Ingenious pain Andrew Miller (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📖

with her kisses. He sits still upon her lap, remote as a spider or a star.

Elizabeth says: 'He will change in time. Give the child time. Was Sarah not a backward, whispery sort of infant? Yet she speaks well and often enough now.' She watches James as though his first words will be a denunciation. She has put the horns on you, Joshua Dyer! Hearing some commotion in the village, she fears it is the Rough Music, the carnivals of hate that play beneath the windows of adulteresses. God forgive her, she tried a dozen times to lose the child, and it was not as if she had not lost others before their term. The last two had never gone beyond the fourth month. But this one was tenacious, bracing itself in her belly. Now, with his blue eyes, his silence loud as a huntsman's horn, he has come to shame her. The old woman, the Widow, blunt red face and ferret's eyes, her mind wringing intelligence out of the air, does not quite dare openly accuse her. She watches the boy, then settles a look on Elizabeth that needs no explanation.

As the child grows, so the turn of her mind is darker. She senses the presence of darkness; a malevolent look in the eye of a ram, a branch slapping her face, a fly crawling on the white of her wrist. She remembers the stranger's hand, long and light, and the lines of a song she sang as a girl: 'The Devil is a Gen'leman, He dances very neat . . .'

On an afternoon in the child's third year, alone with him, watching him gaze about with that quiet, empty look, as if he understood everything or nothing, she pinches him hard on his upper arm, fixes him with her nails, almost until he bleeds. When he looks at her, merely quizzical, and then looks down, calmly, at the raw, narrow ruby on his arm, she is filled with a horror of him, a nausea. But the panic passes and she is swept by waves of tenderness. How pretty he is! How absurdly sad, bolted into his silence. She hugs him and sucks the mark she has made on his

arm, though she cannot shift it and sees it there long afterwards, memento of her shame, terror, love.

Sometimes she is afraid that the Widow will speak to Joshua, yet they both know Joshua will believe only what he wishes to, the thing most comfortable to believe: that his wife is faithful and loves him as he loves her. Once a day he dutifully asks, 'How is it with the boy?', but he does not stay for an answer, nor does he whittle in the evenings wooden dolls and spinning-tops as has done for the others.

Dumb beneath this canopy of adult fears, James's world expands. His mind, a room furnished with fires, cats and painted suns, now fills with the life of the farm. In hand-me-down rabbit-skin breeches he is led into the ooze of the yard, watching the hens squabble and spiders spin their webs about the hinges of wedged and unshuttable doors. He learns the smell of lime in the fields, sees the spoor of hares on the snow, listens to the threshers, their voices ghostly among the dust and shadows in the barn, old hats on their feet to save them breaking the thatching straw.

He meets Tom Purely, the 'strawberry man' on account of a growth of pink skin from his neck. Tom takes the boy to see the pig and they find it in the orchard, a taU white pig with large ears, its breath smelling of apples and cabbage and sour milk from the dairy slops. He watches when it is slaughtered, the men flexing their hands and burning off the creature's bristle with torches of straw.

Jenny Scurl takes him for walks in the orchard. By the hedge at the back she kisses Bob Ketch or Dan Miller or Dick Shutter. Bob Ketch squeezes her bubs and she sighs as if it made her sad. In May she puts flowers in her hair and in the boy's hair too. His hair is lighter, touched with gold in summer. His eyes, which everyone hoped would turn brown like the other children's^ stay blue. Mr Viney, stopping by one day, tells Joshua how it

is not unheard of, one blue-eyed child among a brood, not unheard of.

As soon as he is old enough he is moved from his parent's room to the chamber next to it. The room is small. Two flock mattresses on either side of the window, and two wooden chests for their things. There is a small fireplace in the corner, and on the wall above the girl's bed is Sarah's picture of a cow, flat and red against a flat blue sky.

Waking in boyhood mornings, coming awake when the world outside is more night than day, this is how it is: the tap and scrape of a horseshoe, the hissed remarks of a ploughboy or horseman to Jenny as she comes from the dairy door to start the milking. Later he hears his parents. His father's boots shaking the house, his mother's whispering. Then the light of a candle inkling beneath the door, the door softly opening and the older children, Charles and Liza, swinging out their legs in rumpled nightshirts, pulling on clothes very fast, and without a word spoken following the candle downstairs.

Later, Liza comes back, her hands scented with cream and fire-smoke and the musky-shitty smell of the animals. She scrubs them - James and Sarah - with a cloth and water she has carried from the well, searching the small folds of their faces with half-tender, half-violent movements. The day is open then. A dozen familiar voices rise out of yards and fields, calling to dogs, herding cattle, greeting neighbours. Saws and hammers and axes begin their work; a flight