Lining the wall to my right are hundreds of brown and green bottles with glass stoppers on shelves that reach up to the ceiling, all labeled neatly across the front. As I look along them I begin to sense a deeper disturbance growing within my new person. Some of the bottles have short chemical names: TANNIC ACID, IODINE, AETHER, BORAX. Others have their empirical formula only: KCL, PSO2, NO2, and the rest have names that fill up the entire side of the bottle: salicylas antipyrini salipyrine, chloret hydrargyros merc.dulc. calomel, hydrochl. Ephedrine, hydras chlorali, salicyl. Nitric. C. themobrom-natrio loco diurectine.
Beyond the chemicals is the fume-cupboard window from which I can see far down towards the village. I can’t stop thinking about Vivien at the graves today. I’m trying to recall every moment of her being there, her posture as she stopped at each one, her expression as she read the words, wishing I had been born with the understanding to decipher what each look or movement means, how it translates into feelings.
I don’t care if Vivien hated Clive, and as I’ve said before, I don’t really care anymore how Maud got to the bottom of the cellar steps. It isn’t the cruelest thing I can think of. The cruelest thing is Vivien. It’s Vivien walking past her own son’s grave without noticing, not even acknowledging his lonely bones. It was that she didn’t walk by him on purpose, that she didn’t shun him but seemed to have forgotten he ever existed. That made it worse. In my mind’s eye I remember how her heel glanced carelessly off the corner piece of flint that Arthur had arranged there, pushing it just below the surface, a little helping hand towards the grave’s inevitable erosion. Arthur had known everything there was to know about his son. I knew two things about him: that he was purple and he was wise. Vivien knew nothing. I felt deep down that there was something wrong with that, that it was what Arthur was talking about all those years ago. It was why he wouldn’t try for another with her and why he saw in her someone he didn’t like.
Arthur had wanted to talk about the boy and the birth, and keep his memory alive, and Vivien didn’t want to think about it but to try for another baby as soon as possible. Arthur would never let her try again, he said, because she hadn’t even looked at this one.
“You can’t choose your children. You can’t take the best ones, the ones that survive, the ones that are born the right color,” I heard him arguing with her some days later. “If you’ve decided to have that child you must take it, whatever happens. You must claim him.”
Back then I listened to Arthur’s tirade and nodded, saying little. At the time I didn’t really understand his anger with Vivien, or his disappointment at her reaction. But he thought I did, because I listened to him and didn’t argue.
Four days after the birth Arthur and I were in The Angel at Hindon. He was driving me home from the hospital, which had kept me in to recuperate, and we’d stopped for lunch. We sat at a small round table by an open fire with old brass cauldrons and tongs hanging above our heads, waiting for someone to take our order. Our trip had been near silent. Then Arthur leaned towards me and put his hand on my knee. “Ginny,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”
Sorry? Sorry they were slow to take our order? Sorry that Vivien had gone, distraught, back to London and not resurfaced yet? Sorry that he too would have to leave me and go back to London soon? I could think of so many sorries.
Finally he clarified it: “I’m so sorry our baby died.”
Our baby? I had spent well over a year conditioning myself that it wasn’t my baby. I had been trained to say, “It is not my baby, I will not be its mother,” and, quite honestly, I didn’t feel like he was mine in the slightest. Not for a moment. No maternal instinct kicked in to fight against giving him away. I had felt no bond with him and I had known he wasn’t mine. I didn’t even think about the biology. To me, I was the carrier—that was it—and now Arthur was looking to me to be the boy’s mother. So Vivien disowned him and he wanted to give him back to me. I hadn’t asked for a child, and I hadn’t asked for Vivien’s burden of grief when she’d got a dead one. If it survived it was hers; if it died, it was for me to mourn.
So I tried, for Arthur’s sake, to be the baby’s mother, but I didn’t really feel it. We named him Samuel during that lunch in The Angel and Arthur had his gravestone designed at much cost and we both watched him buried alongside the freshly turned grave of his grandmother.
Although at the time I hadn’t understood Arthur’s desperation for his dead son to have a mother, all that changed yesterday when I saw his mother step right over him. It was the strangest feeling: from that moment on he was not hers but mine, as if my latent maternal feelings were ushered out of apathy, pricked into life full of fierce revenge. How dare she throw away the son I had entrusted to her? If Samuel had grown up and not done as well as she’d wanted, if he’d been slow or retarded, would she have thrown him back to me then?
Finally I understand Arthur and his anger. I understand that the words on the headstone—no less loved—have real meaning, and for the first time they don’t just apply to Arthur but to me also: it’s a yearning, heartbreaking love that I’ve never known before, a part-of-me-missing kind of love.
I stare out of the laboratory window into the silver darkness and suddenly I feel him there, even though he’s been there all along. I think of the flints and the still mound of earth and I want to go back and, like a wild woman, desperately paw at the ground, dig him up and hold him, just hold his lonely bones, claim him, own him, be his mother, all because his real mother was too selfish to have him.
I’d love to be able to tell Arthur my change of feelings now. I’d like to have all those conversations about Samuel he wanted back then, right now, nearly half a century too late. But, of course, Arthur will be nearing the end of a multitude of eras in his own life. The brief liaison with Vivien and me, and the birth of Samuel, will now seem such a tiny speck on the landscape of his past, hardly of any consequence, while I see now that the very same speck—up close a perpetually deepening well for Vivien and me—has always remained the focal point of our lives, and for all those years we must have been only pretending to walk on into the horizon.
After we had buried Samuel, I saw Arthur once more. It was five years later in exactly the same spot, when he turned up unexpectedly at Clive’s funeral. He said he’d come to see how I was. He hadn’t changed, except he was now remarried.
Less than a handful of people—Arthur, two nuns from the Anchorage and I—watched Clive’s coffin lowered into place next to Maud’s and Samuel’s in the St. Bart’s graveyard extension. The nuns said Clive had eased himself towards death as earlier he’d eased himself towards madness.
The bottles lining the shelves in our laboratory wouldn’t, to you, look in any particular order. They certainly aren’t alphabetical but, believe me, they have a very distinct arrangement, an order of use, those used most often the nearest to hand, rather like the QWERTY arrangement of keys on a typewriter. Those most frequently used in the same preparations are grouped together and those that have a similar function—for example, restoring colors in the wing, or relaxing a specimen from rigor mortis—are also assembled together. I scan the wall to take in the ones I recognize most easily: Sol. camphor. spirit, Boric acid, Bromet. Kalic., Naphaline, Carbolic acid. I like saying the names. I don’t mind admitting to you that I feel proud to know what they are and what each one can do. I’m glad I’m an expert and have all that knowledge that so many ordinary people don’t. My eyes wander to the bottles a couple of shelves up, set high on their own to the far left of the others. It’s the poison shelf, the anesthetics and the killing fluids. Each bottle is marked with a large white skull and crossbones, some with a red triangle too, and the bold red words CAUTION POISON in case the symbols haven’t given a clear enough indication of the potency of the fluid within: Sol. ammonia spirit anis, Potassium Bromide, Nuics Vomictincture, Sol.peroxyd. hydrogenii, Aether 1.5/5 g sol.