The Wasp Factory Page 0,48

now.

Eric was crazy all right, even if he was my brother. He was lucky to have somebody sane who still liked him.

6

The Skull Grounds

When Agnes Cauldhame arrived, eight and a half months pregnant, on her BSA 500 with the swept-back handlebars and eye of Sauron painted red on the petrol-tank, my father was, perhaps understandably, not ferociously pleased to see her. She had, after all, deserted him almost immediately after my birth, leaving him holding the squealing baby. To disappear without so much as a phone call or a postcard for three years and then breeze back down the path from the town and across the bridge - rubber handlebars just clearing the sides and no more - carrying somebody else’s baby or babies and expecting to be housed, fed, nursed and delivered by my father was a little presumptuous.

Being only three at the time, I can’t remember much about it. In fact I can’t remember anything about it at all, just as I can’t remember anything before the age of three. But then, of course, I have my own good reasons for that. From the little I’ve been able to piece together when my father has chosen to let slip some information, I’ve been able to get what I think is an accurate idea of what happened. Mrs Clamp has come across with some details on sporadic occasions, too, though they are probably no more to be relied on than what my father’s told me.

Eric was away at the time, staying with the Stoves in Belfast.

Agnes, tanned, huge, all beads and bright caftan, determined to give birth in the lotus position (in which she claimed the child had been conceived) while going ‘Om’, refused to answer any of my father’s questions about where she had been for the three years and who she had been with. She told him not to be so possessive about her and her body. She was well and with child; that was all he needed to know.

Agnes ensconced herself in what had been their bedroom despite my father’s protests. Whether he was secretly glad to have her back, and perhaps even had some foolish idea that she might be back to stay, I can’t say. I don’t think he is all that forceful really, despite the aura of brooding presence he can show when he wants to be impressive. I suspect that my mother’s obviously determined nature would have been enough to master him. Anyway, she got her way, and lived in fine style for a couple of weeks that heady summer of love and peace, etcetera.

My father still had full use of both his legs at the time, and had to use them to run up and down from kitchen or lounge to the bedroom and back when Agnes rang the little bells sewn into the bell-bottoms of her jeans, which lay draped over a chair by the side of the bed. On top of that, my father had to look after me. I was toddling around at the time getting into mischief the way any normal, healthy three-year-old boy does.

As I say, I can’t remember anything, but I’m told that I did seem to enjoy annoying Old Saul, the bandy-legged and ancient white bulldog my father kept - I’m told - because it was so ugly and it didn’t like women. It didn’t like motorbikes, either, and had gone wild when Agnes first arrived, barking and attacking. Agnes kicked it across the garden and it ran off yelping into the dunes, only reappearing once Agnes was safely out of the way, confined to bed. Mrs Clamp maintains that my father ought to have put the dog down years before all this happened, but I think the wet-jowled, yellow-bleary-eyed, fishy-smelling old hound must have worked on his sympathy just by being so repulsive.

Agnes duly went into labour about lunch-time one hot still day, pouring sweat and Omming to herself while my father boiled lots of water and things and Mrs Clamp dabbed Agnes’s brow and like as not told her of all the women she’d known who had died in childbirth. I played outside, running around in a pair of shorts and - I imagine - quite happy to have the whole pregnancy thing going on because it gave me more freedom to do as I liked about the house and garden, free from my father’s supervision.

What I ever did to annoy Old Saul, whether it was the heat that made him especially