Grazing The Long Acre (20 page)

The next morning I saw Mrs Brown again, for the last time. I was up early, Suze was in the shower. Mrs Brown and her family were checking out. Germaine, the nanny, was directing the porter, who was carrying their bags out to the car. Marianina was with her. Celine and Carmen stood looking a little lost, while their mother validated her credit by passing an imperious hand across the ID screen. Mrs Brown gave a sharp glance up at the stairs, where I was standing. She moved towards the door. Then Celine and Carmen…They melted. They flowed, they ran like liquid glass through the air. There was only one golden-haired figure, walking away.

 I rushed up to the desk. ‘Did you see that?’ I demanded. ‘Did you see? Flavia! Tell me!’

The desk clerk was our padrone’s daughter, a sensible and intelligent girl. For a moment I thought she was going to deny everything. Perhaps she realised the truth was the best way to suppress my curiosity. She looked up, with wise young eyes.

‘
Dottora Lalande
, two weeks ago a gentleman stayed here who was travelling with an
eidolon
, a hologram of his dead wife. We must set a place for her, serve dishes to her, arrange her room. He spoke to the digitally generated image as if it was alive. And though I know this is impossible, I am sure I heard the lady answer.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘And there was the family from Germany, with the teenage boy who had taken gene-therapy to cure a terrible wasting disease. He was completely well, it was a miracle. At night this boy stayed out late. He came back to La Fontana not quite himself, you understand? Luckily, he could leap and hit the night-bell with his muzzle, so the porter would let him in. It was easy enough to wash the pawprints from the sheets.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘One sees everything, in the hotel trade, and one mentions nothing. These things happen, they happen more and more. It’s best simply to accept them…and look the other way.’

Mrs Brown had left no address, but I managed to get Flavia to tell me she had been heading north, to the Lakes. Over breakfast I tried to convince Suze that we had to follow and somehow track them down. I knew she was already angry with me over the Browns, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt there was a disaster that I must try to avert. Suze accused me of being infatuated, either with Laura Brown or the heavenly twins. She refused to consider the idea of leaving Santa Margarita.

When Suze and Bobbi went to the beach I stayed behind.

I took our guide-book and set out to explore the town, in the hope that some distraction would help me to think. I had not dared to tell Suze about my second strange experience. For one thing, I suspected that young Flavia wouldn’t back me up. But much as I hated to fight with Suze, I was desperate to unravel the mystery. What was happening to Celine and Carmen, and why? Had the desk clerk and I shared a hallucination? Or were Cinderella’s sisters really capable of vanishing into thin air?

La cenerentola
was there. She had climbed on the railings outside the Renaissance chapel. She was swinging from them, head down, her feet kicking in the air and her hair brushing the ancient stone of the porch steps. As I approached she flung herself down, carelessly scattering the passers-by, and stood glaring at me. She was wearing her favourite grubby shorts and tee-shirt. As soon as she saw that she’d been recognised, she ran away.

Of course, I followed.

Marianina didn’t run too fast. She made sure that I could keep up. Before long I found her waiting for me, in the small formal garden that surrounded the much-eroded remains of a Roman temple, on the edge of the pedestrianised centre. It was a quiet place. This was the end of summer; the flowerbeds had been allowed to fade. The roman fountain in their midst was dry, the benches round about stood empty. There was a chirping of insects, clear above the distant hum of traffic.

Children, when they’re left to run wild, are uncouth creatures. They’ll tell silly, arbitrary lies if they feel caught out, but not one in a thousand will naturally invent the concept of polite conversation. Marianina didn’t say a word to me at first. She sat on a lump of carved stone, its meaning eroded beyond recognition, and examined a graze on her knee.

‘I thought you guys had left Santa Margarita.’ I offered, oppressed by her silence.

‘We moved to a different hotel. We’re leaving tomorrow.

‘At the campsite in Mauro,’ I said, ‘they called you la cenerentola: Cinderella, because of your sisters. Is it true? Did they make you feel left out?’

The child flashed me one of her sly, hostile glances. ‘Mummy said to tell you, leave us alone. Stop following us. There’s nothing you can do.’

Prince Charming, I thought, rejected the step-sisters, their artificial finery and their contrived attractions. He chose the dirty girl: with her little hands as rough as the cinders, her careless rags, her knobbly knees, her insouciant independence. It was the same with Laura Brown. I had thought I understood everything: right from that first night, when she told me her story at
L’Ecureuil.
It had been obvious that she had not been interested in either of her children’s fathers. There was no adult lover in her life. Maybe she was one of those people who cannot tolerate another adult as a lover…That was why Marianina, scorned in public, had become the secret object of her affections, as the twins grew older.

I could understand how a child like this, deliberately humoured in all her native childish awkwardness (the sequences of DNA randomly recombined, no perfections but those of untamed chance and necessity) might seem the fairest, the true beauty. I could feel her troubling allure myself, and I’m no paedophile. She was so
real
. The Italian woman at the campsite had made up a vicious story which probably had no basis at all in fact. But a child can be corrupted, without any gross abuse…Now I saw that whatever the relationship between Marianina and her mother, the situation was not that simple. 

‘What about your sisters. Will they be travelling with you?’

 ‘Oh, them.’ A smug grimace. ‘I don’t think they’ll be around much longer.’

 I felt suddenly chilled. ‘What do you mean, they won’t be around?’

 ‘She hasn’t said. But I think Mummy’s taking them back.’

 Marianina slid to the ground, scouring the backside of those long-suffering shorts.

 ‘Taking them back? Back where?’

 ‘Back where they came from, of course.’

La cenerentola
had performed her errand. She’d had enough of my solemn eyes and stupid questions. She left, jumping over the stones and skipping away, without another word.

Interlude: The Philosopher’s Dream

I see a room in an appealing little hotel, somewhere in the north of Italy. It’s a room that Suze and Thea could have chosen: deceptively simple, with every modern comfort hidden in a tasteful, traditional disguise. Through the window I see (but this is pure invention) a view of forests and mountains, a long blue lake under a cloudless fairytale sky. There’s no getting away from it, we are in a fairytale. Mrs Brown and her daughters, Thea and Suze; everyone else who shares our affluence. Our lives have become magical, by any sensible standards. Nothing is impossible, the strangest things can happen.

I see a beautiful woman, and the twin daughters who might be her sisters: daughters with that uncanny, replicant perfection of the optimised clone. She told me that their creation was her husband’s idea. I don’t know if I believe that, but in any case she has become tired of these flawless, sweet-natured dolls. The double mirror irritates her. The twins are sitting in a window embrasure, talking softly with each other. Perhaps they are deciding what they will wear tomorrow. They take comfort in clothes and make-up, because they know they have been superseded. I witness the transformation scene. I see how the two bodies are magically drawn across the room, and melt—at first resisting desperately, but finally calm- into the original of their flesh.

 It is a triumph that
la cenerentola
in the story might have longed for, before she dreamt of going to the ball. Fathers are chancy creatures, the handsome prince is a shadowy promise. But mother, even if you are not completely her own creation, is the first object of any child’s desire.

 Now Cinderella is alone, with the only handsome prince this version of the story needs. Poor Carmen, poor Celine. This time it is forever.

Finale

I don’t believe we’ll ever get tired of Bobbi. I don’t know which of us loves her more. But a long vacation brings out the strains in any relationship, and sometimes I wonder what would happen if we should tire of each other. We walk hand in hand, Suze and Bobbi and I, and suddenly I suspect that we’re taking up more space than three people should. I look up and see Suze a little further away from me than she ought to be. The air shimmers. For a moment there are two Bobbis…I am afraid that these moments may grow longer in duration. It won’t be possible to hide the embarrassing thing that has happened, except by moving on: going our separate ways with our separate daughters, and praying that no further dilution occurs.

We have beaten the stern old gods of the nineteenth century. But in escaping from them, could it be that we have let something wild and dangerous back into the world? Our magical technology may have unsuspected costs. In the end, stretched and spread over the world as we are by our desires, perhaps Suze and I will vanish like Mrs Brown’s perfect twins. We will lose hold of our fantastical riches and fade away, like the ball-dress, the pumpkin-coach, the rat coachman…in this case leaving nothing behind, not even a glass slipper.

DESTROYER OF WORLDS

I’m trying to create in my mind the image of a little boy. He’s four years’ old, his hair is brown and not clipped short; it’s long enough to curl in the nape of his neck like a duck’s tail. He is wearing a blue jacket with green facings, green lining to the hood. Red mittens dangle on a woollen cord from the cuffs of his sleeves, his little hands are bare. I remember him clearly, but it isn’t enough. I want to see him. I’m walking around the park, called Delauney’s park, though who Delauney was no one has any idea. There’s a playground with squishy asphalt so the children won’t break their heads. There’s a gravel football pitch, there’s a shelter with toilets (always locked), and a space of turf, greenery, shrubberies, trees. The park is small, tired, urban. It was all the world to us. We used to come here, not every day but very often, right from the beginning. I remember playing hide and seek. It was a winter’s day, the winter before he started school, the rosehips bright red vase-shapes on the bare bushes. I saw him walk out from behind the shelter, having failed to find me, those little mittens hanging pitifully. Head down, so utterly lost and bereft, oh dear sweet child. I was hiding behind a tree.

I walk around and around, a woman alone, staring at toddlers. I’m not trying to control myself, I know that the expression on my face looks frightening but I have licence. I don’t have to make that slight constant effort we all make in public, maintain the barrier, don’t let your emotions leak out. Tell any one of these mothers-with-small-children, and even fathers-with-small-children, what has happened to me, and whatever I do, they will accept. If I lie down and kick my legs and scream and mash my face into the ground that will be fine. As if I was three years’ old.

He never did that. He was a sweet child.

And out of the tail of my eye I see him. He’s there,
there he is
. I turn my head, very, very slowly. I can hold him in place,
I can see him,
the little boy standing by the corner of the shelter, looking to and fro, looking for me. I don’t have to concentrate, he’s there independently, no effort,
I am really seeing him
…It lasts only a fraction of a second, like the existence of a rare, fragile element in a scientific experiment. Then I’m fighting the whole weight of reality again. He’s there still but it’s an effort to hold the image, quivering like a stilled frame on a TV screen, and that’s no good. It was my imagination.

Up in the back of the park, furthest from the road and the playground, there’s a certain bend in the path, a corner that is always in the shadow of tall laurel bushes. A place you think dogs wouldn’t pass, they’d crouch with hackles raised and back away. He was afraid of that spot. We used to tell each other maybe it was haunted. He liked to be frightened, children do like to be frightened,
just a little
. Really it was the deep shade he didn’t like, I’m sure; but a child’s uneasiness is convincing. You think they must know something they haven’t the words to tell. I’m walking around and around, mad woman staring. I come to the murky corner because I must, and I see him again. The little boy is there, completely without my volition.

I went home. My husband was curled in a fetal position on the couch in the living room, daytime TV on the screen. My mother had left the day before. She’d been wonderful, bearing up with a brave face, cooking meals for us and so on. I think we were both relieved to be alone again, although there is no relief when a thing like this has happened. But her departure means we have moved into the next phase. We’ve brought the baby home from the hospital, we’ve had the few days’ buffer state of importance and fuss, we’ve reached the point when we are on our own and the task opens up, limitless, this time our baby is his death. I’m trying to recapture this little boy: putting him to bed, his bathtime, his sweet little body, he’s giggling, running all wet and rosy from the towel that’s trying to catch him, miniscule little erection. I want him here, I want to see him here. ‘I saw him,’ I said. ‘In the playground. Eric, listen. I saw him. I really did.’

My husband said, ‘What’s the use in that? You didn’t lose him anywhere near the park.’

I sat down on the armchair, the old one with the leaf-pattern in black and white on the upholstery, the leaves he used to trace very seriously with baby fingers.

‘You think I’m mad.’

‘I think in your state of mind you can easily force yourself to see a ghost. I just don’t understand why you’re doing it.’

‘I want to know what happened to him. I want to see it.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ he said.

My child, called Christopher after his grandfather, went out with me to the shops. In the Post Office I looked around and he was gone. I ran out into the street. He was nowhere. And when I was sure he was gone, you can imagine. You can imagine how I ran up and down, calling his name, how I flung myself at passers-by, how I was shaking from head to foot, how terror possessed me. We always called him Fery, it was his own name for himself. He’s gone to the fairies, he’s gone. It’s eight days. He’s dead.

In cases like this, suspicion always falls on the family, especially on the man. The police were going to be suspicious of us as a matter of course. I think we made it worse for ourselves by being certain, straight away, that he was dead. I think I made it worse for us by my terror. But how could we believe anything else? The child is gone for an hour, for three hours, he’s been missing for a day and a night. How are we supposed to unknow what everyone else in the world knows about what happens to a child snatched away like that?…just because it is our child, this time, not a story on the news. They told us not to give up hope. Children have funny whims, he might have wandered off, taken a bus, decided to run away from home. Paedophiles often are not violent, he might turn up safe in some sad bastard’s miserable bedsit. Fools. We can’t give up hope, we will hope forever: but we know he’s dead. I think of him when we had the builders in before he was two years’ old. My baby goes up to the foreman and takes hold of the man’s big, plaster-ingrained hand, wants to show him a Lego house. It’s potty-training summer, the little boy is dressed merely in a blue tee-shirt that leaves his round middle and his little bum bare. ‘You’ll have to watch him,’ says the builder-man to me, very seriously. ‘He’s too friendly.’

A child must not be friendly, that’s provocation. A child must not smile, must not take an adult’s hand, that’s flirtatious. I shake with fury. They’re saying it was his fault. They’re saying he brought it on himself. I try to imagine him here, giggling and wriggling among the cushions, very small. But all I see is something like a great sky folding into itself from horizon to horizon, bellying and billowing into a vast ochre mushroom cloud that rises and fills the universe. A million megatons of death, nothing can be saved, destroyer of worlds.

‘I’m going to go back to work,’ said Eric. ‘Do you want your sister down?’

By work, he means that he’ll return to his office at the back of our house, the room that overlooks the garden; where he teleworks on his computer. Projects, consultancies. I have no more idea of what he does, in detail, than if I was the child myself. He makes good money. I don’t have a job, which means I have nowhere to go. My sister has offered to take unpaid leave, desert her family, come and be with me. I don’t want her.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

A policewoman comes to visit the house, with a uniformed constable, also a woman. They ask me if they can have a look around. Would I mind? They want to search our house, and I’m supposed to say well of course, please, step this way. My face serene, a little polite smile, as if they’ve come to read the gas meter. I am not supposed to resist, or question. I am not supposed to say,
you think my husband killed our son
. It’s such an insane charade, dealing with the police. The WPC in uniform sits there holding her mug of tea, (I offered: they accepted). She has her face arranged in a solemn look of sympathy. I think she’s really sorry, how could she not be sorry, but it’s like tissue paper. Any move I make, anything I say will tear it and reveal the police agenda. Any sign that I’ve ever read a tabloid report on a child’s disappearance, or watched the news, or seen a TV mystery drama where
it was the father, of course it was the father, you can see the solution a mile off…It was the mother, you can see she’s disturbed
…will be an admission of guilt. The superior officer searched the house. The WPC sat with me. Strange, I’d have thought it would be the other way round. Eric stayed in his office. When she came back the superior officer started to ask me a few questions.

I said, ‘How can you think my husband had anything to do with this? He’s desperate. He’s sitting up there out of his mind with grief. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep—’

‘Mrs Connors,’ she said. ‘Hazel…I’m still hoping Christopher will be found. Believe me, it does happen. Children are found, more often than not. But don’t you think a man who had killed his seven year old son would be distraught?’

It was as if she’d hit me. Seven years old. My image in the park was wrong, completely wrong. He doesn’t look like that any more. His ghost can’t look like that. Three years. I’d forgotten a whole three years. This is what happens to you when the Destroyer of Worlds has filled your mind. Your whole memory unravels, crumbles, you can’t hold it together. I stared at her, and the mug of tea in my hands dissolved. I couldn’t feel it any more, it fell to the floor and cooling tea spilled all over my feet.

She looked at the mess. I didn’t. I was thinking of how much work I had to do, getting him to appear to me not as a four year old but as he was the day I lost him. That’s the only way I’ll find out what happened. She took my hand, and I let her do that.

‘Hazel, why wasn’t Christopher in school that day?’

‘He had a cold. I kept him at home, but he seemed well enough to come out with me.’

‘But your husband was at home?’

‘He works at home. He does his share of looking after Fery, but he works office hours. Am I getting points for answering the same questions in the same words fifty times over?’

A pause, a look of reproof. I’m tearing the tissue paper.

‘Christopher’s seven years’ old. Did you ever think of having other children?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m planning to go back to work. But it wouldn’t make sense, at the moment. Wouldn’t have made sense. When Eric isn’t working at home, he has to travel. He’s away often. I would have gone back to work, when Fery was old enough to be home alone.’

What the superior officer is really asking about is our sex life. No children? Why? Don’t you sleep together? So, what does your husband do instead? I won’t tell her anything.

 When Fery was two, he buried a wooden train in the sandpit at Delauney’s park. It was red and blue, it had yellow wheels, it was called Thomas. He didn’t tell me that Thomas was missing until we were about to go home; and it was winter and getting dark. I searched, as well as I could. I couldn’t find that little train at all. I didn’t have a chance, the sandpit was too big and Fery could not tell me where I should dig. We went back the next day, and we still couldn’t find Thomas. We never found him. But all that year, and longer, Fery went on looking. Stranger than that: wherever we were, including when we were on holiday in Italy, if we passed a playground he must go in. If there was a sandpit, he must dig. He was looking for Thomas. Long afterwards, he still remembered. I’d be in Delauney’s park, the mothers sitting together the way we do, on the edge of the sandpit: I’d see my four year old casually get hold of a shovel and start turning over the cool, dirty, lollipop-stick infested sand. I’d know he was looking for Thomas, but he didn’t want anyone to know because he knew it was silly. And I’d want to help him. As if any day could be that winter’s day, and we could tear the tissue paper and step back, undo the wrong we did, catch up the dropped stitch, make the little red and blue train appear.

I walk down to the row of shops. The pharmacist, the bakery, the bank on the corner. The greengrocers. They will vanish soon. The only shops in the world will be inside shopping malls, nothing but To Let signs blossoming on the High Street. The mothers-with-children, and the occasional fathers-with-children, queue up in the Post Office with the foreign students and the pensioners. I look inside. I am trying to make him appear, there by the carousel of cheap greeting cards. He’s looking at the cards, investigating the dirty jokes, lingering with tender emotion over sugary cartoon animals. He’s at an age where the attraction is equal, either way. This is the way I’ll find him. Not by running and sobbing, not by marching in a line across waste ground, searching the back alleys, pulling up floorboards. Not by looking up the paedophile register. I will walk along this row of shops, pushing the doors and glancing in. This is where he was lost, this is where he will be found. Where else could he be? Lost Thomas logic. I’ll take his hand, I’ll say t
here you are,
exasperated: and we’ll go home together. Years from now, as long as the same shops are still here, as long as I can find anywhere little shops that remind me of these, it could happen.

What was he wearing? A boy, his body no longer blurred by the chubby disproportion of babyhood, not even a small child any more. A boy nothing like the sweet baby with the red mittens, in Delauney’s park. I need a different ghost. (I need all the ghosts.) He was wearing trainers and tracksuit trousers, black with white stripes. He was wearing red boxer shorts and a green T-shirt, and grey socks. He was wearing a grey hooded sweater with some sporting logo on the front, and a black quilted jacket. He was carrying nothing. He was too old to be visible in mothers-with-children world. He was not holding my hand. We’ve asked and asked, the police have asked and asked. No one saw him that morning. No one remembers me except as the mad woman, running up and down, distraught, flying up to the counter at the bank, demanding wildly
have you seen a little boy
? I don’t remember him myself.