She was crying inwardly, Yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly what I want! But she said, ‘No, of course not.’
‘He’s physically normal for eighteen months. He’s very strong and active of course, but he’s always been that. You say he’s not talking? But that’s not unusual. Wasn’t Helen a late talker? I believe she was?’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet.
She took Ben home. Now he was locked into his room each night, and there were heavy bars on the door as well. Every second of his waking hours, he watched. Harriet watched him while her mother managed everything else.
David said, ‘What is the point of thanking you, Dorothy? It seems everything has gone a long way beyond thank-yous.’
‘Everything has gone a long way beyond. Period.’ Said Dorothy.
Harriet was thin, red-eyed, haggard. Once again she was bursting into tears over nothing at all. The children kept out of her way. Tact? Were they afraid of her? Dorothy suggested staying alone with Ben for a week in August while the family went off together somewhere.
Neither Harriet nor David would normally have wanted to go anywhere, for they loved their home. And what about the family coming for the summer?
‘I haven’t noticed any rush to book themselves in,’ said Dorothy.
They went to France, with the car. For Harriet it was all happiness: she felt she had been given back her children. She could not get enough of them, nor they of her. And Paul, her baby whom Ben had deprived her of, the wonderful three-year-old, enchanting, a charmer – was her baby again. They were a family still! Happiness…they could hardly believe, any of them, that Ben could have taken so much away from them.
When they got home, Dorothy was very tired and she had a bad bruise on her forearm and another on her cheek. She did not say what had happened. But when the children had gone to bed on the first evening, she said to Harriet and David, ‘I have to talk – no, sit down and listen.’
They sat with her at the kitchen table.
‘You two are going to have to face it. Ben has got to go into an institution.’
‘But he’s normal,’ said Harriet, grim. ‘The doctor says he is.’
‘He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are.’
‘What kind of institution would take him?’
‘There must be something,’ said Dorothy, and began to cry.
Now began a time when every night Harriet and David lay awake talking about what could be done. They were making love again, but it was not the same. ‘This must be what women felt before there was birth control,’ Harriet said. ‘Terrified. They waited for every period, and when it came it meant reprieve for a month. But they weren’t afraid of giving birth to a troll.’
While they talked, they always listened for sounds from ‘the baby’s room’ – words they never used now, for they hurt. What was Ben doing that they had not believed him capable of? Pulling those heavy steel bars aside?
‘The trouble is, you get used to hell,’ said Harriet. ‘After a day with Ben I feel as if nothing exists but him. As if nothing has ever existed. I suddenly realize I haven’t remembered the others for hours. I forgot their supper yesterday. Dorothy went to the pictures, and I came down and found Helen cooking their supper.’
‘It didn’t hurt them.’
‘She’s eight.’
Having been reminded, by the week in France, of what their family life really was, could be, Harriet was determined not to let it all go. She found she was again silently addressing Ben: ‘I’m not going to let you destroy us, you won’t destroy me…’
She was set on another real Christmas, and wrote and telephoned to everyone. She made a point of saying that Ben was ‘much better, these days.’
Sarah asked if it would be ‘all right’ to bring Amy. This meant that she had heard – everyone had – about the dog, and the cat.
‘It’ll be all right if we are careful never to leave Amy alone with Ben,’ said Harriet, and Sarah, after a long silence, said, ‘My God, Harriet, we’ve been dealt a bad hand, haven’t we?’ ‘I suppose so,’ said Harriet, but she was rejecting this submission to being a victim of fate. Sarah, yes; with her marital problems, and her mongol child – yes. But she, Harriet, in the same boat?
She said to her own children, ‘Please look after Amy. Never leave her alone with Ben.’
‘Would he hurt Amy the way he hurt Mr McGregor?’ asked Jane.
‘He killed Mr McGregor,’ Luke said fiercely. ‘He killed him.’
‘And the poor dog,’ said Helen. Both children were accusing Harriet.
‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘he might. That’s why we have to watch her all the time.’
The children, the way they did these days, were looking at each other, excluding her, in some understanding of their own. They went off, without looking at her.
The Christmas, with fewer people, was nevertheless festive and noisy, a success; but Harriet found herself longing for it to be over. It was the strain of it all, watching Ben, watching Amy – who was the centre of everything. Her head was too big, her body too squat, but she was full of love and kisses and everyone adored her. Helen, who had longed to make a pet of Ben, was now able to love Amy. Ben watched this, silent, and Harriet could not read the look in those cold yellow-green eyes. But then she never could! Sometimes it seemed to her that she spent her life trying to understand what Ben was feeling, thinking. Amy, who expected everyone to love her, would go up to Ben, chuckling, laughing, her arms out. Twice his age, but apparently half his age, this afflicted infant, who was radiant with affection, suddenly became silent; her face was woeful, and she backed away, staring at him. Just like Mr McGregor, the poor cat. Then she began to cry whenever she saw him. Ben’s eyes were never off her, this other afflicted one, adored by everyone in the house. But did he know himself afflicted? Was he, in fact? What was he?
Christmas ended, and Ben was two and a few months old. Paul was sent to a little nursery school down the road, to get him away from Ben. The naturally high-spirited and friendly child was becoming nervous and irritable. He had fits of tears or of rage, throwing himself on the floor screaming, or battering at Harriet’s knees, trying to get her attention, which never seemed to leave Ben.
Dorothy went off to visit Sarah and her family.
Harriet was alone with Ben during the day. She tried to be with him as she had with the others. She sat on the floor with building blocks and toys you could push about. She showed him colourful pictures. She sang him little rhymes. But Ben did not seem to connect with the toys, or the blocks. He sat among the litter of bright objects and might put one block on another, looking at Harriet to see if this was what he should do. He stared hard at pictures held out to him, trying to decipher their language. He would never sit on Harriet’s knees, but squatted by her, and when she said, ‘That’s a bird, Ben, look – just like that bird on that tree. And that’s a flower,’ he stared, and then turned away. Apparently it was not that he could not understand how this block fitted into that or
