The Fifth Child (12 page)

Ben’s screams and struggling were shaking the house.

“The police will be here,” said David.

“Keep them quiet,” she commanded, and went up with the food.

When Ben saw what she held, he became silent and still, and his eyes were avid. She lifted him like a mummy, put the cup of milk to his lips, and he almost drowned as he gulped: he was starving. She fed him bits of biscuit, keeping her fingers clear of his teeth. When what she had brought was finished, he began roaring and flailing again. She gave him another jab.

The children were in front of the television, but were not watching it. Jane and Paul were crying. David sat at the table with his head in his hands. She said softly, for him to hear, “All right, I am a criminal. But they were murdering him.”

He did not move. She had her back to him. She did not want to see his face.

She said, “He would have been dead in a few months. Weeks, probably.” A silence. At last she turned. She could hardly bear to look at him. He looked ill, but that was not it.…

She said, “I couldn’t stand it.”

He said deliberately, “I thought that was the idea.”

She cried out, “Yes, but you didn’t see it, you didn’t see—!”

“I was careful
not
to see,” he said. “What did you suppose was going to happen? That they were going to turn him into some well-adjusted member of society and then everything would be lovely?” He was jeering at her, but it was because his throat was stiff with tears.

Now they looked at each other, long, hard, seeing everything about each other. She thought, All right, he was right, and I was wrong. But it’s done.

She said aloud, “All right, but it’s done.”

“That’s the
mot juste
, I think.”

She sat down beside the children on the sofa. Now she saw
they all had tear-stained faces. She could not touch them to comfort them, because it was she who made them cry.

When she at last said “Bed,” they all got up at once and went, without looking at her.

She took supplies of suitable food for Ben up to the big bedroom. David had moved his things to another room.

When Ben woke towards morning and began his roaring, she fed him, and drugged him.

She gave the children breakfast as always, and tried to be normal. They tried, too. No one mentioned Ben.

When David came down, she said, “Please take them to school.”

Then the house had only her and Ben in it. When he woke, she fed him but did not drug him. He roared and struggled, but, she thought, much less.

In a lull, when he seemed worn out, she said, “Ben, you are at home, not in that place.” He was listening.

“When you stop making all that noise, I’ll take you out of that thing they put you in.”

It was too soon, he began struggling again. Through his screams she heard voices, and went to the banisters. David had not gone to his office, had stayed home to help her. Two young policewomen stood there, and David was talking to them. They went away.

What had they been told? She did not ask.

Towards the time the children were due home, she said to Ben, “I want you to be quiet now, Ben. The other children will be here and you’ll frighten them screaming like that.”

He became quiet: it was exhaustion.

He was on the floor, which was by now streaked with excrement. She carried him to the bathroom, took off the jacket, put him in the bath and washed him, and saw that he was shuddering with terror: he had not always been unconscious when they washed him in that place. She took him back to the
bed, and said, “If you start all that again, then I’m going to have to put that thing back on you.”

He ground his teeth at her, his eyes blazing. But he was afraid, too. She was going to have to control him through fear.

She cleaned his room while he lay moving his arms about, as if he had forgotten how to do it. He had been in that cloth prison, probably, ever since he had been in the institution.

Then he squatted on his bed, moving his arms and staring around his room, recognising it, and her, at last.

He said, “Open the door.”

She said, “No, not until I am sure you will behave well.”

He was about to start again, but she shouted at him, “Ben, I mean it! You shout and scream and I’ll tie you up.”

He controlled himself. She handed him sandwiches, which he crammed into his mouth, choking.

He had unlearned all the basic social skills that it had been so hard to teach him.

She talked quietly while he ate. “And now listen to me, Ben. You have to listen. You behave well and everything will be all right. You must eat properly. You must use the pot or go to the lavatory. And you mustn’t scream and fight.” She was not sure he heard her. She repeated it. She went on repeating it.

That evening she stayed with Ben, and she did not see the other children at all. David went up to the other room away from her. How she felt at this time was that she was shielding them from Ben while she re-educated him for family life. But how they felt it, she knew, was that she had turned her back on them all and chosen to go off into alien country, with Ben.

That night she locked the door on him, and bolted it, left him undrugged and hoped he would sleep. He did, but woke, screaming in fear. She went in to him, and found him backed against the wall at the end of the bed, an arm up over his face, unable to hear her, while she talked, and talked, using reasonable persuasive words against this storm of terror. At last he
became quiet and she gave him food. He could not get enough food: he had really been starving. They had had to keep him drugged, and, when drugged, he could not eat.

Fed, he again backed himself against the wall, squatted on the bed, and looked at the door where his jailers would enter: he had not really understood he was at home.

Then he nodded off … woke with a bellow; nodded off … woke … She calmed him, and he dropped off.

Days passed; nights passed.

He at last understood he was at home and safe. Slowly, he stopped eating as if every mouthful were his last. Slowly, he used his pot, and then allowed himself to be taken by the hand along the passage to the lavatory. Then he came downstairs, darting glances around him to see the enemy before he could be captured again. As he saw it, this house was where he had been trapped. And by his father. When he first set eyes on David, he backed away, hissing.

David did not try to reassure him; as far as he was concerned, Ben was Harriet’s responsibility, and his was for the children—the real children.

Ben took his place at the big table, among the other children. He kept his eyes on his father, who had betrayed him. Helen said, “Hello, Ben.” Then Luke: “Hello, Ben.” Then Jane. Not Paul, who was miserable that Ben was there again, and took himself off to flump into a chair and pretend to watch television.

Ben at last said, “Hello.” His eyes were moving from face to face: friend or foe?

He ate, watching them. When they went to sit and watch television, he did, too, copying them for safety, and looked at the screen because they did.

And so things went back to normal, if that was a word that could be used.

But Ben did not trust his father; he never trusted him again.
David could not even come near him without Ben freezing, and backing away, and, if he came too close, snarling.

When she was sure Ben had recovered, Harriet acted on an idea she had been developing. The garden had got badly out of hand last summer, and a youth called John came to help with it. He was unemployed, and did odd jobs.

For a few days he had cut hedges, dug up a couple of ailing shrubs, sawed off a dead branch, mowed the lawn. Ben would not be parted from him. He crouched at the French doors, waiting for John to arrive; then followed him around like a puppy. John did not mind Ben at all. He was a big, shaggy, amiable youth, good-natured, patient: he treated Ben in a rough-and-ready way, as if Ben were indeed a puppy that needed training. “No, you must sit there now and wait till I’ve done.” “Hold these shears for me, that’s right.” “No, I’m going home now, you can come to the gate with me.”

Ben sometimes whined and grizzled when John went off.

Now Harriet went down to a certain café—“Betty’s Caff,” as it was known—where she knew he hung out, and found him there with some mates. This was a gang of unemployed young men, about ten of them, and sometimes there were a couple of girls. She did not bother to explain anything, for by now she knew that people understood very well—that is, if they weren’t experts, doctors.

She sat among these youths, and said that it would be two years, perhaps more, before Ben went to school. He wasn’t suitable for ordinary nursery school. She looked at John deliberately, in the eyes, when she used the word “suitable,” and he simply nodded. She would like Ben taken care of during the day. The money would be good.

“You want me up at your house?” John asked, saying no to this proposition.

“It would be up to you,” said Harriet. “He likes you, John. He trusts you.”

He looked at his mates: they consulted each other with their eyes. Then he nodded.

Now he arrived most mornings about nine, and Ben went off with him on his motorbike: went exultantly, laughing, without a look back at his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters. The understanding was that Ben should be kept well away from his home until supper time, but often it was long after that when he arrived. He had become part of the group of young unemployed, who hung about on pavements, sat around in cafés, sometimes did odd jobs, went to the cinema, rushed about on motorbikes or in borrowed cars.

The family became a family again. Well, almost.

David came back to sleep in the connubial room. There was a distance between them. David had made and now kept this distance because Harriet had hurt him so badly: she understood this. Harriet informed him that she was now on the Pill: for both it was a bleak moment, because of everything they had been, had stood for, in the past, which had made it impossible for her to be on the Pill. They had felt it deeply wrong so to tamper with the processes of Nature! Nature—they now reminded themselves they once felt—was at some level or other to be relied upon.

Harriet rang up Dorothy and asked her if she would come for a week, and then begged David to go off with her on a holiday somewhere. They had not been alone, ever, since Luke was born. They chose a quiet country hotel, and walked a good deal, and were considerate with each other. Their hearts ached a good deal; but then that seemed to be something they must live with. Sometimes, particularly in their happiest moments, they could not stop their eyes from filling. But at nights when she lay in her husband’s arms, Harriet knew this was nothing like the real thing, not like the past.

She said, “Suppose we do what we said we would—I mean, go on having children?”

She felt how his body tensed, felt his anger.

“And so it all never happened?” he asked at last, and she knew he was curious to hear her: he could not believe his ears!

“Another Ben wouldn’t happen again—why should it?”

“It’s not a question of another Ben,” he remarked at last, and he was keeping his voice emotionless because of his anger.

She knew that what he could have assaulted her with was exactly what she always tried to conceal from herself, or at least the worst of it: she had dealt the family a mortal wound when she rescued Ben.

She persisted, “We could have more children.”

“And the four we have don’t count?”

“Perhaps it would bring us all together again, make things better.…”

He was silent; and against that silence she could hear how false her words had rung.

At last he enquired, in the same emotionless way, “And what about Paul?” For it was Paul who was the most damaged.

“Perhaps he would get over it,” she said hopelessly.

“He is not going to get over it, Harriet.” And now his voice vibrated with what he was suppressing.

She turned away from him, and lay weeping.

When the summer holidays were due, Harriet wrote careful letters to everyone, explaining that Ben was hardly ever in the house. She felt unfaithful and treacherous doing this: but to whom?

Some of them came. Not Molly, or Frederick, who did not forgive her for bringing Ben back; nor would they ever, she knew. Her sister Sarah came with Amy and with Dorothy, who now was Amy’s support against the world. But Amy’s brothers and sisters went to stay with their other cousins, Angela’s children, and the Lovatt children knew they would not have company for the holidays because of Ben. Briefly, Deborah was there. She had been married and divorced since they had seen
her. She was a spiky, elegant, increasingly witty and desperate girl, who was a good aunt to the children, in an impulsive unskilled way, with expensive and unsuitable presents. James was there. He said several times that the house was like a large fruit-cake, but this was kindness. There were some grown-up cousins, at a loose end, and a colleague of David’s.

And where was Ben? One day, Harriet was shopping in the town, and she heard the roar of a motorbike behind her, and turned to see a creature like a space-age jockey, presumably John, crouched low over the bars, and behind him, clutching tight, a dwarf child: she saw her son Ben, his mouth open in what seemed to be a chant or yell of exultation. Ecstatic. She had never seen him like this. Happy? Was that the word?

She knew he had become a pet or a mascot for this group of young men. They treated him roughly, it seemed to Harriet, even unkindly, calling him Dopey, Dwarfey, Alien Two, Hobbit, and Gremlin. “Hey, Dopey, you’re in my way.” “Go and fetch me a cigarette from Jack, Hobbit.” But he was happy. In the mornings, he was at the window waiting for one of them to come and fetch him; if they failed him, rang up to say they couldn’t make it that day, he was full of rage and deprivation, and stamped bellowing about the house.

It was all costing a good bit of money. John and his gang were having good times at the Lovatts’ expense. Not only, these days, at the expense of James, Ben’s grandfather, for David was doing all kinds of extra work. They did not scruple to put the screws on. “We’ll take Ben off to the sea, if you like.” “Oh good, that’d be lovely.” “It’ll be twenty quid, then—there’s petrol.” And the roaring machines went off to the coast, crowded with young men and girls, Ben with them. When they returned him: “That cost more than we thought.” “How much?” “Another ten quid.”