I looked across at Mazey. Squatting on his heels, he was whittling another of his unidentifiable shapes. I wondered if he’d been listening. You never could tell with him. Sometimes he’d say something later, though — six months later, or a year — and you’d realise that he’d heard every word. I sat beside him, among the leaves, just watching him. The sun warmed my back. I was glad we’d come.
Before we left, I took hold of his shoulder and looked into his eyes. I thought I’d found the words at last.
‘You see this place?’ I said. ‘Right here?’ I dipped my hand in the water, took it out and shook it. ‘This is where you became my son.’
A cool spring day. Several years had passed. I must have been forty-two or thereabouts. Though I was still married to Peter Kroner, I saw less of him than I used to. His father had died, and he was running the vineyard now, as well as the quarry. Sometimes he’d go drinking, though, and when he came home he’d try and put his hands on me, sweet nothings catching on the tooth that Karl had broken for him, but deep down he knew it was no good and before too long he’d be swaying round the bedroom with his black hair sticking up and his face all red and he’d be calling me foul names.
‘Sticks and stones,’ I’d say. ‘Sticks and stones.’
Karin had just celebrated her fifteenth birthday. I remembered what Karl had said about her inheriting my mother’s looks. The hotel phone was always ringing, and whenever we drove into the town together I could feel the eyes of men on her like postage stamps that were already licked and looking for an envelope. I thought there might be trouble and I mentioned it to Kroner, but he just looked at me in utter scorn and said, ‘What would you know about it?’ I noticed Mazey looking at her, too, with the same damp look, but I wasn’t going to mention it again.
And then, a cool spring day — March, I think it was …
As soon as I saw Karin from the window, standing in the car-park with her dress sticking to her and her hair pasted flat against her neck, I knew what had happened, I just knew, and I felt my heart sink down, like a cow or an ox when it’s been shot, the way their legs just crumple, go from under them.
I walked down the stairs and out through the side entrance. The car-park was empty that day. We had no guests. I listened to my shoes on the gravel as I walked towards her. I could see Miss Poppel’s house, still unsold, the front garden piled with machinery, abandoned wind-chimes jangling. Further down the street the sun was out, but where we were, it was shadows and a chill wind.
I said her name, but she didn’t look at me. I said her name again. This time she twitched as if I’d pulled on something that was attached to her. She was looking at the ground. Water dripped from the hem of her dress. It drew a black circle round her on the gravel. Seemed to be sealing her off.
‘What is it, Karin? What happened?’ Though I knew.
Her head moved one way, then the other; she might have been disagreeing with what I’d said. Her eyes rolled upwards, skywards, then she turned and walked past me, back into the house. I followed her through the door and up the stairs. She was already half-undressed when I reached her bedroom. I saw a bruise on her thigh, just below her hip. There were other bruises on her elbow and her knee. On the inside of her upper arm there were four ghostly mauve-blue fingerprints. She bundled her clothes into a sodden ball and put them on the floor in the corner, then she climbed into bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She lay on her back, a chalkiness about her lips and her teeth moving behind them. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.
I put my hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.
‘Don’t — don’t let him in here.’
‘Who? Mazey?’
She closed her eyes tight shut.
‘Don’t let him in,’ she whispered.
Outside her room, I stood with my hands wedged under my arms, uncertain what to do. She didn’t seem to be hurt, which was something; I didn’t want to involve the doctor. If it was Mazey who’d done it — and I was sure it was — I would take the necessary action myself. I didn’t want any strangers interfering. I didn’t want him taken away from me either; I couldn’t stand the thought of him in an institution. I went downstairs. I made Karin a glass of warm milk with sugar in it and I took it to her. She was sleeping, so I left it on the table beside her bed. Then I sat in the kitchen, waiting for Mazey to return.
I saw him through the window as he came up out of the trees, his hair pale against the dark green of the foliage, his shoulders slightly rounded, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. There was nothing in his face to suggest that anything had happened — but then, I hadn’t expected there to be. He walked into the kitchen, stooped over the sink and, scooping a handful of water from the cold tap, brought it to his mouth. It was almost always the first thing he did when he got home, no matter how long he’d been away. It seemed odd to think of him as a creature of habit, but that was what he was.
‘Mazey?’
He turned round.
‘You did something, didn’t you?’
He stared at me, the tap still running behind him, the water dripping off his chin.
‘Do you know what you’ve done?’
He began to shuffle on the floor. The first time he shuffled like that, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It reminded me of what a cat does when it covers up its mess.
‘Well?’
‘I–I did something.’ He wasn’t confessing exactly, but it wasn’t a question either.
‘It was bad what you did, Mazey. It was really bad.’
He turned back to the sink again. He cupped his hand under the running water and drank. But not because he was thirsty.
‘Mazey,’ and I took him by the arm, ‘you can’t do things like that. If you do things like that, people will come and take you away.’ I shook him hard. ‘You remember that place Kroner took you to? That place I had to come and fetch you from?’
His grey eyes fixed on my face, and he nodded.
‘If you do things like that, they’ll take you back again and this time it’ll be for ever. I won’t be able to do a thing about it. Not a thing.’
‘You can fetch me.’
I shook my head. ‘Not this time, Mazey.’
‘You can fetch me. With the knife.’ He was grinning.
I couldn’t explain it to him. It was strange. He could operate my father’s lathe. He could even drive a truck. But there were things you couldn’t make him understand. Simple things, like the fact that we get older. Like the fact we die. Like God. And, who knows, maybe it was better that way, not understanding something that’s beyond our understanding anyway. He had his own way of thinking, which he sometimes made available to me. Sometimes.
I did the only thing I could think of: I put him in the car and drove out to my father’s house. I told him to take his wind-chimes with him; I thought they might be some consolation.
There were dark clouds to the west of us, a great curving bank of blackness in the sky, a kind of overhang, but the wind was coming out of the north and I thought the storm would pass us by. I drove over the bridge, loose boards drumming under the wheels. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but it felt later; I even had to switch the headlights on. We turned on to the track, two ruts with a strip of grass down the middle, grass that was long enough to brush against the underside of the car.