A Dark Dividing (7 page)

Simone asked who the treacly voiced men were, and the little girl said the children called them the Pigs. They had nasty piggy eyes, greedy and sly, and thick fingers that prodded at you. After they had looked, they quite often smiled and nodded to one another, and said you were good enough to save up for a while.

Save up for what?

But the little girl only laughed when Simone asked this, and even though the laugh and the voice was still inside her head Simone heard that it was a horrid kind of laugh, pitying and smug, as if the little girl thought Simone was stupid. You know, she said. You know what I mean, and so Simone pretended that she did know, really.

Mortmain meant dead-man’s hands. It was French, and the little girl had explained it to Simone. ‘It’s always been called that,’ she said. ‘Mort is French for dead, and main means hands. I don’t suppose you’d know that, though.’ There was a faint air of I’m-better-than-you, which was one of the things Simone hated. So she said she was just starting French at school, and she knew what Mortmain meant perfectly well.

But it was a pretty spooky name for a house—even for that house. Spookiest of all was Mortmain’s crumbliness, because you had only to see it once to know that people had not lived there for years and years.

‘It’s a famous ruin,’ Mother said, when Simone asked about it one day. They had been at Weston Fferna for several weeks, and they were getting to know some of the places and some of the people. Mother had made one or two friends, mostly other parents at Simone’s school. ‘It’s quite a prominent local landmark,’ Mother said. ‘I read about it in the library—they’ve got some quite good books on local history there. I’ll take you to see them one Saturday.’ Mother liked things like local history and local legends; she liked Simone to know about them as well.

‘But what was it really? I mean years ago—when it wasn’t all broken up?’

‘A workhouse. That’s a place where people in the past had to go if they hadn’t got any money. Workhouses were dreadful places, not much better than prisons, and it was regarded as very shameful if you were taken into the workhouse; it meant you couldn’t pay your way in life. And then I think that later on Mortmain was used by the army in the war. For the soldiers to live.’

‘World War Two.’ They had learned about this a bit at school; Simone had always hated the sound of it, because it must be pretty horrid to have the whole world at war all round you, and bombs being dropped all the time. Simone had made some drawings of soldiers and air-raid shelters, and then Mother had found some old photographs that had been her mother’s—that was Simone’s grandmother, whom Simone had never met because she had died when Mother was quite small.

But the photos were great; they showed young men in uniforms, and girls with their hair pinned up in rolly shapes on top of their heads. Simone loved photographs better than anything, even better than drawings. She loved seeing how people looked against different backgrounds—trees or houses or the sky—and how the trees and the sky could look different according to what time of day it was, or whether it was raining or sunny, and whether the people themselves looked different because they had a storm-sky behind them, or sunshine, or black wintry trees. She pored over the photographs for hours, until Mother said if she was as keen as all that perhaps she would like a camera of her own, what did she think?

‘I’d like that a huge lot,’ said Simone. She added, ‘I’d extra-specially like it,’ then wished she had not said ‘extra-special’, because that was one of the little girl’s expressions. Mostly she tried not to use them, but sometimes they seemed to sneak out by themselves. She said, ‘I’d really like it. When could we do it?’

‘Next birthday? It’ll be quite expensive, so it can’t be like buying just an ordinary thing. But we’ll go into some shops beforehand—it’d probably have to be somewhere like Oswestry, or maybe we could drive further into England to Chester. You’ve never been to Chester, have you? It’s nice. We could get some brochures to look at and you can think about what sort of camera you’d like.’

This was one of the really good things about Mother. She understood that if there was going to be a particularly exciting treat you wanted to think about it and discuss it before it happened. Simone would like to have a camera of her own very much. She said carefully that she would quite like to take photographs of Mortmain House. Would that be possible?

‘What a funny little horror-comic you are,’ said Mother. ‘Yes, of course we’ll go out there if you want to, although we’d better make it a Saturday afternoon when there’s lots of people around. I think tramps sometimes doss down in the ruins, and gypsies. Real gypsies, I mean, not us.’

‘Oh, I see. Um—would we have to ask someone first?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t know who owns it—I don’t think anyone does know. That’s why it’s been let go so badly, I suppose. But I can’t imagine why you want to photograph it. It’s a gloomy old place.’

The little girl did not think that Mortmain was especially a gloomy old place; but Simone supposed that if you had never known anywhere else—if you had never known about huge, sun-filled rooms, and schoolrooms where people talked a bit noisily about lessons, or places like cinemas or swimming pools where everyone shrieked and laughed, you might think that Mortmain was pretty good.

But gloomy old places could be splendid for games, and one of the games that the little girl told Simone about was a game called the dance of the hanged man. There was a song that went with it: Simone was not sure if she had understood it properly, but it was something about, ‘The morning clocks will ring/And a neck God made for other use/Than strangling in a string.’ Then came the chorus that everybody had to join in, which was about the gallows-maker building the frame and then the hangman leading the dance, and everyone had to do all the movements about building the gallows and hammering in the nails and fashioning the gibbet. Then they had to jig round the yard in a line for the dance. Simone thought she understood that that by ‘the yard’, the little girl meant a sort of playground.

She did not properly understand about the hanging game and she did not properly understand about the other children who seemed to be part of the game, but she thought it sounded hateful, and the little girl sounded hateful as well when she talked about it. Sly and giggly and as if somebody was being hurt in the game, and as if she found this exciting. Simone was not absolutely sure what a hanged man was, except that it had something to do with murdering people.

She was not sure who was being murdered or whether it was only a game anyway, but she thought it might all have something to do with the men who came to inspect the children, and who were so extremely bad and cruel, even though they looked normal and ordinary.

‘Think of them as normal and ordinary,’ said Martin Brannan on Mel’s next visit. ‘It’s what they are, you know. You’ll see that when they’re born. It’ll be a C-section, of course. You’re all right with that, are you?’

‘If that’s the best way.’ Mel did not mind how the babies were born providing they could be born safely and with the best possible chance of surviving.

‘It is the best way. We’ll probably do it at thirty-seven weeks. Full anaesthetic as well, I think, rather than just a spinal epidural. You’ll go to sleep quite comfortably, and when you wake up it’ll all be over, and a cup of tea waiting at your bedside.’

‘You can’t make it a gin and tonic, I suppose?’

‘That’ll come later.’

‘In a minute you’ll pat my hand and say,
Trust me
.’

He gave her the smile that seemed to hold such intimacy and liking, but that he probably used on all his patients. ‘I don’t need to. You do trust me. You’ll have to come into St Luke’s a few days before the procedure. That means everything will all be calm, and nicely planned ahead. It’s a very civilized way of giving birth. I wonder now—’

‘Yes?’

‘I wonder if it would help you to know a bit more about other cases of conjoining,’ he said, speaking slowly as if he was considering the idea for her.

‘You mean, like the real Siamese twins?’ Mel had been trying not to use this word, but she used it now. ‘The first ones?’

‘Chang and Eng. Yes. They led an odd life, those two, but they were quite separate personalities and they achieved a degree of normality, even in their time. That was the early eighteen-hundreds. They died in eighteen seventy-something, as far as I can remember it. They were never separated, but they both married and fathered several children.’

Mel said cautiously that this must have been a bit bizarre for all parties, and Martin Brannan said, Yes, and bizarre was hardly the word was it. This time the smile was more of a mischievous grin, sharing the small joke with her. It was remarkable to think that this man already knew her body more intimately than anyone else ever had or ever would, and that in a few weeks’ time his hands would be inside her womb, cutting and slicing, and detaching two tiny living creatures… It was something you ought really to share only with your husband, that intimacy. She wondered if Martin Brannan had any children, and then she wondered whether he was married, and supposed he was.

‘There’s a wealth of stuff written about these cases,’ said Martin. ‘Oh, listen, though, keep off the medical side, won’t you? It’s graphic and distressing at times, and you won’t have the necessary detachment. And it can be confusing. Concentrate on the personalities and the successes. The twins who were separated and lived normal lives—even the twins who weren’t separated and still lived reasonable lives.’

‘I’d quite like to do that,’ said Mel thoughtfully. ‘If I knew about other cases—other parents—I don’t think I’d feel so isolated.’

‘Mel—’ In some subtle way they seemed to have travelled beyond the Mrs Anderson/Mr Brannan stage by this time, although Mel had not quite ventured to call him Martin yet. ‘Mel, you aren’t isolated,’ he said. ‘Nor are the twins isolated.’

‘Simone and Sonia,’ said Mel, suddenly aware of the inner delight again at remembering the girls’ names. ‘We’re going to call them Simone and Sonia.’

‘Nice,’ he said, giving her the sudden smile. ‘Simone Anderson and Sonia Anderson. I like that very much.’

Joe thought Mel was being morbid, reading up all those accounts of joined twins. Dear goodness, he said, why must she bury herself in the lives of all those sad grotesque creatures, most of whom had lived in the days before medical science was really developed? To his way of thinking it was downright dismal; his mother had said exactly the same thing as a matter of fact. Nature had a way of taking care of things, Mel would see. They would wait for the birth, and the chances were that everything would be all right.

‘But it can’t be all right,’ said Mel. ‘All the scans and the tests show that the twins are definitely joined. They aren’t going to become unjoined.’

But Joe had no opinion of scans and tests, and he had no opinion of clever young doctors who frightened people half to death. What Mel needed was cheering up, he said. Would she not like a little shopping trip to one of the big department stores for baby outfits? They might go along this very morning. Marks & Spencer, or British Home Stores. They would have a bite of lunch in the BHS coffee shop.

Mel looked at him, and thought, I wanted a soul-mate, a sensuous impetuous lover: someone who would plunder the love-poems of the centuries and quote rose romance verse to me by passion-filled firelight, or whisk me away to Paris’s Left Bank or Samarkand or the Isles of Avalon at a moment’s notice. What did I actually get? Joe Anderson, who gives me verbatim reports of town planning meetings, and thinks the height of dissipation is lunch at British Home Stores.

She said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather stay here, I think.’

Even if she had wanted to fight Saturday-morning shopping crowds she did not want to go shopping with Joe, who was apt to be embarrassingly bluff with shop assistants, and tell them his name with unnecessary loudness in the hope that they would recognize him as a prominent member of the local Council. What she really wanted to do was to stay in the warm, well-lit study, and read the books she had borrowed from the local library about all those other twins who had beaten the odds. She wanted to try to visualize them, and to imagine how their parents had felt and behaved and reacted.