The Cuckoo's Child (28 page)

“Jezebels! Harlots!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Born to sin and darkness, turning from the light in their wilful wickedness, the filthiness of their walk and conduct!”

The leather chair creaked as Magnus stirred uneasily.

“Mother,” he warned, “you said you wouldn't upset yourself now.”

The old woman ignored him. Her small mouth worked, radiating wrinkles as if it had been pulled tight by a drawstring. It reminded me of an anus.

“Look,” I said hurriedly, pulling my mother's photograph from my bag, and holding it close to her so that she could see it clearly. “Does this look like a Jezebel? She was a
child
. She was
your child
, for heaven's sake. And I'm her daughter.”

“Flesh-pleaser,” my grandmother hissed at the picture and, snatching it from my hand, hurled it at the fire. The frame cracked smartly against the grate and shattered. Magnus leaned forward with a grunt and rescued the photograph, already curling in the heat of the coals.

“Flesh-pleaser?” I asked. “What . . .”

“The body of the saint is the temple of the Holy Ghost!”

“Well, that may be, but . . .”

“Polluted it, she did, with her filthiness. Wasn't that committing the sin of Zimri in the presence of the Holy Ghost?”

“Zimri?”

My grandmother's voice was taking on a rapt quality, as if she were hypnotizing herself with the borrowed rhetoric. Certainly she was launched on a well-worn path, and I was lost already. I could no longer tell where her own words ended and quotation began.

“She gave herself over,” she intoned, “just like her sister, carnally minded. They that are in the flesh cannot please God. So they cast themselves out. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned!”

Rage and a sort of fascinated horror had strangled me, but a brief pause as the old woman heaved in some air broke the spell and I managed one protest.

“She needed protection, and you turned against her because she was a sinner? What would you call yourself?”

It sounded impotent even to me. Grandmother continued as if I hadn't uttered a word. Her oratory moved up another notch beyond any kind of rational discourse. Her bun was slipping from its moorings, and wisps of white hair haloed her congested face, giving her an unsettling air of wildness. She'd become one of the more misanthropic Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah perhaps, in mid-rant, the seventeenth century pouring from her mouth as if she were helplessly speaking in tongues, yet all the time with an appalling vindictiveness. I could feel the hair standing up on my arms.

“In the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. He who is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Would I not cut away the contagion? If your limb is mortified, do you not sever it? Shall those who are in spirit with Christ be in body one flesh with the vilest of the vile? She put away her faith and made shipwreck.”

My grandmother's mouth was flecked with spittle, and a fat purple vein stood out on her temple.
My God
, I thought,
she's foaming at the mouth, she's barking mad, I should stop this, she's an old woman, she'll never change
. But I couldn't let her retreat into a mumbo-jumbo of self-serving quotation and imagine she had won. Magnus was unhappy, but we both ignored his feeble attempts to break in and defuse the situation, she with the ease of long practice and I with the callousness that a duel to the death brings on.

“Having an illegitimate baby in that day and age was punishment enough. Why did you have to add to it?”

She was waiting for me.

“Many sorrows shall be to the wicked,” she proclaimed.

I exploded.

“Being seduced by a hypocritical lecher is
not
wickedness! Wickedness is making a prisoner of your child and her infant, ostracizing her, and driving her away with your hatred and your cruelty and your loveless religion to struggle on her own in the middle of a war. What happened to ‘suffer little children to come unto me'? Where was ‘God is love'? At the very least you sentenced her to poverty and hardship; as it is, you sentenced her to death.”

“Hold on now,” protested Magnus, but his mother overrode him.

“What is the wages of sin?” she asked the air and answered herself with a hideous glee. “The wages of sin is death!”

“But that's my point! There was no sin on her part. She didn't
deserve
her death.”

“She made her choice and turned away from the light! I said to her, Walk ye in the light of your fire and in the sparks ye have kindled, you and your bastard, the child of a bond-woman. It's death to be carnally minded because the carnal mind is enmity against God.”

Her voice was powerful and steadily rising, her face almost purple with intensity. I could feel myself recoiling instinctively from her otherness. She was terrifying.

“You walk in darkness, I said, because you hate the light, and the Father will not raise you up on the last day. For you have turned your back, and the Father will not draw you to Him, but cast you out to be consumed in the fire. Kindle your fire, I said, and compass yourself about with sparks and at last lie down in sorrow.”

At this point she heaved herself onto her feet and pointed a shaking finger at me.

“Coming here, expecting me to welcome you in! Spawn of whores, work of darkness, swine's blood upon the altar, polluting my house with your wicked godlessness! Defiling a man of God with your vile and baseless slurs! Cleanse your hearts, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. But you have no faith and walk in wickedness; where will you be at the last day?”

Her voice had grown thick and rough, as if all the blood vessels in her throat were dilating and squeezing her larynx shut, and her last question came out as a hoarse wheeze. Magnus was on his feet, but she flailed at him with one impatient arm as she gathered herself for a final effort.

“God now laughs at his calamity,” she croaked, “and mocks when his fear cometh.”

At which she tottered sideways, caught her foot in the footstool, and crashed like a felled tree into the hearth with a fearful clatter of fire irons. One hand flopped into the coals and stayed there.

“Oh, my God, my God, Mother!”

My uncle's distress and my horror made us clumsy. We jostled each other, wasting valuable time treading on each other's feet, trying to step over my grandmother's inert bulk, both of us manoeuvring for the best position in the confines of the hearth to snatch the motionless hand from the fire. The hand was hissing and there was a dreadful smell that caught at some fear deep inside and turned my gut to water. With the strength of panic, I hauled my uncle aside as he slowly tried to bend, seized my grandmother's sleeve, which was just starting to smoulder, and wrenched her hand out of the coals.

I tried not to look at the blackened skin, split like a roast pepper, as we struggled to lift her out of the fireplace to lie more comfortably on the hearthrug. She was unconscious, her face grey and sweaty. Her glasses had broken in her fall, and a thin worm of blood wriggled from the edge of her right eyebrow into the hair above her ear. She was drooling, and her face looked oddly askew and uninhabited. I felt for a pulse and found a thready faltering beat at her throat.

“She needs an ambulance, quickly,” I said. Magnus nodded and heaved himself up from his knees. “Where can I find blankets?” I asked. He gestured toward a door in the far corner of the room and lumbered to the telephone.

The door opened onto an old-fashioned enclosed staircase, steep polished wood steps that rose like a mine shaft toward light from a small window at the top. Through it I could see more gardens, humble ones this time, and extensive woodland at the end of the plots. Something stirred in my head, but urgency crushed it down again, and I hurried to the first door along the landing, flung it open, and tore the quilt and pillows from the bed inside.

Magnus had finished with the phone by the time I returned, and together we swaddled the old woman in the quilt and tucked the pillows under her head and shoulders. I was concerned about her hand.

“We need some clean cloth to wrap that in,” I said. Magnus looked at me helplessly. “A clean dishtowel, pillowcase, anything will do.”

Magnus nodded and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a crisp linen tea towel covered with British songbirds. I noticed it had been ironed while still damp, perfectly smooth with a faint sheen, perfectly square at the corners, and folded with geometric precision. Very gently I wrapped it loosely round the burned flesh, laying the linen parcel carefully on top of the quilt. Magnus relaxed a little when we could no longer see the blackened hand.

“I'll have to go to the hospital with her,” he said.

“Would you like me to come with you?”

“I don't think so, my dear. There's little enough to be done, I reckon.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to bring this on you.”

Magnus looked sharply at me. The adrenalin was still making me shake.

“Don't you go shouldering this load,” he said sternly. “'Tweren't your fault. You can't fill yourself up with hate and bitterness all your life and not have it poison you inside and out. She's my mother, but I can say it where I wouldn't let others take the liberty. She's a nasty soul, and she's choked on her own venom at last, see if she hasn't. There's a justice there, somewhere.”

I was still digesting this when the ambulance swept up to the front door, lights flashing. The two ambulance attendants took over, loud and reassuring.

“Come on then, Ma, let's make you comfy, then. Soon have you right.”

“What's this then?” said the other, unwrapping the hand. “Bloody hell,” he exclaimed and covered it up again, hurriedly. “Put your skates on with this one, mate.”

Within minutes, my grandmother was loaded like an unwieldy roll of carpet onto a stretcher, the back doors of the ambulance slammed shut, and it sped away. Magnus and I looked at each other. “I'll wait for my ride,” I said. “I'll go for a walk out the back, perhaps. Is that all right? I'll phone you later tonight, okay?”

Magnus nodded.

“Have your walk,” he said. “I'm off to the hospital.”

I watched him lumber past the pied tree and disappear through the archway in the brick wall. Then I turned back into the house.

I snooped, of course. After all, it could have been my one chance to wander round the house where my mother grew up. I just wanted to learn its shapes and patterns, breathe its smells, hear its noises. Share this one thing with the mother I had never really known.

So I wandered about the still, bare rooms, listening to the crack of the floorboards and laying my cheek against the chill plaster to savour its damp, gritty smell. In my grandmother's room there was a cumbersome mahogany bed with a fat feather mattress and a matching wardrobe and dressing table, but nothing stood on any of the surfaces, not a brush or an ornament of any kind, no photographs, no flowers, no pictures, no cushions, no rugs, no slippers waiting by the bed, nothing except for a Bible, bound in black calf and clamped shut with a brass clasp, waiting on the pillow.

Uncle Magnus's room was also spartan, but it had the well-worn simplicity of a soldier's quarters. The bed was narrow and trim, almost a cot; a small table beside it held an ancient alarm clock, the wind-up kind, and a small pile of books, the top one lying open. I picked it up to see what my uncle chose as bedtime reading; it was William Cobbett's
Rural Rides
. The only luxuriant thing in this ascetic room was a massive maidenhair fern that stood in the window and gushed all over its brass pot.

I tried to imagine my mother as a little girl straining to reach the taps in the bathroom sink or splashing about in the big white bath with the lion's feet. My hand learned what hers had known as I stroked the polished mahogany of the banister and unscrewed the knob on the brass bedstead. Did she, like me, lean dreamily out of the dormer windows in the tiny rooms at the back of the cottage, warmed by the slice of sunshine they offered as she watched the hens scratching below or the squirrels jerking head first down the tree trunks at the bottom of the garden?

Contemplating the garden like that reminded me of my intention to have a walk. Despite all my longing to find some lingering traces, there was really nothing of my mother in the house. Too much time had crept by, too much had been wilfully erased, and not even the faintest echo survived. Only the most indomitable spirit could ever have prevailed against my grandmother's implacable will.

Downstairs again, I gagged at the smell lingering on the air. Was that how Auschwitz smelled? If so, how could anyone pretend they didn't know what was being burned? I hurried into the small kitchen, flung open the back door, and stumbled outside. The air was cool and sweet, reviving, and the finest of rain gently misted my face and hair.

I followed a grassy path toward the trees. There were garden plots on either side. The left side seemed to be devoted mainly to flowers. I recognized the remains of sunflowers and holly­hocks by the fence, and little islands of hollow stalks, with new shoots already showing where delphiniums had stood the previous summer. I passed a line of stakes and netting that had supported vines of some kind, for the dried tendrils still corkscrewed through the string in places: sweet peas, at a guess. And there were wigwams of bamboo canes that must have been covered with scarlet runners or beans of some kind.

The right side was more regimented. Here the lines were straight. There were two rows of dry-looking strawberry plants, wisps of their straw mulch still in place. Next came rows of kale and cabbage like green cannonballs and the large red-veined leaves of old beets. The rest of the plot was bare, dug over; there were mounds of earth, furred with tiny weeds, and a long hump like a Stone Age barrow. The garden had no defined end; the tame simply gave way to the wild. There was a stretch given over to the behind-the-scenes stuff any garden involves: a patch of ash where bonfires had burned; compost bins; a heap of broken pots and a coiled length of hose; a rusted oil barrel. Beyond this, I was pushing through long grass and the tough flowerless stems of last year's buttercups, with the sly claws of brambles clutching at my legs.