Morag Joss - Half Broken Things

Shocking, isn’t it? It shocks me. And I do truly hate violence. I do not say this with any pride, but if I am a killer, I am a gentle one. After all, I saw to Mother with a tea towel, and this time I’m doing it with cake. Hardly offensive weapons. But I hope the necessity for it is understood, and I shall make it a very strong dose that works quickly. I intend to do all I can to avoid unnecessary suffering.

There has been, however, a change of plan.

It was Mr Standish-Cave’s telephone call. He sounded nice. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but not such a concerned and pleasant person. He said he was ringing just to ask me to be very, very sure that there was nothing in the house that would remind his wife of babies. He was certain, really, that he had put all the baby things into the nursery and locked it, but just in case, would I go round and check before they arrived. I must have sounded surprised because he went on to explain. They had not been able to bring their baby home. He had died in hospital when he was five months old, after a number of operations. His wife had had a breakdown over it; that was why they had been abroad for so long. She was much better now, but frail, and he wanted her to be eased gradually back into things, not be reminded too suddenly of the previous terrible year. And, he was delighted to say, she was pregnant again. So I said oh, how lovely, now you have everything to look forward to. And he said yes, we feel so lucky. His voice grew slightly hoarse when he said that.

You see? It changes everything. It’s one perfect chance. One perfect chance to get the important things right. A curled, waiting, perfect chance, and it’s theirs. When I think of all the messes and inadequacies we have been caught up in and have, no doubt, contributed to- there’s me and Mother and my real mother, Steph and her hopeless parents and her first baby, and Miranda, and then there’s Michael’s poor child-mother and kind, puzzled Beth and Barry and then there’s Sally treating Charlie like an encumbrance, and that husband who’s waltzed off to put other people’s lives right- I think, we got it spectacularly wrong, didn’t we? Somehow we got it all spectacularly wrong, and for the most part it wasn’t even our fault. And here in this house, we’ve been able to put so much right. It fills me with happiness that we have been able to do that. It redresses a balance.

And that, surely, should be enough. I’m still tempted to think that we really could arrange matters so that everything goes on just as it is, and forever, but in the end, we are not greedy. We are not monsters. We made our own and our only perfect chance here in this house, and we took it, with whole hearts and together, and we lived it out, every moment. And with our hearts still full, and still together, we should leave others now to their perfect chance. The Standish-Caves might make wonderful parents, and they might not, but I think they should be allowed their perfect chance, too. The truth of it is that even before we came here, time was pretty much up for us all. There can be nothing good waiting for any of us beyond this. We seized our perfect chance at the last possible moment.

Besides, how long would we have? How long before our lovely lives unravelled again? It would not take much; do the Standish-Caves not have parents, or other family, or friends? For how long would they be content to communicate by e-mail, even supposing we made no disastrous mistakes? How long before someone discovered that the Standish-Caves were not ‘abroad’, and came knocking on our door to find out where they really were? I’ve come to the conclusion that the world just will not go away. That’s all we want it to do, just go away and leave us in peace. But it won’t. It never does. It keeps at you, prodding and pricking till you’re demented, slicing at all your defences till you’d do anything just for a place to lie and gasp, and even if you’re lucky enough to find one, it’s just when you’re beginning to breathe normally that it comes after you again. The whole idea that we could keep the world away indefinitely was, of course, desperate. You can go ahead and call it mad if you like, I wouldn’t.

So the change of plan came into my mind, and my mind, I assure you, is as clear as could be. And when I changed the plan, I began to come up here to the study to write my report in the afternoons, feeling that I should like everything to be understood, even though I am not sure who I am writing to, exactly. I have been coming up for a few hours each day for about twelve days now. The Standish-Caves are due back on the 3rd of September. It is the 31st of August. Tomorrow morning I shall put all these pages I have written into an envelope and send Michael to post it, first class, to Shelley. That’s the obvious destination, I can rely on Shelley to get things moving. But I do not know who will be here first (the post is so unreliable these days), whether it will be Shelley herself, or the police, whom Shelley is sure to contact at once, or the Standish-Caves. I do apologise to whoever it is for what is sure to be an unpleasant discovery. I should like to leave things somewhat tidier, but I don’t believe that’s possible.

You see, I have told Steph and Michael that it is my birthday tomorrow. I think that right this minute down there in the garden they are discussing what they might give me as a birthday present, but of course they have given me everything already. Thanks to them I am not just an agoraphobic old woman with wild hair, I am Michael’s mother, a devoted mother-in-law and grandmother, a homemaker. They gave me that. Steph is not just a sleepy, tongue-tied girl in strange baggy clothes, nor is Michael to be dismissed as a depressive with nervous eyes and an occasional facial tic. We are a family. And for that reason, I’m afraid it is necessary to include Charlie in this. He would be lost without us. You may say he would still have Sally, but that would be to overlook an important point. I have met Sally, of course, and spoken to her on the telephone and heard enough about her from Steph, to know that as Charlie grows up Sally might take on the world for him. She’ll be shrill on his behalf, abuse his teachers, insist on his rights. He’ll get the best in car seats, bicycle crash helmets, orthodontics and for all I know hot air ballooning lessons, but will he know a moment’s peace? What will she do when he is frightened, lonely and unsure? Do you think she will wrap him round quietly, with wisdom and warmth, make him feel strong, and secure, and wanted? No, it has to be this way, to save him knowing what it is to grow up with a mother who does not really want him, not enough. He must be spared that.

The sun is leaving the garden now. From about now until sunset the edge of the house will cast a shadow like a sundial across the grass, between the willow tree whose leaves Michael swept up the other day and Miranda’s grave, where Steph’s marigolds are finishing now. There is a coolness in the air already; I shall ask Michael to light a fire this evening. I wish every remaining hour of today and tomorrow to be gracious and pleasant.

I have made a cake for my birthday, of course. It is in the oven now, a honey cake with the necessary amount of spice added. I shall give it a layer of icing for extra sweetness. I expect they will find some candles for it. And at teatime tomorrow I shall blow out my candles and cut the cake into slices. I shall mash up a little bit with ice cream and feed it to Charlie myself, and when I have seen Steph and Michael bite into theirs, I shall eat my own. I shall spare them from knowing, beyond a little bitterness on the tongue, that the end has come.

Now I realise that it is the house that has brought us to this. For this house is itself a kind of deep and slow-ticking clock, in which our days have spent themselves as imperceptibly as a perfect mechanism winds down or a living heart beats towards its own end; the days have ticked out so quietly that it seems that our hearts have beaten with more mellow calibrations than before. Our passing lives have slipped by us here in the way that a song cheats time. When I hear Steph singing her song to Charlie,