One important instinctual need, that for early attachment to the mother, remains as we know more or less unsatisfied; consequently it may become blunted, which means that the child after a while ceases to search for a mother substitute and fails to develop all the more highly organised forms of love which should be modelled on this first pattern.
– Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Infants Without Families: The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries, p. 22
Judith Fairchild appeared again while we were having breakfast. She had painted a line in a darker shade of orange across each cheek.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d still be having breakfast. Routines slip, don’t they, when there’s no school? You’re lucky you get such long holidays from the university, though. Must be a huge perk.’
I offered Moth a spoonful of porridge, which he spat out.
‘Go away that woman.’
‘Hush, Moth,’ said Giles. ‘We don’t say that. Can we help you, Judith?’
‘There’s a difference between a holiday and a vacation,’ said Raph. His mouth was full of toast and peanut butter. ‘There wouldn’t be anything to teach the students if people didn’t get time to do their research.’
She looked at me as if she’d been the recipient of the porridge. ‘Shh, Raph,’ I said. ‘Eat your breakfast.’
‘But you always say that!’
‘I hope you had a comfortable night,’ I said to Judith.
‘Why?’ asked Raph.
Moth drew in the spat-out porridge with his finger, which was blotched with what on closer inspection turned out to be red jam.
‘Oh, well, we were a bit warm. It’s funny, isn’t it, you come to the Hebrides and even with all the windows open all night it gets hot – and those duvets are very cosy, aren’t they, for summer?’
‘There’s a special condenser boiler,’ said Raph. ‘It’s meant to maintain a steady temperature. And there’s triple glazing.’
Giles stood up. ‘I’ll come over now and reset the thermostat for you. Easily done. Was there anything else?’
‘We were hoping to do the circular walk from Rothkinnick. Only we’d need a lift over there.’
‘Sure,’ said Giles. ‘When did you want to go?’
‘We should make the most of the weather, really, shouldn’t we?’ She looked pointedly at the sky. ‘While it’s bright. It’s meant to rain later.’
‘Whenever you’re ready.’ Giles finished his tea and held the door for her. I could see the puffins flying sadly across his mind.
I lifted Moth out of his chair and began to tidy up breakfast. It would, I knew, be sensible to stop looking for the baby. She wasn’t Alexander Buchan, not unless his mother had had both a wartime affair with Nigel or Edwin and some unimaginable reason for burying him in the wrong place, which was hardly plausible after all the official involvement in Mary’s death. I didn’t really think Julia or Thea would secrete even a stillborn baby on Colsay. Why should they? She could be anyone, any small human, wanted or reviled, lost to anger or accident or despair, any of those brief and unrecorded lives that never got as far as the baptismal font, let alone a first-person narrative on the internet or a journal held in cold storage in a city archive. The Cassingham DNA didn’t really change anything; a late miscarriage, a stillbirth, common enough now and more so in the nineteenth century. I wondered how the world would be different if the accidents of infant mortality had fallen in slightly different places, erasing, for example, Einstein, Freud and Stalin while leaving for articulate adulthood the contemporaries mourned only by mothers and those whom infant mortality deprived of motherhood. Instead of psychoanalysis and general relativity and the gulags, with their own harvest of human potential, what?
‘Moth done a poo.’
I picked him up and held him at the shoulders and knee. Never squash a full nappy.
‘Raph? I’m going to change Moth’s nappy and then we’re going down to the headland, OK? I want to show you something there.’
‘What?’
‘Surprise project. You’ll see when we get there.’ Unless I thought of something better in the meantime, an interactive lecture on Colsay Burial Practices Through the Ages.
We could see showers moving across the sea, blurring the horizon like grease on a lens, but the sky over Colsay was silver and the grass was dry. The air smelt of seaweed and peat. I shifted Moth on to the other hip and unfastened my cagoule; the house is so cold that I often find myself overdressed when I get outside. Raphael had run ahead and then been arrested by something on a dry stone wall.
‘What is there?’ I called.
‘Moth down. Moth go see.’
I put him down and watched him diminish across the grass. I don’t usually see Moth from a distance greater than I might cross between him losing his balance and hitting the floor, I don’t go too far to be able to smell the food in his hair and the poo in his nappy. He’s so small I could lose him in an open field.
There were patches of blue sky by the time we came to the ruins of the church, and a hesitant reflection of the pale sun in the sea. The church is at the end of the ‘street’, the worn stones between the two rows of houses. I don’t know if there were never any pews or if they were taken out, but there is one small window high in the eastern wall and even I have to duck in the doorway. It would have been a dark place to spend summer Sundays, with the birds calling and swooping outside, the sea blue and the grass rippling in the sunlight.
‘Careful, Raph. We don’t know the walls are safe. It was the graveyard I wanted to look at.’
He came out. ‘Why?’
‘I thought it might be interesting to see if we can read any of the inscriptions. Moth, love, don’t go through there.’
‘Why?’
‘Moth, come here!’ I crouched behind a stone. ‘Peepo!’
He came running. ‘Peepo!’
‘Why, Mummy?’ repeated Raph.
‘Because then we can find out about the people who lived here. That’s history.’
He stroked the top of a gravestone, worn and tilting.
‘Are the bones still here?’
‘Probably. Bones take a long time to – to disappear.’ To rot.
‘Peepo!’ shouted Moth.
Raph fingered his own eye sockets. Shadows flickered across the grass, a brighter green here than anywhere else on the island. Two ravens glided over our heads, squawked and tumbled up the sky, turning like stunt planes.
‘Come on. Let’s see if we can find any we can read.’
Most of the stones had been hammered by rain and scoured by wind until it was hard to tell that they had ever been pulled from the ground and chiselled into words. There were people there whose only legacies were posterity, and perhaps the ghosts of their impatience, their bad temper, the way they never recognized their children’s achievements and were incapable of admitting error, were still whispering in the ears of parents in Colla and Newfoundland and Sydney.
‘Look, Raph, can you see? Even rock gets worn away by wind and rain in the end. Look how they’re so much rougher on this side where the wind comes off the sea.’
‘Down,’ said Moth. ‘Moth want a biscuit.’
I pulled a foil package out of my pocket and offered him an oatcake.
‘No oatcake. Biscuit.’
‘OK. Biscuit while Mummy looks at some more stones, all right?’
‘Stones biscuit.’
I gave him the ginger biscuit from under the oatcakes, which left me without a bribe for the way home.
The newer graves are further from the church, towards the rocks.
‘I still can’t really read any letters.’ Raph was kneeling at one of the stones, tracing grooves with his finger.
‘I think this might say “Mary”,’ I said. ‘I doubt they bothered with long inscriptions. Everyone must have known who was where anyway.’
It was seeming less and less likely that we were going to find Alexander Buchan or any other story lying in a rough grave behind a drystone wall. There were lots of mounds in all sizes, and it was hard to tell which were man-made and which natural, let alone the size of the bones underneath. I like the churchyards in Sussex, where you get names and relationships and causes of death and how the survivors wanted people to think they felt about it, but perhaps that’s just another way of denying mortality. Perhaps it would be better for the living to accept that the narrative inside our heads is finite and probably inconclusive, not to be chiselled on to stone and cast out into the future.
Raph stroked a fallen stone. ‘This one’s broken.’
‘It’s probably been there a long time. The graveyard might pre-date the church.’
I stooped over a small mound with a knee-high stone. Under the lichen, three letters were engraved, probably initials, as if passers-by might need reminding who lay there. If even the majority of those born on Colsay had died here over the centuries, there must be a lot more bodies somewhere. The ravens landed on the church roof, and one of them shouted something down to us.
‘Mummy? Where’s Moth?’
My heart turned. Where?
‘Moth! Moth, where are you?’
Small head bouncing off the rocks, little fingers scrabbling on falling stone. I had always deserved this.
‘Moth!’
‘Mummy, where is he?’
‘I don’t know. Help me look. Look behind all the stones.’ But he’d have come out by now.
‘Moth!’
Where would he go? Not, usually, away from me, not voluntarily. ‘Moth!’
Raphael was running from stone to stone, as if Moth would really cower there while he called him. I climbed up the dry stone wall. This is the beginning of it, this is what it feels like to become one of those stories. Alexander Buchan’s story.
‘Mummy, don’t, it’ll fall.’
He wasn’t there.
‘Moth!’
In the church. No. I ran around the outside wall. I knew what came next.
He was gone. Moth was gone. No sign of him on the rocks, no body bobbling like discarded plastic on the waves. No – no blood.
‘Moth! Moth, come back! Moth!’
Raph let out a wail. I looked at him and had nothing to say.
‘Moth!’
I didn’t know what to do next. Run for Giles and his phone, but I didn’t want to leave the place we’d last seen Moth. Keep looking, but we knew he wasn’t there. Find him.
I heard a shout. Not Moth.
‘Anna! He’s all right. I’ve got him.’
Zoe. Zoe coming up the street, holding Moth’s hand as he trotted beside her. I ran to him.
‘There’s my mummy.’ He sounded as if I was expected.
I picked him up and held him so tightly I could feel his ribs flexing. My eyes filled. Never out of my sight, never again. He wriggled.
‘He was just pottering in the houses,’ said Zoe. ‘He was totally safe. He’s been chatting away.’
I buried my nose in his hair. Zoe’s mouth made the shape of a smile.
‘He does. But I was frightened. I looked up and he wasn’t there.’
She pushed her hair back. ‘He was there. Just not where you thought.’
‘Bad enough. Believe me.’
Raph came up. There were tears on his face. ‘Can I cuddle him too?’
‘Of course you can.’
I knelt down, Moth on my hip, and put the other arm round Raphael.
‘Don’t squeeze him too hard.’
Raph stroked my hair. ‘You did.’
‘Moth pulling Raph’s hair,’ said Moth. I disentangled his fingers and stood up. ‘Moth down!’
‘Not yet.’ My hands were shaking. I tried to take a deep breath and failed.
Zoe looked at Raph. ‘Hello. I’m Zoe. I was just exploring your village.’
He studied her clothes. All fashions have always looked convincing on thin eighteen-year-olds, from balloon sleeves and Leghorn hats to tight jeans and the kind of top I vaguely associate with American ball games, but she was obviously cold, her hands mottled and lips pale. Her lollipop-stick legs ended in those canvas ankle boots they all wear, which were wet and muddy. Her mother should have made her put her wellies on, I found myself thinking, as if I didn’t myself allow Raph out without a coat most of the winter. Her hair, the caramel colour often adopted by women in their later thirties but rarely seen in nature, hung in tangles around her face. I had an uncharacteristic urge to wrap her up, warm her, feed her.
‘Why are you exploring it?’ Raph asked.
She smiled. ‘Because I think a deserted village is cool, and because I didn’t have anything else to do.’
‘I think it’s warm. The Romans could make buildings that stayed cool even in Naples in summer. I took my coat off.’
I glanced around. Took it off and left it somewhere, but there are worse things to lose than coats.
‘Down!’ said Moth. I put him down but kept hold of his hand.
‘It is bright,’ Zoe agreed. ‘Can you tell me about your village?’
The sun was on his face and he squinted up at her. I should have tried to inflict sunscreen. There is a rule that babies and children should not be in direct sunlight at all between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. and it applies in Scotland as well as on the beaches of the Mediterranean.
Moth pulled my hand. ‘Mummy come!’
‘I can tell you a bit,’ said Raph. ‘People lived in it until after the war, but not many, and then they went away and died. And we can’t read the gravestones.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I expect they’re pretty worn out by now.’
I followed Moth towards one of the houses and stood watching outside the door when he went in. The island children must have roamed freely, but some of them must also have fallen off the rocks. And in winter they’d have been corralled inside like animals in a byre.
‘You didn’t feel like a walk?’ I asked Zoe.
‘I felt like a walk. That’s why I came here. I just didn’t feel like spending the day with my mother.’
I nearly said that I wouldn’t either. ‘Sometimes it’s nice to have some time to yourself,’ I substituted.
Moth came back to the doorway. ‘Up! More biscuit!’
‘All gone biscuits,’ I told him. ‘Oatcakes.’
‘No oatcakes!’
‘All gone biscuits.’
He rolled on the ground. ‘Moth wants a biscuit! No oatcakes! No!’ His feet drummed my boot and I moved.
‘That’s pretty cool,’ said Zoe.
‘Yeah. I always think that.’ I looked at her. I had no hope of achieving anything until after lunch anyway. ‘Would you like to come back to the house and have some tea or something? Stay for lunch if you like, though we’re not a gourmet establishment.’
‘OK. Thanks. Only I’m vegetarian.’
‘Oh, we don’t have meat for lunch. I’m no cook.’ I scooped up Moth and clasped him as he kicked at my pubic bone. ‘Ow, Moth, no kicking Mummy. Raph! Come on, love, I think we’d better go home and make lunch.’
He poked his finger into a hole in the wall. ‘Can I stay here? I won’t do anything silly.’
No. Because the Neolithic wraiths will come up their stairs and drag you in. Because the sky might fall on you. Because one day those walls will collapse and therefore I don’t want you anywhere near them ever. ‘I can’t see a good reason why not. But Zoe’s coming back with us.’
His shoulders relaxed. ‘OK. I’ll come too.’
Moth stopped kicking. ‘Raph come too and have a biscuit.’
It is occasionally clear to me that they as well as I would prefer a wider world.
‘Should I take my shoes off?’ asked Zoe.
I stared at her. ‘Why? Your feet would probably freeze to the floor.’
She shrugged. ‘Mum insists, at home. She says she won’t have whatever people have stepped in on the pavement walked all over her carpets.’
I put Moth down and he stood holding my hand and looking up at Zoe.
‘But there aren’t any pavements. I even reckon the birdshit has probably worn off Giles’s shoes by the time he’s walked back here. Not that there’s much carpet either. Don’t worry.’
‘Zoe,’ said Raphael. ‘Do you like bridges?’
She smiled at him through her hair. ‘I like standing on them watching the water. Do you play pooh-sticks?’
He went into the playroom. ‘I like them because of the building. Do you know how they tense the caissons?’
He held out the bridge-building book and she went over to him.
‘I’ll make you some tea,’ I said.
Alone in the kitchen, I ate a dried apricot and sniffed at some out-of-date cream cheese which I was hoping to feed Zoe. It was too far gone, but there were eggs only a couple of days past the date stamped on their shells.
‘Do you like scrambled eggs?’ I asked.
‘I don’t,’ said Raph.
‘Yucky eggs,’ Moth added.
‘I wasn’t asking you. There’s enough soup for two.’
‘Sure,’ said Zoe. She was sitting on the floor between them, helping Moth push the animals into the ark. ‘But I’m not very hungry.’ She had the body of someone who had been very hungry for a very long time.
I went back into the kitchen and broke the eggs, which seemed to be all right. I didn’t have to persuade Moth to be put down while I stirred in milk and pepper, and I didn’t have to step over Raph and his book to get to the fridge. Toy cars were not being pushed under my feet and no one demanded to play with the milk carton and its lid or push down the lever on the toaster. I could have put the radio on and heard the news or – I glanced at the clock – maybe even the Afternoon Play without concern for developing young minds. I went and looked into the playroom.
‘Are you OK here, Zoe? Don’t feel you have to entertain the children.’
She looked up. Mrs Noah (doesn’t that woman have a name of her own?) was standing on the roof of the ark as if reasoning with the elephant threatening to jump off the second floor of the garage.
‘One, two, three, jump!’ said Moth. ‘Oh bugger ark.’
Zoe grinned. ‘I’m having a great time. Best for weeks.’
‘Zoe’s been in a rainforest,’ said Raph. ‘A temperate rainforest in Canada. With bears. Not the Amazon rainforest. People keep cutting down the Amazon rainforest and it makes half of the oxygen on Earth so if they don’t stop we won’t have any oxygen to breathe and we’ll all die.’
I stroked his hair. ‘I’m sure they’ll work something out. Someone will work something out. Was it fun, Zoe, in Canada? Where were you, on the West coast?’
Her hair swung down. ‘Vancouver Island. It was fun for a little while. Then I came home.’
‘Lunch nearly ready?’ asked Moth.
‘Soon, Moth. I’ll get back to the eggs. I’d love to hear about Canada, I haven’t been anywhere for years.’
*
‘That’s far too much for me,’ said Zoe. I tipped most of her egg back on to my plate.
‘Like so?’
She shrugged. I am entirely willing to waste food in exchange for childcare.
‘So you’re just back from Vancouver?’ I wanted to hear about a different ocean, the smell of different trees, the sound of other accents. I put some cheese on Moth’s fork in the hope that experiments with cutlery would lead him to eat it. ‘Are you having a gap year?’
Zoe pushed her egg around, watched by Raphael as if eating disorders were a form of avant-garde performance art.
‘What’s a gap year?’ he asked.
‘When people finish school and before they go to university they spend a year travelling on their own or with friends.’
Zoe’s hair came down.
‘Oh. Why?’
‘Because it’s interesting,’ I said. ‘To see bears.’ Or Save the Rainforest.
‘Yeah,’ said Zoe. ‘Only I dropped out of mine.’
‘Dropped splat,’ said Moth.
‘You dropped out of your gap year?’
‘My mother doesn’t think it’s funny. She’s, like, shadowing me in case I try to drop out of Cambridge as well.’
‘Are you going to Cambridge?’
She cut up some toast and pushed it under the egg. ‘I’m meant to be starting next year. She says if I can’t cope with a gap year I should go in October instead. I think she thinks they should throw someone else out so I can change my mind. Or she can change it for me.’
‘What are you going to read?’ I put some more butter on my bread.
‘Law.’
Law didn’t seem like a mother-hater’s choice. English literature, perhaps, populated by malevolent parents (why do children tell all the stories?), or a modern language involving many months far away. The impenetrable realms of physics, or the secret kingdom of mathematics.
‘Are you looking forward to that?’
She shrugged. ‘It seems too far away.’
In fifteen months, Raph would be nine and Moth would be a person with bowel control, the beginnings of altruism and a haircut. He squeezed a piece of cheese on toast until it extruded like toothpaste through the gaps in his fingers.
‘Don’t do that,’ said Raph. ‘There are children in Africa who don’t have anything to eat at all.’
I sat up straight. ‘There are also children in Africa who are too full for a second helping of ice cream. It’s a continent, not a refugee camp, Raph.’
Moth began to rub the squashed cheese into the table.
‘Moth like some ice cream.’
‘I haven’t got any ice cream. We were just talking about it.’
‘More ice cream?’
‘There isn’t any ice cream.’
He banged his plate on the table.
‘Moth wants ice cream!’
‘I know Moth wants ice cream but there isn’t any. What about a biscuit?’
‘No biscuit. Not like biscuit.’
‘Yes, you do,’ said Raph. ‘You’re always wanting biscuits.’
Moth’s plate and cup swept on to the floor as if a tornado had passed over the table. His feet drummed and his arms lifted as if he were about to speak in tongues.
‘Moth wants ice cream now! Now!’
I hauled Moth out of his chair so he didn’t bang his head on it. Raph put his fingers in his ears.
‘Zoe,’ I shouted, ‘you and Raph finish lunch.’
She nodded. I took Moth into the playroom, where I passed the time by thinking about my book until the storm cleared.
*
Zoe helped me tidy up lunch and congratulated Moth on putting wooden animals into animal-shaped holes in a wooden cube while I loaded the washing machine and put away some dishes which had been air-drying for several days. She offered to play with Raph so I could work when Moth went to sleep, and when the ensuing silence made me peer over the banisters I could see them lying on their stomachs building another doomed Lego metropolis. I went back to my laptop, which was sitting on the bed, expectant as a dog.
Although it was, in theory, possible to reclaim abandoned children from the Hospital, in fact barely 1 per cent of those given into its care returned to the wider community. The numbers are so small that it is hard to generalize (and it should be borne in mind that 70 per cent of foundlings did not survive their first year in the Hospital during this decade), but in general those who were reclaimed were under six months old, had been at the Hospital for less than three months and were returned to their mothers, many of whom had been forcibly deprived of their babies as a result of sickness, indigence or drunkenness.
I rolled off the bed and went to the door to listen. I could hear Raphael saying something about fire engines and Zoe laughing. I went along the hall, setting my feet down carefully and avoiding the creaking boards, and sidled down the outside edges of the stairs. When I was little, I used to get out of bed and sneak downstairs to make sure my parents weren’t arguing, which they were. It seemed somehow that by providing an audience I made a boundary for their conflict, ensured that the knots in my stomach and the rawness of my bitten fingers were the manifestations of nothing more cataclysmic than my own fear. As long as I was crouching on the stairs, neither of them would leave. Zoe was building something rectangular with a tower at one end, like a Saxon church, and Raph was readying the fire brigade on the other side of the room. There are places in the world where people have been herded into churches which are then locked and set on fire, but they are not usually places and times for the emergency services. I went back to my room, leaving the door wide open.
It is, of course, impossible to follow the subsequent lives of these babies in any detail, although study of parish registers (see Kenton and Johnson, 2002, pp. 112–18) suggests that, as one would expect, mortality rates after return were disproportionately high. Whether this is a result of enduring physical problems consequent upon time spent in the care of the Hospital or a reflection of the economic and social problems that caused their admission in the first place is now beyond investigation; the lives and deaths of poor children from this era often appear to elude the most basic records.
The sky was grey. No particular weather, no birds. I could hear Zoe making fire-engine noises with an edge of self-consciousness in her voice, like a primary school teacher singing hymns pour encourager les autres. I reopened the ‘Orchard Baby’ folder.
Mr Webb again thanked Mrs Buchan, and said that the inquiry would hear from Jamie Norman and John Peterson in the afternoon.
Mr Norman and Mr Peterson confirmed that they had lifted Mary Homerton’s body from the water. They had taken their twenty-foot dayboat out to the north end of the island when they heard that the children were missing and that Mary had been seen carrying Alexander past the church in the afternoon, thinking that ‘You’ve a better view of the cliffs from the bottom than the top.’ They saw the searchers on the headland and began to survey the water, following the current where it sweeps round towards Inversaigh. There was a slight easterly wind and no waves to speak of, and they followed the cliff round towards the cave, where they saw something bobbing in the water. They guessed at once what it was. Mr Peterson raised the body with the boathook and both men pulled it in. It had been face-down in the water so they knew there was no point in trying to revive her, but they tried anyway. There was no pulse and they were unable to start respiration. They did not wave and shout to the searchers for fear of conveying the message that Mary was alive. When they were sure she was dead, they spent some time looking for Alexander, but being so much smaller he was harder to find and after an hour or so decided they should return the body to land.
Dr Welling appeared next. He had been among the searchers and was summoned as soon as the boat was seen. He confirmed that the cause of death was probably head injuries almost certainly incurred in falling down the cliff, followed by drowning; at the time it had been hard to say whether death had occurred before or after entry to the water, although the post-mortem has since indicated that Mary drowned. Grazes on her hands and arms suggested some attempt to arrest her fall, although he did not like to say that this indicated an accident; instinct or perhaps second thoughts had been known to lead suicides who had left quite explicit notes to incur severe lacerations under similar circumstances.
Mr Webb asked Dr Welling if he felt anything could or should have been done differently to prevent the tragedy. He replied that a secure fence would prevent accidents, and incidentally reduce the loss of livestock on the island, but under present conditions it was clear that such a project would be practically impossible, and no physical impediment will prevent a determined suicide. At this point someone arrived with a message that Dr Welling was urgently required elsewhere; Mr Webb confirmed that he had nothing further to say and the case was adjourned.
MARY HOMERTON CASE: SUMMING-UP
Mr Webb concluded the Mary Homerton case today, reminding the court that it is not the role of a Fatal Accident Inquiry to apportion blame in the moral or legal sense but only to make recommendations with regard to what might be done to avoid or reduce the risk of any repetition of a fatal accident. It is in the nature of accidents that they need not have happened and that had events unrolled differently they would not have happened; it was clear in this case, for example, that had the person who saw Mary leaving the village with Alexander asked her where she was going and why, the outcome might have been very different. But perhaps she would have given a plausible answer – perhaps, indeed, she had a plausible reason – and continued on her way. We will never know, and several of those involved have testified to their self-doubt and questionings. These are natural but not useful preoccupations.
Mr Webb suggested that the Castle School should reconsider the amount of unsupervised free time allowed to girls known to be unhappy or fragile, but accepted that, within reasonable bounds, every institution must find its own balance between the freedom of the many and the safety of the few, and he did not believe that the Castle School’s unusual ethos had been outwith the bounds of reason on this occasion. He would communicate with the Cassingham family with regard to the possibility of fencing the cliffs, but felt there were no grounds for an urgent or formal recommendation at the present time.
The baby must have survived then, somehow. Mustn’t it? There was a patch of sunlight out to sea and brightness behind the clouds outside the window. A raven came gliding past, and out across the weed-stained stones on the beach, each feather of its wings clear against the pale sky. The cliffs, of course, are still not fenced, and I find it hard to imagine that any barrier would withstand the winter winds. There are traces of a dry stone wall along the section above the church, which means that someone must have balanced there, hefting stones with the sea exploding against the rock face so far below that you can tell a drifting lifebuoy only by its shape (Giles waited for it to follow the tide round into the bay and then went out to check the ship’s name so he could report it to the coastguard, as if Colsay were a fellow traveller subject to the codices of seamanship). Raph and I once saw a lamb fall down the cliffs when they were rounding up the sheep on Shepsay, bounding and leaping vertically in a fast-forward parody of springtime gambols until it lay broken on a ledge. The lambs were being taken to the mainland for slaughter and we knew that, had eaten lamb chops for supper the previous night, and I knew, but did not tell Raph, that that jolting flight was a better death than the one awaiting it two days later. Still it figures in my dreams sometimes, the way a misstep leads to death. The babies who crawl across the glass cliff into their mothers’ embrace are perhaps right after all: we pass our days on that glass, all of us, and if we looked down we could not move at all. I heard Moth begin to stir and went to him; children need the mother on the other side of the chasm or they stop, suspended between past and future like the Wild Boy of Aveyron.
I picked him up. He put his arms round my neck and rubbed his face on my shoulder.
‘Hello, love. Mummy just needs to finish with her computer.’
He raised his head. ‘Pooter. Moth press buttons.’
‘Not just now.’
I carried him back into our bedroom. The sun had gone in and the sky was dark over the sea. I closed the computer and took him downstairs, to where Zoe was determinedly rescuing Raph’s Lego churchgoers with a wind-up fire engine driven by a grinning plastic cat.
While theories about the historical specificity of emotional bonds between parents and children have become deeply unfashionable in recent years, it is hard to find a fully satisfactory alternative account of the rise of boarding schools during this period. The advent of paved roads and the stagecoach network made people of middling rank much more mobile than they had been in the previous century, while the kinds of knowledge that were valued, especially for boys but also to a lesser extent for girls and especially girls from socially aspirant families, were less compatible with the daily occupations of most parents. It is relatively easy to teach a child what you are doing while you do it, but harder, and often economically inefficient, to stop what you are doing in order to teach a child double-entry book-keeping or French grammar. The increased value placed upon these skills in the context of the urbanizing and industrializing world of the mid- to late eighteenth century was in itself a reason for sending children to institutions where such things were known and could be efficiently passed on, while the mechanics of this ‘sending’ were ever easier, but neither seems quite sufficient to explain a shift in what we would now call ‘parenting culture’ of which contemporary observers seem to have been fully aware.
I was teetering on the edges of an inversion of the outdated view that children became more precious to their parents as their economic use declined. Does it betoken greater affection to keep your children with you, illiterate and limited to a life of manual labour like your own, or to send them away at considerable cost to learn another way of being? It was far from clear to me that parental love is reliably manifest in action anyway, and once you find yourself trying to write the history of love you would probably be better occupied tilling the fields yourself. I deleted the double-entry book-keeping, on the uncharacteristically honest grounds that I do not really know what it is.
‘Anna?’ Giles calling from upstairs, where he was reading to Raph.
‘What? I’m working.’
Footsteps along the landing. ‘Can you get the door?’
I looked up. The grass on the hill was glowing in the light of the low sun, and there was probably a photogenic sunset in progress over the sea. Someone knocked on the door, and regrettably there was no possibility that it was a pizza delivery or even Jehovah’s Witnesses. I saved my work and went down the hall. There was indeed molten pink sky etching the clouds and reflecting off the sea and I felt that, having come so far for the Great Outdoors, Judith could reasonably have been expected to give it her attention.
‘Judith. No further problems, I hope?’
She was wearing a Liberty peacock skirt. I once gave my father a tie in that print, bought on my first excursion to London, but he never wore it and when we went through his clothes after the funeral it was not there.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No’ with the cottage. I’ve been enjoying the view.’ Whisky, again, and her diction blurred.
‘Good.’
She took a breath. ‘Anna. Can I talk to you? I mean, please could I come in? It’s abou’ Zoe.’
‘Oh.’ It is in contravention of the spirit of the Hôtel de la Mère to take on other people’s distress. I was willing to exchange houseroom and meals for ad hoc childcare, but counselling was not part of the deal.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll make some tea.’
She followed me down the hall, bumping once against the wall. ‘Do you have mint? Or anything else without caffeine? It stops me sleeping.’
I stood in front of my glass of claret and put it behind the toaster. My experience is that alcohol will prevail over caffeine, but since she wanted tea I was very willing to give her Giles’s rather than mine.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Giles has a cupboard full of infusions.’
I gave her the Bird Mug. I leant against the counter and she stood in the middle of the room, legs planted apart, like an estate agent sizing it up.
‘You had Zoe with you most of the day.’
I warmed my hands around my mug. ‘Most of the afternoon, anyway.’
‘Was she – was she OK?’
We both know the extent to which Zoe is not OK.
‘Judith, I don’t know her. She seemed happy enough.’ The balance of her mind was not disturbed.
‘It’s just – well, I don’t know if you noticed how thin she is.’
‘I did. I’m afraid I’ve seen quite a few anorexic students.’
‘So I worry about her.’
I waited, sipped some caffeine. I wondered if she would regret this in the morning.
‘And she doesn’t talk to me. We got her to the doctor but she said she wasn’t interested in any treatment and Brian says she’s not sick enough to be sectioned and anyway sectioning people keeps them alive but it doesn’t make them better.’ She looked up and some of the tea jerked on to the floor. ‘Only – you know – she’s my child. I’d settle for keeping her alive. Sorry. I’ll wipe that if you show me where the cloths are.’
‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘These days I count that kind of spill as cleaning. Come on, sit down. Would you like a biscuit with that?’
There was half a packet of the ginger bribes at the back of the cupboard. I think Giles thinks the children snack on rice cakes and carrot sticks.
She nodded. ‘Thanks. I shouldn’t really. I don’t have them in the house, at home.’
And you and your daughter are models to us all. ‘Surely the point is that neither your doctor nor your husband think Zoe’s in immediate danger?’
She shrugged. ‘It just seems so pointless to wait until she is. In danger. You wouldn’t, would you, if you saw Timothy going towards a river or trying to get the top off a bottle of pills. I’m her mother. And I’ve read about it: sometimes people collapse quite suddenly and it just seems – Anna, it’s such a waste. I mean, they’ve always done so well. Will, my son, you know he’s reading medicine. At King’s.’ She took a slug of tea as if it were gin. ‘And she’s so pretty when she’s not so thin and she got such good A-levels and she was always so polite. All my friends used to be envious, their children were getting into drugs and drinking and not doing their homework and all I had to worry about was that she was working too hard. And then she started going running on the streets, which was a worry, but she let me drive her to the gym instead, every day after school, and then that stupid, stupid idea about going off to Canada. I knew she wouldn’t cope on her own, I told her over and over and she just said I was being controlling and I wouldn’t let her live her own life. And now I’m just having to watch while her whole life goes down the toilet. All those years. Just when we were expecting – I mean, just when you think you’ve done the job.’
Tears slid down her face. The make-up was waterproof. ‘Maybe she wanted to try it without help,’ I suggested. Maybe she doesn’t like being someone’s job.
‘Her! I don’t think she knows how to use a washing machine or fry an egg. The idea of flying off to Canada …’
‘Oh, we all work out eggs and washing machines. I mean, Moth can do the washing machine, he just doesn’t always put clothes in the drum. And you know, she’d do some of that at Cambridge anyway.’
Unless Judith was planning to book herself into the Hilton for the duration of term. We had one parent who did that, though what really astonished me was that her son accepted it, as if it was entirely natural that his mother had no life of her own, as if he hadn’t noticed that other people’s parents had gone back to their own worlds.
Judith began to stack our unopened bills. ‘Yes, in college, with people to look after her and me at the end of the phone. I did most of Will’s washing in his first term anyway, and then I think he found a girlfriend.’
I bit my lip. It was too late for Will anyway.
‘Don’t you think if he’s going to practise medicine, domestic appliances shouldn’t be beyond him?’
She met my eyes for the first time. ‘They appear to be beyond his father, who specializes in cardiothoracic surgery.’
We heard Giles coming down the stairs.
‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I only wanted to ask you how Zoe seemed. Since I can’t – can’t get through to her these days. Did she eat anything?’
I finished my tea and brushed the biscuit crumbs on to the floor before Giles saw them. ‘A bit of lunch. Not much.’
‘Oh,’ said Giles. ‘Good evening, Judith. Everything OK over at the house?’
‘Yes. Thank you. I’m just going back over there. Thanks, Anna. Good night.’
She saw herself out, banging the door. Giles sat down. ‘Didn’t you have a bottle open? Anna, was she drunk?’
I retrieved it and poured him a glass. ‘Yup. Cheers.’
‘Cheers. And what did she want? No fish forks? Shortage of cappuccino whisks?’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Nothing much. Nothing to worry about.’
He drank some wine and began to turn the glass by its stem. ‘Listen, Anna?’
I yawned. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stay awake if I tried to keep working. ‘What?’
‘I had an e-mail from Sam.’
I leant back in the chair. My eyes were closing. ‘How is he?’
‘Fine. Says hi. Anna, are you awake?’
I opened my eyes. The room blurred and they closed again. ‘More or less.’
‘There’s a job in Glasgow.’
I sat up. He’d stopped turning the glass and was looking at me.
‘Glasgow?’ I said. Too far for even Giles to think he could commute from here. Unless he was planning to abandon me with the kids on Colsay while he holed up in some pristine new-build flat all week, somewhere with wooden floors and a shiny kitchen. ‘What about me?’
He took another drink. ‘It’s for you. A history job. Eighteenth or nineteenth century, interest in family studies, gender or childhood particularly welcome. Rather a plum, I’d say, especially at the moment. God knows how they got the funding.’
‘Oh.’ I ran my finger round the rim of my glass. Another invitation to chip away another piece of my self-esteem. I negotiate not getting jobs that aren’t a perfect fit by saying that they probably found someone who really knows about the Grand Tour or the Napoleonic Wars or whatever it is, but not getting the job Giles was describing would mean there is someone else who does exactly what I do better than I do it. Or perhaps just more than I do it, which would not be hard.
‘I thought you’d be interested. Sam said he thought of you as soon as he saw it.’
I wouldn’t get it. There are too many men and childless women who go to the bar after seminars and work through the weekends. I like Glasgow, though. Scottish schools are meant to be good. If we sold the Oxford house – but I have been ‘at Oxford’ all my adult life and I think I might be a different person without that word on my lapel badge, neither the eighteen-year-old who left home by walking down the street to the bus under a rucksack so heavy it was like learning to walk for the first time, ignoring my mother who stood waving in the curved window of the front room, nor the person who is able to hold her institutional affiliation like a secret pregnancy or an invisible comfort blanket. Affiliation, a word holding both filament and filial, the ties that bind. The comfort blanket, which neither of my children could be persuaded to accept as a substitute for my nocturnal attentions, is what I have recently learnt to identify as a ‘transitional object’, a material substitute for or reminder of the absent mother. The university as transitional object for adults whose need for Mummy was never satisfied: discuss. Giles, whose mother sent him to boarding school before he could tie his own shoelaces, flicked his hair.
‘So. You should apply.’
‘So you can take that professorship at the Highlands and Islands place? You realize everyone in Oxford would think you were mad?’
He shrugged. I think being that posh equips people with such an implacable sense of self-worth that they can take down struggling democracies, thunder downstairs while the children are asleep and send the lower orders over the top at Ypres without feeling in the least implicated. It should come as no surprise that this also makes it possible to resign from the jobs for which other people would sell their bodies in order to become the saviour of puffins.
‘Why would I care? I wouldn’t be there. Come on, Anna. It would be good for all of us. Think about it, OK?’ He stood up. ‘And if you got that job and we moved, you’d be earning as much as I would.’
I yawned again. Maybe I could just put my head down on the table and sleep here, further from the children. ‘Would you like that?’ I asked.
‘You would. Come on, bedtime. You’re falling asleep there.’
Yes, I would.
Colsay House,
Colsay
24th Nov., 1878
Dear Miss Emily,
No news of the new inhabitant yet! Mrs Grice appears well enough, and though I have forborn to exact a promise I do believe that she may trust me enough to allow my presence when her crisis comes, and I know you will believe me when I say that if I am present I will not allow anything to be done that will harm her child no matter what the superstitions and customs may be here.
No, I write on a matter perhaps yet more momentous. You have perhaps read or heard of the proposed emigration of the people of Shepsay to Canada. You and Lord Hugo asked me to inform you of what I thought best for the welfare of the population of Colsay, and I would be failing in that promise if I did not say now, before there is thought of the Spring planting, that it is my opinion that the people of this island should receive, and be encouraged to accept, a similar offer. Truly, they are living like savages, like animals, and the sufferings of the women in particular are what no subject of a civilized nation should be asked to witness, let alone endure, in the present century. Emigration of course is not an easy choice, particularly for a people so deeply attached to familiar terrain as the islanders are known to be, but, the first hurdles over, I am convinced that the women who spend their days eviscerating birds and trudging like beasts of burden through the rain and the men who daily risk their lives in the primitive pursuit of seafowl would live to thank you for transplanting them to a place of sunshine and wheat-fields. I know the expense would be great, perhaps even compared to that of erecting and maintaining a school, but, knowing also of your family’s commitment to the best interests of the people entrusted to your management, I am emboldened to explain my views.
Naturally I have not mentioned this to anyone on Colsay, and if you see fit to investigate my suggestion it would surely be better not to mention my name in this connection, for to do so must jeopardize my work here and thus the lives of those who may yet see a brighter future, for the islanders have that prejudice against the idea of emigration which ignorance and superstition must lead one to expect.
I will, of course, write again as soon as there is news.
Yours most sincerely,
May Moberley