The Fifth Child (15 page)

Ben was there, listening. He had been told by John already, in Betty’s Caff. But he had not taken it in. John had come up on purpose to say this to Harriet, with Ben present, so that Ben could accept it.

“Why can’t I come, too?” demanded Ben.

“Because you can’t, mate. But when I come and visit my mother and father, I’ll come and see you.”

Ben insisted, “But why can’t I come with you?”

“Because I’ll be at school, too. Not here. I’ll be far away. Far, far away.”

Ben stiffened. He assumed his rigid crouching pose, fists held out. He ground his teeth together, his eyes malevolent.

“Ben,” said Harriet, using her special voice. “Ben, stop it.”

“Come on now, Hobbit,” said John, uneasy but kind. “I can’t help it. I’ve got to get away from home some time, haven’t I?”

“Is Barry going? Is Rowland going? Is Henry?”

“Yes, all four of us.”

Suddenly, Ben rushed out into the garden, where he began kicking at a tree trunk, letting out squeals of rage.

“Better the tree than me,” said John.

“Or me,” said Harriet.

“I’m sorry,” said John. “But there it is.”

“I cannot imagine what we would have done without you,” said Harriet.

He nodded, knowing it was true. And so John left their lives, for good. Ben had been with him almost every day of his life since he was rescued from the Institution.

Ben took it hard. At first, he did not believe it. When Harriet arrived to fetch him and, sometimes, Paul from school, he would be at the school gates, staring down the road where John had appeared gloriously on his motorbike. Reluctantly he went home with her, sitting in the corner of the back seat opposite from Paul, if Paul was not at the psychiatrist’s, and his eyes searched the streets for signs of his lost friends. More than once, when he was not anywhere in the house, Harriet found him in Betty’s Caff, sitting isolated at a table, his eyes on the door, where they might appear. In the street one morning, a minor member of John’s gang was standing outside a shop-window, and Ben, crowing with pleasure, rushed to him: but the youth said casually, “Hi, it’s Dumbo. Hello, Dopey,” and turned away. Ben stood transfixed with disbelief, his mouth open, as if he had received a blow across it. It took him a long time to understand. As soon as he got home with Harriet and Paul, he would be off again, running into the centre of the town. She did not follow him. He would come back! He had nowhere else; and she was always pleased to have Paul alone with her—if Paul was there.

Once, Ben came thumping into the house, with his heavy run, and dived under the big table. A policewoman appeared and said to Harriet, “Where’s that child? Is he all right?”

“He’s under the table,” said Harriet.

“Under the … but what for? I only wanted to make sure he wasn’t lost. How old is he?”

“Older than he looks,” said Harriet. “Come out, Ben, it’s all right.”

He would not come out: he was on all fours, facing where the policewoman stood, watching her neat shiny black shoes. He was remembering how once someone in a car had captured him and taken him away: uniforms, the aroma of officialdom.

“Well,” said the policewoman. “Anyone’d think I was a childsnatcher! I shouldn’t let him go running around like that. He might get himself kidnapped.”

“No such luck,” said Harriet, every inch the jolly coping mum. “More likely he’d kidnap them.”

“It’s like that, is it?”

And the policewoman departed, laughing.

David and Harriet lay side by side in their connubial bed, lights out, the house still. Two rooms down, Ben slept—they hoped. Four rooms down, at the end of the passage, Paul slept behind a self-locked door. It was late, and Harriet knew David would be asleep in a minute or two. They lay with a space between them. But it was no longer a space full of anger. Harriet knew that he was too permanently exhausted to be angry. Anyway, he had decided not to be angry: it was killing him. She always knew what he was thinking: he often answered, aloud, to her thoughts.

They sometimes made love, but she felt, and knew he did, that the ghosts of young Harriet and young David entwined and kissed.

It was as if the strain of her life had stripped off her a layer of flesh—not real flesh, but perhaps metaphysical substance, and invisible, unsuspected, until it had gone. And David, working as he did, had lost the self that was the family man. His efforts had made him successful in his firm, then gained him
a much better job in another. But that now was where his centre was: events have their own logic. He was now the sort of man he had once decided never to be. James no longer supported this family; he only paid for Luke. The candour, the openness that had come from David’s stubborn trust in himself had been overlaid by his new self-confidence. Harriet knew that if she were to meet David now, for the first time, she would think him hard. But he was not hard. The rock she felt there in him was endurance. He knew how to stick things out. They were still alike.

Tomorrow, which was a Saturday, David was going to a cricket match at Luke’s school. Harriet was visiting Helen at her school: Helen was in a play. Dorothy was coming in the morning to let the two escape for the weekend. Jane would not be with her, but at a party at a school friend’s house she did not want to miss.

Paul was going with his father to visit his brother.

Ben would be alone with Dorothy, who had not seen him for a year.

Harriet was not surprised when David said, “Do you think Dorothy understands how much older Ben is than he looks?” “Should we warn her?”

“But she understands everything, after about five minutes.”

A silence. Harriet knew David was nearly asleep. He roused himself to say, “Harriet, has it occurred to you that in a couple of years’ time Ben will be adolescent? He’ll be a sexual being?”

“Yes, it has. But he’s not on the same clock as we are.”

“Presumably those people of his had something like an adolescence?”

“How do we know? Perhaps they weren’t as sexual as we are. Someone said we’re oversexed—who? Yes, it was Bernard Shaw.”

“All the same, the thought of Ben sexual scares me.”

“He hasn’t hurt anyone for a long time.”

After that weekend Dorothy said to Harriet, “I wonder if Ben ever asks himself why he is so different from us.”

“How do we know? I’ve never known what he’s thinking.”

“Perhaps he thinks there’s more of his kind somewhere.”

“Perhaps he does.”

“Provided it’s not a female of the species!”

“Ben makes you think … all those different people who lived on the earth once—they must be in us somewhere.”

“All ready to pop up! But perhaps we simply don’t notice them when they do,” said Dorothy.

“Because we don’t want to,” said Harriet.

“I certainly don’t want to,” said Dorothy. “Not after seeing Ben.… Harriet, do you and David realise that Ben isn’t a child any longer? We treat him like one, but …”

Those two years before Ben could go to the big school were bad for him. He was lonely, but did he know he was? Harriet was very lonely, and knew she was.…

Like Paul, when he was there, Ben now went at once to the television when he came in from school. He sometimes watched from four in the afternoon until nine or ten at night. He did not seem to like one programme more than another. He did not understand that some programmes were for children, and others for grown-ups.

“What was the story of that film, Ben?”

“Story.” He tried the word, his thick clumsy voice tentative. And his eyes were on her face, to discover what she wanted.

“What happened in that film, the one you’ve just seen?”

“Big cars,” he would say. “A motorbike. That girl crying. Car chased the man.”

Once, to see if Ben could learn from Paul, she said to Paul, “What was the story of that film?”

“It was about bank robbers, wasn’t it?” said Paul, full of scorn for stupid Ben, who was listening, his eyes moving from his mother’s face to his brother’s. “They planned to rob the bank
by tunnelling. They nearly reached the vault, but the police caught them in a trap. They went to prison, but most of them escaped. Two of them were shot by the police.”

Ben had listened carefully.

“Tell me the story of the film, Ben?”

“Bank robbers,” said Ben. And repeated what Paul had said, stumbling as he reached for exactly the same words.

“But that was only because I told him,” said Paul.

Ben’s eyes flared, but went cold as he told himself—Harriet presumed—“I mustn’t hurt anyone. If I do, they’ll take me to that place.” Harriet knew everything Paul was thinking, feeling. But Ben—she had to try to guess.

Could Paul perhaps teach Ben, without either of them knowing it?

She would read a story to them both, and ask Paul to repeat the story. Then Ben copied Paul. But inside a few minutes he had forgotten it.

She played games like snakes-and-ladders and ludo with Paul, Ben watching; and then, when Paul was with his other family, she invited Ben to try. But he could not get the hang of the games.

Yet certain films he would watch over and over again and never tire of them. They had hired a video. He loved musicals:
The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Oklahoma!, Cats
.

“And now she is going to sing,” Ben told her when she asked “What is happening now, Ben?”

Or, “They are going to dance around, and then she will sing.” Or, “They are going to hurt that girl.” “The girl ran away. Now it is a party.”

But he could not tell her the story of the film.

“Sing me that tune, Ben. Sing it to me and Paul.”

But he could not. He loved the tune, but could bring out only a rough, tuneless roar.

Harriet found Paul teasing Ben: asking him to sing a tune,
then taunting him. Harriet saw fury blaze in Ben’s eyes, and told Paul not to do that ever again.

“Why
not?”
cried Paul. “Why not? It’s always Ben, Ben, Ben …” He flailed his arms at Ben. Ben’s eyes glittered. He was about to spring on Paul …

“
Ben
,” warned Harriet.

It seemed to her that these efforts she made to humanise him drove him away into himself, where he … but
what?—
remembered?—dreamed of?—his own kind.

Once, when she knew he was in the house, but could not find him, she went up from floor to floor looking into the rooms. The first floor, which was still inhabited, with David and herself, Ben and Paul, though three of the rooms were empty, their beds standing ready, spread with fresh pillows and laundered duvets. The second floor, with its clean empty rooms. The third floor: how long since children’s voices, their laughter, filled that floor and spilled out of the open windows all over the garden? But Ben was not in any of those rooms. She went on quietly up to the attic. The door was open. From the high skylight fell a distorted rectangle of light, and in it stood Ben, staring up at dim sunlight. She could not make out what he wanted, what he felt.… He heard her and then she saw the Ben that this life he had to lead kept subdued: in one leap he had reached the dark at the edge of the eaves and vanished. All she could see was the obscurities of an attic that seemed boundless. She could hear nothing. He was crouching there, staring out at her.… She felt the hair on her head lift, felt cold chills—instinctive, for she did not fear him with her mind. She was rigid with terror.

“Ben,” she said softly, though her voice shook. “Ben …” putting into the word her human claim on him, and on this wild dangerous attic where he had gone back into a far-away past that did not know human beings.

No reply. Nothing. A blotch of shadow momentarily dimmed
the thin dirty light under the skylight: a bird had passed, on its way from one tree to another.

She went downstairs, and sat cold and lonely in the kitchen, drinking hot tea.

Just before Ben went to the local secondary modern school, the only school of course that would have him, there was a summer holiday, almost like those in the past. People had written each other, had rung: “Those poor people, let’s go there, at least for a week.…” Poor David … always that, Harriet knew. Sometimes, rarely, poor Harriet … More often, irresponsible Harriet, selfish Harriet, crazy Harriet …

Who had not let Ben be murdered
, she defended herself fiercely, in thought, never aloud. By everything they—the society she belonged to—stood for, believed in, she had had no alternative but to bring Ben back from that place. But because she had, and saved him from murder, she had destroyed her family. Had harmed her life … David’s … Luke’s, Helen’s, Jane’s … and Paul’s. Paul, the worst.

Her thoughts circled in this groove.

David kept saying she should simply not have gone up there … but how could she
not
have gone, being Harriet? And if she had not, she believed David would have.

A scapegoat. She was the scapegoat—Harriet, the destroyer of her family.

But another layer of thoughts, or feelings, ran deeper. She said to David, “We are being punished, that’s all.”

“What for?” he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated.

“For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because
we
decided we would be.”

“Rubbish,” he said. Angry: this Harriet made him angry. “It was chance. Anyone could have got Ben. It was a chance gene, that’s all.”

“I don’t think so,” she stubbornly held on. “We were going
to be happy! No one else is, or I never seem to meet them, but we were going to be. And so down came the thunderbolt.”

“Stop it, Harriet! Don’t you know where that thought leads? Pogroms and punishments, witch-burnings and angry Gods—!” He was shouting at her.

“And scapegoats,” said Harriet. “Don’t forget the scapegoats.”

“Vindictive Gods, from thousands of years ago,” he hotly contended, disturbed to his depths, she could see. “Punishing Gods, distributing punishments for insubordination …”

“But who were
we
to decide we were going to be this or that?”

“Who?
We
did. Harriet and David.
We
took the responsibility for what we believed in, and we did it. Then—bad luck. That’s all. We could easily have succeeded. We could have had just what we planned. Eight children in this house and everyone happy … Well, as far as possible.”