Читать книгу The President’s Child - Fay Weldon - Страница 8

Homer, for a day or so, said no more about Jason needing to see a child therapist. Isabel went nervously about her work and life, watching Jason for signs of inner disturbance. Any child, when watched closely, when faith has gone, can appear both deranged and malicious. Naivety can seem calculated, charm self-conscious, the noisy and instant expression of emotion a covert attack upon the adult. Isabel knew this, and reassured herself. Jason was a six-year-old child behaving like a six-year-old child, and was neither her persecutor nor her victim.

Which was just as well, because if Jason was indeed suffering some inner turmoil, which only truth would resolve, then she would have to start digging away at the very foundation of her life with Homer, and this she did not wish to do. Self-interest, as well as maternal pride, was at stake. Jason, for everyone’s sake, had to be in good heart and good health.

Dandy Ivel made a speech about probity, integrity, endurance and fidelity. It was reported on British television. Isabel changed programmes. Homer said, ‘That man throws abstract words about like karate chops, the better to confuse and terrify.’ Isabel said, ‘Yes, doesn’t he?’

Isabel and Homer and Jason went to stay for the weekend with the Humbles, in Wales. Ian and Doreen had given up their Wardour Street life of (him) dress-designing and (her) film-making, and taken to sheep-farming up a distant Welsh hillside. Ian and Doreen drove a battered Land Rover stuck with anti-nuclear stickers, and their children were dressed in stiff woollen garments, hand spun, natural dyed, and knitted on very thick needles; their tiny limbs, thus encased, and macrobiotically lean, found movement difficult. They sat on the splintery wooden floor of their homestead and wailed. Jason took offence at this, and no amount of reproof or explanation could prevent him from setting about them with his fists.

‘Jason, they’re only little. Please stop.’

‘Jason, it’s their home, their toys. They don’t understand about sharing. They don’t go to school, as you do!’

Doreen taught the children at home, as she was qualified to do. She didn’t want them subjected to the brutality and corruptness of (presumably) the likes of Jason.

‘Jason, if you go on like that, you’ll have to go to bed.’

Jason was frightened by the dark and the silence and became hysterical when Isabel tried to put him to bed, wrapping tentacle-like limbs around hers. Presently, when he was calmer, Homer took him away and bathed him, in a tin bath in the outhouse filled by hand from a tank inadequately warmed by a solar panel. But Jason found the presence of a broody hen offensive and frightening (according to Homer, later) and then bit his father in his struggle not to be bathed, and then denied that he had, although the marks were clear enough on Homer’s ankle.

‘He doesn’t travel well, that’s all,’ said Isabel, lightly, and pointed out that Ian and Doreen’s girls twitched and scowled and whined; and that although they didn’t make nearly so much noise as Jason, they were equally troublesome, and had stolen his silver tractor and hidden it, quite deliberately.

‘But they didn’t bite,’ said Homer. His horror of biting was irrational, he agreed. A child might well feel it reasonable to use his teeth to make an impression, in every sense of the word: nevertheless, Homer was upset by it.

The night they returned to London Jason wet the bed. Homer stripped the sheets and washed and turned the mattress.

‘Isabel, you must see,’ he said. ‘Jason is upset and worried and needs help. What are you worried by? What are you so guilty about? I don’t understand it. It’s so unlike you.’

‘I don’t want him defined as disturbed,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him given pills.’

‘Neither of those things will happen,’ said Homer. ‘Perhaps you’re afraid of some criticism of you? That it might be said that Jason’s troubles stem from your work? But we both know that isn’t so: my working is as likely to upset Jason as your working. We’ve both been equally involved in his upbringing – except I notice it’s me dealing with the sheets when he wets the bed!’

Isabel capitulated. Homer brought Dr Gregory to her attention.

‘Who recommended him?’

‘Colin Matthews.’ Colin Matthews was one of Homer’s authors. He wrote bestselling political novels.

‘But you don’t trust his judgement or his politics or his style. How can you trust him to be right about a child psychologist?’

‘Dr Gregory saw his daughter through a bout of head-banging. Little Antonia. Do you remember? We went to her christening party.’

‘We shouldn’t have gone. It was hypocrisy. The whole child’s life is based upon hypocrisy. The father’s a fascist and the mother a hyena, and Antonia goes to a Steiner school. No wonder she banged her head.’

Isabel knew she was being unreasonable and ridiculous. She could feel her bottom lip, already so thinned and mutilated, tightening and narrowing yet more, to become, in the end, her mother’s.

‘Perhaps that’s what Dr Gregory pointed out,’ said Homer, patiently.

‘She’d have probably stopped anyway,’ said Isabel. ‘You don’t meet that many adults who bang their heads – or bite people’s ankles, for that matter.’

‘You do in mental homes,’ observed Homer. It was the last protest Isabel made. She rang Dr Gregory. The only appointment he had available was at three the following afternoon. Isabel accepted.

She had forgotten, of course, that she would have to fetch Jason out of school before time. In so doing, she encountered Mrs Pelotti.

‘Jason? Leaving school early to see a psychiatrist? You astound me. Why are you doing it? Did the recommendation come from the school? No? Then what are you doing to the child? Jason is a great trial to all of us, but he isn’t disturbed. There is nothing wrong with Jason that shouldn’t be wrong with all of us. Are you a cabbage? No! Is your husband a cabbage? No! Then why expect your unfortunate child to be a cabbage?’

Mrs Pelotti had a low opinion of parents, who seemed to her, from her long experience of them, to have their children’s worst interests at heart. The middle classes over protected; the working classes were themselves a source of actual danger to their progeny. She took children in from the age of three – all of them, selection being by catchment area alone. She took in the backward and the brilliant, the sickly and the healthy, the mad and the sane, the poor and the rich, bullies and victims – and wherever her eye fell there was health, sanity and energy. The red-brick building, with its high echoing walls, rang to the sound of child music and was brilliant with child art, and where she trod flowers, both artificial and natural, bloomed. If her eye could not fall upon, her foot could not seek out, every corner of the school; if bullying and misery and meanness of every kind swept in with the litter off the street, blown in by winds of urban discontent, it was not her fault, nor her predecessors', nor those who would come after her, when finally she lay down exhausted and died.

Of Mrs Pelotti’s pupils one out of every five came from homes where there was a mother at home and a working father. The rest had empty houses to return to; or were brought up by mother or father alone; or by grandparents or elder brothers or sisters; or by foster parents. All had roofs over their heads, and shoes, usually sneakers, on their feet; but seldom the roof they wanted, nor shoes that fitted.

Isabel and Homer sent Jason to Mrs Pelotti’s school because they thought they should, and because he was happy there. Friends had children who went to schools where fees were paid and blazers worn and feet clipclopped in polished lace-up shoes, and these parents blamed Isabel and Homer for sacrificing Jason on the altar of socialist, or whatever, principle. Isabel and Homer said they didn’t want Jason growing up fearful in a world in which he didn’t participate. And how could society ever be changed for the better, they asked themselves and each other, if the middle classes reserved privilege for their children? Mrs Pelotti, they reasoned, needed their help.

Mrs Pelotti this morning, seemed in no need of help.

‘You see,’ said Isabel, ‘he’s taken to biting!’

‘So?’ said Mrs Pelotti. ‘So would I if I were him. You talk to him too much. You ask his advice. You forget he’s too young to give it. You treat him as if he were grown-up. He’s only six. Of course he bites. He could never talk his way round you lot. What else is he to do?’

‘Anything else we do wrong?’ asked Isabel.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Pelotti, ‘you’re always late. Bring him in on time and collect him on time. You and your husband spend so much time discussing whose turn it is that the child gets forgotten. But take him to a shrink if it entertains you, and you’ve got the money. I don’t suppose it will do much harm. If you have things to throw away there’s a jumble sale next week. I have become more a fund raiser of late than an educationalist. I have no choice.’

‘Mrs Pelotti,’ said Isabel, surprised. ‘I’m never late.’

‘One of you is,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s your husband. You’re both so busy you never notice anything.’

That over, Isabel went to work. Mrs Pelotti had been unfair. Jason was almost always delivered and collected on time, but Mrs Pelotti’s way was to brisk up both parents and children by brutal overstatement, and send them away with some kind of achievable, practical mission. If you were five you learnt to tie your shoelaces; if you were thirty-five you aspired to get up on time.