I shook my head.
‘I don’t know who they are – not names, I mean. Names don’t have any thinking-shapes, so we’ve never bothered. You just know who’s thinking, like you know who’s talking. I only found out who Rosalind was by accident.’
He went on looking at me seriously, uneasily.
‘How many of you?’ he repeated.
‘Eight,’ I told him. ‘There were nine, but one of them stopped about a month ago. That’s what I wanted to ask you, Uncle Axel, do you think somebody found out -? He just stopped suddenly. We’ve been wondering if anybody knows. . . . You see, if they found out about him -‘ I let him draw the inference himself.
Presently he shook his head.
‘ I don’t think so. We should be pretty sure to have heard of it. Perhaps he’s gone away, did he live near here?’
‘I think so – I don’t know really,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure he’d have told us if he was going away.’
‘ He’d have told you if he thought anybody had found out, too, wouldn’t he?’ he suggested. ‘ It looks to me more as if it’d be an accident of some kind, being quite sudden like that. You’d like me to try to find out?’
‘Yes, please. It’s made some of us afraid,’ I explained.
‘Very well.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll see if I can. It was a boy, you say. Not very far from here, probably. About a month ago. Any more?’
I told him what I could, which was very little. It was a relief to know that he would try to find out what had happened. Now that a month had gone by without a similar thing happening to any of the rest of us we were less anxious than we had been, but still far from easy.
Before we parted he returned to his earlier advice to remember that no one could be certain of the true image.
Later, I understood why he gave it. I realized, too, that he did not greatly care what was the true image. Whether he was wise or not in trying to forestall both the alarm and the sense of inferiority that he saw lying in wait for us when we should become better aware of ourselves and our difference, I cannot say. It might have been better to have left it awhile – on the other hand, perhaps it did something to lessen the distress of the awakening. . . .
At any rate, I decided, for the moment, not to run away from home. The practical difficulties looked formidable.
7
The arrival of my sister, Petra, came as a genuine surprise to me, and a conventional surprise to everyone else.
There had been a slight, not quite attributable, sense of expectation about the house for the previous week or two, but it remained unmentioned and unacknowledged. For me, the feeling that I was being kept unaware of something afoot was unresolved until there came a night when a baby howled. It was penetrating, unmistakable, and certainly within the house, where there had been no baby the day before. But in the morning nobody referred to the sound in the night. No one, indeed, would dream of mentioning the matter openly until the inspector should have called to issue his certificate that it was a human baby in the true image. Should it unhappily turn out to violate the image and thus be ineligible for a certificate, everyone would continue to be unaware of it, and the whole regrettable incident would be deemed not to have occurred.
As soon as it was light my father sent a stable-hand off on a horse to summon the inspector, and, pending his arrival, the whole household tried to disguise its anxiety by pretending we were just starting another ordinary day.
The pretence grew thinner as time went on, for the stable-hand, instead of bringing back the inspector forthwith, as was to be expected when a man of my father’s position and influence was concerned, returned with a polite message that the inspector would certainly do his best to find time to pay a call in the course of the day.
It is very unwise for even a righteous man to quarrel with his local inspector and call him names in public. The inspector has too many ways of hitting back.
My father became very angry, the more so since the conventions did not allow him to admit what he was angry about. Furthermore, he was well aware that the inspector intended him to be angry. He spent the morning hanging around the house and yard, exploding with bad temper now and then over trivial matters, so that everyone crept about on tiptoe and worked very hard indeed, in order not to attract his attention.
One did not dare to announce a birth until the child had been officially examined and approved; and the longer the formal announcement was delayed, the more time the malicious had to invent reasons for the delay. A man of standing looked to having the certificate granted at the earliest possible moment. With the word ‘baby’ unmentionable and unhintable, we all had to go on pretending that my mother was in bed for some slight cold, or other indisposition.
My sister Mary disappeared now and then towards my mother’s room, and for the rest of the time tried to hide her anxiety by loudly bossing the household girls. I felt compelled to hang about in order not to miss the announcement when it should come. My father kept on prowling.
The suspense was aggravated by everyone’s knowledge that on the last two similar occasions there had been no certificate forthcoming. My father must have been well aware – and no doubt the inspector was aware of it, too – that there was plenty of silent speculation whether my father would, as the law allowed, send my mother away if this occasion should turn out to be similarly unfortunate. Meanwhile, since it would have been both impolite and undignified to go running after the inspector, there was nothing to be done but bear the suspense as best we could.
It was not until mid-afternoon that the inspector ambled up on his pony. My father pulled himself together, and went out to receive him; the effort to be even formally polite nearly strangled him. Even then the inspector was not brisk. He dismounted in a leisurely fashion, and strolled into the house, chatting about the weather. Father, red in the face, handed him over to Mary who took him along to mother’s room. Then followed the worst wait of all.
Mary said afterwards that he hummed and ha’d for an unconscionable time while he examined the baby in minutest detail. At last, however, he emerged, with an expressionless face. In the little-used sitting-room he sat down at the table and fussed for a while about getting a good point on his quill. At last he took a form from his pouch, and in a slow, deliberate hand wrote that he officially found the child to be a true female human being, free from any detectable form of deviation. He regarded that thoughtfully for some moments, as though not perfectly satisfied. He let his hand hesitate before he actually dated and signed it, then he sanded it carefully, and handed it to my enraged father, still with a faint air of uncertainty. He had, of course, no real doubt in his mind, or he would have called for another opinion; my father was perfectly well aware of that, too.
At last Petra’s existence could be admitted. I was formally told that I had a new sister, and presently I was taken to see her where she lay in a crib beside my mother’s bed.
She looked so pink and wrinkled to me that I did not see how the inspector could have been quite sure about her. However, there was nothing obviously wrong with her, so she had got her certificate. Nobody could blame the inspector for that; she did appear to be as normal as a new-born baby ever looks. …
While we were taking turns to look at her somebody started to ring the stable bell in the customary way. Everyone on the farm stopped work, and very soon we were all assembled in the kitchen for prayers of thanksgiving.
Two, or it may have been three, days after Petra was born I happened upon a piece of my family’s history that I would prefer not to have known.
I was sitting quietly in the room next to my parents’ bedroom where my mother still lay in bed. It was a matter of chance, and strategy, too. It was the latest place that I had found to stay hidden awhile after the midday meal until the coast was clear and I could slip away without being given an afternoon job; so far, nobody had thought of looking there for me. It was simply a matter of putting in half an hour or so. Normally the room was very convenient, though just at present its use required caution because the wattle wall between the rooms was cracked and I had to move very cautiously on tiptoe lest my mother should hear me.