Free On Loving Josiah by Olivia Fane Page A

worker suggested, helpfully.
    ‘Good idea! Let’s take a look, shall we?’
    And when the bedroom was empty, Eve would open the linen cupboard door, and express surprise that he wasn’t there either.
    ‘Oh where, where, did I put him?’
    ‘This isn’t necessary, you know, Eve.’
    ‘You’re right. But it’s fun, don’t you think? Wait, the last time I saw him he was in his highchair eating breakfast!’
    And the pair would race back down the stairs into the kitchen only to find the highchair quite empty.
    ‘Damn,’ Eve exclaimed, good-humouredly.
    At this point the social worker might catch sight of the baby in the garden with his father, because, come fine weather or foul, morning or dusk, that is where they would always be. Or Eve, both bored and irritated , and desiring this alien female to be out of her house, would clap her hands and declare she had just spotted him near the greenhouse.But each social worker was too humiliated to report back Eve’s little ruse, doubtless because they would also have to cast themselves as the butt of it; rather, after two or three visits, they would complain of a ‘lack of trust between us’ or simply ‘lack of progress’. Were they ever worried about a ‘lack of care’, on the other hand? They all agreed they’d seen worse, far worse. Yet they couldn’t leave the case alone. In the same way as Eve had managed to remain a patient at Fulbright for twenty months, she also managed to remain a ‘client’ of the Social Services, and the games went on through the seasons, through the years, with only the slightest modifications, until Josiah reached the age of seven. There was something about her which made the challenge: quagmire I might seem, but stay with me and one day you’ll reach solid ground. And to that extent, Eve was irresistible to them.

    Josiah grew into a good-looking boy, and seemed in robust health. He had wavy blond hair down to his collar, and deep blue eyes, which would confront his interlocutors with a brazen stare. His clothes were old-fashioned, button-up shirts and corduroy trousers, his shoes Start-Rite sandals. Yet this was barely the stuff of childcare proceedings, despite the fact (as those women inevitably observed) that his hands were always dirty and there was mud under his fingernails.
    ‘There is something not quite right about the boy,’ wrote a social worker. For Josiah didn’t like it when the social workers leaned over to pat him on the head, and he didn’t like the look of their large smiling faces when they squatted down ‘to have a chat’. Nor did Josiah ever give them the relief of one ordinary child-like sentence to prove that his personality was unscathed, that it had somehow survived his parents.
    Neither Eve nor Gibson had ever bought him toys, not as adeliberate strategy, nor even as an economy, but rather because it simply didn’t occur to them that Josiah would want toys. And probably they were right: when Josiah was four a social worker took pity on him and produced a sack-load of puzzles, bricks, dinky cars and even an old garage, stuff that her own children had grown out of; but each time she visited (and this particular woman lasted a full six months), she found the toys untouched in a corner of Josiah’s bedroom. She wrote a report describing such behaviour as ‘ disturbing ’ and ‘unnatural’. To be four and never to have said ‘brum brum’ to a car! The boy wasn’t thriving, it was all she could conclude; but frustratingly, there was no positive evidence of abuse.
    Josiah was by nature as silent as his father, and as alert and suspicious as his mother, so it should be of no surprise that he never bothered to answer these women. ‘What do you really like doing?’ they would ask him, but why on earth should he tell them? What would they know about gardening? For by the age of four, Josiah had a passion for growing seedlings.
    Josiah and Gibson used to go in search of good earth, by bus. Neither of