Rupert Thomson - The Insult

Most people had caught a glimpse of the truck when it was towed back through the village. Others had visited the site of the accident. Some had even seen the bodies of the deceased. No one could believe the child had survived. It was a miracle, they said. Equally miraculous was my eagerness to adopt him — especially to the Poppels. They’d always doubted me and, even now, suspected that I might be up to something. They set their narrow minds to work on the problem, but they got nowhere with it. There wasn’t anywhere to get. I could have told them that.

It was with a querying air that Mrs Poppel came up to me after the service. She offered her condolences. I offered mine.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least they’re together.’

I nodded. That’s what you think.

She gave me a look that lasted seconds, then she stooped over the baby and tickled him under his chin. I stared down at her — the reddened eyelids, the dirt under her fingernails.

At last she straightened up. She stepped back, gathering her black shawl around her shoulders. ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is.’

Not long after the funeral I was preparing supper for my father one evening when I heard the jingling sound of reins outside. Through the window I watched a horse and cart lurch to a standstill in the clearing behind the house, two lanterns swinging from the tail-board. Several people clambered down on to the ground. I saw a woman first and recognised the high, pinched nose on her.

‘It’s the Poppels,’ I told my father.

Five of them had come. Mrs Poppel, her sister, her sister’s daughter (or granddaughter — you never could tell, with the Poppels) and two sons, including the one who’d asked me for a dance at the wedding. They sat against the kitchen wall on straight-backed chairs drinking cherry brandy, which was all we had in the house. The two men took out tobacco pouches and rolled cigarettes that were as thin as matches. They smoked quickly, furtively, their eyes high up in the corners of the room.

Not until Mrs Poppel had drained her glass did she begin to speak. It was about the child. She was grateful to me for having taken him. She thought it was fitting. I was family, after all; I was blood. What’s more, I was the right age — just two years older than her poor Eileen. A tear fattened on her lower eyelid. I watched it burst and spill across her cheek.

‘And it’s one less mouth for you to feed,’ I said.

They bred like rabbits, the Poppels. Like rabbits.

‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘there is that, of course …’ She looked at my father, who had hardly said a word. ‘And if you should ever think the child might need a father,’ and she glanced at her son, the one sitting across the room, the one who liked dancing, ‘well …’

Her son was staring at the wall. The hand holding the cigarette rested on his thigh, the cigarette pointing inwards, at his wrist. His eyes sprang towards me and then away again, as if the look was attached to a length of elastic.

‘A baby’s one thing,’ I said. ‘A husband’s quite a different matter.’

My father cleared his throat and spat into the fire. The phlegm sizzled. ‘Contributions,’ he said, ‘would always be welcome.’

I wasn’t sure he meant it. I thought he was probably just telling the Poppels that their visit was over. He wasn’t a great one for socialising, Arno Hekmann.

I waited until the cart had disappeared up the track and then I turned to him. ‘Contributions?’ I said.

My father lit his pipe. ‘I don’t see why not.’

As he leaned back in his chair and lifted his eyes to the smoke-blackened ceiling, I thought I saw a smile cross his face.

Later that night, though, he told me he was worried about money. There was less work than there used to be. He wasn’t sure we could afford to keep the child. I reminded him that I was working now. And I would go on working. They didn’t pay me much at the hotel, but it was better than nothing.

‘If all else fails,’ I said, ‘I’ll get married.’

My father contemplated me through coils of blue pipe-smoke.

‘But not to some Poppel,’ I added.

Now that Axel and Eileen were gone and my father was alone, I spent half of every week at the house. In the mornings I would walk into the village with Mazey bound tightly into a blanket on my back. When I reached the hotel I would lay him in a drawer, the same drawer that I’d found him in (it wouldn’t be long before he grew out of it). If I was cleaning, I carried the drawer from room to room with me. If I was sweeping the terrace or scooping leaves out of the pool, I took the drawer outside. If I was cooking, the drawer stood on the kitchen table, among the fruit and vegetables. He was never any trouble. It was only his hands opening and closing in the air above the drawer that told you he was there. Eva didn’t mind my bringing Mazey to work with me. She had two children of her own now, Thomas and Anna, yet she seemed more interested in mine. She thought there was something different about him. She was almost envious.

‘He’s so quiet,’ she said, ‘so,’ and she bit her pale bottom lip, trying to think of the word, ‘so peaceful.’

He had always been quiet. I could only remember him making one sound, and that was when he called out to me from the floor of the truck, to tell me he was there. He’d been quiet ever since. To me, that was normal. Also, it was an absence of something; it would have been hard for me to notice it, this being my first child. He didn’t cry at night; in fact, he seldom cried at all, not even when he cut his teeth. Eva told me this was unheard of. She’d never come across a child who didn’t cry when it was teething.

‘You must be giving him something,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not giving him alcohol?’

‘No.’

‘Some kind of herb, then?’

I shook my head.

It was Eva who told me about the rumours that were spreading through the village. People thought Mazey might be a prophet or a saint. That was the reason he’d survived that terrible plunge through the woods. That was the reason he’d been spared the fate of his unfortunate parents. You might almost say that they’d been sacrificed on his behalf. They had died that he might live.

‘That’s absurd,’ I said.

Eva lifted a finger to silence me. ‘I didn’t tell you about the miracle.’

The week before, she’d taken Mazey shopping in the village. It was late afternoon, already dark. Several people were in the grocer’s when she walked in. While she was waiting to be served, her arms grew tired and she sat Mazey on the counter. Suddenly there was a violet flash in the square outside and then a loud crack overhead, like a dry stick being snapped in two, and all the lights went out.

‘He was sitting on the counter,’ she said, ‘and somehow there was this glow around him, I don’t know if it was a reflection or what it was, but anyway, everybody noticed it. And because everybody in the shop was looking at him, they all saw him lift his arms up and at the same moment that he lifted his arms, the lights came on again — but only in the shop. The rest of the village was still in darkness.’ Eva stared at me with eyes that were wide and glistening, mesmerised by her own re-telling of the story.

It sounded like a coincidence to me.

‘I know,’ Eva said, ‘but people are talking.’

The next time I cut Mazey’s hair, she asked me for a lock of it. I gave it to her without thinking. A week later, while I was cleaning the lobby, I found the lock of hair. It had been laid on a square of brown velvet, then sealed into a small gilt box with a glass lid on it. The box had been fixed to the wall above the entrance to the hotel. When I asked her what it was doing there, kinks appeared in both her eyebrows; they could have been about to tie themselves in knots.