A Change of Climate: A Novel

EIGHT

After a month Ralph wrote to his uncle James:

There is no news. If in two weeks there is still no news we are to return to England. After all, they say, they can carry on the search without us—and they will carry it on, and thoroughly, I have confidence in that, if in nothing else. Still, I dread the thought of leaving here, because the day we leave we will be admitting to ourselves that there is no hope.

I am much better than when I wrote last. I was “lucky,” the doctor said. I’m afraid I laughed in his face. Anna and I, we dislike being in different rooms now, and we never let Kit out of our sight. The same doctor who told me I was lucky said that this was a shock reaction and it would wear off, and that we must expect to find in ourselves certain oddities of behavior, jump at any noise, suffer nightmares, and so on. I don’t suffer nightmares, because I don’t sleep.

I feel I am living in an alien world now. I know that is one of those phrases that your brain reaches for when it’s tired, but I can’t think of any other way to express it. To be more exact I feel that I am suspended, that I am like someone hanged, that the ground has been dug out from under me, or my support kicked away. This woman, Felicia, the children’s nanny, how could she do it? There is no doubt that it was planned. I must have told you in my earlier letter that Felicia had packed her clothes—everything in her room was gone. The two men brought a truck—the police found the tire tracks. And Felicia stayed in the house that night, whereas for some months she had been in the habit of going back to her own room as soon as the twins were settled. I thought it was the storm that made her want to stay by the fire—but she was staying for another purpose. If I had not let the men in, she would have let them in. I suppose that might be some comfort to me. But then, it isn’t. There is no comfort. I am the one who opened the door to them. They said they wanted shelter. I decided to do a good action, and by it my life has been split open and destroyed.

James, can you please explain to my mother and father and to Emma what we think has happened—I mean, can you explain to them that it is not likely Matthew has been taken for ransom? I can’t write it in a letter. Besides, people in England wouldn’t believe that crimes of such a nature occur. I would not have believed it myself, but when we were in Elim our doctor, Koos, told me one day about medicine murders. So when I asked the police why anyone would take my boy—and they told me—I knew I should believe them. They don’t know how many children are stolen in a year and sold to the witch doctors. Sometimes children, older children, wander into the bush. The disappearance is not reported because there is no one to report it to. These children never come back. Perhaps animals kill them, or they starve. That is possible, of course.

Anna believes that Matthew may still be alive, and that is what she fears most. She says “If he is dead, he is not suffering now.” But she is not sure. There is not a moment when we can be sure of anything.

There is of course a hope, a possibility, that the police will arrest these people. After all, we can identify Felicia and Enock, though I could not swear to recognize the man who stabbed me. If they are caught, perhaps they will tell us what happened to Matthew, but I am given every reason to doubt it. When these cases come to court no one will ever give evidence. They are too afraid of the witch doctors, I am told. If they are caught, they will probably be hanged. That matters nothing to me, one way or the other. I have no feelings about it. I would only want them to speak—so that I can know, so that we can know our little boy is dead, so that we can mourn for him. It is hard to mourn when there is no body to bury. I think—I try to imagine—how many people have said that in the history of the world. But most of them have entertained some hope, I suppose, whereas we must accept that there probably never will be a funeral. In these cases the police never find an identifiable victim. One man said to me, “Sometimes we find traces.” I asked him what he meant by traces, and he said, “Substances, in bottles and jars.”

Why was Kit spared? They wanted the boy, that’s clear. They could have taken and killed her too, but perhaps there would have been no money in it for them. It seems a strange impulse of grace, to lay a baby down in a ditch, with a storm raging. She could have drowned in that ditch, or have died of cold before we found her, or have been savaged by an animal. It seems to me that she has been selected for life, and her brother for death. I shall always have to think about this. And I do not think the years that pass will make it easier to understand. Do you?

Kit is a strong child. She cries a lot now—for her brother, we suppose—but she is too little for us to explain anything to her. It is a blessing, in a way—you see that I am looking very hard for blessings, James. She will never remember what has happened. We mean never to tell her. Because how, in God’s name, would we begin? I want you to impress this, to impress this very strongly, on my mother and father and on Emma, that as Kit grows up she must be protected from knowledge of this horrible thing. If she learns about it, it will contaminate her life.

I wish we had never left England. I do not believe that any good we have done here can compensate for a hundredth part of what we have suffered, and for what we will suffer as our lives go on. It seems to me impossible that we will ever lead lives like other people, or that anything ordinary and normal and safe will ever be within our reach again.

Don’t advise me to pray, because I don’t feel that prayers meet the case. I wonder about the nature of what I have been praying to. Before now I have looked at the world and I have seen no compelling evidence of the goodness of God, but I chose to believe in it, because I thought it was more constructive to do so. I thought that not to believe in it was a vote for chaos. I thought there was order in the world, at least—a kind of progress, a meaning, a pattern. But where is the pattern now? We’ve tried blaming ourselves, but we are not very convincing at it. If I had dealt earlier with this man Enock, if Anna had not insulted him … if I had not opened the door. I accept that I made choices and they were wrong, but then I think, too, that our lives have been ruined by malign chance. I do not see any pattern here, any sense, any reason why this had to happen.

James, in his office in the hostel in the East End, turned over the letter. On its back he wrote, “If it is chance, can it be malign? If it is malign, can it be chance?”

From beyond the flimsy partition he heard the broken and shabby men in his care, going about their evening routine. He heard the thump and scrape of furniture, the clink of spoon against tin mug. He heard the reiterated wild shout of a frequent customer of his, a tramp with presenile dementia: “Tommy didn’t do it. Tommy didn’t do it, Tommy didn’t … he never.”

Tommy didn’t do it, he thought. No, no, he pushes off the blame, he places it elsewhere. And Enock didn’t do it? God did it. Ralph will think so, anyway. How not—if God made us, if God made us as we are, if he is all powerful, all knowing—could he not have stretched out his arm? In Ralph’s mind, God works through Enock now, just as once God worked through Hitler. He will think it is God that plunged the knife into his back and took his child and cut him into pieces, dissected his child alive.

A wash of bile and saliva rose into James’s mouth. He struggled not to vomit. He rose from his chair, gripping the arms. Let no one come in; he cannot face them, cannot meet human eyes. Animals are better than we are, he thought; they do what they must. Pounce, tear, suck the blood; it is their nature, God has made them so and given them no choice.

He moved heavily across the room to the small window, which was barred against thieves. He looked out at an East End evening: wastepaper scudding in autumn gutters, and cabbage leaves from some street market, white veins shining in the dusk. Early darkness: months ahead of rain and fog, slush and thaw. God had to permit his creations to do evil; it was the penalty of giving them a choice. Animals have no choice; it is why they are different from us. If we could not choose to do evil, we would not be human. I will tell him this, he thought, tell his poor wife. I will not say what I have often thought: that animals, who have no choice and so commit no crime, may have a guarantee of heaven, but that we, who are God’s apes, may be shut out for eternity in the cold and the dark.

From beyond the office door the banging and clattering grew louder. He heard cursing. No doubt there was a fight about to break out; perhaps one of the old men had fallen over, or pulled out a knife. James turned from the window, caught sight of himself in a square of dusty mirror that hung on the opposite wall; saw a spare and desiccated old man, worn by humility, sucked dry by the constant effort of belief. He spoke aloud for a moment, as if Ralph and his wife were in the room with him. “Anna, there is nothing, there is nothing worse, there is nothing so burdensome … there is nothing so appallingly hard … as the business of being human …” His voice died in his throat. I should take that mirror down, he thought, I have often meant to do it, glass is a danger in a place like this.

When Ralph and Anna returned to England they began at once upon the business of finding a house. Practical considerations would not go away; there were decisions to make. Anna had talked only briefly, grudgingly, about her missing child. What was the point of talking? she asked. No one could share her feelings. No one could enter into them.

“Anna, don’t injure yourself more,” James said. “There is a thing people do—when they have been hurt, they hurt themselves again, they compound the damage. Don’t become bitter. That’s all I ask.”

“It’s a great deal to ask,” Ralph said.

“Next, James,” Anna said, “you’ll be asking me to forgive.” A kind of hard jauntiness had entered her voice; it was her usual tone now.

“No, I wouldn’t ask that. Not yet.”

“Good,” Anna said. “I am not up to the effort.”

“If you could think,” James said, “that there are some things that God does not control or will, then you could ask God for comfort … but it’s very difficult, Anna.”

“It’s impossible,” she said. “I asked God for comfort when I came home to Elim every night, and saw these beaten people waiting for me on the stoep—but God kept very quiet, James. God did nothing. It was up to me to do something, but I acted within constraints—I tried to be good, you see, I felt the love of God biting into my wrists like a pair of handcuffs. So what did I offer these people? Bandages and platitudes. Suppose my training had been different? I might have stepped on the train to Cape Town with a revolver in my bag, I might have shot Dr. Verwoerd—then I might have done some good in the world. Now, James—when I had in the room with me the man who was going to kill my child—when I had in my hand a broken bottle, suppose I had drawn the edges across his eyes? Suppose I had sliced his eyes to ribbons, suppose I had severed his veins and made him bleed to death? Then I would have done some good in the world.”

“Anna—” he said.

She saw the fear in his face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You leave me alone, James, and I’ll leave you alone. You don’t come at me with your theology, and I won’t stop Ralph doing his job. It was planned that he should take over the Trust, yes? So there’s no reason to change the plan. It doesn’t matter what I think, inside myself. Nobody could imagine or know what I think, inside myself. But I promise you I won’t stand up in church and bawl out that it’s all a sham. We’re professional Christians, aren’t we, Ralph and me? That’s how we make our living. Why should we be poor, when every hypocrite is rich?”

No one had seen her cry, not once; not from the beginning. Emma knew right away, when she met them at the airport: “Anna is too angry to cry. She is almost too angry to breathe.”

They found a house quite easily. Emma’s friend Felix drove them through the country lanes, away from the bustle of Norwich: which seemed to them, after their time in the wilderness, like some vast metropolis. Felix stopped his car under a tree by a red-brick, rambling, ill-proportioned house: “It needs work,” he said. “But it will accommodate both your office and your family.”

He looked over his shoulder at Anna, in the backseat. No point trying to avoid the word. Anna was expecting another baby. Everyone said it was the best thing that could have happened.

They went inside. “The drawing room,” Felix said.

They moved into the light of the long windows. Anna noticed how they were liberally bespattered with mud; Ralph noticed the paneled shutters of old pine. He admired the wide staircase, the lofty ceilings; she breathed the house’s air, the compound of strange molds and the trapped smoke of long-dead fires. “We must have it,” he said. Anna shook her head. But then she felt—or thought she felt—the child move inside her. She registered its claims. She thought of having more children, many children, to fill the aching void of grief.

They moved into the house three months before Julian’s birth; two months after the birth, Ralph’s father died. It was a shock, because he had seemed a fit man; but last year’s news from abroad, the news carried in Ralph’s first incomprehensible and distressing letter, had dealt him a terrible blow. The whole business perplexed and maddened him; he was used to taking control of life, but now here was a problem without a solution, the theft of a child he had not seen in a country he could not imagine. When his son came home he seemed unable to speak to him, barely able to be in the same room. James said, “To some people, great grief is an indecency. They cannot look at it. They blame the bereaved.”

Matthew became, more than ever, subject to sudden outbursts of temper, to seizures of indignation about the state of the world. The sight of Julian—his second grandson—made him want his first; it made him rage with disbelief and dismay. “Why did you go?” he said to Ralph one day. “You didn’t need to go. The missions must be staffed, but you needn’t have gone, you shouldn’t have gone, there were plenty more experienced people to go. Pride made you do it, I think—pride, and being above yourself, knowing better than other people. That’s always been your fault, boy.”

Ralph said, “You want to know why I went to Africa? I’ll tell you. I went to get away from you.”

The day after the quarrel, Matthew suffered a stroke. Ralph never spoke to him again—or rather, he spoke, but the old man gave no sign of hearing or comprehending, though somehow Ralph believed he did both. Ralph whispered to him: forgive me, for the things I have done that hurt you, and for the things that hurt you that I didn’t know I had done.

By his father’s deathbed he felt himself begin to grow up. He said, after all, my father was not so old himself in the days when he treated me so badly. He was still learning the world, he felt responsibility heavy on his back. It is hard to be a father; no doubt he was not malicious, no doubt he did the best he could. “Please forgive me, because I forgive you,” he whispered. His father died after three days, the pardon ungranted.

What to do now, with ordinary grief, ordinary guilt? All emotions seem attenuated in the wake of the one great disaster. “Nothing can hurt you worse,” Ralph’s mother said. “Nothing can hurt you worse than you have been hurt already. I don’t expect you to cry for him, Ralphie. Let’s just get him buried.”

After this, Dorcas moved in with them, a carpet-slippered presence in the drafty hall of their new house.

It’s not so easy to return from Africa, even when circumstances are favorable and the return is planned. Hostilities against the cockroach and the ant cease only gradually. A mark on the wall converts itself into a crawling tick, and there is effort and vigilance all the time—it is hard to sit in the fitful English sunshine, in the heat without threat, harmless insects brushing your bare arms. It was more than a year before Anna could bring herself to leave a plate or a cup on a table; after it had been used, she would snatch it away and wash it, to thwart the advancing carpet of crawling greed. “Poor Anna,” people said. “She’s always on the go. She’ll wear herself out, that girl.” The words used about her, the trite kindnesses, had a sting of their own. There had been a tragedy in her life, and no one here had the terms for it. In winter the weight of her clothes oppressed her; wool and shoe leather chafed and cramped and squeezed.

And how England looks like itself! After the white light, the sun that bleaches out color and destroys perspective, here are the discrete, exclusive Old Master tints, sienna, burnt umber, indigo: the dense conifers in shadowed ranks, the tan flash of stripped bark, the flush on the trunk of silver birch at sunset; breath on the raw air, and owls calling at dead of night. Another spring will come, and summer: green layered on green, the mossy wall, the lichened fence; and drowsing horses beneath an elm, flanks fly-buzzed, necks bowed, dreaming of George Stubbs.

So now, where should they begin? How should they coordinate their slow crawl back from the desert? What should they say? What could they tell people? Who was entitled to the whole story, and who could be kept at a distance with a half-truth?

Anna’s parents knew the facts—knew the probabilities, that is— but they settled for not talking about them. They pretended that they were sparing their daughter’s feelings, but really they were sparing their own. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for catastrophe. They worshipped routine; events were dubious matters, and often in bad taste. It was a form of showing off, to have things happen to you. “Of course, it’s terrible, a horrible thing, dreadful,” Mrs. Martin said, “but although I don’t say so, of course, I blame him for taking her there in the first place. He could have had a nice job with his father, there was no need to trail halfway across the globe.”

The Martins had spent much of their lives beating the drum for the Christian faith, getting up jumble sales and flower shows so that the dark races could have the benefit of the company of brisk young Englishmen who were familiar with the Psalms and (among other Books) the Book of Job. But they did not expect to have one of these young Englishmen in their back parlor behind the shop, frozen and speechless with misery. They did not expect the Book of Job to have any practical application.

And friends of the families—what to tell them? They flinched from detail, and Ralph flinched more than Anna. He thought, if we tell them what we think has happened, we will pander to their filthy prejudices, we will seem to traduce a whole nation: savages, they will say.

It was possible to say, “We lost our son.” That covered everything. Few people inquired further. Rather, they would shy away, as if the bereaved might break down in front of them, lie on the floor and howl. It was surprising how vague people were, even the people who claimed they had been praying for them every Sunday. I thought the young Eldreds had two children, people would say, didn’t I hear from somewhere that they had twins? Unease would cross their faces; was there some story about it, an accident perhaps, or was it just that the child succumbed to a tropical fever? Ralph had feared intrusive questions, but instead there was an indifference that he felt as an insult. He made a discovery, common to those who expatriate themselves and then return: that when he and Anna went abroad they had ceased to be regarded as real people. Out of sight, out of mind. Nobody, even the most generous donor to mission appeals, wanted to hear anything about Africa.

In the early years after their return, huge areas of reference were excluded by their family, their close friends. They were surrounded by acres laid waste, acres of silence. Slowly, cautiously, normality tiptoed back; the family no longer censored themselves, guarding conversation from all mention of Africa. After a while they ceased to flinch when a picture of a lost child appeared in the newspapers. Finally the dimensions of the tragedy shrunk; there was a little barbed area in which no one trod, in which the secret was sequestered and locked away. Was it less potent, confined? No: it was more potent, Ralph felt. He dreamt of scrubbing blood away, scrubbing his own blood off a cement floor; but the stain always returned, like the blood in Bluebeard’s room. He understood, then, what the fairy tale means; blood is never wiped out. No bad action goes away. Evil is energy, and perpetuates itself; only its form changes.

Over the next few years Ralph made himself busy, burying the past under a weight of daily preoccupation. Anna watched him change, cultivate a sort of shallow and effortless bonhomie—beneath which, she imagined, his real thoughts teemed on, guilty and seething and defrauded. In daily life he became an exacting, demanding man, who gave her only glimpses of the gentleness of those early years; she had to look at his sons, as they grew up, to see the kind of man Ralph had once been. She had realized very early, when they lived in Elim, that his kindness had a detachment about it, that his care for people was studied and willed; now it became a hard-driving virtue, combative.

During the 1970s the Trust became one of the better-funded small charities, and attracted a member of the royal family as patron. Ralph was contemptuous of the young man, but he would put up with anyone’s company to further his aims. He must see progress everywhere; he must see improvement. All day there must be action, or the simulation of it; letters in every direction, telephone calls, driving about the county and up and down to London; there must be advertising and exhortation, press campaigns and fund-raising drives. He took charge of policy, of the broader picture, engaged the services of a freelance public-relations expert; he rebuilt the hostel, updated its aims and methods. He granted an interview to the Guardian and one to New Society and was sometimes called into television studios to engage in futile scraps with those who thought differently about drugs, housing policy, education. At the hostel he was available to oversee the minutest detail, the supply of paperclips and pillow cases; he spent a lot of time sitting with the sullen, inarticulate, unlikeable children who found themselves in his care. In Norfolk, too, he became well-known as one of those men who you telephone if you want something done; sometimes the novelty of his ideas outraged the Eastern Daily Press. The power of his will, he seemed to think, could pull the world into a better shape. Underneath, Anna thought, he must know it is all an illusion. A futility.

For a year or so after their return from Bechuanaland, she fought to keep her hold on the past, on every detail of it. She had been afraid to forget anything; to forget seemed a betrayal of her child who might—it was possible—still be alive. She rehearsed constantly in her mind the incidents of their life at Mosadinyana: from their arrival on the station platform under the stars, to their final exit, bags packed for them by commiserating strangers. But though the pain remained fresh, specific memories staled and faded; they receded from her, the little events of this day and that. The one night remained in her mind, indelible—the thunder snarling overhead, the hammering of the rain on the roof, Ralph’s blood coating her hands to the wrist. But after two years, three, her inner narrative slipped, became disjointed. What remained as memories were a series of pictures, some hard and sharp, some merely cross-hatched blurs of light and sound.

On the day Julian was born, Anna had no interest in resisting pain, or behaving well, or making the process pleasant for those who attended her. When a medical fist squashed a mask onto her face, she gulped oblivion; and she would not allow herself to come back. She wanted the gas and not the air; oblivion informed her, it was what she craved. When Julian was first placed in her arms—a neat, clean, pink little baby, held by the unfeeling hands of nurses, scrubbed and sanitized before they gave him to her—she felt a certain flinching, a pull away from him; she hated to place any burden of expectation on this fragile scrap of being wrapped in a shawl. She saw the tight folds of his lashless eyes, his sea-sponge mouth, forming and re-forming, the stiff mottled fingers that thrust through the cobweb knitting of the shawl: she tried to pretend she had no other son, that she was seeing a son for the first time. Julian had fair curls and soft eyes; he lay in his father’s arms and trusted him. He did not remind her unnecessarily of her sharp, small, dark child, his fragile skull still showing when she lost him, the pulses visible, beating beneath that fluttering baby skin.

Ralph’s mother, Dorcas, was a friend to her, in those early years; a close-mouthed, uncommunicative old woman, but always there, always attentive, always to be relied on. Anna shrank from her sister-in-law at first; bossy young GP, driving over from Norwich every other Saturday, full of specious knowledge, worldliness, vitality. She shrank from the world, indeed; there were days when she wouldn’t go out of the house, couldn’t go out, when a word from a stranger would make her blush and shake, when she could not bear to lift her head to meet another person’s eyes.

Sometimes she woke with her right hand contracted, clenched, as if she were still holding the neck of the bottle she had broken against the Instows’ sideboard. For a year and a half she kept Julian’s cot in her room, and only when Robin was born, and she had something frailer to concern her, did she cease to wake and check his breathing many times during the night. When Kit went to school, she could hardly be persuaded from the school gate.

Of course, people noticed her behavior. They said, Anna, you’re a trained teacher, you’ve got your mother-in-law to look after the children for you, why don’t you go back to work? You need an interest, it would take you out of yourself. They wondered why she was seen so seldom, outside her own house; why she did not take what her mother called “an active interest in charity work.”

After a year or two of this—the searing gaffs of other people’s demands—Ralph’s sister Emma took her aside and spoke to her, just in time to save her life. She saved it by small, usual words, trite in themselves, but very important if you were dying.

“Anna,” she had said, “you don’t seem well to me, you seem out of breath, shall I listen to your chest? I wouldn’t treat my own family, of course—but I could just tell you if there was anything obviously wrong.”

“It’s nothing,” Anna said, “it’s the cold weather, you know, it puts me out of breath—besides, I’ve always been like it.”

“Have you?” Emma said, interested.

“Oh yes … I’m strong enough, in myself, but I could never run much. Even when I was little. Don’t you notice me, when I dash upstairs?”

“No, what do you do?”

“My heart pounds.” She frowned. “I’ve always been like it. I told you. It was easier when we went to Africa. There were no stairs.”

“I never realized,” Emma said. “What an idiot I am.”

She was able to tell Ralph, after investigations, that Anna had a slight defect in a heart valve: nothing that required surgery, nothing that was going to kill her, nothing that would ever give her more than the minor inconvenience she had suffered all her life, and which she had never thought to speak of. “It’s common enough,” Emma said, trying to create the proper balance between reassurance and alarm. “But you must give her a quiet time, Ralph. She has enough with the house and the babies, you mustn’t let anyone try to prod her and pester her into supporting amateur dramatics and doing these damn flower festivals and calling on old gossips who are fitter than she is. You must protect her, you see. When people want her to do something, you can sit back in your chair, and frown, and say, well now, my wife, didn’t you know she is not precisely well?”

Not precisely well. Ralph wondered if it was fear that impeded Anna’s breathing, fear that stuck in her throat.

“It’s difficult,” Emma said, “to disentangle the causes and effects. Certainly, Anna has anxiety attacks. I’ve seen them, I’ve seen it happen. It’s not surprising at all that she has them, when you think what she’s gone through. After some great upset in your life you may think you’re coping, in your mind—you may feel you’re on top of life. Very well—the mind has strategies. But the body needs different ones. It has a memory of its own.”

“But this defect, in her heart, the valve—that’s not to do with anxiety attacks, it’s something in itself, you’re saying?”

Emma hesitated. “Yes, it’s something in itself—something and nothing. But Ralph, people are very ignorant and cruel, and they won’t accept mental suffering as an excuse to avoid anything. They say, “Pull yourself together.” I am afraid I couldn’t bear to hear anyone say that to Anna—and we are not far off the day when they will. But—trust me, I know what people are like—they’ll respect a heart complaint. A heart complaint is very respectable, very respectable indeed.”

Ralph said, “Sometimes I feel panic too. And a …” he put his hand to his throat, “something here, a heaviness, it won’t move. Still, I … I keep going.”

“That’s what men do,” Emma said. “Keep going. Often at the expense, don’t you think, of the people around them?” They shout at the news on the television, she thought, and call politicians fools—that’s a release for them. They lose their temper and hit people, and are admired for doing it. They sit on committees, or enforce laws. Whatever is wrong inside them they project to the outside, they find somebody out there to stick the blame on. But women—women turn inward. “Men make decisions,” she said, “and women fall ill.”

“That seems a gross simplification.”

“Of course it is,” Emma said. “Of course it is. But you can help your wife now, can’t you? Why do you want precision reasoning? I’ve given you something, Ralph—won’t it do?”

“Thank you, Emma,” he said. “You may have saved her life.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t die of it—” Emma began; but then she stopped because she saw the extent of his fear. Impenetrable, delicate, dry-eyed Anna: she had been near that cutting edge? “Oh, Ralph,” his sister said. “I didn’t know. I’d have come up with something before. Doesn’t she want to live, for the children she has?”

“It is the one we don’t have that dominates our life,” Ralph said. “It’s what is missing that shapes everything we do. Sometimes she smiles, but have you noticed, Emma, she never laughs. She is crippled inside. She has no joy.”

“Joy,” Emma said. She smiled her twisted smile. “A word to be kept for Christmas carols, don’t you think, Ralph? Don’t expect joy. Survival, that’s all—survival should be the ambition.”

There was some surprise when—after Kit, Julian, Robin—Anna Eldred became pregnant for a fourth time. People said, Anna, I thought you’d stopped; three is enough in this day and age, and I heard you had heart trouble. Yes, I’ve got heart trouble, Anna said. Yes, I’ve stopped now. The world had moved on by the time

Rebecca was born. There were people who knew nothing of what had happened to them in Bechuanaland, and people who had known but had contrived to forget. There came a time when she didn’t think, every minute, about her stolen child.

But the grief waited in the thickets of daily life, in unoccupied hours, ready to bludgeon her again, to drag her down: drag her under like a woman drowned, a woman sewn in a sack.

One day Dorcas had a fall in the kitchen, broke her wrist. They took her in to hospital, to casualty, but it was a Friday night, and they had to wait, and the wait and the pain and the other clients distressed Dorcas beyond bearing. There were young men with springing scalp wounds, blood leaking and pumping out of them as if blood were as cheap as water; there was a woman brought in after a road accident, dumped in a wheelchair waiting for attention. One eyelid was cut, puffing and oozing; she had lost one high-heeled shoe, and in the twenty minutes she waited for attention she never stopped sobbing and asking for her husband.

In time Dorcas was led away, curtained off, her arm manipulated; she was wheeled through cold corridors to X-ray. The hospital offered a bed. “No,” Anna said, “this place has frightened her, I’ll take her home.” The doctor seemed relieved. “Call your GP in the morning,” he said.

“Keep her wrapped up,” their GP advised, “keep her in bed, don’t let her get worked up about things.” When Emma came to see her late that afternoon she was dismayed by the old woman’s low spirits; she seemed in pain, could not rest, would not eat. “You know what I think?” Emma said. “I think she’s had enough.”

When a chest infection developed their GP arranged for Dorcas to go back into hospital. But because she fretted, and still would not eat, the hospital sent her home. She insisted that Ralph stay by her, then; she began to hold his hand tightly with her good hand, and to talk to him, talk with a grim fluency, about her girlhood, her courtship, her marriage, her husband. It was as if, on what she acknowledged to be her deathbed, she was giving birth to a new version of her life.

“You thought he didn’t believe in science, didn’t you, Ralph?” Her face was very small against the pillows. “But he broke my spirit, scientifically. I wasn’t always the carpet under his feet, I wasn’t born like that. No, I had a life, when I was a young girl—my family weren’t so strict. I used to go to dances.”

“Mum, don’t cry,” Ralph said.

“Let her,” Emma said. “Crying does no harm. It might ease her chest.”

“That Palmer boy, young Felix—that friend of yours, Emma—I knew his father. He was a good dancer, very light on his feet. And a gentleman. He’d buy me ginger beer.”

Emma sat on the bed. She lifted her mother’s hand and rubbed it between her own. “Was he sweet on you, Mum?”

“Oh yes.” Dorcas smiled, painfully. She seemed to sleep for a moment. But then she continued quite smoothly, just where she had left off. “The thing was though, your father came along, and I thought he was more of a man, really. His father was a lay preacher,” she said, as if they hadn’t known it, “and he had a fine voice.”

“Ah,” Emma said. “So you gave up Mr. Palmer?”

“Yes,” Dorcas said, “I did, I did give him up, I told him he should look elsewhere. He was a snappy dresser, you know, I’ll say that much for him—and oh, could he make you laugh! Still, that’s not life, is it … laughing, that’s not life. He married a bottle-blond from Cromer, went into the building trade, he did well I always heard, that’s how little Felix got his airs and graces. Your father was a serious man. We never went to a dance.”

“Mum, you’re tired,” Ralph said. “Why don’t you have a sleep now?”

“Don’t try to shut her up, or I’ll never forgive you,” Emma said mildly. “This is my mother, and—” she turned to him, and whispered—“and I’ve got to my present age without ever hearing her say anything of interest. So don’t you try to stop her now.”

Dorcas looked up. “You see, I always had to please him, Ralph. I was a good girl and went to church, but six months after I was married I gave up fearing God and started fearing your father. I mean that, you know. I don’t mean it as a blasphemy. He always seemed to me like a person from another age. Abraham. A patriarch. He wasn’t fair to you, Ralph, and the worst thing, you know—he made me take part in it. Oh, you hated me then. That night when I came into your room and said to you, you have to fall in with him, Ralph, or you’ll see your sister suffer for it.” She closed her eyes. “He knew you loved your sister.”

Emma said, “What does she mean?”

“Nothing,” Ralph said.

“What is it? Come on, Ralph! If you won’t tell me, she will.”

Ralph glanced at Dorcas; she seemed to be sleeping, but he had a feeling she was listening still. He reached out for his sister’s arm. “Emma, come with me, come, let’s get out a bit, let’s go and walk, or let’s make tea, do something, go and sit by ourselves … this is such old ground, I didn’t think I’d ever have to go over it.”

Emma seemed stunned. “But Ralph, why didn’t you tell me? All these years have gone by, events making no sense or partial sense … I used to say to you, why did you let him bully you?”

“Yes, you did.”

“How did you bear it?”

“There was no alternative.^*’

“I thought you were spineless. Weak.” Emma looked very young, as if layers had peeled away. “He’d have done it, you know—he’d have kept me at home to punish you. With most fathers it would have been bluster, but with him—no, he meant every word he said.” She shook her head. “Imagine—it would have been a better revenge than anything he could have done to you directly. If you’d have insisted on your path in life, I’d have been turned off mine. And think of the hook of guilt it would have put into your flesh.”

“Yes.” He remembered a thorn that had once, at Mosadinyana, embedded itself in the pad of his middle finger, and made his arm numb to the elbow: an intricate thorn, like a medieval battle weapon, designed by man to do its worst. “But she, Mum—she’s no saint. She colluded with him.”

“She was frightened, Ralph.”

“Can’t you overcome fear?”

“You ask too much of people,” Emma said sadly.

They did not speak for a while. Then Ralph asked, “Will she live?”

His sister said, with professional accuracy, “She’ll die the day after tomorrow.”

It is a pity that she cannot, with similar accuracy, put a term to the afterlife of the missing child. It would be possible, if one were harsh, to regard this lost child not as an innocent, but as a malign half presence, a destroyer, a consumer of hope. Katherine grows up; they search her face for signs of what her brother would have been. As babies, they were not much alike. So no consolation there; but no further suffering, either. Except you cannot help but mark out the course of the shadow-life … he would be six years old, he would be seven years old, he would be seventeen. He has all we lack, he is everything we are not; we have our gross appetites, but he is the opposite of flesh. Somewhere in Africa the little heart rots, the bird bones crumble or—alternatively—the traces dry in their jar; their child becomes a bush-ghost, powder on the wind.

Norfolk, 1980: midsummer. Cyclists take to the road, with flapping shirts and fluorescent saddlebags. Women in loud print dresses, their cardigans over their arms, pad downhill in seaside streets, with wide feet like the feet of waders. There are fathers in cars, lost in country lanes: irate metropolitan faces behind glass, and wives tearfully slapping at maps that won’t fold.

There are poppies in the verges—indecent splashes, as if blood were welling up beneath the landscape. In every vegetable garden in the county, cabbage whites hover dangerously over the brassicas. Those hedges that remain are towering walls, walls of deep green; lemonade bottles perch in them, chucked out from passing cars. Small animals are smashed into the tarmac of the A149—so flattened, so thoroughly dead, that they look like animals in cartoons, who will instantly spring back into their old shape.

Sandra and Amy Glasse are selling samphire, cauliflower, lettuces, beans, and new potatoes. They are selling large fleshy tomatoes, because last winter Julian reglazed their greenhouse. Ralph is now in love with Mrs. Glasse, and sees her once a week, twice a week, three times if he can contrive it. Contriving is hard and goes against his nature; but when has his nature ever been what it should be?

Summer visitors came to Ralph’s house, children from the hostel. Ralph’s own children treated them with the usual distant tolerance. Kit had not resolved her future; she drifted around the house, and bickered with Daniel, who found himself in the neighborhood every other day.

The Visitors exhibited their customary bewilderment. They had grown up in cities, and spent a lot of their lives standing about in the street. Here, there was no street worth standing in—just a lane, its high verges choked with thistle and fern, cow parsley and rose-bay willow herb. They did not go out of the house much, because they did not like to walk anywhere or ride bicycles. Sometimes they begged lifts to Reepham, the nearest market town. They would swagger across the market square, then lean on the railings outside the Old Brewery, looking hopeless; stare into the butcher’s window, to see if the lamb chops were doing anything exciting; shove and barge into the post office, which sold stationery and newspapers and picture postcards of Norwich, and there shoplift packets of paper doilies, and marble-swirl pencils with erasers on the end. Then they would vandalize a few hanging baskets, and beg a lift back to the house again.

“If this goes on,” Kit said to Robin, “the people in Reepham will start complaining. They’ll get up a petition.”

“They’ll get up a mob, I should think.” Robin lurched unsteadily across the kitchen, pulling his forelock and pretending to be a vampire’s manservant. “My lord, the villagers are advancing, armed with staves.”

“No, seriously,” Kit said. “The Visitors seem worse than ever this year.”

“It’s you that’s changing. Getting old and mean.”

“And where’s Julian? He’s no help. He’s always over at Sandra’s house, you’d think he’d decided to leave home. When he’s here he doesn’t speak.”

“Well, he’s gone mad, hasn’t he?” Robin said. “Round the twist. I thought we’d established that. What I want to know is, how is he going to keep a grip on Becky now it’s the school holidays? He can’t be over there screwing Sandra and here guarding his little sister, not both at the same time.”

“No,” Kit said. “Think how he must be torn.”

“Very odd, our family.”

“I said that. A few weeks ago. You seemed to disagree. You seemed to think they were normal.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“A man’s privilege.”

“But Kit—can you make sense of it? Don’t watch television, it contaminates your brain. Don’t hang around with smart kids with money, or you might contract that fearful disease materialism. So what do we get instead, for entertainment and company? Child prostitutes from Brixton. Heroin addicts. Thieves.”

“We’re supposed to be proof against it,” Kit said. “We’ve been so well brought up that they’re not going to influence us, or do us any harm.”

“That’s the theory,” Robin said.

“It works, doesn’t it? I don’t see you shooting up, or selling your body.”

“True,” Robin said guardedly. “But Kit, isn’t it time you got away? Once I go off to medical school you won’t catch me hanging around here in summer. Not if summers are like this one. All this snapping and snarling, and creeping about.”

“Yes.” Kit turned away. She had been thinking a lot, since her midnight conversation with Robin, and she was uncomfortable with her thoughts. She didn’t want to risk having them exposed. “Anyway,” she said, changing the subject. “Anyway. The Visitors will have gone soon. All except this Melanie.”

“Oh yes, Melanie—when does she get here?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

“Kit,” Ralph said, as the family sat down to eat, “do you have any nail polish remover?”

“Why, Dad, do you want to do yourself a revarnish?”

“Christ,” Robin said. “Dad’s a transvestite. He’s got a secret life.”

“Don’t worry,” Kit said. “There’s probably a self-help group we can join.”

“Yes,” Robin said. “Ask Dad. He’ll know.”

“For goodness sake,” Anna said. “Listen to your father and stop being so slick.”

“Ah,” Kit said. “Mum doesn’t like the thought that he’s got a secret life.”

“My problem is this,” Ralph said. “Melanie. She might inhale it.”

“Dad, look.” Kit held up her hands, “I am a stranger to the manicurist’s art.”

“Oh, good,” her father said.

“Not very observant, are you?” Robin put his chin on his hand and watched his father.

“I’m not,” Ralph said. “It’s a fault of mine.”

“People are just problems to you,” Kit said. “Problems on two legs. That’s why you don’t notice things.”

“Well, I—you may be right, but in my line of work—if you think about it—I don’t meet people without problems.”

“That’s not my point,” Kit said. “My point is that you don’t see—what’s her name, Melanie—you see ’persistent absconder, multiple addictions’—whatever the jargon is at the time.”

“Do I? Well, I yield to you in charity, you are my superior. The problem is that the nature of what I do is so contentious, so risky— wading into children’s lives and trying to put them right—that I’m always glad if I can identify a pattern of behavior. And there are such patterns, you see.”

“Everyone is unique,” Kit said. “Surely.”

“I used to think so. But then I see how they—my clients— behave or react in the same way as others who have gone before— or, let’s say, they have a small range of possible reactions.”

“Don’t they have free will?”

Ralph looked at his daughter appraisingly, as if to judge her seriousness. “I used to think that was the single question,” he said. “I used to think, of course they have free will. But then after a few years I saw these patterns repeat themselves, as if people were born into them. I read case files all the time, and sometimes, quite often really, I get one client’s story mixed up with another. People use certain drugs, perhaps, or drink, or whatever—they are as they are, and that is much as their parents were—they beat their children or neglect them, they go into prison and come out and go in again, and you feel that you could write the next page in the file, you know what their future is going to be, and their children’s future too. Nine times out of ten you’d be right. It depresses me, how seldom people do the unexpected. They start off down a path and they stick to it.”

“In my opinion,” Robin said, “stupidity has a lot to do with it. I know people can’t help being thick, but if they’re so thick that they can’t control their lives properly I don’t see how it matters if they have free will or not. That’s just theory. In practice they don’t have choices.”

Rebecca kicked her brother’s shin, under the table. “I asked you half an hour ago to pass the sweetcorn.”

“Shut up, Becky,” Kit said. “But Robin, you can be quite bright and not have choices. Take love, for instance.”

Anna sat back in her chair, putting her fork down. “Take love?” she said.

“Sorry,” Kit said, “I know I’m contradicting what I said earlier, but I do see your point, Dad. Love, you know, it’s a chemical thing. When people say they’re in love it’s just a set of physical reactions, there are all these substances whizzing around your brain, and hormones making you obsessed—”

“Very scientific,” Robin said.

“—and that’s why although everybody thinks that nobody in the world has ever felt like they do, they all listen to these schmaltzy songs and write poems and feel at one with the universe. They’re all going through the same process. We’re programmed for it.”

“You may be right,” Ralph said. “Are you in love, Kit?”

“No. I’m sure that if I were, I wouldn’t talk about it with such a lack of respect.”

“You’d be like everyone else,” Robin said. “You’d think you were unique.”

Kit made coffee. As if on cue, Daniel came to the front door. “How are you, young man?” Ralph said. He liked Daniel, he had decided, because he seemed to have evolved; in the present casual optimist, in his new stiff tweeds, you could seem to see his grandfather, the snappy dresser so slick on the dance floor and free with ginger beer.

“I came to thank Julian,” Daniel said. “Shame he’s not here. Peace is much better than war, isn’t it? Oh,” he looked around, “don’t you know what I’ve been up to?”

“Barn conversions?” Ralph suggested. “That’s the usual bone of contention, isn’t it?”

“Not anymore. You know Julian’s girlfriend? I’ve been over to their farm. Mrs. Glasse has this outbuilding that Julian wants to demolish because it’s falling down anyway. Mrs. Glasse was very mysterious about it and made objections, she said, ’I use it to keep buckets in.’ Anyway, when I had a look at it, I came in and told her what I would pay for the roof tiles, which are beautiful, absolutely beautiful—and she said, quick, Sandra, let’s all go and lean on the bugger, it cant come down soon enough for me. I said, ’What about the buckets?’ and she said, ’They can be rehoused. Or get foster homes. Ralph knows all about it. He’ll get them a social worker if I ask him.’ “

“Oh,” Kit said, “so you’re best mates now, you and Jule?”

“He still says I’m a vandal, but I think he’s glad to find a way of reducing the damage. By the way,” he said to Anna, “have you met Sandra’s mother? She’d interest you.”

“In what respect?”

“She’s not what I expected—quite a clever woman, I’d think, very sharp, very, what’s the word, droll—but just absolutely content to stay on her patch. No wider ambitions, none at all.”

“You mean she’s like me?” Anna said.

“Oh no—I didn’t mean that.”

“You needn’t blush. She sounds an admirable type.”

“She’s so young,” Daniel said. “Of course, you know her, Ralph. I was amazed, she’s so attractive—I mean, Sandra’s not much to look at—don’t mention to Jule I said so—but Mrs. Glasse is quite stunning, in her way.”

“Did you tell her so?” Anna said.

“God, no,” Daniel said. “Mrs. Glasse? I wouldn’t dare.”

“I don’t see why not. She leads a solitary life, from what I hear. She probably goes short of compliments.”

There was a fine disgust in Anna’s voice. Ralph’s pulse rate rose when he heard it. Daniel looked covertly at Kit, to see if he had made her jealous. But Kit only smiled her placid smile.

It was a chilly evening, for August. Daniel’s pullover had a suggestion of cashmere, a certain Burlington Arcade air about it. Ralph was wearing an army-style sweater, with fabric elbow and shoulder patches, which Rebecca had given him last Christmas. Ralph disliked it, because it was shoddy, militaristic, and already fraying; but Becky had saved up for it, and thought it dashing, so he wore it to please her. Daniel seemed to be eyeing it—not covetously, Ralph thought. “How’s your car running, Daniel?” he asked. He lunged into the conversation as if at a runaway horse, trying to catch it and lead it away from Amy Glasse.

Ten o’clock—Daniel on his way home, Kit washing up—he went out to attend to the boiler. This brute occupied its own hot little room—in the depth of winter, it was a popular meeting place for the family. The air was dry, calcified, osseous. He would have let it go out in the summer, except that it supplied the family’s hot water too. When the children were babies it had seemed quite natural to dunk them in and out of each other’s bath water; when they were older, he had expected them to exercise economy. One Easter holiday long ago, Kit had a friend to stay. “You can have first bath,” Kit had said, “but leave me your water.” Her friend had stared at her. It’s like the middle ages here, she’d said. And telephoned her parents to be collected next day.

All these thoughts were running through Ralph’s mind—to block out certain other thoughts—as he drove the scuttle vengefully at the coal, felt the coal rattle in, felt the dust fly up and sully his cuffs. He straightened up, and Julian was there, in the doorway, leaning against it.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Julian said.

“The boiler,” Ralph said.

“Don’t be funny. It’s not funny,” Julian said. “I’ve just come from Sandra’s. I’ve been covering up for you so far, but why should I go on doing it? Why should I? You’re going to wreck up everything for me and Sandra, and that’s only the beginning of the damage you’re going to do.”

Ralph said, “This is neither the time nor the place, is it?”

Julian leaned forward and took a handful of his father’s sweater, somewhere around the shoulder patch. He shifted his grip, seemed uncertain whether he had his father or not. “Look, what the hell are you doing?” he said.

Ralph said, “Give me an inch of space, Julian. What am I doing? I don’t know.”

Melanie, their Visitor from London, arrived next day. The children always hung around to see a new arrival, but they were disappointed by this one. She was wearing an ordinary pair of jeans, black lace-up boots with domed toe caps, and a leopard-skin print T-shirt with a hole in it. “Very conventional,” Kit said. “Almost Sloane Square.”

“Boring,” Rebecca agreed.

Melanie had a nylon hold-all, but it seemed to be empty. “What’s happened to her clothes?” Anna said.

“She burned them,” Ralph said shortly. It was clear that he didn’t mean to enlarge on this.

Anna sighed. “We’ll have to get her kitted out, then. That will be a battle.”

She took Melanie upstairs to settle her in her room. “Have you got any tablets, my dear?” Anna said. “Anything you shouldn’t have? Needles?”

Melanie shook her cropped orange head. Anna felt that she was lying, but balked at a body search. The girl slumped down on the bed and stared hard at the wall. She was here against her wishes and she meant to make this clear. Anna looked out of the window, over the fields. Fields, fields on every hand, all choked with snares for the urban young. To Melanie—who had broken out, sooner or later, from everywhere she had ever lived—it must feel like a Siberian labor camp. The permafrost on every side; searchlights and razor wire. As if catching her thought, the girl said, “Is there bulls?”

“In the fields? No, not usually. We don’t have that kind of farming. In the fields we grow things.”

“What, like bloody grass?” the girl said.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Anna said. “Don’t swear at me. It won’t make you any happier.”

“But it does,” Melanie said balefully.

Anna went downstairs, and checked that anything Melanie might inhale or swallow was locked away. Not many women have to padlock their oven cleaner, Anna thought. They had tried to exclude from the house any substance with a potential for abuse, but you could never be sure; a boy who’d stayed last year had a predilection for a certain brand of suede cleaner, and had ransacked the kitchen cupboards and her dressing-table drawers on the off-chance that she might have some lying about. Again, these children were given to what are known as “suicidal gestures”—drinking bleach, for instance. Some of their experiments were so unlikely that it was only later, when they got out of hospital, that you could find out from them whether they’d been in search of euphoria or oblivion—a temporary exit, or a permanent one.

“Ralph,” Anna said. “I’m afraid Melanie is a Sad Case, a very sad one indeed. You’re not going to leave me with her this afternoon, are you?”

“I have to go out,” Ralph said, “for three hours.”

“Can’t you cancel? I don’t think I can be responsible.”

Ralph wavered. “I’m expected,” he said. He thought, how easy it is to lie. “Robin’s locked the bikes away. She’ll not run off, I don’t think. Nowhere to run to. She seems dazed, doesn’t she? It’s odd, because she was all right at Norwich station when the volunteer handed her over. But then as soon as we got out of town she seemed to go rigid. In the end she shut her eyes and wouldn’t look out of the window.”

“I’m not worried about her running away,” Anna said. “I’m worried about what she might do if she stays here.”

“We’ve had worse than Melanie.”

“I know—but Ralph, I know we’ve done this for years, had these poor things here in summer, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s fair on them—they hate it so much. And we hate it, too.”

“We’ve had this out before,” Ralph said. “And I really do believe it does some good. They get good food, they get at least a bit of fresh air, they see something different from what they’ve seen all their lives—and there are people around who are willing to spend time with them and sit and listen if they want to talk.”

“Let’s hope she doesn’t want to talk this afternoon, then. Because you’ve gone and fixed some meeting, which will probably go on into the evening.”

“No. I’ll be back for five. I promise.” He was already on his way out of the back door. I have to see Amy, he was thinking, I have to. He felt nauseous at the lies he was telling, at the thought of his duties neglected; felt almost sick enough to turn back. But I promised I’d see Amy, I have to. He drove away, cherishing the comforting belief that he was under a compulsion.

Anna was annoyed with herself; she hadn’t meant to get involved in a debate about the philosophy of Visitors, she’d really meant to get a phone number from him, so that if there was any crisis with Melanie she could get him out of his meeting. She went into his office. His diary was in its usual place, top right-hand drawer. From his pewter frame Matthew Eldred frowned at her, hand on his watch chain; Uncle James, in his tropical kit, squinted into the sun. And Ralph was there, too; Ralph on the stoep at Flower Street, one hand in his pocket, leaning against the wall. It was the only photograph they displayed, of their life in Africa. It was there because Rebecca, a couple of years ago, had begged to see some; she had taken a fancy to this, saying, “Oh, Dad, weren’t you handsome, you’re not a bit like you are now.” Ralph had decided the picture should go on his bureau, to remind him of his present imperfections. It was a photograph devoid of associations; he did not remember it being taken. He saw a smiling, insouciant boy, a lounger with curly hair; a broad-shouldered boy, who looked—if only momentarily—at ease with the world.

Anna took out the diary, found the week, page, day.

9 A.M.: Meet Red Cross about Home-from-Hospital scheme. DON’T FORGET—ring the bishop. 11 A.M.: Collect Melanie Burgess from station.

Then nothing. So he had left the afternoon free, and something had come up at the last minute. Why didn’t he say so? Anna put the diary back in the drawer. She thought no more about it.

Ralph left Amy’s house at half past four. As he reached the top of the track he saw a police car, apparently waiting for him. He stopped the engine and waited in his turn. He recognized the officer who got out first; it was one of the men he had seen previously at the same spot, one of those who, Amy said, were always watching the house.

Ralph wound his window down. “What do you want?”

“Could I have your name, sir?”

“Eldred, Ralph Eldred.”

“And your address?”

He gave it.

“Is this your car?”

“Yes. Unfortunately.”

“Can you tell me the registration number?”

He told it.

“Would you have your driver’s license on you?”

He took it out of his pocket. The policeman looked at it, handed it back; clean, not a penalty point, nothing to be done there. “We’ve seen you round here before.”

“Yes. I’ve seen you.”

“Been calling at the farm down there?”

“Yes.”

“Reason for visiting, have you?”

“No,” Ralph said. “I just drive about Norfolk at random, calling at farmhouses whenever I feel like it.” He swung open his door and stepped out. “What is it you want? To look in the boot, is that it?” He walked around and unlocked it. “Okay. There you go. Get on with it.”

The officer didn’t know what he wanted, really; but he ferreted about in the boot of the Citroen, found a pair of Wellingtons, a jack, a toolbox, a bundle of old newspapers. “All right?” Ralph said. “It doesn’t make much sense, this, does it? If you think I’m supplying stolen goods to the people down there, why didn’t you search the car on the way down?”

“We might just go and check out the farm, now,” said the other constable, who was leaning against the police car.

“You are harassing Mrs. Glasse,” Ralph said. “You know perfectly well that all her market-trading is legal and aboveboard, but you like the thought of tormenting two women who can’t torment you back. But I can, and I will, because I know the procedure for making a complaint against the police, and I know when to make one and I know how to make it stick.”

“Had many dealings with the law, have you?”

“God’s my witness,” Ralph said, “I don’t know how you blokes keep your front teeth. Finished with me, have you?”

“Oh yes, sir. We’ve got your name and address.”

“Oh no, sir, you mean.” Ralph got back into his car, slammed the door, spoke through the window. “Right, so we’ll be seeing each other again, will we?”

“Look forward to it,” one of the policemen said.

At the Red House next morning, Melanie did not appear for her breakfast. “Leave her,” Ralph said. “Let her get some rest.” He sat at the breakfast table, trying to argue sensitivity into his younger daughter. “Be kind to Melanie,” he said.

“Why?” Rebecca asked.

Ralph looked at her in exasperation. “Because it might achieve something. And the opposite won’t.”

“Melanie,” Rebecca said, “is filthy and foul.”

“Perhaps,” Ralph said. “Maybe. But how will she get any better unless people treat her kindly? And you must ask yourself, before you start, if any of it is her fault. Melanie has what we call a personality disorder.”

“Oh, come offit,” Robin said. “She can’t have. She hasn’t got a personality. She just sits there with her mouth half open, staring at her boots.”

“If that were true,” Ralph said, “there wouldn’t be a problem. But I’m afraid she’s not really like that. Come on, Robin, I don’t expect much of your sister, but you ought to have some sense at your age. Melanie has barely been under this roof for twenty-four hours, you can’t know anything about her. Don’t tease her and don’t provoke her, because she can be violent.”

“Oh, we won’t stand for violence,” Kit said. “Robin will bring her to the ground with a flying tackle.”

“You don’t understand,” Ralph said mildly. “The violence would be against herself.” He paused. “When she comes downstairs, look carefully at her arms, the inside of her arms. You’ll see she has old scars there.”

“She cut herself,” Anna said. “Did she use a razor blade? Or something else?”

“You noticed, did you?”

“Of course I noticed,” Anna said, annoyed. “Do you think I’m as heedless as the children?”

“I’m sorry,” Ralph said.

“So you should be. You went out and left me with her yesterday afternoon, and you warned me about things she might sniff or inhale but you didn’t warn me about knives and scissors. When I noticed her arms I had to slide away, and then run around the house hiding anything sharp.”

“You’re right,” Ralph said, “I should have warned you, but it was a long time ago she did the cutting, she seems to have other means now of relieving the stress. She was bullied at school, that’s where it started, and so she played truant and then she got in with a gang of older girls, and they took her shoplifting.”

“The usual story,” Robin said.

“True,” Ralph said. “But with one piquant variation. She was taken into care, and after three months she was allowed back home. Her parents had sold her record player and her records, and they’d given away the toys she’d had as a baby, and her clothes. Anything they couldn’t sell or give away they’d just put out with the rubbish. Maybe the social workers hadn’t done their job properly, or maybe the family hadn’t listened, maybe they didn’t take in what they were told, because it was quite obvious that they never expected to see her again.”

The children were quiet. “So what did she do?” Robin said in the end; his tone respectful now.

“There’s some waste ground near her family’s council flat—she found some of her clothes there. In a black dustbin bag, she told me. She went around for a bit trying to find out who they’d sold her things to, and knocking at their doors trying to persuade them to give them back, but naturally as they’d parted with cash they thought they had a good title, as the lawyers would say. After that I don’t know what happened, it’s a blank, she won’t tell anybody. She turned up in London about ten days later. She hadn’t a penny on her when they brought her to the hostel. She had the dustbin bag, though.” He sighed. “We bought her some clothes, but she wouldn’t wear them. She wanted the originals, I suppose. She went out at the back and had a bonfire.”

Kit had stopped eating. “It seems a terrible thing,” she said. “That a child could be worth so little to its parents.”

“What do you expect?” Anna pushed her plate away. “We live in a world where children are aborted every day.”

“Hush,” Ralph said. He did not want Rebecca to start asking questions. Or anybody to start asking questions, really. He had not seen Julian since their confrontation two nights ago. His son had gone back to the coast and not returned. He, Ralph, wanted so badly to see Amy Glasse that it was like a physical pain. He didn’t want to drive to the farmhouse and run into Julian again, but what could he do? I am going to have to speak, he thought, tell Anna— or break this off—break it off now, because it’s already too serious—how could it not be? All these years I have never looked at another woman, never thought of one, my life in that direction was closed, there was no other woman in my calculations.

If only Julian would come home, he thought. Then I should make some excuse, get into the car, drive.

He looked up. Melanie was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at them. “Come on, my dear,” Anna said. “There’s plenty of food left. Pull up a chair.”

Melanie recoiled: as if she had been asked to sit down with tribesmen, and dine on sheep’s eyes. For another minute she studied them, poised as if for flight; then her big boots pounded up the stairs again, and her bedroom door slammed.

Summer heat had built up. White sky and a smear of sun. No wind. Heaven and earth met imperceptibly in a straw-colored haze, and the outlines of trees were indistinct. Through this thick summer soup Julian and Sandra walked together by the footpaths, tacking inland. There was thunder in the air.

“You can come and live with us, if you want,” Sandra said. “My mum would be glad to have you. And then—though you’d have to see Ralph—you wouldn’t have to go home and face Anna.”

“My father,” Julian says, “actually believes that you don’t know what’s going on.”

“There he’s wrong. The first thing I noticed, he was always there when he thought I was away.” Sandra raised her hands, and tucked her red hair modestly behind her ears. “He doesn’t see me, so he thinks I don’t see him. But I do see him—because you know my habit of coming home across country.”

“Through hedges and ditches.”

“If need be.” Sandra stopped, and looked directly at him. “I

brought this on you, Jule. If I’d never come to your house, this would never have happened.”

“But you did,” Julian said. “You did come. So what’s the use of talking like that?”

“I don’t know. It’s no use. But it’s a point of interest, isn’t it? If you hadn’t come to North Walsham that day, when I’d gone out with the motor bikes. Or if it had rained before, five minutes before, you’d never have seen me. You’d have turned up your coat collar and gone striding off back to your car, and I’d have taken shelter in the church. And your dad would be at home with your mum, and everybody would have been happy.”

“No, not happy,” Julian said. “That’s not how I’d describe us.”

They were heading toward Burnham Market. But before they reached the village she said, “Come in this church.”

“Why? It’s not raining.”

“No, but there’s a thing in it I look at. I want to show you.”

An iron gate in a grassy bank, a round tower; their shadows went faintly before them over the shorn grass. Inside, an uneven floor, cream-colored stone; silence, except for the distant hum of some agricultural machine. Light streamed in through windows of clear glass. “The old windows blew out in the war,” Sandra said. “So my grandmother told me.”

“I didn’t know you had a grandmother.”

“I called her my grandmother. She lived at Docking.”

“But who was she really?”

Sandra shrugged. “My mother, she never talks about her life. I don’t know who my dad was, so I’m not likely to know much about my grandmother, am I?”

The chill of the floor struck through his thin rope-soled shoes. He looked around. A square, massive ancient font, of the kind he had been dipped in, he supposed; he found it easy not to examine it. But there was something here worth attention; he saw a wineglass pulpit, delicate and frail. “Is this it?” he asked Sandra.

He stood before the pulpit: I should not touch it, what if everyone touched, it would dissolve. He made himself an exception: his fingertip grazed the outlines of church fathers in their mitres and cardinals’ hats, their quills inscribing scrolls: deep green and crimson scratched and flaking away to show the wood beneath, so that the faces were half of paint flake, half of the wood’s grain. On the walls he could pick out the curve of a halo, a line of color faint as thought; he would not have seen it if Sandra had not traced it for him with her finger.

Then she touched his arm. “But look, Julian. Come here. This is what I want to show you.”

She led him away from the pulpit to the south aisle, turned him with his back to the altar. She pointed to the flags at their feet, and to one stone, gray-black, mottled, scarred: yet each letter perfectly incised and clear. “This one,” she said.

In Memory of Mrs. Theaophila

Thurlow, Daughter of the

Reverd Mr. Thos Thurlow

Rector of the Worthams in

Suffolk, descended of the

Thurlows of Burnham ulpe

She departed this life 18th of

Iune 1723 aged 24 yeares.

And Frances Hibgame her Niece,

Daughter of Tohn and Catherine

Hibgame of Burnham Norton, who

died 19th of Decemr 1736 aged

10 yeares, 5 months, 2 weekes and 1 day.

They stood for a moment without speaking. Then Sandra touched his arm. “They say that people in those days didn’t love their children, but it can’t be true, Julian, can it?”

“No.” He dropped his head. “Of course they must have loved her. Because they counted up every day.”

Again, silence. Sandra said. “Listen, this thing about Becky—

you must stop. It’s cruel, you see. It’s cruel to your mother and father.”

“Cruel to them?’

Unwanted knowledge lay inside her like a stone. “Just let it go,” she said. “Let her grow up, will you? You talk about them being unhappy, but can’t you see? What you’re doing, it’s like putting a knife in them.”

“Why? You mean, because I say they can’t look after her?”

“Yes, just for that reason.”

“I’m frightened for her,” Julian said. “Such evil things happen.”

“I know. I know you’re frightened. But let it go now, will you?

They walked away down the aisle to the back of the church, and again their shadows moved before them, merging and melting, their limbs like those of giant animals, their shapes outlandish; but soft, very soft, shades reflected, shadows seen through glass. The machine in the distance had cut its engine; the thunder in the air had killed the bird song, the insect hum. They touched hands as they came out of the porch—just the back of their hands brushing against each other. Sandra did not dare look into Julian’s face; he did not look at her. In the distance, imaginary no doubt, the undisturbed pulse of the sea.