merely a precaution; Mother knew what she was doing and didn’t want interference.
Below the water was a slimy substance which Muriel found interesting. She put her hand in, and brought it out dripping. Mother gave her a handkerchief to dry it on. They watched the cardboard box, growing soggy, bobbing in the water. There was no sign of the swap. The two babies were already confused in her mind; cold, stunted, condemned to the changeling life, their scant humanity draining away from them year by year. The box dipped in the water and was soon lost from view; the days were short, and there was not much light under the trees. Was it a boy or a girl? Sholto had asked her. I don’t know, she replied; it was all so long ago. She had felt on the canal bank—or was it only later that she felt it?—a small gnawing inside that she called regret. It was all she had, and now it was drowning. It was true that her knowledge of matters was limited, but it was possible that everything, from her go in the park onwards, could have worked out differently. It was not regret for the infant she felt; after all, she hardly knew it. Perhaps it was for herself then; she wondered for a moment how she came to be alive, how it was that her old mother had not brought her here and floated her off one day in the hope of getting in exchange a human child. She brushed the thought away, rubbing her slimy hand down the sleeve of her winter coat. She was hungry. Mother said it had not worked. It was time to be getting home; darkness was closing in rapidly over the fields.
They returned home. It was only five o’clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. The lightbulb had gone in the hall. Her tummy was rumbling. When the knock came at the front door, Mother said, it’s that gas man again, I suppose we’ll have to let him in sooner or later. She gave Muriel a shove in the ribs, told her to stay in the back room. Make yourself scarce, she said.
But when Evelyn opened the front door it wasn’t the gas man at all. It was Miss Isabel Field from the Welfare, the lady they had been keeping out for months.
Mother had dropped her guard, and she probably knew then that she was going to suffer for it. But first she tried to retrieve her error, smiling sweetly at the girl, leading her up the stairs. Muriel leaned against the door of the back room, breathing, listening. As soon as Mother had ushered Miss Field into the spare room, she turned the key on her. Muriel came out into the hall. She sat on the stairs, her knees drawn up to her chin, and listened to Miss Field suffering. How she screamed! How she hammered at the door! How she hammered on the window! She’d put her hand through the glass if she didn’t take care.
When the banging started at the back of the house too, the devil got into Muriel; she said right, solve this one, Mother, but she didn’t dare to say it out loud. The sound of the words and the sound of the hammering went round and round and reverberated in her head as she padded in her bedroom slippers towards the kitchen door.
And then came the invasion. A man burst in. He ran through the house, shouting. Mother came after, striving and yelling; white in the face, wrapped in her cardigan, as fast as she could caper. Up the stairs ran sweating man. After him went Mother. The next moment she lay in a heap on the floor at the bottom. Muriel, behind the front door, stood regarding her.
Assembled in the hall now were Miss Florence Sidney, who baked mince pies; Miss Sidney’s brother Colin; and the welfare worker, Miss Isabel Field. Miss Field said she was leaving the profession. It was too much, she said, to be locked up in a bedroom by some type of madwoman when you were only trying to do a home visit. She was trembling, crying a little. Miss Sidney’s brother got down on the floor and lay on top of Mother. He fastened his mouth voraciously over hers. Mother did not respond; it was ages since she’d had the attentions of a man. After a few minutes, Colin Sidney pushed himself upright, wiped his mouth, and looked down at Mother lying between his legs. He raised his fist and hit her chest a tremendous blow; two blows, then three. Muriel watched closely, sharing his disappointment that Mother seemed to feel nothing of all this. Presently he gave up on her. He lurched to his feet, talking, breathing heavily. She was hanging on to me, he said, as I tried to get upstairs; like a maniac, Miss Field, you were pounding on the bedroom door. I shrugged her off, shrugged is all I did; she slipped, she lost her footing. Now, Colin, said his sister, Florence, now, Colin, the ambulance is on its way, no one is blaming you. You did the right thing to rescue me, Miss Field said; locked in that room by myself I felt something pulling at my skirt. She shivered. Colin took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders. There you are, Miss Er, he said. Field, she told him. Victor of the Field, Muriel whispered. For a moment they stared at her; they were not sure if she had spoken or not.
When Miss Sidney was out doing her telephoning, the brother and the social worker turned to each other. They acted as if no one was there; not her in the bedroom slippers, not Mother in a heap. They were people who had met before; their eyes met, and then their hands. She would not be surprised if they had not met on a go in the park. She had a grievance against the social worker, with her trim waist and pale pretty face. She herself was still bloated from her pregnancy, but the girl did not know that. The baby was something they’d kept to themselves; a private trial, which they had faced in their own way.
Miss Sidney was back now. She turned to Muriel. Now, Muriel, she said, I don’t want you to upset yourself, and what we could do with is a blanket to cover up your poor old mum. Let her shiver, Muriel thought, noticing that she did not. Already the grievances of a lifetime were rising up in her mind. Did other people live like this? She had no idea. The social worker said that the place was like a morgue. She bent over Mother, turning her head with her slim white hand. No one’s blaming you, she said to Colin Sidney; she’s had a heart attack. Mother’s face was a strange mottled colour; its expression was one of astonishment.
In the last few moments of Mother’s life, she, Muriel, had come up the stairs from the bottom. Whilst Mother was slipping, sliding, clutching with one hand at the banister and the other at her chest, she had knitted her fingers into the back of Mother’s cardigan, she had taken her by the scruff and bounced her slam, slam, against the wall; and this was why, when Mother died, she looked so surprised.
There were now more people in the house than Muriel could ever remember; more, at any rate, than since Father’s funeral. She had been only a child then; she had wondered why Clifford Axon couldn’t be buried at the back, outside the lean-to, but her mother had said no, she wanted him off the premises. Thirty years had passed; life was going to alter. In the midst of her speculations, her stomach rumbled again quite audibly. Murder makes me famished, she thought. She took a final look at her mother, then went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of bread. She rummaged in the cupboards and found a pot of some kind of red jam. The old cow, she thought, she was keeping this for herself. There was quite a lot left, three-quarters of the pot. She got a knife from the cutlery drawer and spread the jam carefully, very thick and right to the edges of the bread. When Colin Sidney came in she offered him a bite, but he did not seem interested. She could hear the social worker being sick again. Vehicles drew up outside, and uniformed men took Evelyn away.
Soon after these events, Muriel left home herself. She understood that she would be going away for some years, to recuperate from her time with her mother. A woman called Tidmarsh collected her. She put a plastic bag in the boot of the car, containing Muriel’s personal effects; the two smocks that Mother had made for her out of a pair of old curtains, and a few other odds and ends she found in the drawers. Muriel looked back at the house where until now she had always lived. She felt a terrible sense of incompleteness, as if something that mattered to her had been abandoned in one of the rooms. She pawed at the woman’s arm, trying to get her to turn back, but the woman shook herself free and yelled out that they would have an accident. How was Muriel to know? She had never been in a car before, only the minibus.
Mother had always threatened her that if she didn’t do as she was told, she’d be rounded up with the other ne’er-do-wells, and taken off and gassed. It had happened once, Evelyn said; and the whole world profits by example. So was this it? She felt no emotion; she did not know what gassed would be like. She looked out at the
