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him up. “Time for your bath, my darling. You may bring your meerkat, but don’t drop him in the water.”
    Jamie was now off duty as far as looking after Charlie was concerned. He went off to practise a piece for a concert the following week, and as she ran Charlie’s bath she heard the rumble of the bassoon in the background. Violins sang, brass crowed, while bassoons, she felt, rumbled according to a Richter scale all of their own. Charlie was allowed to have something they called a Saturday Bath, in which the bathtub was filled almost to its brim. This allowed him to duck himself under the water in a game that he called Big Submarines. Isabel watched closely: Big Submarines was a physical game, and from time to time he had to be restrained from slopping almost the entire contents of the bath on to the floor. He was like a seal, she thought, or an otter perhaps, as otters were as playful as four-year-old boys, and as slippery. Big Submarines was a bad name for this game, as submarines, especially big ones, were stately, rather considered boats that slid up and down through the water without anything approaching exuberance.
    “What are the rules of Big Submarines?” she once asked.
    Charlie had looked at her with surprise. “No rules,” he said.
    “Does the biggest submarine win?”
    He looked slightly resentful. Adults should not interfere in games; they did not understand. “The good submarine wins,” he announced.
    “Ah,” said Isabel. “That’s good to hear.” A mental image came to her of a good submarine—painted white, perhaps, with a crew that eschewed swearing (at sea) and hard liquor (when ashore), engaged in heroic acts, never used, as most submarines were, to intimidate others. But there were no such submarines—not in the world we knew. There were only dark prowlers bristling with weapons. One nuclear submarine, armed with its Trident missiles, could destroy our planet as we knew it. One submarine, she thought; one. In such a world, what chance did a good submarine have?
    On that particular evening, the game of submarines seemed to fizzle out rather quickly. Charlie was tired; she could see that.
    “Time for your story,” she said. “Babar tonight.” And added, “Again.” Like any child, Charlie liked the same story time and time again.
The Adventures of Babar
had been a favourite for the past few weeks, and attempts to move on to something new had been stoutly resisted by Charlie himself.
    Isabel dried him and put him into his pyjamas. She noticed that these pyjamas had pictures of ducks on them. There was another pair with anchors, and one with small, friendly rockets travelling through fields of stars and moons.
Adult pyjamas,
she thought,
say nothing.
    “Babar!” demanded Charlie, and snuggled down in his bed, holding his mother’s hand. Isabel felt an overwhelming tenderness. My little boy; this little creature I have created; the person I love more than anything or anybody in this world; who means absolutely everything to me; who provides my answers in the way in which no philosophy, however brilliant, can ever do; mine.
    They began
Babar,
right from the beginning. Isabel had toyed with censoring the scene in which Babar’s mother is shot by a cruel hunter—some parents skip that page—but she had decided not to shield Charlie from the truth, even if the truth was fictional. He had asked her why the hunter had shot Babar’s mother, and she had replied that it was because he was cruel, and cruel people did unkind things since they did not think of the feelings of others. And that, she thought, was as far as one might get in any attempt to explain the cruelties of this world to a four-year-old. She wondered whether more sophisticated explanations could get much further: ultimately it was a matter of the absence of human sympathy. One might dig deeper: the aetiology of evil could be complex and tendentious. What made Hitler what he was? A sense of historical injustice? Personal