‘My dear,’ Miss Smith’s husband said, ‘you really will have to be more careful.’
‘But I am. Truly I am. I’m just as careful as anyone can be.’
‘Of course you are. But it’s a difficult age. Perhaps, you know, you need a holiday.’
‘But I’ve had difficult ages to deal with for years –’
‘Now now, my dear, it’s not quite the same, teaching a class of kids.’
‘But it shouldn’t be as difficult. I don’t know –’
‘You’re tired. Tied to a child all day long, every day of the week, it’s no joke. We’ll take an early holiday.’
Miss Smith did feel tired, but she knew that it wasn’t tiredness that was really the trouble. Her baby was almost three, and for two years she knew she had been making mistakes with him. Yet somehow she felt that they weren’t her mistakes: it was as though some other person occasionally possessed her: a negligent, worthless kind of person who was cruel, almost criminal, in her carelessness. Once she had discovered the child crawling on the pavement beside his pram: she had forgotten apparently to attach his harness to the pram hooks. Once there had been beads in his pram, hundreds of them, small and red and made of glass. A woman had drawn her attention to the danger, regarding curiously the supplier of so unsuitable a plaything. ‘In his nose he was putting one, dear. And may have swallowed a dozen already. It could kill a mite, you know.’ The beads were hers, but how the child had got them she could not fathom. Earlier, when he had been only a couple of months, she had come into his nursery to find an excited cat scratching at the clothes of his cot; and on another occasion she had found him eating a turnip. She wondered if she might be suffering from some kind of serious absent-mindedness, or blackouts. Her doctor told her, uncomfortingly, that she was a little run down.
‘I’m a bad mother,’ said Miss Smith to herself; and she cried as she looked at her child, warm and pretty in his sleep.
But her carelessness continued and people remarked that it was funny in a teacher. Her husband was upset and unhappy, and finally suggested that they should employ someone to look after the child. ‘Someone else?’ said Miss Smith. ‘Someone else? Am I then incapable? Am I so wretched and stupid that I cannot look after my own child? You speak to me as though I were half crazy.’ She felt confused and sick and miserable. The marriage teetered beneath the tension, and there was no question of further children.
Then there were two months without incident. Miss Smith began to feel better; she was getting the hang of things; once again she was in control of her daily life. Her child grew and flourished. He trotted nimbly beside her, he spoke his own language, he was wayward and irresponsible, and to Miss Smith and her husband he was intelligent and full of charm. Every day Miss Smith saved up the sayings and doings of this child and duly reported them to her husband. ‘He is quite intrepid,’ Miss Smith said, and she told her husband how the child would tumble about the room, trying to stand on his head. ‘He has an aptitude for athletics,’ her husband remarked. They laughed that they, so unathletic in their ways, should have produced so physically lively an offspring.
‘And how has our little monster been today?’ Miss Smith’s husband asked, entering the house one evening at his usual time.
Miss Smith smiled, happy after a good, quiet day. ‘Like gold,’ she said.
Her husband smiled too, glad that the child had not been a nuisance to her and glad that his son, for his own sake, was capable of adequate behaviour. ‘I’ll just take a peep at him,’ he announced, and he ambled off to the nursery.
He sighed with relief as he climbed the stairs, thankful that all was once again well in the house. He was still sighing when he opened the nursery door and smelt gas. It hissed insidiously from the unlit fire. The room was sweet with it. The child, sleeping, sucked it into his lungs.
The child’s face was blue. They carried him from the room, both of them helpless and inadequate in the situation. And then they waited, without speaking, while his life was recovered, until the moment when the doctor, white-coated and stern, explained that it had been a nearer thing than he would wish again to handle.
‘This is too serious,’ Miss Smith’s husband said. ‘We cannot continue like this. Something must be done.’
‘I cannot understand –’
‘It happens too often. The strain is too much for me, dear.’
‘I cannot understand it.’
Every precaution had been taken with the gas-fire in the nursery. The knob that controlled the gas pressure was a key and the key was removable. Certainly, the control point was within the child’s reach but one turned it on or off, slipped the key out of its socket and placed it on the mantelpiece. That was the simple rule.
‘You forgot to take out the key,’ Miss Smith’s husband said. In his mind an idea took on a shape that frightened him. He shied away, watching it advance, knowing that he possessed neither the emotional nor mental equipment to fight it.
‘No, no, no,’ Miss Smith said. ‘I never forget it. I turned the fire off and put the key on the mantelpiece. I remember distinctly.’
He stared at her, drilling his eyes into hers, hopelessly seeking the truth. When he spoke his voice was dry and weary.
‘The facts speak for themselves. You cannot suggest there’s another solution?’
‘But it’s absurd. It means he got out of his cot, turned the key, returned to bed and went to sleep.’
‘Or that you turned off the fire and idly turned it on again.’
‘I couldn’t have; how could I?’
Miss Smith’s husband didn’t know. His imagination, like a pair of calipers, grasped the ugly thought and held it before him. The facts were on its side, he could not ignore them: his wife was deranged in her mind. Consciously or otherwise she was trying to kill their child.
‘The window,’ Miss Smith said. ‘It was open when I left it. It always is, for air. Yet you found it closed.’
‘The child certainly could not have done that. I cannot see what you are suggesting.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I am suggesting. Except that I don’t understand.’
‘He’s too much for you, dear, and that’s all there is to it. You must have help.’
‘We can’t afford it.’
‘Be that as it may, we must. We have the child to think of, if not ourselves.’
‘But one child! One child cannot be too much for anyone. Look, I’ll be extra careful in future. After all, it is the first thing like this that has happened for ages.’
‘I’m sorry, dear. We must advertise for a woman.’
‘Please –’
‘Darling, I’m sorry. It’s no use talking. We have talked enough and it has got us nowhere. This is something to be sensible about.’