The Cleft (12 page)

Together with the constant fretting and perturbation about the fewness of the children, and how vulnerable they all were, went – in the tales of the males, and of us – complaints about the females' continual nagging at them. The females found the males lacking, and we have now perhaps to wonder if this expressed a deeper dissatisfaction – because females were so fundamentally dependent on the males.

And while all this went on an older pattern (we may call it a preNoise pattern) also went on.

All the babies were born in the caves above the sea, and they played in the waves and were safe. Most females lived in the caves, because they did not like the valley, and most males lived in their valley. There was constant visiting. The girls went to the valley when they had to, and the males sometimes spent time in the caves. New little males were not brought up by the men, but were with the little girls. The caves, full of little children, boy-babes and girl-babes, would not look so very different from a collection of our children. The children, the girls and boys, often went to the valley. The valley was a wondrous and amazing place, for both the little girls and little boys.

The women did not like the children to be in the valley – and here is sounded another consistent complaint from them. The great river, recovered from the Noise, ran as swiftly and as strongly as ever, and the children were at risk. The newly built sheds and shelters were as dirty and unkempt as ever and, if the children enjoyed that, the women complained and tried to keep the children with them on the shore. But that changed because it became the custom for the little boys to leave their mothers and the caves, and join the men, when they were about seven. In language not unfamiliar to us now, the boys described the caves, and the seashore, and their mothers as soft and babyish. The big river and its dangers were seen as initiatory, and desirable for the boys' development. Soon all the boys had to leave the caves and learn to dare the dangers of the cold, deep, deadly river currents. When one, and then another, died the males seemed to think this a reasonable risk.

Some events this summer make me resume my comments.

I preface what I have to say with the reminder that the Spartans removed boy children from their mothers at the age of seven.

Titus and I had ridden out to our estate early in
the summer, expecting not to see Julia and Lydia till early autumn. But Julia sent me a message that she meant to go to a wedding party on the farm next to ours and would drop in. The new husband was Decimus, and Julia had been his mistress for years. Decimus was marrying ambitiously, Lavonia, a highly placed girl. Decimus sent a chariot to bring Julia to the wedding, and one afternoon this pretty vehicle, garlanded and beribboned, arrived with Lydia as well as Julia. The women got out and I went out to greet them. Titus saw them and was running up but then, really seeing his mother and his sister, stopped, and stood frowning at them: the sun was in his eyes. But that was not the trouble: Julia and Lydia made a dazzling pair. Julia wore a rose-coloured gown, and the little girl a light mauve one, designed for her by her mother. What a handsome woman Julia was now, and the girl, an apparently frail and delicate little thing, set her off. Julia saw a good-looking boy, staring at her. She did not at once know this was her son, whom she had scarcely seen for a year or so. Her first reaction was to flirt, send him smiles that acknowledged his attractions, but this impulse was cut off as she took in his pose. He had half turned away, hands loose, his body saying that he was about to take off and away.

Next to his mother his sister stood smiling. ‘Look at me! Just look at me. You almost didn't recognise me, did you?' Those two had been good friends always, until the summer before, when Lydia seemed almost
overnight to enter into some ancient endowment – a newly arrived sexual knowledge, an instinctual understanding of herself and of the male sex. Her smiles at her brother were not acknowledging their friendship, but that she was an adult and he must recognise that. Is there a greater gulf than between a thirteen-year-old boy and his fifteen-year-old sister, already a woman? My boy was stunned, as if the smiles of the two women had been poison-tipped arrows. He could not move.

Meanwhile Julia was equally immobilised. This was her son, this beautiful boy. She did not know how to behave. Then she took a step towards him and ruffled her hand through his hair – a beautiful white hand where shone my first wife's rings, and my mother's. The boy took a step back, frowning. He was as tall as she was. His eyes, on a level with her wonderful dark eyes, stared, stern, grave – accusing? Certainly he repudiated her and her silly caress. I believe that she was feeling, as I had so many years ago, that this was her son and she had lost all the years when she could have known him. I don't know: she never said so, but she was certainly penitent, standing there. Her eyes filled with tears. Meanwhile, just behind her, the chariot's horse was stamping and tossing his head: the reins were too tight. I signalled to the charioteer to loosen the horse's head, and I saw that Julia at the same moment had seen the discomfort of the horse, and that she might have remedied things herself. She was overcome with
shame, a complex of regrets, standing there, this beautiful woman, in the hot sunlight. The slave with the sunshade was holding it steady, but the sun was striking Julia's cheek.

I have always said that she has a good heart, she is a kind woman. I think her present associates would laugh to hear me say so. They know the woman who screams applause at the blood in the arena, the death throes of the animals, and of the gladiators. Yet that afternoon she felt for that mistreated horse.

She was such a picture of vulnerability – helplessness? – and I impulsively did something that I had planned to say to her, alone.

I believed she was mistaken, agreeing to go to this wedding, particularly when the new husband had made a point of sending a very elegant little chariot. Julia would shine at this wedding, no matter how many other pretty women would be there. I stepped forward, and put my arms around her and whispered into her ear just visible under one of the monstrously complicated coiffures that are fashionable now, ‘Be careful, little partridge, be careful, Julia.'

Lydia heard these words. I do not believe that either of the children had seen many tender moments between their parents. Julia, careful not to disturb her complicated tresses, responded by melting into my embrace (I have to say, like a daughter, rather than a wife) and she whispered, ‘Thank you, my dear, thank you – always.' Her daughter's eyes flashed – jealousy, that so primeval emotion, mother-and-daughter jealousy. Lydia
even put out her hand as if to pull her mother away from me, but let it drop. Meanwhile the boy stood, staring at us. If we had been in private I would have gone on, ‘It is not unknown, Julia, for a new wife to punish her predecessor or even try to kill her.' But I could see Julia was thinking hard, as she deftly let me go, patting her rolling black locks.

(In the event Lavonia, the new wife, died in childbirth in the spring of the following year.)

Tears flowing on her pink cheeks, Julia stepped into the chariot, and Lydia, obviously feeling that she had not made enough of a statement, came to embrace me. This was not false, we had always got on well, little Lydia and I – but little Lydia was not here this afternoon, here was this lovely young woman, returned to being a child for a moment. Then, feeling herself as she had been so recently as a few months ago, she went towards her brother, not coquettishly, or flirtatiously, but sending him glances like a friend – like a loved sister. But Titus had turned away from her. Lydia, spurned, tossed her head and was ready to sulk, but then she too got into the chariot and off they went, the two women, to the next estate. It was only a short distance: they could have walked it easily.

And I stood there in the wonderful afternoon, eagles wheeling overhead, sparrows chirping from a near bush.

The boy turned from the women in a violent impulse of escape and leaped, once, twice, more – he went running across the already sun-parched fields. And that was how I remember that summer – the boy in movement, in
flight, by himself or with the herdsmen's boys, or the house slaves' sons. These had always played together, but what I was watching was not play.

The house servants, who of course had known Titus all of his life and could be said to be secondary mothers, loved him. Some had seen that little play by the chariot. They knew what it all meant – the slaves and servants know far more of us than we like to think. They wanted to make up to the boy for his careless mother, but tenderness was not what he needed then. Watching him in his strenuous activities, climbing high and dangerously in the hills where the eagles nested, running races with the other boys, high at the top of trees so tall I could hardly bear to watch, the somersaults, the acrobatics, the competitions they set up for themselves, I felt that he was trying to outrun something or somebody, to free himself. I was reminded of once when some slaves were sent to get fish from the marsh and the midges were out looking for food. The slaves were dancing and leaping about inside a dense cloud of the insects, swatting at their heads, their arms, their legs.

You could imagine that an invisible cloying clinging substance was attacking my boy, and he was trying to free himself.

He became gaunt and lean, that summer, no longer a child, but a strong youth, even a man.

He refused to see his sister, and was not at home when Julia arrived, ready to see him.

This summer made me think of my childhood. I was
one of three brothers, older than the little girl, born late in my mother's reproductive life. We boys petted the girl, made her our plaything – and ignored her when she got in the way of our games. How hard it can be for a boy younger than a loved sister, I saw that summer.

I tried to be always available for him, tried to show – silently – how I felt for him. And so did the servants and slaves – the women. He was a polite boy, good-hearted, he did not repel them, fend them off – but he fled from them, his face always averted from them.

One afternoon I had picked a little bunch of flowers, and I was walking down towards our statue of Artemis, in a grove where paths crossed, when I saw Titus walking behind me, looking to see what I was doing. I beckoned to him and he nodded, but stayed behind me, his steps audible on the hard late-season earth. When I was a boy (like my father), I loved Diana, the tomboyish girl, whom I thought of as a playmate, who understood me. I left her little gifts and hoped that one day I would come on her, with her girls, and she would recognise me. Later I found her too young for me and loved Artemis. When I reached the statue, I bowed and set the little bunch of flowers at her feet. I hoped Titus would see me and understand what I felt. I could not say to him, your mother, your sister are not the only representatives of the female sex.

He was standing close to me, looking with me at the beautiful Artemis. I was silently saying to him, no matter how hard things get, we can always rely on something
that will never change. Smiling, beneficent Artemis will be here for ever. It is not possible to imagine that she could ever be absent. I have never felt much for Juno, Minerva, Hera, they are too far from me. They, too, will always be in their heavens. But Artemis – I feel as close to her as to my mother, or my poor first wife. So you see, Titus, remember: she is here, and she will always be here, her statue will stand here, smiling, for always.

Life on the river changed with time. Boats arrived, some not more than trunks of trees, or bundles of reeds. There were festivals at the river, where all the females came to take part, and there was dancing and feasting. Festivals, which have about them a sense of ‘We always do it this way', cannot be imagined during the very earliest days of the people. Now there were feasts, where fire played such a part, the cooking of flesh killed in the forest – we are talking about an age, or ages, passing.

By now the young of these people, both males and females, regularly met at the Killing Rock, which had long ago forgotten its horrid history, and there were races and wrestling and all kinds of acrobatics. It is not possible to imagine the soft, fat, slow females of the earliest times wrestling or even running. I think we must assume their physique had changed, the strong, muscled, fat-protected bodies of the girls who
swam faster than they could ever walk had slimmed and become lithe and flexible.

Meanwhile – and what a long
while
that was – all the little boys clamoured to be part of the river life. They were not like our indulged boys always watched over by their slaves, perhaps earning indulgent smiles as they played soldiers and the miniature legionnaires tested their strengths. These children from infancy had known their way over the mountain. No use for Maire or her successors saying, ‘We do not allow it.' How could they reinforce their prohibitions? Fearless little boys, some not much more than infants, found their way to the valley, and the women could chide and rebuke as much as they liked.

Things were always easier in the valley. Now there were equal numbers of Clefts and Squirts – we have to deduce this – the boys were delivered of their constant restlessness and need, whose causes they did not understand. Not that we can now say what they understood and what they did not. How do we now look at the word ‘understand'? One thing to say, ‘We know that the Clefts come to us and we play our games and then later they produce babies.' Yes, but that is very far from what we believe the girls thought. They had to know that without ‘the games' they played with the boys, there would be no babies. During the time of the great wind, the Noise, little mating went on, and the Clefts had to notice, if the
boys did not, that there were no babies being born when it was reasonable to expect babies. Did they say ‘nine months' or anything like that? We do not know. But they knew there was an interval after mating and then there was a baby, girl or boy.

Just as there were continual complaints by the Clefts about the dangers the little boys were expected to face, so there were complaints from the Clefts, specifically about the great river. The little boys should not be allowed to go near the river, said the women.