that she’d barely taken a breath, not adapted to light, never left the daze of surprise at air on her skin and sounds not muffled by water in her ears. Never quite come to life. Moth was born in his bag of waters, asleep, and when the midwife told me to pick him up from between my legs he hadn’t started breathing, didn’t know he’d been born. He’s not breathing, I said in panic, he’s not alive, and Jane said, wait, it hasn’t been a minute yet, the cord’s still pulsing. I took another deep breath for him, to oxygenate our blood. And then he opened his eyes, eyelashes still filmed with amniotic fluid, looked into my face, and started to breathe. He began his life in my arms. It wasn’t yet time to wake him, but I closed my files and went up to watch Moth sleep.
‘Mummy,’ said Raphael.
‘What? Look, Moth, what’s that?’
‘Elephant,’ said Moth. He giggled. ‘Elephant jumps on a garage!’ The elephant from the Noah’s Ark leapt on to the second floor of the wooden multi-storey car park (‘complete with helipad and functioning lift for hours of imaginative play!’).
‘Mummy?’
The elephant was followed by a giraffe, which had to go in sideways.
‘Yes.’
‘Cows going in a lift!’ exclaimed Moth.
‘Mummy, I think there’s something you should know.’
He sounded as if he was about to tell me he was gay, or had decided to join the army, or both. I don’t think I would mind not having grandchildren – it would in some ways be a relief to know that the rot stops here – certainly not as much as I would mind a child of mine being paid to kill people. He came to stand in front of me.
‘You might be frightened.’
I dropped the rhinoceros.
‘Crash rhinoceros!’ said Moth.
Raph twisted his hands. ‘It’s – I don’t like saying it.’ He hid his face.
‘What? Raph, love. Come here.’
Moth sat pink-cheeked and giggling. I pulled Raph towards me and held him. He ground his forehead against my collarbone.
‘Cuddle Moth too!’ Moth crawled over and tried to push between us. I moved Raph round.
‘There! Raph, tell me. I won’t be frightened. It’s my job to stop things frightening you.’
He pulled back and Moth seized his opportunity. ‘I thought it was your job to write your book?’
I felt slightly sick. ‘That too. Go on.’
Raph went over to the window. ‘There’s something in the attic. Something that moves about and makes a noise. I keep hearing it. I thought it was a burglar.’
‘Raph—’ I said. ‘Raph, it’s not—’
He turned and went out, turning his face away as he walked past. Moth pulled my top forward and peered down the neck. ‘There Mummy’s tummy.’
Raph spoke from the stairs. ‘It’s that baby. It’s that dead baby.’
I picked Moth up, took Mog and the Baby to distract him, and followed Raph up the stairs. He had got into bed and pulled the duvet over his head.
‘Raph hiding,’ said Moth. ‘Peepo Raph!’ He pulled the duvet back and Raph growled.
I sat on the bed. ‘Leave him be, Moth. Look! Here’s Mog and the Baby!’
Moth sat on the floor, in the perfect straight-legged, straight-backed yoga position of the person who has never sat at a desk, and began to leaf through a faux-naïve account of post-natal depression encoding a thinly veiled warning about what will happen if you leave your screaming baby with a motherly neighbour for an hour in order to go shopping (it will crawl into the path of oncoming traffic and survive only by grace of an improbably positioned cat, to which you will then owe a lifetime of gratitude and service). I stroked Raph’s shoulder.
‘Raph, there’s nothing in the attic. Really. How many times have we been up there, and never seen anything? There’s nothing scary here. That baby probably died hundreds of years ago, maybe even before the Vikings. Lots of people used to die when they were babies and now we’ve got so good at making sure people have enough food and clean water and doctors to help when they’re ill that nearly everyone lives a long time.’
He pushed the duvet back from his face. ‘Lots of babies still die because of dirty water. It gives them diarrhoea and they get dehydrated and people won’t give them a bit of sugar and salt to make them better.’
‘Dehydrated. I know. But at least we do know, so we can do something about it.’
‘Do we do something about it?’
No. We spend our money doing up the blackhouse and buying olive oil and books and designer clothes from Swedish catalogues which cheer us up and we don’t, once we’re grown up, give the dehydrated babies a moment’s thought from one week to the next.
‘We can give money to charities who do something about it. But Raph, the baby isn’t in the attic. The police are looking after her bones and the rest of her is gone.’
‘There’s something up there,’ he said. ‘I keep hearing it.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Sit up. Look, next time you hear it, come and find me and we’ll go look together.’
He flinched.
‘Or I’ll go, and tell you what’s there. And now, shall we go down and make some popcorn?’
I gave him a hug. ‘All right. Moth, shall we come down and make popcorn?’
‘Moth have some hotcorn too!’
Popcorn offers a uniquely consoling combination of snack and controlled explosion, which I emphasize by making it in a Pyrex bowl, which burns the bottom layer but allows the children, standing on chairs pulled irresponsibly close to the stove, to watch things blow up as they are not allowed to do in any more conventional setting.
Raph took another handful and I burnt my fingers trying to pick the blackened ones from the bottom of the bowl.
‘Mummy, if you put oil in would they not stick?’
‘More hotcorn!’ said Moth.
‘The only time I put oil in, it caught fire, remember?’
A small fire, easily extinguished with a pan lid and a wet tea-towel. Another secret from Giles.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘We’re going to Colla this afternoon. To the library.’
Raph stopped with popcorn half way to his mouth.
‘I don’t want to go to the library.’
‘You’ll like it,’ I said. ‘Come on, it’s full of books. We’ll get you a ticket and you can borrow engineering textbooks.’
‘I want to stay here and read.’
So do I, I thought.
Moth reached for his bowl and spat his popcorn into it. ‘Moth want to stay here too.’
‘Nonsense. We’ll go in the boat and you can see the birds and the waves going splosh, splosh, and there might be seals, maybe a mummy seal and a baby seal!’
Though I think that for seals maternity is merely seasonal.
Raph stood up. ‘I want to stay here and read and I’m going to.’
‘Raph?’ I followed him. He was deploying his father’s tactic and hiding behind the Guardian, which was full of unsuitable tales in which evil is rewarded and good people come to bad ends. ‘Raph, you can bring a book. OK? You don’t have to stop reading. And they’ve probably got a whole section on bridge-building. Come on.’
‘No.’
I sighed. ‘All right then. If you’re not outside the door in your shoes and coat by the time I’ve got Moth ready I’m going to take away your Lego until the weekend.’
The library is a low brick building on the edge of the village, recently built with EU money. Inside, there was a ‘pushchair park’, posters of the characters from children’s books and a purple carpet with red dots. It reminded me of the children’s ward in our hospital in Oxford, effervescent with plastic toys, as if books were a manifestation of the mortality from which the general public, and children in particular, must always be distracted.
Raph rubbed birdshit from the edge of his shoe on to the carpet. ‘It looks like a bloody playgroup.’
I was unpeeling Moth from his waterproof jacket and trousers, which won’t pull over his shoes. ‘I know. But don’t swear. They’ve got lots of books.’
Moth tried to run off and fell over his trousers.
Raph grabbed him. ‘Shut up! Shut up! This is a library.’
I once took Raph to the History Faculty Library when I had to return some books and he was off school. The memory was apparently still vivid for him. ‘It’s all right, Raph. It’s not that kind of library.’
I hoisted Moth on to my hip and held Raph’s hand. There was someone behind a counter in the children’s section.
Moth wriggled. ‘There’s a Gruffalo!’
‘Mummy, can I use those computers?’ asked Raph.
‘Yes. If you must. Why not find some new books?’
The woman at the counter was wearing the kind of understated tailoring last seen on women with BlackBerrys and expensive glasses on the 19.10 out of Paddington. She looked up. ‘Good morning. He’ll need a username and password for the computer,’ she said. ‘Are you wanting to join the library?’
‘If we can,’ I said. ‘Do we count as local residents?’
‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Visitors use the library too.’
‘Oh.’
She’s right, of course, nothing in Giles’s stone-by-stone knowledge of Colsay makes him – or me – less of a visitor. I straightened my back.
‘And I was also wondering about the archives. I’m Anna Bennet, Giles Cassingham’s wife. We’re staying on Colsay for the summer and letting out the blackhouse. I thought I might try to write a booklet for the visitors.’
She typed something into her computer. ‘You know there’s a very good local history. Thomas MacFarland – he was our rector here – when he retired he took a PhD and wrote his book. Published by Birlinn.’
‘I’d like to see that,’ I said. ‘Raph and I have been talking about World War Two, haven’t we, love?’
She pushed her hair back and smiled a teacher’s smile at Raph, who ducked behind me. ‘You know we had an exhibition about wartime here in the winter? The schoolchildren did a bit of an oral history project and we had lots of old photos up.’
I breathed in and out carefully. ‘I didn’t know. Do you still have them, the photos and recordings? Raph would love to see them, wouldn’t you?’
He ground his head against my back.
‘And maybe we could sort out computer access for him?’
She kept her gaze on my face, as if Raph were doing something obscene which she was too well bred to acknowledge.
‘I’m sure we could do that.’
‘Mummy!’ called Moth. ‘Mummy, look! A baby gruffalo! Mummy read it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Raph’s just shy. And of course we don’t see many people at the moment.’
‘Not to worry. When you’re ready I’ll show you and the lads the exhibition, all right? Some of the old ones gave us their photos at the end and we’ve the recordings.’ She paused. ‘I’ll show you something else as well, you might be interested for your booklet. We had a grant to digitize the local paper right back to the 1920s. It’s all there, every word. And I couldn’t honestly say it’s been much used. I’m Fiona Firth, by the way. The archivist.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Really. Thank you.’
The photos had the strangely jovial quality that seems to mark most amateur wartime photography, at least in Britain. Women with shiny curls laughed up at the camera as if the medieval agricultural implements in their hands were cocktails and the wind-scoured fields Californian swimming pools. There were some more serious pictures of men, facing away from the camera and getting on with manual labour with faces shadowed by tweed caps and beards.
‘Mummy? If it was the war, why are they smiling?’
Fiona Firth put a picture of some children down in front of him. I craned to look. Girls and boys together, so probably not the Castle School.
‘Maybe they were enjoying themselves,’ she said. ‘You can listen to some of the people who remember it, if you like. People got to do lots of things they wouldn’t have done without the war, especially the children.’
Raph looked through the window. There were rabbits cropping the grass, and a build-up of cloud to the north. Time to go home soon. ‘There were lots of people dying in Germany. And Poland. I’ve seen pictures. And children and babies.’
Fiona Firth looked round at me.
‘Not here,’ I reminded him. ‘Here children were just going to school and playing and helping on the land the same as always.’
His gaze moved to the gathering clouds. ‘And people holding hands waiting to be shot and all the houses falling apart.’
Moth placed a sticky hand in mine. ‘Moth and Mummy holding hands. Up and see more rabbits!’
I picked him up. ‘We’d better go,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the look of those clouds. Would it be OK to come back, maybe tomorrow, or – or—’ Or the next day, which might be Wednesday or Thursday but I would not be very surprised if it were Friday or Saturday. And on one of those days, the Fairchilds were coming.
Fiona looked at Raph as if he might tear down all the Disney on the way out and replace it with multiple copies of If This Be Man.
‘Oh,’ she said slowly. ‘Oh, whenever you want. Of course.’
She followed us towards the soft play area. ‘Were you wanting the newspaper? If you’ve got the internet out there I’ll give you a password.’
‘Giles? Is there a copy of your family tree here?’
He was washing up, and I was pottering around the kitchen trying to look busy.
‘Almost certainly. Why?’
‘I was just wondering who was around before the war. Who lent the house to that school. That article just says “the owner”.’
His face, reflected in the window behind the sink, was blank.
‘What, before the war? Or during? Because I told Ian MacDonald, remember, it got passed on several times when people were killed.’
‘Before, probably. Or at the beginning.’ I looked into one of the covered bowls in the fridge and looked away again.
‘Those two cousins, they were called Edwin and Nigel—’
‘Of course.’
‘Who inherited but were killed in action in quick succession. There was my Great Aunt Edith—’
‘Shut up. Who lived a blameless if anachronistic life in Bath for most of the twentieth century. I think she might have owned it after Nigel died, but that was 1942 or ’43. You probably want earlier than that.’
So she would have been roughly the right age to have a baby late enough for the knitting not to have rotted; well into the twentieth century, but before living memory. Before Giles’s parents would have had to have been involved.
‘Tell me about Great Aunt Edith.’
He turned round, water dripping from the popcorn bowl.
‘Are you planning to impress the Fairchildren with family history, or are you about to accuse Great Aunt Edith of premarital sex, secret pregnancy and infanticide?’
I reopened the fridge, as if the covered bowls might have moved on.
‘I was just thinking, if that burial is pre-war it’s much more likely that she was buried by someone who was living in the big house than one of the villagers. I mean, why would you risk carrying a dead baby to someone else’s house? It’d be quite a walk for someone who’d just given birth. So I’m just thinking about who was around earlier in the century.’
He put the pan down and came and stood with his hands on my shoulders as if he’d like to shake me, which Old Etonians don’t do.
‘Anna, stop it. Write your book. Start getting some job applications out, if you’ve got spare time. Teach Raph Latin, or something. But stop accusing people of killing babies, OK?’
‘I don’t know any Latin. State education, remember? Someone did kill a baby.’
His grasp tightened and then he stepped back and returned to the sink.
‘Either someone did, or the child died of something. I don’t know why you’re so sure it was murder. The police might find out, though it seems a lot more likely that they’ll dismiss it as historical. In either case, it’s not your problem. Jesus, Anna, if you want to join the police get a job and make some money out of it.’
‘I have a job, remember? Research Fellow, St Mary Hall?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I remember. Will you go write your book now, please, and let me get on in here.’
I wandered towards the sofa, as if I had time to spare. I don’t know why I’m so sure it was murder, either.
While the brief lives of foundlings and abandoned children are in general beyond the scope of this kind of cultural history [insert footnote –? Levine book], most of the images of urban life from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attest to the constant presence of the destitute. The children in Hogarth’s satires (see figs. 29 and 30) are well known, but even the painting opposite (fig. 31), commissioned by Lady Alicia Chevalier when her marriage to the Duke of Dorset removed her from her much-loved London home, shows very young children begging in the most glamorous parts of the city. Their presence in this deliberately romanticized image of London suggests the ubiquity of malnourished and homeless infants in cities across Europe, and it has been estimated that approximately 120,000 babies in the first year of life were abandoned each year in western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Where, then, are these children in the conduct and didactic literatures for the young which boomed during precisely these decades?
I heard the voice of Antonia Rivett. ‘Save rhetorical questions for rhetoric, please, Anna.’ Ten years later and I still couldn’t brook her disapproval. I deleted ‘Where, then, are’ and inserted ‘are missing from’ after ‘children’. The wind howled along the beach and through the orchard, throwing rain against the windows. Those eighteenth-century children must not have seemed fully human to the people coming out of Sheridan’s new sell-out success and heading for vol-au-vents and hothouse grapes in rooms the size of swimming pools. They would have been feared a little, small people but, like child soldiers, small people with nothing to lose, children who would do anything at all, and allow anything to be done to them, for money. Or food. I got up to close the curtains. If we did move here, Moth and Raph would be spared all that. The conviction that children are up to no good, guilty until proven innocent, loitering with intent. I shivered. I watch Raph growing up in England with the parallel fears that some less educated child who can spot a naïve geek across the park will knife him because he doesn’t have a mobile phone to hand over, and that he will be arrested and taken away from us for anti-social behaviour because he bares his teeth and growls at strangers. We could keep him safe, here. If Ian MacDonald and the local concern didn’t get to him first.
These children are not, in fact, erased from cultural memory, but they figure exclusively as objects. Objects of charity, fear or scorn, often – like the misbehaving children on today’s ‘reality TV’ programmes – objects of comparison against which the most impatient middle-ranking mother can feel adequate, their subjectivity remains inadmissible, an idea that is almost never entertained. It is a situation that casts a glancing light on the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who may have been distinguished from these most familiar children not by his destitution or even by his unsocialized mind but by his habitat. European cities of the later eighteenth century were littered with children believed never to have learnt to be human. The USP of the Wild Boy, the basis of philosophers’ belief in his possible redemption, was his Alpine backdrop.
It was good, but I wasn’t sure it was true. I could see the Fellows’ red pens scoring through the reality TV and the USP. I ran my hands through my hair, which needed washing, and maximized the Colsay evacuees’ story. I still couldn’t really make it fit the orchard baby, although two tragically dead infants on one small island seemed too much of a coincidence. Or maybe not. Maybe the planet is in fact sown with broken babies. Or maybe Giles was right, the baby was a stillbirth that hadn’t qualified for burial in consecrated ground and had been quietly interred in the orchard. In England at least there was no obligation to register stillbirths until the twentieth century, which I suppose means that, like the result of a miscarriage now, you could bury one anywhere you wanted. Somewhere you could watch over it from your window, where the sea would sound until the world ends. If I had to bury either of mine I would—
I pushed the chair back and went to find Giles. He appeared to be cleaning the sink.
‘What you are doing?’
He turned round.
‘Look, Anna, I can’t keep doing this any more.’ He was going to leave me. He had a secret boat, had been having an affair with someone who is not obsessed with her children and her career. Someone who cares when he is depressed. He looked at the wall above my head. ‘I know what happened. At college. With Moth. And I know you haven’t been back.’
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Secrets at Oxford are about as common as students from the inner city.
‘And?’
‘Oh, Anna.’ He came over to where I stood in the doorway, tried to put his arms round me. I stood stiff. ‘I’m sorry. But I don’t know why you stopped going to college. You must have known they’d notice in the end.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I suppose you don’t. And if you ever mention it again I’ll – I’ll take the kids and leave.’
‘Back to Oxford?’ he asked.
‘I’m going to bed. I’m tired.’
The bathroom door locks with a key, which we hid high up after Raph locked himself in for the third time and had to be rescued by Jake with his ladder. I scaled the bookcase, raising swirls of dust, and then gave up and wedged the ancestral mahogany towel rail, which stains the towels and regularly falls over on Moth, under the door handle. I ran a bath. I brushed my teeth. I read Happy Babies and Children and concentrated on feeling guilty (‘all that your child really needs, now and later, is the absolute certainty that you love and approve of him, that your affection is not in any way conditional’). The bath came out well, just short of the overflow and hot enough to remind me of the point where pain and pleasure merge. I could stay in it a long time and the towel rail would, at least temporarily, frustrate any rescue attempts on the part of Giles.
What happened in college was that a student complained to the Principal that I had failed to turn up to a tutorial, which I had, because I’d had a phone call from St Peter’s saying that Raphael had been involved in an altercation in the playground an hour earlier and had been hiding under a desk, refusing to speak, ever since. A phone call I’d missed because I’d been in the library with the phone, as it should have been, silenced, and when I came out to cycle up Keble Road to the tutorial I checked the messages, phoned school to find that he was still unresponsive and that they had been unable to contact Giles (subsequently found to have been taking a potential college benefactor out to lunch). ‘A family emergency,’ I told the porter. People miss tutorials all the time, usually because they’ve been asked to speak at something in London, have lost their cat or are hungover, but the Principal was disposed to take this more seriously because he felt that, after a promising start (before the morning sickness kicked in and I began to decline the port), my commitment to the college had been questionable for some time and I needed to understand that a Research Fellowship was not simply a gift from the college to a fortunate individual but a contract between the Fellows and the scholar holding the Fellowship, an invitation, in effect, to join them for a number of years. That my formal obligations were limited not because the College wished to underwrite my domestic interests but because they hoped that the scholar who received the Fellowship would benefit from the freedom to carry out the most demanding research. The Principal hoped he would not find it necessary to repeat this interview and looked forward to seeing me at more of those events where the Fellows gathered, which were the cornerstone of college life.
The water had made a red tidemark above my breasts, which were, I was interested to note, leaking milk which drifted away like smoke from a cigarette. I turned on to my stomach so that my pelvic bones, missing in action since morning sickness wore off two years ago, grated on the enamel. I took a breath and pushed my face under the water. Victorian plumbing noises gurgled in my ears. If Giles came, if Moth cried, if Raphael had a nightmare or an urgent question about bridge pilings, I would not know. I should spend more time with my head underwater.
There was a Formal Hall three days later. Gowns will be worn. MA gowns (the doctoral gown is worn so rarely that it is usually hired) cost more than cashmere cardigans and since for babysitting reasons we never needed one at the same time we shared one that was short for Giles and long for me. As several elderly male professors of our acquaintance would attest, a gown covers a multitude of sins with regard to soup and, much less commonly, baby snot and sicked-up milk. Formal Hall begins at 7 p.m., sherry from 6.30 in the Senior Common Room. Moth, then seven months old, had supper at 6 p.m., bath at about 6.30, followed by a breastfeed which finished when he fell off the nipple so deeply asleep that the last gulp ran out of his open mouth. The ceaseless arithmetic of parenthood; I asked nursery not to let him nap so I could put him to bed early and leave Giles with a small warm bundle anaesthetized by milk, and hoped that by skipping dessert (which is not pudding, oh dear no, what do you think you’re living in, the post-imperial age?) and cycling really fast I could get home before his distress at the breast having unaccountably missed its 10 p.m. appointment annoyed the philosophy don next door.
Moth went to sleep in the pushchair on the way back from nursery at 4.30, a catastrophe. I lifted him out, sang songs about bouncy rabbits, tickled him, put him back, and he slept so deeply I kept touching his eyelids to make sure he wasn’t in a coma. We collected Raphael who, once convinced that he really was being encouraged to make a loud noise and wake the baby, produced more decibels than I had thought the human voice capable of generating. Moth’s eyelids flickered and he sank back into the stupor of an overstimulated seven-month-old who has found peace at last. Then I hoped he might sleep on into the evening so we could do the supper-bath-bed tarantella when I got back.
He woke at six, screaming as if he had just understood that we are all bound for death. Puréed avocado and baby-rice were ineffectual, but he scrabbled at my top as if I kept the elixir of eternal youth in there.
‘I can’t not feed him,’ I said, opening my shirt.
‘He’s going to want it again before you get back,’ warned Giles, who was trying to convince Raphael that an odd number of fish fingers on the plate is not a widely recognized harbinger of doom.
Moth grabbed a handful of the padding over my once visible ribcage and pulled my breast into his mouth. Silence, for a moment, filled the room, followed by gulping. Giles passed me a glass of water. It was 6:25.
‘OK,’ said Giles. ‘I’ll get the gown. You haven’t time to change.’
‘I need some make-up,’ I said. ‘Spotted bag in the bathroom cupboard. I’ll do it in the loo at college.’
‘Mummy,’ said Raphael. ‘Mummy, what happens if submarines run out of compressed air?’
‘Giles, can you put my phone in the sleeve of the gown? On silent?’
The only thing I was looking forward to was leaving the house without a bag.
Moth went on and on. At 6:40 I pushed my little finger into his mouth and pulled away. Milk spurted in jets. Moth rooted for a minute and then remembered mortality.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. I can’t leave him like this.’
‘Mummy, what if a submarine runs out of compressed air before it gets to the top?’
‘OK,’ said Giles. ‘Look, go now. At least show your face. If he doesn’t calm down in an hour I’ll bring him in a taxi, you can feed him somewhere and then I’ll take him away again. But you need to go now.’
I remembered the Principal’s pointing finger, his gaze on the rain outside. My Oxford career was probably already beyond redemption.
‘Anna, come on. You can’t lose your Fellowship over one breastfeed. He won’t starve in three hours.’
I poked my finger into his mouth again. Milk trickled. I pushed some kitchen paper into my bra, settled the gown over the whole sorry mess and ran for my bike. Moth’s screams curled round my legs to the end of the road.
The bath was cooling, becoming comfortable. I sat up, let some water out and added more hot. The house was silent, as if Giles had gone to bed. I lay down again and wriggled back until, by tilting my head, only my nose and mouth were above water.
I’d arrived at college with wild hair and my skirt soaked. The Fellows were filing in, meaning that I was too late to engage in the SCR dance where you try to make sure you finish the sherry in close proximity to someone whose company you can tolerate for the rest of the evening. It is not all right to swap places when the Principal rings the bell. I added myself to the procession and found myself next to the Bursar, who would have made an excellent prison warden or doctor’s receptionist. The Principal banged the table three times with the silver gavel, required the Almighty’s blessing in Latin, and the students sat down. As the noise level rose I remembered Moth’s open mouth and felt milk for him beginning to trickle into my bra.
‘Have we seen you since you took all that maternity leave?’ asked the Bursar.
‘Early evenings are difficult with small children. I’ve been back at work for eight weeks.’ Because maternity leave makes me want to chew my feet off. Because there were days when Raph was at school and Moth cried if I tried to put him down – so I could dial a phone number, for example, or butter a piece of toast – when I ended up walking up and down the road with him in my arms because I couldn’t actually go anywhere in case he needed feeding (which I did too badly to attempt in public) but I couldn’t stay in the house any longer because I didn’t trust myself not to hurt him.
‘Hmph,’ said the Bursar. ‘Of course in my day we had to choose. And if you chose to have children, you looked after them yourself. Better all round.’
A small white plate supporting an arrangement of fish and beetroot descended over my shoulder. You are not supposed to make eye contact with the butler. If you do, you will see in his eyes that he has decided which knife he would use and how long he would take over it. My phone banged against the table as I moved my arm.
‘It must have been hard,’ I said.
She forked beetroot. ‘Not in the slightest.’
There are four courses, not including dessert, which is a more or less optional extra. You converse with the person on your left until the plates are removed and then change sides, like one of those 1940s breastfeeding regimes. The senior Fellow should initiate the change. I was trying to drop casual remarks about recent progress with my research into conversation with the Fellow in Engineering when my phone began to whirr. I excused myself and ran for the corridor.
‘Anna, I’m sorry. He screamed until he was sick. We’re in a taxi.’
I could hear Raph singing ‘Old MacDonald’ and Moth moaning and hiccupping.
‘You mean he didn’t stop at all?’
‘We’re at the gates. I’ll come and find you.’
I heard the howls coming down the corridor. Hall has double doors lined with green baize. Oxbridge colleges are probably the last refuge of the green baize door, but I don’t know that they keep baby hysteria from the unsullied ears of the Fellows. Moth’s face was beetroot pink, his mouth cavernous with woe.
‘Oh Christ, quick. Give him to me. Raph, Daddy will take you to see something.’
‘But Mummy, what if a submarine runs out of compressed air?’
I ducked into the SCR, which was quiet and to hand, leaving Giles to address submarine contingency plans in the corridor, or perhaps to take Raph into Hall and make enquiries of the Fellow in Engineering. Moth’s howls rose. Death is certain and God is not in the world, suffering is inevitable and we had brought him into a vale of tears. I sat in the nearest seat, a low gold brocade which was probably meant by its eighteenth-century maker as a nursing chair, tucked the gown under my chin and latched him on. He pulled off again, screaming. I bared the other breast, leaving the first one waving in the wind, dribbling milk on to the brocade and the Persian rug below, and that was when the Principal came in.
Giles is right. I haven’t set foot in the place since, haven’t opened their letters. My salary keeps coming in, but if there is a mechanism for sacking Oxford Fellows it is so arcane that even other Oxford Fellows can’t invoke it. My contract ends in a few weeks and my career is effectively over.
What Giles doesn’t know, what nobody knows except the doctor at the Family Planning Clinic and perhaps, now, Ian MacDonald, is that the following week I unplanned our family. The sickness and tiredness I’d put down to Moth’s sleeplessness and constant breastfeeding, which I held also responsible for my lack of periods. But when the vomiting started and the soreness spread across my breasts, it occurred to me to check. I abandoned research to cycle out to Bicester to buy a pregnancy test where there was no risk of encountering an old student or one of Giles’s colleagues. I dithered in the chemist’s, briefly convinced that some kits must be for women who want a baby and some for women sickened by the idea and that if I bought the right one it would give me the right result. Is Clear Blue the clear blue line of a (male?) baby or the clear blue skies of freedom? Is the worm promised by Early Bird a writhing infant or the security of a long, free day ahead? The sales assistant began to watch me and I picked up an unbranded box, hoping that economy and (Giles’s) anti-capitalist principles would buy me peace.
They didn’t. I peed on the stick in the ladies’ at the public library in Bicester and watched two lines appear as swiftly as skin blistering after a burn. I wrapped the test in the chemist’s bag, poked it into the bin, washed my hands and cycled back into town and straight to the clinic. Giles has always wanted a daughter. Given my history, it was not hard to persuade two doctors that my mental health would be jeopardized by a third child. I turned over quickly, slopping water on to the floor, and kept my face under until the plumbing went quiet and stars exploded under my eyelids.
Colsay House
18th November
Dear Aubrey,
I make bold to write again; although I have received nothing from you the postal service here is such that the absence of letters tells me nothing about my friends’ intentions – as you perhaps noted on your travels in the summer, there is no post road closer than Inversaigh. I have been making progress here, I believe; it is slow work but the best prizes are not easily won and I have reason to be more hopeful than when I last wrote.
The great news here is that Lord Dumfermline has decided to offer all the residents of Shepsay free passage to Canada at the same time as raising the rents of those left behind. Apparently the people have been for some years crowded on to subdivided crofts at the northern end of the island, where the land is poorer and the water not so good, and, after an outbreak of sickness, it has been decided that they must be better and happier where there is land for the asking, with fine trees and rivers and a climate which means that they will never have to borrow for meal again. Mrs Grice tells me there is great unhappiness at the announcement, but Mrs Barwick says most sensible folk are glad at the chance so it is hard to say who might be right, but in any case it seems to me that it would be a great thing for the people of Colsay to do likewise. Do you think it would be objectionable if I were to write to Miss Emily about this? I imagine it would be cheaper than building and maintaining a schoolhouse and paying a schoolmaster for the rest of the century, which after all the new Education Act will oblige Lord Hugo to do if the people remain, and I am very sure that it would be in every way better for them to build new houses in a new land than to drag on in the filth and smoke and dampness of their current abodes, however competent such a schoolmaster might be (which is, is it not, highly doubtful, considering the situation here and probable remuneration?).
I hope to be able to send you good news of Mrs Grice later this month, and am happy to say that I am in expectation of another patient in the Spring, although she is not a woman with whom I have been able to have any conversation so far! I do hope you will find a moment to write soon. I recall what was said under the tree in August and wonder how much was truly meant …
Fond regards,
May