‘The Hanburys have never been able to acknowledge their divisions,’ I said grandly, somewhat surprising myself.
‘What do you mean?’ Lisa visibly perked up.
‘They’re so socially and materially conformist, yet so terrified of seeming conventional,’ I continued, finding that it was not about the Hanburys but the Alexanders that I was speaking, ‘that they violate the laws of emotion as a substitute for real acts of rebellion.’
‘Adam’s stepmother is a very dark lady,’ Lisa presently agreed, apparently inspired by my talk of laws being violated. ‘She’s a very dark, unhappy lady. Did you know that when they were younger she used to deny the children food?’
‘Did she?’
‘She denied them fruit!’ Lisa looked me in the eye as she levelled this obscure charge. ‘Adam told me that once she put some beautiful peaches in a bowl on the table and every time the children asked if they could have one she said no. Then one day they found that the peaches had gone bad. Also,’ she continued in a low voice, carefully hooking her hair behind her ears, ‘she tried once to stop Adam and me getting married.’
‘Why?’ I said, surprised.
‘Because of my — you know. My previous life.’ She leaned forwards on the edge of the bath. ‘She told Adam,’ she continued discreetly, speaking only with her lips, ‘that he shouldn’t saddle himself with someone else’s child. I don’t know if that’s exactly how she put it, but that was the gist, you know. She offers to have Janie sometimes but Janie won’t go. The first time she met her Janie thought she was a witch.’ Lisa sat back and looked at me triumphantly. ‘It was quite embarrassing, actually. The thing is, the baby isn’t even related to her,’ she concluded irrelevantly. ‘I have to keep reminding Adam that Vivian and the baby aren’t actually blood relatives.’
I had a pressing need to get out of the bathroom, whose close, tiled walls seemed to be amplifying but not ventilating our conversation. Besides, we had left Hamish and the baby downstairs in the richly carpeted sitting room, whose dense furnishings would no doubt absorb any sounds of alarm. Lisa rose from her seat on the bathtub as though I had spoken this thought aloud: I followed her through the bedroom, lapped suddenly by warm sensations of gratitude which caused my personal powers of discrimination to cleave to my skin like wet clothing. It was not the first time in our brief acquaintance that Lisa had caused me to feel this singular form of discomfort. Not only had she elected to look after Hamish in the mornings while Adam and I were up at the farm, but already she actually claimed to feel some fondness for him. When we came back from the farm I had found him sitting on her lap on the sofa in a synthetic-coloured swamp of baby toys, watching television; and while I questioned her methods I was overwhelmed all the same by relief. Nevertheless, I sensed that Lisa was a person who could say anything, and would, given sufficient time. I was no closer, after our conversation in the bathroom, to understanding her relationship with Adam: in fact, if anything I was more mystified, now that I knew he had not only ‘saddled’ himself with the encumbrance of a child but winkled its mother out of the humble but tenacious bosom of her family in the distant north-east, for the express purpose of being with her. It seemed to run contrary to his sense of personal destiny, not to mention that of geographical limitation.
Hamish and the baby were exactly as we had left them, seated on the carpet with their faces lifted, transfixed, to the television screen. They sat in its blue light as though in the light of an icon. Their submission was slightly sinister. I noticed that Lisa, with the use of various aids, was adept at plunging children into immobility or, if required, rousing them to action. She could get them from one state to the other in seconds, guiding them on their criss-crossing paths through the hours like someone in a control tower directing air traffic. Similarly she appeared able to do several things at once, as though her body were inhabited by more than one consciousness. She had the unnerving habit, when speaking to another adult, of removing sweets from their wrappers with her hands without her eyes ever leaving your face, so that when a child came to interrupt she could insert one directly into its open mouth. While preparing to take me on her tour of the house she had placed the children in front of the screen, switched it on, and then, like an anaesthetist, waited for a count of ten, before the end of which they had happily vacated their bodies.
‘A hot potter,’ Hamish said when he noticed us.
This utterance, which I had to conclude was more or less meaningless, was nonetheless typical of a recent advance in Hamish’s development: I hoped, at least, that it was an advance, consisting as it did of phrases of verbal nonsense spoken earnestly, as though they contained coded information of the highest importance. This scrambled form of communication was slightly distressing to me. I felt sure that Hamish did have important things to say, particularly about his mother, whom he saw on the eve of our departure repeatedly smashing my watch against the kitchen wall while it was still attached to my wrist. Rebecca had never censored her outbursts for Hamish’s sake: on the contrary, I sometimes thought she needed to have him there, as the courtroom needs the stenographer, in order to see the precise record of her actions detailed on his blank little face. Rebecca claimed to believe that it was better for him to see her as she really was, while feigning a certain blindness to the effects of these exposures. I sometimes felt that Hamish was closer to madness than Rebecca herself, though I did not endear myself to her by saying so.
‘A hot trotter,’ he said.
‘What’s that he’s saying?’ marvelled Lisa, deceived by the mysteriously accomplished tone of his delivery.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘But at least it’s in English. I used to worry that he might be tuned into a different station.’
Hamish had started doing something strange with his hands, which involved holding them above his head and rotating them very fast, as though he were spinning a dinner plate on each one. This was a relatively new habit, which I had noticed with a sinking heart.
‘Are you saying you think there’s something wrong with him?’ said Lisa.
I had by now grown used to the way she leaned forward in order to communicate something she considered to be private. The movement caused the blade of her hair to swing disconcertingly towards my face. Lisa gave the impression that it was of no interest to her whether there actually was something wrong with Hamish or not. What concerned her was whether I thought there was. The sitting-room window extended almost the entire width of the room: it faced on to the back garden, and hence gave an unconfined view of a confined space. The effect was distinctly odd. The room was saturated with grey daylight. The fenced rectangle of the garden lay unbearably exposed in every detail.
‘Not at all,’ I said.
‘He’s just a little delayed,’ she continued, as though he were a train. ‘He’s obviously very bright.’
I had heard these two statements juxtaposed so many times that their true nature was beginning to make itself known to me. Taken separately they were relatively harmless, but together they functioned like the converging arms of a pair of pliers bent on working Hamish loose from his happy entrenchment in obscurity. He turned his head and looked at us over his shoulder. His large, highly modelled face was startling and slightly grotesque in the room’s relentless neutrality. Hamish looked good against a more gothic background. He said something that sounded like ‘Derry doctor’ and returned his attention to the screen.
‘That’s Adam back,’ said Lisa, although it was unclear how she had deduced this from the torpor of the house. A minute or two later, though, the front door banged and Adam called out from the hall. Lisa sat on the sofa, plump, almost mystically calm, as though directing him in with rays from her unblinking eyes. I sat on the thick carpet with the children. In the warm, well-sealed room we were like dumb creatures waiting in a nest.