The Fifth Child. Doris Lessing

it. ‘You are tired, girl,’ she said. ‘You are bone tired.’ Then, seeing Harriet’s face: ‘Well, all right, but you aren’t to do anything, mind.’

      The two sisters and Dorothy made themselves responsible for the shopping and the cooking, the hard work.

      Downstairs among all the people–for the house was again full – were the two little creatures, Helen and Luke, all wispy fair hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks. Luke was staggering about, aided by everyone, and Helen was in her pram.

      That summer – it was 1968 – the house was full to the attic, nearly all family. The house was so convenient for London: people travelled up with David for the day and came back with him. There was good walking country twenty minutes’ drive away.

      People came and went, said they were coming for a couple of days and stayed a week. And how was all this paid for? Well, of course everyone contributed; and, of course, not enough, but people knew David’s father was rich. Without that mortgage being paid for, none of this could have happened. Money was always tight. Economies were made: a vast hotel-size freezer bought second-hand was stocked with summer fruit and vegetables. Dorothy and Sarah and Angela bottled fruit and jam and chutneys. They baked bread and the whole house smelled of new bread. This was happiness, in the old style.

      There was a cloud, though. Sarah and her husband, William, were unhappily married, and quarrelled, and made up, but she was pregnant with her fourth, and a divorce was not possible.

      Christmas, just as wonderful a festival, came and went. Then Easter…sometimes they all had to wonder where everybody was fitting themselves in.

      The cloud on family happiness that was Sarah and William’s discord disappeared, for it was absorbed in worse. Sarah’s new baby was Down’s syndrome, and there was no question of them separating. Dorothy remarked sometimes that it was a pity there wasn’t two of her, Sarah needed her as much, and more, than Harriet. And indeed she did take off on visits to her Sarah, who was afflicted, while Harriet was not.

      Jane was born in 1970, when Helen was two. Much too fast, scolded Dorothy, what was the hurry?

      Helen moved into Luke’s room, and Luke moved one room along. Jane made her contented noises in the baby’s room, and the two little children came into the big family bed and cuddled and played games, or they visited Dorothy in her bed and played there.

      Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved. Often, when David and Harriet lay face to face, it seemed that doors in their breasts flew open, and what poured out was an intensity of relief, of thankfulness, that still astonished them both: patience for what seemed now such a very long time had not been easy, after all. It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves. And look, they had been right to insist on guarding that stubborn individuality of theirs, which had chosen, and so obstinately, the best – this.

      Outside this fortunate place, their family, beat and battered the storms of the world. The easy good times had utterly gone. David’s firm had been struck, and he had not been given the promotion he expected; but others had lost their jobs and he was lucky. Sarah’s husband was out of work. Sarah joked dolefully that she and William attracted all the ill luck in the clan.

      Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William’s unhappiness, their quarelling, had probably attracted the mongol child – yes, yes, of course she knew one shouldn’t call them mongol. But the little girl did look a bit like Genghis Khan, didn’t she? A baby Genghis Khan with her squashed little face and her slitty eyes? David disliked this trait of Harriet’s, a fatalism that seemed so at odds with the rest of her. He said he thought this was silly hysterical thinking: Harriet sulked and they had to make up.

      The little town they lived in had changed in the five years they had been here. Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now commonplace. Gangs of youths hung around certain cafés and street-ends and owed respect to no one. The house next door had been burgled three times: the Lovatts’ not yet, but then there were always people about. At the end of the road there was a telephone box that had been vandalized so often the authorities had given up: it stood unusable. These days, Harriet would not dream of walking at night by herself, but once it would not have occurred to her not to go anywhere she pleased at any time of the day or night. There was an ugly edge on events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in England, not one – enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other said. The young Lovatts made themselves read the papers, and watch the News on television, though their instinct was to do neither. At least they ought to know what went on outside their fortress, their kingdom, in which three precious children were nurtured, and where so many people came to immerse themselves in safety, comfort, kindness.

      The fourth baby, Paul, was born in 1973, between a Christmas and an Easter. Harriet was not very well: her pregnancies had continued uncomfortable and full of minor problems – nothing serious, but she was tired.

      The Easter festivities were the best ever: that year was the best of all their years, and, looking back afterwards, it seemed that the whole year was a celebration, renewed from a spring of loving hospitality whose guardians were Harriet and David, beginning at Christmas when Harriet was so very pregnant, everyone looking after her, sharing in the work of creating magnificent meals, involved with the coming baby…knowing that Easter was coming, then the long summer, then Christmas again…

      Easter went on for three weeks, all of the school holidays. The house was crammed. The three little children had their own rooms but moved in together when beds were needed. Which of course they adored. ‘Why not let them sleep together always?’ Dorothy, the others would enquire. ‘A room each for such little tiddlers!’

      ‘It’s important,’ said David, fierce; ‘everyone should have a room.’

      The family exchanged glances as families do when stubbing toes on some snag in one of them: and Molly, who felt herself both appreciated but in some devious way criticised, too, said, ‘Everyone in the world! Everybody!’ She had intended to sound humorous.

      This scene was at breakfast – or, rather, mid-morning – in the family room, breakfast continuing indefinitely. All the adults were still around the table, fifteen of them. The children played among the sofas and chairs of the sitting-room area. Molly and Frederick sat side by side, as always, preserving their air of judging everything by the perspectives of Oxford, for which, here, they often got teased, but did not seem to mind, and were humorously on the defensive. David’s father, James, had been written to again by Molly, who had said he must ‘fork out’ more money, the young couple simply were not coping with feeding Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. He had sent a generous cheque and then had come himself. He sat opposite his former wife and her husband, and as usual both kinds of people were observed examining each other and marvelling that they could ever have come together. He looked fitted out for some sporting occasion: in fact, he was off skiing shortly, like Deborah, who was here with her little air of an exotic bird that had alighted in a strange place and was kept there by curiosity – she was not going to admit to admiration. Dorothy was there, dispensing tea and coffee. Angela sat with her husband; her three children played with the others. Angela, efficient, brisk (‘a coper,’ as Dorothy said, the ‘thank God’ being unspoken), allowed it to be known that she felt the two other sisters took up all of Dorothy and left her nothing. She was like a clever, pretty little fox. Sarah, Sarah’s husband, cousins, friends – the big house had people tucked into every corner, even on the sofas down here. The attic had long ago become a dormitory stacked with mattresses and sleeping bags in which any number of children could be bedded. As they sat here in the great warm comfortable room, which had a fire burning of wood collected by everyone yesterday from the woodland they had been walking in, the rooms above resounded with voices, and with music. Some of the older children were practising a song. This was a house – and this defined it for everyone, admiring what they could not achieve themselves – where television was not often watched.

      Sarah’s husband, William, was not at the table, but