The Children’s Home (3 page)

The work absorbed him. He saw the books first as objects that demanded his attention, like insects or lacquered boxes. Many of them dealt with local matters, because the gentlemen who had owned them were local men. There were books about the history of the county and fox hunting, books about the old religion and the Reformation, books that described the houses and lands of the rich, small much-consulted books on estate management. For Morgan, who had no interest in the world outside the borders of his property, these books existed to be classified, not read. There were numerous copies of
Punch
and the
Illustrated London Magazine
and
Blackwood’s
, bound into volumes and stamped with the year. Both men had collected these periodicals, and had them bound, though neither copy seemed to have been much read. Morgan also felt no desire to read these works. Sometimes, though, as he wrote out a title on the index card, his tongue between his teeth, he would feel an urge to put down his pen and open the book to see what it contained and find himself reading an article about Dundee or the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, or wondering if cartoons of the sort he discovered, though finely drawn, had ever made people laugh. Books of travel delayed him as his grandfather’s charts had, with their descriptions of places he would never see; books with maps and the names of distant cities. Antioch. Cathay. Jerusalem. Like the scent of spices from the charts that had tickled his palate before. The older books spoke of places with monstrous people, who used their single feet like parasols to protect themselves from the sun, or lived on air and water. These books he would thumb through, pausing to savor paragraphs before continuing with his cataloguing. Works of philosophy and moral thought attracted him, and he would set their cards aside for later, for when he had time to read was how he put it to himself, aware that there was no time other than the present and that he could expect another fifty years of that.

But the book that interrupted him was entitled
A History of Masks
. It had been published over a century ago and was richly illustrated, with hand-colored drypoint etchings protected by sheets of tissue paper, the line of glue along the inner edge the color of weak tea. The first illustrations were of Greek theater, where the role of the masks was merely ritual. Morgan was rapidly bored by these archetypes of tragedy and comedy, lust and derision; they seemed to him to conceal nothing, but simply to be—there was no face behind them, but only the physical form of the bearer, whose task was to move the mask around the stage. Not even the audience cared what lay behind. What sense did a mask have, he wondered, if to remove it meant nothing?

He turned to the next section. Here were Italian masks from Naples and Florence and Venice, dating back to the Renaissance. These were often small; the concealment they offered was a sort of titillation. Morgan was intrigued by these slips of papier-mâché and silk and finely worked animal hide. Here, in these masks of occasion, the final purpose was to be revealed. He imagined galas and carnivals, when people would fall in love as much with what they imagined as with what they saw before them.

Later sections were devoted to the masks of Africa and Asia and North America. Here, Morgan felt that he was searching for something that he knew would not be there, his own new face made out of leather and conch shells. He wanted to see what the mask would look like that had no face beneath it; the mask that had become the face. He wanted to see if anyone had lived with the living face removed and only the mask remaining, pressed and sealed to the bone. But the writer had no interest in the notion that faces and masks might be interchangeable, or that the lines between them might be blurred. Morgan had not occurred to him.

One day, Morgan stopped reading and began to write. He prepared his desk. He found the typewriter his mother had used for letter writing, a black-and-gold cast iron object as tall as it was wide, and arranged for ribbons to be sent, which took some weeks and much anxiety. He had a ream of clean white paper placed beside an empty tray he planned to fill with words. This was around the time he had the windows boarded up and covered with extra shelves. Each morning, after finishing his breakfast, he would come to the book room and put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and wait for words to come. Sometimes they did. They were never the words he wanted, but sometimes they would do. He wrote about the objects he saw in his room to start with, to limber up, minute descriptions of the chair and desk, of the typewriter itself, that caused him immense effort. He had never
seen
anything before. After a while, when everything that surrounded him had been described, he turned to the subject of masks in a mood of angry frustration and determination. He would say what the book hadn’t said. He would say what he knew.

The first few pages he wrote were ponderous and confused. There were too many things a mask could be used to do, and Morgan lost himself in cavils and qualifications. In the end, he closed his eye and pushed the typewriter away.

He started to write again after Engel and the children arrived, but this time he chose not to write about himself. He wrote about his grandfather, the stories he had been told by his mother as a child. There were hundreds of these, phrases and anecdotes and longer, more intricate tales that occupied many pages. Sometimes, he would sit with the end of his pen in his mouth and dream, then set himself back, with a shake, to the task at hand.

Morgan’s mother had always said Morgan looked like his grandfather, but was more handsome, and she had shown him photographs to prove it, though he couldn’t see the likeness. To Morgan, every face was different, there were no likenesses. Certainly, though, his grandfather had been handsome.

Most photographs of him had been taken abroad. He had seemed to enjoy dressing up in the local fashion, posing in turbans and caftans and decorated robes of various kinds, with pointed shoes and hats and a series of weapons, real and ornamental, that dangled from sashes and belts. He had the air of an adventurer, which was what he was.

These were the things that Morgan wrote. He wrote about the commercial empire his grandfather had created and maintained between his own country, in which he barely set foot any longer, and the Middle East. He wrote about the year his grandfather had spent in a jail in Cairo, in a cell with a hundred other men, because he had been confused with someone else. He wrote about how his grandfather, upon his release, had begun to study medicine, that of the Arabs, which he referred to as the original medicine, and then the medicine of his own country, filling notebooks with scribbles that were barely legible, collecting specimens from every part of the world, injecting himself with potions and dirt and then more potions, so that he would pass days, and sometimes weeks, in a state of modulated fever. His grandfather had seemed to be searching for something to cure an illness that had still to be defined; he had got everything back to front. And as Morgan wrote, stiff-backed and upright, he forgot about his face for hours on end. Which made it all the worse when he remembered.

Moira would often lie beside him in the finely carved sandalwood cot that had once been his, which Engel pushed from room to room as Morgan ordered. He wanted to watch Moira grow; more important, he wanted her not to lose sight of what he was; familiarity protected them both from shock. When she murmured or cried or gurgled, he turned from the typewriter and stroked the hair from her face, touched when she caught his hand and pulled it to her mouth to be sucked on and dribbled over. She said his name once, he was sure of it, and, shortly after, that of Engel, though Engel wasn’t there to hear. She will never say Mummy or Daddy, Morgan thought, but that was just as well. To say Morgan and Engel would be enough; these words were also tokens of love.

But then one day she did say
maman
, quite distinctly, when he lifted her out of the cot, towards his face, because he couldn’t resist putting her to the test, to see if she would flinch or touch. She said
maman
to him. He hugged her to his chest, as Engel so often did, enthralled by this mistake. Where did the word come from? he wondered. Who could have taught it to her? Had it been waiting, bubbling under, for its moment? Had she been made in order that this word be uttered? No, he said gently, because it wouldn’t have been honest not to correct her, and he would always be honest with his children, with all his children, I’m Morgan. Morgan. He let her finger touch his lip as he spoke so that she could feel the word as well. He knew that he hissed when he had to pronounce certain sounds, the letters
s
or
f
, but he had been fortunate in that; he could still say his name.

in which Doctor Crane returns to the house

T
he second time Doctor Crane came was for Moira, who had been suffering from a high temperature for days. This time, Engel took Crane into the largest of the sitting rooms. Morgan had arranged his seat behind a Chinese screen, a series of hinged, lacquered panels with a row of diamond-shaped holes, at eye level for someone sitting, as Morgan was. Engel had watched him set this up with evident irritation, which he had tried to ignore, successfully at first. This had encouraged her to begin to tut, initially under her breath, the noise gradually increasing in volume as Morgan arranged the screen to his satisfaction and chose the most suitable chair, suitably upholstered because he might be there for some time. Eventually, he had asked her what was wrong, with a waspish tone. Was there something that offended her? Well, she said, nothing, I suppose. You’re making an awful lot of noise about nothing, he said. The noise I make is my affair, she said. Lord knows, it isn’t my place to tell you what to do. He was silent; he knew that the best way to make Engel talk was to challenge her by silence. In the end, she began, like a blocked pipe that suddenly breaks and pours out water everywhere. It’s all the same to me, she said, if you’re too proud to let the Doctor see you. Too proud to let a man of science look at your face. A good man, it’s shining out of him; he wouldn’t hurt a fly if he could help it, his good hands, his good heart, you can see his goodness in every ounce of him. Do you think I don’t know a good man when I see him?

It’s not a question of pride, he said, but shame. At this, Engel gave a scornful grunt. And what have you to be so ashamed of? You didn’t do it to yourself, did you? And isn’t he a doctor, for goodness’ sake? Don’t doctors look at men like you every day of their lives and live with it? What good is a doctor that can’t look at a man and see a man? You let me look, don’t you? Where’s the shame in that? Are you ashamed with me?

Morgan listened to this, his face averted, but did not speak. She was right, of course, he had been seen by doctors a thousand times. He had been examined and pored over and reproved and commiserated with, because they had done all they could and it was not enough, and he was aware, as they spoke among themselves and to him, that all they were asking from him was forgiveness. We know the extent to which we have failed, they seemed to want to say; we know that what you are is hidden beneath what we have made of you, despite our efforts, and that it will never be uncovered because it no longer exists. And yet they were filled with pride as well, and rightly so, because they had brought him back from the brink of death. They had dragged him back to life and given him what was nothing if not a face, though what kind of face it was they wouldn’t say. He did feel a sort of gratitude, not for the work they had done but for the fact that they had done it, that they had thought him worth it. He was grateful for that, he couldn’t deny it; for the generosity of their intentions. Which was why he had never had the heart to tell them that he would rather have died than live like this. That he would never forgive them for what they had done, for the patchwork of mortified flesh into which their efforts had transformed him. That he would willingly wish his face on them, on each of them, if that meant that he would be free of it, even in death he would wish it on them. He would never forgive them for assuming that he would wish to live, for assuming that all life, of any kind, was to be preferred to death.

Yet what blame did Doctor Crane have in all of this? Engel was right. He was more than a good doctor, he was a good man; that had been clear from the way he treated Daisy. What Engel had meant was that he was worthy of my trust, thought Morgan. He stood there, thinking all this, when the door knocker sounded. Engel came back into the room, wheeling Moira in the carved cot of Indian sandalwood that had once been Morgan’s, and with Doctor Crane, in his long gray overcoat, one step behind. They were all three of them in the room before the Doctor noticed Morgan.

“Oh my poor man,” he said, walking towards him, his hand held out. “Who has done this to you?” And Morgan shook his head, taking the hand and holding it tightly, with a strange sense of joy, because he had been recognized.

“No one,” he said. “It was an accident.”

He had sworn to himself, in his ward in the clinic, that he would never do this, yet less than three hours later, when the two men were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, he found himself telling the story of the accident as he had never told it. Perhaps if Engel had asked him, he might have opened his heart to her; but she had never asked. He had always thought: She doesn’t need to know; she knows. Yet he didn’t feel that this was the case with the Doctor. Morgan needed to tell him; he needed to let the Doctor know that what had happened to him could, after all, be shared. He felt that the Doctor had given his permission for this. This is why the expression
opening his heart
was the right expression to describe what he was doing; because it was a gift both of love and of revelation. He talked, and while he talked the Doctor reached over and held Morgan’s two bare hands, the good one and the wounded one, between his. And all the while Engel sat beside them, in her armchair by the fire, with Moira asleep like a cat in her lap. Morgan talked, and this is what he said.