The Fifth Child Part 4

The new baby had of course been offered to everyone to hold, when they asked, but it was painful to see how their faces changed confronting this phenomenon. Ben was always quickly handed back. Harriet came into the kitchen one day and heard her sister Sarah say to a cousin, "That Ben gives me the creeps. He's like a goblin or a dwarf or something. I'd rather have poor Amy any day."

This afflicted Harriet with remorse: poor Ben, whom no one could love. She certainly could not! And David, the good father, hardly touched him. She lifted Ben from his cot, so much like a cage, and put him on the big bed, and sat with him. "Poor Ben, poor Ben," she crooned, stroking him. He clutched her shirt with both hands, pulled himself up, and stood on her thigh. The hard little feet hurt her. She tried to cuddle him, persuade him to soften against her.... Soon she gave up, put him back in his pen, or cage ... a roar of frustration because he had been put down, and she held out her hands to him, "Poor Ben, dear Ben," and he grasped her hands and pulled himself up and stood grunting and roaring with triumph. Four months old ... He was like an angry, hostile little troll.

She did make a point of going to him every day when the other children were out of the way, and taking him to the big bed for a time of petting and play, as she had with all of them. Never, not once, did he subside into a loving moment. He resisted, he strove, he fought-and then he turned his head and closed his jaws over her thumb. Not as an ordinary baby will, in the sucking bite that relieves the pain of teething, or explores the possibilities of a mouth, tongue: she felt her bone bend, and saw his cold triumphant grin.

She heard herself say, "You aren't going to do me in, I won't let you."

But for a while she did try hard to make him ordinary. She took him down into the big living-room where all the family were, and put him into the play-pen there-until his presence affected people, and they tended to go away. Or she took him to the table in her arms, as she had done with the others-but could not hold him, he was too strong.

In spite of Ben, the summer holidays were wonderful. Again, there were two months of it. Again, David's father, briefly descending, gave them a cheque, and they could not have managed without. "It is like being in the middle of some b.l.o.o.d.y great fruit pudding, this house," said James. "G.o.d knows how you do it."

But afterwards, when Harriet thought of those holidays, what she remembered was how they all looked at Ben. There would be a long thoughtful stare, puzzled, even anxious; but then came fear, though everyone tried to conceal it. There was horror, too: which is what Harriet felt, more and more. Soon she was shutting Ben up in his room away from everyone. He did not seem to mind, or even to notice. It was hard to make out what he did think of other people.

Harriet lay inside David's arms one night before sleeping, talking over the day, as they always did, and she remarked, out of a current of thoughts about the summer, "Do you know what this house is good for? What people come for? It's for a good time, that's all."

He was surprised. Even-she felt-shocked. "But what else do we do it for?" he enquired.

"I don't know," she said, sounding helpless. Then she turned in to his embrace, and he held her while she wept. They had not yet resumed love-making. This had never happened before. Making love during pregnancy, and very soon after pregnancy-this had never been a problem. But now they were both thinking, That creature arrived when we were being as careful as we knew how-suppose another like him comes? For they both felt-secretly, they were ashamed of the thoughts they had about Ben-that he had willed himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness, which had no defences against him or anything like him. But not making love was not only a strain for them both, it was a barrier, because they had to be reminded continually of what threatened them ... so they felt.

Then something bad happened. Just after all the family had gone away, as the school term began, Paul went into Ben's room by himself. Of all the children, he was the most fascinated by Ben. Dorothy and Alice, who were together in the kitchen, Harriet having gone off to take the older ones to school, heard screams. They ran upstairs to find that Paul had put his hand in to Ben through the cot bars, and Ben had grabbed the hand and pulled Paul hard against the bars, bending the arm deliberately backwards. The two women freed Paul. They did not bother to scold Ben, who was crowing with pleasure and achievement. Paul's arm was badly sprained.

No one felt like saying to the children, "Be careful of Ben." But there was no need after the incident with Paul's arm. That evening the children heard what had happened, but did not look at their parents and Dorothy and Alice. They did not look at each other. They stood silent, heads bent. This told the adults that the children's att.i.tudes to Ben were already formed: they had discussed Ben and knew what to think about him. Luke, Helen, and Jane went away upstairs silently, and it was a bad moment for the parents.

Alice said, watching them, "Poor little things."

Dorothy said, "It's a shame."

Harriet felt that these two women, these two elderly, tough, seasoned survivors, were condemning her, Harriet, out of their vast experience of life. She glanced at David, and saw he felt the same. Condemnation, and criticism, and dislike: Ben seemed to cause these emotions, bring them forth out of people into the light....

The day after this incident, Alice announced that she felt she was no longer needed in this house, she would go back to her own life: she was sure Dorothy could manage. After all, Jane was going to school now. Jane would not have gone to school this year, a proper school, all day, for another year: they had sent her early. Precisely because of Ben, though no one had said it. Alice left, with no suggestion it was because of Ben. But she had told Dorothy, who had told the parents, that Ben gave her the horrors. He must be a changeling. Dorothy, always sensible, calm, matter-of-fact, had laughed at her. "Yes, I laughed at her," she reported. Then, grim, "But why did I?"

David and Harriet conferred, in the low, almost guilty, incredulous voices that Ben seemed to impose. This baby was not six months old yet ... he was going to destroy their family life. He was already destroying it. They would have to make sure that he was in his room at mealtimes and when the children were downstairs with the adults. Family times, in short.

Now Ben was almost always in his room, like a prisoner. He outgrew his barred cot at nine months: Harriet caught him just as he was about to fall over the top. A small bed, an ordinary one, was put into his room. He walked easily, holding on to the walls, or a chair. He had never crawled, had pulled himself straight up on to his feet. There were toys all over the floor-or, rather, the fragments of them. He did not play with them: he banged them on the floor or the walls until they broke. The day he stood alone, by himself, without holding on, he roared out his triumph. All the other children had laughed, chuckled, and wanted to be loved, admired, praised, on reaching this moment of achievement. This one did not. It was a cold triumph, and he staggered about, eyes gleaming with hard pleasure, while he ignored his mother. Harriet often wondered what he saw when he looked at her: nothing in his touch or his look ever seemed to say, This is my mother.

One early morning, something took Harriet quickly out of her bed into the baby's room, and there she saw Ben balanced on the window-sill. It was high-heaven only knew how he had got up there! The window was open. In a moment he would have fallen out of it. Harriet was thinking, What a pity I came in ... and refused to be shocked at herself. Heavy bars were put in, and there Ben would stand on the sill, gripping the bars and shaking them, and surveying the outside world, letting out his thick, raucous cries. All the Christmas holidays he was kept in that room. It was extraordinary how people, asking-cautiously-"How is Ben?" and hearing, "Oh, he's all right," did not ask again. Sometimes a yell from Ben loud enough to reach downstairs silenced a conversation. Then the frown appeared on their faces that Harriet dreaded, waiting for it: she knew it masked some comment or thought that could not be voiced.

And so the house was not the same; there was a constraint and a wariness in everybody. Harriet knew that sometimes people went up to look at Ben, out of the fearful, uneasy curiosity he evoked, when she was out of the way. She knew when they had seen him, because of the way they looked at her afterwards. As if I were a criminal! she raged to herself. She spent far too much of her time quietly seething, but did not seem able to stop. Even David, she believed, condemned her. She said to him, "I suppose in the old times, in primitive societies, this was how they treated a woman who'd given birth to a freak. As if it was her fault. But we are supposed to be civilised!"

He said, in the patient, watchful way he now had with her, "You exaggerate everything."

"That's a good word-for this situation! Congratulations! Exaggerate!"

"Oh G.o.d, Harriet," he said differently, helplessly, "don't let's do this-if we don't stand together, then ..."

It was at Easter that the schoolgirl Bridget, who had returned to see if this miraculous kingdom of everyday life was perhaps still there, enquired, "What is wrong with him? Is he a mongol?"

"Down's syndrome," said Harriet. "No one calls it mongol now. But no, he's not."

"What's wrong with him, then?"

"Nothing at all," said Harriet airily. "As you can see for yourself."

Bridget went away, and never came back.

The summer holidays again. It was 1975. There were fewer guests: some had written or rung to say they could not afford the train fare, or the petrol. "Any excuse is better than none," remarked Dorothy.

"But people are hard up," said David.

"They weren't so hard up before that they couldn't afford to come and live here for weeks at a time at your expense."

Ben was over a year old now. He had not said one word yet, but in other ways he was more normal. Now it was difficult to keep him in his room. Children playing in the garden heard his thick, angry cries, and saw him up on the sill trying to push aside his bars.

So he came out of his little prison and joined them downstairs. He seemed to know that he ought to be like them. He would stand, head lowered, watching how everyone talked, and laughed, sitting around the big table; or sat talking in the living-room, while the children ran in and out. His eyes were on one face, then another: whomever he was looking at became conscious of that insistent gaze and stopped talking; or turned a back, or a shoulder, so as not to have to see him. He could silence a room full of people just by being there, or disperse them: they went off making excuses.

Towards the end of the holidays, someone came bringing a dog, a little terrier. Ben could not leave it alone. Wherever the dog was, Ben followed. He did not pet it, or stroke it: he stood staring. One morning when Harriet came down to start breakfast for the children, the dog was lying dead on the kitchen floor. It had had a heart attack? Suddenly sick with suspicion, she rushed up to see if Ben was in his room: he was squatting on his bed, and when she came in, he looked up and laughed, but soundlessly, in his way, which was like a baring of the teeth. He had opened his door, gone quietly past his sleeping parents, down the stairs, found the dog, killed it, and gone back up again, quietly, into his room, and shut the door ... all that, by himself! She locked Ben in: if he could kill a dog, then why not a child?

When she went down again, the children were crowding around the dead dog. And then the adults came, and it was obvious what they thought.

Of course it was impossible-a small child killing a lively dog. But officially the dog's death remained a mystery; the vet said it had been strangled. This business of the dog spoiled what was left of the holidays, and people went off home early.

Dorothy said, "People are going to think twice about coming again."

Three months later, Mr. McGregor, the old grey cat, was killed in the same way. He had always been afraid of Ben, and kept out of reach. But Ben must have stalked him, or found him sleeping.

At Christmas the house was half empty.

It was the worst year of Harriet's life, and she was not able to care that people avoided them. Every day was a long nightmare. She woke in the morning unable to believe she would ever get through to the evening. Ben was always on his feet, and had to be watched every second. He slept very little. He spent most of the night standing on his window-sill, staring into the garden, and if Harriet looked in on him, he would turn and give her a long stare, alien, chilling: in the half dark of the room he really did look like a little troll or a hobgoblin crouching there. If he was locked in during the day, he screamed and bellowed so that the whole house resounded with it, and they were all afraid the police would arrive. He would suddenly, for no reason she could see, take off and run into the garden, and then out the gate and into the street. One day, she ran a mile or more after him, seeing only that stubby squat little figure going through traffic lights, ignoring cars that hooted and people who screamed warnings at him. She was weeping, panting, half crazed, desperate to get to him before something terrible happened, but she was praying, Oh, do run him over, do, yes, please.... She caught up with him just before a main road, grabbed him, and held the fighting child with all her strength. He was spitting and hissing, while he jerked like a monster fish in her arms. A taxi went by; she called to it, she pushed the child in, and got in after him, holding him fast by an arm that seemed would break with his flailing about and fighting.

What could be done? Again she went to Dr. Brett, who examined him and said he was physically in order.

Harriet described his behaviour and the doctor listened.

From time to time, a well-controlled incredulity appeared on his face, and he kept his eyes down, fiddling with pencils.

"You can ask David, ask my mother," said Harriet.

"He's a hyperactive child-that's how they are described these days, I believe," said old-fashioned Dr. Brett. She went to him because he was old-fashioned.

At last he did look at her, not evading her.

"What do you expect me to do, Harriet? Drug him silly?

Well, I am against it."

She was crying inwardly, Yes, yes, yes, that's exactly what I want! But she said, "No, of course not."

"He's physically normal for eighteen months. He's very strong and active of course, but he's always been that. You say he's not talking? But that's not unusual. Wasn't Helen a late talker? I believe she was?"

"Yes," said Harriet.

She took Ben home. Now he was locked into his room each night, and there were heavy bars on the door as well. Every second of his waking hours, he was watched. Harriet watched him while her mother managed everything else.

David said, "What is the point of thanking you, Dorothy? It seems everything has gone a long way beyond thank-yous."

"Everything has gone a long way beyond. Period." Said Dorothy.

Harriet was thin, red-eyed, haggard. Once again she was bursting into tears over nothing at all. The children kept out of her way. Tact? Were they afraid of her? Dorothy suggested staying alone with Ben for a week in August while the family went off together somewhere.

Neither Harriet nor David would normally have wanted to go anywhere, for they loved their home. And what about the family coming for the summer?

"I haven't noticed any rush to book themselves in," said Dorothy.

They went to France, with the car. For Harriet it was all happiness: she felt she had been given back her children. She could not get enough of them, nor they of her. And Paul, her baby whom Ben had deprived her of, the wonderful three-year-old, enchanting, a charmer-was her baby again. They were a family still! Happiness ... they could hardly believe, any of them, that Ben could have taken so much away from them.

When they got home, Dorothy was very tired and she had a bad bruise on her forearm and another on her cheek. She did not say what had happened. But when the children had gone to bed on the first evening, she said to Harriet and David, "I have to talk-no, sit down and listen."

They sat with her at the kitchen table.

"You two are going to have to face it. Ben has got to go into an inst.i.tution."

"But he's normal," said Harriet, grim. "The doctor says he is."

"He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are."

"What kind of inst.i.tution would take him?"

"There must be something," said Dorothy, and began to cry.

Now began a time when every night Harriet and David lay awake talking about what could be done. They were making love again, but it was not the same. "This must be what women felt before there was birth control," Harriet said. "Terrified. They waited for every period, and when it came it meant reprieve for a month. But they weren't afraid of giving birth to a troll."

While they talked, they always listened for sounds from "the baby's room"-words they never used now, for they hurt. What was Ben doing that they had not believed him capable of? Pulling those heavy steel bars aside?

"The trouble is, you get used to h.e.l.l," said Harriet. "After a day with Ben I feel as if nothing exists but him. As if nothing has ever existed. I suddenly realise I haven't remembered the others for hours. I forgot their supper yesterday. Dorothy went to the pictures, and I came down and found Helen cooking their supper."

"It didn't hurt them."

"She's eight."

Having been reminded, by the week in France, of what their family life really was, could be, Harriet was determined not to let it all go. She found she was again silently addressing Ben: "I'm not going to let you destroy us, you won't destroy me...."

She was set on another real Christmas, and wrote and tele phoned to everyone. She made a point of saying that Ben was "much better, these days."

Sarah asked if it would be "all right" to bring Amy. This meant that she had heard-everyone had-about the dog, and the cat.

"It'll be all right if we are careful never to leave Amy alone with Ben," said Harriet, and Sarah, after a long silence, said, "My G.o.d, Harriet, we've been dealt a bad hand, haven't we?" "I suppose so," said Harriet, but she was rejecting this submission to being a victim of fate. Sarah, yes; with her marital problems, and her mongol child-yes. But she, Harriet, in the same boat?

She said to her own children, "Please look after Amy. Never leave her alone with Ben."

"Would he hurt Amy the way he hurt Mr. McGregor?" asked Jane.

"He killed Mr. McGregor," Luke said fiercely. "He killed him."

"And the poor dog," said Helen. Both children were accusing Harriet.

"Yes," said Harriet, "he might. That's why we have to watch her all the time."

The children, the way they did these days, were looking at each other, excluding her, in some understanding of their own. They went off, without looking at her.

The Christmas, with fewer people, was nevertheless festive and noisy, a success; but Harriet found herself longing for it to be over. It was the strain of it all, watching Ben, watching Amy-who was the centre of everything. Her head was too big, her body too squat, but she was full of love and kisses and everyone adored her. Helen, who had longed to make a pet of Ben, was now able to love Amy. Ben watched all this, silent, and Harriet could not read the look in those cold yellow-green eyes. But then she never could! Sometimes it seemed to her that she spent her life trying to understand what Ben was feeling, thinking. Amy, who expected everyone to love her, would go up to Ben, chuckling, laughing, her arms out. Twice his age, but apparently half his age, this afflicted infant, who was radiant with affection, suddenly became silent; her face was woeful, and she backed away, staring at him. Just like Mr. McGregor, the poor cat. Then she began to cry whenever she saw him. Ben's eyes were never off her, this other afflicted one, adored by everyone in the house. But did he know himself afflicted? Was he, in fact? What was he?

Christmas ended, and Ben was two and a few months old. Paul was sent to a little nursery school down the road, to get him away from Ben. The naturally high-spirited and friendly child was becoming nervous and irritable. He had fits of tears or of rage, throwing himself on the floor screaming, or battering at Harriet's knees, trying to get her attention, which never seemed to leave Ben.

Dorothy went off to visit Sarah and her family.

Harriet was alone with Ben during the day. She tried to be with him as she had with the others. She sat on the floor with building blocks and toys you could push about. She showed him colourful pictures. She sang him little rhymes. But Ben did not seem to connect with the toys, or the blocks. He sat among the litter of bright objects and might put one block on another, looking at Harriet to see if this was what he should do. He stared hard at pictures held out to him, trying to decipher their language. He would never sit on Harriet's knees, but squatted by her, and when she said, "That's a bird, Ben, look-just like that bird on that tree. And that's a flower," he stared, and then turned away. Apparently it was not that he could not understand how this block fitted into that or how to make a pile of them, rather that he could not grasp the point of it all, nor of the flower, nor the bird. Perhaps he was too advanced for this sort of game? Sometimes Harriet thought he was. His response to her nursery pictures was that he went out into the garden and stalked a thrush on the lawn, crouching down and moving in a low fast run-and he nearly did catch the thrush. He tore some primroses off their stems, and stood with them in his hands, intently staring at them. Then he crushed them in his strong little fists and let them drop. He turned his head and saw Harriet looking at him: he seemed to be thinking that she wanted him to do something, but what? He stared at the spring flowers, looked up at a blackbird on a branch, and came slowly indoors again.

One day, he talked. Suddenly. He did not say, "Mummy," or "Daddy," or his own name. He said, "I want cake." Harriet did not even notice, at first, that he was talking. Then she did, and told everyone, "Ben's talking. He's using sentences." As their way was, the other children encouraged him: "That's very good, Ben," "Clever Ben!" But he took no notice of them. From then on he announced his needs. "I want that." "Give me that." "Go for a walk now." His voice was heavy and uncertain, each word separate, as if his brain were a lumber-house of ideas and objects, and he had to identify each one.

The children were relieved he was talking normally. "h.e.l.lo, Ben," one would say. "h.e.l.lo," Ben replied, carefully handing back exactly what he had been given. "How are you, Ben?" Helen asked. "How are you?" he replied. "No" said Helen, "now you must say, *I'm very well, thank you,' or, *I'm fine.' "

Ben stared while he worked it out. Then he said clumsily, "I'm very well."

He watched the children, particularly Luke and Helen, all the time. He studied how they moved, sat down, stood up; copied how they ate. He had understood that these two, the older ones, were more socially accomplished than Jane; and he ignored Paul altogether. When the children watched television, he squatted near them and looked from the screen to their faces, for he needed to know what reactions were appropriate. If they laughed, then, a moment later, he contributed a loud, hard, unnatural-sounding laugh. What was natural to him, it seemed, in the way of amus.e.m.e.nt was his hostile-looking teeth-bared grin, that looked hostile. When they became silent and still with attention, because of some exciting moment, then he tensed his muscles, like them, and seemed absorbed in the screen-but really he kept his eyes on them.

Altogether, he was easier. Harriet thought: Well, any ordinary child is at its most difficult for about a year after it gets to its feet. No sense of self-preservation, no sense of danger: they hurl themselves off beds and chairs, launch themselves into s.p.a.ce, run into roads, have to be watched every second.... And they are also, she added, at their most charming, delightful, heart-breakingly sweet and funny. And then they gradually become sensible and life is easier.

Life had become easier ... but this was only as she saw it, as Dorothy brought home to her.

Dorothy came back to this household after what she called "a rest" of some weeks, and Harriet could see her mother was preparing for a "real talk" with her.

"Now, girl, would you say that I am interfering? That I give you a lot of unwanted advice?"

They were sitting at the big table, mid-morning, with cups of coffee. Ben was where they could watch him, as always. Dorothy was trying to make what she said humorous, but Harriet felt threatened. Her mother's honest pink cheeks were bright with embarra.s.sment, her blue eyes anxious.

"No," said Harriet. "You aren't. You don't."

"Well, now I'm going to have my say."

But she had to stop: Ben began banging a stone against a metal tray. He did this with all his force. The noise was awful, but the women waited until Ben stopped: interrupted, he would have raged and hissed and spat.

"You have five children," Dorothy said. "Not one. Do you realise that I might just as well be the mother of the others when I'm here? No, I don't believe you do, you've got so taken over by ..."

Ben again banged the tray with his stone, in a frenzy of exulting accomplishment. It looked as if he believed he was hammering metal, forging something: one could easily imagine him, in the mines deep under the earth, with his kind.... Again they waited until he stopped the noise.

"It's not right," said Dorothy. And Harriet remembered how her mother's "That's not right!" had regulated her childhood.

"I'm getting on, you know," said Dorothy. "I can't go on like this, or I'll get ill."