The Fifth Child. Doris Lessing
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then in her two hands, but he vigorously kicked her away.
Harriet found herself thinking, I wonder what the mother would look like, the one who would welcome this – alien.
She stayed in bed a week – that is, until she felt she could manage the struggle ahead – and then went home with her new child.
That night, in the connubial bedroom, she sat up against a stack of pillows, nursing the baby. David was watching.
Ben sucked so strongly that he emptied the first breast in less than a minute. Always, when a breast was nearly empty, he ground his gums together, and so she had to snatch him away before he could begin. It looked as if she were unkindly depriving him of the breast, and she heard David’s breathing change. Ben roared with rage, fastened like a leech to the other nipple, and sucked so hard she felt that her whole breast was disappearing down his throat. This time, she left him on the nipple until he ground his gums hard together and she cried out, pulling him away.
‘He’s extraordinary,’ said David, giving her the support she needed.
‘Yes, he is, he’s absolutely not ordinary.’
‘But he’s all right, he’s just…”
‘A normal healthy fine baby,’ said Harriet, bitter, quoting the hospital.
David was silent: it was this anger, this bitterness in her that he could not handle.
She was holding Ben up in the air. He was wrestling, fighting, struggling, crying in his characteristic way, which was a roar or a bellow, while he went yellowish white with anger – not red, like a normal cross baby.
When she held him to get up the wind, he seemed to be standing in her arms, and she felt weak with fear at the thought that this strength had so recently been inside her, and she at its mercy. For months, he had been fighting to get out, just as now he fought in her grasp to become independent.
When she laid him in his cot, which she was always glad to do because her arms ached so badly, he bellowed out his rage, but soon lay quiet, not sleeping, fully alert, his eyes focused, and his whole body flexing and unflexing with a strong pushing movement of heels and head she was familiar with: it was what had made her feel she was being torn apart when he was inside her.
She went back into bed beside David. He put out his arm, so that she could lie by him, inside it, but she felt treacherous and untruthful, for he would not have liked what she was thinking.
Soon she was exhausted with feeding Ben. Not that he did not thrive: he did. He was two pounds over his birth weight when he was a month, which was when he would have been less than a week old if he had gone full term.
Her breasts were painful. Making more milk than they ever had had to do, her chest swelled into two bursting white globes long before the next feed was due. But Ben was already roaring for it, and she fed him, and he drained every drop in two or three minutes. She felt the milk being dragged in streams from her. Now he had begun something new: he had taken to interrupting the fierce sucking several times during a feed, and bringing his gums together in the hard grinding movement that made her cry out in pain. His small cold eyes seemed to her malevolent.
‘I’m going to put him on the bottle,’ she said to Dorothy, who was watching this battle with the look, it seemed to Harriet, everyone had when watching Ben. She was absolutely still and intent, fascinated, almost hypnotized, but there was repugnance there, too. And fear?
Harriet had expected her mother to protest with ‘But he’s only five weeks old!’ – but what Dorothy said was ‘Yes, you must, or you’ll be ill.’ A little later, watching Ben roar, and twist and fight, she remarked. ‘They’ll all be coming soon for the summer.’ She spoke in a way new to her, as if listening to what she said and afraid of what she might say. Harriet recognized it, for this was how she felt saying anything at all. So do people speak whose thoughts are running along secretly in channels they would rather other people did not know about.
On that same day, Dorothy came into the bedroom where Harriet fed Ben, and saw Harriet pulling the child clear of breasts that had bruises all around the nipples. She said, ‘Do it. Do it now. I’ve bought the bottles, and the milk. I’m sterilizing the bottles now.’
‘Yes, wean him,’ said David, agreeing at once. But she had fed the other four for months, and there had been hardly a bottle in the house.
The adults, Harriet and David, Dorothy and Alice, were around the big table, the children having gone up to bed, and Harriet tried Ben with the bottle. He emptied it in a moment, while his body clenched and unclenched, his knees up in his stomach, then extended like a spring. He roared at the empty bottle.
‘Give him another,’ sad Dorothy, and set about preparing one.
‘What an appetite,’ said Alice socially, trying hard, but she looked frightened.
Ben emptied the second bottle: he was supporting it with his two fists, by himself. Harriet barely needed to touch it.
‘Neanderthal baby,’ said Harriet.
‘Oh come on, poor little chap,’ said David, uneasy.
‘Oh God, David,’ said Harriet, ‘poor Harriet is more like it.’
‘All right, all right – the genes have come up with something special this time.’
‘But what, that’s the point,’ said Harriet. ‘What is he?’
The other three said nothing – or, rather, said by their silence that they would rather not face the implications of it.
‘All right,’ said Harriet, ‘let’s say he has a healthy appetite, if that makes everyone happy.’
Dorothy took the fighting creature from Harriet, who collapsed exhausted back in her chair. Dorothy’s face changed as she felt the clumsy weight of the child, the intransigence, and she shifted her position so that Ben’s pistoning legs could not reach her.
Soon Ben was taking in twice the amount of food recommended for his age, or stage: ten or more bottles a day.
He got a milk infection, and Harriet took him to Dr Brett.
‘A breast-fed baby shouldn’t get infections,’ he said.
‘He’s not breast-fed.’
‘That’s not like you, Harriet! How old is he?’
‘Two months,’ said Harriet. She opened her dress and showed her breasts, still making milk, as if they responded to Ben’s never appeased appetite. They were bruised black all around the nipples.
Dr Brett looked at the poor breasts in silence, and Harriet looked at him: his decent, concerned doctor’s face confronting a problem beyond him.
‘Naughty baby,’ he conceded, and Harriet laughed out loud in astonishment.
Dr Brett reddened, met her eyes briefly in acknowledgement of her reproach, and then looked away.
‘All I need is a prescription for diarrhoea,’ said Harriet. She added deliberately, staring at him, willing him to look at her, ‘After all, I don’t want to kill the nasty little brute.’
He sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed them slowly. He was frowning, but not in disapproval of her. He said, ‘It is not abnormal to take a dislike to a child. I see it all the time. Unfortunately.’
Harriet said nothing, but she was smiling unpleasantly, and knew it.
‘Let me have a look at him.’
Harriet took Ben out of the pram, and laid him on the table. At once he turned on to his stomach and tried to get himself on all fours. He actually succeeded for a moment before collapsing.
She looked steadily at Dr Brett, but he turned away to his desk to write a prescription.
‘There’s obviously nothing much wrong with him,’ he said, with the same baffled, offending note that