The evening went very well. Both the parents looked proud and indulgent as their children stood tall and parroted out all the facts they knew. Clara read three poems: one by Keats, one by Shelley; the final one was by Edwin Exley, although the author’s name was not mentioned. Susan thought it would be a charming little secret. It wasn’t necessarily a very good poem, and was rather cruelly exposed beside the Victorian Romantics that had inspired it, but Mr and Mrs Exley couldn’t tell the difference.
Mr Exley gave the children a round of applause, and a shilling each, and told Susan that they would have to have a similar soirée at some point. Maybe at Christmas, when all their friends were there?
That night Susan visited Edwin in the study.
“I love you,” said Edwin, suddenly.
“Well, I love you too.” Susan thought nothing of this: Clara was always telling Susan she loved her, and putting her arms around her, she was such a needy girl. And Edwin was studying a book at the time, he wasn’t even looking at her.
“Will you marry me one day?”
Susan laughed. “Oh, I shouldn’t have thought so!”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a little boy.”
“I won’t be a little boy forever. I’ll get older soon. And I’ll go and fight. I’ll be brave and defend my country, and I’ll never be afraid. Do you believe me?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe you.”
“I’ll be fighting for you.” Edwin had put aside the book now, he had abandoned cover, and he was staring at Susan, and he was beginning to cry, but he didn’t seem sad, he seemed fierce.
Susan didn’t know what to say. “You’ll marry someone else, Eddie. You’ll see. Someone better than me.”
“And when I do, will you come to my wedding?”
“Of course I will!”
“Good. I want you there. I want you to see my bride. I want you to know that I shan’t love her. That I’m marrying her out of spite. That I’ll be cruel to her, and punish her, because she’ll never be you. I want you to know it’ll be your fault.”
“That’s a wicked thing to say,” said Susan. Edwin didn’t care. He shrugged.
“I pray to God each night that you’ll love me,” he said.
“God can’t answer prayers like that.”
“Not the God of Jesus,” he sneered. “There are older gods. The things I’ve read. The things that are in the books on the top shelf.”
Christmas Day, Mr Exley said, would be for the family alone. Cook and the two maids were given time off. Susan was put right at the heart of the celebrations, and it was tacit proof of acceptance that she found very touching. Mrs Exley gave her as a present a pink dress—”You don’t seem to have anything nice, my dear,” she said, and the dress fitted perfectly. Clara gave Susan a piece of embroidery she had stitched herself. Edwin didn’t give Susan anything, but he was a boy.
And in the evening they all went to a carol service at the church, and sang hymns together. Mr Exley sang with particular gusto. Edwin sat at the end of the pew, away from Susan, and barely even mouthed any of the hallelujahs to Christ.
On Boxing Day Cook and the maids came back, and everyone prepared for the party. Lots of Mr Exley’s old friends came with their twittering wives, and in honour of this Mr Exley wore his regimental uniform. There was a turkey dinner, and crackers, and cigars, and a game of charades. Susan didn’t join in, but she enjoyed watching all the grown-ups play. Before the children’s bedtime they were presented, newly dressed in smart clothes; the Exleys said Clara and Edwin would perform for them. Edwin stiffly recited the crowned heads of England once more, and the men especially gave hearty applause. Clara performed from memory a short poem by Keats. As a grand finale, the children would chant the seven times table.
It began well enough. Everyone looked on kindly, knowing that it would all be at an end soon, and they could get back to their sherries and jokes and fun. No one even appeared to notice how Edwin’s delivery was somewhat forced and sarcastic; Clara, at least, was a perfect angel.
Somewhere in the middle Edwin broke rank, and began to deliver a poem of his own. Clara didn’t know what to do, she floundered on for one more calculation, then came to a stop, and stared at her brother open-mouthed and dumb.
It wasn’t a love poem. That was the first thing to say. There was really very little about love in it.
It was a wonder Edwin got as far through it as he managed. He told, in doggerel verse, how he and his governess would meet regularly at night and have sex in his father’s study. There was nothing tender to it. It was blunt and pornographic.
And it was something more too. There was something animal about it. Not merely the sex itself, as rough and primal as it was. But a suggestion too in the act of congress, that as Edwin performed acts he should not have known about, and that surely most humans weren’t even capable of, there was something monstrous being born, that these writhing creatures were no longer simply boy and woman but something not of this world; there were beaks, and scales, and talons, and tongues that were impossibly, terrifyingly, long.
Mrs Exley just said, “No, no, no,” over and over again, as if her quiet denial of it could really matter a jot. Mr Exley roared at his son to stop, and when he didn’t, he got up, marched over to him, and clipped him hard around the head. At that point only did Edwin fall silent; he glared at his father, glared at the room, and glared at Susan most particularly. Then he ran from the room.
Susan ran too. She didn’t know where to go. She went to her room. She sat on the bed, numbed. She wasn’t there for long. Mr Exley banged upon the door, told her to get out, and come with him.
She had never been to Edwin’s room before. Now she saw that all over his bed were pages and pages of scribbled verse, ripped out of the notebook she’d bought him, and sketchpad drawings. The drawings were of her, she recognised herself at once. In most she’d been given claws and wings, it was her head on the body of wild beasts—lions, dogs, birds. In all she was naked. Human breasts, obscenely large, grew out from trunks of fur and scales, and dangled.
Edwin stood there, frightened, but acting brave, acting like a man.
Mr Exley picked up some of the writings, looked them over briefly. Threw them on the floor. “Filth,” he said.
He turned to Susan. “I do not believe. I cannot believe. Any of the things he writes here are true.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
“But how,” he said. “How?” And in that moment he looked at her so imploringly, like a little child himself, begging her to make things all right again. The face clouded; his teeth clenched; he was an adult once more. He said to Susan, “I want you to beat him. You must beat him. To within an inch of his life.”
And she saw then that in his hand, lying almost nonchalantly against the seam of his regimental uniform trouser leg, was a cane. “No,” she said.
“If you don’t beat him, I will,” said Exley. “And it will be easier on him if it’s you.”
“I can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Very well. But you will watch.”
She did watch. And just before Edwin bent over there was still something of the man in him, staring down his father defiantly, staring down the world. But it didn’t last long. And as he struck his son, again, and again, and again, Mr Exley would glance at Susan to check she was still watching, to check she appreciated what her bad teaching had forced a loving father to do—and she could see that he wished he could beat her as well, that he could put her over his knee and beat her senseless.