The Fifth Child. Doris Lessing

out his triumph. All the other children had laughed, chuckled, and wanted to be loved, admired, praised, on reaching this moment of achievement. This one did not. It was a cold triumph, and he staggered about, eyes gleaming with hard pleasure, while he ignored his mother. Harriet often wondered what he saw when he looked at her: nothing in his touch or his look ever seemed to say, This is my mother.

      One early morning, something took Harriet quickly out of her bed into the baby’s room, and there she saw Ben balanced on the window-sill. It was high – heaven only knew how he had got up there! The window was open. In a moment he would have fallen out of it. Harriet was thinking, What a pity I came in…and refused to be shocked at herself. Heavy bars were put in, and there Ben would stand on the sill, gripping the bars and shaking them, and surveying the outside world, letting out his thick, raucous cries. All the Christmas holidays he was kept in that room. It was extraordinary how people, asking – cautiously – ‘How is Ben?’ and hearing, ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ did not ask again. Sometimes a yell from Ben loud enough to reach downstairs silenced a conversation. Then the frown appeared on their faces that Harriet dreaded, waiting for it: she knew it masked some comment or thought that could not be voiced.

      And so the house was not the same; there was a constraint and a wariness in everybody. Harriet knew that sometimes people went up to look at Ben, out of the fearful, uneasy curiosity he evoked, when she was out of the way. She knew when they had seen him, because of the way they looked at her afterwards. As if I were a criminal! she raged to herself. She spent far too much of her time quietly seething, but did not seem able to stop. Even David, she believed, condemned her. She said to him, ‘I suppose in the old times, in primitive societies, this was how they treated a woman who’d given birth to a freak. As if it was her fault. But we are supposed to be civilized!’

      He said, in the patient, watchful way he now had with her, ‘You exaggerate everything.’

      ‘That’s a good word – for this situation! Congratulations! Exaggerate!’

      ‘Oh God, Harriet,’ he said differently, helplessly, ‘don’t let’s do this – if we don’t stand together, then…’

      It was at Easter that the schoolgirl Bridget, who had returned to see if this miraculous kingdom of everyday life was perhaps still there, enquired, ‘What is wrong with him? Is he a mongol?’

      ‘Down’s syndrome,’ said Harriet. ‘No one calls it mongol now. But no, he’s not.’

      ‘What’s wrong with him, then?’

      ‘Nothing at all,’ said Harriet airily. ‘As you can see for yourself.’

      Bridget went away, and never came back.

      The summer holidays again. It was 1975. There were fewer guests: some had written or rung to say they could not afford the train fare, or the petrol. ‘Any excuse is better than none,’ remarked Dorothy.

      ‘But people are hard up,’ said David.

      ‘They weren’t so hard up before that they couldn’t afford to come and live here for weeks at a time at your expense.’

      Ben was over a year old now. He had not said one word yet, but in other ways he was more normal. Now it was difficult to keep him in his room. Children playing in the garden heard his thick, angry cries, and saw him up on the sill trying to push aside his bars.

      So he came out of his little prison and joined them downstairs. He seemed to know that he ought to be like them. He would stand, head lowered, watching how everyone talked, and laughed, sitting around the big table; or sat talking in the living-room, while the children ran in and out. His eyes were on one face, then another: whomever he was looking at became conscious of that insistent gaze and stopped talking; or turned a back, or a shoulder, so as not to have to see him. He could silence a room full of people just by being there, or disperse them: they went off making excuses.

      Towards the end of the holidays, someone came bringing a dog, a little terrier. Ben could not leave it alone. Wherever the dog was, Ben followed. He did not pet it, or stroke it: he stood staring. One morning when Harriet came down to start breakfast for the children, the dog was lying dead on the kitchen floor. It had had a heart attack? Suddenly sick with suspicion, she rushed up to see if Ben was in his room: he was squatting on his bed, and when she came in, he looked up and laughed, but soundlessly, in his way, which was like a baring of the teeth. He had opened his door, gone quietly past his sleeping parents, down the stairs, found the dog, killed it, and gone back up again, quietly, into his room, and shut the door…all that, by himself! She locked Ben in: if he could kill a dog, then why not a child?

      When she went down again, the children were crowding around the dead dog. And then the adults came, and it was obvious what they thought.

      Of course it was impossible – a small child killing a lively dog. But officially the dog’s death remained a mystery; the vet said it had been strangled. This business of the dog spoiled what was left of the holidays, and people went off home early.

      Dorothy said, ‘People are going to think twice about coming again.’

      Three months later, Mr McGregor, the old grey cat, was killed in the same way. He had always been afraid of Ben, and kept out of reach. But Ben must have stalked him, or found him sleeping.

      At Christmas the house was half empty.

      It was the worst year of Harriet’s life, and she was not able to care that people avoided them. Every day was a long nightmare. She woke in the morning unable to believe she would ever get through to the evening. Ben was always on his feet, and had to be watched every second. He slept very little. He spent most of the night standing on his window-sill, staring into the garden, and if Harriet looked in on him, he would turn and give her a long stare, alien, chilling: in the half dark of the room he really did look like a little troll or a hobgoblin crouching there. If he was locked in during the day, he screamed and bellowed so that the whole house resounded with it, and they were all afraid the police would arrive. He would suddenly, for no reason she could see, take off and run into the garden, and then out the gate and into the street. One day, she ran a mile or more after him, seeing only that stubby squat little figure going through traffic lights, ignoring cars that hooted and people who screamed warnings at him. She was weeping, panting, half crazed, desperate to get to him before something terrible happened, but she was praying, Oh, do run him over, do, yes, please…She caught up with him just before a main road, grabbed him, and held the fighting child with all her strength. He was spitting and hissing, while he jerked like a monster fish in her arms. A taxi went by; she called to it, she pushed the child in, and got in after him, holding him fast by an arm that seemed would break with his flailing about and fighting.

      What could be done? Again she went to Dr Brett, who examined him and said he was physically in order.

      Harriet described his behaviour and the doctor listened.

      From time to time, a well-controlled incredulity appeared on his face, and he kept his eyes down, fiddling with pencils.

      ‘You can ask David, ask my mother,’ said Harriet.

      ‘He’s a hyperactive child – that’s how they are described these days, I believe,’ said old-fashioned Dr Brett. She went to him because he was old-fashioned.

      At last he did look at her, not evading her.

      ‘What do you expect me to do, Harriet? Drug him silly? Well, I am against it.’

      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