The Children's Home: A Novel, page 5
And throughout all this, his mother had gardened. And cultivated orchids.
Now, when Crane began to talk about the world outside, Morgan found himself thinking of the stories he had heard in the kitchen all those years before. He hadn’t believed them then and now these new stories seemed equally unlikely. The truth was that, after he had left the clinic and come home, he rarely thought about the world beyond the estate and certainly never regarded it as a threat. The gates had been standing open for months now, because the man who had opened and closed them and kept their hinges oiled was simply not there one morning and had not been replaced. There was no need. Nobody came to the house, or left it. It had a reputation, Morgan was sure of that. Whenever a new kitchen maid was required, one of the staff would persuade a younger sister or cousin to work for the monster they were never allowed to see, but knew might be lurking; the thought of it kept them obedient. Besides, he paid more than anyone else, thanks to Engel, who arranged their hours and his, to make sure they would never overlap. Engel was no fool.
The Doctor told Morgan that his father and mother had also been doctors. Against the wishes of his father, Crane had trained to be a surgeon. His father had said that the only true doctor was the family doctor, that all the rest were mechanics who dealt with body parts. How can you treat a person, he used to say, when you don’t know what his home is like, or the quality of his mother’s cooking. A man is a whole thing or he is nothing. For his father, what made a doctor a doctor was his ability to listen. Let them talk, he said, and they will tell you everything you need to know. If what they say is the seed, then you must learn to be the earth. He was right, said Crane, I realized that the first time I cut into a man whose name I didn’t know. And so I came back to work with them. And then they died, my mother first and then my father, and I stayed here because the practice would have closed and no one else wanted it. And here I am. He paused and smiled to himself. My father used to like to say: None of my patients is ill but thinking makes him so, is that Shakespeare? Morgan nodded. Hamlet, he said. More or less. To me it is a prison.
CHAPTER NINE
in which Trilby and Pate arrive at the house unannounced
The Doctor and Morgan were playing backgammon in the book room one day when Engel rushed in, flustered, gasping for breath after climbing the stairs. She stood at the door, her large hand on the round brass knob. “They’re here,” she panted. “They’re here for the children. The Lord damn their eyes and ears. They say they’re from the government.” Both men ran from the room and crossed to the landing window, from which they could see a small gray car parked in the drive. Two men stood beside it, staring up at the rows of dark uncurtained windows. They were dressed identically in black suits, white shirts, black ties, and brown suede shoes. One man was bald, the other wore a narrow-brimmed trilby. Both men were smoking in the same way, with their hands cupped round the end of the cigarette as if to protect the flame, in unison flicking the ash onto the gravel. If they hadn’t been smoking, they would have looked like civil servants or plainclothes police. Morgan realized as he watched them examining the house and dropping their ash on his drive that he was trembling, and not for fear of his face being seen, although that was also there, that fear was constant, but because these unwanted, uninvited men might take away their children.
“You have to help me,” he said, clutching the Doctor’s sleeve.
“Of course,” said the Doctor. He turned to Engel. “What exactly did they say to you? What were their words?” His tone was stern. Engel cast her eyes to the ceiling.
“I don’t exactly know. I heard them say children, something about our children, and my stomach opened with fright. I thought I would lose my self-respect on the floor in front of them, right there on the floor of the hall. I said I would fetch you at once.” She looked at Morgan, hotly ashamed. “I’m sorry, I know I should never have said that. I wasn’t thinking. I was so scared.”
“That isn’t important now,” said Doctor Crane. He squeezed Morgan’s arm. “I’ll talk to them.” Morgan nodded, then said to Engel, “Take them to the green drawing room. But give me enough time to get behind the curtain.” He ran down the stairs, pausing only to assure himself that the front door was properly closed and that he would not be observed. As soon as he was safe behind the curtain, he forced himself to breathe more shallowly. A moment later, Engel opened the door and ushered in the two men, followed by Doctor Crane. Pate took the lead.
“Are you the owner of this house?” he said.
“I am the owner’s doctor,” Crane said.
Trilby had taken a soft black notebook from his inside breast pocket. He uncapped his pen. “Doctor—?”
“Crane.”
“And the owner of the house? Mr.—?”
“Is away at the moment. On business. Perhaps I can help?”
Pate looked suspicious.
“And might I ask what you’re doing here in the house alone, with the owner away? In his house?”
“I would be grateful if you could explain to me first exactly who you are,” said Doctor Crane. “And what your business is. Before I answer any more of your questions.”
“We’re from the ministry,” said Trilby.
“The ministry?”
“Of welfare. The ministry of welfare.”
“So there is still a ministry of welfare?” said Doctor Crane, with a sniff. “I assumed they’d closed it years ago. For all the welfare I see around me. And you have documents to prove this?”
Both men produced from their jacket pockets a metal plate with their photographs and the symbol of a ministry, a portcullis between two towers. Crane took his time examining these, then gave them back.
“And whose welfare is it exactly that brings you here?” said Crane.
Pate thought about this for a moment, then shook his head as if to dislodge a fly.
“As I said, we’d like to speak to the owner of the house.”
“Who is away,” said Crane. “As I said.”
“It’s about certain, well, disturbing rumors that have reached the ministry’s ears,” continued Pate. “Regarding children.”
Morgan’s breath caught in his windpipe; for a moment he thought he was going to choke.
“Children?” Crane said.
“We believe there are children here. In the house. Strays.”
“Children in the house? In this house? Really?” said Crane, in a tone of ascending surprise. “Might I ask on what grounds you believe this?”
“We have our sources,” said Pate in a self-important way, glancing at Trilby, who stood beside him, his pen poised over his notebook. “The ministry, that is to say, has its sources. Which naturally must remain confidential.”
“You said stray children,” Doctor Crane said, slowly, as though the word were new to him. “I’m not sure I quite understand what you mean. In what way might children be considered stray?”
Pate looked embarrassed. “It’s a ministry term,” he said. But Crane insisted.
“Clearly. Which means?”
Pate looked at Trilby, who indicated what appeared to be his permission with a nod; Pate then said, “Well, otherwise unaccounted for, unparented. What used to be termed orphans, you might say.”
“Unwanted, in other words?”
“That’s neither here nor there from the ministry’s point of view,” said Pate. “Nor from ours, come to that, as ministry servants. It isn’t our job to justify the official terminology. These children must be accounted for, that’s all. There are structures.”
“And these stray children?”
“Are taken care of by the ministry,” said Pate. “Of welfare.”
“I understand,” said Crane. He glanced for a fraction of a second towards the curtain, one eyebrow raised. It might have been a tic. “In structures.”
Pate spoke again, with increasing impatience. “Perhaps you would be so good as to answer our questions, Doctor—”
“Crane,” said Trilby, reading from his notebook.
“I really don’t know what else to say,” Crane said. “As you can see for yourselves,” he gestured around him, “there are no children here, stray or otherwise. The owner of this fine old house leads a secluded existence, as I’m sure your sources at the ministry will have informed you. He is a man of great culture, a scholar, and appreciates his own company more than any other’s. The last thing he would want is the presence of children. When he travels, he does so to ensure himself that his affairs abroad are in order and to experience other civilizations, other worlds. He would hardly want to leave a houseful of children to their own devices. And if you wish to know why I am here, though of what concern my presence might be to the ministry I fail to understand, then I can tell you that the owner of this house is a friend of mine, a dear old friend, whose door is open to me with or without his presence. I am here today, as it happens, to study in the library, which has an extensive collection of medical texts from the last century. I am here to enrich my knowledge. I am certainly not here to gather children, strays or otherwise.”
Pate said, “We have a warrant.”
Crane gestured towards the door. “Indeed? In that case, I’m sure the owner would have no desire to impede you in your ministerial duties. In his absence, I shall be delighted to show you round.” He opened the door and waved them both through, not looking towards the curtain. “Perhaps the main rooms on the ground floor first? The house, as you will have realized, is rather large.”
As he watched them leave the drawing room, Morgan’s heart began to thump against his ribs. His reason told him that his fear was quite unnecessary. Engel, by this time, would certainly have spirited the children away. But perhaps a teddy bear or building brick would have been forgotten, or the small soft shoe of a toddler. Perhaps a cry would escape from the mouth of one of the babies, wherever they were hidden, and be heard by one of these men, these gray-suited jackals with their talk of strays. For one exhilarating second, Morgan entertained the notion that he could spring out from a corner, utter a ghoulish moan, and frighten the men to death; yes, even to death. He could stalk them as they trespassed around his grandfather’s house, because it was clear to him that they were trespassing despite their warrant, until the appropriate moment arrived and the horror of his face would do its work. But that would solve nothing, he knew. Then it occurred to him that he could do what he had done the first time the Doctor came; he could hide in the scullery and watch them as they came into the kitchen. Surely they would never search the scullery, he thought. They were from the ministry; the scullery would be beneath them. He lifted the curtain and was about to step into the room when he heard the engine of a car start up and wheels on gravel. Moments later, Crane burst into the room. He couldn’t speak for laughter.
“They are such fools, such idiots,” he said finally. “I took them into one of the rooms downstairs and they just stood in the middle of it and looked around as though they’d completely forgotten why they were there. They hadn’t got the faintest idea, you know, of what to look for nor how to look for it. They wouldn’t have recognized a child, let alone a stray one—you heard that, didn’t you? a stray child, isn’t that the worst of all?—if one had leapt out at them. Mind you,” he said, and paused, “they certainly do seem to have disappeared, don’t they? The children, I mean. What’s Engel done to them?”
“Will they be back, do you think?”
“Heaven only knows.” The Doctor was silent. He cocked his head to one side, and Morgan did the same. Not only the Doctor, but the entire house was silent, as though there were no other living being within it than these two men. “Where are they, do you suppose? The children, I mean. Engel must have whisked them away.”
Then Morgan said what he had wanted to say to someone, because it had been troubling him, for months now, maybe longer. “Have you noticed,” he said, hearing his voice hiss on the final syllable and recalling, as he always did, what thing he was, and realizing, with a start, that to remember implies forgetfulness, and that he had had that moment of forgetfulness and should be grateful, these thoughts so fast they barely registered as thoughts. “Have you ever noticed,” he said, “that the children seem to know when they’re not wanted, not in the ministerial sense, of course, but, you know, when somebody simply wants to be quiet, I suppose I mean when I want to be quiet? They just disappear, they make themselves scarce, as though they’ve never been in the house at all, as though they’ve never existed. And then, just when you notice and start to wonder where they are, when you start to worry about them, I suppose, although you might not realize it’s worry, it registers as a sort of apprehension, they reappear as miraculously as they disappeared. They pop up from behind a sofa or you hear them crying or calling things out in the garden. But haven’t you ever wondered just where they go?” He paused for a moment. When he continued his voice was hesitant. “It’s as though they came from the air,” he said. And then he told Crane about the arrival of Melissa, expecting to be believed. As he was.
“And hasn’t Engel said anything?” the Doctor asked.
“No,” said Morgan slowly. “Because that’s the other thing. I know it sounds absurd, I hardly like to admit it, but sometimes I have the strong impression that Engel disappears along with them. Sometimes I feel that I’m utterly alone, not just in the house but altogether, in the world in a way, as though none of them had ever been.” He was silent for a moment. “I’m not complaining, you must understand. I’m almost happy to feel so alone. If nothing else, it gives me a feeling of security.” He paused a second time before adding shyly: “You’re the only one who seems real then.”
CHAPTER TEN
in which Doctor Crane and Engel discuss the nature of disappearance
After this conversation the Doctor seemed to watch the children in a different way. He spent more time than ever before in the house; he wandered the corridors alone, opening the doors to rooms in which the children might be hiding, rooms in which he had seen them play together in the past, only to find them empty. Yet the emptiness seemed recent, as though another, invisible door had only just closed, behind which the children were gathered, holding their breath perhaps so as not to laugh, playing what to them must have seemed a delightful game; and was, except that he had no idea what such a game might mean, other than that he and Morgan were somehow peripheral to it, if not explicitly excluded. Once, he told Morgan, he looked into a room and found it empty and closed the door, only to open it a moment later and see the children, or some of them, half a dozen or so, sitting in a circle on the floor and twirling a bottle to see where it would point. They glanced up towards him and smiled, but paid no more attention to him than that; they preferred to watch the bottle slow and settle, to see whose turn it would be to accept the forfeit, if that was what the game involved. He might have asked, but something about their concentration dissuaded him. Eventually, he closed the door and walked away, and it seemed to him that there was silence once more; even the soft dry rattle of the glass against the wood could be heard no more.
Another afternoon, he had been staring at the empty lawn from a first-floor window for minutes on end, in a sort of trance; then, he must have blinked, he supposed later, but that one blink was time enough for the children to appear, as Melissa apparently had, and to be waving up. That was the other thing; they were at once aware of him, as though they had come back specifically, perhaps to reassure him that they were there. Which was quite the opposite of the effect their coming had.
Engel was another matter. Although he himself had observed how the children appeared to come and go at will, the notion that fleshy full-bodied Engel might do the same was inconceivable to the Doctor; to such an extent that he decided one day to take her into his confidence.
“You know what our friend Morgan thinks?” he said. They were both in the kitchen. Engel was making tea the way she liked it, strong and left to stew a little. The Doctor was warming his hands before the fire.
“Some nonsense, I suppose,” she said, with affection. This was how they spoke of him when they were together, as though he were capable only of mischief.
“Well, yes, perhaps,” he said. “It’s hard to say. I thought so at first, but now I’m not so sure.”
“That’s got me curious,” she said. She poured the tea out into large white mugs, added sugar and a splash of whisky.
Crane took a deep breath, then began. “He says the children seem to disappear sometimes, when they’re not with us, when they’re not being watched by anyone. I think he’s beginning to wonder if they’re really here at all. Perhaps he’s invented them, that’s what he thinks, though he didn’t say that, quite. He wouldn’t.” He stirred his mug slowly and sipped, then blew on the tea to cool it down, before sipping again. When he had finished this, he said, “That’s what he’s afraid of, I think, discovering that they’re figments of his imagination. They come through the air, he said. I think he wonders sometimes if he might have made them up. Which would mean that he was mad.”
“And you?” said Engel. “What do you think?”
Doctor Crane sipped again, and blew.
“I don’t think he’s mad,” he said after a moment.
“Nor I,” said Engel, “I don’t think he’s got an ounce of madness in him, though he’d have the right to it.”
“So I suppose I may believe him,” he said.
Engel nodded and drank. “He’s no madman,” she said again. “He’s as sane as I am. Saner.”
“But it isn’t possible, surely?” the Doctor said, conscious that he was behaving in a manner that might seem peculiar to anyone else, asking the housekeeper for what amounted to a medical opinion, yet unable to do otherwise. “That the children come and go?”
“They’re bright enough,” she said. “They’re bright as buttons, even the babies. Who knows what they can do?”
