“It looks quite valuable,” Evelyn said. “Where on earth did you find it?”
“Where the birds live in the cliff. I climbed up to see if I could see any baby birds. Not to scare them or take eggs away or anything, just to pat them.”
“Now don’t get off the track, angel, please. All I want is a straight plain story.”
But to Jessie there was no such thing as a straight plain story. All the details were equally important. How could she describe finding the watch without telling about the baby birds she was looking for, and why, and whether she found them, and how the cormorants kept house?
“They live on fish,” Jessie said. “Like eagles. There’s a story in a book at school about eagles and their nests weighing a thousand pounds. But not these birds. They just have holes to live in. I didn’t find any eggs or babies but I found the watch. There was bird-stuff all over the cliff and on the watch, too. Only I polished it off.” She added thoughtfully, “Maybe someone hid it there.”
“I don’t think so. Don’t start imagining things. Someone probably lost it, from the top of the cliff.”
“They can’t have. I often drop little stones over and they always land at the bottom, on the beach.”
Evelyn hesitated, knowing Jessie was right, that the cliff, at the spot where the cormorants lived, was slightly concave. It would be impossible for an object dropped from the top to be caught on one of the ledges.
“I could ask Daddy,” Jessie said. “Or Mrs. Wakefield.”
“A watch?” Mrs. Wakefield said. “That’s odd. No, I know nothing about any watch, nothing...”
“What’s that in the trunk?”
“Billy’s toys and some of his clothes.” A linen picture book, a doll with a wooly yellow wig, a teddy bear with one eye and one ear, a striped jersey, a pair of pajamas without a string — Billy’s. “I haven’t quite decided what to do with them.”
You could give them to me, Jessie thought. I could play with them and dress up for fun. But the words remained unspoken; death lay in the folds of the clothes like mothballs.
The trunk gaped at her and suddenly closed its mouth with a click of teeth. She jumped back, as if the teeth had barely missed catching her hand or her foot.
“I could give some of them to you,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “Would you like that?”
“No, thank you,” she said faintly. “I give some of my own things away all the time to the people in Europe.” She edged away toward the door. “I’ve got to go now. My mother’s waiting.”
Mrs. Wakefield locked the trunk. “You tell her — tell her I don’t know anything about the watch. As far as I’m concerned you can keep it.”
I hate lying to a child, she thought. And yet it’s for her sake that I’m lying.
With a sound of mourning she leaned against the trunk. The beat of her heart was loud and hard, as if the heart itself had become an external organ suspended on a chain between her skin and her clothes. She felt weak from the strain of lying, and the sudden shock of seeing the watch again, not in John’s pocket, but dangling from Jessie’s hand and still ticking. Still ticking after all this time, after the wind and the weather, the sea fogs, the malignant sun.
John had kept it in his pocket, and sometimes Billy sat on his knee and held the watch against his ear, listening to the mystery of the hours, the passing of the minutes that would never pass again.
Billy sat, quiet and heavy, wearing the watch like a golden earring. He had a watch of his own, a fat silver one, and its sound was louder than that of his father’s watch, but cold. It was nicer to lean against his father’s chest and hear, besides the ticking, the rise and fall of a heart, the faint rumble of a stomach; to smell tobacco and sweat and shaving lotion; to feel tiny wire whiskers that stung when they were touched.
“You’d better get down now, Billy. You’re getting awfully heavy. Wait now. Be careful of the watch.”
He did not want to leave the warm moving womb of his father’s lap, but he was thrust out, into birth. He looked with hate at the hands that pushed him. These hands with the fuzzy yellow hair were hostile. They had pulled him into the jaws of the sea, and now they pushed him away, they tore the watch from his ear. Hate, hate.
“Get down now, Billy. That’s a good boy. No, Billy, no! Get down... Janet,” he said. “Janet help me.”
She helped him. The bites on his wrist weren’t deep, but they bled inside like a mortal wound.
“John...”
“No, I’m all right. I... you’d better take him to his room.” She picked Billy up, and he hung in her arms like a sack.
“He didn’t mean it, John. You know he didn’t mean it.”
“Please. Take him away.”
She carried him to his room, shielding him with her strong arms. Her baby; a big boy, too heavy to be carried, but still a baby, not knowing what damage he could do.
When she returned she saw the watch lying face down on the rug, still ticking.
“He just doesn’t know his own strength, John,” she said.
“No.”
“Perhaps it’s a new phase, part of the improvement Miss Lewis talks about. He could be — well, asserting his independence. He doesn’t need us so much any longer.”
She thought of a dozen explanations, but she never thought that Billy hated to be born. Brought, reluctant, out of the womb, he could only find his satisfactions in an approximation of it. And, as he grew older, there were less and less of these satisfactions. He was too big to be carried, to sleep with Miss Lewis, to be held long in a lap. More was expected of him and less was given. Time was his enemy. He was eight years old, further and further away from the warm safety, the gentle rocking.
“He could be plain bored,” she said. “After all, other children get that way when they’re ready to take a new step forward.”
“What’s the use of talking, of trying to explain things?”
“I only want...”
“We can’t handle him anymore, Janet. He’ll have to be sent away to a school.”
“No, no! You promised me!”
“It’s a promise I can’t keep,” he said heavily. “We’ve lived here for a long time now, without friends. I’m beginning to feel — more than lonely, almost a little queer... I can’t tell you...”
“He’s our son, we can’t send him away. They couldn’t understand him as I do. They might be cruel to him.”
“Perhaps we’re the ones that are cruel.” The toothmarks on his wrist were vivid against his bloodless skin. “He seems to hate me lately. And sometimes I feel that... that I’m beginning to hate him in return.”
She couldn’t breathe for pain. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Worse to feel,” he said. “Much worse.” He stooped and picked up the unbroken watch.
“You need a change, John. You could take a trip. A cruise, perhaps.”
But he didn’t take a cruise. His departure was a final voyage on an unreturning ship.
Leaning against the trunk she saw, for a moment, the pattern of her life, with the black patches of death sewn in with steel by a steel hand. Though she called it fate, the steel hand was her own.
Outside, Mr. Roma rang the bells for lunch, the silver sleigh bell first, and then the cowbell to summon Jessie and Luisa from the woods.
Mrs. Wakefield dragged herself upright, dreading the questions she might be asked about the watch, already planning answers that seemed reasonable.
But the subject was carefully avoided during the meal, and she wasn’t sure whether her lie had been accepted as the truth, or as an excusable lapse in taste, like a belch.