‘But I couldn’t do that to you because you’re too big. How d’you hurt someone who’s bigger than you?’
‘It’s easier to hurt people who are weaker. People who are weaker are always the ones who get hurt.’
‘Can’t you hurt someone who is stronger?’
The grass-cutter thought for a time. ‘You have to be cunning to do that. You’ve got to find the weak spot. Everyone has a weak spot.’
‘Have you got a weak spot?’
‘I suppose so,’
‘Could I hurt you on your weak spot?’
‘You don’t want to hurt me, James.’
‘No, but just could I?’
‘Yes, I suppose you could.’
‘Well then?’
‘My little daughter’s smaller than you. If you hurt her, you see, you’d be hurting me. It’d be the same, you see.’
‘I see,’ said James.
All was not well with Miss Smith. Life, which had been so happy when her baby was born, seemed now to be directed against her. Perhaps it was that the child was becoming difficult, going through a teething phase that was pleasant for no one; or perhaps it was that Miss Smith recognized in him some trait she disliked and knew that she would be obliged to watch it develop, powerless to intervene. Whatever the reason, she felt depressed. She often thought of her teaching days, of the big square schoolroom with the children’s models on the shelves and the pictures of kings on the walls. Nostalgically, she recalled the feel of frosty air on her face as she rode her bicycle through the town, her mind already practising the first lesson of the day. She had loved those winter days: the children stamping their feet in the playground, the stove groaning and crackling, so red and so fierce that it had to be penned off for safety’s sake. It had been good to feel tired, good to bicycle home, shopping a bit on the way, home to tea and the wireless and an evening of reading by the fire. It wasn’t that she regretted anything; it was just that now and again, for a day or two, she felt she would like to return to the past.
‘My dear,’ Miss Smith’s husband said, ‘you really will have to be more careful.’
‘But I am. Truly I am. I’m just as careful as anyone can be.’
‘Of course you are. But it’s a difficult age. Perhaps, you know, you need a holiday.’
‘But I’ve had difficult ages to deal with for years –’
‘Now now, my dear, it’s not quite the same, teaching a class of kids.’
‘But it shouldn’t be as difficult. I don’t know –’
‘You’re tired. Tied to a child all day long, every day of the week, it’s no joke. We’ll take an early holiday.’
Miss Smith did feel tired, but she knew that it wasn’t tiredness that was really the trouble. Her baby was almost three, and for two years she knew she had been making mistakes with him. Yet somehow she felt that they weren’t her mistakes: it was as though some other person occasionally possessed her: a negligent, worthless kind of person who was cruel, almost criminal, in her carelessness. Once she had discovered the child crawling on the pavement beside his pram: she had forgotten apparently to attach his harness to the pram hooks. Once there had been beads in his pram, hundreds of them, small and red and made of glass. A woman had drawn her attention to the danger, regarding curiously the supplier of so unsuitable a plaything. ‘In his nose he was putting one, dear. And may have swallowed a dozen already. It could kill a mite, you know.’ The beads were hers, but how the child had got them she could not fathom. Earlier, when he had been only a couple of months, she had come into his nursery to find an excited cat scratching at the clothes of his cot; and on another occasion she had found him eating a turnip. She wondered if she might be suffering from some kind of serious absent-mindedness, or blackouts. Her doctor told her, uncomfortingly, that she was a little run down.
‘I’m a bad mother,’ said Miss Smith to herself; and she cried as she looked at her child, warm and pretty in his sleep.
But her carelessness continued and people remarked that it was funny in a teacher. Her husband was upset and unhappy, and finally suggested that they should employ someone to look after the child. ‘Someone else?’ said Miss Smith. ‘Someone
Then there were two months without incident. Miss Smith began to feel better; she was getting the hang of things; once again she was in control of her daily life. Her child grew and flourished. He trotted nimbly beside her, he spoke his own language, he was wayward and irresponsible, and to Miss Smith and her husband he was intelligent and full of charm. Every day Miss Smith saved up the sayings and doings of this child and duly reported them to her husband. ‘He is quite intrepid,’ Miss Smith said, and she told her husband how the child would tumble about the room, trying to stand on his head. ‘He has an aptitude for athletics,’ her husband remarked. They laughed that they, so unathletic in their ways, should have produced so physically lively an offspring.
‘And how has our little monster been today?’ Miss Smith’s husband asked, entering the house one evening at his usual time.
Miss Smith smiled, happy after a good, quiet day. ‘Like gold,’ she said.
Her husband smiled too, glad that the child had not been a nuisance to her and glad that his son, for his own sake, was capable of adequate behaviour. ‘I’ll just take a peep at him,’ he announced, and he ambled off to the nursery.
He sighed with relief as he climbed the stairs, thankful that all was once again well in the house. He was still sighing when he opened the nursery door and smelt gas. It hissed insidiously from the unlit fire. The room was sweet with it. The child, sleeping, sucked it into his lungs.
The child’s face was blue. They carried him from the room, both of them helpless and inadequate in the situation. And then they waited, without speaking, while his life was recovered, until the moment when the doctor, white-coated and stern, explained that it had been a nearer thing than he would wish again to handle.
