The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (51 page)

The three older children stared down at the newcomer who was so different from them all: of a different substance, so it seemed to Harriet. Partly this was because she was still responding to the look of him with her memories of his difference in the womb, but partly it was because of his heavy, sallow lumpishness. And then there was this strange head of his, sloping back from the eyebrow ridges.

‘We are going to call him Ben,’ said Harriet.

‘Are we?’ said David.

‘Yes, it suits him.’

Luke on one side, Helen on the other, took Ben’s small hands, and said, ‘Hello, Ben.’ ‘Hello, Ben.’ But the baby did not look at them.

Jane, the four-year-old, took one of his feet in her hand, then in her two hands, but he vigorously kicked her away.

Harriet found herself thinking, I wonder what the mother would look like, the one who would welcome this – alien.

She stayed in bed a week – that is, until she felt she could manage the struggle ahead – and then went home with her new child.

That night, in the connubial bedroom, she sat up against a stack of pillows, nursing the baby. David was watching.

Ben sucked so strongly that he emptied the first breast in less than a minute. Always, when a breast was nearly empty, he ground his gums together, and so she had to snatch him away before he could begin. It looked as if she were unkindly depriving him of the breast, and she heard David’s breathing change. Ben roared with rage, fastened like a leech to the other nipple, and sucked so hard she felt that her whole breast was disappearing down his throat. This time, she left him on the nipple until he ground his gums hard together and she cried out, pulling him away.

‘He’s extraordinary,’ said David, giving her the support she needed.

‘Yes, he
is,
he’s absolutely
not
ordinary.’

‘But he’s all right, he’s just…”

‘A normal healthy fine baby,’ said Harriet, bitter, quoting the hospital.

David was silent: it was this anger, this bitterness in her that he could not handle.

She was holding Ben up in the air. He was wrestling, fighting, struggling, crying in his characteristic way, which was a roar or a bellow, while he went yellowish white with anger – not red, like a normal cross baby.

When she held him to get up the wind, he seemed to be standing in her arms, and she felt weak with fear at the thought that this strength had so recently been inside her, and she at its mercy. For months, he had been fighting to get out, just as now he fought in her grasp to become independent.

When she laid him in his cot, which she was always glad to do because her arms ached so badly, he bellowed out his rage, but soon lay quiet, not sleeping, fully alert, his eyes focused, and his whole body flexing and unflexing with a strong pushing movement of heels and head she was familiar with: it was what had made her feel she was being torn apart when he was inside her.

She went back into bed beside David. He put out his arm, so that she could lie by him, inside it, but she felt treacherous and untruthful, for he would not have liked what she was thinking.

Soon she was exhausted with feeding Ben. Not that he did not thrive: he did. He was two pounds over his birth weight when he was a month, which was when he would have been less than a week old if he had gone full term.

Her breasts were painful. Making more milk than they ever had had to do, her chest swelled into two bursting white globes long before the next feed was due. But Ben was already roaring for it, and she fed him, and he drained every drop in two or three minutes. She felt the milk being dragged in streams from her. Now he had begun something new: he had taken to interrupting the fierce sucking several times during a feed, and bringing his gums together in the hard grinding movement that made her cry out in pain. His small cold eyes seemed to her malevolent.

‘I’m going to put him on the bottle,’ she said to Dorothy, who was watching this battle with the look, it seemed to Harriet, everyone had when watching Ben. She was absolutely still and intent, fascinated, almost hypnotized, but there was repugnance there, too. And fear?

Harriet had expected her mother to protest with ‘But he’s only five weeks old!’ – but what Dorothy said was ‘Yes, you must, or you’ll be ill.’ A little later, watching Ben roar, and twist and fight, she remarked. ‘They’ll all be coming soon for the summer.’ She spoke in a way new to her, as if listening to what she said and afraid of what she might say. Harriet recognized it, for this was how she felt saying anything at all. So do people speak whose thoughts are running along secretly in channels they would rather other people did not know about.

On that same day, Dorothy came into the bedroom where Harriet fed Ben, and saw Harriet pulling the child clear of breasts that had bruises all around the nipples. She said, ‘Do it. Do it now. I’ve bought the bottles, and the milk. I’m sterilizing the bottles now.’

‘Yes, wean him,’ said David, agreeing at once. But she had fed the other four for months, and there had been hardly a bottle in the house.

The adults, Harriet and David, Dorothy and Alice, were around the big table, the children having gone up to bed, and Harriet tried Ben with the bottle. He emptied it in a moment, while his body clenched and unclenched, his knees up in his stomach, then extended like a spring. He roared at the empty bottle.

‘Give him another,’ sad Dorothy, and set about preparing one.

‘What an appetite,’ said Alice socially, trying hard, but she looked frightened.

Ben emptied the second bottle: he was supporting it with his two fists, by himself. Harriet barely needed to touch it.

‘Neanderthal baby,’ said Harriet.

‘Oh come on, poor little chap,’ said David, uneasy.

‘Oh God, David,’ said Harriet, ‘poor Harriet is more like it.’

‘All right, all right – the genes have come up with something special this time.’

‘But what, that’s the point,’ said Harriet.
‘What
is he?’

The other three said nothing – or, rather, said by their silence that they would rather not face the implications of it.

‘All right,’ said Harriet, ‘let’s say he has a healthy appetite, if that makes everyone happy.’

Dorothy took the fighting creature from Harriet, who collapsed exhausted back in her chair. Dorothy’s face changed as she felt the clumsy weight of the child, the intransigence, and she shifted her position so that Ben’s pistoning legs could not reach her.

Soon Ben was taking in twice the amount of food recommended for his age, or stage: ten or more bottles a day.

He got a milk infection, and Harriet took him to Dr Brett.

‘A breast-fed baby shouldn’t get infections,’ he said.

‘He’s not breast-fed.’

‘That’s not like you, Harriet! How old is he?’

‘Two months,’ said Harriet. She opened her dress and showed her breasts, still making milk, as if they responded to Ben’s never appeased appetite. They were bruised black all around the nipples.

Dr Brett looked at the poor breasts in silence, and Harriet looked at him: his decent, concerned doctor’s face confronting a problem beyond him.

‘Naughty baby,’ he conceded, and Harriet laughed out loud in astonishment.

Dr Brett reddened, met her eyes briefly in acknowledgement of her reproach, and then looked away.

‘All I need is a prescription for diarrhoea,’ said Harriet. She added deliberately, staring at him, willing him to look at her, ‘After all, I don’t want to kill the nasty little brute.’

He sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed them slowly. He was frowning, but not in disapproval of her. He said, ‘It is not abnormal to take a dislike to a child. I see it all the time. Unfortunately.’

Harriet said nothing, but she was smiling unpleasantly, and knew it.

‘Let me have a look at him.’

Harriet took Ben out of the pram, and laid him on the table. At once he turned on to his stomach and tried to get himself on all fours. He actually succeeded for a moment before collapsing.

She looked steadily at Dr Brett, but he turned away to his desk to write a prescription.

‘There’s obviously nothing much wrong with him,’ he said, with the same baffled, offending note that Ben did bring out of people.

‘Have you ever seen a two-month baby do that?’ she insisted.

‘No. I must admit I haven’t. Well, let me know how you get on.’

The news had flown around the family that the new baby was successfully born, and everything was all right. Meaning that Harriet was. A lot of people wrote and rang, saying they were looking forward to the summer holidays. They said, ‘We are longing to see the new baby.’ They said, ‘Is little Paul still as delicious as he was?’ They arrived bringing wine and summer produce from all over the country, and all kinds of people stood bottling fruit and making jams and chutneys with Alice and Dorothy. A crowd of children played in the garden or were taken off to the woods for picnics. Little Paul, so cuddlesome and funny, was always on somebody’s lap, and his laugh was heard everywhere: this was his real nature, overshadowed by Ben and his demands.

Because the house was so full, the older children were in one room. Ben was already in a cot with high wooden slatted sides, where he spent his time pulling himself up to a sitting position, falling, rolling over, pulling himself up…This cot was put in the room where the older children were, in the hope that Ben would be made social, friendly, by his siblings. It was not a success. He ignored them, would not respond to their advances, and his crying – or, rather, bellowing –made Luke shout at him, ‘Oh
shut up!’
– but then he burst into tears at his own unkindness. Helen, at the age to cherish a baby, tried to hold Ben, but he was too strong. Then all the older children in the house were put into the attic, where they could make as much noise as they wanted, and Ben went back into his own room, ‘the baby’s room’ – and from there they heard his grunts and snuffles and roars of frustration as he tried some feat of strength and fell down.

The new baby had of course been offered to everyone to hold, when they asked, but it was painful to see how their faces changed confronting this phenomenon. Ben was always quickly handed back. Harriet came into the kitchen one day and heard her sister Sarah say to a cousin, ‘That Ben gives me the creeps. He’s like a goblin or a dwarf or something. I’d rather have poor Amy any day.’

This afflicted Harriet with remorse: poor Ben, whom no one could love. She certainly could not! And David, the good father, hardly touched him. She lifted Ben from his cot, so much like a cage, and put him on the big bed, and sat with him. ‘Poor Ben, poor Ben,’ she crooned, stroking him. He clutched her shirt with both hands, pulled himself up, and stood on her thigh. The hard little feet hurt her. She tried to cuddle him, persuade him to soften against her…Soon she gave up, put him back in his pen, or cage…a roar of frustration because he had been put down, and she held out her hands to him, ‘Poor Ben, dear Ben,’ and he grasped her hands and pulled himself up and stood grunting and roaring with triumph. Four months old…He was like an angry, hostile little troll.

She did make a point of going to him every day when the other children were out of the way, and taking him to the big bed for a time of petting and play, as she had with all of them. Never, not once, did he subside into a loving moment. He resisted, he strove, he fought – and then he turned his head and closed his jaws over her thumb. Not as an ordinary baby will, in the sucking bite that relieves the pain of teething, or explores the possibilites of a mouth, tongue: she felt her bone bend, and saw his cold triumphant grin.

She heard herself say, ‘You aren’t going to do me in, I won’t let you.’

But for a while she did try hard to make him ordinary. She took him down into the big living-room where all the family were, and put him into the playpen there – until his presence affected people, and they tended to go away. Or she took him to the table in her arms, as she had done with the others – but could not hold him, he was too strong.

In spite of Ben, the summer holidays were wonderful. Again, there were two months of it. Again, David’s father, briefly descending, gave them a cheque, and they could not have managed without. ‘It is like being in the middle of some bloody great fruit pudding, this house,’ said James. ‘God knows how you do it.’

But afterwards, when Harriet thought of those holidays, what she remembered was how they all looked at Ben. There would be a long thoughtful stare, puzzled, even anxious; but then came fear, though everyone tried to conceal it. There was horror, too: which is what Harriet felt, more and more. He did not seem to mind, or even to notice. It was hard to make out what he did think of other people.

Harriet lay inside David’s arms one night before sleeping, talking over the day, as they always did, and she remarked, out of a current of thoughts about the summer, ‘Do you know what this house is good for? What people come for? It’s for a good time, that’s all.’

He was surprised. Even – she felt – shocked. ‘But what else do we do it for?’ he enquired.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, sounding helpless. Then she turned in to his embrace, and he held her while she wept. They had not yet resumed love-making. This had never happened before. Making love during pregnancy, and very soon after pregnancy – this had never been a problem. But now they were both thinking, That creature arrived when we were being as careful as we knew how – suppose another like him comes? For they both felt – secretly, they were ashamed of the thoughts they had about Ben – that he had willed himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness, which had no defences against him or anything like him. But not making love was not only a strain for them both, it was a barrier, because they had to be reminded continually of what threatened them…so they felt.

Then something bad happened. Just after all the family had gone away, as the school term began, Paul went into Ben’s room by himself. Of all the children, he was the most fascinated by Ben. Dorothy and Alice, who were together in the kitchen, Harriet having gone off to take the older ones to school, heard screams. They ran upstairs to find that Paul had put his hand in to Ben through the cot bars, and Ben had grabbed the hand and pulled Paul hard against the bars, bending the arm deliberately backwards. The two women freed Paul. They did not bother to scold Ben, who was crowing with pleasure and achievement. Paul’s arm was badly sprained.