Free The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

house was so full, the older children were in one room. Ben was already in a cot with high wooden slatted sides, where he spent his time pulling himself up to a sitting position, falling, rolling over, pulling himself up.… This cot was put in the room where the older children were, in the hope that Ben would be made social, friendly, by his siblings. It was not a success. He ignored them, would not respond to their advances, and his crying—or, rather, bellowing—made Luke shout at him, “Oh shut up!” —but then he burst into tears at his own unkindness. Helen, at the age to cherish a baby, tried to hold Ben, but he was too strong. Then all the older children in thehouse were put into the attic, where they could make as much noise as they wanted, and Ben went back into his own room, “the baby’s room”—and from there they heard his grunts and snuffles and roars of frustration as he tried some feat of strength and fell down.
    The new baby had of course been offered to everyone to hold, when they asked, but it was painful to see how their faces changed confronting this phenomenon. Ben was always quickly handed back. Harriet came into the kitchen one day and heard her sister Sarah say to a cousin, “That Ben gives me the creeps. He’s like a goblin or a dwarf or something. I’d rather have poor Amy any day.”
    This afflicted Harriet with remorse: poor Ben, whom no one could love. She certainly could not! And David, the good father, hardly touched him. She lifted Ben from his cot, so much like a cage, and put him on the big bed, and sat with him. “Poor Ben, poor Ben,” she crooned, stroking him. He clutched her shirt with both hands, pulled himself up, and stood on her thigh. The hard little feet hurt her. She tried to cuddle him, persuade him to soften against her.… Soon she gave up, put him back in his pen, or cage … a roar of frustration because he had been put down, and she held out her hands to him, “Poor Ben, dear Ben,” and he grasped her hands and pulled himself up and stood grunting and roaring with triumph. Four months old … He was like an angry, hostile little troll.
    She did make a point of going to him every day when the other children were out of the way, and taking him to the big bed for a time of petting and play, as she had with all of them. Never, not once, did he subside into a loving moment. He resisted, he strove, he fought—and then he turned his head and closed his jaws over her thumb. Not as an ordinary baby will, in the sucking bite that relieves the pain of teething, or explores the possibilities of a mouth, tongue: she felt her bone bend, and saw his cold triumphant grin.
    She heard herself say, “You aren’t going to do me in, I won’t let you.”
    But for a while she did try hard to make him ordinary. She took him down into the big living-room where all the family were, and put him into the play-pen there—until his presence affected people, and they tended to go away. Or she took him to the table in her arms, as she had done with the others—but could not hold him, he was too strong.
    In spite of Ben, the summer holidays were wonderful. Again, there were two months of it. Again, David’s father, briefly descending, gave them a cheque, and they could not have managed without. “It is like being in the middle of some bloody great fruit pudding, this house,” said James. “God knows how you do it.”
    But afterwards, when Harriet thought of those holidays, what she remembered was how they all looked at Ben. There would be a long thoughtful stare, puzzled, even anxious; but then came fear, though everyone tried to conceal it. There was horror, too: which is what Harriet felt, more and more. Soon she was shutting Ben up in his room away from everyone. He did not seem to mind, or even to notice. It was hard to make out what he did think of other people.
    Harriet lay inside David’s arms one night before sleeping, talking over the day, as they always did, and she