“About the other night—”
“Yes,” Frank said. “Splendid do. Good food—if I say so myself—and the best of company. You must come again.”
Colin stared at him hard. “Oh, splendid do,” he said, with a heavy irony that did not seem to strike home. “A most civilised evening.”
“Excellent raconteur, Edmund Toye. And young Elvie the life and soul. Sylvia enjoy herself?”
“Hugely.”
“Get home all right?”
“In one piece.”
“Good, good, good. Well, better shuffle off now and sing a hymn, hadn’t we?”
Colin followed him. He felt benumbed, stupefied. What had he expected? Perhaps that Frank intended to sue him or at least knock him down, that Mrs. Toye had been taken to a psychiatric ward, that Yarker was in police custody. It seemed miraculous that anything short of murder should have come out of such an evening. Perhaps Frank was suffering some type of amnesia. He passed Stewart Colman in the corridor. Colman nodded amiably.
“I say,” he said, “did you nick Frank’s file?”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“All part of the fun,” Colman said. “We had a nude treasure hunt. Looked for it till dawn. What did you want to go rushing off for? Oh yes, they’re all right, Frank’s parties, if you can put up with the literary chitchat. That can be a bit of a bore.”
Is this how people live? Colin thought. I must have no idea how people live. At my age…He followed Colman.
“Stewart—”
“Got to get along.”
Colin took him by the arm. “Listen to me.” They came to a halt in the corridor seething with children. “Was he serious about writing that novel?”
“Good Lord, how do I know?” Sounding surprised, Colman disengaged his jacket from Colin’s grasp. “Doesn’t pay to take anything too seriously, you know. Life’s too short.”
“Look at it,” Evelyn said. “You can’t say it’s human.” It was Tuesday morning. She brought the child over to show to Muriel, pointing out the strange large ears, the wrinkled skin, lifting the flaccid limbs and letting them drop. “It cries all the time,” she added, unnecessarily. “You never cried, Muriel. You were as quiet as a lamb.”
Unable to bear the feel of the child’s damp skin, she crossed the room and put it back in the box. “It might be a changeling,” she said. “I’m not saying it is, but it could be. It didn’t seem as bad as this when it was born.”
Of course, she’d not been able to stay with Muriel all the time. Only a few minutes after the birth, she’d gone out to answer a call of nature. And any time, during the night or when she was down in the kitchen putting the kettle on; there was plenty of opportunity for a substitution to be made.
“Because I wouldn’t want you to think,” she said generously, “that it’s some shortcoming of yours. Not necessarily. You’re bound to be disappointed in it. Are you disappointed, Muriel?”
From Muriel, no answer. Head twisted away. No gratitude for her mother’s concern.
“If it is a changeling, you ought to give some thought to getting the real one back. The ones they take lead miserable lives. They look in at people’s windows. Their growth’s stunted. They’re always cold.”
Muriel took the feeding bottle and thrust it at the child once again. The ugly little face contorted, sucked a little, twitched away.
“It’s a simple matter, Muriel. You have to find some water, a river or something. Float it along. And sometimes they pick it up and give you your own back. Well, you ought to have something better than this after all you’ve been through. You’re entitled. I’m not saying it always works. There’s a risk, of course. A real baby would be nice, though, wouldn’t it?”
Muriel seemed dubious. She peered at the baby, as if she thought that, after all, this was her own, this was what she was entitled to. Did they have stores of them, she wanted to know, real babies stacked up by river banks?
“Fairly cunning, aren’t you?” Evelyn said in admiration. “Like to pull a little trick on them, would you? Well, you’re right, even if it’s not a changeling it certainly looks like one.”
Muriel had always been credulous. Evelyn had noticed that she believed most things she was told. I am perhaps halfway to believing myself, she thought, there are plenty of subhumans planted among the real men and women; you learn about them if you read the newspapers: rapists, vandals, people who make nail bombs. On the bus, she had been reading the headlines, and it made her feel queasy to think about it all.
“A real baby…” she said, her voice softening. “We could do the place up a bit. Decorate. Perhaps we could have television. Ah, you understand that, don’t you?”
She looked down at the baby, and saw Clifford again, sitting behind its eyes; behind the glassy layers the years peeling away. She picked up Muriel’s cardigan from a chair, and threw it over the baby’s face.
CHAPTER 8
Wednesday. They hadn’t slept. The incessant mewing kept them awake. At least it was too feeble for the neighbours to hear. “We’ll not put it off any longer,” Evelyn said. “We’ll take it up to the canal this afternoon. There’ll be nobody around. If they give us a nice little baby, Muriel, we’ll take it out in a pushchair, you and me. In the spring. We’ll go to the Parade.”
More likely, of course, the Welfare would catch up with them and take it away. They couldn’t be avoided for ever. Still, Muriel was entitled to a bit of hope. Except for the baby, the house was so quiet. No incursions from the spare room. Everything held its breath. Another lightbulb had gone. The weather was getting colder, and the house was full of draughts.
By now there was no more milk. Muriel had spilled a lot, wasted it, even drunk some of it herself. Evelyn didn’t feel up to another shopping trip. It had a strange effect on her, making her speak out to people like that, tell them confidences. Least said, soonest mended. There were people everywhere waiting to report you to the Welfare. Look at that Florence Sidney.
Yes, look at her. Evelyn stood at the window on the landing. What did Florence think she was doing, standing outside by her dustbin and staring up at the roof?
Evelyn stopped at the door of the spare room and listened. She distrusted this unnatural silence. After a minute or two she thought she heard a faint stir behind the door, a grumbling, a low mutter of protest. I’ll fetch you a sop, something that’s belonged to it, palm you off.
“Well now, Muriel, are you ready?” she asked, going downstairs. “It’ll be dark before long. You carry the box. Sink or swim, we’ll have to see. We all take our chances in this world.”
“All right,” Muriel said.
They put on headscarves, and their thick coats. The baby seemed exhausted now, and had stopped crying; it didn’t seem likely to attract attention. Evelyn put a towel over its face, and folded over the flaps of the box.
The clock struck half-past three as they set out. It was one of those dank cheerless days so frequent in February and March; the ground was sodden underfoot, the trees dripping, and the sun a white haze low on the horizon. They passed no one on Lauderdale Road, no one on Turner’s Lane. From here a muddy path led across an open field. There was a faint scrabbling from within the box, and Muriel tightened her arms around it. She looked about her as she walked. It was months since she’d had an outing, of course. “Don’t dawdle, Muriel,” Evelyn said crossly. “At my age you feel the cold.”
On the canal bank, their shoes squelched in a mulch of old newsprint and last autumn’s leaves. There was no one about. There was a wrecked car rusting away, and broken glass on the path. The water was stagnant, green. A wind was getting up.
When Evelyn turned back the flaps of the box, Muriel thrust her hands out officiously, as if to pick the infant up. Evelyn slapped them away. She removed the towel and the sheet that had lined the box, put them aside, and lowered the box onto the surface of the water. She straightened up; her back ached from bending. In the last few minutes it had seemed to grow darker. The wind will push it along, Evelyn thought. They watched the box growing sodden, tipping into the water. “It must be moving,” Evelyn said. Then darkness sucked it away.