Transit(48)

Eloise had noticed me looking at her and she immediately gathered her straying attention and directed it in a single smiling beam towards me. She clasped her hands over her bosom, leaning as though confidentially across the table.

‘I want to know everything!’ she said.

Her younger son Jake had left his place at the other end of the table and was standing at her elbow. He tapped her arm.

‘What is it, Jakey?’ she said, turning her head distractedly.

He stood on tiptoe to whisper in her ear and she listened with an expression of bright patience on her face. When he’d finished she excused herself and got up and went to speak to Lawrence, who was taking food out of the oven, an apron tied around his waist.

While she was gone Jake asked me if I had ever been to Mars. I said that I hadn’t.

‘I’ve got a photograph of it,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see it?’

He went away and came back with a book and laid it open on the table in front of me.

‘Do you see what that is?’ he said, pointing.

I said it looked like a footprint. He nodded his head.

‘That’s what it is,’ he said. ‘I thought you might have seen it in real life,’ he added, disappointed. He said he was going to live on Mars, just as soon as he was old enough to get a rocket. Sounds like a good plan, I said.

Lawrence came over and told Jake to sit back down in his place.

‘And don’t go asking Mummy for different food,’ he said. ‘We’re all going to eat the same thing.’

Jake looked immediately anxious.

‘But what if I don’t like it?’ he said.

I saw that Lawrence was struggling to keep his temper. His face was brick red and his mouth was set in a line.

‘Then don’t eat it,’ he said. ‘But you’ll be hungry.’

Eloise came and sat back down, straightening her dress. She leaned across the table to address me in her confidential whisper.

‘Have you ever noticed how controlling Lawrence is about food?’ she said. ‘He’s positively French. We were in a restaurant the other day and he made Angelica eat a snail.’

Angelica was Lawrence’s daughter.

‘The poor child was like Joan of Arc at the stake,’ Eloise said. ‘Jakey and Ben were absolutely goggle-eyed. You could see they were thinking they’d be next. Jakey only eats sugar,’ she added. ‘And Ben won’t touch anything that’s not basically white. They wouldn’t go near her for hours afterwards. They said they could smell it on her breath.’

She glanced around the table and then leaned even further across towards me.

‘He gets so angry when I give them what they want,’ she whispered. ‘He’s appalled at their lack of discipline. You know Jakey doesn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘He comes into our room four or five times a night and Lawrence won’t let him get into our bed. He doesn’t approve of it. The thing is,’ she said, ‘Jakey always used to get into my bed. It was what made him go back to sleep. But now I have to get up with him and take him downstairs in the middle of the night.’

I asked her what they did together at that hour.

‘We watch television,’ she said. ‘The thing is,’ she went on, leaning even closer, ‘Susie was very organised. She got it all out of books. They had a whole library of them. Every time a child did something you’d have to stop and wait while she went and looked it up. Some of it,’ she added, ‘was actually quite Victorian.’

I remembered once visiting Susie and Lawrence’s house and coming across Angelica aged three or four sitting alone at the bottom of a staircase. It was the naughty step, she told me when I asked. She was still there when I left.

‘I say to Lawrence, honey, we’ve just got to love them.’ Eloise’s eyes were filling with water. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? They just need you to love them.’

I said I didn’t know. For someone like Lawrence that kind of love was indistinguishable from self-abnegation.

‘I think people are frightened,’ Eloise said. ‘Frightened of their own children.’

If that was true, I said, it was because they saw in their children the register of their own failings and misdemeanours.

‘You’re not frightened, are you?’ she said, looking at me beadily.

I found myself telling her about an evening some years before, when I was alone at home with my two sons. It was winter; it had been dark since mid-afternoon and the boys were becoming restless. Their father was out, driving back from somewhere. We were waiting for him to come home. I remembered the feeling of tension in the room, which seemed to be related to the provisionality of the situation, the fact that we were waiting. The boys kept asking when he would be back and I too kept looking at the clock, waiting for time to pass. Yet I knew that nothing different or particularly important would happen when he got back. It was merely that something was being stretched to breaking point by his absence, something to do with belief: it was as though our ability to believe in ourselves, in our home and our family and in who we said we were, was being worn so thin it might give way entirely. I remembered the pressing feeling of reality, just under the surface of things, like a secret I was struggling to contain. I realised that I didn’t want to be there, in that room. I wanted to go out and walk across the fields in the dark, or go to a city where there was excitement and glamour, or be anywhere where the compulsion of waiting wasn’t lying on me like lead. I wanted to be free. The boys began to argue and fight, in the way that they often did. And this too seemed all at once like a form that could be broken, could be suddenly and shockingly transgressed. We were in the kitchen and I was making something for them to eat at the long stone counter. The boys were at the other end, sitting on stools. My younger son was pestering the older one, wanting him to play with him, and the older one was becoming increasingly irritated. I stopped what I was doing, intending to intervene in their fight, when I saw my older son suddenly take his brother’s head in his hands and drive it down hard against the countertop. The younger one fell immediately to the floor, apparently unconscious, and the older one left him there and ran out of the room. This show of violence, the like of which had never happened in our house before, was not simply shocking – it also concretised something I appeared already to know, to the extent that I believed my children had merely acted in the service of this knowledge, that they had been driven to enact something that they themselves didn’t realise or understand. It was another year before their father moved out of the house, but if I had to locate the moment when the marriage had ended it would be then, on that dark evening in the kitchen, when he wasn’t even there.