Night Waking Read online

  Night Waking

  SARAH MOSS

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1: THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

  2: NOT FOR THERAPEUTIC USE

  3: FEARING TO HANDLE A KNIFE

  4: THE CHILD’S CURIOSITY

  5: A SNAKE, HARMLESS

  6: ANXIOUSLY PREOCCUPIED WITH OTHER MATTERS

  7: THE ABILITY TO DEFEND ONESELF

  8: THE CAPACITY OF AN ADULT

  9: COMMON KNOWLEDGE

  10: THE MORE HIGHLY ORGANIZED FORMS OF LOVE

  11: WATCHING BUT NOT STARING

  12: IRRATIONAL EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS

  13: THE CHILD’S NEEDS

  14: THIS HAPPY PARTNERSHIP

  15: THE NEXT GENERATION

  16: WHAT MAY BE FOUND WITHIN

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Copyright

  Night Waking

  THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

  It remains true that social behaviour cannot come about unless the individual has progressed from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. But the statement is not reversible in the sense that this advance itself guarantees socialization.

  – Anna Freud, Normality and Pathology in Childhood

  (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 145

  The swans are by the shore, drifting bright as paper cutouts against waves blurred by dusk. They spend the night murmuring oboe harmonies to each other, a woodwind of reassurance. Ordinary swans, the Queen’s swans on the river where we feed the ducks at home, have faces apparently afflicted by some medieval disease, and sleep standing on one leg, heads under their wings like child-free passengers on long-haul flights who can summon night with a nylon blindfold. These sea swans seem to stay awake all night, sailing through the fading light like ships bound for far countries, and they have faces as smooth and neutral as the corps de ballet, faces that can’t communicate any level of grief or pain. Perhaps this is an asset in species that mate for life.

  I glance back at the house. Its façade, dark as the cliff-face at the other end of the island, turns away from the after-light shining over the sea, from where America is coming up for a new day as we turn away from the sun. One of the swans stretches towards the sky and cries out, wings threshing the water in sudden agitation like that of someone who has just remembered that a friend is dead. I saw a goose dying, once, a Canada goose that had flown all the way from the Arctic to end its life on the hard shoulder of the M40, and although one wing was still beating as if to music while the other lay across the rumble-strip, its face was impassive. I stood on the footbridge, watching, joggling the pram in which the baby would sleep only for as long as we kept moving, until some lorry driver, merciful or inattentive, left a flurry of feathers and red jam on the road. Our swans are safe from that, here. For a season. Like us, they will go south in the autumn, but for now there are no cars, no roads. No bridges, either. The stars are coming out in the darkening sky over the hill. I shiver; not cold, exactly, but time to go in.

  The power was still off, which doesn’t matter too much in summer as long as we keep our laptops charged. Giles had lit a candle.

  ‘Look! Here we are.’ He passed me a holiday brochure, folded back to show a stamp-sized picture of the blackhouse down by the beach, taken last summer before the building work began. The idea is that at some point the income generated by letting it as a holiday cottage will cover the cost of the restoration. The reality is that even if Giles stops telling our friends and, God help us, his family, that they’ll be able to stay for free, the argon-filled triple glazing, grey water scheme (it flushes the loo with water previously used to wash your clothes) and reclaimed furniture (reclaimed from a shop in Bath and transported over land and sea at expense that surprised Giles) might be hoped to pay off in the lifetime of our grandchildren. If any. I held the brochure towards the light.

  *

  Spend a week or two on your very own island! A stunning new conversion of a traditional blackhouse dwelling with magnificent sea views from every window, set on the deserted island of Colsay. The house, newly restored by an award-winning architect, boasts slate floors with underfloor heating, rain-mist shower and a kitchen hand-made from local materials. No TV, but a thoughtful book collection and arts and crafts kits for rainy days. There are no roads or cars on the island; your host will collect you from the harbour at Colla and take you back at any time during your stay for shopping or days out, enjoying the walks, crafts and heritage of the Inversaigh area. Colsay itself has a wealth of bird life and historical remains to explore, or you may be happy to

  ‘“Very special”?’ I put the brochure down too fast and the candle on the table went out. ‘And all those adjectives? Giles, you should have asked me to do it. You’ve even put an exclamation mark in, for God’s sake. People can get silence at home, you know. In libraries.’

  I miss the silence of libraries. Even whooper swans wouldn’t talk in my favourite libraries.

  ‘I couldn’t have asked you.’ Giles started trying to relight the candle from a tealight. Wax dripped predictably onto his papers. ‘It was the week they both had that puking bug.’

  The week Giles kept going to work because it was ‘expected of him’ and I stayed at home scrubbing sick out of carpets. I do, as Giles does not tire of pointing out, get paid whether I actually do any work or not. It’s in my contract. ‘The Research Fellow shall make such progress as might reasonably be expected with the research project outlined before taking up the Fellowship.’ Apart from that I can discharge my contractual obligations by dining in college twenty-four times a year. Most of the Fellows (who are not fellows but ladies of a certain age and don’t-mess-with-me demeanour) would not recognize me on the high street, although few people recognize me on the high street anyway because I am usually behind the pushchair. The pram in the hall may be the enemy of promise, but outside it would be the perfect cover for almost any kind of criminal act. You could strafe the high street with a machine gun and stroll away wearing nothing but high heels and a top hat, behind a pushchair, and nobody would remember you’d been there.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Giles. ‘The anchorite enjoyed the silence. I mean, isn’t that the whole idea? Ow.’ Wax ran down his fingers.

  ‘I expect the anchorite was far too busy looking for something to eat and hiding from the Vikings. Lighter? Matches?’

  He shrugged and we both looked around as if we could see the children’s books, half-eaten biscuits and papers awaiting filing that trickle from every orifice of the house.

  ‘Oh well. At least we can’t tidy up in the dark.’ I moved my foot and encountered something squashy, either stuck to the floor or surprisingly heavy, perhaps a recalcitrant small mammal or my mother-in-law’s fruit cake. ‘I hope you know the on-call ferryman is you. I’ve got Fair Seedtime to finish. And who’s assembling this book collection?’

  Fair Seedtime: the invention of childhood and the rise of the institution in late eighteenth-century Britain was due at the publisher last month. In theory, I should be more employable with a book to my name. In practice, there will be no jobs in history for several decades to come and, if there were, they would go to people who haven’t spent half of the last eight years changing nappies instead of buying drinks at the conference bar. Giles started picking the wax off the papers and rolling it into balls.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Moth’ll eat them.’

  He dropped one into the tealight. ‘Better than birdshit.’

  I stood up. ‘I wasn’t claiming birdshit as the base line in infant nutrition. Anyway, that was why I gave up on the garden. I can’t plant the sodding trees without looking away from him for the odd second or two. At least it wasn’t foxgloves.’

  Foxgloves contain digitali
s, and will stop your toddler’s heart long before you can cross the Sound to the village surgery, which is open four mornings a week.

  ‘I got to him in time. I made him spit them out. I told you.’

  ‘Yeah. You said. I’m going to bed.’ I burnt my fingers balancing the tealight on my palm and crossed the room as one might venture across a minefield in the dark, which is reasonable when many of the small objects you can’t see have wheels.

  I’ve stopped showering in the morning because Raph allows me three minutes and then stands on the bathmat with a stopwatch telling me how many millimetres of the polar ice cap have been melted by the energy used to heat the water and Moth, who still has vivid memories of what breasts are for, peers round the curtain, getting his clothes wet and gesturing unmistakably. Candlelit showers by night are awkward for obvious reasons, so I ran a bath hot and deep enough to drown polar bear cubs and stood at the bookcase wondering whether to drown my sorrows in Marjorie Makes It at the Chalet School or revive my intellect with the selected essays of Henry James. I picked up Caring for Your Child (1947) in the hope that I might have missed the solution to toddler insomnia last time I read it. Giles’s family have been using this house as a repository for unreadable books since the War.

  ‘You were asleep,’ said Giles. He’d found matches and another candle, or maybe nipped outside with a couple of flints.

  My neck was stiff and the water had cooled. I pulled myself up to sitting and yawned.

  ‘So?’ At least by candlelight I didn’t need to pull my stomach in.

  ‘One of these days you’ll drown.’

  I rubbed my neck and scooped water on to my face. ‘I’m sure a lung full of water would wake me up. If it was that easy people wouldn’t bother cutting their wrists. Anyway, it sounds a nice way to go.’

  He started brushing his teeth. They can probably hear Giles brushing his teeth on the mainland. ‘What about the children?’

  ‘You’re dribbling toothpaste on your jumper. They’d be your problem.’ Which is probably one of my better reasons for staying alive.

  I waited till he put the candle down on the bookcase by the door and then climbed out. The bathmat wasn’t where I’d hoped it might be and I pretended to believe that what I’d stepped in was water, a regular pretence the alternative to which would be cleaning, which I decline on ideological grounds I cannot be bothered to specify, even to myself.

  He spat toothpaste. ‘Nice tits, missis.’

  ‘Piss off. You can’t even see them.’ And they’re not, haven’t been for some years. My towel smelt faintly of fish. I walked through a curl of smoke as I found the door. ‘I think you’ve just set the Guardian on fire.’

  ‘Fuck.’ He grabbed a flaming Weekend magazine from the top of an unsteady pile of clothes on the bookcase and dropped it in the bath. I caught a glimpse of a double-barrelled chef and a pig before they were consumed by green flames and then drowned. ‘Oh well, I’d read that one.’

  ‘I hadn’t. I was saving it. For a bath with electric lights and all.’

  ‘Read it online. Come on, it’s gone midnight.’ He ran his hand over my shoulder and down under the towel, tracing my spine with a fingertip.

  I batted at his hand. ‘If I get unmolested time on my computer I’m not wasting it reading the bloody Guardian, I’ll write my book. I said, piss off.’

  What I miss most when the electricity goes off is the steady gaze of my radio alarm clock. It’s hard to navigate the night without the stations of the clock. I couldn’t have been asleep long, because our west-facing bedroom was still as dark as a coffin when I swam up through sleep to Moth’s shouting. The floor was cold and gritty under my feet. As I crossed the landing, where the coming day was beginning to assert itself in the uncurtained window, something rustled and creaked in the attic upstairs. I picked Moth up and he clung to my hair and rubbed his slimy nose on my neck.

  ‘Mummy.’ There was food behind his ear but his hair still had the butter smell of babies. I kissed his salt cheek and felt the weight of him on my wrists. ‘Mummy. Moth frightened.’

  I paced, four steps across and four back, watching out for the nineteenth-century iron fender which juts out of the fireplace. Giles remembers his father putting in the electric heaters, not as a concession to modern ideas of comfort but in recognition of the fact that there was nobody left on the island to cut peat for him.

  ‘Mummy sing a Gruffalo.’

  ‘Later. Gruffalo in the morning.’

  ‘Mummy sing a Gruffalo!’

  I patted him. ‘Night-night, Gruffalo. The Gruffalo is sleeping.’

  ‘Want Gruffalo!’

  If he screams, it wakes Raphael, who requires not the Gruffalo but lies about why there will probably still be a planet for him when he grows up. I murmured into Moth’s ear.

  ‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good. Where are you going to, little brown mouse? Come and have lunch in my log-pile house—’

  He lifted his head. ‘Unnerground house.’

  I pushed his head back down. ‘No, that’s the snake.’

  ‘Fox in unnerground house. More.’

  ‘Well if you know it, why don’t you—’

  ‘More.’

  ‘It’s terribly kind of you, fox, but no, I’m going to have tea—’

  ‘Lunch.’

  ‘Lunch. With a gruffalo. A gruffalo, what’s a gruffalo? A gruffalo? Why, don’t you—’

  ‘Didn’t you know.’

  I fear that I now know the works of Julia Donaldson better than those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but if that’s true then Moth’s commitment to accuracy suggests that I don’t know anything very well. Which is plausible.

  ‘Oh! But who is this creature with terrible claws and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws?’

  Moth had gone soft and heavy on my chest again.

  ‘His eyes are orange, his tongue is black; he has purple prickles all over his back.’

  I crooned towards the vegan resolution – ‘The mouse found a nut and the nut … was … good’ – and his fingers stayed loose on my neck. I hummed the Skye Boat Song and, as if exploring the fifth arrondissement with no particular destination in mind, sauntered towards the cot and back towards the bookshelf. Reconnaissance successful. I made a second approach, heading for the window but pausing at the cot as if a jeweller’s window display had caught my attention. Moth’s breathing didn’t change, and I’d eased him back down, risked putting a blanket over him, evaded the creaking floorboards and the rustling bin liner over the dinner jacket hanging from the door for reasons that presumably seem logical to Giles and was pushing Giles back onto his own side of our bed before Moth woke to find himself abandoned to what one of my parenting handbooks helpfully calls ‘a barred cage far from you in the dark’. Not far enough. By the time Raphael required my services to evict the Somali child soldiers from last week’s Guardian magazine from under his bed there was grey light in the sky over the mountains. I escorted the child soldiers all the way down the stairs and went to hide in the unfinished stunning modern eco-conversion with my laptop until morning forced itself upon me in the form of the builder’s motor boat.

  *

  My book is about the relationship between the Romantic celebration of childhood as a time of joyful purity and the simultaneous increase in residential institutions for the young: boarding schools, orphanages, hospitals and prisons. At the same time as Wordsworth is rejoicing in the clouds of glory trailed by infants and Rousseau is telling us to learn from the instinctive wisdom of toddlers, other people – actually, sometimes the same people – are sponsoring establishments intended to take the children of the poor away from their families and make them into useful consumers and producers for the age of capitalism. Nothing changes; as in modern parenting books, either babies come with a beautiful inner self that we need to respect and liberate (bring your child into your bed when he wakes at night) or they come as a primitive set of desires and
have to be socialized into humanity (leave him to scream until he learns not to be nocturnal). It’s interesting that the era famed for its embrace of infant innocence is equally, and simultaneously, committed to the idea of taming the little savages in institutions. When I started the research I thought this was simply a conflict between idealism and pragmatism, indulgence and discipline, but the more I read their rules and manifestos the more I think that institutions have utopian agendas of their own. Institutions constitute an attempt to ratify a brighter future, to achieve what individual households cannot encompass. They exist in order to make things different or better, although it seems to be in the nature of either humans or institutions that they often end by reinforcing, or even fossilizing, the status quo and making things worse. Institutions, at least in the eighteenth century, are the incarnation of optimism, of a confidence in human capacity for change that we lost somewhere along the way. My editor has said she’ll still take the manuscript if I get it in by September, and I think I’ll make it. If the USB device proffered by Giles as the solution to my need for online databases on an island without broadband works more often than it has so far, I’ll make it. If I can keep on behaving as if sleep were elective I’ll make it.

  I’ve finished the archival research, or even I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to come to Giles’s island. I’ve read the manuscript records of meals, accounts, expulsions and punishments in the boarding schools of the 1790s, plodded along lists of the benefactors of foundling hospitals across England, leafed my way through pages of yellowed instruction in uneven typeface: ‘It is with great Pleasure that I see at last the Preservation of Children become the Care of Men of Sense … this Business has been too long fatally left to the Management of Women, who cannot be supposed to have proper Knowledge to fit them for such a Task …’ (William Cadogan, An Essay Upon Nursing (London: 1753)). I’m more or less up to date on the secondary material, although I realized rather late in the day that the most important work on childhood and institutions was done by Anna Freud and her disciples in the aftermath of the Second World War. Freud himself has long been towards the top of the list of people I should have read, pretend to have read, but haven’t. My understanding of Freud is that he shows that the realization of human potential depends upon the self-control of parents, while I find economic and political solutions to the problem of suffering more palatable and, frankly, more likely to be achieved. Peace in the Middle East and the end of poverty and famine would be easier to implement than perfect parenting for all, and so I prefer the prophets of the Left to those of the human heart, Marx to Freud; one is, after all, concerned with what is possible as well as what is right. Nevertheless, when I saw that the collected works of Sigmund and Anna hadn’t been out of the college library in nine years I thought I might as well bring them here for the silence and fresh air. I’ve got the whole thing in draft so the idea, Giles’s idea, is that the isolation of Colsay is perfect for drafting and polishing and meditating on psychoanalysis without feeling the Fellows breathing malodorously down my neck. He overestimates my capacity for abstract thought and hasn’t really understood the extent to which the Fellows don’t care.