The Fifth Child (7 page)

She went to Dr. Brett at eight months and asked him to induce the baby.

He looked critically at her and said, “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”

“I don’t. But this is different.”

“Not that I can see.”

“It’s because you don’t want to. It’s not you who is carrying this—” She cut off
monster
, afraid of antagonising him. “Look,” she said, trying to sound calm, but her voice was angry and accusing, “would you say I was an unreasonable woman? Hysterical? Difficult? Just a pathetic hysterical woman?”

“I would say that you are utterly worn out. Bone tired. You never did find being pregnant easy, did you? Have you forgotten? I’ve had you sitting here through four pregnancies, with all kinds of problems—all credit to you, you put up with everything very well.”

“But it’s not the same thing, it is
absolutely
different, I don’t understand why you can’t see it. Can’t you
see
it?” She thrust out her stomach, which was heaving and—as she felt it—seething as she sat there.

The doctor looked dubiously at her stomach, sighed, and wrote her a prescription for more sedatives.

No, he couldn’t see it. Rather, he wouldn’t—that was the
point. Not only he, but all of them, they
wouldn’t
see how different this was.

And as she walked, strode, ran along the country lanes, she fantasised that she took the big kitchen knife, cut open her own stomach, lifted out the child—and when they actually set eyes on each other, after this long blind struggle, what would she see?

Soon, nearly a month early, the pains began. Once she started, labour had always gone quickly. Dorothy rang David in London, and at once took Harriet into hospital. For the first time, Harriet had insisted on a hospital, surprising everyone.

By the time she was there, there were strong wrenching pains, worse, she knew, than ever in the past. The baby seemed to be fighting its way out. She was bruised—she knew it; inside she must be one enormous black bruise … and no one would ever know.

When at last the moment came when she could be given oblivion, she cried out, “Thank God, thank God, it’s over at last!” She heard a nurse saying, “This one’s a real little toughie, look at him.” Then a woman’s voice was saying, “Mrs. Lovatt, Mrs. Lovatt, are you with us? Come back to us! Your husband is here, dear. You’ve a healthy boy.”

“A real little wrestler,” said Dr. Brett. “He came out fighting the whole world.”

She raised herself with difficulty, because the lower half of her body was too sore to move. The baby was put into her arms. Eleven pounds of him. The others had not been more than seven pounds. He was muscular, yellowish, long. It seemed as if he were trying to stand up, pushing his feet into her side.

“He’s a funny little chap,” said David, and he sounded dismayed.

He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped from his eyebrows to
his crown. His hair grew in an unusual pattern from the double crown where started a wedge or triangle that came low on the forehead, the hair lying forward in a thick yellowish stubble, while the side and back hair grew downwards. His hands were thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms. He opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother’s face. They were focussed greeny-yellow eyes, like lumps of soapstone. She had been waiting to exchange looks with the creature who, she had been sure, had been trying to hurt her, but there was no recognition there. And her heart contracted with pity for him: poor little beast, his mother disliking him so much … But she heard herself say nervously, though she tried to laugh, “He’s like a troll, or a goblin or something.” And she cuddled him, to make up. But he was stiff and heavy.

“Come, Harriet,” said Dr. Brett, annoyed with her. And she thought, I’ve been through this with Dr. bloody Brett four times and it’s always been marvellous, and now he’s like a school-master.

She bared her breast and offered the child her nipple. The nurses, the doctor, her mother, and her husband stood watching, with the smiles that this moment imposed. But there was none of the atmosphere of festival, of achievement, no champagne; on the contrary, there was a strain in everyone, apprehension. A strong, sucking reflex, and then hard gums clamped down on her nipple, and she winced. The child looked at her and bit, hard.

“
Well,”
said Harriet, trying to laugh, removing him.

“Try him a little more,” said the nurse.

He was not crying. Harriet held him out, challenging the nurse with her eyes to take him. The nurse, mouth tight with disapproval, took the baby, and he was put unprotesting in his cot. He had not cried since he was born, except for a first roar of protest, or perhaps surprise.

The four children were brought in to see their new brother
in the hospital ward. The two other women who shared the room with her had got out of bed and taken their babies to a day-room. Harriet had refused to get out of bed. She told the doctors and nurses she needed time for her internal bruises to heal; she said this almost defiantly, carelessly, indifferent to their critical looks.

David stood at the end of the bed, holding baby Paul. Harriet yearned for this baby, this little child, from whom she had been separated so soon. She loved the look of him, the comical soft little face, with soft blue eyes—like bluebells, she thought—and his soft little limbs … it was as if she were sliding her hands along them, and then enclosing his feet in her palms. A real baby, a real little child …

The three older children stared down at the newcomer who was so different from them all: of a different substance, so it seemed to Harriet. Partly this was because she was still responding to the look of him with her memories of his difference in the womb, but partly it was because of his heavy, sallow lumpishness. And then there was this strange head of his, sloping back from the eyebrow ridges.

“We are going to call him Ben,” said Harriet.

“Are we?” said David.

“Yes, it suits him.”

Luke on one side, Helen on the other, took Ben’s small hands, and said, “Hello, Ben.” “Hello, Ben.” But the baby did not look at them.

Jane, the four-year-old, took one of his feet in her hand, then in her two hands, but he vigorously kicked her away.

Harriet found herself thinking, I wonder what the mother would look like, the one who would welcome this—alien.

She stayed in bed a week—that is, until she felt she could manage the struggle ahead—and then went home with her new child.

That night, in the connubial bedroom, she sat up against a stack of pillows, nursing the baby. David was watching.

Ben sucked so strongly that he emptied the first breast in less than a minute. Always, when a breast was nearly empty, he ground his gums together, and so she had to snatch him away before he could begin. It looked as if she were unkindly depriving him of the breast, and she heard David’s breathing change. Ben roared with rage, fastened like a leech to the other nipple, and sucked so hard she felt that her whole breast was disappearing down his throat. This time, she left him on the nipple until he ground his gums hard together and she cried out, pulling him away.

“He’s extraordinary,” said David, giving her the support she needed.

“Yes, he is, he’s absolutely
not
ordinary.”

“But he’s all right, he’s just …”

“A normal healthy fine baby,” said Harriet, bitter, quoting the hospital.

David was silent: it was this anger, this bitterness in her that he could not handle.

She was holding Ben up in the air. He was wrestling, fighting, struggling, crying in his characteristic way, which was a roar or a bellow, while he went yellowish white with anger—not red, like a normal cross baby.

When she held him to get up the wind, he seemed to be standing in her arms, and she felt weak with fear at the thought that this strength had so recently been inside her, and she at its mercy. For months, he had been fighting to get out, just as now he fought in her grasp to become independent.

When she laid him in his cot, which she was always glad to do because her arms ached so badly, he bellowed out his rage, but soon lay quiet, not sleeping, fully alert, his eyes focussed, and his whole body flexing and unflexing with a strong pushing
movement of heels and head she was familiar with: it was what had made her feel she was being torn apart when he was inside her.

She went back into bed beside David. He put out his arm, so that she could lie by him, inside it, but she felt treacherous and untruthful, for he would not have liked what she was thinking.

Soon she was exhausted with feeding Ben. Not that he did not thrive: he did. He was two pounds over his birth weight when he was a month, which was when he would have been less than a week old if he had gone full term.

Her breasts were painful. Making more milk than they ever had had to do, her chest swelled into two bursting white globes long before the next feed was due. But Ben was already roaring for it, and she fed him, and he drained every drop in two or three minutes. She felt the milk being dragged in streams from her. Now he had begun something new: he had taken to interrupting the fierce sucking several times during a feed, and bringing his gums together in the hard grinding movement that made her cry out in pain. His small cold eyes seemed to her malevolent.

“I’m going to put him on the bottle,” she said to Dorothy, who was watching this battle with the look, it seemed to Harriet, everyone had when watching Ben. She was absolutely still and intent, fascinated, almost hypnotised, but there was repugnance there, too. And fear?

Harriet had expected her mother to protest with “But he’s only five weeks old!”—but what Dorothy said was “Yes, you must, or you’ll be ill.” A little later, watching Ben roar, and twist and fight, she remarked, “They’ll all be coming soon for the summer.” She spoke in a way new to her, as if listening to what she said and afraid of what she might say. Harriet recognised it, for this was how she felt saying anything at all. So do
people speak whose thoughts are running along secretly in channels they would rather other people did not know about.

On that same day, Dorothy came into the bedroom where Harriet fed Ben, and saw Harriet pulling the child clear of breasts that had bruises all around the nipples. She said, “Do it. Do it now. I’ve bought the bottles, and the milk. I’m sterilising the bottles now.”

“Yes, wean him,” said David, agreeing at once. But she had fed the other four for months, and there had been hardly a bottle in the house.

The adults, Harriet and David, Dorothy and Alice, were around the big table, the children having gone up to bed, and Harriet tried Ben with the bottle. He emptied it in a moment, while his body clenched and unclenched, his knees up in his stomach, then extended like a spring. He roared at the empty bottle.

“Give him another,” said Dorothy, and set about preparing one.

“What an appetite,” said Alice socially, trying hard, but she looked frightened.

Ben emptied the second bottle: he was supporting it with his two fists, by himself. Harriet barely needed to touch it.

“Neanderthal baby,” said Harriet.

“Oh come on, poor little chap,” said David, uneasy.

“Oh God, David,” said Harriet, “poor Harriet is more like it.”

“All right, all right—the genes have come up with something special this time.”

“But what, that’s the point,” said Harriet.
“What
is he?”

The other three said nothing—or, rather, said by their silence that they would rather not face the implications of it.

“All right,” said Harriet, “let’s say he has a healthy appetite, if that makes everyone happy.”

Dorothy took the fighting creature from Harriet, who collapsed exhausted back in her chair. Dorothy’s face changed as she felt the clumsy weight of the child, the intransigence, and she shifted her position so that Ben’s pistoning legs could not reach her.

Soon Ben was taking in twice the amount of food recommended for his age, or stage: ten or more bottles a day.

He got a milk infection, and Harriet took him to Dr. Brett.

“A breast-fed baby shouldn’t get infections,” he said.

“He’s not breast-fed.”

“That’s not like you, Harriet! How old is he?”

“Two months,” said Harriet. She opened her dress and showed her breasts, still making milk, as if they responded to Ben’s never appeased appetite. They were bruised black all around the nipples.

Dr. Brett looked at the poor breasts in silence, and Harriet looked at him: his decent, concerned doctor’s face confronting a problem beyond him.

“Naughty baby,” he conceded, and Harriet laughed out loud in astonishment.

Dr. Brett reddened, met her eyes briefly in acknowledgement of her reproach, and then looked away.

“All I need is a prescription for diarrhoea,” said Harriet. She added deliberately, staring at him, willing him to look at her, “After all, I don’t want to kill the nasty little brute.”

He sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed them slowly. He was frowning, but not in disapproval of her. He said, “It is not abnormal to take a dislike to a child. I see it all the time. Unfortunately.”

Harriet said nothing, but she was smiling unpleasantly, and knew it.

“Let me have a look at him.”

Harriet took Ben out of the pram, and laid him on the table. At once he turned on to his stomach and tried to get him
self on all fours. He actually succeeded for a moment before collapsing.

She looked steadily at Dr. Brett, but he turned away to his desk to write a prescription.

“There’s obviously nothing much wrong with him,” he said, with the same baffled, offended note that Ben did bring out of people.

“Have you ever seen a two-month baby do that?” she insisted. “No. I must admit I haven’t. Well, let me know how you get on.”

The news had flown around the family that the new baby was successfully born, and everything was all right. Meaning that Harriet was. A lot of people wrote and rang, saying they were looking forward to the summer holidays. They said, “We are longing to see the new baby.” They said, “Is little Paul still as delicious as he was?” They arrived bringing wine and summer produce from all over the country, and all kinds of people stood bottling fruit and making jams and chutneys with Alice and Dorothy. A crowd of children played in the garden or were taken off to the woods for picnics. Little Paul, so cuddlesome and funny, was always on somebody’s lap, and his laugh was heard everywhere: this was his real nature, overshadowed by Ben and his demands.