Small Circle of Beings (3 page)

Stephen, I suspect, would like to live in town where things are orderly and neat. He would like to attend bridge evenings, go to dinner parties with friends. He has spoken from time to time
about moving back there. ‘One of the outlying suburbs,’ he says. But I can’t do it. This house belongs to the family, I tell him. My mother has lived here all her life, as hers
did. We can’t give it up. Besides, I say, what would Mother do in town? Here she can wander all she likes without getting into trouble. It’s safer by far to live here.

In reality, I love this place, with its wild views down the valley, the storms that come down from the hills. I have discovered something of myself in the solitude. Here I am not answerable to
people or to custom. I can do as I please. I am my own woman.

I must concede, then, that perhaps a division existed in our marriage long before the sickness began. Perhaps, in our battle of wills, our daily unspoken compromises, there was a fault for which
I had to pay, whether or not David fell ill.

But he does fall ill. It becomes clear that something larger and more frightening than I first supposed has entered into his body, and our lives. The pain, the little pain which was the first
warning of our downfall, has not gone away. Instead it grows, day by day. The morning after Dr Bouch has made his proclamation, the ache is back. David cries. And it’s then, as I gaze at him
where he stands in the centre of his room, holding in one hand his grey school shirt and in the other the place in his stomach that is sore, that a revelation comes to me: something has begun.
There are secret, subtle nerves between us through which messages and signals are transmitted. As I stand in his bedroom, looking helplessly down at him, I experience a flash of hurt in my body
that corresponds in some way with that in his. I go down on one knee and hug him. His arms go round me and he cries.

Chains do exist. People are bound. Nine years ago I gave birth to this boy. Over the months – eight and a half of them – the weeks, the days, that I carried him, he became part of me
in elemental cellular ways. I gave him up when the time was due, expelling him from the cave with strong round rings of muscle. But his presence remains. Sometimes at night, lying awake, I can will
myself to recall the sensation of his weight, and I feel the kick of a foot, the shift of a limb, beneath my skin. He continues to live in me, not yet discharged. I am his haven and his prison. He
will never leave alive, despite the evidence of this child, nine years of age, who is crying now in my arms. I rock him gently, murmuring in his ear. His nose is running and it gums wetly against
my neck.

‘Shh now,’ I say. ‘I’ll make it all better.’

But he goes on crying. Till then, a word from me would have been enough to comfort him. Now he’s learnt, perhaps, that I lie.

He doesn’t go to school that day. I take him instead back to Dr Bouch’s rooms, where the little man lays him out on the table and examines him again. He’s not as light-hearted
this time about his task. He sees in me, I think, a determination he hasn’t bargained for. He takes a urine sample. And blood: we watch, David and I, as the pale syringe sucks fluid from his
arm.

The results of the tests will be phoned through. But, other than that, Dr Bouch can ‘still find nothing wrong’. He looks at me over the top of his desk, contemplative. There is that
in his glance which suggests he is sorry, truly sorry, he can find no sickness in my son.

I take David home. I put him to bed. For the first few days he is calm. The pain seems to come to him at particular moments, or times of the day: late afternoons, mostly, and late at night. Then
he cries. But otherwise a placid ritual evolves that has as its centre the child in the bed. I go in and out of the room on numerous little missions, bearing trays of tea, plates of snacks. I sit
with him. I read to him often from books I buy in town. He’s always enjoyed reading; the sound of words excites him. At other times we talk, but on subjects that he chooses. In the morning
and at noon, Salome takes proper meals to him, also on a tray. She clears them later. My mother, on her wanderings about the house, discovers his constant presence in the tiny room at the end of
the passage. She too takes to visiting, and I often come in to find her sitting in my chair next to the bed. ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Sammy and I were talking about
weddings.’

‘My name is David,’ he says, and giggles.

Sammy is the name of my father, who died when I was ten years old. There is a photograph of him on the wall above the fireplace, amongst the many others of our family gone past. When I look at
this particular photograph I see a man with swollen dark eyes and balding head. His mouth was cruel, but his smile seemed kind enough. I remember little of him, too little. I need to know more, but
there is nowhere to find out. Only from my mother who sometimes, in her convoluted ramblings, lets slip a truthful word.

‘This is David,’ she says now, and grins at me with her turtle’s mouth.

I don’t like to sit with David and my mother. There is between them, I’m afraid to say, a coded communication which I’m not party to. They get on well. They speak of things I
do not understand. ‘The roses,’ my mother says, ‘are full of worms.’ She prods at David under the blankets with a long jointless finger, and they laugh merrily together,
showing their teeth.

I don’t laugh. I’m jealous of them, I have to concede, though why I couldn’t say. I suppose I resent the fact that David is so easy with her, that they like each other so much.
My mother was never this good to me as a child, not when she was sane.

I talk to David about it. ‘Does she bother you,’ I ask, ‘with all her mad stories?’

‘She isn’t mad,’ he says. ‘She’s clever.’

He holds my arm as he says this and speaks so completely earnestly that I become angry.

‘Of course she’s mad,’ I cry. ‘She’s as mad as a hatter.’

At this he begins to snivel. After a moment I pat his head. I’m ashamed of myself and the ancient anger I’m venting on him. He doesn’t know better and if she’s a good
companion to him, why should I complain? So, after this occasion, I try not to mind so much when I find her drowsing in that chair like a woman long dead.

Stephen, however, will not go in while she’s there. She always leaves a room when he enters it, casting backward glances and muttering. He finds her reaction uncomfortable, being an
upright man with a sense of order. He stands by this.

‘Decency,’ he once told me, ‘is a sense of order.’

With decency, then, Stephen runs his life. He is concerned for David, but not as concerned as I. He does not believe in fate or things inescapable. Life, he would maintain, is a mathematical
affair. Emotions are algebra. There are sums by which one lives and by which, eventually, one dies. There is a logic to this comprehension: he was, after all, a maths teacher for most of his
working life, until he became headmaster of the high-school in town. He was a maths teacher when I met him, ten years ago: a thin, tall man with short black hair and a huge black moustache through
which he breathed. His eyes, then as now, were lidless and huge. They saw everything there was to see.

He does not get on with David. He loves him, I hasten to say – but this is perhaps the problem. Stephen doesn’t know what to do with his love. He whittles it down to dry and brittle
words. He refrains from touching David, but keeps his distance and speaks of silly things. David senses this. He finds it difficult to respond, to demonstrate his need for a father he can hug, or
talk to, or build kites with. So between them is a rigid trade of thoughts, but never touch.

(Which leads
me
to a thought: Stephen, who has become so comfortable with me, who talks with me and touches me with ease, does he love me still? I have no way of knowing.)

Now, when he comes home from school in the late afternoon, Stephen goes into David’s room. He stands awkwardly next to the bed, pulling at his hands as if to rid them of their skin.

‘How do you feel today?’ he asks. ‘Are you better than yesterday?’

Or:

‘I had a terrible time today. So many bad boys in the office. You’re not going to be a bad boy, are you, when you grow up?’

To which David smiles and says no.

Stephen doesn’t stay in there long. He comes out after fifteen minutes or so and goes to change. He takes off the tight blue suits he wears daily to school and which give him an implacable
air, like a man in command. He dresses in casual clothes: shorts and sandals, T-shirts or vests. But he cannot shake off a tense quality, as perceptible as starch.

He says to me one night as we are undressing for bed, ‘What do you think is the matter?’

‘The matter?’

‘With David,’ he says, looking down as he takes off his socks.

‘He’s ill,’ I say.

There is a pause.

‘Of course he’s ill,’ Stephen says shortly. ‘I asked what you thought the matter was. But never mind.’

With this he lies back and puts off the lamp on his side of the bed. But I am awake for a long time afterward, staring up at a ceiling I can’t see in the dark. I don’t know what he
means by asking me this. Does he believe, because I am his mother, that I should have an inkling of what is happening to David? And should I? Is this fair?

Asking questions, I do fall asleep eventually.

Thus do our lives begin to alter, subtly, imperceptibly, with the change in our midst. We are all of us, in some tiny way, affected.

Except for Moses, who proceeds, oblivious and sulky, with his work. He mows the lawn by the light of the moon and appears not to give a second thought to the people inside the house, clustered
like clams about the white bed in which the sick boy lies.

David has jaundice. The results of the tests come back and a jubilant Dr Bouch is on the phone, his round voice rolling like a series of little marbles into my ear. He comes
out himself later, glowing with pride, as though he is personally responsible for this reverse in our fortunes. He gives David another going-over and confirms this diagnosis. The pain, he tells us,
comes from his liver. He leaves him a small bottle of pills.

I walk back out with him to his car. My mother comes with us, hobbling on her crooked feet and clutching Dr Bouch’s arm. Her poodle limps behind. She remembers Dr Bouch from the days when
he treated her when she first lost her mind. He’s kind to her, he smiles.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ my mother says. She grimaces with delight.

‘Only a pleasure, Mrs Roper.’ He turns to me and takes my hand. His touch is dry and cool. ‘It’ll all be over soon,’ he says.

This would seem to be true. For a while the jaundice runs its course; there comes into David’s complexion a strong yellow colour. He is sick, but not as sick as I’d imagined him to
be. So it is with great relief that I observe the illness take effect. His tongue goes yellow. He sweats. His temperature is up and he tosses on the pillow. In a few days I am alarmed to see that
the yellow has even coloured his eyes, so that they roll in his head like balls of ivory.

I tend him closely through this time, sitting by him as much as possible.

My absence means that I cannot keep as close an eye elsewhere as I would like. Small duties are neglected. Salome doesn’t wash the floor as thoroughly. There are streaks of grime on the
window panes. I find traces of soap in the rinsed washing. The bushes in the garden that Moses should be pruning are ragged and badly cut.

I notice these things at night, after David is asleep. Or they are pointed out to me by Stephen, who likes an ordered home. It is he who notices that the bushes aren’t properly pruned, one
evening as we stroll together in the garden before supper.

‘You must keep a firm hand,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll try.’

It is difficult to do. Watching the servants takes a lot of time. The tasks that have been set for them are a meaningless affair as far as they’re concerned. This is not their home. The
disciplines of care and cleanliness must be enforced by me. My mother, too, has to be watched, or she will misbehave. She is given to compulsive deeds that are unpleasant and costly. Once I caught
her carrying armfuls of books out to a bonfire below the house. Several times she has phoned arbitrary numbers overseas and had long conversations with people on the other side.

I speak to Salome and Moses, scolding them with strong words. They listen but do not respond, standing side by side in the dirt outside the back door. Salome shifts from foot to foot, biting at
her lip. Moses, as always, has his eyes fixed on a point behind me and to the left.

I long for this trying time to be over, for things to return to normal. There is a point, it seems, at which life is tedious but most acceptable. We have passed beyond it for a little while, but
we will resume our dull course soon. We will be back where we began.

But this is not to be. David gets worse, not better. Dr Bouch has been out twice in the last week to examine him and seems happy enough with his recovery. But, as the jaundice
goes, it becomes clear to me that something else is taking hold. I watch him carefully.

Now I am afraid. At first I tell myself not to worry. My mind is upset by tensions in the home, but my instinct insists. I look at David one day and see him, with a jarring shock, as a stranger
might. How much he’s changed. How pale he is, how thin he’s getting.

I phone Dr Bouch that night. He sounds peeved, but agrees to drive out. And this time he does not look so calm when he comes out of the room, his little black bag in hand. He walks back with
Stephen and me into the lounge, where we all three stand for a long moment without speaking. For some reason the lamps have not been lit in here, and blue light from the moon comes stretching into
the room. I am cold, terribly cold, though the air is dense with heat.

Dr Bouch begins. He touches the frame of his spectacles from time to time with a nervous hand.

‘There is something,’ he says. ‘Something …’

A silence falls.

‘A growth,’ he says. ‘In David’s throat.’