Waterland (40 page)

‘Goodbye. Hey, Price, not so final. Not so solemn. I’ve got till the end of term. And we’ve got our French Revolution to finish still. Have you forgotten? Hey, Price,’ (from the platform as my bus carts me off) ‘don’t let him do it!’

And History scarcely finds time to mention that on the eve of the French Revolution Louis XVI mourned his firstborn.

44
Begin Again

W
E TAKE the baby to the car. By some freak, it’s asleep. Hasn’t even wet itself. I think for a moment: it’s dead with shock. Mary sits in the back seat and clutches it and I drive. What follows is like a parody of those panic drives to hospitals made by young husbands with wives in the throes of precipitate labour. Save that in our case we already have the baby and we are rushing to return it.

From the back seat Mary offers a running confession:

‘It was easy. Easy. I saw her come in. She left the pram near the way in. That was risking it, wasn’t it? I was by the fruit counter, heading for the checkout. Crowded. One of those big prams, not a pushchair. Maybe she’d just got a few things to get, and she thought – with that big pram and all those people. I watched her go up one of the aisles. Didn’t think I would ever. But then I put down my basket. Didn’t get any shopping, after all. Got a— Instead.
I looked up the aisle. Went over to the pram. Looked. I got hold of the handle. Pushed, pressed, the way they do. I said, “Here I am. Off we go then.” Nobody would’ve known. Nobody would’ve known that I wasn’t the real—’

Mary, you’re fifty-two.

‘And I knew it was all right. Because it smiled. When I pushed, it smiled. Didn’t you? Didn’t cry. Did you? Then I wheeled the pram round the corner and into the lift to the multi-storey. I put my bags in the boot and the baby in the back seat with some of the blankets. Know that’s wrong. Supposed to strap them in, aren’t you? But it didn’t cry. Didn’t cry at all …’

But she says all this as if only pretending, under some sort of hypnosis, to be a woman confessing to a crime. The truth is so different, no one would believe it. The truth is a miracle. God came down to Safeways and left her a gift, a free product. A babe in the bulrushes. He said, Go on, I command you. Take. It’s yours …

(It’s what she’ll tell a presiding magistrate and a practising psychiatrist. To her husband alone – a sort of practising historian – she gives the unreal, historical facts.)

‘Would you recognize her, Mary – I mean the mother – again?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course …’

I see her in the driving mirror. Her eyes are brilliant and clear. Yes, she’ll continue this trumped-up narrative (… and just drove off. No hue and cry. No chasing police cars …), she’ll play this part of the cranky child-thief. But in reality …

As if we’re not in the same space. As if there’s a glass plate between us. She in the back seat, I her cabby. Where to, lady?

(Where to? Where to now?)

Or, the picked-up suspect in the back of the squad car; interrogation already beginning:

‘So you left the pram? So then you drove home …?’

(But we’ll know, soon enough, about squad cars and rides to the station.)

The lights of Shooter’s Hill, of Blackheath, Lewisham. A Friday evening in the suburbs. Heavy traffic in Lewisham High Street. Should I sound my horn, flash my lights? Make way, this is an emergency!

But why this haste? Why this wild car-dash? When a simple phone call. Why this need to return to the scene of the—

A quarter past five. We reach the multi-storey. Park on level three.

‘So this is where you left the car?’

It’s called reconstructing the crime. From last to first. It’s an analogy of the historical method; an analogy of how you discover how you’ve become what you are. If you’re lucky you might find out. If you’re lucky you might get back to where you can begin again. Revolution.

I turn off the engine.

‘Now give me the baby, Mary. We’re here now, Mary. I’ll take the baby now.’

As if I’m talking to another baby.

‘Mary, I’ll take—’

She hands it over, in a trance. But it’s still there really, still in her arms. Always will be.

I hold it. Incredibly, it goes on sleeping. It won’t know. All this will be its dream.

‘Now we’re going to go back to Safeways. To where you—’

We’re going to retrace our steps, to go back …

She walks with dazed confidence. (God’s waiting. He’ll explain. That other yarn I told you in the car – all nonsense.)

‘So you pushed the pram along here, from the lift?’

No prowling policemen. No distant hubbub.

So perhaps it never.

Or perhaps the scene has already shifted: A tearful
woman sits in a police station. A constable offers unconsolatory tea. A phone-summoned husband arrives, wild-eyed. A pram awaits forensic inspection … Meanwhile the shoppers return to their shopping. Drama over. The wire trolleys fill …

We’ll arrive with our cock-and-bull story. Woman? What woman? What baby? We never—

I’m wrong. As we come out of the lift and turn the corner by Mothercare and the kiddies’ play centre: a knot of people visible outside Safeways. Police helmets. Security staff. Gaggles of onlookers watching from the entrances of W. H. Smith and Marks and Spencer.

So the drama’s not over. The Mother, perhaps, refusing to budge. From where she last— Though it’s an hour since. Still doesn’t believe. It can’t have really. Hoping for a miracle.

Which she’s going to get. Come on, Mary. Be brave, be brave. We’re going to restore— We’re going to return. Keep walking, Mary. Only a few paces. Back. To go forward.

Or—

Yes, I’ve thought of this too. She’ll tear Mary’s eyes out. The crowd will set upon us. I know about mobs (how, for example, in revolutionary Paris …) Spitting and scratching. Uproar. A Lewisham lynching.

But it doesn’t happen like that. It happens as if it’s all on a stage. The crowd parts. ‘Please, please – we’ve got the baby. The missing baby.’ The crowd hushes. The mother occupies the centre of the scene. I see her. She’s standing beside a policeman and a policewoman, both in attitudes of patient persuasion. She’s young. Still in her teens. She can’t be any age. A kid. Only a kid. A kid.

She turns. Red-rimmed, emptied eyes. She sees me; or rather, she sees the baby. And hears it (before this audience, it wakes up, suddenly bawls its part). She sees only the baby. She doesn’t see me, or Mary behind. She doesn’t see the crowd – blurred faces on a backcloth. She steps
forward; she knows, without thinking, her role. She takes her child, not caring who I am, or how or what or where or why. Her face spills over. She starts to sob ecstatically words which only moments before were sobbed in agony: ‘My baby, my baby, my baby …’

And it’s then that Mary groans, snaps, topples out of her trance, falls into my arms. I totter, rock, an unaccustomed pillar of support.

(Mary, my darling, my angel, my strength—)

‘My name is Crick. My wife took the baby. Yes. My wife’s – not very well. We’ve brought it back now. So it’s all right now. Please, is that all?’

But it’s not all. As you know. Though it’s over, that’s not the end. ‘This way, sir, please – and Mrs Crick.’ They want to know how and where and why. They want to know what really— (Officers, I’m familiar with all this. You see, my job—) ‘Very well, sir, shall we make a start?’ But officers, there are different versions. (There always are; for example, 1789: bread riots, or the millennium.) There’s her first explanation (which is far-fetched) and then what she told me in the car. ‘Look, sir, shall we go back to the beginning?’ The beginning? But where’s that? How far back is that? Very well, I confess that my wife, with intention so to do, took a baby from an unminded pram. Very well (this far back?): I confess my responsibility, jointly with my wife, for the death of three people (that is – it’s not so simple – one of them was never born, and one of them – who knows if it was really a death …).

But what does it matter. She’s got her baby back. That’s the only thing that— And my wife, as you see, officers, is in no fit—

But not so fast, Mr History Teacher. You can’t change your tune. You can’t set yourself up to be a classroom sleuth and
then want to skip the process when it’s your turn for investigation.
Historia
, or Inquiry (as in Natural History). You’re not saying all this was an accident, are you, sir? And none of this talk of miracles. We want an explanation …

And we want our story. Yes, we can’t do without stories. Even when the police have finished and legal proceedings have taken their course, the press-men want their stories … Read this. Stole a baby. Right outside Safeways. What kind of a woman—? Said God told her. Well, would you credit it? A psychiatrist testifies – yes, yes, but never mind the clever-talk. And her husband a schoolteacher. (Not for long he won’t be.) To think of our children—! He’ll lose his job (she’s lost her mind) … Hey, is there any more? A quarter-page photo of the relieved Mother and the innocent Babe. How I felt when … Hey, this is good stuff, this is a real-life drama. Let’s have more.

45
About the Pike

A
ND Dick, while I watch, clambers on to his bed and, reaching up to the precariously perched glass and mahogany case, containing the stuffed and mounted carcass of a twenty-one-pound pike, caught on Armistice Day by John Badcock, puts his hand through one of the side panels, which, since the signing of the Armistice, has lost its glass, and thus (even Dick’s large, bony hand passes with ease) into the gaping and befanged jaws of this same memorable specimen …

Alive and not alive. Dead yet unperished. A ghost … Those restless nights, when Dick and I slept in the same room, and even my mother’s stories …

Moonlight on the staring eyes, on the icicle teeth.
Nov. 11th 1918.

Twice it had to be removed for giving me bad dreams. But it was Dick’s prize possession. (And a wedding gift.) ‘Only a fish, Tom. A dead fish.’

But they’re killers. Pike. Freshwater-wolves. They’ll tackle ducks, water rats, other pike. The teeth rake backwards towards the gullet, so what goes in, can’t— Killers.

And into the jaws of a killer, the hand of a—

But Dick’s no longer a creature to be feared. It’s some days now since I’ve locked my door against him. Since we’ve played our see-saw game of nerves: who’s more afraid of whom? Fear’s been dissolved by something else. Fear’s been washed away by local scandal, the after-ripples of which eddy and rebound around the communal gossip pool of Hockwell, and cannot fail to ruffle even Dick’s duck’s-back senses; since there’s a deep end to this gossip-pool, and Dick’s brother’s in it.

So the poor thing got taken to hospital. Very nearly— Septi-thingummy of the womb. Martha Clay! Martha Clay! That old— And her a convent girl. Bless us, what’s happening to the world. (A world war’s happening to it.) First Freddie Parr. And now her Dad’s shut her away for her pains. Or maybe it’s her as doesn’t want to show her face. And it was young Tom Crick, they say, would you believe …?

Yes, it’s common knowledge. But only I know about that night in Martha’s cottage. What I saw through the window. And that dawn. That dawn. I carried the pail, down to the Ouse. Because Martha said: ‘You gotta do it, bor. Only you. No one else. In the river, mind. An’ when you throws it, don’t you look. Nothin’ but bad luck if you
looks.’ So I carried the pail across the mist-wrapped, dew-soaked meadows. Larks were trilling somewhere above the mist, but I was stumbling through a mist of tears. I climbed the river wall, descended to the water’s edge. I turned my head away. But then I looked. I howled. A farewell glance. A red spittle, floating, frothing, slowly sinking. Borne on the slow Ouse currents. Borne downstream. Borne all the way (but for the Ouse eels …) to the Wash. Where it all comes out.

He grips me by the arm. His grip wants to tell me something. His lashes fan his eyes. He says, ‘C-come with Dick. D-Dick show.’ He leads me up the stairs to his room.

And where’s Dad, on this dull and sullen yet revelatory Sunday morning? On his way, at this very moment, to Polt Fen Farm. To make due representations, to make reparations by word of mouth to Harold Metcalf. Though God knows what he’ll say to him, since he hasn’t found a way yet of having matters out with his son. His good-scholar son (not the other one). His pride-and-hope and so-full-of-promise younger son. Something stops his paternal wrath. He opens his mouth to speak but something sticks in his throat and turns his lips into a sad, mute circle. We all go wrong. It all goes wrong. All scooped into the net of trouble. So is it time then, time at last, to tell the whole story? For his son’s weeping confession, one of his own? He broods by the lock-gate. Rehearses a dialogue that never gets performed: So it was serious, after all. Dead serious. But if you, I mean, if she was— Why didn’t you just—? Not such a bad match – even starting it the hard way – you and Metcalf’s girl. Though old Metcalf would have had his piece to say. So why?… Trouble upon trouble. First Freddie. And now. But it’s a punishment, that’s what it is. A punishment for non-vigilance. For neglect of duty.