Ralph’s Children Read online

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ Kate had said.

  ‘When are you going to tell him?’ Bel had asked.

  ‘I’m not certain that I’m going to,’ Kate answered.

  ‘You’re not serious?’ Her father had been shocked.

  ‘I’m not sure I blame her,’ Bel said, ‘in the circumstances.’

  ‘It’s just so unlike him,’ Michael said.

  ‘Are you implying any of this is Kate’s fault?’ Bel demanded.

  ‘Of course not,’ Michael said. ‘But I think Rob’s probably grieving right now because he may believe your child’s already gone. His, too, remember?’ He took in Kate’s pale, weary face, wanted to stop, but pushed on. ‘I just can’t imagine you think it’s fair to punish him by keeping the truth from him.’

  Kate had telephoned Rob as soon as they’d left.

  Before she had time to change her mind.

  The relief in his voice was plain to hear.

  ‘How’s Emmie?’ Kate had asked.

  ‘Beautiful.’ Rob had paused. ‘Kate, I want to come home.’

  She felt suddenly unable to respond.

  ‘If it’s all right with you,’ Rob said.

  Kate heard the uncertainty and neediness in his voice.

  Yet he had emotionally abandoned her at exactly the moment when she had most needed him, had totally shut down on her. She remembered his obduracy, the hardness of his eyes. Remembered him packing. Leaving.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, surprising herself.

  ‘I see,’ Rob said.

  A world of disappointment in his voice.

  ‘No,’ Kate had said. ‘I don’t think you really do.’

  The miscarriage had happened swiftly and agonizingly a fortnight later, and she had gone through the nightmare alone, refusing to let the hospital call anyone. And afterwards, when she had told her parents and they’d come together to the Royal Berkshire, she had made them promise not to telephone Rob.

  ‘But you have to tell him,’ Michael said.

  ‘And have him feel obligated to come and see me?’

  She’d felt so vulnerable in her hospital gown, emptied out, her thoughts muddled, grief ebbing and flowing, half submerged by medication, corrosive anger seeming to surface more readily, its first target the husband who had wanted their child more than his wife.

  ‘He’ll want to come,’ Michael had said. ‘Of course he will.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kate said. ‘I’m not sure I want him.’

  ‘You’re going to need each other, Kate,’ Bel had told her gently.

  ‘I’ll tell him when I’m ready,’ she said.

  Sandi West, her mother’s friend, came to see her two days later, at the cottage.

  The last person in the world Kate wanted to see.

  She wore a limp-looking raincoat, carried her walking stick and a brown paper bag, which she thrust into Kate’s hand.

  ‘Grapes,’ she said. ‘People sneer, I know, but healthy all the same.’

  Rage filled Kate, at her mother for confiding in this woman, of all people.

  ‘You look tired.’ Sandi took a critical look. ‘But not too bad, considering.’

  ‘I wish,’ Kate said, ‘Mum hadn’t told you.’

  ‘Your mother tells me most things.’ Sandi leant on her walking stick. ‘Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’m actually very tired,’ Kate said. ‘I was about to have a sleep.’

  ‘You’re not an easy person to help, Kate, are you?’ said Sandi.

  ‘I don’t recall asking you for help,’ Kate said.

  Sandi gave a sigh, began to turn to the front door, then stopped. ‘I just wanted to say what I expect you’ll be too raw to believe right now.’

  ‘Time,’ Kate said, harshly. ‘Healing. All that.’

  ‘And true, I expect,’ Sandi said. ‘Mine’s another cliché, really. God moving in mysterious ways.’

  Kate froze. ‘Meaning what exactly?’

  ‘That perhaps, awful as this must be for you, it might, in the circumstances, be for the best.’ Sandi paused again. ‘For you and the child.’

  Kate stared at her in disbelief.

  ‘Get out,’ she said, her voice shaking.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sandi said. ‘I don’t want to upset you!’

  Kate pushed past her, opened the door, stood back.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘While I still have enough self-control not to slap you.’

  She shut and bolted the door, then went to the phone and called Bel.

  ‘How the hell could you do that to me, Mother?’

  ‘God,’ Bel said, ‘what have I done now?’

  ‘Sandi just paid me a visit.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bel took a breath. ‘I’m so sorry. It was a moment of weakness.’

  Kate held on to herself.

  ‘Can I at least take it that you haven’t told Rob?’

  ‘We promised we wouldn’t,’ Bel said.

  ‘Sandi thinks my baby dying was for the best,’ Kate said acidly. ‘She says you tell her everything.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Bel protested.

  ‘Good to know, Mother,’ Kate said, and she put down the phone and tossed the bag of grapes into the bin.

  When Rob arrived two days after that, without a word of warning, carrying flowers, for an instant Kate’s anger at her parents resurfaced – but then she saw the soft teddy bear tucked under his arm, and burst into tears again because plainly he did not know.

  ‘God, Kate,’ Rob said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He had grown a small beard, something he’d never done when they were together because she hated the prickle of stubble, and whether it had been encouraged to sprout out of independence or misery, she disliked it because it seemed to emphasize his unfamiliarity.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, and stepped back.

  She took the flowers from him, but not the stuffed toy, and then she told him, without any more delay, right there in the hallway.

  And saw, instantly, shockingly, that he did not believe her.

  ‘How can you do that?’ His face had grown ashen. ‘How can you stand there and tell me such a lie, about our own child?’

  Kate had stared at him for a long moment, and then she’d turned and gone up the narrow staircase to their bedroom and shut the door behind her.

  Moments had passed.

  And then the sound of the front door closing again.

  Ending them.

  He had returned again, two days later, having spoken to Michael.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘For everything.’

  Kate saw that his remorse was real, that he was filled with self-recrimination, but somehow none of that helped, and this time she let him into the living room, asked him to sit down. And told him that he was too late.

  ‘I’m not saying,’ she said, ‘that it’s all your fault, because I expect it isn’t.’

  ‘I left you,’ Rob said. ‘I wouldn’t even let you talk.’

  ‘You found it too hard to contemplate what I felt we needed to.’

  ‘I did,’ he agreed. ‘And I was wrong, and I’m sorrier than I can say.’

  ‘All the same,’ Kate said, ‘right or wrong, it all seems ruined to me.’

  ‘It needn’t be.’ Rob looked aghast. ‘Surely not.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Kate said, ‘I really think it is.’

  A hormone and grief-fuelled catalogue of mistakes, of idiocy, by both of them.

  ‘You’re so stubborn,’ Michael told her, some time later.

  ‘They’re both stubborn,’ Bel – by then almost forgiven – affirmed.

  They had gone on telling Kate that, after Rob had moved into a rented flat in Coley Hill, after the initial anger and pain had dulled, after she had begun to become fully and horribly aware of how much she missed him, how empty the cottage felt without him, how dead.

  Like their son.

  ‘It’s plain as day you still love each other,’ Bel had tri
ed one more time, ‘so why can’t you both just swallow your pride?’

  Fair question, Kate knew.

  With only one answer.

  Idiocy.

  Ralph

  It was Wayland’s Smithy and the children’s ritual of creeping out of the home after dark that had first brought Ralph to them.

  Not, of course, that she had been Ralph – which was the name of the children’s leader in the book – or their ‘chief’ – right away. And anyway, none of the group had believed back then that she would not make trouble for them, get them into shit.

  She was one of them, after all. A grown-up, old, and one of them.

  From the home.

  * * *

  She could remember even now, many years later, what she had felt that first time, standing in the dark just outside the chamber, concealed from them by one of the great standing boulders, watching and listening.

  Mesmerized.

  Her heart pounding, her palms perspiring.

  Something being tapped deep within. Some kind of emotional wellspring blocked off since her own adolescence, when her father had made it necessary for her to shut down sensibility in order to survive.

  Rape, impregnation and the killing of her firstborn.

  Not born.

  Barren ever since, in body and mind.

  Till that moment.

  She had been at the time a residential support worker at Challow Hall, assisting with the care and general welfare of the children; a position of responsibility of which she was not particularly proud, conscious that with the intelligence inherited from both her parents – she came from educated stock, her mother a teacher, he a librarian – she might have gone further academically. Yet she had not, had merely travelled as far as she felt she needed, and then stopped, decided that was as far as she would bother to progress.

  She could not, back then, recall ever being proud of anything. She had been a hollowed out shell of a human, with no capacity for pride or any other strong emotion.

  A woman who had taught herself not to feel.

  She had happened upon them by chance, when she was leaving the home early one winter evening, had stopped her car to check that she had brought out a particular file, and had seen strange flickering lights in the dark distance.

  She had opened her window and heard a curious sound.

  Silvery on the evening air.

  The laughter of a girl and boy, she thought, the joyful sound cut off, perhaps suppressed, then escaping again like bubbles into the atmosphere.

  The lights were from torches, she realized after a moment, moving steadily away from the home along the pathways that led through wheat and tall grass up towards the inky black Ridgeway Path.

  She had parked her car, switched off the engine and lights, and taken her own torch from the glove compartment.

  And followed them.

  It was hard, afterwards, to be sure of her initial motives for pursuing them: children bent, she had assumed, on some kind of mischief. Whatever they were up to, they were certainly endangering themselves, but at the moment when she’d made the decision to follow, she had done so neither for discipline’s sake nor even because she cared about what happened to them.

  She had not cared about them at all then, had not cared about anyone in those days, not even herself. She had simply been curious, especially once she had become aware – as they headed straight across the Ridgeway Path itself and passed through the gate directly ahead – that their final destination had to be the ancient long barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy.

  She hung back close to the gate, shielded by trees, watching them walk, single file, along the path. She could see now in the moonlight that they were four quite young children, judging from their shapes and sizes and the pitch of their voices which were still hushed even now they were two or more miles from the home.

  Shivering a little, not having anticipated a cross-country night walk, she waited, impatient to follow again. She knew what lay around the corner, had come here alone last spring and been moved by the peace of the site, remembered sunlight streaking down through tall, sheltering beech trees, birdsong lifting her spirits.

  It occurred to her suddenly that they might be planning vandalism, felt an intense hope that they were not; not because she cared for the stones, but because a good part of her intrigue, following them this evening, had come from the fact that these, clearly, were adventurous children, interesting children – not, she hoped, mindless thugs.

  She waited until they’d turned under the trees ahead and disappeared, and then, masking all but a pinpoint of light from her torch, she trod carefully along the narrow grassy verge between the path and barbed wire fence, her rubber-soled footsteps silent.

  At the corner, she paused again, saw the glade and the English Heritage sign before it and the mound up ahead.

  The children had vanished, their torchlight with them.

  She held her breath, not daring to move.

  Not that there was any fear in her. This might, she supposed, have been an eerie, even frightening place at night, yet the moon’s light, dispersed in constantly shifting glimmers by the swaying branches of the tall trees, lent it serenity.

  In any case, she was too intrigued to be afraid.

  She heard a new sound, of scraping.

  Matches being struck.

  A glow came from the left, below the mound.

  She recalled the construction of the place and what remained of the tomb, and realized that the children had walked between the two great guarding stones to the left of the mound and gone down into the passage beneath.

  She crept closer, aided in her silent approach by creaking branches and shuffling creatures and the calls of night birds, and . . .

  They were speaking.

  She stepped closer still, until she was standing right up against one of the huge sarsen stones.

  Not speaking, but reading, she realized. Reading aloud.

  From a novel she recognized. One she’d read in her own schooldays, a famous book, she knew it immediately.

  That was the instant in which it had all begun for her, with a curious thrill that was so physical it felt like a note being struck deep within her, seeming almost to reverberate, to shimmer through her.

  She trod another two small steps to her left, peered through the darkness into the passage and saw them.

  They were standing in a semicircle, their young faces illuminated by their candles, their exhaled breath vaporizing in the cold air.

  Familiar faces, from Challow Hall. Two boys and two girls, all about ten years old, all intent and wholly absorbed.

  Not vandals at all. Just children.

  Reading from a book being held by one of the girls.

  That was the thing, of course. It was not what they were reading – the effect on herself at that moment would probably have been similar if they had been reading Mark Twain or Shakespeare – perhaps even Enid Blyton. It was the sheer, unexpected oddness of the fact that they were reading anything at night in such an extraordinarily atmospheric location.

  It was the intensity of their focus.

  She felt that something extraordinary was unfolding.

  Something remarkable.

  They were remarkable, she thought.

  And in that instant of awakening, she had felt something she had no memory of ever having experienced before, not even in the years when her mother had still been alive.

  A most profound sense of connection.

  She had to make a crucial decision, whether to turn away and leave them, or to speak.

  She knew right away that she could not leave them.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and added swiftly: ‘Please don’t be alarmed.’

  They all jolted and stared into the night, eyes adjusting, finding her, their expressions hostile and afraid, yet she had a sense that her own heartbeat was racing even more wildly than theirs.

  ‘You’re not in any trouble,’ she said.

  None of
them spoke. Two of them – the taller girl and a boy with hair that seemed burnished gold in the candlelight, but was in fact, as she recalled, fiery red – went on staring past her into the darkness, and she realized that their impulse was to run and scatter into the night, but she was blocking their exit.

  They could have pushed her aside, but they did not.

  ‘Truly.’ She felt an urgent need to make them believe her. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’

  Still they said nothing.

  ‘In fact, I’m pretty impressed,’ she went on. ‘That’s quite a book you’re reading.’

  ‘And?’ The first word spoken to her, by the lad with red-gold hair, who looked and sounded belligerent, still waiting for trouble.

  She felt as she imagined a wildlife student might, coming upon a rare species and wary of snapping a twig and losing them forever.

  ‘Have any of you seen “Dead Poets”?’ she asked, knowing instantly that it was a foolish question because they were ten and at Challow Hall and of course they hadn’t seen it.

  ‘Huh?’ the second boy said.

  ‘She means the bloke who wrote the book,’ said the tall girl. ‘Cos he’s dead.’

  ‘He’s not, actually.’ Having embarked on it, she felt she had to stick with it, went on lightly. ‘But I meant a film called Dead Poets’ Society about some schoolboys who meet up secretly to read poetry and escape rules.’ Their expressions glazed, and she made a swift amendment. ‘Though mostly,’ she said, ‘they’re escaping too much control. A bit like you, maybe.’ She paused. ‘Have you done this before?’

  ‘Are you going to tell?’ the belligerent boy asked after a moment.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘So long as you mind how you go.’

  It was, she knew, a strange and irresponsible decision, but a sense of something at stake much greater than rules had gripped her, was moving in tandem with her own just awoken emotional response.

  ‘And so long as you let me drop in again,’ she had added.

  A touch of blackmail, she supposed.