Tree of Hands (9 page)

In the basement room she sat by the window. A woman went by, then a child with a dog on a lead. Benet made herself a cup of tea for something to do and drank it to pass the time. The time until what? She wondered about the rest of her life, how she could contemplate it, what she
could possibly do with it. After a while she put a coat on and went out of the house and on to the Heath. It was a cold day with a cold wind blowing. The air was as clear as if this were some remote unspoiled place on the edge of the world where pollution and fog and fouled atmosphere never came. Acres of London roofs and spires and towers lay below her clear as a painting on glass, only faintly blurred with blue at the horizon. Clouds lay over Highgate and the north, piled, frothy, full of rain. She went back.

The phone rang three or four times. She didn't answer it. She ate a very small piece of bread and butter and half an apple, afraid she would be sick if she ate any more. After that she went back to the window and sat there, wishing she hadn't thrown Ian Raeburn's sleeping pills away. She sat and thought about James because there was nothing and no one else to think about. She had written a book and had a child and now the child was dead and she would never write again. It seemed like something that was happening to someone else because it was too bad, too terrible to be happening to her. Yet it was. The someone else was she herself and it was all for her alone . . .

Above her, beyond the window, against the pavement, she heard her own car draw up. She knew the sound of that car. Mopsa was back. It was only just gone three.

She didn't look. It was only Mopsa. The front door closed and footsteps sounded along the passage above her head. A moment ago Benet would have said that she could never wish passionately for anything again but she found herself wishing passionately that Mopsa was not with her, that Mopsa would go home, that she might be alone. It was kind of Mopsa, it was motherly, it was what mothers did – but it would be better if Mopsa were gone. At least, if not better, it would somehow be less intensely, grindingly, awful.

Mopsa came into the room. She was holding a child by the hand, a small boy. She said rather stupidly, ‘Were you asleep, Brigitte? Did we wake you up?'

Benet had eyes only for the child. Apart from the girl
walking the dog, this was the first child she had seen since James's death.

‘Who is that?' she said. It was her voice but it sounded to her like someone else's, coming from another part of the room.

‘Don't you like him?' Mopsa said.

That seemed to Benet one of the most absurd remarks she had ever heard. It was meaningless, not something you asked in connection with a child. A dog perhaps . . .

‘Who is he?'

Mopsa had begun to look frightened. The wary, alert animal look was on her face. The little boy still held on to her hand in a docile way. He seemed about two or a little younger, James's age perhaps, but big and sturdy. Under a dirty red quilted jacket with a dirty white nylon fur lining, he wore blue denim dungarees, green-and-brown striped socks and sandals of red moulded plastic. His hair was fair, almost white, a thick thatch of it. He had bright shiny red cheeks and big coarse features. You could already see the man he would become in those features, in the strong nose and the rather bloated sore-looking lips. Benet thought him the ugliest child she had ever seen.

‘He's Barbara Lloyd's little boy,' Mopsa faltered.

‘I don't know any Barbara Lloyd.'

‘Yes, you do, Brigitte. You'll remember when I tell you. She's Barbara Fenton that was, Constance's girl. She married a man called Lloyd who's something in computers. They're living with Constance until their house is ready.'

Then Benet did remember. Not so much Barbara Fenton whom she must once have known by sight if not to talk to, but the phone conversation she had had with Constance a thousand years ago, when things were all right, when she was happy, when James was alive and she was stupid enough to be worrying over Mopsa. Constance had told her then that she had her daughter and son-in-law and grandson staying with her.

‘What's he doing here with you?'

‘I said I'd mind him for them for a little while. They were desperate.'

The little boy had freed himself from Mopsa's grasp. He took a step forward in this strange place, looked about him, then up at Benet, back at Mopsa, his face beginning to work in that open, unrestrained way children's faces do. His mouth made a square shape and he started to cry.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,' said Mopsa. ‘Oh dear.' She was saying it to herself, not to him. She bent to pick him up. In her arms he struggled and screamed.

Benet went upstairs to her bedroom.

It was dark when she came down again. She hadn't heard the car go. She looked and saw that the car was still there. The boy was still there too and he was sitting in James's highchair. Mopsa had given him a scrambled egg and fingers of bread and he was using his fingers and a spoon to eat it. Mopsa herself sat up at the table beside him with a cup of tea in front of her.

‘Isn't it time you took him home?' Benet said.

She could tell her mother was hiding something. Mopsa was tense with nervousness.

‘Why did you have to have him anyway?'

‘Someone had to. The lady he was going to stay with, she's his godmother, she fell over and broke her leg.'

‘He's got a mother and father and grandmother, hasn't he?'

‘They were booked up for this holiday. They've been booked up for weeks.'

Benet felt cold. ‘Mother, what holiday? What do you mean?' She recalled something Mopsa had said. ‘What did you mean “going to stay with”?'

Mopsa faltered. ‘He was going to stay with his godmother.'

‘Yes, you said. Do you mean he's come to
stay
here?'

Mopsa bit her lip. She was half smiling while she did so, like a naughty child. She gave Benet a sly sidelong look.
The boy was eating his egg and bread, concentrating, apparently enjoying his meal.

‘Where does one go on holiday in November?'

‘The Canary Islands,' said Mopsa.

Closing her eyes, Benet held on to the arms of the chair. She counted to ten. She opened her eyes and said to Mopsa, ‘You mean they are going to the Canary Islands and you've said you'll look after this child while they're away? You've actually offered to do that? For how long? A week? A fortnight?'

A very small low voice whispered out from Mopsa's faintly tremulous lips, ‘A week.'

Benet stared at Mopsa uncomprehendingly. It was not possible. How could anyone be like Mopsa? She would never get used to her, never accept her, never understand. How could Mopsa do what she had done, attend to everything, be caring and attentive and responsible, yet also be so brutally insensitive and thoughtless and cruel? To bring that child here where her own daughter had lost her child, a child of the same age and sex! How could she? How could anyone?

I must not hate my mother . . .

Mopsa had tied a table napkin round the boy's neck for a bib. She was pouring milk into a mug for him and he put out his hands for it, making what Benet thought of as idiot sounds, not words. This was just the sort of child that hefty lump Barbara Fenton would have had. Benet thought she could even trace Barbara's big prominent features in his. Suddenly Mopsa began to talk, to recount in detail the plight of Constance Fenton and the Lloyds, how when she had arrived they had resigned themselves to having to forgo their holiday and lose the advance payment they had made for a reduced-cost flight. Barbara had been crying. It was to have been the first holiday she had had in five years. What could Mopsa do? She hadn't wanted to do it, she dreaded the thought, but she owed it to Constance, Constance had been so good to her in the past. And she hadn't been thoughtless, she had known how Benet would feel.
But Benet was mostly up in her own room, wasn't she? It was a big house. Benet need hardly see him. She, Mopsa, would do it all on her own, have him to sleep in the same room with her, take him out . . .

Benet got up. She looked through the E–K phone directory. Mrs Constance Fenton, 55 Harper Lane, NW9.

‘What are you doing, Brigitte?'

‘Phoning Mrs Fenton to tell her we're sorry but we're not a nursery, we don't board kids, and we're returning her grandson to her in half an hour.' Her finger in the dial, the first digit spinning.

‘They won't be there, they'll have gone by now.'

‘I don't believe you, Mother.'

She listened to the bell ringing. She was beginning to be angry. It was, at any rate, a change of emotion, it was different. The bell went on ringing. No one was going to answer it. Mopsa was right, they had gone.

The boy had got down from the highchair, his face still sticky with food. He was moving about the room, looking for something to do. There was nothing for him to do, there were no toys, no books, crayons, no television. He went into the kitchen area and opened a cupboard door. He paused, looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was going to stop him, and, when he saw they weren't, began removing from the cupboard on to the floor a saucepan, another saucepan, a sieve, a colander.

‘I'm going out,' said Benet. ‘I'm going for a walk on the Heath.'

‘It's pitch dark, Brigitte. I'm sure it isn't safe.'

‘That's all right. Maybe I'll get murdered.'

Normally she would have regretted saying anything that made Mopsa's face change like that, quiver like that, made her hands go up to cover her wobbly mouth. Now she didn't care. She went out into the cold clear night under a moon that had just begun to wane from the full.

IT WASN'T UNTIL
the following day that she asked his name. He was a child, he was in her house, none of it was his fault. She was going to have to see him and occasionally – though as seldom as possible – be with him. She had to know what he was called.

Mopsa looked foolish. This was not her witch or her frightened hare but her village idiot look. She smiled slyly.

‘I don't know.'

They had been out, Mopsa and the boy. She had taken him somewhere in the car. The thought came to Benet that he must have sat in the back in James's baby seat. At least she hadn't seen it. She had decided she wouldn't go out in daylight again. After dark, yes, but not by day. They had been shopping and brought back their purchases, whatever those might be, in carrier bags from Mothercare and Marks & Spencers. The boy whose name Mopsa said she didn't know was taking off his dirty red coat and trying to undo the fastenings on his sandals.

‘Yes, you do,' Benet said. She thought her voice sounded like that of a psychiatric nurse. ‘Of course you know his name.'

Mopsa squatted down to help him with his sandals. She looked up at Benet in a very shifty, sly, covert way. She held her head on one side as if assessing what Benet's reaction would be to the reply she intended to make. Benet wondered what sort of people Constance Fenton and her daughter could be to entrust this child to Mopsa's care. She was mad. Couldn't they see that? She was unfit to be in charge of a child. And Constance Fenton knew it, she knew Mopsa's past. In the circumstances, should she,
Benet, allow Mopsa to be responsible for him? That thought with all its implications was something else she wasn't going to think about.

‘Come on, Mother. What is his name?'

‘It's James.'

Benet said no more. She went upstairs. She didn't cry. She hadn't cried since they told her James was dead. Crying seemed an inadequate thing, not big enough for a great grief.

They had had to tell her twice. Ian Raeburn told her and she had fainted, and when she came round he was there with a sister and they both had to tell her again. James had stopped breathing before the anaesthetist reached him. His airway had closed. If Mr Drew had perhaps taken this emergency measure – this very rare emergency measure in the case of a child – half an hour before, if they could have foretold the ventilation would cease to work, if . . . if . . .

‘You ought to sue them for negligence,' Mopsa had said.

But there had been no negligence, only mischance, only a human error of timing. And what was she supposed to achieve by an action? Compensation for the loss of James? She wasn't poor, she didn't want money or consolation or revenge. She wanted James again and no one could give him to her.

She lay down on her bed, thinking of what Mopsa had said, of the stream of insensitive, outrageous things that issued from Mopsa's slyly smiling, tremulous mouth, telling herself not to hate her mother, to bear with her, to try to understand. How can the sane understand madness? She wondered now how on that first day she could have thought Mopsa ‘cured' or even improved.

After a while she sat up and reached for the phone and dialled Constance Fenton's number. By now she knew it by heart, she had dialled it so many times. Much of what Mopsa told her she refused to believe. Mopsa lied if there was the slightest risk of anything unpleasant for herself, anything that might cause a hint of uneasiness to herself,
attaching to the telling of the truth. Lies made life smooth so she told them as a matter of course. Benet knew that the whole tale of the Fentons going to the Canaries might be a fabrication. Instead of a week in the Canaries, they might be spending three days in Blackpool. They might never have gone away at all. The phone rang and rang. They might have gone away – and this would be the worst – not for a week but a fortnight. The phone went on ringing and Benet put the receiver back.

She began to think that it was perhaps wrong to leave that child in Mopsa's charge. When she had first understood that the boy was there to stay, that he was staying in her house for a week, she had considered going away to an hotel. She was still thinking of it, but no longer very seriously. It would be an irresponsible thing to do. She couldn't leave Mopsa and she dared not leave a child alone with Mopsa. As much as his presence distressed her, she couldn't leave Mopsa to him and him to Mopsa. The memory was strong and sharp of herself and her small cousin locked in that dining room, of the barricaded door and windows, of the knives.