Stone Cradle (19 page)

She came early, did Mehitable – slithered out, all thin and slimy. I took one look at her and knew some dark days lay ahead. It began almost as soon as she was born – the screaming. It was something chronic. I did not blame my daughter-in-law for not loving that child, oh no, for I could see how difficult it was to love a child that unhappy. There is, after all, only one thing we ask of our Little Ones – that they outlive us, and that they be happy with it. That is all our hopes and dreams, all wrapped up into one request. If some
stranger came along and started making your child miserable, day in, day out, would you not hate them with all the passion in your heart? Yes, you would – and even when it’s your child is making
itself
miserable, you can’t helping hating it for doing it to itself, while still loving it at the same time. And that sets up a new kind of torment, inside. I watched my daughter-in-law hating and loving that sickly babby – and I was not surprised that often she would thrust her at me and say, ‘Mother, you do something with her, she don’t want me.’

I would take Mehitable off for a walk or out into the garden and she would maybe quieten down for a little bit. I suppose it must have seemed unfair to my daughter-in-law that I could calm her child but I couldn’t really – she was just an unhappy baby, and that was that. The only difference was, I wasn’t all tight about her being unhappy, like her mother was. I could accept Mehitable’s unhappiness and think of it as part of her, not take it personal like. I loved her at one remove, without blaming myself for everything that was wrong with her.

Whatever I did, it never lasted long. And there were times when even my comforts had no effect. Mehitable’s moaning was ghostly, sometimes. It was like she was not a human thing at all, and it could go on for hours and hours. I did everything I could for her. I sang the old songs to her, about the moon and the sun. I placed charms under the padding in her Moses basket. Nothing worked. She was beyond me, or anyone. It was like there was a devil in her. I even started to wonder if I should take her out into the country and find one of our people who could really help. I don’t think my daughter-in-law would have minded, she was that desperate. I think we all went a little mad at that time – no wonder Lijah stayed out drinking so much. So would we all, if we’d had the choice.

She was an odd-looking thing, Mehitable. Dark eyes, straight dark hair. She put on hardly any weight as an infant and when you bathed her you could see her ribs sticking out funny, her chest
heaving in and out as she bawled. (She hated being bathed as much as she hated anything.) Then when she was grow’d a bit to the age when she should’ve been walking, all she could do was haul herself up on the furniture and move along it, clutching on for dear life. Her legs were bent funny, bow-legged but more so. She’ll never stop a pig in a passage, I used to think.

My daughter-in-law went on something awful to Lijah about getting a doctor for her but proper
gorjer
doctors cost a fortune. Oh, I ached to take that child out into the fields to lead a proper life.

When she got bigger, she could still hardly walk. She would stagger along, holding on to the furniture, her chest all puffed up and heaving, with her dark hair and dark eyes staring – it was like having our own baby blackbird. Our cripple. Our Mehitable.

The money was saved for a doctor, eventually. He came one afternoon and looked at her and stared at us like we’d done it to her on purpose. Rickets, it was called. It was on account of not getting the right food and we had to get liver inside her or her bones would set wrong and she would never be right even when she was grow’d. She would need braces on her legs anyway. I said to him, did that account for how she had always cried as a baby and he said, yes, it hurt their bones to have rickets.

After he had gone, my daughter-in-law and I were sitting in the little parlour. We had got Daniel to carry Mehitable outside. My daughter-in-law had her hand over her mouth, which I had learned was a sign she was not right happy.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘when Lijah gets back we’d best tell him to be off down the butcher’s with whatever he’s got, find some way to feed that child up.’

My daughter-in-law stood up, looked at me with thunder in her eyes and said, ‘Don’t you mention Elijah’s name to me. I don’t even want to hear his name
spoken
.’ Then off she went upstairs and
slammed her bedroom door and would not come down the whole day and night.

When Lijah got back that evening, I told him about the doctor’s visit, and he frowned. “Well, there’s lots of children don’t eat proper,’ he said after a while, ‘but it don’t make them bow-legged.’

It’s more than that, if you ask me,’ I said. ‘It’s how she’s cooped up here all day long. Because she can’t walk proper she never goes anywhere, just lies around being sickly and miserable. I know your wife’s got a house to run but she’s got to get that child out and about more. You’ve got to make a little cart or something so’s I can take her with me when I goes shopping. Just think of all the air going stale in this house. If she was out in a field, she’d grow strong enough, you’d see.’

He turned away without speaking, that habit of his.

‘Nobody never had rickets when you was a boy,’ I added.

‘Oh yes, that’s right, Mother,’ he said, in a nasty-sounding voice, turning back to me. ‘Nobody
never
got poorly, did they, and we
hall
had a right good time with enough to
heat
and nothing to do but sit round a campfire singing songs to
heach
other?’

I was shocked that he could be so ironical with me. ‘What has got into you, Elijah Smith?’ I asked. I knew what had got into him of course: the strong, black stuff, Audit Ale – evil, it was. They served it down the pubs on a Friday when everyone had just got paid and my Lijah drank it whether he’d been paid for anything or not.

He muttered something but I couldn’t hear him properly. I let it go.

That house, that house. It was like the graves in the cemetery at Werrington. It was like we was dead people all packed up into little boxes. Night after night I would startle awake and lie in the dark thinking maybe I was dead and crammed into a box all on my own and I was going to lie there, underground, for all eternity. I would
feel hot and clammy at the same time, and my breath so raggedy it would make my throat ache. When I got like that, the only thing that would calm me would be to go down to the garden: to sit in the night air and light my pipe and feel the cool smoke in my throat. I would look back at the house and think, how do they stand it?

Mehitable got to walk when she was older, and she only had to have a brace on one leg, which seeing as we had to borrow for it was a good thing. Things got a bit better for her, after that, and she was even able to hobble around after the other children in the street, in a fashion. I’ve seen some children be right horrible to cripples, but no one never said a thing to Mehitable. She was such a peculiar little thing. When she turned her smile on, it was like the sun after a storm, on account of it being so rare.

No, the other kids never bothered her. Maybe it was because their parents told them not to pick on the poor crippled girl from what was now the poorest family in the street – or maybe it was because they knew her big brother Dan would thump them if they tried. Mehitable being a cripple brought out the worst in my daughter-in-law and the best in my grandson. For Daniel learned from when he was very young that it was his job to care and look after a small thing what could not look after herself – and I think that kind of lesson gets stuck in you when you learn it young enough, for Daniel was the kind of boy who spent his whole life looking after other people and never thinking not once of himself.

Next was Bartholomew. Along he came, Barty-boy, and he was half his brother and half his sister: small and dark, but healthy with it. The third child – just the next thing, really. He had the good luck to be ignored a bit more often than the other two and it never seemed to harm him. Things went a bit bad for us, after he was born. It was probably a good thing he weren’t paid much attention to, as I don’t think it would have been the sort of attention he’d’ve liked.

Yes, things got bad all round, for a bit. After her third baby, my daughter-in-law went down with the melancholia. Sometimes, she wouldn’t even leave the house. She started saying how all the neighbours hated us because we brought the down the tone of the street, which was naught but foolishness as that street was about as low as you could get before any of us set foot in it. Once, when Rose was crying about how hard her life was I pressed her and she owned up to having borrowed money from the Empers and how she couldn’t face them as she couldn’t pay it back. Well, that explains a lot, I thought – those askance looks I get from time to time. Lilly Empers was the key to that street. Cross her and you were finished.

The mirror went, with its ugly golden frame. Lijah’s one suit that she had laboured over to make him, with a sewing machine she had rented for a shilling a week – that went, but only to the pawnbrokers. She managed to get it out so Lijah could wear it to get each of the children christened.

A dark time it was. I would have disappeared myself if it weren’t for the grandchildren. Lijah was off as much as he could get away with – which didn’t mean he brought any more
lovah
into the house, and the less he earned the more he drank, as far as I could tell. The money situation got a bit desperate. I took to a little dukkering, on the quiet like, without telling Lijah or his wife, and that brought in a few pennies from neighbours who were sworn to secrecy with the reasoning that if rumours of my extraordinary powers got out, there would be queues that stretched as far as the common. But there was days when there was no food in that house and things between Lijah and Rose got pretty chronic.

Then came the incident that really put the lid on it.

It was September. Time for the farmers to get their corn in, if they haven’t already. But not where we was living.

Lijah was out. He’d been out all evening, on one of his benders, no doubt. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all but went and slept in the Gas Lane stable with Kit the Second, which was the best thing, often enough.

It was late. The children were asleep upstairs. Daniel slept across the foot of his parents’ bed and Mehitable and I slept toe-to-tail on my straw mattress. The new babby was in a Moses basket on top of the chest of drawers in Rose and Lijah’s room. That house was far too small now there were three Little Ones as well as three of us.

Barty-boy was restless that night and my daughter-in-law had just gone up to see to him. I was cleaning, wiping all the surfaces in their little parlour with a damp cloth as we’d had a bit of autumn sunshine earlier in the day and I’d thought they looked a bit dusty. It was dark, though, and I couldn’t really see what I was doing by lamplight. I had just about had enough and was thinking of going up myself.

There came a knock at the door.

I knew straightaway that it was not a good knock. A good knock is light, a little apologetic, even. Someone who means you well is worried that they might be disturbing you, and they communicate that with a light tap-tapping, with little breaks in between – merry tapping, like a dance.

This was three knocks, more bangs than knocks, in fact. They were done with a closed fist.

I went quickly to the door, the cloth still in my hand.

Three men stood on the doorstep. The light was dim but I could see them quite clearly. One, the biggest one, had mounted the step and the other two were pressed in behind him. They were rough-looking types, around my age, working men with flat caps on their-heads and leather waistcoats beneath their jackets.

The one in front said to me, ‘We want to speak with Smith.’

I knew I had to think quickly. Lijah might be back any minute. I
took care to look each one of them in the face, long enough so’s he knew I would remember him another time.

‘My son is away on business,’ I said, eventually.

What the first one said next was shocking. I don’t like to repeat his actual words. ‘You
eff
ing pikey,’ he said, his face contorted. ‘I want your son out here now or I’ll come in and get ’im.’

One of the others put a hand on his arm. ‘Bert,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to be rough with the lady. He might not be here.’

‘Don’t be daft‚’ Bert replied, shaking his arm free. ‘He’s here, all right.’

I stood back. ‘Come in, gentlemen, if you don’t believe me. You are welcome to search the house. I just ask that you don’t disturb the children what are sleeping upstairs.’ Such an invitation would have been understood as a clear refusal where I come from. No
Romani
chal
would ever enter another’s
vardo
uninvited, however strong his grievance.

The first one stepped up – but the second held him back.

‘He’s not here, Bert.’

I waited for a minute. It seemed at first that ‘Bert’, whoever he was, was persuaded and they might leave. Then he shook his head, and pushed past me. The others followed him in.

‘May I ask …’ I began, but I was interrupted by a sound from above. Bartholomew had started to cry and Rose was moving around her bedroom. Her door opened and she called down. For once in her life, she said the right thing. ‘So he’s back, is he?’

The men glanced at each other. Bartholomew’s crying rose in pitch.

‘My daughter-in-law has retired for the night and will not be decently dressed,’ I said, ‘but I am perfectly prepared to call her down if you wish, gentlemen.’ Then, for good measure I added, ‘She has probably finished feeding the baby by now.’

I went to the bottom of the stairs and called up, ‘There are three men here to see Elijah.’

Rose came to the landing, holding Bartholomew on her shoulder. ‘Oh Lord,’ she said, ‘what’s he gone and done now?’

I turned back to speak to the men but they had already left, leaving the door open. I went after them, closing the door behind me as I went. They had hurried off down the street and I was forced to run after them in the dark. When I caught up with them, they turned. I could see that Bert was still angry, not in control of himself, so I addressed my question to him. He was most likely to give me an answer, however indelicately put.