Gently, he said, ‘That’s just what I was about to say.’
‘Can you get away?’ she asked. ‘I really need you.’
‘Within half an hour. I’ll be with you by four.’
‘Hurry! But drive carefully. But
hurry
…’
He arranged for one of the students to complete the photographic record on his behalf, and earned a spontaneous and warm round of applause when he announced the reason for his abrupt departure from the excavation. The motorway to the south was almost empty and he crossed London’s North Circular Road at three in the afternoon, but then crawled in traffic for an hour to Harley Street. He couldn’t park legally and so resigned himself to getting a ticket.
Inside the clinic, Susan was waiting for him with the infant. After a few minutes’ fuss and hugging, he signed the appropriate papers for the consultant, who wished all three of them a long and happy life together.
Susan had taken care of the financial arrangement.
Again, a crawl out of London, this time to the east, into Kent (the car had not been booked for parking on a double yellow line, which Richard took as a good omen). When at last they picked up the motorway they made excellent time to the village of Ruckinghurst, where they had their house, Eastwell, on the hills that dropped sharply to the wide expanse of the Romney Marsh.
For much of
the journey Susan was very subdued, although she responded positively to Richard’s conversation and questions. But she didn’t want to talk about Michael’s natural mother, and Richard imagined well enough why that should be.
When he asked, ‘Was everything all right? No difficulties?’ Susan was silent for a long while. He prompted her. She sat in the back, Michael asleep in her arms, and stared blankly at the Kent countryside.
Eventually she said, ‘There
was
a problem.’
‘With the boy?’
‘With the mother.’
‘She wasn’t there! Surely …!’
‘She was there earlier. The look in her eyes … when she looked at me … that look. It …’ She shuddered and stared through the window. ‘It frightened me.’
‘Had she changed her mind?’
‘I don’t know. No. Of course not. She would have kept the child if she had. But there was something horrible about her look.’
‘Try not to let it upset you …’
It was a pointless thing to say. He winced as the words were articulated. Susan glared at him in the mirror.
‘I’m working on it, Rick. I’m working on it.’
He smiled, feeling grim. Susan had swept her hair back into a loose ponytail, and she wore no make-up; her eyes looked hollow. But she sang quietly and rocked the infant, and after an hour or so the gloom in her mood had passed considerably.
The rain of earlier had passed over the Channel, and the evening sun was warm and glowing. The woods between their house and the chalk escarpment glistened with green and orange colour. A fresh breeze brought the smells of late summer into the house when they opened the French windows.
Michael was
restless and Susan fed him as she had been shown. Richard tried to familiarize himself with the sterilizing tank, the bottles, the nappies, the instructions, everything taught to Susan in the local ante-natal clinic, everything he had managed to avoid learning himself.
It was such an odd feeling: to be a father, but not to have been through nine months of supporting: through morning sickness, helping a hugely pregnant spouse up out of chairs, preparing odd concoctions for meals – everything he imagined was the labour of gestation. One hour he had been wading around in mud and Viking timbers, while Susan was teaching art at Maidstone College; four hours later they had a
child
. And he was theirs until death did them part. They were parents. Suddenly. Incredibly. (And expensively!)
His head started to spin as he opened the champagne. He had eaten very little since breakfast, nothing more than a sandwich and a chocolate bar. So when he raised the glass, and clinked Susan’s, and drank to Michael’s health, the wine went quickly to his head. ‘Let’s welcome him properly …’
Susan sighed, knowing what was coming. ‘All right. Just so long as you don’t get embarrassing.’
He lifted Michael from her arms and carried him outside. They walked down the long garden, past the ramshackle greenhouses.
‘My grandfather built those,’ he said, turning to show the staring infant the whitewashed glasshouses, where tomatoes and spaghetti squash were about the only growing things. ‘Forty years ago …’
They moved on through the hedges that separated flower from vegetable patches. These made a crude but effective maze system, which his nephews and nieces loved, and the trio walked solemnly through the winding path and down to the fence. The gate here opened on to farmland, a cornfield, now harvested and part-blackened from the burning of the stubble. A few yards away a rough, grassy hump marked the site of a Bronze Age barrow, a flattened tumulus, its identity marked by a rusting iron notice leaning aslant from its summit. The barrow had a catalogue number and was one of several that scattered this high ground, looking out over the marsh to the distant sea. There were three further tumuli in the thin woods across the field, one of them partially cut
away by the disused chalk quarry.
Nothing was buried in the mound, now (or indeed, in any of them). The bones of the single burial were in Dover Museum, the bronze implements and horse trappings that had been excavated were on display in the British Museum in London. Locally, the mound was known as ‘the scar’, although in the Whitlock family they called it ‘the tump’.
They stood on the mound and Richard said, ‘Make a wish.’
‘You make yours first,’ Susan said. ‘I’ll make mine later.’
She seemed edgy, but the wine had blunted Richard’s perception, so that although he noticed her unease, he did not respond to it.
He looked down at Michael. The child watched the sky through eyes so translucent Richard felt he could dip in a finger and feel the cool water of the infant’s soul. Michael was so calm. There was something almost knowing in his gaze. Sometimes he stared heavenwards, sometimes at his parents, and at times he turned slightly away, as if he could see something from the corner of his water-blue eyes.
And all of this, of course, was just the new father, in romantic mood, looking for signs of awareness in the guileless features of the newly born.
‘When I was two weeks old, young Michael, my father carried me out to this bruised and battered old tumulus and stood with me and wished me something that I’ve never regretted, and which I wish to you now …’
‘Oh,
dear God,’ Susan groaned, but Richard ignored her.
‘… May you have a love for the past and a respect for everything that reflects it, especially the land itself …’
‘An ageing hippie,’ Susan muttered, shaking her head. ‘I married an ageing hippie.’
He looked at her with mock sharpness.
‘I’m an archaeologist. These things are important to me. And less of the “ageing”, if you don’t mind.’
‘Get on with it. You’re traumatizing him.’
The teasing exchange was interrupted by a sudden gust of wind. A spray of fine dirt blew in their eyes and spattered the restless child. They shook their heads, blinking to soothe the stinging. Susan brushed the dust from Michael’s swaddling, but the child was quiet again, and alert.
‘Your turn,’ Richard said. ‘Make your wish.’
‘As I said: later.’
‘But this is the place to do it. This mound is propitious.’
‘Later …’
Magpies screeched in the far woods. Three of the birds came swooping and soaring towards the tumulus, but settled suddenly in the burned stubble field.
‘One for sorrow,’ Richard remembered, ‘two for joy …’
He glanced at Susan. ‘Three for a girl?’
He tugged at Michael’s nappy, peered down through the vapours of talcum powder and early-human soil.
‘It’s still there. Thank God for that.’
Susan laughed. ‘Superstitious idiot.’
‘A joke. It was a joke …’
*
It was after
two in the morning before Susan finally, quietly, made her own wish.
Richard was sleeping soundly. Michael had woken from his own restless slumber, and had been fed, and for a while Susan had cradled him, and stroked the skin of his face. She had thought that Richard would wake too, but the day had been long, the drive from the clinic exhausting, and their private ceremonies had ended with food and wine. His body – older than Susan’s – could not take the pace.
‘We were so lucky to get you.’
Michael spluttered bottled milk, a sequence of bubbles that formed a stream down his chin.
A gentle chime from the hall: two o’clock. Richard stirred but didn’t wake.
Susan reached to her bedside cabinet, and from among the packs of pills, the tissues and the books, drew out a small, red-clay figurine. She had fashioned it in minutes out of the modelling clay she used for teaching. It was a very simple shape, a head, legs, arms, sex unspecified. It was unfired, dry and fractile.
She eased herself out of bed and walked quietly down to the sitting room, where she switched on a corner light. From behind the sofa she fetched the crude wooden cradle she had made that evening, a simple weave of the ivy stem and dry twigs they used for kindling. The cradle was decked with brightly coloured flowers of the field in a way that she vaguely remembered from her childhood, when her aunt Ruth had shown her how to banish shadows.
She laid Michael in the cradle; the dry twigs cracked beneath his tiny weight. But the child remained quiet, and his pale eyes watched his new mother in the dim light from the lamp. Susan smiled at him, then raised the small, crude figurine. She whispered, ‘There was bad in your mother. You don’t know it. Your father doesn’t know it. But I know it. I saw it in her eyes. If there was bad in your mother, then perhaps there is a shadow of that in you.’ She moved the doll through the air. ‘All the bad from your mother, come into this doll. Come on. Come on. Into the doll.’
She lifted
Michael from the cradle and opened his woollen jacket. Then she rubbed the crumbling clay figure against the infant’s mouth, against his cheeks and eyes, over his head, down his breast, across his back and down his legs. She left him smeared with a fine layer of red clay.
‘All the bad has been swallowed,’ she said, and thought briefly of those dusk evenings when the aunts, in their claustrophobic living room, had passed similar figurines from hand to hand and spoken soft words that Susan, watching from a corner, could only partly understand.
Now she placed Michael on the floor and put the cradle in the clean grate of the fireplace, crushing the twigs to make a small pyre. She crumbled the doll over the pyre, let the pieces fall through her fingers, scattered on the wood. Then she set light to the fire and watched it burn, listening to the sharp, dry snaps as the kindling flared and was consumed in seconds.
Michael’s eyes blazed in the brief firelight and he turned his head to watch the burning. Susan rested a hand lightly on his chest and drew the glitter of his pale gaze back to her.
‘You belong to us,’ she whispered. ‘You are ours, now. We couldn’t have our own child, but we will love you no less. We love you. The shadow stuff from your mother is gone.’
She leaned down to kiss her son.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
Susan was startled by the sudden, angry voice from the doorway. Richard stood there, naked and dishevelled, his eyes telling clearly of his suspicion.
‘What
are you doing down here?’
‘I didn’t know I’d woken you. Sorry.’
‘You didn’t wake me. The smell of burning woke me. I thought there was a fire.’ He walked over to the grate and crouched before the dying embers; he was puzzled, curious, but perhaps too sleepy to frame his thoughts clearly. ‘What were you doing? Keeping warm?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Michael was restless. I’ve just fed him.’
He reached into the grate and drew out the half-charred head of a dandelion. He met her gaze and she shrugged, looked quickly away. Then he noticed the red coloration on Michael’s face.
‘Christ! And you call
me
superstitious!’
He flung the shred of flower back into the embers, picked up Michael and rocked the silent child. His anger subsided. He looked at Susan and muttered, ‘I do
know
about the aunts. The old witches. You told me, remember? Which ritual was this? Bind his soul to the spirit world of your family? Link him with the ancestral spirits from ancient Hungary?’
She smiled, and told the partial lie with the greatest of ease: ‘I was linking him with the spirit of his parents. With us. That’s all.’
Richard sighed and she responded to his sudden, affectionate touch on her shoulder, kissing his fingers sadly. ‘We all do foolish things on whim. We do them for the best of reasons.’
‘Yes,’ he said tiredly. ‘I know. Like my ceremonial welcome on the tumulus.’
‘Kentish Bronze Age meets Hungarian Aunt Magic …’
That made him laugh. ‘Should develop into a well-mixed-up kid.’
He stood
up, red-skinned Michael nestling against his chest, secure in his father’s large arms. ‘Are you going to clean him off, or shall I?’
‘I’ll do it. You go back to bed. Get some beauty sleep.’
‘I don’t need it. Do I?’
They exchanged the infant and a hug. Susan watched as Richard left the room, then rocked Michael in her arms and whispered to him as she brushed the dirt from the child’s face.
Michael began to cry, but the sound was soft. Almost controlled.
Susan had left
the French windows open during the morning, glad of the sunshine and the freshness in the air after the days of miserable late-summer rain. With Michael soundly asleep in his carrycot, just inside the open doors, and a whole day to herself now that the health visitor had left, she set up for a few hours of her hobby: doll restoration.
She had found two dolls in a small shop in Bloomsbury, two months ago. They were Victorian bed-dolls, designed to be placed on the pillows in a child’s room. She wasn’t sure if they made an original pair, although they were ‘man’ and ‘woman’. They had been clumsily and crudely restored around the face and hair, and she had decided to unrestore them and return them as closely as possible to their original appearance.