A Change of Climate: A Novel

TWO

Anna, as Ralph vanished from view, plucked the afternoon post from the wooden mailbox by the gate; then picked her way over rutted ground to the front door. The drive was more of a farm track than anything else; often it looked as if a herd of beasts had been trampling it. The mailbox was something new. Julian, her eldest boy, had made it. Now the postman’s legs were spared, if not the family’s.

The Red House was a farmhouse that had lost its farm; it retained a half acre of ground upon which grew sundry bicycle sheds, a dog kennel and a wire dog run with the wire broken, a number of leaning wooden huts filled with the detritus of family life, and an unaccountable horse trough, very ancient and covered with lichen. Recently, since Julian had been at home, the hedges had been cut back and some ground cleared, and the rudiments of a vegetable garden were appearing. The house and its ramshackle surroundings formed a not-displeasing organic whole; Julian’s attempt at agriculture seemed an imposition on the natural state of things, as if it were the bicycle sheds that were the work of nature, and the potatoes the work of man.

The house itself was built of red brick, and stood side-on to the road. It had a tiled roof, steeply pitched; in season, the crop-spraying plane buzzed its chimney stacks and complicated arrangements of television aerials. There were a number of small windows under the eaves, and these gave the house a restless look: as if it would just as soon wander across the lane and put down its foundations in a different field.

Two years before, when it seemed that the older children would shortly be off their hands, Anna had suggested they should look for a smaller place. It would be cheaper to run, she had said, knowing what line of reasoning would appeal to Ralph. With his permission she had rung up Felix Palmer’s firm, to talk about putting the house on the market. “You can’t mean it,” Felix had said. “Leave, Anna? After all these years? I hope and trust you wouldn’t be going far?”

“Felix,” Anna had said, “do you recall that you’re an estate agent? Aren’t you supposed to encourage people to sell their houses?”

“Yes, but not my friends. I should be a poor specimen if I tried to uproot my friends.”

“Shall I try someone else, then?”

“Oh, no need for that … If you’re sure …”

“I’m far from sure,” Anna said. “But you might send someone to look around. Put a value on it.”

Felix came himself, of course. He brought a measuring tape, and took notes as he went in a little leather-bound book. On the second story, he grew bored. “Anna, dear girl, let’s just say … a wealth of versatile extra accommodation … attics, so forth … an abundance of storage space. Leave it at that, shall we? Buyers don’t want, you know, to have to exercise their brains.” He sighed, at the foot of the attic stairs. “I remember the day I brought you here, you and Ralph, to talk you into it …” His eyes crept over her, assessing time’s work. “You were fresh from Africa then.”

I was tired and cold that day, she thought, tired and cold and pregnant, rubbing my chilblains in that drafty wreck of a drawing room; the Red House smelled of mice and molds, and there were doors banging overhead, and cracked window glass, and spiders. To preempt his next comment, she put her hand on his arm: “Yes, Felix. It was, it was a long time ago.”

Felix nodded. “I remember saying to you—it’s the sort of place you come to grips with in your own good time.”

“And we never have.” She smiled.

“You filled it with children. That’s the main thing.”

“Yes. And for all their presence improved it, we might as well have stabled horses. Well, Felix—what’s the verdict?”

“There’d be interest,” he said cautiously. “London people per-haps.”

“Oh—fancy prices,” Anna said.

“But consider, Anna—do you really want to do this rather dras-tic thing?”

Felix closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. They went downstairs, and had a glass of sherry. Felix stared gloomily over the garden. Slowly the conventions of his calling seemed to occur to him. “Useful range of outbuildings,” he muttered, and jotted this phrase in his book.

That evening Felix telephoned Ralph. “Why don’t you hang on?” he said. “Prices are going up all over East Anglia. A year from now you might make a killing. Tell Anna I advise staying put.”

“I will.” Ralph was relieved. “I take her point, of course—Kit and Julian away, Robin will be off in a year or so, and then there’ll be just the two of us and Becky, we’ll be rattling around. But of course, it’s not often that we’re just the family. We get a lot of visitors.”

“You do, rather,” Felix said.

“And we have to have somewhere to put them.”

Two days later, while Ralph and Anna were still debating the matter, their boy Julian turned up with his suitcase. He wasn’t going back to university, he said. He was finished with all that. He dumped his case in his old room in the attics, next door to Robin; they had put the boys up there years ago, so that they could make a noise. Julian offered no explanation of himself, except that he did not like being away, had worried about his family and constantly wondered how they were. He made himself pleasant and useful about the house and neighborhood, and showed no inclination to move out, to move on, to go anywhere else at all.

Then Kit wrote from London; she phoned her parents every week, but sometimes things are easier in a letter.

I’m not sure yet what I should do after my finals. There’s still more than a term to go and I have various ideas, but I keep changing my mind. It isn’t that I want to sit about wasting time, but I would like to come home for a few weeks, just to think things through. Dad, I know you mentioned to me that I could work for the Trust for a year, but the truth is I’ve had enough of London—for the moment, anyway. I wondered if there was something I could do in Norwich …

“Well,” Ralph said, rereading the letter. “This is unexpected. But of course she must come home, if she wants to.”

“Of course,” Anna said.

Her perspective altered. She felt that she must settle to it, give way to the house’s demands, perhaps until she was an old woman.

When on the afternoon of the funeral Anna let herself into the wide square hall, she peeled off her gloves slowly, and placed them on the hallstand, a vast and unnecessary article of furniture that Ralph had picked up in an antique shop in Great Yarmouth. “No other family in the county,” she had said at the time, “feels they need an object like this.” She looked with a fresh sense of wonder and dislike at its barley-sugar legs and its many little drawers and its many little dust-trapping ledges and its brass hooks for gentlemen’s hats, and she saw her face in the dim spotted oval of mirror, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead, then took off her coat and threw it over the banisters.

The Norfolk climate gave Anna a bloodless look, tinged her thin hands with violet. Every winter she would think of Africa; days when, leaving her warm bed in a hot early dawn, she had felt her limbs grow fluid, and the pores of her face open like petals, and her ribs, free from their accustomed tense gauge, move to allow her a full, voluptuary’s breath. In England she never felt this confidence, not even in a blazing July. The thermometer might register the heat, but her body was skeptical. English heat is fitful; clouds pass before the sun.

Anna went into the kitchen. Julian had heard her come in, and was setting out cups for tea.

“How did it go?”

“It went well, I suppose,” Anna said. “We buried him. The main object was achieved. How do funerals ever go?”

“How was Mrs. Palmer?”

“Ginny was very much herself. A party of them were going back to the house, for vol-au-vents provided by Mrs. Gleave.” Anna made a face. “And whiskey. She seemed very insistent on the whiskey. If you’d have asked for gin—well, I don’t know what!”

Julian reached for the teapot. “Nobody would have gin, would they, at a funeral?”

“No, it would be unseemly,” Anna said. Mother’s ruin, she thought. The abortionist’s drink. A mistress’s tipple. Flushed complexions and unbuttoned afternoons.

“And how was Emma?”

“Emma was staunch. She was an absolute brick. She turned up in that old coat, by the way.”

“You wouldn’t have expected her to get a new one.”

“Oh, I don’t know. A lesser woman might have hired sables for the day. And implied that Felix had given them to her.” Anna smiled, her hands cradling her teacup. “Your old dad and I were talking on the way home. About how he went on for so long, without knowing about Felix and Emma.”

“Twit,” Julian said.

Some three years earlier, the year before Kit went to university, Ralph Eldred had been in Holt for the afternoon. It was a Wednesday, late in the year; at Gresham’s School, blue-kneed boys were playing hockey. The small town’s streets were empty of tourists; the sky was the color of pewter.

Ralph decided—and it was an unaccustomed indulgence on his part—to have some tea. The girl behind the counter directed him upstairs; wrapped in bakery smells, he climbed a steep staircase with a rickety handrail, and found himself in a room where the ceiling was a scant seven foot high, and a half dozen tables were set with pink cloths and white china. At the top of the stairs, Ralph, who was a man of six foot, bent his head to pass under a beam; as he straightened up and turned his head, he looked directly into the eye of Felix Palmer, who was in the act of pouring his sister Emma a second cup of Darjeeling.

The twenty minutes which followed were most peculiar. Not that anything Emma did was strange; for she simply looked up and greeted him, and said, “Why don’t you get that chair there and put it over here, and would you like a toasted teacake or would you like a bun or would you like both?” As for Felix, he just lowered his Harris tweed elbow, replaced the teapot on its mat, and said, “Ralph, you old bugger, skiving off again?”

Ralph sat down; he looked ashen; when the waitress brought him a cup, his hand trembled. The innocent sight that had met his eyes when he came up the staircase had suddenly and shockingly revealed its true meaning, and what overset Ralph was not that his sister was having an affair, but his instant realization that the affair was part of the world order, one of the givens, one of the assumptions of the parish, and that only he, Ralph—stupid, blind, and emotionally inept—had failed to recognize the fact: he and his wife, Anna, whom he must go home and tell.

Ask him how he knew, that moment he swiveled his head under the beam and met the bland blue eye of Felix: ask him how he knew, and he couldn’t tell you. The knowledge simply penetrated his bone marrow. When they brought the toasted teacake, he took a bite, and replaced the piece on the plate, and found that what he had bitten turned into a pebble in his mouth, and he couldn’t swallow it. Felix took a brown paper bag out of his pocket, and said, “Look, Emma, I’ve got that wool that Ginny’s been wanting for her blasted tapestry, the shop’s had it on order for three months, I just popped in on the off-chance, and they said it came in this morning.” He laid the skein out on the white cloth; it was a dead bracken color. “Hope to heaven it’s the right shade,” he said. “Ginny goes on about dye batches.”

Emma made some trite reply; Felix began to tell about a church conversion over in Fakenham that had come onto the firm’s books earlier that week. Then they had talked about the salary of the organist at the Palmers’ parish church; then about the price of petrol. Ralph could not make conversation at all. The loop of brown wool remained on the table. He stared at it as if it were a serpent.

Ralph arrived home alone that evening—which surprised Anna. No cronies, no hangers-on, no fat file of papers in his hand; no rushing to the telephone either, no flinging of a greeting over his shoulder, no distracted inquiries about where this and where that and who rang and what messages. He sat down in the kitchen; and when Anna came in, to see why he was so subdued, he was rocking on the back legs of his chair and staring at the wall. “You know, Anna,” he said, “I think I’d like a drink. I’ve had a shock.”

Alcohol, for Ralph, was a medicinal substance only. Brandy might be taken for colic, when other remedies had failed. Hot whiskey and lemon might be taken for colds, for Ralph recognized that people with colds need cheering up, and he was all for cheerfulness. But drink as social unction was something that had never been part of his life. His parents did not drink, and he had never freed himself from his parents. He had nothing against drinking in others, of course; the house was well stocked, he was a hospitable man. When the tongue-tied or the chilled called on him, Ralph was ready with glasses and ice buckets. His eye was inexpert and his nature generous, so the drinks he poured were four times larger than ordinary measures. A local councillor, upon leaving the Red House, had been Breathalyzed by the police in East Dereham, and found to be three times over the legal limit. On another occasion, a female social worker from Norwich had been sick on the stairs. When these things happened, Ralph would say, “My uncle, Holy James, he was right, I think. Total abstinence is best. Things run out of control so quickly, don’t they?”

So now, when Anna poured him a normal-sized measure of whiskey, he judged it to be mean and small. He looked at it in bewilderment, but said nothing. After a while, still rocking back on the chair, he said, “Emma is having an affair with Felix Palmer. I saw them today.”

“What, in flagrante?” Anna said.

“No. Having a cup of tea in Holt.”

Anna said nothing for a time; then, “Ralph, may I explain something to you?” She sat down at the table and clasped her hands on the scrubbed white wood. It was as if she were going to pray aloud, but did not know what to pray for. “You must remember how Emma and Felix used to go around together, when they were young. Now, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. He stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair came down with a clunk. “But that’s going right back—that’s going back to the fifties, before she was qualified, when she was in London and she’d come up for the odd weekend. That was before we went abroad. And then he married Ginny. Oh God,” he said. “You mean it’s been going on for years.”

“I do. Years and years and years.”

“Would it be … for instance … when we came back from Africa?”

Anna nodded. “Oh, yes. It’s so many years, you see, that people no longer bother to talk about it.”

“And you knew. Why didn’t I know?”

“It’s hard to imagine. Perhaps because you don’t notice people.”

“But people are all my life,” Ralph said. “God help me. Everything I do concerns people. What else do I ever think about?”

“Perhaps you don’t think about them in quite the right way. Perhaps there’s a—gap—in the way that you think about them.”

“Something missing,” Ralph said. “Well, there must be, mustn’t there? If that’s the case I’ll have to sit down and talk to myself and try to examine it, whatever it is, this lack, won’t I? Otherwise it’s obvious I’m not fit to be at large.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you what puzzles me, though. There’s Emma living in her cottage right on the main street in Foulsham, and there’s Felix over at Blakeney, and since we know innumerable people in between—”

“Yes, we know people. But it’s as I say, they don’t talk about it anymore.”

“But why didn’t somebody tell me?”

“Why should they? How would they have broached the topic?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would you have done with the information?”

Ralph was still shaking his head. He couldn’t take this in—that his discovery, so exciting to him, was stale and soporific to everyone else. “What I can’t understand is how in a place like this they could conduct what must be so blatantly obvious—I mean, the comings and goings, she can’t go to Blakeney I suppose so he must come to Foulsham, his car must be parked there, all hours of the night—”

Anna smiled.

“No,” Ralph said. “I don’t suppose it’s like that, is it? I suppose they go to teashops quite a lot. I suppose it’s a—mental companionship, is it?”

“I think it might be, largely. But people like Felix and Emma can get away with a lot, you know. They have everything well under control.”

“It’s never damaged their standing,” Ralph said. “I mean, their standing in the community. Do the children know?”

“Kit knows. The boys know, I suppose, but they never mention it. It wouldn’t interest them, would it?”

“What does Kit think?”

“You know she always admires her aunt.”

“I hope her life won’t be like that,” Ralph said. “My God, I hope it won’t. I don’t want Kit to turn into some plain woman driving about the countryside in a tweed coat to share a pot of tea with some old bore. I hope somebody flashy and rich comes and carries her off and gives her diamonds. I don’t mind if she isn’t steady. I want Kit to have a good time.”

“How old-fashioned you are!” Anna laughed. “You talk about her as if she were a chorus girl. Kit will buy her own diamonds, if it crosses her mind to want any.” Anna looked down at the minute solitaire that had winked for twenty-five years above her wedding ring. “And Ralph, there is no need to insult Felix. You like him, you always have, we all like him.”

“Yes. I know. But things look different now.”

He put his empty glass down on the table. This is more than a failure of knowledge, he thought, it is a failure of self-knowledge. Anna poured him another whiskey. He ignored it, so she drank it herself.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Julian said, “I thought Kit would have come home for the funeral.”

“It was mainly our generation,” Anna said. “There were a lot of people there. I think three Eldreds were enough.”

“An elegant sufficiency,” Julian said.

His mother laughed. “Where did you get that expression?”

“I heard Kit say it. But didn’t you think she’d have wanted to be there? As she’s so friendly with Daniel Palmer these days.”

Felix’s son, the architect, had a flat above his office in Holt. He was interested in Kit; he had taken her to the theater, and out to dinner, and invited her to go out in the boat he kept at Blakeney. Anna said, “I think Kit regards Daniel as a provider of treats. A funeral is not a treat.”

“When will she be coming home, then?

“Not till Easter. She’s got her exams in a matter of weeks, you know.”

“Yes, I do know. You don’t have to keep mentioning things like that. Terms. Exams.”

“We have to talk about you, Julian. But perhaps not this afternoon.” She looked over the rim of her cup. “What have you done today?”

“I started putting in those poles for the back fence.”

“And have you seen your girlfriend?”

The slight vulgarity and childishness of the expression struck Julian. It was as if his mother had spilled her tea on the table, or put her fingers in the sugar bowl.

“I’m going over tomorrow. I just wanted to get a start on that fence, as the rain was keeping off. I wish Kit would come home soon. I want her to meet Sandra’s mother. I want to know what she’ll think of her.”

So Sandra will be with us for another summer, Anna thought. With Julian you had to glean things, here and there.

A few days after the funeral, Emma went to the shrine at Walsing-ham. She was not sure why; her faith, if it still existed, was not something she displayed in public. But when you cannot cope with grief, she reasoned, you can do worse than observe the forms that have helped other people cope with it. At Felix’s funeral the minister had said that, even in the depth of misery, the familiar forms of prayer can lift the heart toward Christian joy. Very well, Emma thought grimly, let’s try it. Something is needed. For Ginny, there were undertakers. There was the question of probate. There was the business of organizing Mrs. Gleave and the vol-au-vents. But for me there is nothing. An empty space. A lack of occupation. It is as if I have been told of a death that has taken place in a distant country. It is as if I have no claim on sympathy, because I have heard of the death of a person my friends do not know. There is no body. There is no corpse. Just this absence, this feeling of something unfinished.

Skirting Fakenham, taking the back roads toward the shrine and the sea, she found her car alone on the road. Across the flat fields towers spiked the snow-charged sky, the clouds pregnant and bowed with cold; Norfolk is a land of churches, some open to the sky, their chancels colonized by nettles, their naves by blackthorn and brambles. In those not yet redundant, congregations dwindle; the Samaritans’ notices, flapping in the porches, attest to the quality and frequency of rural despair.

In Walsingham, the car park was empty. The streets were devoid of tourists and pilgrims, and the old buildings—half timber and brick and stone, steep roof and Dutch gable—seemed to have moved closer together, as if the town were closing itself down for the winter. By the Anglican shrine, plaster saints looked out from shop windows: and woven saints, with tapestry eyes. Touches of gilt glinted here and there on a cardboard halo; postcards were for sale, and prayers printed in mock black letter on mock scrolls. You could buy candles, which you might put to secular use; other windows displayed recordings of plainchant, and pots of honey in stoneware jars, and boxes of Norfolk Lavender soap. Walsingham tea towels were on offer, jars of chutney, tins of shortbread, Earl Grey tea bags in cod Victorian packaging; and there were herb pillows, Olde Englishe Peppermint Lumps, potpourri and fluffy toys, wall plaques, paperweights, and scented drawer-liners—all the appurtenances, in fact, that you would expect to find at an ancient pilgrim site. Trade was poor. The only visible inhabitant was a woman with a shopping basket over her arm and a pug dog on a lead. She nodded to Emma and walked on, huddling into the shadow of the Abbey’s wall.

Emma went up the path to the church. It was a building put up in the 1930s, and its exterior, disappointingly plain, hid its dim papistical contents: devotional candles blinking, sad-eyed virgins pouting in gold frames. She asked herself, what would my father have said, what would my father have said to a bauble-shop like this? Matthew Eldred seemed very far away, very old and dead and gone. Not so Felix. Alone in her cottage in Foulsham, she still listened for the sound of his key in the lock.

Emma lurked about toward the back of the church, away from the altar. Finally she sat down on a chair at the end of a row. She gave herself permission for tears, but she was not able to cry. Like her sister-in-law Anna, she had trained herself out of it. The thought of Felix lay like a stone inside her chest. Outside, some sort of building work seemed to be going on; she could hear the monotonous thump of hammers and the whirring of drills. In my family, she thought, we practice restraint and the keeping of secrets, and the thoughts we respect are unvoiced thoughts; even Felix, an open secret, was a secret of a kind. But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.

On the back wall were wooden plaques, names and dates: thanks given, intentions stated. Thanks for preservation in a motor accident, 1932. For reunion of husband and wife, after prayer at the shrine, 1934. Success in an examination, Thanks, 1935. What minute considerations we expect God to entertain, Emma thought. Thanks for a happy death, prayed for at the Holy House. Who put that here, and how did they know it was happy? Some plaques gave nothing away. Upon these the visitor might exercise imagination: Prayers Answered.

Near these plaques, the water from the Holy Well was made available in buckets. Pilgrims might help themselves, by dipping with assorted vessels; a table, stacked up with prayer books, held also the abandoned top of a thermos flask, some paper cups of the kind tea machines dispense, and some beakers of molded plastic, each one frilly at the rim, as if it had been gnawed. Emma thought the arrangements unsanitary. She went out, her gloves in her hand.

In the porch was a vast book, well-thumbed, its pages ruled into columns. A notice promised ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE SHRINE.

Emma took her pen out of her pocket, turned to a clean page, and wrote down the date. She did not put Felix’s name in the book, because she believed that energy should be directed toward the living, not the dead. She did not put her own name, because she believed she would manage well enough. But she wrote the names of her brother and his wife:

RALPH ELDRED

ANNA ELDRED

Beneath she wrote:

KATHERINE ELDRED

then hesitated, and skipped one line, before

JULIAN ELDRED

ROBERT ELDRED

REBECCA ELDRED

It was half dark when Emma left the porch. Between the church and the road there was no pavement; she crept uphill by the high wall, protected only by heaven’s benevolence from the cars behind her. Eddies of sleet swirled in a huddle of stone and flint, slapping at window glass and melting underfoot. Sitting in an almost empty cafe, her hands around a mug of hot chocolate, she thought of that other frozen afternoon, when Ralph’s curly head emerged up the staircase of the Holt tearoom, and dipped under the beam, and swiveled, gaze focusing … If Ralph had not come upon them that particular day, his sensibilities skinned by the cold, he would have continued in his obstinate and peculiar ignorance; when Felix died, they would have stood at his graveside as two old family friends, and Ralph would have given her not a word of sympathy except that due between decent people when a contemporary has quit the scene. And that, she thought, would have suited me.

Lines of poetry ran through Emma’s head. Auden, she thought. She was pleased at being able to identify it, because she was not a literary woman. They were insistent lines, stuffed with a crude menace.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

Emma shared the cafe with one be-skirted cleric, who was reading the Daily Telegraph. An oil stove popped and hissed at her back. She thought again of crying, but she was afraid the man might put his newspaper down and try to console her. Instead she buttoned her coat, and braced herself for the twilight and cold, the drive home to Foulsham. I hardly know what I am anymore she thought: a Good Soul, or a Sad Case.

O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress;

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.