The Children’s Home (19 page)

“He must come too,” said David, tilting his head towards the other man. “He’s part of this.” Morgan didn’t expect Crane to obey the boy, but Crane stood up and followed them both, the boy leading Morgan, along the corridor to the Doctor’s room. “Do you remember?” David said when the three of them were standing together at the center of the room. “We were looking for something in here and we couldn’t find it? And I was angry?” He looked at Morgan, who hadn’t understood. “You weren’t here, Morgan. It was the day we showed the Doctor the woman, do you remember, Doctor Crane?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, we were looking in the wrong place. We all thought it was something medical we needed, something we could see and touch, but we were wrong. We needed to know where we came from, you see. When we found the woman, and found out how to open her, we thought she might have been our mother, but we were wrong about that too. Our mothers are dead, all of them. We found out the truth in a story.”

David crossed the room and knelt down to take something from the bottom shelf. It was a bound volume of magazines Morgan’s grandfather had collected. Morgan remembered it from his childhood. They were stories of other worlds, of other planets, of visitors from other places, illustrated sometimes, but the illustrations were nothing compared to the pictures in Morgan’s head. He had scared himself out of sleep with some of the tales the volume contained. David was crouched on the floor with the book in front of him, flicking through the pages in search of something. Finally, with a sigh, he stopped. “Here it is,” he said. He picked the volume up and laid it on the Doctor’s table. The two men stepped forward and began to read where his finger rested.

For the first two years of the war, the Children’s Home was a place of safety. Protected by a fortuitous combination of slipshod administration, good fortune and remoteness from the theater of battle, the children led a peaceful, even idyllic life until the morning of March 6.

As the children settled down to drink hot chocolate around the long wooden tables of the refectory, three vehicles, two of them lorries, the other one an army jeep, pulled up in front of the home. Soldiers leapt from the jeep, entered the building and forcibly removed all forty-four children, hurling them onto the lorries like sacks of corn. When the housekeeper tried to protect the smallest child, little more than a baby, she was marched behind the Home and shot.

Following the raid, the shivering, frightened children were taken to a nearby town and held in the collection center—a requisitioned factory—for almost two months, waiting for the first available train to leave for the camps in the East. The journey was long and bitter, but, when the train stopped to be refueled or was shunted into a siding, singing could sometimes be heard from the freight car in which the children were held. Miraculously, deprived of food and with no more water than they had managed to carry with them concealed in their clothes, they all survived the week-long journey. On arrival in the East, forty-two of the children, some of them still too young to do more than toddle, were immediately gassed. The two oldest were put to death by firing squad within days of their arrival.

Soon after the morning raid, a telegram was sent to headquarters declaring that the Children’s Home had been fumigated and that all trace of its residents had been removed.

in which the boathouse reveals its purpose

D
avid gathered the children together. It was night by now, the garden was pitch dark apart from the overlapping arcs of light from the windows of the house. Morgan, watching the scene from the porch, began to count them, but before he had finished they were crossing the lawn in a loose pack, talking and laughing among themselves, the youngest ones, as usual, in the arms or on the shoulders of the older children. They had eaten and bathed and found fresh clothes. There was an air about them of purity; that was the word that first came to Morgan, and that stayed with him. They had been washed clean. He wished Crane were with him, but the Doctor was still in his room, with the bound magazines open in front of him. All he would say was that this was nonsense, that it made no sense at all. He had refused to eat. Morgan had seen Crane’s ashen face and the tremor of his hands. He is a doctor, and imagines he can heal the sick, but there are sicknesses no doctor can heal, Morgan told himself. He had seen Crane’s power, which was the power to forgive as well as to heal. Let him be, said Engel, he’ll be all right in the end. Morgan remained unconvinced of this, as perhaps did Engel. She has stayed in the house, thought Morgan, but a moment later he realized that he was wrong. He saw her scurrying across the lawn, the light from the windows reflecting on her white apron, like the tail of a rabbit in a torch beam.

It took Morgan some minutes to understand that David was leading the children towards the boathouse. Filled all at once with an anxiety he couldn’t account for, he hurried after them. By the time he had caught up with the group, David had disappeared inside the building and turned on a light, which flooded out of the door and the side window onto the eager, smiling faces of the children. They were standing in a semicircle around the door, with Morgan and Engel behind them and to one side. David came out and beckoned Morgan. The children parted to let him through, until, once again, the two of them, Morgan and David, were alone inside the boathouse. The single light hung from the ceiling shone harshly into Morgan’s good eye; for a moment he was blinded, and only the guiding hand of David prevented his falling into the lake as the water lapped by his feet.

“I want to thank you,” said David.

“You have no need to thank me.”

David shook his head, as if to dismiss this.

“Things will change now, because of what we did today. You know that, don’t you?”

“I hoped that would be the case,” said Morgan.

“No, not just at the factory,” said David. “Here, too. Your life, this house. Nothing can stay the same any longer. I didn’t expect this, none of us did. We didn’t ask ourselves about what might happen here, I suppose. Perhaps we should have done.” He paused, then shook his head. “It will be hard for you, I think.”

“My sister is dead,” said Morgan.

“There are other people,” said David. “But yes, your sister is dead, and it will take a little time before the others pick up where she left off. I thought it might be different here, but all your books tell me something else, that nowhere is different, in the end.” He smiled suddenly. “But we have made a difference, haven’t we, Morgan? Today? Did you see their faces? When we took the factory from them? Did you see what they understood in the end? That it was over? For a while at least.”

“Doctor Crane is too shocked to speak.”

David shrugged. “He’s a doctor, isn’t he? Doctors ought to be at home with blood. Where we come from, doctors used us for worse than that. It’s all in your books, even when they pretend it isn’t true and call it stories. You saw that. Sometimes that’s all you can do with the truth. You should go and look.”

“You’re more of a man than Crane is,” said Morgan. “Sometimes, I’ve seen it in his face, the way he flinches. He’s no better than a boy. It isn’t his fault.” He stared down into the water. “You’ve noticed that too, David, I know you have. I’ve seen you lose your patience with him.”

David nodded. “Death shocks him still. He thinks it doesn’t, but it does. He has to get used to it. You should help him. You will know what to do. He thinks he’s seen everything, but you know more than he does.”

Morgan looked around him. “My mother died here. An awful death.”

“It’s not such a bad place to die,” said David. “I mean, there are worse places than this.” He took Morgan’s hand, the damaged one. “Before I go,” he said, “I want to fix this.” He started to move the fingers, one by one, bending them forwards and backwards as far as they would go. Morgan watched, feeling nothing at first, half fascinated, half afraid, as though the hand belonged to someone else. Then, as David worked, a sort of tingling filled the hand, like heat beneath the skin. It took all of Morgan’s strength not to pull the hand away. He was thinking, What do you mean, before you go? How can you go? But before he could speak, David had freed his hand and was resting a palm on Morgan’s sightless, always-open eye.

“Just be still,” the boy said in a soothing voice. And Morgan was still. “I’m not putting everything right,” David said. “I just want to make it easier for you to live. What’s happened to you is you, you can’t change that. You found that out yourself, with the wax face, didn’t you? You thought you could keep it on forever and then you didn’t want to. I’m right, aren’t I? It was like how we were with the woman. We thought she might matter to us, love us, I suppose.”

Morgan nodded, too awed to speak as his eye took in light and the boy’s touch moved down to his mouth.

“Sometimes you have to give up the easy thing and do the right one,” said David finally, stepping back as if to examine his work. A moment later, he turned and walked away. He paused in the boathouse doorway, a silhouette, and spoke to the ring of illuminated faces outside. He saw them all, Moira and Melissa, Georgina and Georgie, Daisy and Christopher and Ruth, and Mite, children he had fed and nursed, whose tears and blood and snot he had wiped away. Behind them, at some distance, stood Crane, staring out across the lawn like someone who had seen his own death. His eyes caught Morgan’s. He shook his head. Morgan was about to go to him, to hold him, but David caught his hand. “Not yet,” he said. Morgan nodded, but pain snagged his heart when Crane raised his shoulders in a gesture of despair and walked away, skirting the dark walls of the house, moving in and out of the arcs of light from the windows, until he could no longer be seen.

“It’s time we went back home,” David said. Morgan saw Engel cover her face with both hands as the children glanced at one another. Mite started to laugh, the gurgling laugh of a baby filled with the joy of its own vast life ahead of it. David had released Morgan and moved away. But then, as if caught by an unexpected memory, he paused, and Morgan saw him smile. “We have to go now,” he said to Morgan. “But Engel will stay with you. You’ll be all right. She’ll make sure of that. And you must think of the Doctor. The Doctor is your responsibility now.” He hesitated for a moment. “We’ll miss you,” he said, in a voice so quiet he could hardly be heard.

Morgan watched them walk past him, one by one, into the water.

in which Crane and Morgan talk about travel and the sense of it

T
he following day Morgan rose early, unrested, and wandered the house, shocked by the silence that greeted him, a silence that seemed to fill his ears. How pervasive the noise of the children must have been, he thought, for its absence to feel so deafening. Everywhere there were signs of them, doors open onto unmade beds, a doll that had once belonged to Melissa, a pair of cotton socks rolled into a ball and thrown into a corner. He walked around the rooms they had slept in, eaten in, studied in; rooms in which he had watched them and offered them comfort, or received it. He touched their chairs and tables and beds, imagining warmth. Everywhere, he found the weight of the emptiness unbearable, stifling, as though their departure had deprived the house of air as well as noise. The kitchen was bare and cold, Engel’s bed unslept in, the curtains drawn. She must be somewhere, he thought; he couldn’t bear her not to be there. Closing the door to her room, a room he had never before entered without her consent, he reassured himself. David had promised him she would stay.

Morgan’s hand was healed; he moved his fingers, tremulous, against his cheek. David had left him that, and he was glad, and not only because he had a hand that worked; without that, he might have believed, in the barren hush of the house, that no one had ever lived there but him. That he had always been alone.

That was when he heard the noise. It came from a room he rarely used, the largest of the several sitting rooms on the ground floor. He was walking past, his heels loudly echoing on the marble floor, when he heard what sounded like a sniffle. His heart leapt in his chest. They’ve come back, he thought. They’ve come back to me. He stepped into the room, ears cocked. The sniffle was repeated, once, twice, a third time. It came from behind the Chinese screen standing to the left of the fireplace. He walked towards it as quietly as he could, grateful for the deep pile of the Persian carpet beneath his feet, until he was close enough to take one edge of the painted screen in his hand. Now, he said to himself, and moved the screen to one side.

Crane was seated, cross-legged, on the floor, in the clothes he had been wearing the previous day. He looked up. He didn’t seem surprised. “Hello,” he said, his voice thick. “I wondered when you’d find me.”

“Get up from there, Crane,” said Morgan, more brusquely than he had intended. Resisting the urge to help his friend, he stood back to watch while Crane struggled to his feet. He felt an anger he did not understand.

“This is where you hid from me, isn’t it?” said Crane, wincing a little as he shook the cramp from his leg. “The first time I came, for Daisy.”

“How do you know that?” said Morgan.

Crane shrugged. “I don’t remember. I expect Engel told me. Perhaps you gave yourself away.” Both hands on his hips, he arched his back, twisted twice at the waist. “I must have been sitting down there too long,” he said. He’d stopped sniffling, but his cheeks were still shiny with tears.

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Morgan, although he wasn’t sure how true this was.

“Well, now you’ve found me,” said Crane. “Perhaps it isn’t such a good place to hide after all.” He paused. “Although it served its purpose for you, I suppose. When you thought you had to hide from me.”

Morgan turned away, unsettled. Had he needed to have the children back so deeply that no other presence would do? Without them there would have been no Crane at all. He would be grateful, he decided; he would learn to be grateful. “You must be hungry,” he said, his tone more generous. “We both need to eat. I imagine there will be something left from last night.”