Castle Of Bone (13 page)

Upstairs in Jean’s room, Anna, who had slept in the little room next door looked disapproving. “Do you know he’s wet right through to the mattress.”

“Well what did you expect. Babies do, you know. It’s not exactly as if we were practised at putting nappies on, and he wriggles such a lot.”

Neither seemed as enthusiastic about baby-minding as they had been the day before. They were on the verge of quarrelling except when united against Hugh. Anna had never sided with Jean when Penn was here, Hugh thought.

Jean said, “We’ll have to say that you and Penn had breakfast early and went out, Hugh.”

“Does that mean I don’t get any breakfast?”

“We’ll bring you something. It will probably just have to be toast or something.”

“I suppose that means I’ll be left to look after him,” said Hugh unenthusiastically, pointing at the baby who merely grinned back inanely. “He looks positively retarded this morning.”

“It’s about your turn. We’ve had him since yesterday. Look, you can feed him too. I’ve managed to bring up some cereal. But for goodness sake, Hugh, keep him quiet,
whatever
.”

Jean did genuinely look tired. Her hair was like the fur on a not quite well cat, a little dull and spiky. She was wearing a brown-stoned brooch which she always wore like a mascot when she expected things to be difficult, Hugh noticed. Anna too was even paler than usual. He felt tired himself. He missed Penn, so, obviously, did Anna. But neither of them appeared as troubled as Jean.

Fortunately Jean remained maternal; it was she, not Anna, who checked the baby’s nappy before she went downstairs, who set out Penn’s food and made sure the room was safe. Anna merely stood and watched. Nor did she kiss the baby as Jean did, awkwardly, before they went out. But if she was less concerned about Penn, the baby, Hugh had the feeling she was more concerned about him as Penn, her elder brother; she turned back at the door, and for a longish moment gazed at him, before following Jean downstairs.

Hugh and Penn were left to stare each other out. Hugh had avoided such confrontations before. Now, uncomfortable, he was the first to look away. “Da,” said the infant Penn, and held out the sodden looking cloth which up till then he’d been stuffing in his mouth. When Hugh did not respond, the baby seemed to realize that he did not know him, and also to notice that both the more familiar girls had gone. He started to crawl frantically towards the door. At the same time, his mouth squaring up, he let out an enormous howl.

Hugh, as frantically, grabbed him back. He tried tickling Penn, bumped him up and down, made every face he could think of – the baby stopped wailing after a moment, but stared at him unblinking, unamused. He felt as foolish as an unsuccessful comic, was about to set him on the floor again when Penn jabbed a finger painfully right into his eye. It was Hugh who felt like howling now.

“Blast you, Penn,” he said. And saying the name, had a sudden desperate vision: that this was Penn, his friend. He could not bear to think of that Penn now. Firmly he shut him from his mind, and remembered breakfast with relief; Weetabix and milk in a rabbit-covered bowl. Before Penn could start to wail again he thrust out a spoonful of the Weetabix – Penn obligingly opening his mouth, but shutting it again as the spoon arrived, so that it merely collided with his face and the Weetabix was scattered, mostly on the floor. The next time also, Penn opened his mouth to the approaching spoon only to push it aside with his fist, again effectively dispersing cereal, now largely over Hugh. Hugh fetched a towel, spread it on the floor and sat the baby in the middle of it. “You can jolly well feed yourself then,” he said grimly and handed Penn the bowl and spoon. The next five minutes’ peace was, he decided, worth the mess. Eating Weetabix with fingers was not exactly a tidy or a clean pursuit.

And after breakfast when Penn had first emptied out Jean’s waste-paper basket and devoured a rotten apple-core, then attempted to annihilate Jean’s collection of glass animals (not that that would have been much loss, Hugh thought privately) noisily resisting all attempts to interest him in the toys provided, Hugh reverted to the only proper distraction that he knew of: paint. There were two old tins of powder colour among his other materials. He mixed them, found sheets of newspaper and his oldest brushes, dabbing the newspaper with paint to encourage the baby and demonstrate the possibilities. The baby was much more interested in decorating itself than the paper, and by hand rather than by brush, but it freed Hugh for another five minutes, more or less, until Anna and Jean arrived back from breakfast with some leathery slices of toast for him.

Jean gasped, seeing the room.

“You didn’t have to let him make such an awful mess. It’s
awful
, Hugh.”

“You must be joking,” Hugh said wearily. “If I ever have babies I’m going to keep them in cages till they’re old enough to be civilized. He practically gouged my eye out. Look.”

“Just look at his cereal. It’s everywhere. And paint, Hugh, paint for a baby of his age. You must be out of your mind.”

“I suppose you would rather that he’d howled the place down,” said Hugh and saw Anna smile secretly, “or broken all your glass animals. They’re hideous anyway.”

“Hugh, you’ve got to do something. We can’t go on like this.” Jean was scarlet in the face.

“Something like what?”

“Like . . . don’t be so negative, Hugh.”

“Well have you any ideas then?”

“I can’t,” she wailed, “I can’t.”

“Well nor have I. Unless we all get in the cupboard ourselves. That’ll be the end of it. We’ll be babies too, no one will be able to make us do anything.”

“No,” said Jean. “
No
.” Hugh could feel her terror, that she could scarcely speak for it, letting it run away with her.

“We could go and see that old man of yours,” Anna said quietly to Hugh.

“What old man?” he feigned incomprehension. “Oh
him
. Just what good do you think he’d do?” He thought to himself, that’s truer than you know; for nothing at all had come out of his going yesterday. The old man had been very unhelpful, and was just as likely to be unhelpful today; the situation being still the same. Positively he did not want to go back to him again. He was sick of the whole business suddenly. He wanted to go away, to shut everything out and paint.
ALONE
, he thought; by
MYSELF
. The thought was as loud to him as a spoken voice, it commanded him; so that he even turned to go out of the room, all the reasons why he should stay wiped clean out of his mind.

“Where are you going? You
can’t
go away,” Jean shouted after him.

“All right, let’s put him in the cupboard again,” Hugh said pointing at Penn, who was sitting in the centre of the room regarding them. The thought only came to his mind as he spoke.

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I am” (which was mostly, though, a lie).

“It
is
an idea,” said Anna thoughtfully. Hugh looked at her with almost as much surprise as Jean did.

“But I don’t see . . .”

“We’ve never tried putting anything back in there, have we? Something we’ve already changed.” Nor had they; which struck Hugh now as odd, almost odd enough not to be an accident. “Suppose it worked the other way,” went on Anna, persuasively.

“Just supposing it
didn’t
?” Jean asked. She sounded calmer now. Even so her interruptions were irrelevant, more or less, Hugh and Anna discussing this as just between themselves.

“He’d only be younger . . .” said Hugh. “We wouldn’t be worse off, would we?”

“It might be better,” Anna said.

“It’s all crazy, it couldn’t be worse,” Jean pushed her voice in forcibly.

“We could experiment with something else first, couldn’t we,” said Anna.

The infant Penn had started to crawl towards the door. They all suddenly saw and stopped and watched him.

“He
wants
to go himself,” said Anna, drawing in her breath. They watched him pull the door open and disappear round it. They heard the door of Hugh’s room pulled open in its turn – at which they all three looked at one another and followed. “Well, at least we won’t need to clean him up,” said Hugh. Penn went straight for the cupboard. Jean gasped and ran to pull him out, but it was tidier, the more obvious course, to let go, to shut the door on him. Hugh automatically, without any conscious decision-taking, removed Jean, and Anna, gently, carefully this time, closed the cupboard door. It felt as if another, inevitable piece had been fitted into a pattern, in which they and everything they knew now formed a part. Then – it was half-past nine on an August Friday – they opened the door again, to find what looked like an almost new-born baby lying there blinking up at them.

Their first thought was uniform, even Jean’s; not shock or fear or horror – Hugh, without looking at them, knew neither of the others felt any of those, any more than he did himself. What he felt – and they felt – was a huge and quite simple awe.

The baby was so tiny, so puny and shrivelled. It could not have been more than a few days’ old. But its face looked as old as an old man’s face, the skin all dried and wrinkled round its eyes and ears. Its legs kicked thin as a sparrow’s legs from the fat white folds of its napkin. When Jean laid it gently down on Hugh’s bed it lay with its eyes wide open, dark yet milky, staring up at the ceiling, and there was a piece of fluff in the centre of one eye. The baby did not seem to mind the fluff. He watched its mouth opening and shutting, its arms and legs moving randomly, slowly. It was there in the room with the rest of them and yet somehow far away, kicking and hitting at something none of them could see.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jean and Anna took turns at carrying the baby down the hill. Penn was much too small to go in the pushchair now, and there was no possibility of getting hold of a pram instead. They had found a shawl in the tallboy from which both the button box and the napkins had come – it must have been white once, but was now faintly yellow and smelt of mothballs. It reminded Hugh of occasions quite other than these, little flashes of himself as a child playing with something or dreaming or watching his mother turn out those same drawers, digging in them frenetically like a terrier, in order to find some garment or piece of material.

The baby, well-wrapped in first the shawl and then a check tablecloth to disguise its existence as far as possible, was asleep; well-fed, replete. Despite the circumstances both Jean and Anna looked pleased with themselves, as well they might, thought Hugh, having observed with surprise the somewhat technical operations necessary for feeding it.

The baby had begun whimpering not long after it came out of the cupboard. “It must be hungry,” Jean and Anna had said more or less simultaneously, and both had turned and looked at Hugh.

“Why are you looking at me? I don’t know the first thing about feeding babies.”

But neither Anna or Jean, it appeared, knew much about feeding either. They seemed scared by Penn’s smallness, holding him gingerly as if he was about to break. They could have given Penn a bottle, but did not know how to prepare it, and had to scour the house for discarded baby manuals which would instruct them. Everything had to be sterilized by boiling, it appeared, including the water to make up the feed, and there had to be the right proportion of milk and the right proportion of water, and to assess that they had to know the baby’s weight. All of this meant expeditions to the kitchen, first to weigh Penn on Hugh’s mother’s old-fashioned scales – half the brass weights were missing which did not help – then to boil pans of water, Hugh keeping guard meanwhile in case his mother came. The baby continued wailing on and off, a small noise like a kitten, but very persistent. It made little sucking, snuffling sounds, trying unavailingly to eat its thumb as a substitute for food.

To distract himself, Hugh read out loud extracts from the baby manual. “The one thing a mother needs to know; what is best for baby’s needs, and what sort of balance to aim for; breast or bottle, let mother choose herself, and what suits her is bound to be good for baby.” He so annoyed the already agitated Jean and Anna that they told him, in unison,
they
weren’t going to buy the tin of milk from the supermarket, the teat from the chemist;
he
was. Luckily for him, they said, he did not have to buy a bottle too, as Jean had unearthed one from the back of the airing-cupboard.

There was a queue in the chemist’s this time, though still only one assistant. As he waited he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“Hugh,” it said. He turned to find of all people the one he least wanted to see, apart from his own mother, that is; Penn’s mother. Her dark eyes were ringed with black this morning – paint maybe, or exhaustion, after her night out – for once she reminded him less of a bird than of some nocturnal mammal; a bushbaby for example, like the one he’d seen at the zoo. How extraordinary to think he’d been at the zoo, looking at bushbabies, only two days ago. It felt more like a hundred years. The colour running to his face, he attempted to be as nonchalant as Anna had been the day before.