The baby gave Vivi a different focus. When she phoned she quizzed me on how I was feeling and how my body was changing, not to empathize with me but because she said she wanted to try to live my pregnancy. She said she wanted to know every feeling and thought and craving and discomfort so she could understand exactly what it was like to be pregnant, and I spent hours trying to recall every detail for her as my tummy grew bigger. She started to wear the things that I wore and eat the things I said I’d eaten. She said she imagined there was a baby inside her, even though I tried to convince her that even I couldn’t imagine one inside me, that I didn’t think much about it at all, that I often forgot I was pregnant. But she shrugged that off as peculiar to me, rather than a natural state of pregnancy. Arthur told me that whenever he returned to London he was interrogated—How was I walking? When did I get indigestion? Had he felt it kick or wriggle? How swollen were my ankles?—and sometimes, he joked, he came back just to get away from the questions about his last visit.
Vivi and I saw each other twice during my pregnancy. Each time we arranged to meet at Branscombe, on the coast, where we spent a day on the cliffs walking to Beer and picnicking in little coves, and a night snuggled up in bed together at a B and B across from the pub. We were our only family now, the two of us and the bump between us. The only thing she talked about was the baby, as if our relationship was singly based on it. She told me what a wonderful aunt I would make and how, when the child was older, we’d take it on holiday to France together.
I tried to persuade Vivi to visit Clive at the Anchorage with me, but she wouldn’t. I saw him once a week during that first year, but he never got over Maud’s death. He remained distant and apathetic. All he wanted to talk about was the moth research, but he wasn’t even interested in that in his usual way. It’s difficult to explain how his interest had changed: he didn’t seem keen to pick at the details anymore—the experimental methods, the results or who wanted to publish them—only to know that I was carrying on, that I had got back up on my feet without him and had some projects going again.
At first he dictated to me exactly what research I should be doing and which grants to apply for and on my following visits he’d badger me about whether I’d done it or not. In the end it was easier to just say I had. I pretended to apply for the grants and then, naturally, I had to say I’d won some and was getting along with the research. I talked to him for hours about imaginary mothing expeditions, made-up methods of tagging specimens and plotting migratory patterns, the results of fabricated assays and numerous fictitious scientific papers. I made up stories of my success. It was the only thing he wanted to hear. It was as if he had to know that I’d made a success of it all by myself, that he wasn’t needed; that I could cope, I suppose. I have no idea why it preoccupied him so but I wasn’t going to deny him so I reeled off as much as I thought he wanted to hear, even though—at that time—I still hadn’t yet found the motivation to get back into it all. Sometimes Clive threw in a question that flummoxed me, but eventually he gave that up too. He wanted to live the rest of his life believing that he’d put me on the path to success, and I didn’t see why he shouldn’t.
It was several months since Maud had died—near the end of my pregnancy—when I first noticed that Clive was going batty. Our conversations must have sounded extraordinary to anyone who happened to overhear them. Nothing Clive said seemed to make much sense anymore, and I could tell him anything and he’d believe it. Shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with acute dementia. Clive had deteriorated so quickly and suddenly after Maud’s death, it was as if he’d already guessed his future mental state and booked himself into a suitable institution in advance.
I stopped visiting him. Sister Vincent, his supervisor, said she thought it best for both of us. Best to remember him how he’d been before his mind was too diseased to be recognizable, she’d said. And when Clive died five years later, she revealed to me that by the end he had been beleaguered by demons. I think, in a roundabout way, she was trying to make me feel better by suggesting his death had been an escape from a sick and troubled mind.
I cross the new slatted bridge—thankful it’s replaced the log—to the footpath that rambles beside the brook, past St. Bartholomew’s church. The edge, once wild with brambles and undergrowth, has been neatly shorn by newcomers, ignorant of the damage they do and the wildlife they endanger by taming their countryside.
I walk past the stone humpback bridge that takes the lane over to Hembury and towards the church. As I approach I can hear a collection of rasping voices, and although I cannot catch every word, I recognize the General Confession and join in the incantation in my head: “…We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts…”
St. Bartholomew’s graveyard is tiny, bound by the brook on one side and the church on the other. I stop several yards away, crouching as best I can behind a laurel hedge so that I will be well hidden when the congregation comes out. I wonder if Vivien is sitting in her favorite spot, next to St. Bartholomew’s toes. I wonder if she’ll remember that her name is scratched onto the sole of his left foot.
I hear the low drone of the rector’s voice and I fill in the words I can’t quite catch from recollections of a distant past when Maud would lead her family to church on Sundays, and afterwards invite everyone to Bulburrow for coffee. I can’t understand why the sounds of the service release a sadness in me. Perhaps they remind me of when I was part of a family. When Vivi and I heard the bells we’d rush upstairs, knowing we had twenty minutes to get ready—find some stockings, wash our faces, brush our hair. In the hall we’d meet Maud, heavily perfumed and doused in jewelry, and Clive in his gray suit, fraying at the elbows, his mind not on the matter at hand. Then we’d walk, like a picture-book family, one parent to one girl, hand in hand, down the drive, through the stone pillars without their gates, along the single lane of the hamlet of Bulburrow to the tiny church. And I’d spend the next hour staring up at the small windows in the eaves and wondering not how we should behave in the house of God, but why anyone thought there was a God at all.
“…that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life, to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.”
The church’s small, high windows meant that even on the brightest day it was always gloomy inside. When you were eventually let out into the world you were blinded by fresh air and sunshine, which left me with the distinct impression that the outside world was the more spiritual of the two places.
My eyes shift to a flurry of red ants on the compacted earth beside me, hurtling over one another in their eagerness to get to and from their nest, a hole at the base of a birch whip. Peering closer, I see they are workers heaving neatly cut pieces of leaf into their nest, but I can instantly sense there is something amiss, something I can’t quite put into words. They seem a little too frantic, even for ants, breaking rank a little too often, almost out of control in their frenetic rush to feed their offspring. They’ve lost their sense of order. I dig my finger partway into the nest’s entrance and scoop away the top and there, at the back of the enclave, writhes a huge pinkish-white larva, squirming in its ugly embryonic form. My hunch has been validated and I click my tongue in a conceited tut. For a moment I wish someone was here to witness my intuitive expertise. I might have a poor understanding of people, but I have an instinct for insects. This isn’t the ants’ larva but an impostor that has ambushed the gentle partnership between ant and tree, where normally the ants feed off the tree’s leaves while fertilizing it with their droppings. But they have been tricked by this bulbous parasite. It’s taken command of the nest, tapping into the ants’ chemical signaling system, instructing them to fatten it up for summer while it rests up lazily. They tend the great white larva without realizing it and, in a few weeks, not satisfied with a vegetarian diet, it will also help itself to the ants’ own neglected larvae. It will gorge itself to immobility, but when it needs to move to its next victim’s nest, it will simply direct the ants, like little robots, to pick it up and carry it.