The Fifth Child (17 page)

She said, “With Ben gone, we could sell this and buy some sensible house somewhere. Perhaps the children would enjoy coming to visit if he wasn’t there.”

No reply: David was asleep.

Soon after that, Ben and the others went off again for some days. She saw them on the television. There was a riot in North London. “Trouble” had been forecast. They were not among those throwing bricks, lumps of iron, stones, but stood in a group at one side, leering and jeering and shouting encouragement.

Next day they returned, but did not settle down to watching
television. They were restless, and went off again. Next morning the news was that a small shop had been broken into, one that had a post-office counter in it. About four hundred pounds had been taken. The shopkeeper had been bound and gagged. The postmistress was beaten up and left unconscious.

At about seven that night they came in. Except for Ben, they were full of excitement and achievement. When they saw her, they exchanged glances, enjoying the secret she did not share. She saw them pull out wads of notes, fingering them, pushing them back into pockets. If she were the police, she would be suspicious on the strength of their elation, their hectic faces.

Ben was not fevered, like the others. He was as he always was. You could think he had not been part of—whatever it was. But he had been there at the riot, she had seen him.

She tried: “I saw you lot on the television, you were at the Whitestone Estates.”

“Oh yeah, we were there,” boasted Billy.

“That was us,” said Derek, giving himself thumbs-up approval, and Elvis looked sharp and knowing. Some others with them, who came sometimes, not regulars, looked pleased.

A few days later, she remarked, “I think you lot ought to know that this house is going to be sold—not at once, but quite soon.”

She was watching Ben particularly, but while he did turn his eyes on her, and—she supposed—took the news in, he said nothing.

“So you’re going to sell, then?” said Derek, she felt as much for politeness as for anything.

She waited for Ben to mention it, but he did not. Was his identification with this gang of his now so great that he did not think of this as his home?

She remarked to him, when he was out of earshot of the others, “Ben, if for some reason you can’t find me here, I’m going to give you an address where you can always reach me.”
As she spoke, she felt that David was watching her satirically, disapprovingly. “All right,” she said silently to the invisible David, “but I know you would do the same, if I didn’t.… That is the kind of person we are, and there’s nothing we can do about it, for better or worse.”

Ben took the sheet of paper on which she had written her name, Harriet Lovatt, care of Molly and Frederick Burke and their Oxford address, which did give her a certain spiteful pleasure. But she found the sheet of paper lying forgotten or unregarded on the floor of his room, and did not try again.

It was spring, then summer, and they came less often, sometimes not for days at a time. Derek had acquired a motorbike.

Now, whenever she heard of a break-in, or a mugging, or a rape anywhere, she blamed them; but thought she was unjust. They could not be blamed for everything! Meanwhile, she was longing for them to leave. She was a ferment of need to start a new life. She wanted to be done with this unhappy house, and the thoughts that went with it.

But they did come, sometimes. As if they had not been absent for so long, saying nothing about where, they would drift into the living-room, and sit themselves around the set, four or five of them, sometimes as many as ten or eleven. They did not now raid the refrigerator: there was very little in it these days. They brought in enormous quantities of a variety of foodstuffs that originated in a dozen countries. Pizzas, and quiches; Chinese food, and Indian; pita bread filled with salad; tacos, tortillas, samosas, chili con carne; pies and pasties and sandwiches. These were the conventional and hidebound English, were they? Not prepared to eat anything but what their parents knew! It did not seem to matter to them what they ate, provided there was a lot of it, and they might strew crumbs and crusts and cartons about, and not have to clean anything up.

She tidied up after them and thought: It’s not for long.

She would sit by herself at the big table while they sprawled
about on the other side of the low wall, and the television noises made a counter-current to their loud, noisy, rancorous voices—the voices of an alienated, non-comprehending, hostile tribe.

The expanse of the table soothed her. When first bought, as a discarded butcher’s table, it had had a rough, much-cut-about surface, but it had been planed down, and at that stage of its life had shown the clean creamy white of the new layer of wood. She and David had waxed it. Since then, thousands of hands, fingers, sleeves, the bare forearms of summer, the cheeks of children who had fallen forward asleep sitting on adults’ laps, the plump feet of toddlers held up to walk there, everyone applauding: all this, the smoothings and caressings of twenty years, had given the wide board—it was all of a piece, cut long ago from some gigantic oak—a gleaming silken surface, so smooth fingers skated over it. Beneath this skin the knots and whorls lay submerged, their pattern known intimately to her. The skin had been scarred, though. Here was a brown half-circle where Dorothy had set down a too hot saucepan and, angry with herself, had snatched it up. There was a curving black weal, but Harriet could not remember what had made it. If you looked at the table from a certain angle, it had areas of tiny dimples or dents, where trivets had been set to keep the heat of dishes off the precious surface.

When she leaned forward, she could see herself in the gleam—dully, but enough to make her lean back again, out of sight. She looked like David: old. No one would say she was forty-five. But it was not the ordinary ageing of grey hair, tired skin: invisible substance had been leached from her; she had been drained of some ingredient that everyone took for granted, which was like a layer of fat but was not material.

Leaning back where she could not see her blurry image, she imagined how, once, this table had been set for feasts and enjoyment, for—family life. She re-created the scenes of twenty, fifteen, twelve, ten years ago, the stages of the Lovatt board,
first David and herself, brave innocents, with his parents, and Dorothy, and her sisters … then the babies appearing, and becoming small children … new babies … twenty people, thirty, had crowded around this gleaming surface and been mirrored in it, they had added other tables to the ends, broadened it with planks set on trestles … she saw the table lengthen, and widen, and the faces mass around it, always smiling faces, for this dream could not accommodate criticism or discord. And the babies … the children … she heard the laughter of small children, their voices; and then the wide shine of the table seemed to darken, and there was Ben, the alien, the destroyer. She turned her head cautiously, afraid to alert in him senses she was sure he possessed, and saw him there, in his chair. He sat apart from the others, always apart; and, as always, his eyes were on others’ faces, observing. Cold eyes? She had always thought them cold; but what did they see? Thoughtful? One could believe him thinking, taking in data from what he saw and arranging it—but according to inner patterns neither she nor anyone else could guess at. Compared with the raw and unfinished youths, he was a mature being. Finished. Complete. She felt she was looking, through him, at a race that reached its apex thousands and thousands of years before humanity, whatever that meant, took this stage. Did Ben’s people live in caves underground while the ice age ground overhead, eating fish from dark subterranean rivers, or sneaking up into the bitter snow to snare a bear, or a bird—or even people, her (Harriet’s) ancestors? Did his people rape the females of humanity’s forebears? Thus making new races, which had flourished and departed, but perhaps had left their seeds in the human matrix, here and there, to appear again, as Ben had? (And perhaps Ben’s genes were already in some foetus struggling to be born?)

Did he feel her eyes on him, as a human would? He sometimes looked at her while she looked at him—not often, but it did happen that his eyes met hers. She would put into her gaze
these speculations, these queries, her need, her
passion
to know more about him—whom, after all, she had given birth to, had carried for eight months, though it had nearly killed her—but he did not feel the questions she was asking. Indifferently, casually, he looked away again, and his eyes went to the faces of his mates, his followers.

And saw—what?

Did he ever remember now that she—his mother, but what did that mean to him?—had found him in that place, and brought him home? Had found him a poor creature half dead in a strait-jacket? Did he know that because she had brought him home, this house had emptied itself, and everyone had gone away, leaving her alone?

Around and around and around: if I had let him die, then all of us, so many people, would have been happy, but I could not do it, and therefore …

And what would happen to Ben now? He already knew about the half-derelict buildings, the caves and caverns and shelters of the big cities where people lived who could not find a place in ordinary homes and houses: he must do, for where else could he have been during the periods of days, or weeks, when he was gone from home? Soon, if he was often enough part of great crowds, part of the element looking for excitement in riots, street fights, he and his friends would be known to the police. He was not someone easily overlooked … yet why did she say that? Everyone in authority had
not
been seeing Ben ever since he was born.… When she saw him on television in that crowd, he had worn a jacket with its collar up, and a scarf, and was like a younger brother, perhaps of Derek. He seemed a stout schoolboy. Had he put on those clothes to disguise himself? Did that mean that he knew how he looked? How did he see himself?

Would people always refuse to see him, to recognise what he was?

It would not, could not, be someone in authority, who would then have to take responsibility. No schoolteacher, or doctor, or specialist had been able to say, “That is what he is”: neither could any policeman, or police doctor, or social worker. But suppose one day someone who was an amateur of the human condition, perhaps an anthropologist of an unusual kind, actually saw Ben, let’s say standing on a street with his mates, or in a police court, and admitted the truth. Admitted curiosity … what then? Could Ben, even now, end up sacrificed to science? What would they do with him? Carve him up? Examine those cudgel-like bones of his, those eyes, and find out why his speech was so thick and awkward?

If this did not happen—and her experience with him until now said it was unlikely—then what she foresaw for him was even worse. The gang would continue to support themselves by theft, and sooner or later would be caught. Ben, too. In police hands he would fight, and roar and stamp about and bellow, out of control with rage, and they would drug him, because they had to, and before very long he would be as he had been when she had found him dying, looking like a giant slug, pallid and limp in his cloth shroud.

Or perhaps he could evade being caught? Was he clever enough? These mates of his, his gang, certainly were not, giving themselves away by their excitement, their elation.

Harriet sat on there quietly, with the television sounds and their voices coming from next door; and she sometimes looked at Ben quickly, and then away; and she wondered how soon they would all simply go off, perhaps not knowing they would not return. She would sit there, beside the quiet soft shine of the pool that was the table, and wait for them to come back, but they would not come back.

And why should they stay in this country? They could easily take off and disappear into any number of the world’s great cities, join the underworld there, live off their wits. Perhaps
quite soon, in the new house she would be living in (alone) with David, she would be looking at the box, and there, in a shot on the News of Berlin, Madrid, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, she would see Ben, standing rather apart from the crowd, staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia, in 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays.

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