Chapter Twenty-Two

January, 1979/80
Geoff was another matter. He was, according to Montessori’s term, a ‘deviated’ child, one that was not settled into himself. His coming in was very different to Sassa's. I consulted the Zen quilters about timing of kids, and Maggie's first response was to choke on her tea and laugh.
'Plan! You guys are too much!' But when she stopped laughing, she and Anne, Shirley, Karen and Carrie all agreed that a year and a half was way too close – we were too late for that anyway - and two was bad – you had a new one smack in at the zenith of the terrible twos – but at three the kid was set in its ways and so, by default, two-and a half was the consensus.

When I reported this conversation to George when I got in, he laughed. 'You polled your girlfriends to plan a baby?'
'They know more about it than I do,' I shrugged. 'Heck, between them, Anne and Maggie have a hockey team.'
We sat on the floor in the common room in front of the stove, and he snagged Sas as she went running by, following the dog out to the kitchen. He swooped her upside down and blew on her tummy, making her squeal. She would never sleep if he kept on, but they were like boon companions, one encouraging the other. He put her down and she ran around him in a circle. 'Up, Daddy! Up!' And away they went again.
'Have you been doing that all night?'
'Pretty much,' he grinned. Ferg came back in and nosed about his elbow. 'Oh, you want in on it too, you playboy?' He ruffled the dog's ears and scooped up Sas again, to put her on Ferg like a pony. I shook my head. It was like having three children.
We continued the conversation later under our pile of winter quilts after Sas did go to sleep.
'So, two and a half means what?' he asked, calculating.
I smiled. ' A happy birthday.'
'I can live with that.' He kissed me. 'Are you all right with that?' He asked seriously.
'I'm more concerned about their getting along, being well-spaced, than my own convenience,' I said frankly.
'That's awfully scientific. Would it be too much, with running after her as well?'
'Shirley says the worst time to do it is when they go to school, so waiting too long is no good either.'
'But do you mind?' He persisted. 'Or is it all too much?'
I knew what was really bothering him – the possibility that I found our life more toilsome than he did. But we each worked as hard as the other. I had no resentment. I turned and looked at him. 'We have this one chance to do this right. I do want it to be right, for everyone. ' I kissed him. 'It's not too much. Sas'll be weaned by then. It's not too much. I had rather this, my lord, than any other where.'
'Ah,' he melted at that, murmuring.
'I like the sound of that, ' I said moving nearer.

When the time came around, Geordie's birthday was in the middle of the week, in the middle of school, with a town meeting that night, so we couldn't take days off as we had in summer with Sassa. Rather, it was on a frigid midnight in the glow of candles after Sas was asleep in her little bed beside Ferg in the common room. True to experience, the presence of the being coming in had been hanging around for a couple of weeks, and now, it seemed to me, that the energy was red – a deep bright scarlet like blood. Whoever this person was, it didn’t want Sas's high spiritual welcome. No, like bread on a cold day, the kundalini would only rise in sultry earthiness. But it did. And when we had drifted up from that deep place in the earth, I still saw the energy all scarlet. The room was hot as a sauna, like a jungle.
'On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves
Washes the grave with so many tears
A soldier cleans and polishes a gun
War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions'

'"I see it crimson, I see it red"' I murmured.
'He was in the war,' George breathed into my ear. 'He wants healing.'
I shuddered with premonition, and wondered if it were Matt Carberry.
I asked George later in the day why if it were Matt he would come to us, rather than Jack, since they had karma.
'Because Jack is an asshole,' he smiled. He put his hands over mine. 'It would just perpetuate their game. At least here, there's a chance he can shake it.'

Everything was different. I was really ill for three whole months. And Shirley said, 'It's a boy.' I ate farina with salt, and a whole jar of the wasabe I had made. And Shirley said, 'It's a boy.' And when he did come, he was late. The winter solstice passed, Christmas, then the New Year, and finally, something began to happen. As weird as it was, it was a relief, because he had been really low for weeks and I waddled around uncomfortably. On the second of January, I was in the kitchen with Sassa, making her lunch, and the baby shifted, and the waters broke all over the floor.
'Oh!'
I looked at Sass at the table, who was laughing. 'Silly Mommy!'
I put down the knife and brought her lunch to the table, squelching over.
'Brother is coming today,' I told her. Fergus had come in, and was nosing about the puddle.
'Out,' I told him. 'Go find my lord,' I told him. And he went.
Geordie came in from the workshop as I was finishing mopping up the puddle. 'Good thing we don't have school till next week,' I said.

Shirley when she came by the next day called it a 'dry birth' then said there really was no such thing, to which I replied, 'no kidding!' because I leaked everywhere for most of the day with nothing much else happening. We didn't too carried away with each other with Sas hanging out with us, but stuck to kissing, which was pretty good anyhow. When Sassa took her nap we did let go together and things opened up. By then it was dark, and we finally had some movement. Sas was asleep when he started to come as midnight approached, and George went to wake her up.

'It's time to see brother,' he said. She came in, rubbing her eyes, and climbed up on the bed where I was kneeling, her little face solemn. The coaching clock in the common room had just chimed midnight when Geoff rounded the corner and slid home. He was big and pale and not very greasy, and screamed blue murder the moment he arrived.
Sassa covered her ears. 'Shh, brother!' she commanded. 'Don't be noisy!'
Brother opened his big blue eyes and looked at her and stopped screaming.
'Neat trick,' George said, laughing and crying. He rubbed Sas's head, and we picked up the baby.

It was very dear to see Geordie with the boy. He wasn't macho about it, but there was a look in his eyes and a tone of voice whenever he was handling the baby, something so melting about the way he said 'son'. He was protective of Sassa, chivalrous, because ultimately she was a daintily made little girl, but Geoff was over nine pounds and with Geordie's own intense gaze. They understood one another in a fundamental way. He said to me one morning early on,
'It shall be interesting to raise a boy to truth and openness and chivalry from the start, to see how he gets on later.' He looked from Geoff to me. 'Less arsed up from ingrained cultural expectations.'
I smiled. 'Different ones! He must climb!' I was only half-joking.
'Yeah....' He sobered. 'Seriously, I'd like to spare him all the torment I went through.'
'Ah, now, that's a father talking.'
That had an unexpected response. He turned to me with a look that echoed that deep red night when Geoff was got, murmuring, 'had you any doubt,' and gave me a very erotic kiss that let the milk down. It was not a question and not a joke about paternity; there was something deep going on here between them, some understanding of karma – and I was their facilitator, their Parvati. I got it.

Feb 1980
Geoff as a person among us was such a completely different experience to Sassa as a baby. He was okay for the first couple of weeks, eating and sleeping as Sassa did, in a dreamy world of babyness. Then he began to vomit all over the place and cried endlessly. He could never settle no matter what we did; and even being carried around all the time in a sling, He was crabby, whining discontentedly.
‘If we’d had to go through this first,’ Geordie said after one bout of four hours of screaming, ‘I’d have said maybe it’s not a bad thing to have only one kid.’ Even Fergus couldn’t stand it anymore, and hid in the kitchen under the ledge, behind the bag of rice.
‘Colic,’ said the mothers of the Zen quilters, nodding.
‘O my God,’ Maggie drawled, ‘Ezra had that for three months, and I thought I would go mad. We had to get earplugs. After the girls, it was a shock.’
Anne agreed. Of her seven kids, her boys had all had it, but not her girls, Maire and Geraldine. Gerry was six months old now, placid and fat. ‘Like a milk-fed veal,’ Anne said.
Shirley said that it was much more common in boys, but I was of the mind that it was Geoff’s karma showing up, expressing itself. Nevertheless, I wrote to my sister and Ellen sent me her recipe for gripe water. While waiting for her reply, I took the plunge and gave up all forms of dairy and eggs. That helped a lot reducing his crying jags to about an hour, and eliminated his whining entirely. After several doses of Ellen’s recipe, Geoff cheered up remarkably and stopped leaving trails of curdled milk everywhere. ‘Veganism by default,’ I said to Geordie, when it was clear that this was working.
He smiled. ‘I knew I’d convince you eventually,’ he said.

Montessori said of kids like Geoff: ‘ the process of normalization is always the same. Into the ordered, tranquil, and harmonious atmosphere of the Montessori class enters the deviated child. It does not matter that his particular form of deviation may be. In some way or
other, however, he is a disordered being... that is the essence of it; he is out of harmony; his movements undisciplined, his mind without focus. Very often he is a veritable thorn in the flesh to the directress; a trouble to himself, and a nuisance to his neighbours. He will probably spend a good part of his time pottering around the room trying now this occupation and now that; but he does "everything by fits and starts and nothing for long." If he is not watched he may disturb the others, even to the extent of tormenting them.

‘Very likely, too, he is extremely disobedient, and wholly lacking in self-discipline. In short, the elements of his personality are in conflict within himself, as he himself is in conflict with his social environment. This state of things may last a short or a long time; but short or long it will be terminated in the same way. If the directress has done her duty properly, if she has treated him with a mixture of firmness and respect, if she has been tireless in presenting him with occupations (however indifferent he may seem), if she has encouraged him without coercion, and left him free to wander round at will... provided he disturbs no one... and if she has let him choose his occupations, then one day will come the great event. One day... Heaven knows why... he will choose some occupation (very likely one he has trifled with many times before) and settle down seriously to work at it with the first spontaneous spell of concentration that he has ever shown. This is the beginning of his salvation. Though he knows it not, but his directress does, he is now at the beginning of a new phase of life, almost a new life. His feet are now on the path which leads to normality.’
This was Geoff all over, which we first noticed when he was at the napkin-folding stage Sas had been – about the time he was crawling and pulling himself up on things. Whereas she was happy to play the game, he would push the cloth away, cry, or crawl away.
I mentioned this to Anne, and she said,’ Yeah I noticed that too. He’s all over the place.’ It was true. Geoff would only stick with examining something or playing with a toy for a very few minutes. She gave us some of Montessori’s work on the deviated child, and, on reading it, I felt really appalled and crushed by the prognosis.
‘What are we doing wrong?’ I asked Geordie. ‘It’s all the same as Sassa.’
He frowned, ‘ I don’t think we are…ask Anne. Perhaps it’s only Matt Carberry.’ He gave me a kiss. ‘Don’t worry!’
Anne said much the same thing. She shook her head, saying, ‘Sometimes it’s not the environment. Sometimes they just come in with stuff. Maybe it’s karma or some throwback to an ancestral problem… Was there anyone like that in your family or his?’
Uptight, discontented, frenetic people? I laughed. “Oh yes!’

October 1980 - Annie
It was strange to be taking him to the airport, sending him away without me. We were so rarely apart, all day long. Stranger still to go from our mountain where it was all of 50 degrees, to Palm Springs where it was 72. I knew that he was feeling distracted – when we had got the news, thank you to Jimbo, whose phone number at the General we had given family in case of emergencies, he cried with great wracking sobs – a child lost in the marketplace, separated from its mother. He had been separated from her, by his father’s sharpness, and now he had to release her to eternity, and face his father. He insisted that he was okay to drive, but he was quiet and grim, pale and his eyes shadowed from no sleep in the long night. He was wearing his only suit – a tweed thing saved for important faculty events – but no necktie, a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts in a daypack in the back with the kids. His collar was open, gypsy-dark summer tan still evident, and the slim graceful line of his neck where his hair curled back into a now long ponytail made me ache. I would miss him and worry about him more perhaps than he could know, but he had enough burdens of his own right now, and there was no need to say the words. But, hearing, he glanced over, and with a warm hand touched mine before he shifted gears.

In the queue we chatted and talked to the children; in the lounge we showed them all the other planes at the small airfield. And held hands as if he were going to war and not merely a funeral. When the flight was called I felt a rush of emotion and we looked at one another. He nodded slowly and smiled a little. ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘and let me kiss you.’ So we rose and kissed good-bye and then he picked up the kids and kissed them, and handed Geoffy to me. Picking up his rucksack, he went through the door with a last, piercing look and down the stairs to the airfield. We watched from the window as his tall slim form disappeared up the steps and into the plane. He had asked me not to, but we waited and Sass and I waved bye-bye to Daddy’s plane. Then we went for an icecream before driving home again over the hill. It felt like sending him off to war. In a way it was.

He hated the long flights; he always had done. Being over six-feet tall, he had no leg room on airplanes, and we couldn’t afford first-class, where there was. In Washington, he had to scramble to make the connecting flight to Manchester. He said it was good to hear a home accent from the stewardesses, who were nice to him when they heard he was going home for a funeral. Geoff met him at the airport. Geoff who was now an engineer and clean-cut with short hair and a wife and kid, with another on the way. He smiled when he saw Geordie, still true to himself, though his face had been grim and anxious a moment before.
‘Hey bro,’ Geoff said. ‘Good to see you, man. You look good.’
They regarded one another, fellow inmates of the asylum. The unspoken feelings about Annie between them.
“Man, Dad is going to blow a cog when he sees you!’
George grimaced. ‘Well he can go f-off. I’m not here to please him.’
Geoff laughed and slapped his shoulder. ‘Right-o!”

They stopped at the airport bar for a drink before heading south to Mobberly. “Dorey’s there with the kid,’ Geoff said, ‘Lord you should see her, she’s big as a house!’ He grinned as they got in the car. ‘It’s great.’
George smiled. ‘Show off.’
‘I’ve got pictures for you,’ Geoff said, ‘to take with you.’
‘I brought some too.’ He reached back and pulled them out of the front of his rucksack, a little bent. Us, the kids, the house, the village. The band at Strawberry. Geoff laughed. ‘Hey hey! Beautiful. A beautiful life.’
‘Yes it is.’
They regarded one another, the unspoken again between them. Then Geoff nodded. ‘Well, let’s go.’

Herb was now very grey, and thinner than he had been. But sharp as ever. He took one look at George and sneered. ‘Well, you haven’t changed.’
‘Neither have you,’ George returned evenly. He gave Dorey a hug. She was tall and blonde and voluptuous with a late-term baby.
‘Nice to meet you! You look beautiful.’
She laughed. ‘Such gallantry! Geoff said you were a romantic. Now I believe him.’
‘Did he? Well. I happen to like pregnant women, and you look a lot like my wife.’ He glanced at his brother, smiling. Geoff shrugged.
'Harriet, come here,’ Dorey said to the little girl who has hiding at the edge of the doorway to the kitchen. She came, a little blonde thing, very much like Sassa. ‘This is your uncle Geordie,’ Dorey said.
George hunkered down. ‘Hello sweetpea. I have a little girl about your age. Your cousin Sassa. Would you like to see?’
Harriet nodded, and he brought out the picture of the kids in the garden.
‘You have a big dog!’
Yes we do.’
‘And a baby! We are going to have a baby.’ She pointed at Dorey.
George laughed. ‘Yes, you are. Are you going to help? Sassa loves to help her Mamma with our baby. His name is Geoff, like your Dada.’
Harriet considered. ‘If it’s a good baby.’

They settled in after that then walked down to the church where the coffin lay in state, just the two of them, Geoff and George. Geordie said that the finality of the experience was quite shocking. Her dark hair was threaded white, but she was otherwise much as she had always been, except that her face was sunken and of a greyish cast that matched the blue flowered frock they had dressed her in. He had to lay his hand on her long thin ones, clasped neatly, to know, really know that this was not a bad dream. She really was dead. Until that moment he had not quite been able to believe it, until he touched her cold flesh and felt no rise of breath. And then the hard grip he’d had on his grief since that first phone call slipped away and he fell into the chasm. He was grateful he said, that here was no-one in the church just then except Geoff, who sat by in the first pew and let him have his time, until he should be able to come away. They were that English. No scenes or effusions. Just a clap on the shoulders, and a long hug in the privacy of the church, then going down to the pub for a drink, where they sat and talked about her for a couple of hours. At the public vigil that night, they did their duty, stoically greeting people and accepting their condolences. At the funeral early the next morning, they shouldered their burden with their uncles, come all the way from Canada late in the night, and a couple of the neighbours, and sat in arid misery while Herb delivered a surprisingly warm and tender eulogy of the wellspring of his life. That is what he called her. George said he nearly lost it then, from both grief and astonishment, because his father had never treated her as if she were that; he knew what that felt like and how the rock of one’s being should be treated. He lived it every day. And Herb was not that. He looked at his brother, who wore an expression of similar incredulity. Another conversation over pints was in order.

He stayed of course to help sort things out, a job that no-one should have to do alone, but by the third day, the day of our phone conversation, he was absolutely desperate – from the continual rain, from the mouldering old glebe, from Herb’s unbearable constant proximity and harangue, and from missing us, missing home.

I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory it falls
Soft and warm continuing
Tapping on my roof and walls
And from the shelter of my mind
Through the window of my eyes
I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets
Of England to where my heart lies

My mind's distracted and diffuse
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie with you when you're asleep
And kiss you when you start your day
And the song I was writing is left undone
I don't know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can't believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you
And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I

It was a Sunday, and he had managed to find some small solace in music with a found guitar in the sacristy, which he took back to the glebe with him and sat in the window playing all day. But he was quite quite miserable, unable to cope with his father any longer, and having no means of escape apart from walking in the rain down to the pub, where no one asked him questions, or to the shop, where everyone did.

After our conversation, he later said, he was better, and not simply because there were only now three days to endure. With Dorey’s help he had sorted through all of Anne’s things and boxed them up – what to keep, what to donate to Oxfam, what to offer to the locals – and they had made a nice little album of the letters and pictures George had sent her since we moved. On the last day, George gave it to his father, saying,
‘Ma would want you to have this, to know that we are here, that you’re not alone.’
Herb harrumphed. ‘What will I do with this?’
‘It will give you something to think about when you write to us, and to remember your grandchildren. And her.’ He looked at his father keenly. ‘I am assuming that you meant what you said the other day Dad, about her. And I want you to know that I completely understand, for such is Claire to me. Even if you can’t ever talk about it, or won’t, we have that in common. Apart from loving her.’ He looked over at the picture of his mother during the war, on the sideboard. A smiling, dark-haired girl in ankle socks and dark lipstick.

’So I hope that we can make some kind of peace. I am a happily married family man, with a good safe job, and a life full of friends and happiness. You wanted me to be successful, and I am. At the school, Claire and I are a legend – Mr. and Mrs., everyone knows who that is. And the kids love us. I hope that is enough to gain your respect, if not your approval or your love.’
They regarded one another, and slowly, Herb’s habitually severe expression melted a little.
‘She’s a pretty little thing, your wife,’ Herb said at last. ‘Very like your mother in many ways.’ His voice broke. 'Annie always said that to me…. Thank you, son.’ He patted the album, with its pictures and letters, to and from Annie.
George nodded and smiled, quite relieved. ‘You’re welcome, Dad.’

When they parted for good, Herb actually embraced him.

June 1982/September 1985
When Geoff was two, we built a lean-to on the south side of the house so it would get the heat from the stove, and divided it up by an inner partition into two rooms of ten feet square each. The kids now had their own rooms, to be in, to decorate and to look after. Even if they were, as James said, the size of monks' cells. There was one door to the rest of the house, through the kitchen, and Sassa wanted the one nearest the front door. She called it her magical cave; we had been reading the Arabian Nights.

Geoff did not easily learn to meditate as Sassa had, though he eventually did, but his early salvation was music. That was the first real breakthrough to the natural child. We had a particular programme for teaching the kids music, beginning with that kazoo. When they were about two and a half, they were allowed to play with the bodhran when we were playing – and I wasn’t using it- and when they had got the knack of following the rhythm, they progressed to a set of spoons. Bones were a knack even for some adults, but spoons were easy to handle and they quickly had the trick of them. They thought themselves very clever. And they were. By three, they were given a recorder and pennywhistle, and learned simple tunes. By five, they could pick out tunes on a small guitar we had borrowed from the summer school. Both the kids took off with that, and our happiest day of their childhood was when our little family had our first jam session, and they could follow along to music they had not practised. Geoff was seven then.

The primary school were very impressed with their skills and asked us to be part of their music programme, which we did, once a week – teaching both music appreciation, which involved movement, and musicianship. Kids who had been struggling with reading music – on guitar, fiddle and flute, the school’s instruments – really improved. We did not supplant their regular lessons, merely added another dimension to them.