And all of this, of course, was just the new father, in romantic mood, looking for signs of awareness in the guileless features of the newly born.
‘When I was two weeks old, young Michael, my father carried me out to this bruised and battered old tumulus and stood with me and wished me something that I’ve never regretted, and which I wish to you now …’
‘Oh, dear God,’ Susan groaned, but Richard ignored her.
‘… May you have a love for the past and a respect for everything that reflects it, especially the land itself …’
‘An ageing hippie,’ Susan muttered, shaking her head. ‘I married an ageing hippie.’
He looked at her with mock sharpness.
‘I’m an archaeologist. These things are important to me. And less of the “ageing”, if you don’t mind.’
‘Get on with it. You’re traumatizing him.’
The teasing exchange was interrupted by a sudden gust of wind. A spray of fine dirt blew in their eyes and spattered the restless child. They shook their heads, blinking to soothe the stinging. Susan brushed the dust from Michael’s swaddling, but the child was quiet again, and alert.
‘Your turn,’ Richard said. ‘Make your wish.’
‘As I said: later.’
‘But this is the place to do it. This mound is propitious.’
‘Later …’
Magpies screeched in the far woods. Three of the birds came swooping and soaring towards the tumulus, but settled suddenly in the burned stubble field.
‘One for sorrow,’ Richard remembered, ‘two for joy …’
He glanced at Susan. ‘Three for a girl?’
He tugged at Michael’s nappy, peered down through the vapours of talcum powder and early-human soil.
‘It’s still there. Thank God for that.’
Susan laughed. ‘Superstitious idiot.’
‘A joke. It was a joke …’
*
It was after two in the morning before Susan finally, quietly, made her own wish.
Richard was sleeping soundly. Michael had woken from his own restless slumber, and had been fed, and for a while Susan had cradled him, and stroked the skin of his face. She had thought that Richard would wake too, but the day had been long, the drive from the clinic exhausting, and their private ceremonies had ended with food and wine. His body – older than Susan’s – could not take the pace.
‘We were so lucky to get you.’
Michael spluttered bottled milk, a sequence of bubbles that formed a stream down his chin.
A gentle chime from the hall: two o’clock. Richard stirred but didn’t wake.
Susan reached to her bedside cabinet, and from among the packs of pills, the tissues and the books, drew out a small, red-clay figurine. She had fashioned it in minutes out of the modelling clay she used for teaching. It was a very simple shape, a head, legs, arms, sex unspecified. It was unfired, dry and fractile.
She eased herself out of bed and walked quietly down to the sitting room, where she switched on a corner light. From behind the sofa she fetched the crude wooden cradle she had made that evening, a simple weave of the ivy stem and dry twigs they used for kindling. The cradle was decked with brightly coloured flowers of the field in a way that she vaguely remembered from her childhood, when her aunt Ruth had shown her how to banish shadows.
She laid Michael in the cradle; the dry twigs cracked beneath his tiny weight. But the child remained quiet, and his pale eyes watched his new mother in the dim light from the lamp. Susan smiled at him, then raised the small, crude figurine. She whispered, ‘There was bad in your mother. You don’t know it. Your father doesn’t know it. But I know it. I saw it in her eyes. If there was bad in your mother, then perhaps there is a shadow of that in you.’ She moved the doll through the air. ‘All the bad from your mother, come into this doll. Come on. Come on. Into the doll.’
She lifted Michael from the cradle and opened his woollen jacket. Then she rubbed the crumbling clay figure against the infant’s mouth, against his cheeks and eyes, over his head, down his breast, across his back and down his legs. She left him smeared with a fine layer of red clay.
‘All the bad has been swallowed,’ she said, and thought briefly of those dusk evenings when the aunts, in their claustrophobic living room, had passed similar figurines from hand to hand and spoken soft words that Susan, watching from a corner, could only partly understand.
Now she placed Michael on the floor and put the cradle in the clean grate of the fireplace, crushing the twigs to make a small pyre. She crumbled the doll over the pyre, let the pieces fall through her fingers, scattered on the wood. Then she set light to the fire and watched it burn, listening to the sharp, dry snaps as the kindling flared and was consumed in seconds.
Michael’s eyes blazed in the brief firelight and he turned his head to watch the burning. Susan rested a hand lightly on his chest and drew the glitter of his pale gaze back to her.
‘You belong to us,’ she whispered. ‘You are ours, now. We couldn’t have our own child, but we will love you no less. We love you. The shadow stuff from your mother is gone.’
She leaned down to kiss her son.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
Susan was startled by the sudden, angry voice from the doorway. Richard stood there, naked and dishevelled, his eyes telling clearly of his suspicion.
‘What are you doing down here?’
‘I didn’t know I’d woken you. Sorry.’
‘You didn’t wake me. The smell of burning woke me. I thought there was a fire.’ He walked over to the grate and crouched before the dying embers; he was puzzled, curious, but perhaps too sleepy to frame his thoughts clearly. ‘What were you doing? Keeping warm?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Michael was restless. I’ve just fed him.’
He reached into the grate and drew out the half-charred head of a dandelion. He met her gaze and she shrugged, looked quickly away. Then he noticed the red coloration on Michael’s face.
‘Christ! And you call me superstitious!’
He flung the shred of flower back into the embers, picked up Michael and rocked the silent child. His anger subsided. He looked at Susan and muttered, ‘I do know about the aunts. The old witches. You told me, remember? Which ritual was this? Bind his soul to the spirit world of your family? Link him with the ancestral spirits from ancient Hungary?’
She smiled, and told the partial lie with the greatest of ease: ‘I was linking him with the spirit of his parents. With us. That’s all.’
Richard sighed and she responded to his sudden, affectionate touch on her shoulder, kissing his fingers sadly. ‘We all do foolish things on whim. We do them for the best of reasons.’
‘Yes,’ he said tiredly. ‘I know. Like my ceremonial welcome on the tumulus.’
‘Kentish Bronze Age meets Hungarian Aunt Magic …’
That made him laugh. ‘Should develop into a well-mixed-up kid.’
He stood up, red-skinned Michael nestling against his chest, secure in his father’s large arms. ‘Are you going to clean him off, or shall I?’
‘I’ll do it. You go back to bed. Get some beauty sleep.’
‘I don’t need it. Do I?’
They exchanged the infant and a hug. Susan watched as Richard left the room, then rocked Michael in her arms and whispered to him as she brushed the dirt from the child’s face.
Michael began to cry, but the sound was soft. Almost controlled.
TWO
Susan had left the French windows open during the morning, glad of the sunshine and the freshness in the air after the days of miserable late-summer rain. With Michael soundly asleep in his carrycot, just inside the open doors, and a whole day to herself now that the health visitor had left, she set up for a few hours of her hobby: doll restoration.
She had found two dolls in a small shop in Bloomsbury, two months ago. They were Victorian bed-dolls, designed to be placed on the pillows in a child’s room. She wasn’t sure if they mad
e an original pair, although they were ‘man’ and ‘woman’. They had been clumsily and crudely restored around the face and hair, and she had decided to unrestore them and return them as closely as possible to their original appearance.
The female doll wore a lacy dress, with linen underclothes. She was barefoot, but the letters A and Q had been drawn on the cotton covering that formed her socks. The male doll wore a tight black jacket and drainpipe trousers. The leather of his shoes was perfectly preserved, even to the tiny laces, one of which was tied in a double bow.
Susan had paid twenty pounds for the pair, but was convinced they would be worth much more. Meanwhile, the immediate pleasure was in the restoration. And she wouldn’t be teaching again until the spring term.
Freedom.
She made herself a pot of coffee, peered down at Michael, who was murmuring in his sleep, then began the slow task of unpicking the clumsy stitchwork of the dolls’ previous owner. She wore reading glasses, propped halfway down her nose. In recent years her eyesight had begun to deteriorate rapidly, but she refused to wear contact lenses; they hurt, and they made her eyes water. Richard thought she looked ‘sexy’ in the gold-rimmed spectacles. Susan herself was more concerned with how increasingly difficult it was to focus for any extended period of time on anything, like a book or a doll, which she held close to her vision.
After half an hour of the intense work her back began to twinge and she put down the doll, removed her glasses and walked out into the garden. Despite the rainy conditions of the previous day, everything seemed so dry now, so hot. She could hear the neighbour’s dog, barking among the fir trees that were a feature of next door’s garden. She walked down to the gate and swung on it, staring out across the cornfield, over the ‘tump’, at the drift of woodland above the quarry, and the bare ridge of the land that marked the drop down to the dykes and sedges of the saltmarsh itself. The wind was fresh. She could smell sea. From the garden the Whitlocks couldn’t see the English Channel, but its scents and the feel of being close to the edge of the land was sharp on these bright days when the wind was on-shore.
Seagulls pestered the field.
Michael wailed suddenly, but the sound went away, and as Susan returned through the fruit trees, mostly alert for the child, passingly aware that the cherry trees had rust-infection, she felt calm. At peace. Quite content.
Stepping in through the French windows she was aware of the phone ringing. She smelled fresh earth, but dismissed the sensation, glancing at the carrycot, aware of its stillness, vaguely aware of something wrong …
The phone was an insistent call and she plucked the receiver from its cradle.
It was Jenny, a close friend who taught at the same college. She wanted to help with the christening party that Saturday, and had had an idea for contributing to the buffet meal.
‘Thanks. But Richard wants to make roast lamb.’
‘For a christening party?’
‘He sees it as a sort of challenge.’
‘Roast lamb for forty people?’
‘He sees it as a challenge. He’s a man. He can do it.’
‘But… roast lamb?’
‘A challenge.’
Jenny paused, then sighed. ‘So a tuna casserole would be superfluous.’
‘No room in the oven to swing a minnow.’
‘I’ll make pudding, then. Fruit salad.’
‘Pudding has been organized by various “mothers”. The real help we could do with is … well, to put it bluntly …’
‘Baby-minding?’
‘The woman is psychic. Yes. Baby-minding. Just for a few minutes here and there while I look after the aunts. Richard will be looking after the booze, of course. And his lamb.’
‘What am I going to do with all this tuna?’
‘Throw them back. Let them have their freedom. And thanks for the thought, Jenny.’
What was smelling so bad? What was that smell of freshly dug earth?
She went into the kitchen and set the percolator on for a second jug of coffee. She placed the leftovers of the previous evening’s casserole into the oven and set the timer. Richard wouldn’t be eating with her tonight, and she was hungry now, so the idea of supper at five in the afternoon seemed a good one.
But that smell!
Puzzled, she went back into the sitting room. It was an odour she associated with her father’s garden; freshly tilled soil, the metallic smell of forks and other garden implements moist and slick with constant use. The scent of wet, of vegetation, of humus, of compost; sharp, woody. So many feelings were evoked by the odour. So many memories …
She walked to the French windows. The smell was stronger here, and she became very disturbed, looking quickly round, beginning to feel panic.
When she saw the carrycot she nearly screamed as she ran for her child and plucked him into her arms.
‘That damned dog. That bloody dog!’
Michael was covered with damp earth. The carrycot was filthy. His chubby hands were black where he had reached and grasped at the dirt. There was a scattering of soil around the cot, on the carpet. It had been this darker stain on the dark fabric that had almost alerted her earlier.
‘Damn! Damn!’
The creature was often to be seen in their garden, prowling and digging at the flower beds and in the vegetable patch. It must have come into the sitting room, filthy from its excavations, to stand right up on the cot, its muddy paws on her son.
Susan cradled the boy for a moment, then brushed him partly clean. She took him to the bathroom and washed the sticky earth from his fingers and face.
Michael was very quiet. Susan could hear the dog barking from across the fence. It had gone back home, then, after straying into Whitlock territory.
‘You poor love. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I’m so silly. I should have thought about that bloody pet next door.’
She finished cleaning the boy, then vacuumed the dirt from the carpet. She closed the windows and sat down with her dolls again. But she was angry now, so angry that she had risked her son’s life. The dog could have been dangerous. It could have smothered him. She hadn’t been attentive enough. A lesson learned!
So angry.
The dolls lay there, forgotten. Michael slept and whimpered. Slowly Susan relaxed, folding her arms across her chest, thinking about the boy, about the adoption, about the look in his birth-mother’s eyes … and about Saturday. Such a big party! So much to do.
‘It will all be fine,’ she told herself. ‘Just don’t get upset. Don’t get upset …’
Next door the dog howled. It had never entered the house before. Perhaps in its narrow, canine way, it knew that it had done wrong.
She walked out of the room and across the lawn to the fence, half inclined to call to her neighbour and say something about the dog’s straying.
But when she looked over and into the next door garden she felt shocked, then confused.
The dog – an Alsatian of dark and grim demeanour – was chained to a post in the middle of the lawn. Stretched at the end of its lead, it was watching Susan, and howling with frustration at being so cruelly tied …
THREE
Richard stood in the corner of the room, camera and torch slung round his neck, ready for action, hands in his pockets. He was slumped and saddened, watching Susan through the puffy, reddening eyes of a man experiencing more distress and confusion than he had ever known. Susan sat before the empty grate of the fire, knees drawn up, head cradled in her hands.
The baby-speaker, connected to Michael’s cot in their bedroom, dangled from the mantelpiece, a motionless piece of plastic, silent for the moment, but almost threatening. Susan watched the speaker through tired, dark-rimmed eyes. The strain of the last three days had begun to break her.
It had taken them both with such shocking surprise.
Her skin was a pallid, sickly yellow in the light from the corner lamp. Her shadow echoed her despair, cast in forlorn detail on the far wall. Her dressing-gown h
ad parted around legs that looked thin and shaky. She hugged her knees, now, watching the microphone that would carry the sound from the room above.
She had been sick, earlier in the evening. There was something more on her mind, Richard was certain of it. He had known her too long. He knew the signs. But when he’d probed gently for the problem she wouldn’t speak.
So now he watched from the corner, his own mind in a turmoil of fear and anticipation as he waited for the next attack on Michael.
He was half convinced himself that it was the mother! Michael’s natural mother.
But if it was, how was she getting into the room? If it was his mother, how was she getting through the window? It made no sense!
And why would she torment them so?
‘Do you want some tea?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks.’
‘Coffee?’
‘No…’ (Irritably.)
‘A brandy?’
‘No! For Christ’s sake, Richard!’
Her head slumped suddenly and she shuddered. The shadow on the far wall followed the exasperated motion. Richard felt his eyes sting and his mouth go dry. He wanted to go over to her, to touch her, to put his hand on her shoulder, but she would probably have screamed at him. There was moisture on her brow. When she glanced up at him the dark lines below her eyes were like make-up. Sweat had dampened the fringe of dark hair, and it stuck to her brow at odd angles. She was close to tears. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Forget it.’
And then the sound … that sound!
Susan almost screamed, startled and shocked by the noise. Richard ran to the middle of the room, listening hard to the dangling plastic speaker.
Yes. That rustling! The sound of earth being thrown at the child. It was the same as before. Then the child’s cry, a soft murmur, then a quick wail, then a more anguished, sustained sound, neither cry nor murmur, but a sort of pain.