A Change of Climate: A Novel

TEN

The child had been scraped up off the streets. She was drowsy and confused, her speech slurred, her eyes unfocused. Her mouth was bleeding. She hadn’t a penny to her name.

She remembered jabbing a fist out at some woman who leaned over her; it was a face she didn’t know, and that was enough to provoke her. Then the rocking motion of a vehicle, an interval of nothing: and a rush of light and air that hit her—like a drench of cold water—as they carried her from the ambulance into casualty. She bent her arm and laid it over her eyes, to protect herself from this brightness and cold; a nurse saw the scars on her inner arm. “What’s this?” she said. “Silly girl!”

That was how they talked to her. As if she were two years old and yet at the same time a piece of filth off the street, something they had got on their shoes. They shook her to try to keep her awake, to make her talk. They tried to keep her eyes open. This tortured her, and she didn’t know why they wanted to do it. She wanted just to slump on the hard hospital trolley, to melt into it: to give way, to give way to the covering darkness, to pull over her head the blanket of death. “What was it?” they shouted. “Tell us what you’ve taken. You silly girl! Nobody can help you if you don’t help yourself.”

Their voices were very loud and hard, the edges of their words shivered and blurred; but she could hear whispers too, nurses talking behind screens. “I never could have patience with suicides.”

Her head lolled. To buy some peace for herself she gave them the address—or an idea of the address—at first able only to describe a house set in fields, with many staircases and people, many huts and sheds and small buildings around it, so that they said, “Some kind of camp, could it be?” and for a while there was a respite. A policewoman in uniform appeared at the end of the bed. When she saw this she tried to climb out. “Your drip!” a nurse yelled, and another nurse and the policewoman dumped her back into the bed and held her there while they rearranged the stand and the tube they had put in her arm.

“Why don’t you let us help you?” the nurse said. “Just your name, my dear.” But there was no love in the words, no my dear about it.

“Where’s my clothes?” she said.

“Why? You don’t want them. You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

“That T-shirt’s not mine,” she said. “That pink top, it doesn’t belong to me. You had no right to take it.”

She meant to say that they had done wrong, double-wrong, taking from her what she didn’t even own.

But one thought disconnected itself, unplugged itself from the next, and her words slid out through bubbles of spittle that she felt at the corner of her mouth but was too weak to wipe away. One of the nurses mopped her mouth for her, with an abrupt efficient swipe: as if she were not aware that her lips were part of a living being. Suddenly, memory flooded her; this is what it is like to be a baby. You are a collection of parts, not a person, just a set of bones in flesh, your hands grasping and your mouth sucking and gaping; you are a collection of troubles, of piss and dribble and shit.

Her mouth stretched open for air. She was sick; she was sick and sick and sick. First on the blanket, which they dragged away from her legs, then in a metal bowl which she held herself, so hard that the rim dug into her fingers. The nurses stood by approving of this, of the awful corrosive fluid that poured out, the stained water and yellow bile.

For a time after that she lay back stiffly, her arms wrapped across her body. Perhaps she slept. Then the door opened, rousing her, and Mr. Eldred came in. He stood at the end of her bed without speaking, just looking at her. She looked at him back for a minute, then turned her head away. There was a crack in the plaster of the wall. She studied it. Eventually he spoke. “Oh, Melanie,” he said. “Whatever next?”

Sometimes she woke up and the man was there. Sometimes she slept. Sometimes she woke up and he was not there. She shouted to a nurse—her voice surprising her, issuing from her mouth like some flapping, broken-winged pigeon—and asked where he had gone, and a nurse said, “He has more than you to attend to, Miss.”

She raised her hand, the one without the drip, and scrubbed her wrist back and forth across her forehead. She looked down at her legs, lying like dead white sticks; her body was hot and clammy, so she kicked the covers off, and then, tight-lipped, they dragged them back again. “Look, I want to talk to you,” she shouted to a nurse, but as soon as she started to talk she began to cry, a wailing sort of crying she’d never done before, which hurt her throat and made her have to blow her nose, and made her breath stick in her throat as if it were something she’d swallowed, a bone. “Please,” the nurse said. “Do you think you’re the only patient we have to attend to? Have some consideration for others—please!”

The thing it was necessary to say was where she’d got the T-shirt from; that she’d taken it out of a basket in the bathroom, where somebody had said dirty clothes went, but that was all the same to her, all her clothes were neither clean nor dirty but just what she wore, and it seemed to her the ones in the basket were just that, clothes. When the policewoman came back, she tried to ex-plain it to her. “Not out of her bedroom,” she said. “I never went in there.”

The woman frowned. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know what you’re on about. What T-shirt is this, then?”

“Shoplifting,” a nurse breathed. “I’ll just bet you.”

“Look, just don’t go on about it,” the policewoman said. “All right? I’m sure it’ll just be forgotten about, if you don’t keep on.”

Behind the screens the nurse said, “As if that were all she had to concern herself about.”

“She had a bag of clothes,” the policewoman explained. “New ones. That’ll be it. Couple of hours before she collapsed somebody saw her selling them.”

“Well, where did she get them from, you wonder? And did nobody do anything about it?”

“You see all sorts of things on the streets,” the policewoman said. “The first thing you learn in this job is to expect no assistance from passersby.”

Time passed; she could not guess how much. The nights were bright and full of action, full of squeaking wheels in the corridors and the squeaking of shoes as nurses ran. Days were indistinguishable. She didn’t know the day of the week, not that she ever had. They put her in a side room, said, “I should say you’re privileged, Miss.” She heard diagnoses, part diagnoses of her condition. Can’t or won’t eat. Can’t or won’t remember. Their voices were hard and bright, like knives.

She heard nurses gossiping, talking about an abortion, one that had breathed. Her own breathing became painfully tight, as if she were trying not to draw attention to herself, trying not to take up space. In the hospital there were sluices and incinerators. She lay in the ward’s half day, half night, deciding when and how to run.

Ralph drove to Blakeney. Ginny let him in, twittering nervously and offering him a drink. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d like to talk to Anna alone, I suppose that’s all right with you?”

Ginny waved him toward her drawing room. The shock of the vast window: the gray day flooded in, its monochromes intermingled, the dun mud of the creek and the shiver of gulls’ wings.

Anna sat with her back to the light. She was wearing a gray dress, and he noticed it because it was not hers; it was too short, too narrow, and even as he came in she was pulling at its neckline, straining it away from her white throat. Seeing him, she let her hand settle on her thigh. “I hardly recognize you,” he said.

“We have that in common.” He understood that she had been crying. Her voice was coarsened, blurred, at her elbow was a glass of dissolving ice.

At first, she didn’t speak. The moment spun itself out. Her eyes rested on his face. Then she spoke all at once, in a rush.

“Ralph, I want you to know that I don’t want anything. The house, everything, you can have it. At first—last night—I didn’t think that. I thought, this woman, whatever backwoods berry-picking life she’s been leading, I don’t want her to improve her position at my expense. But now I realize—”

“Anna, you’re exhausted,” he said.

“Yes. But I think now, what’s the point, what’s the point of hanging on?”

“You give me up, Anna?”

“What choice have I?”

“Every choice.”

“Every choice? I don’t think you will indulge me while I consider them.”

“It’s not a matter of indulgence. You have every choice. Trust me.”

“You have no right to ask that, Ralph. Of all the things you could ask, you have least right to trust.”

He nodded. “I see that. I suppose I meant, trust me for the sake of the past, not the present.”

“I shall have to go back home for a little while. A few weeks. To work out where I am going to go after that, and what’s to happen about a school for Rebecca. So what I want—I want to make this agreement with you—”

“Anna, this is not what I meant.” Ralph was panic-stricken. “You can’t just—reinvent yourself like this, people don’t do it. I thought we should sit and talk—”

“Too much of that,” Anna said. “So much talk, but here we are.” Again her hand went to her throat, trying to pull the neckline of Ginny’s dress away from her skin. “I want to make this agreement. That you will come home and get your things and do it all at once. I mean that you should get yourself organized and move out. I don’t want sordid to-ing and fro-ing with suitcases.”

“So that’s the decision you have made?”

“That’s the first decision I have made.”

Ralph looked away. “I wish you would get back into your own clothes.”

“I didn’t bring any.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Ginny’s a friend.”

“Ginny is pernicious.”

“Oh—because she gave me a drink, and a dress to wear?”

“This is childish. A childish conversation.”

“True. And you, of course, are acting like a mature man.”

“You must not think,” Ralph said, “you must not think that this was some stupid fling.”

“Oh, wasn’t it? I see, I do see. Your emotions were engaged, were they? Your poor little emotions.” That first rush of energy had died out of Anna’s voice; it was low, toneless now. “Then let me congratulate you. You’ve found the love of your life, have you? Well, go to her then. Quick about it!”

“I don’t want to go. I want you to forgive me, if you can. That’s what I came here to ask you, but you didn’t give me a chance.”

She shook her head. “Ginny has been talking me through it, a woman’s options. A woman in middle life, whose husband flits off to something more juicy. But I don’t feel that I can consider these options, I feel that I’m not going to sit in the house, waiting and hoping. I have done it before, and I’m tired of it.”

Ralph sprung up from his chair. He wanted to cross the room to her, but he did not dare. “I’m not asking you to wait. Or hope. Or anything. Just talk to me, let’s talk it through. I wanted to explain my feelings—”

“Why should you think I might want them explained?”

“Because it is usual. In a marriage. To talk about feelings.”

“Oh yes. Perhaps. In a marriage.”

“Listen to me,” Ralph said. “There is nothing to be gained by bandying words and freezing me out. I wanted to tell you what had happened, I wanted to be truthful with you—and if you can’t forgive me now, which I well understand, I wanted to go away with the hope that you might forgive me—in time.”

“I’m no good at forgiving.” She looked down at her nails. “Don’t you know that? It doesn’t matter if the action is to be deferred. I can’t do it. The years pass and they don’t make a difference. I know, you see. Because I’ve been betrayed before.”

“It’s useless, then,” he said. “If you will insist on seeing this as some kind of continuation or extension of what happened to us twenty years ago.”

“All my life has been a continuation of it.” She raised her eyes. “I know you have put it behind you. You have been able to say, let us not hate, we are reasonable people. Even though what happened was not reasonable. Even though it was barbaric and foul.” She put her hand to her throat again. They had hanged Felicia.

“You were not the only person betrayed,” he said. “I was betrayed too.”

“Not so much. After all, you opened the door to them.”

“Yes. Is it the action of a human being, to throw that in my face now?”

“There is no limit to what human beings will do. We know that, don’t we? There is no depth to which human beings won’t sink. And I’ve never claimed to be more than human. Though you would have appreciated it, if I had been.”

He looked as if the breath had been knocked out of him. Sat down on one of Ginny’s fringed Dralon armchairs; on the edge. Wiped his hand across his face.

When evening came Anna and Ginny put on their coats and went to walk by the quay. The water was flat, motionless. The small boats were perched on it, like toys on a steel shelf.

“How are you now?” Anna asked her. “About Felix?”

“You mean him dying?”

She really is faintly stupid, Anna thought. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“Well, you get to a stage where you don’t think about it every day,” Ginny said. “At least, so I’m told. I haven’t reached it yet.”

Anna saw the bulk of the Blakeney Hotel, a ship of flint, bobbing at the quayside and showing its lights. She heard the evening complaints of cattle from the salt marshes, and the competing snicker of sheep. She said, “I don’t understand this thing about forgiveness, Ginny. You hear about these people in Ireland. Their husband’s been shot, or their children blown apart. And you have some woman propped up before the cameras, saying oh, I forgive the terrorists. Why forgive them? I don’t.”

“I thought you were religious,” Ginny said: her tone careful, distant.

“I’m barely a Christian. Never was.”

Somewhere in Ginny’s mind a door opened, just a crack; was there not some story, long ago, about a dead child?

“Why don’t we drop in to the hotel for a drink?” she said.

“A drink, for a change!” Anna said. “Yes, why not?”

They sat in the bar for half an hour, sipping gin among pseudomariners. Evening light on blazer buttons: early diners tripping in to their shellfish and game. “I could ask if they had a table,” Ginny said.

Anna shook her head. “It would be a waste. I couldn’t eat. And I hate to waste food.”

“I’ll make us an egg then, shall I? A nice scrambled egg, or would you prefer it boiled?”

“Whatever,” Anna said. Widow’s food, she thought; food for women alone, for their pale little appetites. Who cares if the flesh drops from their bones, if the light fades from their eyes?

Ginny said, “Be careful, Anna. You’re fifty.”

“Whatever do you mean, I’m fifty?”

“I mean you might lose everything, if you don’t put up a fight.”

Anna sat eating peanuts from a glass dish, looking out at the mud flats. “Tomorrow I must go back to the Red House,” she said. “Everything must be faced.”

Foulsham: “Both our parents have run away from home,” Rebecca said. “I’ll have to come and live with you, Emma.”

“Your mother telephoned, my dear. She’ll be back in the morning. She wants you not to worry, she says she knows you’re a grown-up sensible girl—and soon everything will be explained.” Somehow, Emma added under her breath.

“Till then Kit has to be a mother to me. And Robin has to be my father.”

“That’s a very nice way to think of it,” Emma said admiringly. “But it’s really only for one night, you know. And you can stay with me if you like.”

“People who run away never go for long, do they?” Rebecca’s face was bright, avid, sharp with fear. “That girl who was here, Melanie. She used to run away all the time, Dad said. But people caught her. The police.”

She is too young for her age, Emma thought; they’ve kept her that way, her brothers and her capable sister, even with all the Visitors they get, even with all that’s happened under that roof, each summer’s tribulations: “It’s not the same when people are grown-up,” she said. “You see, they have to make their own decisions about where to live. And sometimes it happens …” Emma shut her eyes tight. What must I tell her? She felt weary. Perhaps it is premature to say anything, she thought, perhaps in some way the row will blow over. She remembered Anna’s voice on the telephone: obdurate, balanced on the steely edge of tears. They’ve been married for twenty-five years, Emma thought; can it fall apart in a night?

But what do I know about marriage?

Rebecca said, “When Dad comes home I’m going to ask him if we can have a donkey to live in the garden. He’ll say no, certainly not, but I’ll keep following him round saying “Donkey, donkey, donkey,” till he gets tired and says yes all right then if you must.”

“Is that how you usually get your way?”

“You have to ask,” Rebecca said. “Don’t ask and you don’t get. Did you know Julian came home?”

“No. Did he? When?”

“He came like a highwayman at dead of night. Two nights ago, or three, I don’t remember. He came climbing up—there’s a way the boys get in, you know, like burglars?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Oh, they’ve always done it. Kit says it’s to show off and they could just as well come in by the door.”

“So didn’t your mum and dad see Julian?”

“No. He stayed in Kit’s room. Robin came down. They had a very serious talk.”

“Where were you?”

“I was sitting on the stairs with my ears flapping.”

“And what did you hear?”

“I don’t know.” She jerked her head away, and began to cry. “I couldn’t understand,” she said. “I had a dream, that I was on my own in the house.”

Emma said, “It wasn’t a dream, was it, Becky? You mean that’s what you’re afraid of”

“Yes. Because what if they all go, what if everybody runs away? Jule’s gone already. And Kit said she was going to go to Africa.”

Emma drew the child against her. “Becky, put your arms around me. Take hold of me very tight. I’m here, aren’t I? Don’t I feel solid to you? Do I feel as if I’ll run away? No one will leave you in the house alone.”

There was no more she could say. She was incoherent with love for the child and anger at Ralph and dismay at what had overtaken them. At the beginning of summer, she thought, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined such a thing; but then that’s perhaps the problem, my dreams have never been wild enough. I don’t understand what drives people, who does? I don’t understand the process by which our lives have unraveled. Why this year, and not other years? Because they are growing up, I suppose, and there had to be a turning point; Ralph met this woman, spoke to her no doubt of certain things, and after that everything must change. When a secret has been kept for twenty years, reality has been built around it, in a special way: it is a carapace, it is a safe house. When the walls have been pulled down and the secret has been let out, even to one person, then it’s no good trying to rebuild the walls to the same plan—they are walls to hold in nothing. Life must change, it will, it has to.

She wondered about going to the coast to see this woman, Mrs. Glasse. Pleading with her in some way. She would be laughed at, of course.

“We ought to be spared this scene,” Amy Glasse said.

“Yes.” Usual kinds of words came tumbling out of Ralph’s mouth, lines that she could swear she had heard on the television. For the sake of the children I really feel … Ah yes, comedy half hour, she thought.

She said, “You look weary, my dear.”

“Yes. I seem to be on the road all the time, driving about between one place and another.” He had spent the best part of a night—by far the best part—sitting at Melanie’s bedside, while she dipped in and out of the conversations that were held around her, picking and mixing as she liked. Nobody had filled in the missing hours, and so they would keep her in hospital till they were sure there was no delayed liver damage from anything she might have taken. What was most likely, given the limited means at her disposal, was that she had been inhaling some type of volatile solvent, enough to make her almost comatose when they fetched her in; but he was aware of her history, the range and type and peculiar dosages of the various means she had used to effect escape, and his greatest concern was that her broken and incoherent conversation, her apparent thought-disorder, should be seen as a possible consequence of drug abuse and not madness. He had witnessed this before, a heavy amphetamine user become agitated, hear voices, hallucinate—and then a cell, and then a prison doctor, and then the liquid cosh: and then the inquest.

Slowly he dragged his mind back, from that sorry afternoon in court to this date and place. “For one thing,” he said, “I feel I would have nothing to offer you. I would probably lose my job, you see. I would have to offer my resignation to the Trust’s committee. They would be obliged to accept it.”

“Hypocrites then, aren’t they?” she said.

“People aren’t enlightened, you know, you think they move with the times but they don’t. I suppose it’s that they’re always looking for a stick to beat you with … there’s the press, if it got into the papers … you see it’s all complicated by the fact that Sandra is my son’s girlfriend and they would twist the whole story around—believe me, I know about the newspapers—into something that resembled incest.”

“Sandra is your son’s mistress,” she said. “Let’s get it right.”

“Yes, I know that. I can’t afford to damage the Trust, because if there is a scandal it affects our fund-raising, and then if we have less money it means we must disappoint people and turn them away.”

“Are you married to Anna, or the Trust?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Amy.”

He did know what she meant, of course, but he was buying time, thinking time; surely, he thought, no one could accuse me of being one of those who love mankind in general but not persons in particular? Perhaps I incline in that direction, no doubt I do, but I try to correct my fault: I love Amy, who is easy to love, and I love my children and Sandra Glasse, and I love Anna, who is another proposition and a tougher one. What person could be harder to love than Melanie, and even there I try; I have made a study of love, a science. He thought, I cannot let them admit the child to a mental hospital, because Melanie is clearly, reluctantly, spitefully sane; stupid perhaps, self-destructive, but in possession of her faculties when she is not under the influence of some dubious tablets bought on the street, or cleaning fluid, or lighter fuel. If she is diagnosed as schizophrenic, or labeled as psychopathic, that will be the end of her, in effect, they may as well bury her now. But I can’t take her out of hospital, I can’t take her back to the Red House now Anna isn’t there, and if I offer to take her back to London and dump her on Richard and the staff she’ll run away again in hours, we can’t keep her under lock and key, we have no authority to do it.

He looked up. There was a smell of baking from the kitchen; the need of income was constant, and no crisis would make Amy alter her schedule. She said, “I think that if you leave me, Ralph, you must give me a proper reason.” Her voice shook. She put her hands to the back of her neck, raked her fingers upwards through her long hair, then let it fall. “You came this spring, and I was lonely. I’ve been on my own for many years now. Since Andrew Glasse walked out of this house when Sandra was two years old, I’ve never let a man over this threshold, if I could help it. You came here; and you were kind, you were very kind to me, Ralph.”

He nodded. “I see I had no right to be. Not in that way.”

“So you must give me a reason now. Don’t give me some stupid reason about how it will be in the News of the World. Tell me you love your wife. Tell me a reason that makes sense. Tell me you love your wife and children and you have to protect them.”

“Anna says she will never forgive me. She wants me to move out of the house.”

“That’s natural for her to say.”

“But she says that as soon as it can be arranged she is moving out herself. I can go back then, she says. The children—I don’t know.”

I will lose them anyway, he thought. It’s not a matter of who lives where, or what custody is sought and granted; I will lose them. I have taught them to discriminate, to know what is right and wrong and choose what is right. They will value the lesson now, and not the teacher. Because what I have done is so patently, so manifestly, so obviously, wrong. And not just wrong, but stupid. “You ask me do I love Anna,” he said. “It’s not the right question. It goes beyond that. You see, when we met, we were children. We made an alliance against the world. Then what held us together—”

“Yes. You don’t have to tell that story, ever again.” Her face was composed, he thought; pale, alight with pity. “One telling is enough for a lifetime. Don’t imagine I’ll forget it.” She stood behind his chair. “Ralph, listen to me. Look at any life—from the inside, I mean, from the point of view of the person who’s living it. What is it but defeats? It’s just knock-backs, one after the other, isn’t it? Everybody remembers the things they did wrong. But what about the thousands and thousands and thousands of things they did right? You lost a child. And every day you think about it. But think of the children you didn’t lose.”

“Nobody has ever said that to me before.”

She moved away and stood before the fireplace, putting her hands flat on the mantelpiece, at either side of the stupid ticking clock. “Just tell me. When you said you loved me, was that a lie?” The careful blankness of her profile seemed to show that she was prepared for any answer.

“No,” he said. “No, it wasn’t.”

She let out her breath. “It’s a brute of a world, Ralph. A brute, isn’t it?” She moved toward him. Her eyes had never been so pale and clear. “Take your coat, my dear. It’s time you left.”

“Sandra and Julian—where are they, do you know?”

She smiled. “Last time I saw them they were sitting in a hedge like ragamuffins, eating blackberries.”

“They must come home. To you, or to us.”

“Sandra’s got the key of a flat in Wells. It’s one of the places she cleans. The landlord will let them have it cheap, till next season.”

“I don’t see how they can afford it. Even cheap.”

“I suppose the Lord will provide.” She smiled tightly. For a moment she reminded him of Anna. “But of course, he won’t. I’ll see they get through the winter.”

She turned away, presenting her shoulder to him. Before she turned, he read the coming winter in her face. As he was leaving she called, “Ralph! Are you sure you don’t want that old clock?”

“Nowhere to put it,” he said. I am houseless, he thought; I should have carried my house on my back. “Be seeing you, Amy.”

Another night of rain; and then, fine windy weather. On the roads there were great standing pools, shattered by sunlight. The sun struck every spark of color from the landscape, revivifying the trees with green, dazing the driver of the early bus; even dead wood, even fence poles, quivered with their own green life.

At ten o’clock, Anna returned to the Red House. She put her key in the door: thought, could there ever be a time when I will not do this?

She remembered how she had tried to sell the place, only a couple of years ago. It was a house with no center, she had always felt, no room from which you could command other rooms. Sound traveled in its own way; from one of the attics, you could hear the downstairs telephone quite distinctly, but from nearer rooms it couldn’t be heard at all. The house had its own conduits, sight lines. Sometimes one of the children’s friends had stayed overnight, without her knowing. She didn’t make a practice of searching the rooms, scouring the cupboards and landings for fugitives or stowaways; the house would have its private life, whether she agreed or not. In the morning a parent would telephone, furious or distraught. She would say, “Your child is here to be collected. I make no charge for bed and breakfast.” And then, oblivious to the babble on the line, she would put down the phone. She had not lived her life in a way that attracted sympathy. She had made sure of that.

Already—in the course of her small absence—the house had acquired an air of neglect. The vast hallstand had a vast cobweb on it, and just off-center sat a small brown spider, its legs folded modestly. Dirty plates and cups were piled in the sink. The boiler was out. “Kit, couldn’t you manage?” she said, exasperated.

“Is that all that’s on your mind? Housework?”

Rebecca was tearful. Robin baffled. Julian absent. Kit hostile. Kit had heard—through Daniel, no doubt—that Ralph had been to Blakeney and had tried to patch things up. She propped a hand against the kitchen wall; her eyes were snapping and fiery. “What can a person do?” she asked. “Except say they were wrong, and try to put it right?”

Anna gazed at her. “You know nothing, Kit.”

“I’m not claiming worldly experience. It’s a general principle I’m talking about.”

Ralph and his daughter, she thought: their terrible moral energy, their relish for the large statement. She had been preoccupied all her life with the particular, the minute; the neat stitching of a seam, the correctness of a turn of phrase. She had thought that life was governed in that way: by details. She had learned as a child, she thought, that details were what you offered God; you couldn’t hope, in any larger way, to please Him.

“Oh, Kit.” She sat down on a kitchen chair. “Will you make me something? Some coffee, with hot milk in it?”

The light of combat died in Kit’s eyes. Docile, solid, efficient, her daughter moved: table to fridge, fridge to the Rayburn. “Why should you forgive?” Anna said.

Without looking at her, Kit said, “Because if you don’t, it will kill you.”

Anna nodded. She knew such a thing was possible. Already she was becoming lighter, skeletal; her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground. She had not been able to eat the little egg, the widow’s meal. This morning there was a dizzying lightness at her center, a space under her heart.

“I have always thought,” she said, “that before there is forgiveness there must be restitution.”

Kit took the pan from the heat. She poured the milk carefully into the cup. “So what do you want him to do?”

“It’s not just him. You see, Kit, I’ve never forgiven anybody. I’ve had no practice. I don’t know how to do it.”

She put her hand to her mouth, as if the secret might spill out. (Are you sick? Kit said. No, no, she said.) All summer she had felt the drag of it, dragging itself toward the light. But perhaps there are no words for it; it can express itself only through symbols, through shadows. And life has always been like this: something more than it appears. In safety, there is danger. In tears, the awful slicing comic edge. In moments of kindness and laughter, the murderer’s fist at the door.

And year after year, Anna thought, I have occupied this room. I have sat at this table making shopping lists and writing letters, reading my daily paper, some faculty below consciousness alert for signs of disintegration: the sighing of the pipes and dripping of gutters, the malfunctioning squeak of ancient domestic machines, the boiler’s cough and the squeak of old floorboards. Coal dust and mouse droppings and vegetable peelings, gas bills and school reports, bitter wrong, and bitter duty correctly performed. Year after year I have sat in the house, windows sealed against the cold, waiting for someone. Who will not come home: who will never come home now.

Ralph went back to the Red House to collect his belongings. He would stay with Emma, he supposed. Anna said she did not want the house, but of course when she had thought about it she would want it, and it would be his responsibility to support her and the children. When he thought of the possible consequences of their separation—of rent for him and rates for her, of the severing of bank accounts and the relative poverty in which they would both live—his mind sheered off and went in some other direction, toward the contemplation of his moral insufficiency. That was easier for him; he was used to abstractions. Perhaps most people are, he thought. We indulge in guilt, shame—but faced with the practical effects of these emotions, we call in a solicitor. No wonder lawyers are never out of work.

He went up to their bedroom and packed some clothes. Anna had said she did not want sordid to-ing and fro-ing—that was the expression she had used—but of course it is impossible to crush a life into two suitcases. He tried, and then gave up, and sat on the edge of their bed, his face in his hands.

He hoped Anna would come in. She would not, of course. What would she see? Nothing to lift her spirits. You wreck your family once … years pass … you wreck it twice. He had evolved very nicely, he thought: along the only possible route.

Perhaps I should leave my clothes, and take my papers, I will need to clear out my desk … He was conscious of Anna, moving elsewhere in the house. Wherever he was, she wasn’t; they skirted and avoided each other.

In his office, he sat down in his wooden swivel chair. He looked at his photograph, the picture taken on the stoep at Flower Street. He folded the frame, laid it face down. That would be the last thing Anna would want; he should never have taken it out, it had only made the children ask questions. Sightless, his mother and father stared down at him: sepia eyes. How his father’s face had coarsened, with age; the flesh swelling, the features seeming to shrink. Would he be like that? It was possible, of course, that when the picture was taken his father was no older than he was now. And surely, he thought, I’m going his way: two inches on the waist, the reading glasses, those shirts that are too small around the collar, and get put to the back of the wardrobe. I am in no shape for a new life, he thought. But, anyway. It seems I have to have one.

Will Anna just watch me go, he wondered. Or is she waiting for me to make some gesture, some sign—but how would I know what it was? She had said she meant him to go, and he must allow her to mean what she said, he must allow her that.

Everything’s gone, he thought: just pride remains.

But how terrible, perhaps the worst thing in the world: to be taken at your word.

His hand crept into the first drawer of his desk. Closed around stone: Gryphaea. He held it to his cheek, and then against his mouth. A child’s life; the salt and cold. He tasted it: Phylum: Mol-lusca. Class: Pelecypoda. Order: Pterioda. Such confidence, he’d felt as a child, about the order of the world. Family: Gryphaeidae. Genus: Gryphaea. Species: arcuata. The past doesn’t change, of course: it lies behind you, petrified, immutable. What changes it is the way you see it. Perception is everything. It turns villains into heroes and victims into collaborators. He held the object up between his fingers: took a sighting, and spun it across the room into the wastepaper basket.

Anna was in the kitchen: I will do something useful, she thought. She ran the hot tap, and rinsed the crumbs out of a dishcloth. She wrung it between her hands, flapped it out, shook it and straightened it and set it to dry, carefully squaring up the corners as it hung over the drain board.

Well … that was marginally useful, was it not? She remembered the night Ralph had left her: washing her cup and washing her cup. A phrase from an old letter came back to her, a letter James had written: “There is always some emergency, God-given or otherwise.” How very odd memory is: and not an ally, on the whole. She could not see how this phrase had any application to her circumstances.

In the other room, Ralph was no doubt going about his preparations.

She walked around the kitchen table, touching the back of the chairs. She had consulted their solicitor; she had better tell Ralph about this, she supposed, as a family solicitor cannot act for both parties when those parties are not to be a family any longer.

She sat down at the table, because she felt ill.

Will he go? Surely he will not? But what will stop him?

She felt she had set him a test, an examination; but he was not aware of it, and so he could not hope to pass.

Ralph picked up his bags. He went out into the hall. “Anna? I’m going now.”

After a moment she appeared. She wrapped her cardigan tight across her chest. He saw the gesture: elderly, a means of defense. “So,” she said.

“You can phone me at Emma’s.”

“Yes, of course.”

“If you want me.”

“I should tell you, Ralph, that I’ve been up to Norwich, to see Mr. Phillips. He agrees that there are grounds, advises I stay in the house, but I told him I don’t want to do that. You will have to find another solicitor—I’m sorry about that, but of course Mr. Phillips can’t act for us both. What I mean to do is to find a flat in Norwich for myself and Becky. Then you can come back here. Kit and Julian and Robin, they won’t mind. They’ll stay here with you, I suppose. The kind of mothering I’ve given them … they’ll probably barely miss it.”

He looked at her for a moment, considering; put down his cases. She thought, he has put down his cases, surely he will not go now? He said, “You are indulging yourself, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes, of course. Self-indulgence is my habit.”

“I mean, you are indulging a notion of failure …”

“Failure? How could I be a failure?” She smiled brightly. “I mean, haven’t I kept the twin-tub in trim? Haven’t I managed the boiler, all these years? And the hallstand—oh, yes, I’ve come to grips with the hallstand. Say anything, but never say the Red House has beaten me.”

He clenched his hand inside his pocket, frozen around the space where he had thought Gryphaea would be. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and picked up his cases.

She opened the front door for him, helpfully. Unbalanced by the bags, he stepped back to kiss her cheek. He saw that she was crying. “You don’t want this to happen,” he said.

“At least acknowledge that I know my own mind.”

The door of the Red House was an old and heavy door. When it was opened the cold morning came in: a big breezy presence, filling the hall. He hesitated on the threshold, scuffing a foot, dragging the time out.

Anna touched his arm. “Ralph …”

He looked away, unwilling to influence by any expression on his face the expression on hers. He glanced up, out into the garden—if garden it could be called: over the mud and the lawn churned up by bikes and neighbors’ dogs that the children played with, over the pond where they’d had fish once and over the rusty swing with its sodden ropes, and over Julian’s vegetable plots, and the wilderness of the dog runs and the outbuildings beyond. Something moved— dog-height—from one of the rotting sheds. Anna said, “What’s that? What on earth is it?”

A creature moved into their view, at a distance. It came slowly over the rough ground, crawling. It was a human being: its face a mask of despair, its body half clothed in a flapping gown, its hands and knees and feet bleeding; its strange head the color of the sun. It progressed toward them; they saw the heaving ribs, the small transparent features, the dirt-ingrained skin.

“I must put these cases down somewhere,” Ralph said. All he could think for the moment was that they were dragging his arms out of their sockets; he did not know whether to put them inside or outside the house. He wondered which of them would move first, he or Anna, toward this jetsam, this salvage; but wondered it idly, without that spirit of competition in goodness that had animated his life. Whichever, it didn’t matter … he put his baggage down, nowhere in particular, wedged across the threshold. “We must take her in,” he said to Anna. “Or she will die.”

“Yes,” Anna’s face was open, astonished. They left the Red House together, stumbling over the rough grass. As they approached the child, she stopped trying to crawl. She shrank into herself, her head sunk between her shoulder blades like some dying animal. But then, as they reached out toward her, Melanie began to breathe—painfully, slowly, deeply, sucking in the air—as if breathing were something she were learning, as if she had taken a class in it, and been taught how to get it right.

In November that year, Emma went back to Walsingham. It was seasonably cold, the light struggling against an obdurate bank of cloud. In the street she saw the pug dog and his woman; these months on, both were a little grayer, stouter, their feet and pads stepping gingerly on the cobbles.

As she walked up the flagged path of the Anglican church, Emma tried to edit her usual perception—that she was entering an extravagantly designed council house. A poor thing, but our own, she thought: noting the brick arches and brick columns, the stoup for holy water. Holy water, that’s going too far—and in fact there was no need for her to go any further, no need to go inside at all.

ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE SHRINE. She stood in the porch, turning the pages of the great book. Back, right back to—when? What date? When had Felix died? Her eyes ran over the columns. The pages were damp, they stuck together and revealed only a clump of months at a time, a huge aggregation of prayers. Patience was required; she started to scuff up the corners, looking for dates, for clues. But yes, here it is at last: her own handwriting.

RALPH ELDRED

ANNA ELDRED

KATHERINE ELDRED

Then the missing line; then

JULIAN EDRED

ROBERT ELDRED

REBECCA ELDRED

Why did I think God would recognize our real names, our formal and never-used names, instead of the names we are called by? There: that’s a puzzle. She reached into her bag for her pen. Her pen was a present from Felix. It was a serious and expensive object, made of gold.

Damn; not there. Her fingers probed, scraped the worn silk lining. Perhaps a child had borrowed it. She plunged her hand into her coat pocket, and brought out a furred and leaking ballpoint, its plastic barrel cracked, its ink silted. She shook it, and tried a preliminary zigzag in a corner of the page. She shook the pen again, tapped it. If you could scribble the book over, make additions … But it did not seem decent to her to spoil the pages. Pray for Felix, she said to herself. Pray for Ginny. Pray for me.

She began to write. Her pen moved over the vacant line. The ballpoint marked the paper, but nothing appeared: only white marks. She shook it once, slammed it on the wooden desk. At last, like a slow cut, the ink began to bleed. Laboriously—the pen faltering, blotting—she filled in the missing line:

MATTHEW ELDRED

So that’s done, she thought. She ran her finger down the page. Prayers answered; after a fashion. She hesitated, her hand in the air, then placed the defective pen beside the book. You could not know what desperate soul would come along, with no means of writing at all.

She stepped out of the porch. The air held snow. Often it promises, but doesn’t perform; we’re not very far from the sea. She put her hands into the pockets of her coat, and began to walk uphill to the car park. The cloud had thinned, and as she walked the sun showed itself, fuzzy and whitish-yellow, like a lamp behind a veil.