The female doll wore a lacy dress, with linen underclothes. She was barefoot, but the letters A and Q had been drawn on the cotton covering that formed her socks. The male doll wore a tight black jacket and drainpipe trousers. The leather of his shoes was perfectly preserved, even to the tiny laces, one of which was tied in a double bow.
Susan had paid twenty pounds for the pair, but was convinced they would be worth much more. Meanwhile, the immediate pleasure was in the restoration. And she wouldn’t be teaching again until the spring term.
Freedom.
She made
herself a pot of coffee, peered down at Michael, who was murmuring in his sleep, then began the slow task of unpicking the clumsy stitchwork of the dolls’ previous owner. She wore reading glasses, propped halfway down her nose. In recent years her eyesight had begun to deteriorate rapidly, but she refused to wear contact lenses; they hurt, and they made her eyes water. Richard thought she looked ‘sexy’ in the gold-rimmed spectacles. Susan herself was more concerned with how increasingly difficult it was to focus for any extended period of time on anything, like a book or a doll, which she held close to her vision.
After half an hour of the intense work her back began to twinge and she put down the doll, removed her glasses and walked out into the garden. Despite the rainy conditions of the previous day, everything seemed so dry now, so hot. She could hear the neighbour’s dog, barking among the fir trees that were a feature of next door’s garden. She walked down to the gate and swung on it, staring out across the cornfield, over the ‘tump’, at the drift of woodland above the quarry, and the bare ridge of the land that marked the drop down to the dykes and sedges of the saltmarsh itself. The wind was fresh. She could smell sea. From the garden the Whitlocks couldn’t see the English Channel, but its scents and the feel of being close to the edge of the land was sharp on these bright days when the wind was on-shore.
Seagulls pestered the field.
Michael wailed suddenly, but the sound went away, and as Susan returned through the fruit trees, mostly alert for the child, passingly aware that the cherry trees had rust-infection, she felt calm. At peace. Quite content.
Stepping in through the French windows she was aware of the phone ringing. She smelled fresh earth, but dismissed the sensation, glancing at the carrycot, aware of its stillness, vaguely aware of something wrong …
The
phone was an insistent call and she plucked the receiver from its cradle.
It was Jenny, a close friend who taught at the same college. She wanted to help with the christening party that Saturday, and had had an idea for contributing to the buffet meal.
‘Thanks. But Richard wants to make roast lamb.’
‘For a christening party?’
‘He sees it as a sort of challenge.’
‘Roast lamb for forty people?’
‘He sees it as a challenge. He’s a man. He can do it.’
‘But… roast lamb?’
‘A challenge.’
Jenny paused, then sighed. ‘So a tuna casserole would be superfluous.’
‘No room in the oven to swing a minnow.’
‘I’ll make pudding, then. Fruit salad.’
‘Pudding has been organized by various “mothers”. The real help we could do with is … well, to put it bluntly …’
‘Baby-minding?’
‘The woman is psychic. Yes. Baby-minding. Just for a few minutes here and there while I look after the aunts. Richard will be looking after the booze, of course. And his lamb.’
‘What am I going to do with all this tuna?’
‘Throw them back. Let them have their freedom. And thanks for the thought, Jenny.’
What was smelling so bad? What was that smell of freshly dug earth?
She went into the kitchen and set the percolator on for a second jug of coffee. She placed the leftovers of the previous evening’s casserole into the oven and set the timer. Richard wouldn’t be eating with her tonight, and she was hungry now, so the idea of supper at five in the afternoon seemed a good one.
But
that smell!
Puzzled, she went back into the sitting room. It was an odour she associated with her father’s garden; freshly tilled soil, the metallic smell of forks and other garden implements moist and slick with constant use. The scent of wet, of vegetation, of humus, of compost; sharp, woody. So many feelings were evoked by the odour. So many memories …
She walked to the French windows. The smell was stronger here, and she became very disturbed, looking quickly round, beginning to feel panic.
When she saw the carrycot she nearly screamed as she ran for her child and plucked him into her arms.
‘That damned dog. That bloody dog!’
Michael was covered with damp earth. The carrycot was filthy. His chubby hands were black where he had reached and grasped at the dirt. There was a scattering of soil around the cot, on the carpet. It had been this darker stain on the dark fabric that had almost alerted her earlier.
‘Damn!
Damn!
’
The creature was often to be seen in their garden, prowling and digging at the flower beds and in the vegetable patch. It must have come into the sitting room, filthy from its excavations, to stand right up on the cot, its muddy paws on her son.
Susan cradled the boy for a moment, then brushed him partly clean. She took him to the bathroom and washed the sticky earth from his fingers and face.
Michael was very quiet. Susan could hear the dog barking from across the fence. It had gone back home, then, after straying into Whitlock territory.
‘You poor love. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I’m so silly. I should have thought about that bloody pet next door.’
She finished
cleaning the boy, then vacuumed the dirt from the carpet. She closed the windows and sat down with her dolls again. But she was angry now, so angry that she had risked her son’s life. The dog could have been dangerous. It could have smothered him. She hadn’t been attentive enough. A lesson learned!
So
angry
.
The dolls lay there, forgotten. Michael slept and whimpered. Slowly Susan relaxed, folding her arms across her chest, thinking about the boy, about the adoption, about the look in his birth-mother’s eyes … and about Saturday. Such a big party! So much to do.
‘It will all be fine,’ she told herself. ‘Just don’t get upset. Don’t get upset …’
Next door the dog howled. It had never entered the house before. Perhaps in its narrow, canine way, it knew that it had done wrong.
She walked out of the room and across the lawn to the fence, half inclined to call to her neighbour and say something about the dog’s straying.
But when she looked over and into the next door garden she felt shocked, then confused.
The dog – an Alsatian of dark and grim demeanour – was chained to a post in the middle of the lawn. Stretched at the end of its lead, it was watching Susan, and howling with frustration at being so cruelly tied …
Richard stood in
the corner of the room, camera and torch slung round his neck, ready for action, hands in his pockets. He was slumped and saddened, watching Susan through the puffy, reddening eyes of a man experiencing more distress and confusion than he had ever known. Susan sat before the empty grate of the fire, knees drawn up, head cradled in her hands.
The baby-speaker, connected to Michael’s cot in their bedroom, dangled from the mantelpiece, a motionless piece of plastic, silent for the moment, but almost threatening. Susan watched the speaker through tired, dark-rimmed eyes. The strain of the last three days had begun to break her.
It had taken them both with such shocking surprise
.
Her skin was a pallid, sickly yellow in the light from the corner lamp. Her shadow echoed her despair, cast in forlorn detail on the far wall. Her dressing-gown had parted around legs that looked thin and shaky. She hugged her knees, now, watching the microphone that would carry the sound from the room above.
She had been sick, earlier in the evening. There was something more on her mind, Richard was certain of it. He had known her too long. He knew the signs. But when he’d probed gently for the problem she wouldn’t speak.
So now he watched from the corner, his own mind in a turmoil of fear and anticipation as he waited for the next attack on Michael.
He was
half convinced himself that it was the mother! Michael’s natural mother
.
But if it was, how was she getting into the room? If it was his mother, how was she getting through the window? It made no sense!
And why would she torment them so?
‘Do you want some tea?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks.’
‘Coffee?’
‘No…’ (Irritably.)
‘A brandy?’
‘No! For
Christ’s
sake, Richard!’
Her head slumped suddenly and she shuddered. The shadow on the far wall followed the exasperated motion. Richard felt his eyes sting and his mouth go dry. He wanted to go over to her, to touch her, to put his hand on her shoulder, but she would probably have screamed at him. There was moisture on her brow. When she glanced up at him the dark lines below her eyes were like make-up. Sweat had dampened the fringe of dark hair, and it stuck to her brow at odd angles. She was close to tears. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Forget it.’
And then the sound …
that
sound!
Susan almost screamed, startled and shocked by the noise. Richard ran to the middle of the room, listening hard to the dangling plastic speaker.
Yes. That
rustling!
The sound of earth being thrown at the child. It was the same as before. Then the child’s cry, a soft murmur, then a quick wail, then a more anguished, sustained sound, neither cry nor murmur, but a sort of pain.
‘She’s in the room. Go!’ he shouted, but Susan was already on her feet and racing for the door to the hall. Flashlight on, camera ready, Richard went swiftly out through the French windows and into the garden, locking the doors behind him. He pounded round the garden to the lawn below their bedroom. He looked up, but when he saw that the window was closed he shouted his confusion, stunned and startled by what he could not see when he had so desperately hoped to
see
it! He flashed the torch around the garden. He ran to the trees, searched their branches, shone the light to right and left. The brilliant yellow beam picked out all the shadows and nooks of the small orchard, the woodshed and tool sheds,
and the high fence.
Turning back to the house he played the beam off the back wall, illuminating each window, each ledge, each length of drainpipe and gutter. There was nothing to be seen.
Susan appeared in the window of the room. The light picked her out, a ghostly figure standing there, holding the child, shaking her head, her face a mask of despair and fear. Tears gleamed on pale cheeks.
Richard went back into the house and up to the bedroom. He could smell the fresh earth even before he reached the stairs, the same heavy odour of newly excavated soil that had been haunting this house for five days now.
Susan watched him in silence as he entered the dark room. He turned on the light and Michael turned his face away, then began to cry. Richard stepped over the dirt-spattered floor. He photographed the room from every angle.
The main concentration of the loose earth was in the middle of the cot. The dirt was dry, this time, and quite light in colour. It had small fragments of stone in it, and some dry leaf and twig.
There was no mark on the ceiling above the bed, and when Richard inspected the wire grille over the window there was no sign or trace of earth that would suggest it had been thrown from the outside with the window open. Exasperated, aware that Susan was close to the edge of despair as she silently held the boy, Richard crouched down and started to scoop up the mess into a
waste bin.
At a glance it seemed that someone had stood at the bottom of the cot and tipped or shaken a bucketful of dry dirt down on to the baby’s body. The soil had scattered in a circle around the bed.
And this was for the third night running!
There was a difference, though. Last night the earth had been red-tinged and dry, like the soil in Devon. And the night before it had been wet and foul-smelling, alive with worms, odd, massive and green-pink in colour, some of them cut through as if a knife had been taken to them.
‘Every door is locked. Every window. If someone
was
in this room, they’re still in the house.’
He searched upstairs first, looking under beds, in cupboards, in clothes chests, and finally behind the panelling on the bath. Downstairs, he double-checked that all the doors were locked, then ran quickly from room to room, even opening the chest freezer in the cellar. The cellar was small and cramped, damp and unpleasant, a junk room of old crates, bicycles, boxes of mouldering books and magazines, and fading furniture. He examined every inch of the place, finally prodding an iron rod into the coal in the bunker. The access doors to the cellar were both locked.
Returning to the bedroom he found Susan calmer. She was tearful and very pale, but she seemed more in control of herself. ‘What about the attic?’ she whispered. ‘Could she have gone up there?’
Richard went out on the landing and looked up at the small hatch to the roof-space. Surely nobody could have scrambled through that small opening in the few seconds before Susan had arrived upstairs after the earthfall?
Even
so, he pulled the stepladder from its storage place and climbed to the hatch, opening it and turning on the light.
It was cool up here, and dry; he moved at a stoop through the stacked boxes and under the supporting beams of the heavily tiled roof. Water gurgled in one of the large tanks. From below the eaves came the restless movement of birds, disturbed by the sudden light.
The attic was otherwise lifeless.
He climbed down to the landing and called for Susan. As he put the ladder away he called again and was puzzled at the lack of response from her. She had gone downstairs, he imagined, taking Michael with her.
The silence suddenly unnerved him. He followed down, glanced into the kitchen, then into the sitting room. Susan was standing by the fireplace, Michael cradled to her chest, her gaze on her husband. Her face was ashen, but she seemed more annoyed than shocked.