Tree of Hands (10 page)

Mopsa had dressed the boy in new clothes. Or at least in different ones. They looked new. It took Benet aback rather to see that at his age he was still incontinent. She could see the bulky outline of a napkin through his blue velvet jumpsuit. He sat in the small wicker chair which had been James's and which, like the highchair, had been hidden by Mopsa until yesterday. What would be next? Benet found herself briefly standing aside in an unexpected cold detachment. James's toys? His clothes even? What would be next?

‘Jay,' he said. ‘Jay. Jay wants drink.'

So he could talk and he was called James. Well, it was a popular enough, even common, name. Mopsa came bustling in with apple juice in a feeding bottle. At least that wasn't James's, she must have bought it. A feeding bottle was something he had never used. The same snobbery which had caused Benet to recoil from the sight of
the napkin now made her look askance at this big child, this very masculine-looking, hefty boy, sucking on a teat.

When he had finished the bottle, he returned to his favourite pastime of turning out the kitchen cabinets. He worked with an air of intense concentration, frowning and keeping his lips firmly compressed as he brought out pots and pans and bowls and dishes, examining them, fitting one into another. He came upon an egg beater, turned the handle and made the whisk blades spin and looked up at Mopsa with a broad grin of satisfaction.

‘May I have one of your sleeping pills?' Benet said to Mopsa. ‘I threw mine away.'

Mopsa said they were in her bedroom on the bedside table and Benet was to help herself. Benet found the bottle of Soneryl between a container of Mogadon and the inevitable Valium behind Edward's photograph. She looked at Edward's face and he looked resolutely away into the distance. The face was intelligent and sensitive as well as handsome. It looked as if its possessor would say and think and feel wonderful things. An air of mystery hung about it as it does over all still and silent beauty. The extraordinary thing was that there was so little underneath and what there had been was so commonplace. It hurt her to think that and to remember it had taken her three years to find it out.

She took the Soneryl quite early and had a long night's sleep. Where the boy was sleeping she didn't inquire. The house had five bedrooms and in any case there was a second bed in Mopsa's room. Mopsa took him out and of course they must have used James's pushchair. Next day she had to go back to the Royal Eastern Hospital for further tests, and Mopsa asked would Benet look after him just for three hours? Benet said she had seen that coming. Sooner or later she had known that would happen.

‘I haven't much choice, have I?' she said.

Mopsa was looking tired. She had dark bags under her eyes and hollows in her cheeks. Looking after a two-year-old was too much for her. Benet wondered if she had been
up in the night with the boy, if he woke up in the nights and cried and wanted his mother and Mopsa had to deal with that. She didn't feel much sympathy, she had no room for pitying anyone but herself.

The boy was back in his denim dungarees today and his red plastic sandals. Benet thought she had seldom seen a nastier kind of footwear for a child. It made her wonder afresh about Barbara Lloyd. The boy clambered up and down the staircases. He seemed safe enough on them, climbing up on all-fours and down by sliding on his bottom. He spoke very little, never for the mere pleasure of making comprehensible sounds. When he wanted something, really wanted it, he expressed himself in the third person, calling himself Jay. Never James or Jim or Jem but always Jay. He was extraordinarily self-contained and somehow self-sufficient. Benet, hunched up in her window chair in the basement, had to acknowledge that he was no trouble.

She hadn't seen him for half an hour so she bestirred herself unwillingly and went upstairs to look for him. He had got into the study room. There he had found a half-empty box of heavyweight A4 typing paper, helped himself to a dozen sheets and was drawing on them with a blue ink felt-tipped pen. He sat on the floor with the paper spread out in front of him and resting on the stiff cover of Benet's book of days. Whether this was by accident or design it was impossible to tell, but it was obviously a sensible thing to do. And although he had got a lot of ink on his hands and arms and dungarees and the book of days, the drawings he had made were not scribbles, they were recognizable drawings of things, of a man, a woman, a house, of something that looked like a bridge.

Benet picked up one of the pictures and looked closely at it. She was astonished. It seemed to her more like something one would expect of a six-year-old and she remembered children's drawings on the wall of the playroom where the tree of hands poster was. The memory of sitting in that playroom came back to her with a pain so sharp
that she dropped the drawing and turned away, clenching her hands.

The boy said, ‘Jay wants drink.' He was trying to put the cap back on the felt-tipped pen.

Benet did it for him. She picked him up to carry him upstairs, performing this action almost without thinking, automatically. Immediately she wanted to drop him again, she had such a sensation of recoil. But she couldn't do that. He was a person, he had his feelings, and none of it was his fault. She took him upstairs and filled a bottle with apple juice for him.

When Mopsa came back, Benet suggested they should rent a television set. The boy had obviously been used to watching television. When he had first come, he had gone about the room looking for it in much the same way as Mopsa had on her first day. ‘It would make things easier for you,' Benet said.

Why wasn't Mopsa more enthusiastic? Benet had expected a delighted response, even a suggestion that they should all go out in the car now and see about it. But there had been a worn look about Mopsa since her return, something almost frightened or hagridden, rather as if, while she was away, she had seen or heard something to dismay her. Yet whatever processes had been gone through at the Royal Eastern, they had been routine and simple and not alarming. She told Benet that and Benet believed her. She screwed up her face, making a muzzle mouth.

‘You don't like television.'

‘I shan't watch it. You and your little charge can have it upstairs in the living room.'

Still there was no show of enthusiasm and Benet said no more about it, but Mopsa must have taken to heart what she had said for a television set appeared, was brought over from a rental centre in Kilburn and installed in the living room. Its big grey pupil-less eye gleamed out from the corner among the still-unpacked crates. At half-past four Mopsa and the boy ensconced themselves on the settee in front of it, Mopsa with a cup of tea and the boy with apple
juice, this time in a cup. Benet went past the open door and looked at them, but did not go inside.

Afterwards she dated what happened from the arrival of the rented television set. That seemed to mark the demarcation line between the wretched limbo she had lived in and what came after it, a time of discovery, of stupefaction, of fear. Yet for a day or two after the television came, nothing much did happen and it would all have happened whether the television had come or not.

For a long time, petrified as a cameo in her mind remained that glimpse, that picture, of skinny, witch-like, galvanic Mopsa, sitting on the edge of the sofa – the way she always sat, poised, tense, as if ready to spring – and the little boy beside her, as snug in stretchy velour as a puppy in its skin, his thumb in his mouth, his other hand firmly holding on to a thick blue pottery mug. This image later seemed to her the last image in a cycle of despair or one that stood at the beginning of being afraid.

That night she did without the Soneryl. She dreamed of the tree of hands. James and she were walking on the Heath. She was pushing the empty pushchair and James was walking beside her, holding her hand. In life they had never been on the Heath together but this was a dream. They crossed a clearing by a sandy path and came into another piece of woodland, sunlit, high summer, the trees in fresh green leaf except for one in the centre of the copse which grew hands instead of leaves, red-nailed hands, gloved hands, hands of bone and hands of mail.

James was enraptured by the tree. He went up to it and put his arms round its trunk. He put his own hands up to touch its lowest hands. And Benet was reaching up to pick a hand for him, a lady's white hand with a diamond ring on it, when his crying penetrated the dream, broke into it, so that the tree grew faint, the sunshine faded and she was awake, out of bed, going to James.

Before she saw the empty room, she remembered. Her body twisted and clenched itself. She closed her eyes for a moment, made the necessary effort and went down the top
flight to where the crying was coming from, the small bedroom next to Mopsa's. The room was in darkness. The boy stopped crying when she put the light on and picked him up. Had he been used to light in his room? Had light perhaps come into where he slept from a street lamp?

She switched on the bedside light, covering the shade with a folded blanket. Sucking his thumb, he fell asleep while she stood and watched him. She found now that she was really looking at him properly for the first time and found, too, that his face reminded her of someone. Who that someone was she didn't know. But this boy was very very like some adult person she knew or used to know. Generally speaking, the ‘prettier' the child, the less he or she resembles an adult. Prettiness, loveliness in very young children is equated not with any individuality of looks but with a conformity to an ideal babyhood appearance, a kind of amalgam of a Raphael cherub, Peter Pan and a Mabel Lucy Atwell infant. The sleeping boy looked quite unlike any of these. His nose was straight and bold, his chin long, his mouth full and symmetrically curved, his eyebrows already marked in sweeping lines. You could see exactly what he would look like when he was grown-up, a craggy-faced fair man, tall and big-built, ugly till he smiled. Some grown man she knew must be like that, or some woman with thick lips and blond hair. Not Constance Fenton. Barbara Lloyd? She didn't think so. She had forgotten what Barbara Lloyd looked like, but now Barbara's face came clearly back to her, moon-like with low forehead and tip-tilted nose. He probably looked like his father whom she had never seen. There was something faulty in that reasoning. He reminded her of someone she
had
seen, someone she knew.

She knew she would get no more sleep. In a dressing gown, wrapped in a blanket, she sat in the study room among the books, the boy's remarkable drawings on her lap, willing the morning to come, yet not much wanting the morning. At about five she made herself tea.

It didn't start to get light until after seven-thirty. A cold
grey twilight seemed to flow out of the cloudy sky, the green Heath, the pond, into the Vale of Peace. There had been no sign of the sun for many days. A boy was delivering newspapers from a canvas bag on his cycle handlebars. Benet watched him. It came to her that she hadn't seen a newspaper for several weeks.

The boy was due to go home on Wednesday and it was Sunday now. Benet went out by herself. She walked down to South End Green. The world was green and grey and chilly, a feeling in the air of November hopelessness, but at the same time it seemed unreal, spaced away from her at a remove and she encased in a capsule of glass. She found a newsagent's open and bought a Sunday paper but she didn't read it. She took it home and put it on the table in the basement room, but still she didn't read it and later on she couldn't find it. Mopsa must have removed it to her bedroom.

Mopsa and the boy watched television. Benet sat with them. She looked for things to do that she had never done with James, walking on the Heath, sitting in the study, watching television. Mopsa seemed uneasy to have her there – perhaps she was troubled by Benet's inconsistency in saying she would never watch television and then doing so – but she became easier once the news headlines had been read.

Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, had died and there was a lot about his funeral. Benet watched for about ten minutes. The boy was holding on to a white rabbit toy Mopsa must have bought him. He sat with his knees slightly apart, holding the rabbit but having absent-mindedly taken it from his mouth like a man with a cigar. His lips were compressed, his eyes fixed on the screen. Benet got up and went upstairs to the boy's room. There was nothing in the room but the bed he had been sleeping in and a small chest of drawers. She looked in those drawers but they were as empty as when she had bought that chest a year before. No suitcase had been sent with him, none of the inevitable carrier bags and holdalls of clothes and toys and
paraphernalia that accompany small children whenever they travel. On top of the chest lay the Mothercare and Marks & Spencer carriers Mopsa had brought home. The clothes in them had been new. Mopsa had bought them. In one of the bags an unworn garment still remained, a pair of brown velour pants.

His clothes might be in Mopsa's room. Benet looked in Mopsa's room but there were no children's clothes anywhere. The
Sunday Times
that she had bought that morning lay curiously tucked between the two pillows on Mopsa's bed. She wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't opened the drawer in the bedside table and, in doing so, very slightly rucked up the bed cover.

Holding the newspaper, she began to go downstairs again. The boy's screams broke out of silence, they sounded as if they came from someone terribly injured. Benet ran down the stairs, seeing Mopsa's eyes, remembering the barricaded room and the knives. She opened the living-room door. The television had been switched off and the boy stood in front of it, screaming in distress, weeping bitter tears, belabouring the screen with his fists.

‘What on earth is the matter?'

‘He didn't like me turning off the TV.'

‘Why did you?' Benet had to shout above his crying. She picked him up and tried to soothe him. He sobbed and beat her shoulder.

Mopsa didn't answer her. She was wearing her defiant, insouciant, nothing-really-matters face.