A Change of Climate: A Novel

FIVE

Anna heard Ralph talking on the telephone. “… I do grasp,” he was saying, “that you raised £132 from the harvest supper and gave the same amount to the Mission to Seamen, but I’m afraid you will confuse the auditor if you don’t show them in separate columns. Leave aside for the moment the question of the rector’s expenses …”

Anna swore mildly under her breath as she sidestepped through the bales of newspapers stacked up in the hall. When Ralph came out of his office she said, “There are more papers here than when I went out. People are delivering these bundles at all hours of the day and night.”

“Not quite,” Ralph said, frowning.

“Couldn’t you ask them to call between set hours?”

“It might put people off. I’m relying on their goodwill. Why don’t you get the boys to carry them up to the attics?”

“What’s the point? They’ll only have to come down again. And when you try to move them the bundles fall apart and the damn things are all over the place.”

“It’s true,” Ralph said. “People don’t seem to know how to tie up bundles.”

“Perhaps it’s a lost art,” Anna said, “like broadcast sowing. Can’t they go in the bike shed?”

“No, nor in any other shed. They might get damp.”

Anna sighed. The newspapers benefited the parish church’s restoration fund in some way: clearly only if they were dry, not if they were damp.

“I have to go out,” Ralph said.

“But Kit will be here soon. I was hoping—”

“It’s the new committee. For the homeless in Norwich.”

“I hardly knew there were homeless in Norwich,” Anna said. “There seem to be enough council estates.” Ralph vanished back into his office. Anna was left with her bad mood. “Perhaps,” she muttered, “some of them could come and live in our hallstand.”

Ralph had almost finished his letters for the day. He had been interrupted by several telephone calls from elderly people within a ten-mile radius, all of them complaining about their Meals-on-Wheels; he had nothing to do with this service, but found it hard to convince them of that. Mobile libraries, too, had been much on his mind. He had received a request for the Trust to support a Good News Van, which planned to jolt around the countryside taking the latest Christian paperbacks to the housebound. “We have known people who have not read a book in years,” the letter told him, “but whose lives have been transformed by thrilling new stories of what God is doing all over the world.” Ralph gave the letter a file number, and scribbled on it, “I suggest we turn this one down. The housebound have enough to put up with.” He dropped it in the box for the next meeting of the Trust committee.

The Trust was not rich anymore, and it was necessary to be selective; need seemed always to increase. He had his procedures: he tried to avoid subsidizing anything too doctrinaire, or anything involving volunteers playing the guitar. Initiatives for the young attracted his interest, but he rejected applications from any group with “Kids” in the title.

The hostel in the East End had changed its character now. Some time in the sixties it had stopped being St. Walstan’s and become Crucible House. In those far-off days when Ralph had reported each weekend to count the laundry out and returned midweek to count it back in, the task had been shoveling old men up off the street and drying them out and sending them on their way a week or two later with a new overcoat and a hot breakfast inside them. Or finding a bed for an old lag who was between prison sentences; or a quiet corner for somebody who’d gone berserk and smashed all the crockery in the Salvation Army canteen. But nowadays the clients were young. They were runaways, some of them, who had fetched up at a railway terminus with a few pounds in their pockets, played in the amusement arcades till their money ran out, and then slept on the streets. Some of them had been “in care”—you would think that was a complete misnomer, Ralph would say, if you could see the state of them.

These young people, boys and girls, had something in common, a certain look about them: hard to define but, after a little experience, easy to spot. They were often unhealthily fat: puffed up with cheap carbohydrates, with the salt from bags of crisps. When they were spoken to they answered slowly, if at all; they focused their eyes at some point in the middle distance, beyond their questioner’s shoulder. Large bottles of prescription drugs clanked in their pitiful luggage, which was often made up of Tesco bags—though Ralph always wondered where they got the means to go to Tesco.

The volunteers who staffed the hostel had changed too. The present director, Richard, was an intense young man with a higher degree. Before his time, in the days when the last of the old men used to shuffle in and out, the volunteers had been clean-cut young men in crewneck sweaters, and girls with good accents, who had a way of talking to the clients as if they were recalcitrant beagles or pointers. But now it was hard to tell the workers and the clients apart. They had a lost air, these modern volunteers: children filling in a year before university, lured by the promise of pocket money and full board in a room of their own in London. They wore clothes from charity shops. They read no books. They seldom spoke, except to each other.

Ralph invited them to Norfolk sometimes, for a week’s country air. He would bring the clients too, packing them carefully into his car with their Tesco bags and driving them through Essex and Suffolk toward a warm family home—though because of the state of the central heating, “warm” was only a figure of speech. Anna, he believed, liked to see new faces. The children were used to what they called Visitors. But nowadays they would look at the arrivals, and affect a greater bewilderment than they felt: “Is she a Sad Case, or a Good Soul?”

There were nights when Ralph sat up till dawn, talking on the telephone to some suicidal adolescent in London; there were nights when he would jump into the car and roar off—this too being a qualified term, considering the state of the Citroen—to deal with some catastrophe that Richard’s jargon was not equal to. Ralph had a plainer way of doing things than Richard could imagine. He was calm and patient, he expected the best from people, he never gave up on them. They recognized this; and often, from plain weariness in the face of his implacable optimism, they would decide to live, and to behave better.

Sometimes, rude questioners would ask him why the Trust didn’t move its entire operation to London, since the need was such a crying need. Then Ralph would talk about the glum, silent forms of rural deprivation: the bored teenagers kicking their heels at a bus stop waiting for a bus that never came; the pensioners in isolated cottages by overgrown railway lines, without telephone and heat and mains drainage. He would talk so long and hard about branch-line closures that his questioner would wish he had never opened his mouth.

The fact was—he was the first to admit it—Ralph and the dwindling resources he could command were wanted in too many places. He was torn, divided. The demands of the world dragged on his conscience; but did he do enough for his own family? Sometimes he felt a strange physical force—little hands pulling at him, invisible hands plucking at his clothes.

So, today—he had just one more letter to do: Church of England Children’s Society. Then Norwich for the committee—and then he would race back for dinner, because Kit was coming home, and Anna was cooking a big meal, and Julian would be bringing his girl over from her farm near the sea.

He applied stamps to his letters. Yawned. But, he told himself, don’t despise these little things; they add up. A tiny series of actions, of small duties well performed, eventually does some good in the world.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Midafternoon, Emma collected her niece Kit from the station in Norwich. Kit ran across the forecourt with her bag; an Easter breeze lifted her hair, fanned it out around her head. Jumping into the car, she shook it like a lion shaking his mane. She kissed her aunt, squeezed her shoulders. Her eyes were leonine: wide, golden and vigilant. How handsome she’s become, Emma thought: a heartbreaker. She remembered Ralph in his National Service days, coming home on leave. Ralph had been too remote to break hearts.

“You can have tea with me,” Emma said. “Then I’ll take you home. Oh, don’t worry, I’ve bought a shop cake. I haven’t launched myself on anything ambitious.”

Emma lived in a neat, double-fronted, red-brick cottage, which stood on the High Street in Foulsham. Foulsham is not a town, by the standards of the rest of England: it has a few small shops, a post office, a church, a Baptist Chapel, and a number of public houses. It has a war memorial and a parish magazine, a village hall, a Playing Fields Committee, a Women’s Institute, and a mobile wet-fish van. A hundred yards from Emma’s house was the school Kit attended when she was five; fifty yards away was the shop where she used to buy sweets after school on her way to her aunt’s house.

In those days Emma seldom held an afternoon surgery; she put in the hours at other times, evenings and weekends when her partners wanted to get away. At four o’clock she had been there to open her front door to the children, to bring them in, listen to the news of their day and give them lemonade and a plain bun and then drive them home. Often Mr. Palmer the Estate Agent was leaving just as Kit arrived. He was, she knew, a very great friend of Aunt Emma’s; she suspected him of getting there before them, to eat buns with icing, have treats that children were denied. Sometimes Mr. Palmer was exceptionally happy. He would throw her up in the air, toss her—giggling, hair flying—to the ceiling, and then give her a two-shilling piece. She’d got quite rich, out of Mr. Palmer. Her small brother Robin, when he started school, complained he didn’t get the same money. Mr. Palmer would ruffle his hair and give him sixpence. Well, she said to Robin: you don’t know, perhaps he’s fallen into poverty. People do. It’s in books.

Now fifteen years had passed, and she put makeup on and went out to eat oysters with Mr. Palmer’s son.

Emma, though not fifty, now described herself as “semiretired.” You’d want to steal away, she said to Ralph, after a lifetime of pallid pregnant wives, and screaming mites with measles spots, and old men wheezing in: “Missus, the old chest—I’m bronical.” She filled in for holidays and weekends off, kept up with the medical literature, and took the occasional family-planning session. This last had always been her interest. She would turn up at outlying cottages, and talk in blunt terms. They would call her in to attend to shingles or lumbago, and she would leave them with some rubber device. Robin had once introduced her to a schoolfriend as “My aunt Emma, who has done so much to depopulate East Anglia.” She was in demand these days for talks in schools and colleges throughout the county. Heads liked her because she talked straight, but did not embarrass their young people. After all, she was old. They did not have to think of her doing it.

Emma’s house was warm and tidy. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. Kit threw herself at a chair. What a lot of energy she had—but then, just as suddenly, it would seem to drain out of her.

“I went to Walsingham,” Emma said. “To pray about Felix. Wasn’t that odd of me?”

“Did you go to the wells?”

“No, just to the shrine.”

“There’s one well, you know, the round one—I used to know a girl who believed that if you drank the water you’d have a secret wish come true within a year and a day.”

“A secret wish?” Emma said. “Secret from the rest of the world, or secret from yourself, I wonder.”

Kit smiled. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? It’s like—didn’t somebody say there’s no such thing as unanswered prayers? All prayers are answered, but not in the way that you notice.”

Emma filled the teapot and brought in plates. She had managed to mash the shop cake, somehow, in getting it out of its packet. She had always described herself as a freethinker in matters of nutrition. Her house guests were fed at uncertain intervals, at unorthodox hours and on strange combinations of food.

I wonder, Kit thought now, how much of that was because of Felix; because she never knew when he’d turn up, and perhaps sometimes she’d cook him a meal and he’d say, no, I’m expected home, and then hours later she’d heat it up for herself …

“Cake that bad?” Emma inquired.

“The cake? No, it’s fine.” Kit cultivated a hedge of yellow crumbs at the side of her plate. “Emma, can I ask you something? Tell me to mind my own business if you like. Only I try, you know, to fit the past together these days. I was thinking about you and Felix. I wondered if you ever talked about him leaving Ginny, and moving in with you.”

“Oh, there was a lot of talk. There always is in these affairs.” Emma ran her hand back through her hair. “I knew him before, you know, before he took up with Ginny. We used to hang around together, when we were sixteen, seventeen, and then when I was away doing my training he’d come to London to see me. I suppose I had my chance then. But I told him to push off. He used to get on my nerves. His waistcoats, mainly. Yellow waistcoats. So it was my own fault, wasn’t it?”

“But later he didn’t get on your nerves, did he?”

“No, I learned to put up with him. He persisted. But Felix had children, remember.”

“Perhaps he shouldn’t have done.”

“Oh, Ginny was never one to avail herself of my devices. The babies were born before we got together again. Or at least, before we got together again in any way that seemed likely to last. Yes, of course, we should have married in the first place, I see that now … but it was done, it was done. He wouldn’t have wanted to leave Daniel and the little girl.”

“You could have had his children. I would have liked it if you’d had children, Emma. There’d have been more of us.”

“But then perhaps there wouldn’t have been any Daniel.”

“Well, I don’t know … I think I would trade Daniel for cousins. They wouldn’t have been like cousins, they’d have been like brothers and sisters.”

“You mustn’t be greedy, Kit,” Emma said. “The truth is, Felix wouldn’t have left Ginny, even if there’d been no children. Ginny’s not the sort of woman that men leave. And what we had was enough, Felix and me. And what you have is enough.”

“I suppose so,” Kit said.

A ray of grace shone through Emma, from some long-ago Sunday-school afternoon. She said it again, gently: “You mustn’t be greedy, Kit.”

Emma had tried to stop Ralph’s children calling her “Aunt.” What you are called you become, she said; she did not want to become something out of P. G. Wodehouse. She had tried to make their lives easier for them, but it was not easy being Ralph’s children.

His standards were high, but different from other people’s. When they were small the children had played with their friends from the row of council houses that straggled up the lane beyond the church, a quarter of a mile from the Red House. Ralph’s children had better manners, Emma thought; but the council-house children were better dressed.

It was lucky that the young Eldreds had schoolmates in similar plights, or they would have thought themselves hard done-by. Kit, for instance, had a friend whose father wouldn’t let a television set in the house. Robin knew a boy whose mother knitted his trousers to her own design. Norfolk breeds such people; huddling indoors out of the wind, they give birth to strange notions.

Emma had been a refuge for the children once; they still liked to be at her house, even if she could not assemble a sandwich without the filling dropping out. She thoroughly understood her practical value to them. She provided money for heart’s desires—for vital clothes and sudden causes, and treats that Ralph disdained. Poor Ralph, she thought. He made them all have music lessons, but they were neither musical nor grateful. Robin had said last year, “Dad’s supposed to be good with young people, but it’s other young people he’s good with. Not us.”

Emma and Kit finished their tea, drove the three miles to the Red House. As they pulled up, Kit said, “Is Dad still on Julian’s back—about doing a year for the Trust?”

“I think he’s given up on it. Julian wouldn’t do in London, would he? He’d be back within days.” Emma leaned across to kiss her niece. “I’m not coming in. The partners are going to the King’s Arms tonight, we’re going to paint the town red.”

“Have a good time.” Kit put her head in at the car window. “Maybe I’ll do it, instead. Do a year … it wouldn’t hurt. Or would it?”

Emma was surprised. “I thought you were doing postgrad? I thought it was all fixed?”

Kit shook her head. Her face was placid, almost sad. “Nothing’s fixed. I had this idea—I wrote home to Dad—I said I didn’t want to be in London … but I suppose I could face it, if it were for the Trust, if I could be any use there.” She looked away. “I don’t know what to think, though. I’ve lost my … no, I don’t know what I’ve lost.”

Your virginity? Emma wondered. The thought must have shown on her face. “It’s not Daniel,” Kit said. “I wouldn’t stay around here for Daniel. Though if I needed an excuse, I suppose he could be one.”

Emma drove away. The door of the house was thrown open and Julian came out, pretending to peer into the bushes, and calling “Come in for your dinner, kitty kitty kitty.”

Rebecca, behind him, said, “Kate of Kate Hall.”

Her brother looked well, Kit thought at once, he looked happy. He straightened up to his impressive height, put his arms around her and hugged her. Behind him was his red-haired girlfriend, Sandra Glasse.

Kit found Daniel Palmer in the kitchen with the rest of the family. All of them were watching carefully, to assess how pleased she was to see him.

“Hello,” Kit said. “I didn’t expect you, where’s your car?”

“I put it under cover.” Daniel did not know his status with Kit; did not know her mood; wondered what the family thought his status was. “Welcome home,” he said. He picked up a strand of Kit’s hair and touched the end of it to his lips.

“He’s got a new car, you see,” Julian said. “He’s afraid rain will fall on it.”

“It’s my Morgan,” Daniel said. Amazed delight showed on his face. Kit retrieved her hair and tucked it back, among those strands romance had not distinguished. “Handbuilt,” Daniel said. “I’ve been waiting four years for it.”

“Goodness,” Kit said. She wondered how desire could last so long.

Ralph said, “I’d be afraid to drive it, I think.”

Becky said, “It pretends to be old, but it’s not.”

“Where’s Robin?”

Ralph said, “He’s playing in it.”

Daniel displayed the car’s keys, holding them as if diamonds trickled from his fingers. “Don’t worry. He won’t get far.”

Sandra Glasse had not spoken at all. She did not seem to know what the others were talking about. She had just arrived, Kit saw: she had a paper bag in her hand, which she cradled against her old jersey. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” she said, “I’ve brought you some hen’s eggs.”

Daniel, who had not met Sandra before, looked around at her with a quizzical smile. It seemed to him she must have dropped in from another world.

They had decided to eat in the kitchen as usual, because the evenings were cold and the central heating was playing up again. Earlier Ralph had met Anna dragging into the boiler room with a scuttle of coal. “Anna,” he had said, “with two sons in the house, I don’t expect to see you—”

“This effort is voluntary,” Anna said. “I’m doing it to warm myself up.”

By the time they had fought a bout with the boiler, they were both warm. “The poor desperate thing,” Ralph said. “I suppose it would be a mercy to knock it out and send it wherever boilers go to die. Still, I can’t see us changing over to oil. Not this year. Besides, with oil, it’s so political, the prices shoot up, they hold you to ransom.”

“Daniel explained to me once,” Anna said, “that when the price of one sort of fuel goes up, the price of all the others goes up soon after.”

“But the installation …” Ralph said. “Honestly, the bills just at the moment … the telephone bill alone.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “Yet when anyone comes by and says “Can I use your phone?” you say, “Of course, go ahead,” and when they offer to pay for the call you say, “No, I won’t hear of it.” You remember that volunteer—Abigail, was it?—the one who said could she phone her boyfriend? And it turned out he’d gone to be a jackaroo for a year?”

“An extreme case. Anyway, it stopped her fretting.”

“People should have less expensive emotions,” Anna said.

“They should have them when it’s cheap rate.” Then she said, “By the way—while we’ve got a private moment—what do you think of Daniel these days?”

He was all right really, was Ralph’s opinion. He had always felt comfortable with Felix’s son. Daniel wore the same clothes as he did—corduroy trousers, old tweed jackets, Fair Isle and lambswool from September through to May. Only recently had he become aware that Daniel’s clothes were not, like his, organic developments. Daniel went to London to get them at vast expense, it seemed. They looked old because they were made that way. Ralph wore his clothes because they were what was in the wardrobe. Daniel wore them for another reason—to become someone. To become a country gentleman, Robin said; it was a pose.

Robin knew these things. Still, he was enthusiastic about the two-seater, the Morgan, could hardly be dragged inside to eat. Later Ralph went out too, to pass a hand over its gleaming body and murmur its praises. Daniel was like a child at Christmas, beside himself with glee; it would have been churlish not to admire. But he felt uneasy about the car and what it might mean. Modern mechanics purred beneath its hood; as Rebecca said, it purported to be what it was not.

All the same, he thought, if Daniel was Kit’s choice, you wouldn’t find him raising objections. Daniel would look after her. There was nothing fake about his bank balance, and the architects of the county were coming men. He could afford the car and he could afford Kit. He would design them a house, no doubt, and built it on a prime site, and Kit would have a cleaning lady and hot water whenever she wanted it, and …

An awful spasm of grief took hold of Ralph; he stood in the outhouse with Daniel and Robin, an old mac around his shoulders, rain and blue evening air gusting in at the door, and felt grief take him by the windpipe, grief shake him like a mugger. He turned away; no one must see his face.

This happened sometimes. More, lately. And trying to separate himself from the emotion, to pull away from it, he wondered: why is this? He went back into the house. In the kitchen, Sandra was washing up; Becky was drying; Anna was decanting the leftovers into boxes for the fridge. A usual kind of family: 1980, and all’s well.

It was a year now since Julian had met Sandra Glasse.

It was a Sunday in April; Julian could not mistake the date, because the Scouts in North Walsham had been holding their St. George’s Day parade. And what was he doing in North Walsham? He had wanted to get out of the house. There were some particularly nasty Visitors, Sad Cases. Robin had the excuse of some sporting fixture or other; he always had a means of escape.

His mother, who was sensitive about the Visitors, had seen Julian’s plight. “Would you go to North Walsham for me? I have a bundle of clothes for the church jumble sale, which includes some things of your father’s that I particularly wish to see the back of. If you could just drop them in at this address I’ll give you—leave them in the garage if they’re out—then you could have the car for the afternoon. How would that be?”

Nothing doing in North Walsham; nothing doing, in a little market town on a Sunday afternoon. Only the Scouts marching down the street with their band, and a gang of bike boys jeering at them. He parked the car, delivered the bundle to a house near the church, walked up the empty street in fitful sunshine. He stopped to stare for no good reason into the window of Boots the Chemist. There was a razzmatazz of vitamin supplements and glucose tablets, and a come-and-get-’em pyramid of Kodak films, and an alluring display of hot-water bottles, for pessimists who might be buying them in for the summer ahead.

The bike boys had gathered around the Market Cross, their machines at rest, and they in their leather jackets pushing and shoving about its venerable dome. Julian always liked to see the Market Cross, but he shied away from approaching them. He was not afraid—or he did not want to think so; but like the Scouts he would have been an incitement to them. He was tidily dressed, like a good schoolboy at weekend, in a loose cream cotton shirt and well-ironed denims—no one could stop his mother pressing clothes. His hair was the color called dishwater blond; still, it was too blond, and conspicuously shiny and clean. He knew his own features: his unformed face, his large unclouded blue eyes. He knew what they represented—provoking innocence. It did not seem to matter that he was physically stronger than most people. Strength’s not much good without permission to use it.

The boys leaning on the columns of the Market Cross had leather jackets with studs and hair shaved off to stubble. The girls with them had long metal earrings and aggrieved faces. They sprawled against the machines or pawed at the boys’jackets, keeping up a braying cackling conversation of sorts. One girl hitched up her thin skirt and threw a leg over one of the bikes; she slithered across the saddle and rode it in seesaw movements, in a mimicry of copulation.

Another girl stood slightly apart from the group. She was with them, but didn’t seem to belong to them at all. She had a shaggy head of thick, dark red hair; he could hardly see her face or shape, and it was the oddity of her that made him give her a second look. She wore a black-and-white tweed jacket that was several sizes too big; it was well-worn, and the kind of thing that a settled Norfolk matron of fifty might call “my old gardening coat.” No pretence at fashion in it, or even anti-fashion. She had lace-up school shoes: also not a rebel’s possessions. Someone spoke to her, and she shook her red head violently, and started across the road, cantering off, like an animal, in the direction of the church.

Julian turned and put the car keys in his pocket. He crossed the road too, followed her into the church grounds. She stood beneath the broken, collapsed tower, whose craggy top overbore the streets, the Market Cross, the bike boys. Seeing him, she seemed to shake herself inside the vast stiff jacket, and trotted further off, to the far side of the churchyard. There she sat down on a bench (put there by the Old Folks’ Welfare Committee) and waited for him to catch her up.

At first he hardly dared sit down beside her, in case she took fright and hurtled off again. Her animal quality seemed pronounced, and he wished he had something to offer, a sugar lump or even a piece of bread, to show that he meant well. As if reading his mind, she reached into the jacket and took out an apple, then a second. She offered one to him, holding it out at arm’s length, without a smile.

“Do you always carry your supplies with you?” he asked.

She said, “Yes, certainly.”

He tossed his head back toward the marketplace. “Do you know that lot?”

“Not really.”

“I thought you were with them.”

“I picked up with them this morning. I’d nothing else to do. I went to Cromer with them. Nobody had any money. We came on here. They fetched me.”

He took the apple and sat down on the bench beside her. She wiped the fruit on the sleeve of her jacket and bit into it. She chewed gloomily, reflectively, eyes on gravestones and the church’s ancient walls.

“Are you going back with them?”

“No.” She was angry. “They’re senseless.”

“Where do you live?”

“In the Burnhams. You know it round there?”

“You’re a fair way from home.”

“You can get a fair way when you go on the motor bikes, that’s one thing about them. Still, I don’t care for it. I ought to be getting back.” She threw her apple core on the ground, but didn’t move, just huddled into her jacket. It began to drizzle. “I’ll take shelter in the church,” she said.

Later, it seemed to him that Sandra knew all the county’s churches, great and small. She treated them as other people treated bus shelters and waiting rooms. He had to stride to keep up with her, as she bolted for the porch. “If you’re not going to eat your apple,” she said, “I’ll have it back, I might need it later.”

He said, “I could take you home.”

“Have you got a car?”

“Yes.”

“You’re young to have a car.”

“It’s my mother’s car. I don’t mind taking you. You’ll never get back any other way, and this rain’s setting in.”

“All right,” she said. They stood in the church porch for a minute and watched the rain fall. “Sanctuary,” she said, unexpectedly.

“Do you know about this church?” Julian looked sideways at her, into her face. Such pale eyes. “When they were building it, it was the Peasants’ Revolt. There was a battle near here. It was the last battle, I think. Some of the rebels came in here begging sanctuary, but the church wasn’t finished, so it didn’t count. The Bishop of Norwich came after them and killed them all.”

The girl blinked at him. “I never heard that,” she said.

He loathed himself, spouting semifacts. Why had he done it? He laughed and said, “Didn’t they tell you about it at school?” He loathed himself more. What had made him go on about the Peasants’ Revolt, for God’s sake? She unnerved him, that was it. She had not told him her name. Her sandy-gilt lashes drooped onto her cheek.

“I don’t recall anything about it,” she said. But then, very kindly, “I’m always glad to know anything about old places, so if you’ve anything to tell me you needn’t be afraid I won’t like it.”

It seemed she expected a long acquaintance. The rain slackened a little. Julian took her jacket by its bulky sleeve and hurried her to the car. The bike boys had scattered. She was his responsibility.

A fine drizzle hit the windscreen. The sea, on their right as they drove, was obliterated by a rising mist. The Sheringham caravan sites loomed out of it, and the wind plucked at the blossom on the cherry trees in the bungalow gardens. The trees looked as if they had been left outside by mistake, or transported from some softer country.

Between Cley and Weybourne, the heathland melted invisibly into the marshes. Bird-watchers, hung about like pedlars with the tools of their trade, strode toward the invisible sea. There were sheep in the fields; among their ambling forms they saw the necks of resting swans, as hard and clear as marble, startlingly white in the thick air. By the roadside, signs—crudely chalked blackboards, or painted boards—advertised FRESH SEA BAIT, SHRIMPS, COCKLES, FRESH CRABS, DRESSED CRABS, KIPPERS. The tourist season was beginning.

They drove in what seemed to be a companionable silence. At Blakeney—the salt marshes a nebulous blend of earth, sea, air— Sandra turned in her seat. “I’m sorry if I was angry back there. I’m not usually angry.”

What Julian saw, from the tail of his eye, was a face set on placid lines; a face with a translucent pallor, and those pale eyes. She seemed strong, composed; she held her white hands on her lap, the one reposing confidingly in the other.

“What did the bikers say to you, to make you run offlike that?”

Sandra thought, then said, “They criticized my garment.”

After a moment, they both yelled with laughter, the noise filling the shabby body of Anna’s car. A gust of wind, blowing inland, peppered the rain against the glass.

“Well, I admit “…” Julian said. “Why do you wear it?”

“We got it donated,” Sandra said. “I can’t afford clothes like they’ve got. It’s funny, I always think—when you’ve got a bit of money you can afford cheap clothes, you can throw them away when they fall apart. But if you’re poor your clothes go on for ever. You get given things the Queen would be proud to wear.”

“Who was it gave it you?”

“Some church. My mum has her contacts. She used to clean for a churchwarden’s wife. So we get remembered when it’s jumble sales.” She paused. “It’s just our size she forgets.”

They began to laugh again. The windscreen wipers swished; ahead of them, toward Wells, the horizon had the pearl sheen of brighter weather. “I dare say it’ll outlast me, this old jacket,” Sandra said. “I once ran through a hedge in it, and it didn’t flinch.”

By the time they reached Holkham, the mist was clearing. Flashes of light struck from the dwarves’ windows of flint cottages, little houses tumbling toward the coast; flint sparkled like gemstones in the wall of a round-towered church. “Turn off here,” Sandra said, directing him toward the sea. They turned between high hedgerows, leaving behind a wide view of windmills and the red roofs of distant barns. The road narrowed. “I live down this track,” Sandra said. “Do you want to come in? You could have a cup of tea.”

The car bumped down an incline. “My mother calls this ’one of the foremost hills in Norfolk,’ “ Sandra said. “Okay—stop here.”

They came to a halt in front of a huddle of low buildings, the doors facing inward, out of the wind. There was a pear tree on a sheltered wall, geese on a pond, a vegetable plot screened off by an amateur windbreak. There were some rotting henhouses, an old cartwheel leaning on a fence, and by the front door a wheelbarrow filled with something shrouded in polythene. They got out of the car. A woman came to the door. “That’s my mother,” Sandra said.

Mrs. Glasse seemed taller than Sandra, not very old. She wore patched jeans and two shapeless pullovers, the one underneath longer than the one on top. She had red hair too, longer than her daughter’s, scooped up with pins. Julian saw that bits of it straggled down her back as she turned to lead the way inside. For the first time, he wondered how his own mother managed to keep her hair fixed in its dark cloudy shapes, arrested in its whirls and coils. There must be an art to it.

Mrs. Glasse had been working outside. Her muddy gumboots stood by the door. There was a wide lobby, full of swirling air—peg rugs on the floor, an accumulation of dark furniture.

“You’re not one of the bike boys,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Come through, I’ve got the kettle on.”

He followed her to the kitchen. It was a big room, light, square, tiled underfoot. Two hard chairs stood by an old-fashioned range, in front of which some clothes were drying. There was a smell of burning wood and wet wool. Mrs. Glasse hoisted the clothes away, and dragged up a third chair, manipulating it with an agile foot in a fisherman’s sock. “Where d’you find him, Sandra?”

Expecting no answer, she gave him a mug of tea, the sugar already stirred into it. Julian could not think of anything to say. Mrs. Glasse did not make small talk, or ask again where her daughter had been. He sat facing the back of the house, watching the light fade. Through an arched doorway, down steps, he caught a glimpse of a small dairy, with its deep stone shelves and recessed windows. Feeling the draft, Mrs. Glasse leaped up and closed the door. He snapped his gaze away. He had wanted to step into the dairy, and run a hand over the icy, ecclesiastical curves of the walls.

As he left the house and drove away, he noticed a glasshouse, its panes shattered; a gate, off its hinges. He felt like stopping the car, going back, offering his services. But then he thought, you can’t ask people to rely on you, if you’re going away at the end of the summer. Between now and October I couldn’t make much of an impression on that place. It would only break my heart.

After this, Julian did not see Sandra for some weeks. But in June, driving back from a friend’s house in Hunstanton on a bright windy day, he saw by the roadside two women selling vegetables from a trestle table. He knew them at once, with their white faces and long flapping scarves. He pulled over and climbed out of the car. “Hello there, Julian,” Mrs. Glasse said. She had a bag of money slung about her waist, like a market trader. Sandra pulled her woolen hat further over her brows, and smiled shyly at him.

“We’ll have strawberries shortly,” Mrs. Glasse said. “That fetches ’em.”

“Is there a lot of trade?”

“Passing trade,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Golfers on their way home, full of golf courses this place is.” The wind ripped the words out of her mouth. “In high season we get the self-caterings. I do vegetables, peeled and quartered, slice the carrots, whatever, put them in polythene bags, if they don’t sell we have to eat them. I do samphire, not that the self-caterings know what that is. We make bread when we’ve got the oven going, when we’re in the mood. I’m learning from a book to make bread into patterns. I can do plaited loaves, wheatsheafs, prehistoric monsters, frogs, and armadillos. The armadillos get a lot of admiration—but all you do is make a monster, and squash it, and bake the top in points.”

“It must be hard work,” Julian said.

“Labor-intensive,” Sandra said. “Of me.”

“We get bird-watchers, I make them sandwiches. We get that lot going to Brancaster and Burnham Thorpe, studying the haunts of Lord Nelson.”

“Early haunts,” Sandra said. “Birthplace.”

“We do goats’ milk, duck eggs. Sandra pushes it all up in the wheelbarrow. This table’s a bugger, though. We have to carry it up between us.”

“Up the foremost hill,” Sandra said. “We tried putting it on the barrow but it barged our legs.”

“Couldn’t you leave it up here?” Julian said. He looked around. “By the wall?”

“Self-caterings steal it,” Mrs. Glasse said. She clapped her hands together, to warm them, hopped from foot to foot. “Summer coming on,” she observed.

“I’m sure I could fix up something,” Julian said. “I could drive a post in behind that wall, nobody would see it, I could chain the table to it. Wrap a chain around the legs and get a padlock.”

“We never thought of that, did we?” Sandra said to her mother. “Well, we did actually, but we’re busy, we didn’t get round to it yet. It’d have to be weather-proofed, though. We couldn’t have our table rotting.”

“Perhaps Julian could build it a house,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Seems cruel to leave it out in the open air, chained up like something dangerous.”

The two women exchanged a glance. They laughed; comfortably enough. Julian felt almost comforted.

The following day, Julian went back to the Glasses’ farm. The women were very busy; Mrs. Glasse sitting by the stove, knitting in an effortful fury, and Sandra, after she had let him in, returning to her task of stuffing dozens of sisal doormats into black plastic bin-liners.

“For the market at Hunstanton,” Mrs. Glasse said. “We’re going tomorrow, we have a stall. Doormats do well, because people live amid such a quantity of mud. And basketwork of all types.”

“Where do you get the doormats?” Julian asked.

“I buy them cheap from a fool.”

“Baskets we make ourselves,” Sandra said. “She taught me. We do it in the winter when the weather keeps us in.”

“How do you get to Hunstanton?”

Mrs. Glasse rolled her eyes. “He do ask questions,” she said.

“Do you like her verb?” Sandra asked. “She does it for the tourists.”

“I only thought, with all your stuff—”

“We have a vehicle,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Of sorts. We try not to take it out more than once a week because of the summonses.”

“She got done for no tax,” Sandra said.

“We have to hide the bloody thing,” Mrs. Glasse said. “The police come down from time to time, sniffing, seeing what they can do us for. We used to have a dog, Billy, they didn’t care for him, weren’t so keen then. But he died.”

“You should get another dog,” Julian said, “if that’s what keeps you safe. I’m sure I could get you a dog.”

“No,” Mrs. Glasse said. He was sitting facing her, and he saw that her large light eyes filled with tears. She was pretty, he thought, might have been pretty, must have been. As if angry with herself, she gave the weighty knitting a push and watched it slither off her lap. “Billy wanted meat,” she said. “I used to feel sorry for him, you can’t expect a dog to get by on carrot and turnip.” She stood up. “That’s enough doormats,” she said. “We’ll bag up the baskets later on, we’ll just have a sit now and a cup of tea.”

Julian said, “I’ll come with you when you do the market. Do you have to take the table? I’ll help you load and unload.”

“You needn’t,” Sandra said. “We’ve always managed.”

“I can do anything you want,” Julian said. “I can patch up the roof if you’ve got a ladder, you’ve got some tiles off. I can do carpentry. I could put you on some new wallpaper if you want. I could lift your potatoes for you.”

Mrs. Glasse said, “Sit down, boy. There’s no need to do anything.”

Julian sat down and drank his tea. He could never remember a time when he had been commanded to do nothing—when it had been enjoined on him.

That summer, it seemed to Ralph, Sandra became a fixture in his house. She was to be found in the kitchen, occupying the rocking chair, her hands folded together, her legs tucked beneath the chair, her ankles crossed. He liked to talk to her if he found her sitting there. She had her wits about her, he told Anna, despite her quaint way of talking; she had a native clarity of mind which the educative process had not succeeded in clouding. School had been an interruption to Sandras life. She had left as soon as she could. “I didn’t see the point of it,” she told Ralph. “It was such a long way, it took hours getting there. It used to be dark by the time I got home.”

Sandra never turned up empty-handed. She brought perhaps a modest present of a lettuce, or some fresh bread; once, when they had not baked, a can of peaches from their store cupboard.

Anna was touched, then exasperated. “Sandra,” she said, “you don’t have to bring us presents. You’re welcome to come here and eat every day and stay as long as you like, nobody who comes here has ever had to pay for their keep.” No one else has ever offered, she thought.

Sometimes Sandra brought a cake; but they baked cakes only as a last resort, when they had nothing else to take to market. They only had to get their fingers amid the eggy stretch and cascading currants, to start cursing and swearing; they were fair set, Sandra said, to slap each other with their wooden spoons. Mrs. Glasse’s cakes had something sad and flat about them, a melancholy Fenlands quality. Sandra’s cakes rose, but in a violent, volcanic way: then cracked on top. How two cakes containing opposite faults could come out of an oven at the same (albeit unreliable) temperature was, Sandra said, one of the mysteries of East Anglia.

But despite their appearance, the cakes sold well enough. People like to buy the fruits of other people’s labor; they like to put the small coin into the very hand that has toiled. Julian thought that it was not the wares that drew the customers, but the women’s full, gray, mesmeric eyes.

That summer he spent market days at Hunstanton, behind the Glasses’ stall; flapping canvas divided him from neighboring stalls, from the shiny acrylic clothing, the check workshirts, the nylon leopard-skin car-seat covers and rubber mats, the cheap lace tablecloths, the bright plastic kitchen gadgets, the inflatable toys for the beach. He felt himself grow an inch taller, his hair tousled, his face sunburned, a canvas bag of change thrown across his body in ammunition-belt style. As summer ended the sea turned to the color of mud, and soon came the wind that cut through the clothes, cut to the bone, propelling the shoppers inland toward the teashops and the amusement arcades.

Ralph said to him: “Look, I know you’re old enough to make up your own mind, but don’t get too involved, will you? Remember you’re off to university in October. You’ve worked hard for it, I don’t want you to be upset by anything, to have any, you know, regrets, or things pulling you back.”

Julian went over to the Glasses’ farm most days. He oversaw the vegetable plots, sawed logs, and mended fences. He thought about reglazing the greenhouse, but did not get around to it before it was autumn, and he had to go away.

Ralph worried. Possibly Anna worried, too; but he did not ask her to talk about it. He remembered Julian as a little boy at his first school, unable to tie his shoelaces or learn his times tables or do up his tie. Tears had been shed, about the tie. Julian did not mind that his mum or dad put it on for him, every morning; but there would be PE lessons, and he would have to take it off. Then he would not be able to put it back, he sobbed. And this was the problem: he would have to scramble it into some knot of his own devising, he could not manage the knot that society required; he would have to stretch and mangle it and treat it like a piece of string. Then, he wailed each morning, they would all know he was a spastic.

“You’re not a spastic,” Ralph said. “Is that what they say? It’s very naughty of them to call you that.” Ralph felt, when he placed the length of cloth around his child’s neck each day, that he was snaring him in a noose.

Then one tear-stained Wednesday afternoon, Kit had taken the situation in hand. She had re-formed the tangled mess which Julian had created, into its approved shape; then simply loosened it, eased it from beneath his collar, and lifted it over his head still knotted. She hung it on the end of his bed. “There,” she had said. “Now, in the morning, you see, just put it over your head.”

“Oh yes.” Julian’s face lit up. “Then all I have to do is—”

“Just pull the knot up,” Kit said. “Here you go.” She fastened his fingers around the short end of the tie. “Gentle, now—not too tight. That’s it. Lovely. Just you wait and see. They’ll all be copying you soon.”

Years later, Julian remembered Kit’s good idea with a pathetic gratitude. Even now when he was grown up, he said, no one had ever taught him anything so useful. Ralph wished he had thought of it.

He had not known how to help Julian; ordinary patience did not seem to be enough. He was slow to learn to read, slow to tell the time; when he tried to learn to write he seemed to be using a foreign alphabet. Even when he had mastered the letter shapes his progress was slow. He was always stopping to rub out what he had written and start again. His collection of erasers was something he prized. Robin sneaked to his mother that he had names for each one: Mouse and Cat and Mother Bear. Julian fell asleep over his reading books, exhausted by the effort of trying to comprehend them.

They took him for an eye test but his sight was perfect. Anna thought of him as a baby: his eyes always on their way from his mother’s face to somewhere else.

Julian had a long memory, longer than seemed possible. One day when he was six he said, where did the cat go, Emma?

“I haven’t got a cat,” Emma said.

“But you had, you had Freddie.”

He described the ancient tabby, vast and slow like a sofa on the move, its lop ear, its tail without a tip. Emma was astonished. Freddie had died long ago, before Julian could walk or talk. It was a prodigious feat of memory, truly extraordinary: Emma reported it to Anna and Ralph. Anna said, “He must have heard him described. I’m sure we’ve often talked about Freddie.”

Kit was listening. “Julian does have lots of memories,” she said. “And so do I. We can remember from before we were born.”

“Don’t be silly,” Anna said. “You know better. No one can do that.”

They plucked Julian out of the village school, saying that they had got him a place in a prep, weathering the skepticism of the headmistress. They kept him at home for a term, feeling guilty about it, and tried to teach him themselves. Mostly he played with bricks, building houses then knocking them down. But he started to look at books, just for the pictures. His fright diminished. Imperceptibly, very slowly and cautiously, he began to read.

The problems were not over; at least, his new teachers did not think so. Hard not to nag such a child, at home and at school. Julian was unpunctual, dreamy, sweetly polite but deeply uncaring. His conversation was intelligent but elliptical. He was seldom on time for anything; he did not seem to see the point of punctuality. Even when he reached his teens, he never wore a watch. “He’s a natural animal,” Kit said. “He goes by the sun.”

Julian was wary of surfaces, it seemed. When he drew a house he began with its contents. Pots and pans came first, objects in cupboards. Then beds and chairs; only then, walls and doors and windows. When he drew a tree he drew not just the trunk and leaves and branches but the roots, running deep under the soil, beyond the range of normal vision.

By the time he reached his teens Julian had adapted to the world, learned to fit in. Sporadically attentive, he passed just enough exams, with just the grades he needed; and passed them doggedly, until the prospect of university loomed—if that was what he wanted. Ralph tried to interest him in geology, thinking that the strenuous, outdoor aspect of it might appeal. But Julian associated the subject with the wrapped, labeled specimens which Ralph still kept in boxes in the attics. He seemed to have a peculiar horror of them: their broken traces, their dead-and-gone lives. Then Rebecca began to have her nightmares about the fossils. “You might get rid of them, give them to a museum,” Anna suggested. “You never look at them.”

True, he thought. I never do. He went up there one weekend, spent a bit of time unwrapping them, labeling them in his mind. There was the Devil’s toenail, fresh and horrible and impressive as ever, lying cold in his palm and smelling of the sea. Phylum: Mol-lusca. Class: Pelecypoda. Order: Pterioda. Family: Gryphacidae. Genus: Gryphaea. Species: arcuata. Old Nick’s remnant … he knew people, or his father had known people, who maintained that all fossils were planted in the rocks by Satan, to tempt scholars into scientific hypotheses, which led them from the knowledge of God. He put arcuata into his pocket and, downstairs, transferred it to the drawer of his desk. Why not keep it to hand? It was his trophy, taken in the battle for reason.

As soon as he arrived at his university, Julian wrote a long letter to Sandra Glasse. He received a picture postcard two weeks later, showing countryside views, clouds and church towers. He wrote again, asking her to visit him. She didn’t answer. He thought that probably she did not have the money for a train ticket; but if he sent the money, would she answer even then? Perhaps his letters were not arriving: perhaps the postman couldn’t be bothered to turn down the track.

He wrote to his father: would he consider driving over to. the farm to see if everything was all right? His father wrote back in surprise, to say that of course everything was all right; Sandra had been over a couple of times, turned up unexpectedly, hitched lifts, coast road to Fakenham, Fakenham to Bawdeswell, then walked to the house. He didn’t like her hitching lifts, in fact he was very upset, but she wouldn’t be told. Julian should write to her on that topic. He shouldn’t expect much by way of reply, she said she wasn’t used to writing letters.

Just before Christmas Julian wrote another letter, to his head of department. Then he packed his bags and took the train to Norwich; then hitched lifts and, changing his suitcase from hand to hand, walked the last few miles from the main road to the Red House. There he had stayed, ever since.

When he was not at the market, or working on the Glasses’ small-holding, he was underneath his new car; his old car that is, the one Emma had given him the money to buy. He coaxed it along; it got him to the coast and back. His new skills were undeniably useful; Anna’s car was now a barely coherent assemblage of rattles and squeaks, and the Citroen caused oily boys at garages to titter and roll their eyes and cast their rags to the ground.

Then there was the Glasses’ Morris Traveller to be rescued from its decrepitude and illegality. He told Ralph about the tax and insurance problem; Ralph immediately handed over some cash that had been earmarked for a new vacuum cleaner and some school clothes for Rebecca. Julian promised to mend the old Hoover; it had value as a technological curiosity, Ralph said, in a year or two they might be able to take it to London and flog it to the Science Museum. Rebecca did not really need new clothes—she would, on the whole, fit into her old ones. With school uniform, it is often heartening if you look a little different from the other girls.

Julian gave the money to Mrs. Glasse. No question of paying it back, he said, it wasn’t like that. “I just don’t want to think about you being pulled up,” he said, “or about the police coming round when I’m not here.”

“They’ll still come if they want,” Mrs. Glasse said. “You’d be surprised how many offenses there are, that a person can commit just without thinking about it. You know, I don’t want to take your money. But I can see that you want to give it.”

Even now they were legal, she would only take the car out on market days, she said. There was the problem of money for petrol. “You can’t knit petrol,” she said. “And they won’t let you barter for it.”

He did not tell Sandra about his sister’s school uniform, or about the row his parents had when the story came out. Privately, he agreed with his father; it was Anna’s fault, it was the fault of her habit of saving bits of money in pots and jars around the house, like some old granny in a cottage. It was too tempting for other people, when they had a prior need.

He did not tell Sandra because he knew she would think the row was ridiculous. She thought his family was rich; she said so.

“Oh, come on,” Julian said. “There’s four of us and none of us has earned anything yet. My mum’s a teacher but she had an illness and she hasn’t been able to work for years. My dad works for a charity, he doesn’t draw a big stipend, he just draws enough to keep us solvent.”

“There you are,” Sandra said. “Stipend. Solvent. Of course, we’re mostly solvent, because we never buy anything if we can help it. Money doesn’t enter into our calculations. I learned it in geography, it’s the only thing I recall. We’re a subsistence economy.”

“I think you’re proud of being poor,” Julian said.

“No, we’re not proud. We just don’t think about it. We just go along.”

“You could get benefits,” Julian said. “Other people do it.”

“Oh, we know all about that. My mum’s been to offices appealing for benefits. Sometimes you get things, other times you don’t. The trouble is, they keep you sitting in a waiting room for hours when you could be out trying to earn something. You get coughs and colds from the other people. Last time my mum went they asked her if she had a man friend. She said, better eat turnips all winter than talk to bureaucrats of romance.”

After Julian’s own household, constantly full of Visitors and their noisy upsets, the silence and peace of the Glasses’ farm was like a convalescence. Only one thing had changed: during his term away, somebody had given them a black-and-white television set. They watched all the soap operas, and discussed them in terms of gentle surprise, as if the characters were people they knew. They explained the characters to him, and he sat with them and watched, predicting the plot developments out loud, as they did. It was something new for him. There was a television set at home, but it was kept in the cold back sitting room, like an impoverished relative whom it was best not to encourage.

Also, they had discovered a big enthusiasm for storybooks. When Sandra had been over at the house one day Anna had taken her into Dereham to help with the weekly shopping, and at the secondhand bookstall Sandra had bought a book called Middlemarch, with the back off, priced 20p. They called this book “the book we’re reading,” and talked about Dorothea all the time, with the same mild interest, the same mild censoriousness. “That’s it,” Mrs. Glasse said. “When you’re young you just don’t know what you want in life. You’ve messed everything up before you find out.”

“The die is cast,” said Sandra.

Julian was confused by them. He was only a geographer; that, at least, had been his subject before he ran away. People from other faculties claimed that geography was a subject studied by slightly dim, marginal students, who enjoyed superfluous good health. It might be true: among those few people in his year with whom he had casual conversation, three or four said they were going to be schoolteachers, teach geography and games. He could not imagine teaching children anything—least of all, to kick footballs about or swing from ropes. If he was going to be healthy and stupid, he could do that at home.

So he reasoned. It didn’t seem to convince his mother. His father didn’t ask him any questions; strangely, though, this seemed to make him like his mother more and his father less. He’s not bothered about me, he said to Robin. He can’t get me to be a Good Soul, and I’m not enough of a Sad Case. He’s only worried about those spotty kids with carrier bags.

Not yet, you’re not enough of a Sad Case, Robin said.

One day in February, he went to bed with Sandra, upstairs in her large brass bed. Mrs. Glasse, downstairs, carried on knitting. Sandra bled all over the sheets.

“He’s drifting—that’s all.” Anna said. “When I ask him what he wants to do with his life, he changes the subject.”

Ralph said, “He’s always been like that. Anyway—is there any point in knowing what you want to do with your life? There are so many things that can go wrong.”

Anna’s voice was strained. “So you just drift with the tide?”

“Remember when he was little,” Ralph said. “We thought he would never learn to read, never do anything. But we cured him just by letting him be. Those few weeks of peace cured him. If we’d have left him at school, with ignorant infant teachers bawling at him, he’d never have made anything. As it is, he got to university—”

“And passed up his chance,” Anna said. “And what will happen to him if he gets tied up with Sandra?”

“He could do worse.”

“I’m aware,” Anna said, “that Sandra is a charity case of yours.”

Ralph said gently, “I hope we can be charitable. Now that the need exists.”

“Hasn’t it always?”

“I mean, in our own family.”

“I suppose I’m not charitable,” Anna said.

Ralph didn’t answer. But he thought, I will never be party to bullying and hectoring my children as my father bullied and hectored me.

Julian explained to Sandra and to Mrs. Glasse what he had not felt able to explain at home. As he talked, he remembered the place in which he had been stranded, this Midlands place, where mean slivers of sky showed between tower blocks. “Homesick,” Sandra said. “Wouldn’t you get over it in time?”

She was not vain; it did not seem to enter her head that—partly, anyway—he might have come back for her.

“You don’t know anything about it, Sandra,” Mrs. Glasse said. “You’ve never been away. It’s like an illness, that’s why it’s called homesickness. People don’t realize. Are they blaming you, your mum and dad?”

“I couldn’t give a reason like homesickness,” Julian said. “They’d think it was feeble. They weren’t that old when they went to South Africa.”

“Did they?” Sandra said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Some people just aren’t cut out for traveling,” Mrs. Glasse said.

Ralph said to Anna, “You are right, of course. About Julian. I apologize.” She stared at the spectacle: this sudden attack of public humility. “I probably ought to find out more about the whole thing,” he said. “I think, after Easter, I’ll go over and see Mrs. Glasse.”