The Children’s Home (20 page)

“Last night,” echoed Crane, taking Morgan’s arm in his as they walked across the sitting room. Nothing more was said until they were halfway down the stairs towards the kitchen, when Crane pulled him to a halt. “We can’t just go on,” he said, “as if nothing has happened.”

“I don’t intend to,” said Morgan.

Engel was in the kitchen, her baking apron on, her hair pinned up inside her cap, kneading a ball of dough. She showed no surprise; she seemed to have been waiting for them to arrive. She nodded a welcome, then wiped her hands to pour out coffee from the jug into two cups, which she placed on the table. Morgan picked his up, more grateful than he could say. We are all still here, he thought. David was right. He didn’t ask Engel where she had been.

“Excellent coffee,” said Crane. He sat down. “As always, Engel.”

“And why shouldn’t it be?” said Engel, but her smile belied the irritation of her words. She began to work the dough once more, tipping a cloud of flour from a small jute sack.

So already Crane was wrong, thought Morgan, cradling his coffee in his hands. We are, after all that has happened, to pretend that nothing has happened. Despite ourselves and what we know, this is what we shall do in order to be safe, to move on. We shall wipe out the last few days, the last few months, from our minds, our lives, as though we were blackboards and the children chalk. He put down his cup and traced a line in the film of flour on the table. A line, and then a letter.
M
.

That was when Crane noticed his hand. He put his own coffee down beside Morgan’s and reached across to touch it as it wrote. Morgan flinched involuntarily, then let himself be held. He felt the slow heat of the other man on the new skin.

“How did this happen?” said Crane.

“David,” said Morgan.

“David the healer,” said Crane.

“He cured my eye as well,” said Morgan, blinking. “You see? And listen, you hear my speech? I no longer lisp.”

“David. The worker of wonders.”

“Yes.”

Crane shook his head, exasperated. “So why not work wonders all the time? Why not simply wave his magic wand and fix the world? He could have done so much.”

“Perhaps it had to be done the hard way,” said Morgan.

“Well, he put us through it,” said Crane. “He certainly did that.” He continued to stroke the back of Morgan’s restored hand, in a slow, distracted way, and Morgan allowed himself to relax into the pleasure of it.

Covering the ball of dough with a tea towel, Engel put a plate of shelled hard-boiled eggs on the table, a bowl of salt, a basket of bread. With his free hand, Crane dipped an egg into the salt and bit off the top half. He chewed for a moment. “I’ve been thinking all night and all I can do is come back to the same thought.” He dipped the remaining half of the egg into the salt and ate it slowly; when he’d finished, a flake of yolk was left at the edge of his lower lip. “It’s a scene, I suppose, and a feeling I can’t quite fathom.” He started to shake. At first Morgan thought he was laughing. He wanted to flick the yolk away, but the hand he needed was in Crane’s hand. Then he saw that Crane had begun, once again, to cry. “He came away in my grasp,” he stuttered through his tears. “That child. I killed him. If he was alive, and I don’t even know that he was, I can’t be sure of that, I killed him.” He sucked back tears into his throat. “And so did you. You did it too.” Pushing Morgan’s hand to one side with a gesture of impatience, he twisted in his chair until he could take his friend by his shoulders and hold him close, so close Morgan felt the heat of Crane’s breath on his face. “And I felt such disgust. Such disgust and horror, and sickness with myself. But I also felt a sort of freedom, do you understand that? As though I’d torn
myself
into two. Not the child, do you see? Myself.” Crane wanted an answer, but all Morgan could do was stare into his eyes until he had finished with weeping and was still. And then, with a smile that Crane, he knew, would recognize as a smile, he said, “You have egg yolk on your lip,” and he brushed it off.

“I can’t go back to where I was,” said Crane.

“You can stay here, in that case,” said Morgan, his voice low, willfully misunderstanding. He turned to Engel. “He can stay here with us, Engel, can’t he? There’s more than room enough.”

•  •  •

Some hours later, during which they had wandered around the house and garden, arm in arm, in silence, the two men came to the main library. Crane said that he wanted to show Morgan something, and pulled open a shallow drawer, filled with hand-drawn and colored maps. “Look,” he said, lifting the first one out and carrying it across to the table at the center of the room. “These must have been made by your grandfather.”

“Or by someone for him,” said Morgan, perversely.

“Well, that doesn’t matter,” said Crane. He was more himself now, as though not just the walking together but the crying fit of the morning had washed something loose in him and rinsed it out. “I was looking at them a few days ago, before we went out in the car, and it set me thinking about those books we were given to read as children, about travelers and shipwrecked sailors? How they found themselves in strange lands? Magical lands where time went backwards or animals spoke their language? But they weren’t strange or magical to the people who lived there, were they? The people who lived there were normal. How formless it all is until an outsider gives it sense.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The children. They came out of thin air, that’s what you said, isn’t it? They came to do something we weren’t expected, or entitled, to understand. I don’t think they understood what they had to do themselves. And then David grew up somehow, so quickly, and it all fell into place. And now, here
we
are. We are what’s left.”

The longer he talked, the more animated he became. For the first time that day, he seemed happy, elated even. He lifted the map up from the table and replaced it in the drawer, eased out the one from beneath it and placed that where the first map had been. His finger traced a coastline, a bay, an inlet. He turned the map over so that nothing but the paper itself could be seen, with the faintest tracing where a nib had dug more deeply into the skin of it. “All these worlds we know nothing of,” he continued. “They’re all connected under the surface, I’m convinced of it. What doesn’t happen in one place happens somewhere else. And at times the strangest things slip through.”

“So somewhere the woman in the chest upstairs is giving birth to an actual child?” Morgan’s tone was gently mocking.

“Exactly!” Crane clapped his hands. “You do see. I knew you would.”

“And somewhere my own mother is alive and well, and loves me as a mother should.”

Crane nods excitedly. “And somewhere there is no illness, and no need for doctors.”

Morgan paused before speaking. “And somewhere I am whole.”

“You are whole here, Morgan.” Crane shook his head. For a moment, in this passing gesture, weary with affection, exasperated at the other man’s stubbornness and refusal to understand, Morgan saw David before him, the man David might have become. “Have you learned nothing from all this?”

I
’d like to thank my usual group of readers, family and friends, in particular Lawrence Pedersen, for their patience, availability, occasional misgiving and constant critical insight. I’d like to thank my friend and agent, Isobel Dixon, for being so true in both these roles. I’d like to thank John Glynn for his skill, enthusiasm and commitment to this book, and Nan Graham, for asking the right question at exactly the right time. I’d like to thank Christian Boltanski, one of whose works showed me the way forward when I thought I might be lost. And, as always, for everything else, I’d like to thank Giuseppe.

ALSO BY CHARLES LAMBERT

Prodigal

With a Zero at Its Heart

The View from the Tower

The Slave House

Any Human Face

The Scent of Cinnamon

Little Monsters

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Charles Lambert

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lambert, Charles, 1953–

The children’s home : a novel / Charles Lambert.

pages ; cm

I. Title.

PR6112.A5225C48 2016

823'.92—dc23

2015027042

ISBN 978-1-5011-1739-8

ISBN 978-1-5011-1741-1 (ebook)

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three