In theory everyone, which was to say Susan Baker, assumed Mharie McNeilly came to Fox Corner to help look after its resident prince. (This being, incidentally, Susan Baker's actual words on the subject, Fox Corner being otherwise bereft of royals to the mundane inhabitants.) And in the way of family mythology, because someone said it, everyone else believed it. It would free up Judith Carlisle, was the theory, Judith being presumably kept busy with baby Nesha (not a name as per Susan Baker) and the general tumble (this actually was the accepted collective noun, as per Uncle Jem) of Carlisle gremlins. Thus Susan Baker started it, but Anne Blythe continued it, as did Gilbert. It was days, or perhaps hours, before the Merediths of Glen St Mary had joined in the round robin, and by that circuitous route it travelled onwards to Nan and Jerry (popularly The Wandering Merediths to family), and thence to a very confused Poppy in Ontario. She read this in a letter, blinked a bit, read it against Mara's account of her sister's arrival, and then passed both on to Peter to confirm that he, too, did not have to squint to spot the difference.
Anyway, that was the theory. In practice Mharie had school during the day, which left great swathes in which, as per the Susan doctrine, baby Iain would have been unattended. Not even Faith, so laconic about her own children's exposure to such things as autopsies and doctoring – 'It's only what we do for a living' was her line – could have countenanced that. And anyway, the thing was practically impossible. The fact was that there was always someone waiting in the wings to take the children.
Though Judith Carlisle did occasionally get a reprieve; that part of the Susan doctrine was right. This happened by way of depositing baby Nesha, who was rapidly becoming Nattie to family (but which still wasn't a Baker-approved name), on the Fox Corner doorstep. Or she and Iain might find their way into the capable hands of Teddy Lovall, or, though less often, under the reluctant ministrations of Kitty Foster. It might be that Faith was running the surgery from Larkrise and could take them in her cobbled-together nursery off the back of the house. On those days they ran and fetched bandages and held pins for her and were declared to be 'very useful indeed.'
Then there was the newly-arrived Mharie, Jem and Dog Tuesday (they were definitely a double act), and Helen, who was herself only a gremlin but desperate to be an adult to somebody. Nor was it unheard of for the Blakes of Martyrs' Manse to volunteer themselves for a spot of child-minding as occasion warranted. On still other occasions entirely, it might fall out that Judith was preoccupied, Faith at the hospital, and Teddy and Kitty embroiled in their various jobs, in which instance, Iain Blythe went with his mother to the Crown Imperial.
No one ever mentioned this to Susan, because if she had never fully come to terms with Walter's poetry she was still less reconciled to the idea of Theatre. The idea that her beloved brown boy snuggled contented into a nest of his own manufacture (read red velveteen cushions repurposed from elsewhere in the wings) while various adults ran lines and blocked scenes would have shocked her. To leave a boy like Iain in a place like that, well, it didn't bear thinking about, and that you may tie to. As for the idea that Iain, age four and precocious with it, had discovered for himself a particular three-legged stool and relocated it to the wings of the stage the better to watch rehearsals – it would have shocked Susan to her could tie to that, too.
Iain adored it. He loved the musty, dusty smell of his mother's dressing room, and the plush of the cushions he curled up on, first, as a baby, to sleep, but latterly to read. He loved the clatter and chatter and rush of the place, everyone coming and going and trying to do ten things at once. He chased bolts of fabric as they tumbled glad riot off their shelves with childish, chubby hands. He ran giddily down the hallway, his arms aeroplanes and Hartley Evans, house porter, cheerily on his heels. He learned to read off the playbills, the ink sharp-smelling and still drying, his fingers growing black with exposure to it.
Susan would have disavowed it all, the ink, the velveteen cushions, the unravelling fabric and impromptu games of tig. She might have relented had she seen he was in a fair way to be petted; if he adored the theatre, the theatre adored him, too. He was the first of the babies to belong to the Evensong Aunts as he called them – the girls his mother had lived with after Swallowgate and the war but before his father – and they worshipped him for it. And whereas the pre-Fox Corner period of Mara Blythe's life had always seemed strange and nebulous to Iain, who could not picture her anywhere but Fox Corner, with the Mull Pottery, resident foxes and the cedars under the window, afternoons at The Crown Imperial had the weird effect of putting all that in context. There was Ianthe with her tragic, almost purple, eyes, and Magda, whose English in spite of her best efforts always carried a hint of elsewhere about it, never quite settling into theatre-house neutrality. Then there was Deirdre, who looked severe but wasn't and had given up the theatre years before Iain was born. This detail did not, however, mean she had foresworn the covenant of the Evensong girls, so she was always dropping in unannounced. That left only delicate, dainty Darla, whose name no one ever quite believed her parents gave her. It was apt though; everyone did love Darla. And she told all the best stories.
These were usually about Evensong and the things the girls had got up to living there. The meals they had skipped to save money, the plays they had put on, or how – and this thrilled Iain immeasurably – they used to take turns to lie down in the road, pretending to have fainted. They did this whenever they had to perform or rehearse outside Kingsport, whenever a vehicle was oncoming to save on the train fare. The thought of Mam doing this, of lying down in the dusty road when usually she was so practical at home or elegant at the theatre was inconceivable to Iain. Darla (he never called her aunt; she was the only one who wouldn't let him) would laugh and say, 'What, did you think we never had lives before?'
Iain, who didn't, who had thought exactly this, would say yes,yes he did, and they would both laugh heartily over it.
'Magda was best at it,' Mam might say, joining in. 'Magda was always thinnest; people were in the way of believing she might faint.'
'But they all fell in love with your mother,' Magda would say, which was disconcerting in the extreme. 'Not that she noticed, and of course that was the most effective thing she could have done.' This made patently no sense to Iain, but he never said so; he sat at their feet and drank in these stories about a time before he had existed, about a world older than he was.
Mam would shrug and say, 'Oh, I don't know. There were enough that ate out of Ianthe's hand, and happily.'
'Just as well,' practical, sturdy Deirdre would say. 'They saved us doing the fainting stunt by the light of the moon, and that's a fact. Much good your stand-offishness was on thatscore.'
Mam would roll her shoulders and toss her head, and maybe say, 'I really don't know what else you think I could have done, under the circumstances.' Magda would agree, laughing, wrapping an arm loyally around Mam's shoulders.
'That's right,' she'd say. 'She couldn't help being attached – and anyway, it got us out of several fixes, that did.'
Not that they ever told Iain what kind of fixes, not that Iain didn't ask. Susan Baker might have been happy to know there were some things not even the Evensong Aunts dared talk about around little pitchers with big ears.
They were a disparate people that somehow came together into a cohesive whole whether it be to lament the cherry orchards of Madam Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya or exclaim over the antics of Hedda Gabbler. They laughed over the gulling of Benedict and Beatrice, and Iain laughed with them, having learned the humour of that play young. They were changeable as sunlight, were the Evensong Aunts and their auxiliary actors and they flashed like it too, sparkling, glittering people who stepped into more worlds than Iain had heretofore dared dream of and lived in them a while.
The effect was mesmeric, and Iain, sitting in the wings on his three-legged stool, was duly mesmerised. The stool had a wobble to it, and listed left if it was not placed exactly so on the uneven floor of the back stage. So Iain learned to a nicety the uneven slope of the floor and the grooves therein, and simultaneously how to sit precise and still on his improvised chair so as not to get underfoot. If this sentiment occasionally drew a raised eyebrow from one of his adults as being preternaturally grown-up, Iain only shrugged clumsily in the manner of his father and stumbled over his words in a rush to articulate how much he felt the luxury of this place, though he did not word it quite that way.
'I like it,' he said to a baffled Kitty when she observed she could never have sat still for so long, even now.
He learned lines by osmosis, not trying with any great effort, but finding the repetitions imprinted on his little brain until he could prompt them – his mother most often, because he knew her speeches best, but not only her. The first time he had done it, the play was Easy Virtue– another thing Susan Baker was never to hear about – and it was an accident. There was a fractionally too-long silence and Iain, hands clasped under his chin, opened his mouth to fill it. They thought it was somewhere between a great joke and an excellent party trick. Iain took for granted that this was what all little boys did when spending an afternoon with their mothers.
He learned exits the better to shuffle his stool out of the way of oncoming traffic, and entrances likewise. He retrieved objects – just the little ones at first – that he knew were going to be wanted in upcoming scenes. There were people, he'd learn later, whose job this properly was, but on those sun hazy afternoons (they were always sunny and always afternoons in Iain's memory of them) they tolerated his interference. He was the Imp of the Crown Imperial, by all accounts, and they wouldn't have it any other way.
If the stool became too uncomfortable, or Iain's back got stiff with sitting, he'd retreat to his mother's dressing room and the cushions he'd amassed in its far corner, and relaxed against them. She would find him there afterwards and wrangle opinions from him; what he liked, what he didn't, what he thought should be different. He had a very distinct memory of saying, once, about Midsummer Night's Dream, about her Helena, 'She's all fire and sparks, but different to you.'
It wasn't quite what he'd meant to say, but he was little, and it was hard then to articulate quite what he meant about her performances. Isobel, later, came much more naturally to it. But at the time, in the dressing room with its mustiness and the hint of her perfume, none of this mattered, because Mam sat down among the cushions and proceeded to prod him about it; different how? Good? Indifferent?
Long afterwards he'd beat Nattie (she would be Nattie by then) for a book prize in English, and he'd cite these afternoons dissecting plays as the source. Nattie would toss her head and say, exasperated just how unfair this was, as if there weren't nine in ten things she didn't outclass Iain in anyway.
Or still later, as she ran her lines for Five Chelsea Lane, Iain would say to his mother, 'Shouldn't she – I mean you – be more afraid?' By then, of course, he was old enough to feel disloyal saying it. But she never seemed to mind; they sat in the dressing room inhaling must, dust and the whisper of her perfume – L'heur Blueit was called, Iain had learned by then – and debate the point academically. Just how afraid was Bella Manningham, and what did that look like?
They all had a version of this, Iain knew. Helen's, unaccountably, was to affix herself like a limpet to Uncle Jem and follow him to the police surgery, where he was wont to declare her the best assistant he could ask for. Why she would want to go poking about in people's innards was a point of everlasting mystery to Christopher as much as Iain, but there it was. It horrified Teddy, who was always bending over backwards to keep them away from murders and all that. It also made for very uncomfortable games of Doctor, since as per Helen's rules, the patient she was poking around in had to be dead. Christopher, far from being her assistant, became the intrepid police detective, Ben or whichever Carlisle was on hand more than happy to be his deputy. Somehow, what with the patient being dead, Iain got saddled with the burial, which lead to such improbabilities as for as much as it hath pleased almighty God to take from us this cat…even as said cat ran streaking and indignant from the room, leaving Iain to say the last rights over void space. Or if Innocent, or Pilgrim or whichever Fox Corner cat it was could not be conscripted, to take from us this dog, said while compulsively rubbing Tuesday's belly to ensure he stayed perfectly still, his belly and feet pointed skyward, unembarrassedly exposing his anatomy to their little funeral party. Provided he was kept in tummy rubs, Dog Tuesday was the best of these victims, totally unfazed by Helen's declarations of cyanide poisoning, or death by asphyxia, or once, gruesomely, decapitation.
If Iain protested that what this really made Helen was a Vet like his father, well, no one listened to him, did they? Least of all Helen, who rolled expressive golden-caramel eyes and told him to imagine that Tuesday was a brutally murdered human, or a spy, or whatever occasion warranted. Iain rolled his eyes right back and reckoned that after all those long hours in the theatre, he knew at least as much about imagining things as Helen. Possibly more. If we shadows have offended, etc, etc.
Needless to say, no one told Susan Baker. Where would they even have started? Sophy became their resident reporter, bickering with Christopher over what she could write in the paper and wrangling for information in a manner that would have done Kitty proud.
You could tell this – the would-be journalism – was Sophy's version of those luxuriant hours on the three-legged stool from the games she played with Kitty. They had one where you came up with headlines for local catastrophes off the cuff – say a glass of spilt milk (Domicile lachrymose over lacteal crisis; Kitty) or a toppled game of dominoes (Local Dachshund first canine winner of dominoes championship; Sophy). You had half a minute to compose your headline, and they all played, but it was really Kitty and Sophy's game; they were best at it.
It was all gloriously unorthodox. No one could agree how it had begun. In one version it was Aunt Judith who was busy, in another it was Iain's mother. Whoever told it, the only really usual thing was this cavalier swapping of children across households so that the poor women of St Margaret's Anglican, or Martyrs' Mission, or even Sacred Heart Church couldn't begin to tell which child was attached to which household. And yet none of them would have had it any other way.
Of course, no one told Susan Baker that, either. What Susan Baker never told themwas that being a wily, intelligent woman – a heroine even – she had guessed it all a long time ago, and wouldn't have altered a thing.