This Was the Old Chief's Country (87 page)

‘Yes,’ said Molly.

‘My God!’ said Angela, with a kind of bitter appreciation of them. ‘Sometimes when I’m with you, I understand everything about this country.’

‘Thank you,’ said Molly.

‘Thank you,’ said Frederick.

‘You aren’t being fair, girl,’ said Dorothy.

‘Fair,’
said Angela, and Harriet, and Sarah, her daughters, almost all at once.

And then everyone but Harriet laughed. In this way was Ben’s fate decided.

A few days later, Frederick rang to say that a place had been found and a car was coming for Ben. At once. Tomorrow.

Harriet was frantic: the haste of it, the – yes, ruthlessness! And the doctor who had authorized this? Or would? A doctor who had not even seen Ben? She said all this to David, and knew from his manner that a good deal had gone on behind her back. His parents had talked to him at his office. David had said something like ‘Yes, I’ll see to it’ when Molly, whom suddenly Harriet hated, had said, ‘You’ll have to be firm with Harriet.’

‘It’s either him or us,’ said David to Harriet. He added, his voice full of cold dislike for Ben, ‘He’s probably just dropped in from Mars. He’s going back to report on what he’s found down here.’ He laughed – cruelly, it seemed to Harriet, who was silently taking in the fact – which of course she had half known already – that Ben was not expected to live long in this institution, whatever it was.

‘He’s a little child,’ she said,
‘He’s our child.’

‘No, he’s not,’ said David, finally. ‘Well, he certainly isn’t mine.’

They were in the living-room. Children’s voices rose sharp and distant from the dark winter garden. On the same impulse, David and Harriet went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. The garden held dim shapes of tree and shrub, but the light from this warm room reached across the lawn to a shrub that was starkly black with winter, lit twiggy growths that showed a glitter of water, and illuminated the white trunk of a birch. Two small figures, indistinguishably unisex in their many-coloured padded jackets, trousers, woollen caps, emerged from the black under a holly thicket, and came forward. They were Helen and Luke, on some adventure. Both held sticks and were prodding them here and there into last year’s leaves.

‘Here it is!’ Helen’s voice rose in triumph, and the parents saw, emerging into the light on the end of the stick, the summer’s lost red-and-yellow plastic ball. It was dirtied and squashed, but whole. The two children began a fast stamping dance around and around, the rescued ball held aloft in triumph. Then, suddenly, for no obvious reason, they came racing up to the french doors. The parents sat down on a sofa, facing the doors, which burst inwards, and there they were, two slight, elegant little creatures, with flaring red, frost-burned cheeks and eyes full of the excitements of the dark wilderness they had been part of. They stood breathing heavily, their eyes slowly adjusting to reality, the warm, lit family room and their parents sitting there looking at them. For a moment it was the meeting of two alien forms of life: the children had been part of some old savagery, and their blood still pounded with it; but now they had to let their wild selves go away while they rejoined their family. Harriet and David shared this with them, were with them in imagination and in memory, from their own childhoods: they could see themselves clearly, two adults, sitting there, tame, domestic, even pitiable in their distance from wildness and freedom.

Seeing their parents there alone, no other children around, and above all, no Ben, Helen came to her father, Luke to his mother, and Harriet and David embraced their two adventurous little children,
their
children, holding them tight.

Next morning the car, which was a small black van, came for Ben. Harriet had known it was coming, because David had not gone to work. He had stayed so as to ‘handle’ her! David went upstairs, and brought down suitcases and holdalls that he had packed quietly while she was giving the children breakfast.

He flung these into the van. Then, his face set hard, so that Harriet hardly knew him, he picked Ben up from where he sat on the floor in the living-room, carried him to the van, and put him in. Then he came fast to Harriet, with the same hard set face, and put his arm around her, turned her away from the sight of the van, which was already on its way (she could hear yells and shouts coming from inside it), and took her to the sofa, where – still holding her tight – he said, over and over again, ‘We have to do it, Harriet. We have to.’ She was weeping with the shock of it, and with relief, and with gratitude to him, who was taking all the responsibility.

When the children came home, they were told Ben had gone to stay with someone.

‘With Granny?’ asked Helen, anxious.

‘No.’

Four pairs of suspicious, apprehensive eyes became suddenly full of relief. Hysterical relief. The children danced about, unable to help themselves, and then pretended it was a game they had thought up then and there.

At supper they were overbright, giggling, hysterical. But in a quiet moment Jane asked shrilly, ‘Are you going to send us away, too?’ She was a stolid, quiet little girl, Dorothy in miniature, never saying anything unnecessary. But now her large blue eyes were fixed in terror on her mother’s face.

‘No, of course we aren’t,’ said David, sounding curt.

Luke explained, ‘They are sending Ben away because he isn’t really one of us.’

In the days that followed, the family expanded like paper flowers in water. Harriet understood what a burden Ben had been, how he had oppressed them all, how much the children had suffered; knew that they had talked about it much more than the parents had wanted to know, had tried to come to terms with Ben. But now Ben was gone their eyes shone, they were full of high spirits, and they kept coming to Harriet with little gifts of a sweet or a toy, ‘This is for you, Mummy.’ Or they rushed up to kiss her, or stroke her face, or nuzzle to her like happy calves or foals. And David took days off from work to be with them all – to be with her. He was careful with her, tender. As if I were ill, she decided rebelliously. Of course she thought all the time of Ben, who was a prisoner somewhere. What kind of a prisoner? She pictured the little black van, remembered his cries of rage as he was taken away.

The days went by, and normality filled the house. Harriet heard the children talking about the Easter holidays. ‘It will be all right now that Ben isn’t here,’ said Helen.

They had always understood so much more than she had wanted to acknowledge.

While she was part of the general relief, and could hardly believe she had been able to stand such strain, and for so long, she could not banish Ben from her mind. It was not with love, or even affection, that she thought of him, and she disliked herself for not being able to find one little spark of normal feeling: it was guilt and horror that kept her awake through the nights. David knew she was awake, though she did try to hide it.

Then one morning she started up out of sleep, out of a bad dream, though she did not know what, and she said, ‘I’m going to see what they are doing to Ben.’

David opened his eyes, and lay silent, staring over his arm at the window. He had been dozing, not asleep. She knew he had feared this, and there was something about him then that said to her: Right, then that’s it, it’s enough.

‘David, I’ve got to.’

‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘I simply have to.’

Again she knew from the way he lay there, not looking at her, and did not say anything more than that one syllable, that it was bad for her, that he was making decisions as he lay there. He stayed where he was for a few minutes, and then got out of bed, and went out of the room and downstairs.

When she had got her clothes on, she rang Molly, who was at once coldly angry. ‘No, I’m not going to tell you where it is. Now you’ve done it, then leave it alone.’

But at last she did give Harriet the address.

Again Harriet was wondering why she was always treated like a criminal. Ever since Ben was born it’s been like this, she thought. Now it seemed to her the truth, that everyone had silently condemned her. I have suffered a misfortune, she told herself; I haven’t committed a crime.

Ben had been taken to a place in the North of England; it would be four or five hours’ drive – perhaps more, if she was unlucky with traffic. There was bad traffic, and she drove through grey wintry rain. It was early afternoon when she approached a large solid building of dark stone, in a valley high among moors she could hardly see for grey drifting rain. The place stood square and upright among dismal dripping evergreens, and its regular windows, three rows of them, were barred.

She entered a small entrance lobby that had a handwritten card tacked on the inner door: ‘Ring for Attendance.’ She rang, and waited, and nothing happened. Her heart was beating. She still surged with the adrenalin that had given her the impetus to come, but the long drive had subdued her, and this oppressive building was telling her nerves, if not her intelligence – for, after all, she had no facts to go on – that what she had feared was true. Yet she did not know exactly what that was. She rang again. The building was silent: she could hear the shrill of a bell a long way off in its interior. Again, nothing, and she was about to go around to the back when the door abruptly opened to show a slatternly girl wearing jerseys, cardigans, and a thick scarf. She had a pale little face under a mass of curly yellow hair that had a blue ribbon holding a queue like a sheep’s tail. She seemed tired.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

Harriet saw, understanding what this meant, that people simply did not come here.

She said, already stubborn, ‘I’m Mrs Lovatt and I’ve come to see my son.’

It was evident that these were words this institution, whatever it was, did not expect to meet.

The girl stared, gave an involuntary little shake of the head that expressed incapacity, and then said, ‘Dr MacPherson isn’t here this week.’ She was Scottish, too, and her accent was strong.

‘Someone must be deputizing for him,’ said Harriet decisively.

The girl fell back before Harriet’s manner, smiling uncertainly, and very worried. She muttered, ‘Wait here, then,’ and went inside. Harriet followed her before the big door was shut to exclude her. The girl did glance around, as if she planned to say, You must wait outside, but instead she said, ‘I’ll fetch someone,’ and went on into the dark caverns of a corridor that had small ceiling lights all along it, hardly disturbing the gloom. There was a smell of disinfectant. Absolute silence. No, after a time Harriet became aware of a high thin screaming that began, and stopped, and went on again, coming from the back of the building.

Nothing happened. Harriet went out into the vestibule, which was already darkening with the approaching night. The rain was now a cold deluge, silent and regular. The moors had disappeared.

She rang again, decisively, and returned to the corridor.

Two figures appeared, a long way off under the pinpoints of the ceiling lights, and came towards her. A young man, in a white coat that was not clean, was followed by the girl, who now had a cigarette in her mouth and was screwing up her eyes from the smoke. Both looked tired and uncertain.

He was an ordinary young man, though worn down in a general way; taken bit by bit, hands, face, eyes, he was unremarkable, but there was something desperate about him, as if he contained anger, or hopelessness.

‘You can’t be here,’ he said, in a flurried indecisive way. ‘We don’t have visiting days here.’ His voice was South London, flat and nasal.

‘But I am here,’ said Harriet. ‘I am here to see my son Ben Lovatt.’

And suddenly he took in a breath, and looked at the girl, who pursed her lips together and raised her eyebrows.

‘Listen,’ said Harriet. ‘I don’t think you understand. I’m not just going away, you know. I’ve come to see my son, and that is what I am going to do.’

He knew she meant it. He slowly nodded, as if saying, Yes, but that isn’t the point. He was looking hard at her. She was being given a warning, and from someone who was taking the responsibility for it. He might be a rather pitiable young man, and certainly an overtired and inadequately fed one, doing this job because he could not get another, but the weight of his position – the unhappy weight of it – was speaking through him, and his expression and his reddened, smoke-tired eyes were severe, authoritative, to be taken seriously.

‘When people dump their kids here, they don’t come and see them after,’ he said.

‘You see, you don’t understand at all,’ said the girl.

Harriet heard herself explode with ‘I’m sick of being told I don’t understand this and that. I’m the child’s mother. I’m Ben Lovatt’s mother. Do
you
understand that?’

Suddenly they were all three together in understanding, even in desperate acceptance of some kind of general fatality.

He nodded, and said, ‘Well, I’ll go and see…’

‘And I am coming, too,’ she said.

This really did alert him. ‘Oh no,’ he exclaimed, ‘You are
not!
’ He said something to the girl, who began running surprisingly fast down the corridor. ‘You stay here,’ he said to Harriet, and strode after the girl.

Harriet saw the girl turn right and disappear, and without thinking she opened a door at her right hand. She saw the young man’s arm raised in imprecation, or warning, while what was behind that door reached her.

She was at the end of a long ward, which had any number of cots and beds along the walls. In the cots were – monsters. While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body…then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs…a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting – a doll with chalky swollen limbs, its eyes wide and blank, like blue ponds, and its mouth open, showing a swollen little tongue. A lanky boy was skewed, one half of his body sliding from the other. A child seemed at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her. Rows of freaks, nearly all asleep, and all silent. They were literally drugged out of their minds. Well, nearly silent: there was a dreary sobbing from a cot that had its sides shielded with blankets. The high intermittent screaming, nearer now, still assaulted her nerves. A smell of excrement, stronger than the disinfectant. Then she was out of the nightmare ward and in another corridor, parallel to the one she had first seen, and identical. At its end she saw the girl, followed by the young man, come a little way towards her and then again turn right…Harriet ran fast, hearing her feet thud on the boards, and turned where they did, and was in a tiny room holding trolleys of medicines and drugs. She ran through this and was now in a long cement-floored passage that had doors with inspection grilles in them all along the wall facing her. The young man and the girl were opening one of these doors as she arrived beside them. All three were breathing heavily.