The Children’s Home (18 page)

•  •  •

Long before he reached the factory doors, with the newly broken clods of damp earth shifting and rocking beneath his feet, Morgan had recognized the smell: the cloying sweetness of it, the underlying pungency. He had tasted it before, once in his life, in the back of his throat, but had never imagined he would be forced to taste it again. Instinctively, both hands rose to his face, to cover it, but also to protect his good eye from what it would see. Crane stood beside him, their shoulders just touching; he could feel the man’s presence as a source of warmth, and comfort. But the comfort Crane could provide would not save him from the scene that met his eye. He paused at the doors, aghast. They were back in the atrium of the factory, but it was barely recognizable. The row of desks had been displaced, as had their occupants. The vast room was stained and tainted by blood, blood glistening on the infinite expanse of floor, blood splashed in great bright swaths across the walls. The windows above the open doors were washed in it, so that all the light was livid pink. The children, in their nakedness, were bathed and clothed in blood. They were standing still, or turning slowly on their heels, now cleansed of earth, their good work done.

And there, at the heart of the atrium, on one of the low sleek desks that had once lined the wall, was Goddie, naked like the others now, his oversize suit cast off, stark ribs sticking out beneath the skin as he raised one fist above his head and hollered in crazy glee. When he saw Morgan, the holler died away. Slowly, with a triumphant smile, he lowered his fist and furled the fingers back to reveal the metal clasp he’d been grasping, the pin sunk deep in his flesh, unbleeding, the letter
F
like a glittering worm in the middle of his palm.

in which the road home is taken by some but not by all

T
he car followed the army back along the road it had taken that morning. But
army
no longer described what was now a straggling flock of children, in holiday mood, anarchic, darting to pick bramble fruit from the hedges, jumping over ditches to drink their fill of new-fallen rainwater from troughs and streams. There was a festive mood, an air of picnic, with David darting among them like a thoughtful sprite, applying his healing touch wherever it might be needed. One boy had found a bicycle and was giving the smaller children rides on the handlebars. Some children had wandered away, like homing birds, while others joined the group, running from houses and barns as if they had been hiding, or held against their will, and were finally released. Exposure to the sun had begun to color the pasty white skin of those who had been lifted from the field. The country at each side of the road seemed greener than it had that morning, only hours before, although it didn’t feel like that to Morgan. It felt as though the world he had known had been transformed as it had the day his mother had chosen to die, taking with her his own, unspoiled face just as surely as Goddie had ripped the clasp from the woman’s head. Everything was fresh and new, it seemed to Morgan, and he wondered how this could be so, how this bloom of freshness was possible, with the image of the atrium still before his eyes.

At the control post they had passed through on their way to the factory, the barrier had been lifted before their arrival. News travels fast, thought Morgan. The soldier on guard was squatting on a stool with his shirt open, smoking a cigarette, watching the children go by. When he saw the Doctor, he smiled and waved a hand. The Doctor, unsmiling, nodded back. He hadn’t spoken since they drove away from what remained of the factory. Before they began their journey he had walked across the fractured earth to the potting shed, or what was left of it, but when Morgan asked him what he had found there, he shook his head. He sat with his hands in his lap, staring ahead as the car made its way towards the house. The children continued before them, untiring, occasionally stopping in their onward movement to play some complex game, a weaving in and out, arms raised and lowered, without any visible leader, like bees, thought Morgan. The car had almost come to a halt behind one of these games, when the Doctor spoke.

“They dug them in,” he said. “They dug them back into the earth.”

“Who did?”

“Your sister’s men.”

“How do you know that?” Morgan remembered what he had seen: a dozen children leaving the group to enter the potting shed.

“I knew one of them. He was a patient of mine some years ago, he’d broken his arm in a brawl. He pretended not to know me. He was hiding behind the shed, from me I thought at first, but he must have been hiding from the children, surely. After what he’d seen them do. He must have been hiding from the children. He might have thought I meant him harm as well, of course. For a moment, with what I’d seen still in my head, I did. The earth was moving beneath my feet, Morgan, there were fingers pushing through,” he said, his voice breaking. He hid his face in his hands.

Morgan waited for him to continue. One of the girls nearest the car had gathered poppies from a field and was plaiting them into another girl’s hair. The girl whose hair was adorned bent down her head and stared into the car. She saw Morgan, Morgan’s face as it was, and Morgan expected her to recoil, flinched with anticipation, but her face was alive with welcoming laughter and a craving to be admired. Morgan stared back, but couldn’t smile.

“I asked him what he thought they had done,” the Doctor said in the end. “He didn’t answer me. He didn’t seem to see the point of my question. Can you understand that, Morgan? He didn’t see the point. I lost my temper with him then, I shook him and he let me do it, he was limp in my hands. I had no choice, he said. It’s what we were told to do.” Crane turned to face Morgan, urgent now. “Is that all we are, Morgan? Tools at the service of power? Unquestioning tools? I
trod
on them, Morgan, they were struggling, stifled with earth, beneath my feet, I couldn’t help it. I tried to pull one out and the same thing happened to me as had happened to you. He broke in my hands like a stalk. What dreadful power did they produce that this should have been done to them?” He grasped Morgan’s shoulder until Morgan winced. “You knew nothing of this? Tell me you knew nothing of this, Morgan. I need to be told you had no hand in this.”

“I think I’ve been chosen,” said Morgan after a moment. “And I don’t know why. At first, I thought it was because I’d suffered and that would help me understand the suffering of others, of the children, certainly, but of more than that, I don’t know how to say it. Some larger suffering. But now I begin to think I was chosen because I am guilty. And then I thought, perhaps to be made whole, you must first be broken. I said something to Melissa once, long ago now, after they’d found the woman. You know they call her their mother? I heard them once. All of them together, like worshippers. But why are you here? I asked her. Are you here to help me or am I here to help you?” The children themselves went into the potting shed, thought Morgan, what Crane has seen is the work of the children. No one is innocent.

“And what did she say?”

Morgan shrugged. “She told me I’d missed the point. David had said something similar to me already, before that day.” He shook his head, then sighed. “It seems I’m doomed always to miss the point. Today I feel that I have seen what I am capable of doing, perhaps of what I have done, or allowed to be done in my name, and I don’t know how I would go on if I didn’t have this girl looking in at the window, her hair filled with poppies.” He turned to face the Doctor, raising a hand to stroke his cheek. “Do you feel this touch, Crane? Do you feel what it has done?”

Morgan was interrupted by a gentle tapping at the window. He wound it down. Goddie stood there, a chain of daisies around his neck, dressed in nothing but a soldier’s jacket and grinning from ear to ear.

“I wanted to say goodbye to you before I went,” he said. “My home is over there.” He pointed towards a cottage in a field.

“But we found you in the city,” said Morgan.

Goddie looked stubborn for a moment, his small face set, then grinned again, as though what Morgan had said was, after all, immaterial. “Thank you,” he said, “for what you did.” On an impulse, he reached into the car and touched Morgan’s twisted mouth with his hand, the lightest touch and yet Morgan felt it, as warmth on his deadened skin. How strange, he thought, first one touch and then another, as though we could all be warmed back by the passing heat of others into some sort of decent life. When Goddie stepped back from the car, Morgan saw that the soldier’s jacket was held closed across the boy’s thin chest by the woman’s metal clasp, in the form of the family’s initial. So everything will find its purpose in the end, he thought. He wondered what his grandfather would have said.

As the road wound its way through open countryside, other children fell away from the procession, in groups or couples, sometimes with a smaller child between them as though they had already formed a family, less often singly, heading off towards houses and barns or any place that offered them shelter. Most of them had found clothes of some sort by now. Among those who were left, the babies were passed from arm to arm, from shoulder to shoulder, piggyback riding as the ever-diminishing raggle-taggle army moved east and the sun sank lower in the sky to guide and greet them. By the time the wall, and then the gate, still open from that morning, came into sight no more than two score—thirty at the most—were left, a little weary and dragging their feet, and it was twilight.

in which Engel tells Morgan about the elements

E
ngel was standing at the front door to the house, under the porch, her apron on, surrounded by the children who had remained at the house. When the first group arrived, she threw open her arms. “You must be starving,” she cried, then turned to her own children. “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Welcome them to your home.” Shyly at first, they obeyed her, the two groups mingling together in the shade of the porch. After a few moments, she ushered them into the house, shaking her head at the state of the new arrivals. The minute David reached her, she hugged him close and whispered some words in his ear. He pulled away with a laugh. “It won’t be long now,” he said, and Engel nodded. “Everything in its own good time,” she said. Morgan, who had left the car and was walking up the steps, heard this and wondered what it might mean. Crane took his arm; he had barely spoken again after Goddie had left them. Morgan sensed an absence in him, as though some secret vessel within him had been opened and its contents emptied out. Together, they stood beneath the porch until the drive was empty, then followed the children into the hall. Engel was leading them all through the green drawing room into one of the rooms that overlooked the garden. She opened the French windows with a flourish, then stood back. On the lawn beyond, long trestle tables had been set up and laid with food. From where he stood, Morgan could see boiled eggs arranged in glistening pyramids, sandwiches the size and shape of dominoes, deep bowls of fruit, pies and sausages small enough to be eaten in one go, carafes of juices, colored jellies. The children surged through the French windows into the garden. He turned to Engel, now standing beside him, arms crossed on her bosom.

“You were expecting us,” said Morgan. Together, with Crane behind them, they left the house and stood at the edge of the lawn.

She sighed with satisfaction as the children began to eat. Some stayed at the tables, reaching for whatever took their fancy. Others carried food off, held to their chests, as though afraid they might be deprived of it. Some helped each other, others turned their shoulders to their neighbor like a shield to ward off threat. One boy picked up a jug and tipped the juice into his mouth as if he had never drunk before, rivulets of orange liquid staining his chin and neck. “I’ve been expecting this for an age,” she said. “A long age, longer even than mine.”

He was used to not quite understanding Engel.

“We’ve been to the factory,” he said.

“I know where you’ve been,” she said, “and what you’ve done.”

“David told you, I suppose,” he said.

She must have heard the trace of irony in his voice. “And if he did?” she said. “What of it?”

“And so we have Moira back.”

She nodded. “Yes, what counts is that we’re all together now. Even the ones that were missing are finally here with us. We can do what we have to do at last.”

Crane had been listening to this. “Dear God. What more must be done?” he said. It was clear from the weariness of his tone that what he expected was for more horror to be committed.

“Air and fire and earth,” she said. She seemed to be reading the words from some card, suspended before her, that only she could see. “Those trials are over now, thank the Lord. What’s left is water, and water is the sweetest one of them all.”

“I don’t understand,” said Crane. He sounded annoyed now, as if Engel were toying with him.

“Air?” said Morgan, throwing a warning glance at Crane.

She stared at Morgan for a moment, her eyes vacant. Had she forgotten who he was? he wondered. Then she shook herself.

“Some air is very bad, unbreathable. It stays in the lungs forever, even when nothing more can be done. When the throat is closed and the nails are broken and the lungs are dead. When everything is dead, there is still the air. It settles. You don’t know what it’s like. I pray you’ll never know.” She touched the unfeeling part of his face, for the first time, he realized later, when it would never be possible again. Her hand was cool, and hard. “You’ve known the presence of fire, of a sort, Morgan. You’ve known what the burning can do. And so have I.”

“And then there is earth,” said Crane. He turned away from them both and walked back into the house.

•  •  •

Later that evening, when the new children had been shown around the house, David came into Morgan’s study. He and Crane had been playing backgammon in a rackety, distracted fashion, to take their minds off the day behind them. Such a day, thought Morgan. Crane might have helped him understand the sense of it all, but he sensed that Crane was as lost as he was, perhaps even more so. It would take time, he decided, before the two of them could talk about the day’s events. But the need to examine them in some way was impellent in Morgan, before whose eyes floated brutal images of his sister, of broken earth, of death, of a metal clasp that stood for him, that represented him, and of sights he had seen with his mind’s eye only, too terrible to be described. So the arrival of David came as a release. Even more so when David took Morgan’s arm and lifted him bodily from where he was sitting, his strength surprising, knocking the game table so that the board flipped over, the pieces sliding into Crane’s lap. Morgan found himself standing beside the boy, as tall as he was now. How long has this been true, he wondered. How quickly this has happened. David took his hand, the wounded hand, and led him from the room. Morgan turned to look at Crane, who was gathering the pieces and stacking them in a pile, not looking at either of them.