The Child's Child (3 page)

I showed them
The Child’s Child,
which Andrew, of course, had seen before and James knew all about through the connection with his great-uncle, and because they were particularly apposite, I told them about its two themes. That one of those was close to the subject of my thesis was a useful coincidence, and we had moved along to the cheese when James asked me, quite pleasantly, how my research was coming along. That led me to telling him about fixing a date for unmarried motherhood’s ceasing to be shameful, and that date’s being roughly coincidental with homosexuality in private’s no longer being illegal.

James said, quite roughly, his tone changed, “There’s no comparison. Sending men to prison for being gay was outrageous, an affront to their human rights. Your girls just got looked down on by a bunch of old women.”

I said no one had ever heard of human rights in 1967, and as for “my” girls, they suffered comparably. If gay men killed themselves from fear of discovery, so did young women dreading disgrace.

“No girl went to jail for having a baby,” he said.

“But they did,” I told him. “Or the equivalent. They were sectioned and put in mental hospitals, called lunatic asylums then, for nothing more than having a child without being married. Some remained in them for years.”

“I’ve never heard that. That can’t be true. It may happen in these novels you read, but not in real life. Tell her about Wilde in chains on Clapham Junction station, And.”

So that was what he called my brother. “He’s told me,” I said. “Anyway, I knew. Believe me, I’m not saying gay men didn’t suffer terribly, I know they did. I’m only saying that women did too.”

“No, you’re not.” James filled his glass so full of pinot noir that it overflowed. “You’re doing what women always do, claim an unfair share of the world’s ills. Victims, as usual.”

“James,” said Andrew quietly.

“No, it’s not ‘James.’ You needn’t defend her, she can look after herself. Those girls of hers had only to put on a wedding ring and they’d be all right. Men were ostracized, attacked, killed. My great-uncle—the one the book’s based on—was blackmailed, outlawed. He lived in daily fear of discovery.” He was looking at me now, ceasing to talk as if I were not here. “That thesis of yours in making some sort of tie-up between the Act of 1967 and women taking the pill is an insult to all the men who suffered. Plenty of them are still alive, they’ll only be in their sixties. It’s an outrage to them. Luckily, it’ll never be published, or not where any of them are likely to read it.”

Andrew had got up, fetched a cloth, and mopped up James’s spilt wine. Andrew is more sensitive than I am, maybe I should say more tender, and his face had gone red. The hand that held the cloth was trembling. He was in love with this man, he must be, and I was appalled.

“Perhaps we should change the subject,” I said for my brother’s sake.

The seat of the scornful hadn’t been sold but had become a throne for James. “Obviously, you would like that. You’ve got yourself into a corner and this is your only way of getting out of it. Change the subject. What else can you do?”

I said that I could leave the room and would. Andrew said, “No, Sis, no. I don’t know how we got into this. It’s ridiculous. Please stay.”

In a mocking, rather high-pitched tone, James said, “Please, Sis, stay. Please don’t go.”

He sounded like a kid of five, not a grown man. His face had gone purple and I realised it was with rage. This meant an awful
lot to him. But I shrugged and went. Down the passage and into the kitchen. I put plates into the dishwasher and washed up Verity’s silver by hand, listening for sounds from the dining room. What I was really listening for was footsteps crossing the hall and making for Andrew’s living-room or his staircase. It must have been years since I’d had a falling-out with my brother. I thought the last time was when we were children. After a while I heard those footsteps and laughter. It was James’s laughter, only James’s. A door slammed and I decided this was the last I would see or hear of them for the night.

I cleared the dining table and started the dishwasher. That was when I remembered the last time Andrew and I had a row. A table in another house, the house we grew up in, and Fay had gone to answer the phone, leaving all sorts of remains of delicacies behind. Andrew started picking at them, eating them, hunks of cheese and half-eaten pots of crème brûlée, slices of pineapple, and I was hissing at him to leave it, not to touch—other guests were in another room—and I grabbed his hand, the hand that clutched a slice of some exotica, a spoonful of damson cheese I think it was. Twelve-year-old Andrew started to cry and Fay came back, exasperated, shaking her head.

That was eighteen years ago and he didn’t cry anymore, though he was still a lot more vulnerable than I was. Still, tonight I was the one who was tender and sensitive, partly because I felt that quarrels, if they must happen, should be about personal matters, not near-political things. It made me think that this one might have been deliberately engineered. It was a fine evening, a nearly full moon shining. A walk round the garden might have done me good, made me feel calm and taken away my resentment. Like all the gardens around, ours was large and dense with trees and shrubs, a lawn like a green island in the midst of them. And because the walls between were overgrown with ivy and creeper and clematis, they were not like separate gardens but formed one great estate, the grounds perhaps of a big country house.

I wouldn’t need a coat, it was still too warm for that. I walked down the passage to the single glass door that led to the garden—Andrew’s part had French windows—and as I put the key into the lock, I saw him and James walk from under the trees onto the lawn. The moon was quite bright enough to show them to me. James had his arm round Andrew’s waist, and as I watched, he placed his hand round Andrew’s head, drew it to him, and kissed him deeply. Abruptly I turned away. I go to the farthest point in the house from the garden, the study, where all those books were. Somehow I knew, and I didn’t like it but was powerless to do anything about it, that Andrew would bring James here to live with him.

B
Y THE
age I was then I ought to have known the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight. I don’t suppose this rule applies in the case of a terrible shock or a tragedy’s striking, but nothing like that had ever happened to me. I didn’t have presentiments either, I didn’t have a sense that something bad would happen later in the day or something good. But I could present to myself the event or sight or words uttered that so upset me and look at them in a new way. I had, after all, no reason apart from a kiss to believe that Andrew would ask James to live here with him, and I couldn’t even know that he was in love with James.

Next morning I was due to see my supervisor to talk to her about the progress of the thesis, see what she would say about including real cases in the nineteenth century of women’s giving birth outside marriage or if I should concentrate solely on contemporary fiction.

Andrew came in, looking not so much awkward as sad. “I’m sorry about last night, Sis. I’d have done anything to avoid it.”

I said that I knew he would, and his face was just as it was eighteen years ago when I grabbed his arm and a lump of damson cheese flopped onto a white lace table mat. He was not crying, of course, not quite.

“You see, James feels very intensely about what gay people went through. He feels it personally. He had this uncle, or great-uncle maybe, whose friend hanged himself because he was gay, and he’s got a friend, a very old man now, who was sent to a mental home for aversion therapy. They showed him pictures of gay porn and gave him electric shocks if he reacted—well, if he got excited by them.”

This only reminded me of those poor girls sent to penitentiaries and put to harsh domestic work for nothing more than being pregnant outside marriage. But there was no point in saying it aloud. “It’s all right,” I said, though it was not. “It’s over.” And then I asked because I had to know, “Is James going to come here and live with you?”

“Would you mind if he did?”

“Your half of the house is yours and my half is mine. You must please yourself.”

“You’d hate it, though, wouldn’t you?”

He did that a lot, told people how they felt when he didn’t really know. He did it to me, our mother, Fay, and her partner, Malcolm, and no doubt he did it to James. I told him I wouldn’t hate it (not true), but that he should think carefully before he asked James, and then I felt I’d gone too far. I was not his mother or the wife he would never have.

“I’ve done that, I’ve thought carefully,” he said, but he didn’t tell me the outcome of these thoughts of his. He had to go to work if he was to get in by ten. He’d scarcely gone when I heard James’s footfalls pounding on the staircase and the front door
slamming as he went out. He slammed it so hard that the whole house seemed to shake.

C
ARLA, MY
supervisor, cautioned me against letting too much reality creep in. If I could find a case that closely parallelled, say, the experience of Fanny Robin when she goes to All Souls’ church instead of All Saints’, where Sergeant Troy is waiting to marry her, I could use that or briefly refer to it. There was probably a case Hardy heard of, and I might try finding it. Otherwise, I should go easy on the social work and the case histories.

My head, rather against my will, was full of James Derain. Although we both knew it was a possibility, we had never, Andrew and I, talked about the possibility of lovers moving in with us. The house was left to us, and we were a brother and a sister who got on well together. We were so excited about it, so pleased, that we shifted our stuff in without thinking much, without considering the possible pros and cons. We had both had boyfriends, but Andrew had never shared his flat with anyone. I had shared a single room once but only for a few months, it had not been a serious relationship. If James was going to live in the other half of Dinmont House, I knew I must make a superhuman (if necessary) effort to get on with him. If I examined my behaviour honestly, I can say that I did little, if anything, to antagonise him, and it looked to me as if he was one of those gay men who disliked women,
all
women. I had never met one before, but I had heard of them. I knew they existed. They were the antithesis of those whose closest and best friend is a woman and one of whom they are often fonder than they are of their current lover.

I delayed going home. The sun was shining, it was lovely in Regent’s Park, and I thought of walking all the way home by way of Primrose Hill. When I was a child, I used to think of Primrose Hill as being the seaside. I was standing in the sea or just on the sand
and looking across the hill itself, the green rise such as English coastal resorts have, with beyond it that long terrace of tall houses like Brighton or Eastbourne. But I wasn’t standing in the sea, I was sitting on a seat on the Outer Circle. It would take me a long time to walk home and be uphill all the way, and I know I was putting it off in case James Derain was there. I heard him go out, but that was three hours ago and he might have come back, Andrew might have given him a key. I told myself that I couldn’t live like this, that yesterday I was happy or at least content, and now I was letting myself be driven out of my own home by a friend of my brother’s I hardly knew.

Instead of walking across Primrose Hill, I walked to the 24 bus stop and was turning into our street when I saw James in the distance. My instinct was to hide from him, cross the street, even just bend down to take a stone out of my sandal, but of course I did none of this. I advanced on him and he advanced on me, and he was charming, all smiles and how was I and wasn’t the sun wonderful. Then he said he was sorry for last night, he always got aggressive when he drank too much, it was a problem he had to “address.” He and Andrew had been drinking before they came and that was something he would have to stop. Could I forgive him?

Of course. What else could I say? I had a shred of hope that he was making for Hampstead tube station, not Dinmont House, but, no, he was going home, he said, and by that he plainly meant my home and Andrew’s. When I went back into the house after posting a letter, I waited in the hall, listening. James was a writer so he didn’t go out to work, he worked at home. Writing by hand? On a typewriter, if anyone still does? Or on a computer, as I would expect? And was he at home in any permanent sense? It was most likely that he was only staying here with Andrew. For a few days or a week, and at the end of it he would go back to wherever he lived.

It was no good loitering there like a lost soul. I went into the study, looked through all the files of notes I had accumulated, and finally came upon an account I got from somewhere of a young woman executed for infanticide in 1801. This story of terror and despair, of a homeless, destitute girl with nowhere to turn, her crying, distraught child a heavy drag on her, I found upsetting the first time I read it and found it doubly so now. Perhaps because I was in an anxious, uncertain state. But it might be that the newspaper in which this account appeared was seen by George Eliot and gave her the germ of an idea for
Adam Bede.
But she wasn’t born until 1819 so she would have had to have seen it some forty years at least after it appeared. Perhaps I should have abandoned this attempt at an analogy and seen instead what I could find of instances of brides going to the wrong church as Fanny Robin does. And then, out of nowhere, I was reconstructing in my mind’s eye James Derain as he looked when we encountered each other in the street half an hour earlier.

He was carrying a “man bag,” a black-canvas-and-tan-leather thing on a long strap, exactly the size of an average laptop. He was carrying a computer. It was plain what had happened. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs that morning, he was going home to wherever his home was to fetch his laptop. So that he could work on his new book here in this house. Andrew would likely give him a little bedroom on the top floor to write in. He would work up there in the peace and quiet of an upper room in Dinmont House with its view of gardens, of trees, of a sea of leaves, and beyond them in the thin mist that hangs over London, the river and the tall, blurred towers . . .