The Children’s Home (4 page)

in which Morgan explains his injuries to Doctor Crane

I
don’t want to sound vain and I don’t want to seem ridiculous because how can anyone who looks the way I do now say that he was once handsome without making himself seem ridiculous. But it’s true. I was extraordinarily handsome when I was young. I was a beautiful child, everyone said so, and I became an even more beautiful boy. I have always hated vanity and now, the way I am, it feels like the greatest deceit of all, like the summoning of evil to my aid; but nothing will otherwise be understood, you see. Beauty is a two-edged sword; it gives and it takes. In my case, it made me hard to love and easy to admire, by my mother at least. She would look at me and see her own beauty reflected, because she too was a famous beauty and I had inherited my features from her; but she would also be challenged by what she saw. I was years younger, and a boy, which gave me a sort of power she would never have. That’s what she must have thought. When people came I would be shown off, she used to treat me as an exhibit; I was her beauty’s ambassador. She had me dressed in a way that exalted my fine straight limbs and the fine and even features of my face. I still have some photographs of that time; someday, perhaps, I’ll show you them. She didn’t care to show off my younger sister so much. Rebecca took after my father’s side of the family and was pretty in a different way, less pretty I suppose than I was, though pretty isn’t the word for what I was, there is no depth to pretty; perhaps this was why my mother loved me more. I think that she only understood what she felt for Rebecca when it was too late, when she had nothing in the house but me and her two wolfhounds.

As I grew taller and my mother weaker, because she suffered from a slow crumbling of the bones that gave her great pain and made all movement difficult, she used me as a sort of crutch, with the wolfhounds bounding around us as her escort, like some pagan goddess. I learned to walk at her pace and pause as she did as we wandered around the garden and she led me down to the lake, where she would examine the water lilies and other plants that grew there, which she had introduced, and then down to the wooded part at the far end of the lawns, beyond the rose beds and the vegetable garden, among the rhododendrons and azaleas, where the air smelt of mold, until she was tired and would need to pause for breath because she had talked herself out. She never stopped talking, as long as she had breath, she always needed to talk. She would tell me about her childhood, the countries she had lived in, the places she had seen. She told me about the first garden she could remember, which was walled and cool, and about the geckos that had lived there, the baby geckos with their beating hearts visible through the skin, the old ones thick and rough, like old men’s hands. She told me about the noise the children made when they saw her, like a little princess, and of how they would run beside her car with their dirty hands pressed to its flanks until it went too fast and they were left in a cloud of dust, and of how the streets were filled with one-eyed cats.

She would use me to speak to the gardeners, telling me what to say to them as they worked, perfectly aware that she could be heard by them as clearly as by me, enjoying the sound of my voice as I repeated what she had said. She loved gardening, in her way. She was an expert, although she left the dirty work to others, almost all the dirty work, right to the very end. She had her passions, which lasted for a while and were replaced; for aquilegias, cycads, scented phlox, finally orchids. Her tastes would swing from the showy to the subtle, unaware of the strange effect this created, the hodgepodge of colors and forms, oblivious of the extra work it made for her gardeners. She had no sense of the large effect, she worked with details. She used to say she was a slave to her garden, which was nonsense; she was a slave to nothing except her appetites and her needs, which were one and the same. Her greatest need of all, though, was for me, to have me with her, beside her, always. She treated me as something infinitely precious, yet also as she might have treated a household pet, one of her wolfhounds; a creature with no will of its own and no rights; she couldn’t see the difference. She made me work for her as a trained animal might have done, some cunning monkey, a source of traction. Sometimes I would row her slowly around the lake until she grew bored; on these occasions she would tell me about her father, her tone a mixture of pride and contempt. She had inherited her grandmother’s capacity for scorn.

I didn’t go away to school; people had come to me for a few years, and so I had learned to read and write, some simple arithmetic, a sprinkling of languages; various tutors, young men usually, who would fall under my mother’s spell and be dismissed as soon as this became obvious. My father would have liked me to go away to school, I think; my grandfather, I know, would have insisted, simply to free me from the stifling company of women. But this was all my mother’s doing; I was her only business, in the end. She had lost her first child, my brother, Ralph, two years before I was born, when a typhoid epidemic killed a dozen boys and two masters at his school. He died without her, she never forgave him that. That’s how selfish she was. After his death, she saw schools as unhealthy, disease-ridden places of death. Besides, my father invariably let her do what she wanted; he was scared of her anger, which she doled out in small hard doses for days and even weeks until he had forgotten its cause. He would confide in me, yet even with me he seemed wary. He said to me more than once that to see my mother and me together was to be breathless with pride. I think he had always been afraid of her, and so he was of me as well. I think he also loved my sister more than he loved me, perhaps because she was simpler to love. He would have given her the factory in any case, I think. I would have liked to have spent more time with him, to learn how to be a man, but he was almost never at home; he was almost a stranger to me. He worked abroad for many years, in my grandfather’s company, buying and selling, I’m not sure what. Spices were part of it, but also, I think, weapons. Perhaps weapons more than anything. I wonder sometimes if that is what the factory is making. I would have liked to study him, and to have him study me, to see what I might become.

I didn’t know many other boys, three or four sons of family friends, with whom I would sometimes be sent to play while the adults stayed in the house and talked among themselves. I saw these boys as enviable. I didn’t feel safe with them, and I liked that; I liked the sense of danger they gave me, though all we did was play the kind of games boys always play, dividing ourselves between the forces of good and bad, like kittens learning to hunt, first one on top and then the other. Afterwards, when they had gone, my mother would ask me if I had enjoyed myself and what she wanted was for me to say no, that I preferred to stay with her. I didn’t say this, although I may have let her think it. My sister was sent away to school, you see, as soon as she was old enough, when she was six; my mother said that girls were tougher than boys and could fight off disease; I was the child to be kept at home; that was my privilege and my punishment. After a while, the other boys stopped coming, around the time the last of my tutors was also dismissed, I must have been thirteen or fourteen. Perhaps it was fear that stopped them, because of what was happening outside, but I think now that their parents were no longer invited because my mother had begun to be ashamed of her body, which was crippled by illness. Her back bent sideways, she had to strain to raise her head. She began to spend her days in bed with her dogs stretched out on the floor beside her like enormous rugs. I would read to her. The books she liked best were stories of the rich. Her favorites were biographies of women aristocrats who had lived in France before the revolution, and been condemned and had gone bravely or unknowingly to their death. Hah, she would say as I read aloud the description of the final ride in the tumbrel to the guillotine, with an exhalation of bitter satisfaction, as though she had been proved right after all. The first signs of her madness were these, I think, the delight she took in hearing of the violent deaths of women she admired and emulated. Because she saw herself as aristocratic to her bones, she’d grown to feel that the circumstances of my grandfather’s birth had cheated her of her natural rank. She never forgave her mother for marrying beneath her. My father used to sit beside her on the bed when I was there and hold her hand, which was beginning to lose its beauty, but he didn’t speak because there was nothing to be said, by him at least. I know now that he had no idea of what she wanted, of how he might have tempered her suffering; he had no idea that her suffering was entirely self-inflicted. He thought I knew, but he was wrong. He treated me like a priest or shaman, and I didn’t know how to tell him she was also a mystery to me, her rage, her selfishness. It’s only now that I begin to understand her, perhaps at this very moment, as I am talking to you. Sometimes she would take my face in her hands, and stare into my eyes with her mad eyes, as if she was using me as a mirror, the only mirror that would show her what she needed to see, and even that only intermittently. She’d turn my face here and there as if to seek it. And then she would cast it away, and sigh with frustration.

The first time she hurt herself was with a knife she kept from the lunch tray, before it was taken back to the kitchen. I found her sawing at her forearm with it. When I walked in, she threw the knife down in a fury. This is no good, she cried, it won’t cut. It won’t cut
properly
. She held out her arm to show me like an angry child. I saw a dozen welts in rough parallel, but no broken skin. The knife was a fish knife, we had eaten smoked haddock poached in milk that day, and I still remember a smear of yellow where she had made the first attempt to cut her arm, after which the knife was clean. She had a sulky, peeved expression on her face, as though a toy had broken. I didn’t know what to do, so I took the knife from her gently, washed it in the bathroom basin, and told no one. Later, I put it back in the kitchen drawer and thought, well, that’s the end of it. I was fifteen.

Three or four months passed before she did anything else like that. I had taken her into the garden, pushing her chair along the path to the rose garden. She was laughing, I remember, because the dogs were behaving like puppies, kicking their legs in the air and barking, and I felt almost proud of her, because she seemed so brave. By then she was in constant pain. She was talking about her plans for the garden, about what she would do that autumn; a large new herbaceous border filled with acid-lovers, the big wisteria on the boathouse pruned. At times what she said made no sense at all, at other times she was perfectly lucid and often amusing, particularly when she talked about my father and what a sweet and useless man he was; she knew full well what she was saying then.

I pushed her until she could reach out and touch the rosebushes. Closer, closer, she insisted, drumming her fingers impatiently on the armrests of the chair. I want to smell them. There was one in particular she loved, with large veined pink-and-white flowers, I don’t remember the name, although she must have said it a hundred times in my presence. It was one of the oldest bushes, a tangle of massive knotted stems and thorns and as soon as she was close enough she pulled one of the thicker stems with a burst of strength that astonished me and dragged the thorns across her face. She’s trying to blind herself, I thought, and I was right. I pulled the chair back and she flung herself forward somehow into the roses, her body a live weight in the middle of the bush. Mother, I cried, Mother, but she was twisting and writhing into its heart, making a low moaning noise, I heard her say
yes yes yes
, and I grabbed her by the back of her dress, by the skirt of it, and started to drag her out. The thorns had hooked themselves to the material, I heard a ripping. She was light enough by then, it was her rage that made her heavy; as soon as I had pulled her up, I grasped her round the waist, I had never held her that close before, she wriggled like a child. I couldn’t see her face. She struggled and writhed, scratching the backs of my hands with her broken nails and crying
put me down damn you put me down you have no right,
while spots of blood splashed down on my sleeve. When she was back in the chair, her body hunched with malevolence and fury, I saw how much damage she had done. Her face was covered with scratches, some of them deep, each of them bleeding—most of her cheeks and chin and forehead were smeared deep red; rose petals were stuck to the blood. One of her eyes was blinking closed and she was moaning. At first I thought she was moaning with pain, but I was wrong; she was moaning with frustration. Finally she came back to herself.
Well don’t just stand there you little fool
, she cried.
I’m your fault now
.

She had scratched the cornea of her left eye, and the scratch became infected. The local doctor wasn’t up to it, he always seemed to be one step behind the problem. Perhaps you knew him? I don’t remember his name. By the time he decided that she needed to be examined by a specialist, when the eyelids were nothing but a pus-closed fissure, it was too late; the sight in that eye was gone. She never complained; in that way she was admirable. The other result was that my father began to say she should be placed somewhere else, where she could be helped more effectively. That was the word he used,
placed
, like an ornament he’d acquired somewhere and brought home. Although back in the country now, he was still away much of the time, from Monday to Friday and often at weekends. He was in charge of what was left of my grandfather’s business, so he only knew about the big events, not the day-to-day strangeness of her. He really had no idea what was happening. He didn’t want her to be helped particularly, I don’t think; generally, people who say this don’t. What he wanted was for the problem of her to be solved. He wanted her out of his life because he didn’t know how to cope with her, she was too big for him, although all he ever saw were the edges of her, the thorns and spikes and husk of her. I was the one who lived
within
the world of her. I was the one who washed her dozen tiny wounds, made with her fingernails if nothing else was to hand, and fed her and heard her say
fuck
a hundred times in succession and then laugh and say that no one had ever loved her, no one, and that this was how she had wanted it, she hadn’t needed love, not even from me; these last words spat at me like poison spray. I let her do all this, how could I have prevented it? I didn’t know what the right thing to do was, there was no one there to ask, no one I trusted; I let her do whatever came into her head. I mentioned my sister to her once, I don’t remember in what connection, because she was almost never at home, perhaps I had said that I missed her, as I often did; and my mother said that she knew damn well what I wanted
her
for, the slut, for my filthy jiggery-pokery, because I was filthy, like all men, I would fuck her blind. I wasn’t surprised, it was the kind of thing my mother often said, but I wondered if it was true that I was like all men, because that would mean that I
was
a man, or sufficiently like one to be the thing itself. I had no sense of other men, no way to measure what might be the man in me. My father had never been the sort to encourage me, as the fathers of other boys seemed to do; as my grandfather would have done, I think, though I never knew him. My father had left me to my mother, as though he wouldn’t in any case have known what to do with me. I was yet another of her mysteries.