Читать книгу The President’s Child - Fay Weldon - Страница 5

On Jason’s sixth birthday Isabel woke with the feeling that something was wrong. She was launched suddenly into consciousness, one second lying in dreams, the next starting into alertness. She thought perhaps there was an intruder in the room, but of course there was not. Homer lay beside her as usual on the brass bed, on his side, relaxed and peaceful, legitimate and uxorious, the delicate skin of his eyelids stretched fine over his mildly prominent eyes. His face had the vulnerable, slightly raw look that faces do, which go bespectacled by day and naked by night.

He slept quietly. He always did. A man with a clear conscience, thought Isabel. Not weltering and hiding deep down somewhere beneath the levels of consciousness – but neatly and tidily, just below the surface, afraid of nothing because he had done no wrong. If Homer slept, what could be amiss?

Something. Jason? No. If she listened hard, as now she did, she could hear the rhythmic change in the stillness which meant that Jason too slept soundly in the room above.

Nothing unusual was happening outside in Wincaster Row. It was half-past six, too early for the milkman, the paperboy or the postman: those ritual early callers who come like the sun, to remind each household that it is not alone but owes a living, perforce, to the rest, and must soon get up and make it. Well, time enough.

The fright that woke Isabel did not diminish with the discovery that there was no cause for it; rather it intensified into a profounder apprehension: the feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

Work? But what could happen there? She had so far presented four late-night programmes for the BBC: they had gone successfully; she had a new two-year contract; the work was comparatively easy. True, it involved the professionalisation of the self, every Monday night, the handing over of the persona for consumption by millions; but that came easily enough, and was forgotten by Tuesday afternoon. Even if her contract was cancelled, and she was ignominiously dismissed, she would not see that as disastrous but as a practical problem. This sudden new fear, now so powerful that it made her catch her breath and hug her chest, had nothing to do with practicalities.

Jason’s birthday? In the afternoon he was to have an outing to the cinema with five school friends. That, although nothing to look forward to, was surely nothing to fear. In fact Homer was to return early from the office and take them to the cinema, while she would stay home and ice the cake and cut little sandwiches into animal shapes. The division of labour was fair, and had been accomplished, as usual, without acrimony.

‘It’s true I’ll get to see the film,’ said Homer, ‘and you won’t. But watching Superman II with five six-year-olds is a dubious pleasure. You’re sure you don’t want to do it the other way round?’

‘No,’ said Isabel. ‘Besides, you’d make the sandwiches with brown bread in spite of it being Jason’s birthday.’

‘Jason’s digestion doesn’t know it’s his birthday,’ said Homer.

Nothing there, surely, to have her sitting up in alarm in her lacy white bed, in the safety of the dark, green-papered walls, the gilt mirrors on the walls throwing back images only of what was familiar and loved.

Isabel got out of bed and went upstairs to Jason’s bedroom. She, who once slept in the nude, now slept in a nightie – as do the mothers of wakeful children – which served as dressing gown as well.

Jason slept on his back, arms outflung, an expression of benign calm on his face. At the foot of his bed were stacked presents, wrapped by Homer and herself the night before.

Jason’s American grandparents had sent a cowboy suit in real leather, with silver-plated holsters and guns.

‘Should we?’ said Homer. ‘Guns?’

‘It’s his birthday,’ said Isabel. ‘And everyone else does. And research shows that children deprived of the formalised expression of aggression via fantasy perform more aggressive acts than children not so deprived.’

‘How convenient,’ said Homer. But the guns were beautifully made, light, delicately filigreed, and Jason would be proud of them. So Homer sighed and added them to the pile.

There was no present from Harriet in Australia. There never was.

‘I don’t think my mother is a woman at all,’ Isabel had said to Homer the night before. ‘Not now. Once she was, but now she’s turned herself into the trunk of an old gum tree, and the sand has silted her up.’ Homer had kissed Isabel and held her hand and said nothing, for there was nothing to be said.

Harriet! Of course, that was it. Something wrong! Isabel went downstairs to the living room – the two ground floor rooms made into one – where the blinds were still down, and the two companionable glasses still stood from the night before, and three half-smoked cigarettes, evidence of Homer’s attempts to give up smoking by the idiosyncratic and expensive method of smoking less and less of each cigarette he lit. She telephoned Australia. She could dial direct now: she did not need the intermediary of a telephonist. Twelve numbers, and there was her mother, and her past.

The telephone rang and rang in her mother’s house, unanswered. The instrument stood in the window sill by the front porch, and whenever it rang grains of sand would jump and bounce around its base in a dance of amazement. Isabel had watched them, many times. Perhaps my mother is lying there on the kitchen floor, she thought, on the other side of the fly screen, and that’s why she doesn’t answer. She’s dead, or had a stroke, or a heart attack; or she’s been raped and robbed; or perhaps she has a boyfriend at last and stays out nights.

A tune rang through her head. A folk singer had sung it on last week’s show:

‘Bad news is come to town, Bad news is carried, Some say my love is dead, Some say he’s married.’

Or perhaps she no longer answers the phone. Eight years since I last saw her. She has sunk finally back into herself; allows me to live her life for her.

The ringing stopped. Her mother said hello.

‘Hello, Mother.’

‘Oh, it’s you, Isabel. How are you, chicken?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Everything OK? Husband, kid and so on?’

‘Yes, they’re fine.’

Silence. Then:

‘It’s very late at night. I was in bed.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be? Nothing ever changes here. How about your end?’

‘I have my own TV show. Once a week. It’s only a chat show, but it’s a start.’

‘Good on you, chicken. Given up journalism, have you? Or did it give you up?’

‘It’s the same thing, really.’

‘Is it? I don’t watch much TV; I wouldn’t know. It all seems rather crude to me. But this is Australia, isn’t it. Down under, here. Enjoy it, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the main thing. Homer doesn’t mind?’

‘No. Why should he?’

‘You know what men are. What suits you never suits them. Listen, chicken, I hate to do this to you, but there’s some sort of goddamned hornet got through the hole in the fly door. This place is rusting to pieces. I’ve got to go.’

‘Of course, Mother. Is it big?’

‘Very.’

‘It’s Jason’s birthday today.’

‘Jason? Oh, the little boy. He must be – what? Four, five? Give him my love. I’m not much use as a granny, but at least I exist.’

‘At least you exist. Bye, Mum.’

‘Why don’t you just call me Harriet? Bye, sweetheart.’

Isabel crept back into bed, dry-mouthed, tasting dust and ashes. Everything was possible, yet everything was impossible. She could wring what she wanted out of the world – success and wealth and personal happiness – and it would do her no good. Her mother would always stand somewhere at the periphery of her vision, out of touch but never quite out of sight, watching her efforts and smiling, passing on the knowledge that the old would do better to keep to themselves – that in the end all goods must be pointless and all sweets tasteless. Better be deaf, and lame, and blind, than know these things too young.

Homer turned towards her in the bed. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Early.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Ringing my mother.’

‘Christ, why?’

‘It’s Jason’s birthday.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Not what I wanted her to say.’

‘What was that?’

‘Well done. Congratulations. I miss you. Why don’t you fly out and see me. The things your mother says to you.’

Homer enclosed her body, as he did her mind, the better to drive out doubt. He folded her in lean, well-exercised arms. He weighed, year in, year out, exactly what the chart at the doctor’s surgery said he should, increasing or decreasing his calorie intake as the need arose. He cycled to his office every weekday morning, and cycled home again every evening. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he rose early and ran almost the entire circuit of Regent’s Park.

‘I would live for ever if I could,’ he would say. ‘As I can’t, I will live as long as I can.’

He is a happy man, thought Isabel, he must be. And she wondered what it would be like, to have such an appetite for sheer existence, and when they made love, would try to catch it from him: but the very evenness of his temperament somehow prevented there being a surplus of whatever it was he had; he kept it to himself: worked upon her physically and rhythmically, and left it to her to create the heights and depths she felt appropriate, which, indeed, she did create and felt no disappointment in him, and could answer, in truth, were anyone impertinent enough to ask for details of her love life, ‘Why yes, it is very good. At any rate, neither of us looks elsewhere for partners.’

Homer’s body was as neat and orderly as his mind. It smelt sweet. Her response to it was easy and immediate. She trusted him. Homer did one thing at a time. She liked that. When he made love he focused his energies and concentrated upon the action of body against the body within, as if the least he could do for his partner was to keep the messiness of emotion out, to offer himself clean and whole and untired and uncluttered. The show of emotion, affection, came before and after. It was Isabel’s nature to do everything all at once: to concentrate the emotions of the day in herself, however inchoate and troublesome and tumultuous, and open her legs at night and be taken body and soul. And because she offered both, he took both, body and soul: but to her he offered one at a time. Body first – this, and this, like this, firm and decisive – soul after, icing on a cake, made a little too thin, slipping and sliding and insecure. ‘Was that all right, Isabel?’ And she would say yes, yes, of course, never quite recovering from one night to the next that he found it necessary to ask. What was, was.

He never cried out aloud in orgasm: the noise was stifled, as if there were always listeners, watchers. ‘Hush, hush,’ he’d say to her, if they were away and the bed creaked: or even at home, when she forgot, when something – perhaps only the accumulated emotions of the day – required a wilder protest, noisier relief. And since they were not the emotions he, Homer, had engendered, she had no real right to them at such a time, and so was readily hushed.

Sometimes, after they’d made love, she would weep and not know why.

‘What’s the matter?’ he’d ask.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t I do it right?’ he would ask, slipping and sliding into insecurity, and she would laugh, because he so patently did do it right, and brought her such gratification.

‘Of course you do it right,’ she’d say.

‘Then what is it?’

But she couldn’t say. Perhaps she wept for the sorrows of the world, or because all things end in death, or because she could not experience pleasure without experiencing too the pain of knowing it must end, or perhaps she wept because Homer never did.

Today at least there was an easy answer.

‘I’m crying because my mother upset me,’ she said. ‘I wish she loved me more.’

‘I wish my mother loved me less,’ said Homer. ‘Then I wouldn’t feel so responsible for her.’

‘We’ve both run out on them.’

‘Run out?’ said Homer in surprise. ‘I like to feel I’ve run in.’

Sometimes disagreeable people would suggest to Homer that he had run out on his country; that his anti-Vietnam stand made him anti-American: that living in Europe was a form of treachery to the country that had nurtured him.

‘If you say so,’ Homer would say, easily. ‘I guess you’re right. I’d rather the world was my oyster, than America, in its present mood, was my country. I’m doing nothing illegal. I pay my taxes. I just like it over here.’

But now that self-doubt and national guilt suffused the American soul as much as they did the European, he crossed the Atlantic more easily. He went to the States some three or four times a year, about his employer’s business, or to take Jason to visit his grandparents.

‘I know they support the handgun lobby,’ he’d say, ‘and so on and so forth, but a breath of air-conditioning and general efficiency can be quite stimulating.’

Isabel, unsure of her welcome, never went home to Australia. Sometimes she wondered, had Jason been a girl, whether Harriet would not have taken more interest in her grandchild.

‘Don’t worry,’ Homer would say. ‘We’ve made London our home, so let it be. We’ll build our dynasty downwards; we’ll forget what has gone before. Our past lies in our genes – that should be more than enough.’

Jason, the child of the continents, played happily in Wincaster Row, and wanted no other life.

Jason’s birthday – upstairs, Jason woke and yelled his greeting to the world. It was not his custom to meet the day with quiet murmurs or gentle moans, as did to all accounts the children of Homer and Isabel’s friends; rather, he liked to hail it with a shout of mixed elation and reproach.

Having released, as it were, the pent-up noise and passion of the night, he would then fall back into sleep for some five minutes before waking, permanently, for the second time. This time his yell would demand acknowledgement: it would go on until one or other of his parents appeared in his room.

‘I expect he’ll calm down when he reaches sexual maturity,’ Homer would say, ‘and has something else to do with the night and his energy.’

‘Five minutes’ grace,’ he said this morning, dabbing away at Isabel’s tears.

It was Homer’s turn to see to Jason, but since it was his birthday both parents went. Isabel got out of her side of the bed; Homer got out of his. They pulled on jeans, and T-shirts, and sneakers. The telephone rang. It was one of Isabel’s researchers, apologising for the earliness of the call, asking permission to contact a Norwegian architect breaking a world tour in London that day. Isabel’s anxiety disappeared. The world was back to normal. There were decisions to be made, money to be earned, the world to be mastered.

Homer opened Jason’s door: ‘Pa-ra-pa-ra-pa-ra,’ rattled Jason, firing his new filigreed gun at his parents, machine-gun style. ‘I’m six, I’m nearly seven, I don’t have to go to school today.’

‘Yes, you do,’ they said. Jason yelled and screamed and stamped. His parents reasoned and explained and cajoled.

Homer took Jason to school on Mondays and Wednesdays and collected him on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Isabel took him on Tuesdays and Thursdays and collected him on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Fridays both parents took him and collected him. The routine suited everyone.

Jason rode behind Homer on the bicycle when the weather was fine. Today was a bicycle day. Jason, still tear-stained, turned round to smile at his mother as they rode off. It was the smile of a prince to a courtier, immensely kind and immensely gracious. It was all-forgiving. It was clear to Isabel that he had always meant to go to school.

Isabel returned to the kitchen for coffee. The radio was on. The news had begun. Isabel listened half-professionally, half as an innocent citizen. She knew a sufficient number of journalists, had met enough editors, had worked on the fringes of enough news rooms, to know the processes by which balance was evolved: the half-accidental, half-purposeful ways in which bias was created, and truth, once again, slipped through the fingers and scattered, like a drop of mercury splashing on the floor: elusive in the first place, now gone for ever. Today some things were clear enough.

The long haul up to the American Presidential election had begun. The Primaries were under way. An outsider, the young Senator from Maryland, was looking good for the Democrats. His name was Dandridge Ivel – commonly known as Dandy Ivel. The commentator, speaking over a crackly line, was speculating on the advantages of having youth at the American helm again, harking back to the Kennedy era, and Camelot, and the golden age of the USA, before national shame, depression, monetarist policies, inflation, unemployment and street riots became commonplace topics of conversation. The age before responsibility – the adolescence of a nation. Perhaps the USA could be young and vigorous again, with Dandy Ivel at the helm? The commentator, his enthusiasm bouncing and crackling off some ill-functioning satellite, left no doubt that he was a Dandy Ivel fan.

Isabel sat down. The house was quiet. The big school clock on the kitchen wall ticked with one rhythm: the grandfather clock in the hall, proud amongst the bicycles and coats, ticked with another. The school clock had to be wound, every day; the grandfather clock every eight. It was Isabel’s job to wind the former, because she so easily forgot the latter. Homer never forgot.

She made herself a cup of coffee. Homer limited himself to two cups a day, and never drank the powdered kind. He feared the powdering agent was carcinogenic.

How would she ever live without Homer, who structured her life and surrounded her personality, and had made her lie-about, sleep-around personality into something so sure, so certain? Isabel clutched her arms across her chest. She had a pain. She rocked to and fro.

Of course she had known: she had seen or heard some mention somewhere of Dandy Ivel’s name, and repressed the knowledge. Of course she had woken up afraid; of course she had rung her mother; of course she had wept.

Dandy Ivel, President of the United States.

Once, Isabel thought, I believed that events were haphazard and unrelated. I believed that people could be loved and left, and that happenings receded into the past and were gone, and that only with marriage, or its equivalent, and the birth of children, did the real, memorable, responsible life begin. Now she saw it was not so. Nothing was lost, not even the things you most wanted to lose. All things move towards a certain point in time. Our future is conditioned by our past: all of it, not just the paths we choose, or are proud of.

There was nothing to be done except say nothing, do nothing, hug the knowledge to herself. All would yet be well.

After an earthquake a house changes. Ornaments stand minutely different on the shelves; books lean at delicately altered angles. The lamp hangs quiet again at the end of its cord, but all things have discovered motion: the power to act and upset. The house laughs. You thought I was yours, your friend. You thought you knew me, but see, you don’t. One day I may fall and crush you to death. It seemed to Isabel that the house she loved so much had changed. It mocked her, and laughed.

Isabel went next door to drink her coffee with Maia. Maia had quarrelled with her husband and run out into the street with tears in her eyes and stepped in front of a car, and lost her sight. Nothing is safe. Husbands, tears, cars, eyes. They won’t be sorry; you will.

Maia and Isabel talked, and said nothing very important. During the day Isabel went into her Hello-Goodnight office. Alice, the researcher, had found the Norwegian architect, but it transpired that these days he built underground houses, not solar-powered holiday homes. In consultation with the producer, Andrew Elphick, it was agreed that it would do neither the architect nor the programme any good were he to appear on it.

‘We’re an informative but light-hearted show,’ said Elphick. ‘Our viewers don’t want to switch off Hello-Goodnight and have nuclear nightmares about the end of the world. They’re common enough without us helping. Don’t you agree, Isabel? I don’t mind us being serious about feminism, racism, homosexuality or any of the other social trimmings, but I won’t devalue the currency of the end of the world in a late-night chat show.’

Isabel saw what he meant. So did Alice, who was thirty-two, and had just turned her back on promotion in order to work just one more time, every time, with Elphick, whom she loved. Elphick was tall and broad and sad and clever and had red hair and a boyish smile. He was forty, and married. He was not popular with the camera crews or studio staff, at whom he shouted and raged, as if married to them.

‘Isabel,’ he said to her as she left the room, ‘do you have a social conscience?’

‘Of course,’ she replied, startled.

‘I thought you did,’ he replied. ‘It’s rather like mine. We know where our duty lies. It’s to fiddle as prettily as possible while Rome burns, so that Nero throws us a penny or two.’

He was drinking already. It was his occupation on five days out of seven. On the other two, run-up days and recording days, he kept sober. His face was lined by scars – from going, rumour said, through too many car windscreens. He only ever slept with Alice when he was drunk – and was thus able to keep his sober self, his real self, faithful to his wife. He believed in individual probity and sexual responsibility, and would not have shifty or immoral people on his show.

‘The example of achievement,’ he would say. ‘That’s what the people need to see. The power of the individual to shape his own destiny.’

‘Her,’ said Isabel, in duty bound.

‘Or her,’ he said, bored.

He caught Isabel’s hand and kissed it, as she left, pressing it to his cold lips. She felt he was desperate rather than lecherous, and removed her hand gently.

‘You don’t really like me, do you?’ he said. ‘No one I like likes me. They put up with me but they don’t like me.’

‘Alice likes you,’ said Isabel.

Isabel went home in time to receive Jason and his friends. The television was on. The video played an endless stream of Popeye cartoons. Parents came and failed to go. Isabel, after all, was a celebrity. Homer, unusually, was late home. The noise was great: Jason paced up and down in the way he had when impatient or cross, head bent forward, hands clasped behind his back, like some adult in a ridiculous cartoon. It made the grown-ups laugh, and that made Jason crosser.

‘Daddy’s late,’ he said. ‘We’ll miss the film. It’s no laughing matter.’

Which made them laugh the more, to hear the adult phraseology from the child’s lips.

Jason’s friend Bobby, who could never be trusted near anything technological, flicked the switch on the video which sent it back to transmitted television. There, on the screen, pacing up and down, head bent forward, hands clasped behind his back, against a background of the stars and stripes, was Dandy Ivel.

‘For all the world like Jason,’ remarked Bobby’s mother.

‘Isn’t that a coincidence!’

‘Stop walking about like that, Jason,’ said Isabel.

‘Why?’ asked her son, not stopping.

‘It’s sloppy,’ said Isabel.

‘I think it’s rather cute,’ said Bobby’s mother.

Jason’s mother slapped her son on the cheek just as Homer came in.

‘Isabel!’ cried Homer, shocked.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Isabel, to both Jason and Homer. It was hard to say which one of them looked more hurt.

Homer switched off the television and ushered the children into a waiting taxi. Isabel iced the cake, while Bobby’s mother watched, critically. Isabel wished Bobby’s mother would go home, but she didn’t. She stayed to help and cut the bread for the elephant sandwiches; she cut far too thickly and failed to butter the slices to the edges.

‘Do you suffer much from premenstrual tension?’ asked Bobby’s mother.

She wore a lacy peasant blouse and a full cotton flowered skirt.

‘No,’ said Isabel, shortly.

‘I never saw you hit Jason before. And he wasn’t doing anything wrong, was he? I just thought it might be PMT. If men had to suffer from it they’d soon do something about it. I sometimes hit Bobby when I’m suffering. I’m sure most women do.’

‘Happy Birthday Jason,’ wrote Isabel, in green icing, by means of a rolled paper spill fastened with a safety pin.

‘A pity Jason isn’t older. He could enter a Dandy Ivel double competition.’

‘I hardly think so,’ said Isabel. ‘He’s fair and Dandy Ivel looks fairly dark to me.’

‘Jason has the kind of hair that’ll get darker as he grows older,’ said Bobby’s mother, getting the elephant shape wrong. ‘I’m afraid these sandwiches look more like hedgehogs than elephants.’

‘Anyway,’ said Isabel, ‘I think Ivel will fade into insignificance pretty quickly. I hardly think he’ll get the presidential nomination.’

‘I think he will,’ said Bobby’s mother. ‘I did an evening course in political sociology. I think the women of America are longing for a husband figure. They haven’t had one since Kennedy. Dandy Ivel looks like the kind of man who’d take care of you.’

Homer came home with six frazzled children. They loved the sandwiches and ignored the cake. Jason threw jelly at the wall. He was over-excited. The parents came early and stood around drinking sherry. The children quarrelled over going-home presents. Bobby set up a roar, in the cloakroom. ‘I’m afraid Jason must have bitten him,’ Homer came back to apologise. Bobby’s mother took him huffily home, saying she always slapped for biting. Bobby had been a biter, but not for long. She’d seen to that. Scratching was one thing, biting another.

‘It’s not good,’ said Homer, when all had departed, supper had been eaten and night fallen. ‘Jason is aggressive.’

‘Perhaps it’s the lead in the London water,’ said Isabel.

‘No,’ said Homer. ‘No excuses. I think he’s disturbed.’

‘Disturbed!’ cried Isabel. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Isabel,’ said Homer, ‘face it. He watched Superman II from the aisle, and when the usherette tried to make him sit in a seat he bit her ankle. There was a terrible scene.’

Isabel laughed.

‘It isn’t a laughing matter,’ said Homer. ‘I think he should see a child psychologist.’

‘What – Jason?’

‘It can’t do any harm, Isabel.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Isabel, but already she was terrified.

She had seen Jason as an extension of herself: flesh of her flesh, mind of her mind. But of course he was not. Jason, her child, was separated from her; the umbilical cord had been cut long ago but she had scarcely noticed. He no longer slept, ate, smiled, felt at her command. He did these things at his own prompting, not hers. She could no longer tuck him under her arm and run, should the going get bad. He could blame her for her decisions, dislike her for what she did, withdraw his love from her. Week by week he became less her perfect child and more his own imperfect master; yet still must suffer, as all children must suffer, because his mother’s love for him was not perfect either: had fallen away, in the light of his own growing independent will, from its moment of perfection, somewhere at the beginning.

Now here was Homer, who should love Jason, saying their son was imperfect and disturbed, implying the fault was hers. She could not protect Jason, because he was not hers to protect, being six and his own self. And she could not protect herself, because she was guilty.

‘Isabel,’ said Homer, alarmed by the expression on her face, ‘it’s no big deal. I just thought it might help. It does seem to me that Jason isn’t all that happy. We might be doing something wrong, between us. God knows what it is.

Perhaps it’s seeing you on the television screen when you ought to be here in the house.’

‘Ought to be?’

‘From Jason’s point of view, no one else’s. Christ, Isabel, he’s a kid of five.’

‘Six.’

‘Six. And Isabel, you’re under a strain yourself.’

‘Me?’

‘You slapped the poor child. Slapped him! And why? What was he doing wrong?’

‘Homer, I told him not to do something and he just went on doing it. There was a room full of screaming kids and bleating adults. I didn’t slap him hard, just enough so he’d listen.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘I can’t even remember. It wasn’t important. Homer, Jason and I are well within the limits of ordinary normal mother and child behaviour. Most mothers slap their children from time to time.’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘Most children are rude, aggressive, disobedient and defiant some of the time.’

‘I don’t think that’s true either. And most children don’t refuse to sit in their cinema seat and then bite the usherette’s ankle when she tries to move them. There, you’re smiling! I think you’re acting something out through Jason, Isabel, really I do, and Jason is reacting badly to it.’

‘You mean I should see an analyst?’

‘Heaven forbid,’ said Homer, wearily, and Isabel felt she had been unreasonable.

‘Anyway,’ said Isabel, ‘we don’t know any child shrinks. They’re out of fashion.’

‘I can always find out through my office,’ said Homer. ‘What’s ten years out of date for you TV people, we publishers are just about cottoning on to.’

‘Homer,’ said Isabel, ‘I get the feeling you resent my job. Shouldn’t we be talking about that, and not shifting the whole problem on to poor little Jason?’

‘I think,’ said Homer, ‘we are nearer to having a row than we ever have been. Let’s go to bed.’

Homer and Isabel went to their white lacy bed with its delicate brass tracery at head and foot, in a bedroom with dark green walls and purple blinds. It was tidy because Homer kept it so. Isabel tended to leave her clothes where they fell. But she made the bed every day, lovingly and neatly, and even sometimes ironed the cotton sheets, when they came from the washing machine, because they were so pretty.

Homer forgave Isabel more quickly than Isabel forgave Homer. Or so it seemed. In fact, it was fear that kept Isabel lying stiffly on her back, her flesh shrinking from her husband’s, and not anger at all. But he was not to know that. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Homer. ‘Look, if it so upsets you I’ll never mention the matter of Jason and a shrink again.’

‘Good,’ said Isabel.

‘Then turn round and kiss me.’

‘No. I can’t. I don’t know why.’

‘You see,’ said Homer, ‘it wasn’t only that he bit the usherette and there was this fuss, but afterwards he denied it. He really honestly didn’t seem to remember it. That was what really got me. I don’t think the other kids noticed much. It was the bit when Superman throws the villain into the Coca-Cola sign. It was actually a shockingly violent film – not at all like Superman I, which was innocent.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Isabel, ‘I get the feeling we’re all being softened up for something, children and all.’

‘If we are,’ said Homer, ‘there’s nothing we can do about it, except look after our own.’

Isabel went to sleep and dreamed about the end of the world. Missiles flashed to and fro above her head, phallic every one. In the end, all was rubble.

She moaned and again Homer tried to take her in his arms and again she refused. Had that ever happened before? She could not remember but she did not think so. She did not want his flesh in hers. It was too dangerous: an opening she could not control. She was half asleep.

Upstairs Jason, as if responding to the tumult and upset of the night, woke and started to cry. Isabel, glad for once to be called fully into consciousness, got out of bed and went upstairs to see what was the matter. Jason was wide awake.

‘I had a nasty dream,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘Bombs.’

‘You shouldn’t be so naughty through the day,’ said Isabel. ‘Then you wouldn’t punish yourself at night. It’s your dream, you know. You own it.’

She didn’t think he would understand, but he seemed to. He was open and receptive; a midnight child.

‘I wasn’t very naughty.’

‘Biting is naughty.’

‘It was my birthday. Bobby took my present.’

‘No. At the cinema. You bit there. A grown-up, too.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Daddy said you did.’

‘I didn’t.’

She didn’t pursue the matter. His blue eyes were wide and clear. They followed her as she moved about the room. So Dandy’s eyes had followed her. Every day, she thought, he grows more like Dandy. I never thought of that. I thought if the child took after anyone he would take after me. I thought that somehow you snatched a child from a man and that was that. I thought, moreover, that I would have a girl. That I would have a boy, and carry the father with me for ever and ever, was something I never envisaged.

She kissed him goodnight, settled him for sleep, and went back to bed.

‘Everything all right?’ asked Homer.

‘Fine,’ said Isabel.