The Children’s Home (7 page)

“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.”

in which Doctor Crane and Engel discuss the nature of disappearance

A
fter 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?”

“But what are they here for, do you think?” the Doctor said.

Engel smiled.

in which David learns to read

I
t was true that the Doctor was studying. Soon after they had passed the first few afternoons of backgammon together, Morgan had begun to show him round the garden and then the house. He had taken him to the other three floors, long corridors giving onto barely furnished rooms. The Doctor had lingered in one of these rooms, crossing to the window and looking out towards the hills. “I should like to have this room,” he said and immediately Morgan had told him that it was his. “You know this whole house is yours,” he said, hearing his voice break, aware for the first time that he had made a friend or, rather, that
they
had each made friends, of each other. “I don’t want the house,” said Crane, with a smile. “I mean the freedom of it,” replied Morgan. “Yes, that I have,” said the Doctor, “and I’m more than grateful for it. But I would like this room for mine. I would like to work here, you see, where I can see the hills.” He pointed towards them. “That’s where I come from, my family, that is. We lived over there until my father died.” Morgan followed the man’s forefinger with his eyes, half expecting to find a house, the house in which Crane’s family might have lived, but all he could see was the blue-gray line of the hills, beyond the garden and the wall and the woods that lay behind it. He had never been there, he had barely been more than twenty miles from the house in all his life, apart from occasional visits to the city with his father and his time in the clinic, and he had no idea where that was, although he had sometimes wondered. He might have asked Crane, who would surely have known; but they had never spoken again about his face, not after that first time. He had thought as he lay in his bed in the clinic that the hardest thing would be pain, but he had been wrong, he realized soon enough, as nurses came and went with their slop bowls and trays of implements and specialists took frozen-faced visitors from bed to bed. The thing that most abased him, that most abased them all, was pity. Crane had understood that. He talked to Morgan’s face as indifferently as the children did.

“What kind of work do you expect to do?” Morgan said.

Crane looked excited. “Well,” he replied, “you have so many books here. Rooms full of books that you haven’t even begun to catalogue. Not just the ones in the library, or in your room, though, God knows, there are more than enough there. I walk around and it’s endless. Books I would guess you’ve never even seen. I was rooting around a few days ago and I found a pile of old medical books, herbariums, works of anatomy, half of them not even in English, in French and German; some of them seemed to be in Arabic, though what I shall make of those I don’t know. It struck me that I could look through them to see what they say. You never know what I might find. I might be no more than a family doctor, but I haven’t stopped
wondering
.” He rubbed his large red hands together and grinned like a boy. Morgan nodded.

“They were my grandfather’s books, all of them,” he said. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books about medicine, mostly, and a hundred other things. My grandfather wondered too, you see. I’ll have them brought here for you.” And over the next few days the gardeners carried trunks of books to Crane’s room.

As Crane darted among the trunks, he discovered that David wanted to learn to read. The first few days the boy seemed content to sit in the room, on a small chair he had found somewhere else in the house and carried there himself, quietly watching the Doctor arrange the books in one bookcase and then another. Later, as Crane settled into an armchair, with the boy beside him, he became aware that David was leaning forward and moving his lips, not uttering a sound, as though he were reading the words on the page of Crane’s book to himself. The book was written in French, a language the Doctor understood, but with difficulty, and he realized that he was silently mouthing the words as he read, as though listening to himself. David must have thought that reading was that, a sort of silent listening. He closed the book.

“Would you like to learn to read?” he said.

“Is that what you’re doing?” David said. “Are you reading now?”

The Doctor nodded.

“Then, yes, I would,” said David, with a shy smile, as though he had just been offered a slice of cake or a special treat of some kind. He took the Doctor’s hand and squeezed it tightly, so that Crane was unexpectedly moved. “Can you show me how to do it? So that I can help you.”

“Help me?”

“Yes.”

“Help me to do what?”

“To find what you’re looking for.”

“And what’s that, do you think?” the Doctor asked, amused, but also curious. “What am I looking for, do you think?” But David didn’t answer. The Doctor reached for a book in English and opened it to the first page. There was a picture of a plant on the left and, on the right, a description of the plant. The book was old but not too old, he thought. He pointed to the name of the plant,
arnica
, and pronounced the word, and then the first letter,
a
. “Yes, yes,” said David, nodding in an anxious, impatient way, “I see. I mean, I understand.”

“Repeat it then,” the Doctor said.

David learned quickly. Sometimes the Doctor felt that the boy was not so much learning to read as remembering a skill he had momentarily lost. His eyes would move down the page with a hungry expression, as though in search of something, even as his lips pronounced the words above. He began to choose the books he wanted to learn from, in a way that made no immediate sense to the Doctor. Not all were books he would have chosen to teach a child his letters, but that didn’t matter to David. If the Doctor hesitated, David sat there and waited, unbudgeable. Soon, within days, it seemed, David was reading alone, taking the books he had chosen to a small chair on the other side of the room. That was when he asked the Doctor if he could teach the others to read, all of them, even the youngest. Even the babies, he seemed to mean.

“Why don’t you show Morgan what you’ve learned first?” Crane said after a moment, wanting to see what David would say. “I’m sure he’ll be so pleased.”

David looked doubtful.

“But I want it to be a surprise,” he said, his lower lip jutting out in a gesture so petulant, so childish, that Crane noticed, as he had done before, how rarely David behaved like a child.

“It will be a surprise,” Crane said. “I haven’t breathed a word to him of this. He thinks I’m studying on my own account.”

“No,” said David, shaking his head. “Not the reading. I didn’t mean the reading.” And then he looked anxious, as though he had said too much, and regretted it. He thought for a moment, then came to a decision.

“All right,” the boy said.

“What did you mean, David, by a surprise?” Crane said, his curiosity too strong to be suppressed. “What did you want to be a surprise?”