The Dumb House (6 page)

‘Two o'clock?'

‘Fine.' I wanted to sound noncommittal, as if I still hadn't decided whether to keep the appointment.

‘I'll expect you at two then,' she said, and as she opened the door, her expression became neutral again. It was as if, with her anxiety, something else was bleeding away, and the last picture I had of her was the image of an empty, impassive face, a contrived and practised absence, a kind of nothingness.

I returned the next morning. At seven thirty I parked the car at the end of the street, so I had a clear view of the house, and waited. I wanted to see Jeremy leave for school and what Mrs Olerud did when she was alone. I did not trust what she had told me in the letter – I had no evidence, other than her word, that the child really was dumb. He might be disturbed, but it was just as likely that his mother was the one with the problem. The boy might have chosen his silence, or he might have had silence forced upon him. I told myself that that was my motive for being there; yet, at the same time, I have to confess that I was less interested in the boy than in his mother. Something had passed between us the previous evening. I had lain awake half the night, thinking about her, remembering her face, and the feel of her hand on my arm. I think, from the first,
I guessed what was about to happen. I had brought her flowers from the garden; even though it seemed quite inappropriate, I felt sure she would accept them.

It was a damp morning. It had rained in the night and the gardens were still wet. As soon as the sun came up, everything began to steam; clouds of vapour unfurled from the larchlap fences, a fine mist formed on the hedges and lawns. Soon it was warm. The light streamed through the gaps between the houses, catching on car mirrors and headlamps, investing the run-down estate with a ghostly and transient beauty. There was no sign of Mrs Olerud or her son. Other children appeared on the street, girls in blue dresses, boys in uniform. One or two saw me and peered into the car, but mostly they passed by without noticing, oblivious to everything but the small miseries and joys to which the school day condemned them. I remembered that sensation from my own school years. I remembered the care I had to take, not to stand out among my classmates. I could have gone to another school, but Mother wanted me to stay close to home, which meant I had to attend the village school, with children who were poorer and less bright than I was. It was an effort not to become a target, especially with the older boys. But I managed quite well. I never put myself forward, never volunteered; in games, I waited to be chosen, in class I waited to be asked. I always seemed to do my best, but I was careful to get the odd question wrong, to seem foolish on occasion, to let the others laugh at me from time to time. I thought I was being smart, but now I see that it was so easy to behave that well because I felt nothing but contempt for most of my classmates.

The one exception was a boy in my class called Alexander. He was locked into a shell of isolation: because he was deaf, his speech seemed odd and amusing to the other children. All the teachers treated him with a special, condescending kindness,
which he obviously hated. I made some efforts to become his friend, with almost no success. He regarded everyone with suspicion. Sometimes I would see him, out in the fields, standing with his head thrown back, staring up into the sky, as if he could see something there that nobody else could detect. I wondered what it was like to live like that. I had imagined that deaf people were locked into a calm and steady silence, but when I looked it up in a book, I discovered there was noise inside their heads, monotonous and ugly, like the space between channels on the radio. I wanted to ask Alexander how he thought: if he could see the words, instead of hearing them, whether he thought in words at all, or whether there were long gaps in his mind, when absence took over. I know, for certain, that he was looking for something. He would find telegraph poles and stand with his arms wrapped around them, his chest and face pressed to the wood, as if he could feel or hear something, coursing through the wires. Maybe he could. If I could have had a friend in school, it would have been him. If I could have asked one question, I would have asked Alexander what it was like to be how he was, but I imagine he would have found it impossible to answer.

Mostly, I was alone. At lunch-time, I would sit in the library with my favourite book. I remember it clearly, even now: it was called
The Junior Dictionary Illustrated.
The cover showed a girl lying on the grass in summer, reading, and an ideal schoolmaster handing a book to an ideal boy, while another girl stood by, holding her own book like a pet or a baby. The first page bore the legend ‘
We Live in a World of Words'
, and showed a variety of objects in boxes, with captions for their names, and the country in which the names had originated:
bantam
and
tattoo
, from the South Seas;
rose
and
mutton
from France,
bungalow
and
jungle
from India,
marmalade
and
cobra
from Portugal. I loved that
book. I loved its pictures of rhododendrons and rabbits, and perfect children skating on perfect ice rinks. I loved its simple definitions, the sense it gave that everything could be classified and explained, and I took what it said at face value: we live in a world of words, things exist because of language, and language could as easily change things as keep them fixed in place.

Mother drove me to school in the mornings. In that school no one else travelled by car, and it set me apart from the others to glide by, and have them see me, sitting in the front alongside a woman who was always expensively dressed and utterly remote. Every now and then she took it into her head to offer a lift to some child who took her fancy, which only made things more awkward. After school, I insisted on walking home by myself. It was nearly three miles, but the road was straight and there was little traffic. It ran out of the village past the houses, skirted a row of allotments, then passed a farm. The farm always seemed deserted: I remember the yard, and a grey metal hopper blotted with rust, tilted over a hedge like a shipwreck. Sometimes a herd of muddy, black-haired cattle stood by the fence, watching me pass; sometimes a dog ran to the gate and barked, but mostly the yard was empty, a pile of logs against the barn, an old tractor marooned in a pool of weeds, rusted remains of farm machinery propped against the walls, like the remnants of a forgotten civilisation.

In winter it would be almost dark by the time I reached the farm. For the next mile, there was nothing but fields on both sides. The silence was heavy and thick, like velvet, broken only by an occasional splash in the ditch beside the road, or a car swishing by on its way to Weston. There were no lights on that stretch of road, but that did not bother me till I got to Laurel Cottage, about half a mile from home. I never saw lights at Laurel Cottage, but I knew the foreign woman was there,
watching me the way she did in the summertime. That bothered me. The people in the village said the foreign woman was mad. Nobody knew how she lived. Sometimes she would be sitting in her garden when I passed by, and she would be knitting, or reading a book. People who had seen inside the cottage said she had hundreds of books, all piled on the floor in the sitting room. Once I saw her standing at her door, eating an apple, and I plucked up the courage to say good afternoon. She looked at me and smiled, but she did not reply. I was intensely curious about her. I wanted to know where she had come from, and what it was that had made her mad.

She wasn't mad all the time. The people in the village said she took fits because of something that had happened to her in the war. I had seen her myself, on occasion, standing in her garden, talking to the trees, when the fit was on her. She would walk round in circles, talking in some language that no one else understood. At first I thought it was Polish or German, because people in the village said she had come from Germany as a refugee after the war. Later, Mother told me it was not a real language at all, but something the woman had invented. As far as I knew, she only ever spoke this language to the trees in her garden.

Her fits would last for hours at a time. To begin with, she seemed excited, even happy: she walked quickly around the garden, sometimes reaching out and brushing a tree with her fingers as she passed. She would talk constantly in a kind of singsong – there was no structure, no syntax. The words seemed to merge, one into another, yet there was no doubt that they meant something to her, that she intended something by them. Then, about an hour after she began, her voice would change. Now there were spaces between one word and the next, everything began to collapse inward, into a kind of slow
motion. Eventually she turned her back on the tree she had been talking to, and walked away. Whenever that happened, she always looked disappointed, as if she had failed in some task. Once, when I was out hunting for animals, I hid in a bush near the cottage and watched the whole thing. It was beautiful in its way, and I was curious about her private language. I wanted to know what it meant to her, what it was she thought she was saying.

Once I was walking home in the springtime. It was late afternoon, still light; the rain had been falling all day, heavy and loud on the windows at school. Now it had stopped but the fields and gardens were still wet. The world seemed abnormally still, after the violence of the rain. As I approached Laurel Cottage, I thought I saw something move – or rather, I had the feeling that someone, some person had moved a moment before I looked, and was now standing amongst the bushes, hushed, waiting for me to pass. Nothing was visible, but I had that sensation you sometimes get, playing hide and seek, when someone gives himself away by trying too hard to stay hidden. I knew it was not an animal I sensed there, but a human being, though I could not have said why. Then, just as I reached the front gate, the foreign woman stepped out from amongst the leaves and stood there, stark naked, streaming with rainwater, and laughing softly to herself. She was so close I could almost have touched her. She was looking straight at me, but I do not think it was me she saw. She was playing a game with someone else, perhaps with someone who had died years before, or it might have been someone she had invented, but it was not me.

I had never seen a naked woman. She was thin, but her breasts and hips were large, and the sight of her thick, dark pubic hair excited and frightened me. I could not take my eyes off her.
As we stood there, face to face, I had the idea of touching her wet skin, of stroking the hair, but I hurried on, walking backwards so I could still see her, afraid to turn my back on her white body.

I waited outside Mrs Olerud's house for three hours. It's strange, how a neighbourhood changes when the people leave. A silence falls; the arrival of a delivery van becomes an event; animals appear and move through the gardens in virtual slow motion. It always seems something has just happened, moments before, but when you look there is nothing.

I didn't notice the boy at first. Like one of the animals, he seemed to emerge from nowhere. I hadn't seen the front door open, but he might have come from the back of the house. He was standing on the path, looking towards the end of the road, as if he was expecting someone. I was sure he hadn't seen me. I got out of the car, clutching my bouquet of flowers, and walked over to the gate.

‘Hello, Jeremy,' I said.

He looked angry. It was obvious that he remembered who I was and didn't want to admit it.

‘Is your mother home?' I asked.

He moved his head almost imperceptibly. I leaned down to open the gate and he retreated a few steps, holding his arms out, as if he could prevent me from entering by sheer willpower. I noticed he was holding something in his left hand.

‘What have you got there?' I asked.

He looked at his hand. It was shaped in a loose fist, cradling something that must have been breakable, or precious to him. Slowly his face broke into a half-smile. He took three steps forward, looked up at me and, holding out his hand, turned it over and unclenched his fingers, like a conjuror performing a trick.

He was holding a baby mouse. It was tiny, almost bald, and quite motionless.

‘It's a mouse,' I said, in my best adult-to-child voice. He gave me a look of contempt. He didn't want my kindness. Showing me the mouse had been some kind of trick on his part, some act of deception he alone understood. I held out my hand.

‘Shall I take it now?' I asked him.

He pulled away his hand and stepped back.

‘But it's dead,' I said softly.

He shook his head.

‘You know it is,' I said. ‘It was only a baby. You should have left it in the nest.'

I thought he would cry. His expression showed that I was responsible for the death, that the mouse would have remained alive, warmed in his clenched hand for hours, if I hadn't turned up, to tell him otherwise. He lifted the animal to his face, and stroked the naked body against his cheek. Then he turned, ran back across the lawn and vanished around the corner of the house.

I had no intention of following. I pushed open the gate and walked in. Now I could see that the front door was open, and slightly ajar. It might have been like that all morning, but when I knocked nobody answered.

I walked around the side of the house to look for the boy. The garden at the back was dark, overgrown with deep weeds, the kind that ran and trailed through the trees, old man's beard, bryony with its red, venomous-looking berries, tall stands of dock and nightshade along the fence. It was still wet. The sun hadn't risen high enough over the roofs to penetrate this far and, even if it had, the air here was dark and heavy and it was probably never dry at the far end, where it had once been planted with shade-loving plants, aucuba and holly and
elaeagnus. I felt that, if I walked to the end of the path, I could disappear, just as the child had done. I couldn't see him but I knew he was there, crouched in the centre of his own private wilderness, watching me.