The first bad days were got through, and then the funeral, with Zebedee and Clever in prominent positions as mourners. Attempts were made to telephone the Mission, but a voice the boys did not know said that Father McGuire had taken all his things away and the new headmaster was not here yet. Messages were left. Sister Molly, left a message, at once rang back, loud and clear though she was miles from anywhere. She said at once, ‘Are you thinking what to do about the boys?' She believed that probably work could be found for them at the Old Mission, looking after the AIDS orphans. When the priest rang back the line was so bad that only intermittently could be made out his concern over Sylvia, 'Poor soul, she did have to work herselfinto the grave.’And, 'If you could see your way to keep the boys it would be best.’And, 'It is a sad business here.'
The boys' griefwas terrible, it was inordinate, it was frightening their new friends, who agreed that everything had been too much: after all, these children – and that was all they were – had been torn from what they had known, then thrust into... but 'culture shock' was hardly appropriate when that useful phrase may describe an agreeable dislocation felt travelling from London to Paris. No, it was not possible to imagine what depths of shock Clever and Zebedee had suffered, and therefore no notice should be taken of faces like tragic masks and tragic eyes. Haunted eyes?
There was something that the new friends had no conception of, and could not have understood: the boys knew that Sylvia had died because of Joshua's curse. Had she been there to laugh at them, and to say, ‘Oh, how can you think such nonsense?' they might not have believed her, but the guilt would have been less. As it was, they were being crushed by guilt, and they could not bear it. And so, as we all do with the worst and deepest pain, they began to forget.
Clear in their minds was every minute of the long days while they waited for Sylvia to return from Senga to rescue them, while Rebecca died and Joshua lay waiting to die until Sylvia came. The long agony of anxiety – they did not forget that, nor that moment when Sylvia reappeared like a little white ghost, to embrace them and whisk them away with her. After that the blur began, Joshua's bony grip on Sylvia's wrist and his murderous words, the frightening aeroplane, the arrival in this strange house, Sylvia's death... no, all that dimmed and soon Sylvia had become a friendly protective presence whom they remembered kneeling in the dust to splint up a leg, or sitting on the edge of the verandah between them, teaching them to read.
Meanwhile Frances kept waking, her stomach clenched with anxiety, and Colin said he was sleeping badly too. Rupert told them that not enough thought had gone into this decision, that was the trouble.
Frances, waking with a start and a cry, found herself held by Rupert, ' Come on downstairs. I'll make you some tea. ‘And when they reached the kitchen, Colin was already at the table, a bottle of wine in front of him.
Outside the window was the dark of 4 o'clock on a winter's night. Rupert drew the curtains, sat by Frances, put his arm around her. 'Now, you two, you've got to decide. And whatever it is you do decide, then you've got to put the other choice clean out of your minds. Otherwise you'll both be ill.'
'Right,' said Colin, and shakily reached for the wine bottle.
Rupert said, 'Now look, old son, don't drink any more, there's a good chap.'
Frances felt that apprehension a woman may feel when her man, not her son's father, takes the father's role: Rupert had spoken as if it were William sitting there.
Colin pushed away the bottle. 'This is a bloody impossible situation.'
'Yes, it is,' said Frances. 'What are we taking on? Do you realise, I'll be dead by the time they qualify?'
Rupert's arm tightened around her shoulder.
'But we have to keep them,' said Colin, aggressive, tearful, pleading with them. 'Ifa couple ofkittens try to crawl out of the bucket they're being drowned in, you don't push them back in.' The Colin who was speaking then Frances had not seen or heard offor years: Rupert had not met that passionate youth. 'You just don't do it,' said Colin, leaning forward, his eyes holding his mother's, then Rupert's. 'You don't just push them back in.' A howl broke out of him: a long time since Frances had heard that howl. He dropped his head down on to his arms on the table. Rupert and Frances communed, silently.
'I think,' said Rupert, 'that there is only one way you can decide.'
'Yes,' said Colin, lifting his head.
'Yes,' said Frances.
'Then, that's it. And now put the other out of your heads. Now.'
'I suppose once a Sixties' household, then always a Sixties' household,' said Colin. 'No, that's not my little aperçu, it is Sophie's. She thinks it's all lovely. I did point out that it was not she who would be doing the work. She said she would muck in – with everything, she said.' He laughed.
Back in bed Rupert said, 'I don't think I could bear it if you died. But luckily women live longer than men.'
‘And I can't imagine not being with you. '
These two people of the word had hardly ever said more than this kind of thing. ‘We don't do too badly, do we?' was about the limit. To be so thoroughly out of phase with one's time does take a certain bravado: a man and a woman daring to love each other so thoroughly – well, it was hardly to be confessed, even to each other.
Now he said, ‘What was all that about the kittens?'
‘I have no idea. Not in this house, and I am sure not at his school. Progressive schools don't drown kittens. Well, not so their pupils can see. '
‘Wherever it happened, it went deep. '
‘And he's never mentioned it before. '
‘When I was a boy I saw a gang of kids torturing a sick dog. That taught me more about the nature of the world than anything else ever has. '
Lessons began. Rupert tutored Clever and Zebedee in maths: beyond knowing their multiplication tables they were as blank sheets, he said, but they were so quick, they could catch up. Frances found that their reading had been extraordinary: their memories retained whole tracts of Mowgli and Enid Blyton, and Animal Farm and Hardy, but they had not heard of Shakespeare. This deficiency she proposed to remedy; they were already reading everything on the shelves in the sitting-room. Colin came in with geography and history. Sylvia's little atlas had done good service, the boys' knowledge of the world was wide, if not deep; as for history, they did not know much beyond The Renaissance Popes — this being a book on Father McGuire's shelves. Sophie would take them to the theatre. And then, without being asked, William began teaching them from old textbooks, and it was this that really did them good.
William said he was unnerved by their application: he himself had to do well, but compared to them...’You'd think their lives depended on it,' and added, making the discovery for himself, ‘I suppose their lives do depend on it. After all, I can always go and be...' 'What?' enquired the adults, grasping at this opportunity to glimpse what really went on in his mind. 'A gardener. I could be a gardener at Kew,' said William gravely. 'Yes, that's what I'd really like. Or I could be like Thoreau and live by myself, near a lake and write about Nature.'
Sylvia had died intestate, and so, the lawyers said, her money would go to her mother, as the next of kin. A good sum it was, well able to see the boys through their education. Andrew was appealed to, as Phyllida's old mate, and, dropping into or through London, he went to see Phyllida, where this conversation ensued.
'Sylvia would have wanted her money to educate the two African boys she seems to have adopted.'