A Change of Climate: A Novel

SIX

The week after Easter the winds were so violent that they seemed likely to tear up small trees by the roots. There was never a moment, day or night, when the world was quiet.

Mrs. Glasse had no telephone, so Ralph couldn’t contact her to arrange a time to meet. “Should I drive over with you?” Anna said.

“No. It would look like a deputation. As if we’d come to complain about her.”

“You wonder what sort of woman she can be,” Anna said. “Strange life they lead.”

His car joined the coast road at Wells. The sky was patchy, clouds moving fast, rushing above him as he skirted the dusky red walls of Holkham Hall: parting now and then to reveal a pacific blue. The sea was not visible at once; but as the road turned he saw on the broken line of the horizon a strip of gray, indefinite, opaque.

It was ten o’clock when he rattled down the stony incline to the Glasses’ house. The door opened before he had switched off the engine. Mrs. Glasse stood waiting in the doorway.

His first thought: how young she is, she can’t be more than thirty-five, thirty-six. She was pale, straight-backed, red-haired: the hair a deeper red than her daughter’s, long and fine. The wind ripped at his clothes as he stepped out of the car, billowing out his jacket like a cloak. “This weather!” Mrs. Glasse said. She smiled at him. “Hello, Julian’s dad.”

It was a low house, old; its bones protested, creaked under the onslaught of the weather. He heard its various sounds, as she stood hesitating inside the door; he thought, it is a house like a ship, everything in movement, a ship breasting a storm. “On your left there,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Go in the parlor. There’s a fire lit, and the kettle’s on.”

“You might have been expecting me,” he said.

He sat by the fire, in a Windsor chair, waiting for her to bring them tea. The wind dropped; it was as if a noisy lout had left the room. In the sudden silence he heard the mantel clock ticking. She returned. Handed him a mug. “I didn’t put sugar in. Did you want it? No, I didn’t think you were the sugar sort.”

“Goodness,” he said. “What does that mean?”

She pushed her hair back. “Sugar’s for comfort,” she said.

“You think I don’t need comfort?”

Mrs. Glasse didn’t reply. She pulled up a stool to the fire. Ralph half rose from his chair; “Thanks, I’m comfortable here,” she said.

“That clock up there.” Ralph shook his head. “We had one just like it at home when I was a boy. It was my father’s. His pride and joy. He wouldn’t let anybody else touch it.”

“You’re not going to tell me,” Mrs. Glasse said drily, “that it stopped the day he died?”

“No, not exactly. My mother threw it out.”

“That was extreme.”

“For her, yes, it was. She couldn’t stand the chime.”

“Did she ever mention it? In his lifetime, I mean?”

“I shouldn’t think so. She was a self-effacing woman. At least, she effaced herself before him.”

She had fine hands, Mrs. Glasse; the calloused hands of a woman used to outdoor work, but still white, long-fingered. They were hands that rings might adorn, and that one did adorn: a plain red-gold wedding band, an old ring, one that might have been in a family for generations. Her skin had begun to line a little round the eyes: so many years of looking into the wind. All this he saw in the vibrant light that spilled into the room, morning light: sliding over the cream walls, turning them the color of butter.

He said, “We have a problem about Julian. Well, not a problem.”

“A problem, but not a problem,” Mrs. Glasse said.

“We thought, Anna and I—Anna, that’s my wife—that perhaps he talked to you. He doesn’t talk to us.”

“Do you see a reason for that?”

“There’s no reason, I hope. It’s just his nature.”

“Well then,” Mrs. Glasse said placidly. “If it’s his nature, what is there to be done?”

Ralph leaned forward, to engage her attention. “You see, Julian’s never been communicative. And a bit of a drifter—you could call him that. Still, we believe in letting him work things through for himself, at his own pace—we always have pursued that policy.”

“Sandra is the same,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Resistant to direction. Not that I try.”

“Yes … so we wondered, Anna and I, if he had said anything to you, about his plans.”

“Plans,” Mrs. Glasse said: as if the word were new to her. “He’s not mentioned any. He’s done a lot for me, around the place. I don’t ask him, he just does it. You can’t say he’s not industrious. He fills his time.”

“But where’s it leading?” Ralph said. “I can’t help but worry.”

There was a pause. They looked into the fire; the flames now were pale as air, the sun drawing their color out. Only the flicker held their eyes. Tinny, grating, the clock struck the quarter hour. Ralph looked up at it in wonder. The sound seemed to tremble in the air. She laughed. “You can have it,” she said, “if it means so much to you.”

He shook his head. “It’s very kind. But no—on the whole I think I share my mother’s opinion.”

“Was he a Norfolk man, your father?”

“Oh, yes. From Swaffham originally—but we moved to Norwich when I was a child.”

“A city boy,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Imagine. I’ve never moved much.”

“Did it belong in your family, this house?”

“Oh, no.” She seemed puzzled. “Nothing like that.”

“It is a very nice house. Very peaceful. I’m not surprised Julian wants to spend his time here. The dairy, he said—”

“Yes—would you like to look around?” Ralph protested, politely. She got to her feet, put her mug down on the mantelpiece by the clock. She led him into the kitchen, where she and Sandra spent most of their leisure time, their chairs set one either side of the range; led him from there to the dairy, its chaste stone slabs, its chill. The tiles were cracked, and the turning world had stopped beneath their glaze; cows trod forever through squares of blue grass, through fields of blue blossom. She turned to him and smiled. “Make our own butter is one thing we don’t do,” she said, “but I did have a cow, at one time. Daisy, she was called—that was original, wasn’t it? I’d sell milk up at the top of the track there. It’s against all the rules, so I had to stop.”

“You’re very enterprising,” Ralph said.

“I have a couple of ponies in my top field now, look after them for weekenders. We didn’t know anything about horses when we took them on. But they couldn’t, we thought, be as complicated as people.”

“And it’s worked out?”

“Yes—Sandra has her talents.” She took him back through the hall, up the low-rising stairs. There were four bedrooms, each of them square and neat, each with the same cream walls; and the furniture of dark wood, chests and tallboys, massive and claw-footed. “All this furniture was my grandmother’s,” she said. “This is Sandra’s room.”

“It’s like a room in a picture book,” he said. “Do you know what I mean? The bed.”

“Yes, Sandra made that quilt for herself, it was the first she ever made, I taught her. She’s a careful worker, she’s slow but she’s neat enough. The trouble is, people don’t want them. Or they want them, but they won’t pay the price, there’s months of work in a quilt, People go for something cheap, something run up on a machine. They can’t tell the difference. But there is a difference, if you look.”

Downstairs she put the kettle on again. They sat in the kitchen waiting for it; “I’m a woman who drinks a lot of tea,” she said, as if in apology.

“It occurs to me,” Ralph said, “it must be worth a bit, this place.”

“I’d never thought about it.”

“Prices are rocketing. You’d be amazed. Would you be interested? I know a good firm of estate agents, old friend of mine but he’s dead now. If you follow me.”

“Of course,” she said. “He’d give me a price from beyond the grave?” She turned her head to him: such pale eyes.

“Actually, he has a son—Daniel, he’s an architect, a nice lad, he sees a bit of my daughter Kit. He’d probably come out here for nothing, give you a rough figure, he knows the market as well as anybody. He’d be interested to see the place.”

“But then where would we live?” Mrs. Glasse said.

“I thought … well, I don’t want to intrude, of course, but I know money’s a problem. You could buy yourselves a cottage, and you’d have a tidy sum left to invest, and it would give you an income.”

“I could live like a duchess,” Mrs. Glasse suggested.

“Well, not quite that.”

“If I had a cottage, I might have to get rid of my ducks and hens. I wouldn’t have eggs to sell. Not to mention vegetables.”

“You could get jobs. It would be more secure for you.”

“Oh, we do get jobs sometimes. In the high season. Hun-stanton, Burnham Market. We might go and waitress for a week or two. Not that we’re good waitresses. We’re not used to it.”

He was struck by the slow and thoughtful way in which she spoke, as if she weighed every word. Struck too by how she spoke of her daughter and herself as if they were of the same generation; as if they had one opinion between them, and what one felt, the other felt. She said, “Sandra and me, we don’t mind hard work, nobody could say that. But we prefer to keep each other company at home.”

“You’re very close.”

“Aren’t you close to your children?”

“I don’t know. I like to think I am. But there are so many other things I have to do.”

“I think that parents ought to take care of their children, and that children ought to take care of their parents. That’s the main thing, that’s what comes first.”

“I’ve said too much,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interfere. I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s all right, you can’t help it. You’re used to putting people’s lives to rights, aren’t you, and giving them advice?” She looked up, full into his face. “God knows, nobody has ever advised me, it might have been better if they had. The thing is, me and Sandra, we manage. Hand to mouth, I know. But there’s always something you can do. Sometimes we’ve gone out housecleaning. And I know where the best blackberries are. At Brancaster—I could get you some this year. We get basketfuls, we bake pies, blackberry and apple, use our own apples, sell them up there on the road.” She shrugged. “There’s always something.”

“I admire you, Mrs. Glasse,” Ralph said. “You live the kind of life you believe in.”

She looked down, and blushed. “What is it, Ralph? Don’t you?”

The Easter holidays ended. Kit went back to London for her last few weeks. Robin began the term at his day school in Norwich; early mornings still so chilly, getting up in blue light to walk a mile to the crossroads and wait for the first bus. His efforts would be rewarded, his parents thought. Robin wanted a place at medical school, and would get it. Yet he seemed to have no humanitarian concerns. He marked off the seasons by a change of games kit; now, spring having arrived, he tossed his hockey stick up in the attics and packed his cricket bag. Weekends saw him bussed about the county, playing away. Sunday nights he bounced, or trailed, back: sad tales of full-length balls on the off-stump, or glory sagas that put color in his cheeks and made him look like his father when his father was young: sixty-five off the first twenty overs, he would say, and then we accelerated, run-a-ball, finished it off just after tea with five wickets in hand. “Do you know what Robin’s talking about?” Anna would say—deriving a pale routine gratification from the child’s health and simplicity, from his resemblance to the other boy she had once known.

“Good God, I was nothing like Robin,” Ralph would say. “My father thought cricket was High Church. Do you think he’ll ever do any work when he goes away? Suppose he became a heart surgeon, and he had to do a transplant, and there was a Test Match on?”

But Emma would say, speaking from experience, “Robin will make a good doctor. Only half his mind will be on his work. That will limit the damage he can do.”

And Rebecca? She rode off on her bike, on the first day of term, to her school two or three miles away; a flouncy, sulky, pretty little girl, who had reached the stage when her family embarrassed her. Soon her embarrassment was to be compounded.

On the Monday morning, the week after term began, Julian came down to the kitchen with his car keys in his hand. “I’ll run you,” he said to her. “Put your bike in the shed.”

Rebecca dropped her spoon into her cornflakes, spattering milk on the table. “Suddenly so kind,” she said. “But how will I get home, sir?”

“I’ll collect you.”

“In your so-called car?”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“Beks, life’s not just a matter of what you want.”

Rebecca sat up and looked pert. “Yours seems to be.”

Julian was not drawn. “Hurry up now, finish your breakfast,” he said. “Don’t argue.”

“What will my friends say when they see me turn up in that thing?” She popped her eyes and pointed, to show what her friends would do. “They’ll take the piss all week. I’ll be a social outcast, a—what is it? Not a parishioner—you know what I mean.”

“A pariah,” Julian said. “Come on now, girl.”

Rebecca saw that he was serious; about what, she didn’t know. She turned to her mother, wailing. “Mum, I don’t have to go with him, do I?”

Anna was loading towels from a basket into her temperamental and aged twin-tub washing machine. “Let Julian take you. It’s kind of him. It’s a nasty morning, very cold.”

Sulking, Rebecca zipped herself into her anorak and picked up her lunchbox and followed him out. “When we get there you can stop round the corner, out of sight …” she was saying, as the back door slammed behind them.

When Julian got back, Ralph was on the phone to London, defusing the latest crisis at the hostel. The office door was ajar, and Julian could hear snatches of the conversation. “What occurs to me,” Ralph was saying, “is that she won’t be able to buy much with our petty cash, with the street price what it is, so what will she do to get the rest of the money?” An anxious babbling came back down the line. In the kitchen the washing machine rocked and danced over the flagstones, in a creaking thumping gavotte.

Anna was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up from the Eastern Daily Press. “What was all that, Julian?”

Julian began to cut himself a slice of bread to make toast. “It’s been on my mind,” he said abruptly. “That little girl in Devon, Genette Tate—do you remember, it was in the papers?”

“The child who disappeared?”

“They found her bike in a lane. She was thirteen. Some man took her away. They think she’s dead.”

Ralph came in. “Going to be one of those days,” he said. “That child, Melanie—do you remember I mentioned her? Swallows every banned substance she can lay her hands on, ran away from her foster parents, absconded from the children’s home?”

“What’s new?” Anna said tiredly. “Don’t they all do that?”

“Just got her off a shoplifting charge last week. Now she’s run away and taken our petty cash. Not that she’ll get far on it. So I was thinking … could we have her here for part of the summer?”

“That’s not really a question, is it?” Anna said. “It’s a command.”

“She really needs, you see, to be part of a normal family for a while.”

“And this is normal?” She rested her forehead on her hand, smiling. “Yes, Ralph, of course we can have her, we must have her, poor little thing.”

“I heard what you were saying just now,” Ralph said to Julian. He put his hand on his son’s head, lightly. “What’s sparked this off?”

“I told you. Well, I told Mum. This little girl in the West Country. I keep thinking about it.”

“But it was Devon. It’s miles away.”

“Use your imagination,” Julian said. “Crimes breed other crimes. People copy them.”

“Rebecca rides to school in a crowd. And back in a crowd. You ought to get behind them in a car, then you’d see.”

“Yes, but when she turns off the main road, she’s on her own for half a mile, isn’t she? It’s not fair, it’s not safe.” He moved his head irritably, pulling away from his father. “So I’ve made up my mind. If either of you will drive her, odd days, that’s okay. Otherwise I will. She’s my sister. I’m not prepared to take a chance.”

Anna looked up. “And will you be her escort for life, Julian? Thirteen-year-olds are at risk, but then so are eighteen-year-olds. So are forty-year-olds. You hear of battered grannies, don’t you?

“Anna,” Ralph said, “there’s no reason to be sarcastic. It’s just, the trouble is, Julian, if everyone thought like you no one would ever let their children out of the house.”

“Okay,” Julian said. “So you think it’s unreasonable? Look, let me tell you something. Ten years ago a boy vanished near Fakenham, he was eleven, he went up the road to see his friend and he never came back. The same year a girl was riding her bike along a track near Cromer—what do you think, is that close enough to home? April, she was called, and she was Rebecca’s age exactly. She set off to go to her sister’s house at Roughton. A man driving a tractor saw her, four hundred yards from her house, six minutes past two in the afternoon. At a quarter past two, three men who were mapping for the Ordnance Survey saw her bike in a field. There was no trace of her. She was six hundred yards from home. Nobody’s seen her since.”

His face set, he waited for their protests to begin. But his father only said, barely audible, his eyes on the table: “You’ve been studying these cases. Why is that?”

“I can’t explain any more than I have.”

“I can’t say you’re wrong. It is a dangerous world, of course.”

“There’ll be an argument every morning,” Anna said. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say to you, Julian.”

“I’m going over to Sandra’s now.” He glanced back from the doorway. Anna was gathering plates, noisily.

“Help me, please, Ralph.” Her tone was wounded, ragged. Ralph scraped his chair back. He began to clear the table slowly, with deliberation, his eyes on a plate, then a cup: anywhere, but not on Anna’s face.

Two days later Ralph went back to see Mrs. Glasse. His frame of mind was exhausted, distressed; he found it difficult to be in the same room with Anna.

Rebecca moaned and squalled; her social life was being ruined, she said. Julian explained patiently that he would drive her wherever she wanted to go; he would pick up her friends too, and see them all safe home. “I don’t want you on my back,” she snapped; Anna watched her without speaking, her face set and tense. Rain slashed against the windows; the air was thin, green, shivering toward summer. I must give the family a breathing space: that was the excuse Ralph made to himself.

And besides, he had been thinking of Amy Glasse. She was continually on his mind; she had established a hold over it, he felt, and he needed to see her again to break the hold, reduce her to an ordinary woman, naive, limited, down-at-heel. He remembered her in the doorway of the farmhouse, those white long-fingered hands flying up to drag back her hair. He thought of the dull gleam of her red-gold wedding ring, and of the curve of her mouth.

It was a finer day than on his last visit: a verdant dampness, a fresh breeze, the promise of a fine afternoon. The holiday caravans were beginning to take to the roads, and behind their flowered curtains, caught back coyly, you could catch glimpses of the owners and their miniaturized lives. Soon the coast road would be nose to tail with cars, each one with its freight of fractious children bawling, elbowing each other, complaining of hunger and boredom and heat.

Again, Mrs. Glasse was waiting for him in the doorway. “I heard the car,” she explained.

“Yes, it does have a distinctive note.”

He stood looking up at the sky. “Good day to be alive.”

“Yes. When you consider the alternative.”

“I was passing,” he said. “I thought, it’s lunchtime. I wondered if I could take you out, you and Sandra.”

“Sandra’s not here. She’s gone cleaning out some holiday flats in Wells, getting them ready for the visitors starting.”

“Well then—just you?”

She dropped back from the doorway. “Come in.” She glanced2 down at her jeans. “I’d better have a word with my fairy godmother, hadn’t I?”

“You don’t need to dress up—I thought, just a pub lunch or something?”

“Give me five minutes.”

When she came back she was wearing a different pair of jeans, faded but clean and pressed, and a white shirt open at the neck. She had let down her hair and brushed it out; it fell over her shoulders to the small of her back. The sunlight made it liquid. It was the color of the cream sherry that his father’s friends, with guilty abandon, had sipped each Christmas: “Just half a glass for me, Mr. Eldred.” He picked up a strand of it, ran it through his fingers; she stood passive, like a kindly animal. “It reminds me of something,” he said.

“Something good?”

“Something sad.”

They drove along the coast. Past Brancaster the sea encroached on their view, its grey line fattening. They stopped at a small hotel he knew, whose windows looked out over the reedbeds and marshes. They were the first lunchers. A girl brought them a menu. “Drink?” she asked.

“I’ll have whiskey,” Mrs. Glasse decided. Two tumblers were fetched, set side by side by considerate fingers. A small wood fire burned in a stone hearth, sighing with its own life; its heart palely burning, but the logs at its margins charred from ash gray to white, from wood to dust. Parrot tulips stood on a dresser; their stems drooped, and the vivid flowerheads seemed to swarm away from the vase, hurtling into the air.

“They have lobster today,” Ralph said. “Would you like that?”

“Thank you, but I couldn’t touch it,” Mrs. Glasse said. “I have an ingrained dislike of animals with shells. My husband was a crab fisherman, he worked out of Sheringham. Well, the life must have palled. I haven’t seen him for sixteen years.”

“Sandra would have been—how old, two?”

She nodded. “But he wasn’t Sandra’s father.” She looked up. “Are you shocked?”

“Oh, God, Amy—it would take a lot more than that to shock me. I don’t lead a sheltered life, you know.”

“When Sandra told me about you at first I thought you did. I said to her, what does Julian’s father do for a living? She said, ’He goes about doing good.’ I thought you were a clergyman.”

“I would have been, I suppose, if things had been a bit different. It would have pleased my family. But I wasn’t concerned to please them, when I was a boy.”

“But you were a missionary, weren’t you? It just shows how ignorant I am—until Julian explained to me I thought all missionaries were clergymen.”

“Oh no, you get doctors, teachers—just people who are generally useful. We didn’t go around converting people.”

“They’d been converted already, I suppose.”

“Yes, largely. But we weren’t like missionaries in cartoons. We didn’t have a portable organ, and shout ’Praise the Lord!’ “

“I’m glad not to have to picture it.” Her smile faded. “But Julian told me, you know—about you being put in prison.”

Ralph nodded. “It was nothing,” he said: writing off the second worst thing that had ever happened to him.

“Julian’s very proud of you.”

“Is he? We never talk about it.”

“No. He said you don’t like to.”

“All that part of our lives, we prefer to forget it, Anna and me. It’s—we’ve closed the door on it.”

“Did they treat you very badly, when you were in prison?”

“No. I told you, it was nothing. If it had been very bad we would have come home after we were released, but we didn’t, you see, we went north, we went up to Bechuanaland. We stayed on.”

“It’s a bit of a mystery. To Julian. He wonders why you won’t talk about it. He builds reasons, in his head.”

“Kit went through a phase, you know how children do—she wanted to make us into heroes. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t go on marches, join Anti-Apartheid, sit down in the road in front of the South African Embassy.”

“And why don’t you?”

“Because it’s more complicated than they think, witless people parading around with their banners. I get sick of them using South Africa to make themselves feel good. Being so bloody moral about a country they’ve never seen, about the lives of people of whom they know nothing. Especially when there is so little morality in their own lives.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Ralph shook his head. “Sorry, I get—well, I lose my patience. I’m sure it is a mystery, to the children.”

“You’ve not been open with them, have you?”

“No.” He picked up his glass and drank off his whiskey and asked for another.

They ate their ham and chicken and baked potatoes, and he turned the conversation, from past to the present, parents to children. He was curious about her life but he could not expect her to reveal anything, when he had been so obstinately unrevealing himself. They ordered some chocolate mousse and some coffee and another whiskey, and then she said, “Better get on with the day, I suppose.”

He drove her home. As he prepared to turn down the incline to the house a police car pushed its snout into the road. Its two occupants, carefully expressionless, turned to look at Mrs. Glasse. One of them spoke to the other. Ralph waited for them to pull out. After a moment they did so, and drove away.

“It’s a good thing I don’t have a gun,” Amy said, “or I’d probably have shot that pair by now. They’re always grubbing about round here. They made sure they took a good look at you.”

“Is it because you had that trouble with your tax disc?”

She looked sideways at him. “Ralph, you gave me the money. Thank you.”

“No, I—no, forget it, I wasn’t trying to remind you or anything.”

“What it is, it’s because we do the markets, me and Sandra. They think we’re receiving. Stolen goods, I mean.”

“And are you?”

“Would I tell you if I were?”

“I would like to know.”

“For your son’s sake,” Amy said, finishing his thought for him. “Well, I can understand that. But you can put your mind at rest. Do you think I’m stupid? I know they watch me. Do you think I want to see Sandra dragged in front of a court?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“I couldn’t go to jail. Not like you. Anna must be a very brave woman, it seems to me. I’d bash my head against the bars until they let me out or it killed me.”

“If they’re harassing you, you must tell me. I can make a complaint.”

“And where would you be when the complaint came home to roost?” She smiled, to take the offence out of the words. “Come in. I’ll make us another cup of coffee.”

“Better not. I ought to get on.”

If she’d said, do come, do, it will only take five minutes, he would have agreed. He wanted to be persuaded. But she said, “Okay, I know you must be busy.” She opened the car door. “I did like that, it was a treat for me, a change. Nobody ever takes me out.” She leaned back into the car, kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Ralph.”

He said nothing. Drove away.

Three weeks passed, in which he sometimes returned. On each occasion, he made sure his son was somewhere else.

Ten o’clock, a blustery morning, Daniel Palmer at the back door: he did not like to turn up uninvited, but this morning he had prepared an excuse. “Hello, Kit. So you’re home for good.”

“I’m home for the summer,” she said.

“How did the finals go?”

She shrugged. He followed her into the kitchen. “Me and Jule have just put the kettle on,” Kit said; not ungraciously, but so that Daniel would realize that no special effort was to be made on his behalf.

“How are you, Julian?” Julian nodded. Daniel began to take off his new acquisition, his riding mac; it was a complex coat, with many flaps and buckles, and pockets in unlikely places. “Been over to Wood Dalling to look at that barn,” he said, “you know the one? For a conversion. Get four beds out of it.”

“If you must,” Julian said.

Kit raised her eyebrows at him.

Julian said, “They put in windows where no windows should be, and doors where no doors should be.”

“What do you expect people to do?” Kit said. “Go in and out of the big doors, as if they were cart horses? And live in the dark?”

“Of course, you would side with your boyfriend,” Julian said.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Look,” Daniel said easily, “I take your point, but the alternative to conversion is to let the barn fall down.”

“At least that would be honest.”

“I don’t understand it,” Daniel said, “this reverence for the original. Because it’s not, you see. I’ve looked into it, its history. The whole roof pitch was altered sometime in the 1880s. Probably that’s when it began to fall down. For the last hundred years it’s been patched up anyhow.”

Julian thought of this crumbling barn, of its roof: lichened, sway-backed, with its many mottled and graduated shades. “It seems right,” he said, “however it got that way. It’s been that way as long as I’ve been seeing it.”

“I suppose we tend to exaggerate antiquity,” Kit said. “Take, for instance, Daniel’s coat.”

“Make sure you do it properly, then,” Julian said.

“Are you setting up as a vigilante, Julian? A barn warden?”

“Something like that.” He turned to Kit. “I’m off to Sandra’s now.”

“Where else?” Kit said.

Daniel said, when he’d gone, “He doesn’t like me much, your brother.”

“Oh, he likes you all right. He thinks you’re a visually illiterate money-grubbing poseur, but he likes you. More coffee? Ginger nut?” Kit rattled the biscuit tin at him, aggressively. “Come on, don’t take it to heart. None of us likes any of us at the moment. Julian insists on taking Becky to school every day and fetching her back, because he’s decided there are kidnappers about.”

“Kidnappers? What, the mafia or something?” Daniel smiled. “After robbing Becky’s pencil case, are they?”

“Nobody can talk sense into him. Becky’s driven mad with it. She calls his car his “so-called car,” and says she’d rather he walked her to school in those reins they put on toddlers. She keeps on at Mum and Dad to call him off but they won’t. The more tantrums she throws, the more silent they go. We think, me and Robin, that they must have had a big row about something, but we can’t work it out, because they never have a row, never.”

“All couples do. Surely.”

“That’s what you read in magazines,” Kit said. “But my parents are the exception to the rule. My father is so bloody saintly it would make you sick, but the trouble is it’s real, it’s all real. My mother has bad tempers but they’re over in a minute. You can see her, you know, getting worked up—and then she has second thoughts, and then she’s saintly too.”

“Well—how can you live up to it?” Daniel said.

“Precisely. That is what I ask myself.”

“Is that why you’re so depressed?”

“Am I? I suppose I am.”

“You haven’t made any plans yet? About going away?”

“No.” She put down her coffee mug. “I’m getting like Julian,” she said. “Manana. Couldn’t give a toss.”

“It would suit me if you stayed around,” Daniel said. “But you know that, Kit.”

He waited for some cross-patch response: I’m not here to suit you, am I? Instead she said, “Suppose—well, I’ve sent off for forms—suppose I went to Africa?”

“Like your parents?”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t go for a church group.”

“Too many strings attached?”

“Yes. And also I don’t believe in anything.”

“I see. You pretend, do you?”

She pushed her hair back, restless and bothered. “It doesn’t arise. I’d not like to hurt people.”

“You don’t feel you should stand up and be counted?”

“What—in the cause of atheism? Not much of a cause, is it? Better be a barn warden. It means more.”

“Yes, I see that. But you’d go as a volunteer, would you?”

“I could offer. They might not want me. I think they only want qualified people, engineers and well-diggers and so on. I could teach English, perhaps.”

“You’ve never mentioned this before.”

“No.” She looked at him balefully. “I don’t mention every thought in my head.”

“Have you talked to your parents?”

“I’ve talked to nobody, except you. Oh, and Robin, I did mention it to Robin, but he was practicing his forward defensive in front of the wardrobe mirror, and I don’t think he heard me.”

Daniel smiled, flicked a hand at his head. “He’s out of it, Robin.”

“Still, you can try your thoughts on him. Voice them. Feel them on the air. See if they sound too unreasonable before you present them to the rest of the human race.”

“To me it doesn’t seem unreasonable, though naturally I … from the purely selfish point of view … the thing is, why do you want to go?”

“Because I dream about it,” Kit said. “Most nights, now. Sorry if that sounds stupid. But there’s really no other reason I can give.”

He frowned. “Good or bad dreams?”

“Neither. They have atmosphere. They don’t have events. You know that kind?”

“Not really,” Daniel lied. “I seldom remember my dreams.”

“Oh, bloody men!” Kit said. “I think they’re a lower form of life. They exist in an eternal present, like dogs and cats.”

“Look, I think I ought to get on.” Daniel moved to the edge of his chair and began to do something with one of his flaps and buckles.

“Of course,” Kit said. “Don’t pause for ostentatious consultation of your Cartier. Good God, a woman may be about to speak of her feelings! Gosh, it must be late! Better run!”

Daniel smiled: meekly, sheepishly. Bowed a little, at the kitchen door. “May I call again, Miss Katherine?”

Kit shook her hair, made a low growling noise. Daniel clicked the door shut as he went. Kit sat back in her chair, her arms around herself. She found she had tears in her eyes. She did not understand this.

Kit had been at home for many days now. It had been the usual arrangement—Emma collected her at the station at Norwich. It was a way of easing herself back into the family, her tea with Emma. But Emma seemed preoccupied and in low spirits. “What’s the matter?” Kit asked. She misses Felix, she thought; she must be lonely.

When she walked into the Red House, the atmosphere hit her at once. “Hit” was the wrong word; seeped into her, that was more like it. It was a cold fog of dismay; her first impression was that something was happening, slowly and stupidly, which the people concerned could not comprehend.

It sapped her strength, whatever it was; she was tired, desperately tired. She had left London healthy enough, only dogged by that usual feeling of anticlimax the end of exams brings. After this, you think, after my papers are over, I will do, and I will do … and then you don’t. You are a shell, enclosing outworn effort. You expect a sense of freedom, and yet you feel trapped in the same old body, the same drab routines; you expect exhilaration, and you only feel a kind of habitual dullness, a letdown, a perverse longing for the days when you read and made notes and sat up all night.

But now, she had gone beyond this disappointed state. A new exhaustion made her shake at any effort, mental or physical. She discovered the curious, unsung, regressive pleasure of going to bed while it is still light. She moved her bed, so that it faced the window. She found herself two extra pillows, and composed herself against them. Eyes open, she watched the sky rush past, and the birds wheel and swoop.

Anna brought her food on trays: a boiled egg, an orange carefully peeled and divided, thin cinnamon biscuits warm from the oven. “Don’t,” Kit said. “Don’t bother. Really.” It was a strange comfort to her to go past the point of hunger; she had never been a thin girl, particularly, so she knew she wasn’t going to waste away.

But it pleased her to push her situation to extremes. She fantasized that she was dying. She was old, very feeble, very weak. Her life was draining from her. But she had lived. She had no regrets, her will was made, and nothing was left undone. She was dying in the odor of sanctity. And indeed she was more and more tired, as if a lifetime’s fatigue had banked up behind her eyes … perhaps, she thought, I have glandular fever, some special disease suited to my time of life …

She slept then, only to be roused by the sounds of the house below as it woke up for the evening: the shrilling of the telephone, the crunch and scrape as the family cars ground home, the slamming of doors and clattering of pans for dinner, the hard stony shower of coal going into the range; and Robin’s feet stampeding upstairs to the next floor, Julian after him, sometimes Sandra Glasse’s high clear voice from the kitchen: “Shall I scrape the carrots, Anna?”

Home life. Sandra had been the first person she saw when her aunt dropped her at the gate. The girl was by the side of the house, with a laundry basket. As Kit stepped out of the car she saw Sandra stretch up to peg on the washing line the white nightdress—chaste, elaborately pin-tucked—which Daniel had given her as a present the previous Christmas. Sandra’s cheeks were flushed from exertion and the wind. She looked very pretty. “Your mother lent it,” she said. “I stayed over. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll iron it and it will be just as nice as you left it. I’m a good ironer.”

Kit’s brows had drawn together. “Have it, if you want,” she said. “Another bit of Daniel’s ersatz tat.”

She’d hauled her bags into the house, and then sat in the kitchen for an hour, brushing off Sandra’s attempts to look after her, to scramble some eggs, to drag luggage upstairs; not even making tea for herself, or going to the lavatory, or washing the metropolitan grime off her face. She seemed unable to do anything to bridge this gap between her former life and the life that was to come.

Then the days passed; she felt ill, a vague, nameless malaise. A white space seemed to grow around her, a vacancy. She felt that it was she who should be able to diagnose and treat the unease in the house, the sudden deficit of happiness, its draining away.

In time, as she knew he would, her father made occasion for a talk. He wanted a talk; she had nothing to say. But she had to decide soon whether she would go back to London to work for the Trust. Live in the hostel: get on democratically with all sections of society: not use expressions like “ersatz tat.” Not make judgments on people.

“I don’t want to push you,” her father said. “We’ve given Julian leeway—I don’t want you to think that we’re discriminating against you. But you see, I have a list of applications from people who want a job, they want the experience before they do social-work courses—”

“Yes,” Kit said. “I’m being selfish.” She combed her fingers through her long hair. He remembered Emma doing that, years ago, in Norwich. “You see, Dad, up to a point it’s easy. You go to

school. You go to university. You don’t have any thoughts, from day to day. You just do what’s expected of you. Then somebody asks you to make a choice and you find yourself … slowly … grinding … to a halt. That’s how I am.” She started to plait her hair now, loosely winding, looping. “I’m a mechanism winding down.”

“A life crisis,” Ralph said.

“Yes, I should have known there’d be some jargon for it.”

“I’m sorry. But that’s what it is.”

“Have you ever had one?”

“Oh, several, I’d say. The first when I was seventeen or so …”

“When you had the row with Granny and Grandad.”

“Yes … well, you know all about that. For months after it I felt as if I were walking around in fog. It was a kind of depression, suffocation—very disabling, because all the time I wasn’t taking decisions for myself other people were taking them for me. That’s how I ended up in teaching, for which, God knows, by temperament I am not suited.”

“Aren’t you? I’d have thought you’d have been a good teacher.”

“No … Teachers need all sorts of large certainties.”

She looked at him in arrogant disbelief. “And you don’t have them?”

“Good God, do you think of me as a person who would have?”

“It’s the impression you’ve given. I mean, you seem to believe in your work, for instance. And in, well, family life, and God, and the Labour Party by and large—the whole package, really.”

“The package.” He thought about it. “I’d not deny that my own father believed in a package. But I dare hope his package seems more stupid than mine?”

She smiled. “Yes, to be a creationist and to have family rows about Darwinism … yes, it does seem stupid. Victorian.”

“So it seemed to me. Even then. But we’ve always been behind the times in Norfolk.”

“You should have stood up to them,” she said.

“Not that easy, Kit. There were penalties they could impose. People bullied other people, in those days.”

It was his oblique way of telling her that she had nothing to fear; not from him, anyway. “You must rest,” he said. “Then when you have rested, think. And then you will know how you want to go on with your life.”

She didn’t mention Africa, this idea she had. Better not; she was afraid of touching some wellspring of unhappiness. One night lately, walking the house in the small hours, he had found Robin alone in the cold back sitting room where the television skulked.

“Test Match highlights,” he explained. “Just finished. I was off to bed. Want a coffee?”

She nodded; sat down on a chair, picked at its upholstery, said, “Do you know, in any other family this chair would be put out for the dustmen to take.”

“I’d never noticed it,” Robin said.

“You’re just like your father. Don’t you ever see how shabby we are? How poor?”

“We’re not poor.” Robin was indignant. “Mrs. Glasse and Sandra, they’re poor. Beks was laughing at Sandra because she said, ’Do you like my skirt, I got it in a charity shop.’ “

“Beks is a brat. She knows nothing. When you’re that age you think you’re sensitive—well, I did, I remember. But you’re about as sensitive as a bouncer in a nightclub.”

“What would you know about nightclubs?”

“As much as a child of two saints should know.” She looked up. “What about that coffee?”

When Robin brought it back—modern coffee, gray and tepid and sugarless—she asked him, “But do you know what I mean? Mum works so hard to keep the house going, with that furnace to be fed, and that demented twin-tub, and that antique Hoover. All Dad does is bring home hulking great hallstands from Yarmouth, and then beam on us like Jehovah and think he’s done his duty by us. Don’t you ever wonder why we have to be good all the time, why we have to have such tender consciences, why we have to have these Visitors every summer?”

“We’ll be getting some new Visitors soon,” Robin said. “Morlocks, Yahoos, slags, and tarts.”

“Why can’t we be normal, and self-absorbed, and acquisitive?”

Robin’s eyes were fixed on the blank television screen. “Haynes 184,” he said thoughtfully. “Hit out to all parts of the ground. Viv Richards 145. God help England. I don’t know, Kit. If you want to be acquisitive, why don’t you marry Daniel?”

“He hasn’t asked me, and I don’t want to get married. Anyway, it’s not a career. What do you think this is, the era of W. G. Grace?”

“I wish it were.” Robin sighed. “So … what are you going to do then? Slope about getting on everybody’s nerves?”

“Do I do that?”

“No, but fuck it—there’s Julian living out his rustic fantasies, and Becky with a mental age of seven, and nobody but me with any sense of purpose these days.”

“Oh, sure,” Kit said. “Jack the Lad, aren’t you? On with the hockey pads. On with the cricket pads. Why don’t you take up schoolboy boxing and then you can get a padded helmet too? With that on you’d be totally impervious to life.”

They sat in silence, Robin slumped on the sofa, Kit curled into the chair, her legs drawn up into the skirt of her chain-store nightdress, which was too tight under the arms, and neither short nor long. “All these questions, Robin. I’ve never had a sensible discussion with you before.”

“And you aren’t now.”

“But you do have thoughts?”

“Yes.”

“Such as?”

“Such as why are we so miserable these days? Creeping around Julian and his obsessions.”

“You’d think Dad would laugh him out of it.”

“He doesn’t seem disposed to laugh.” Robin turned his head back to the TV screen. “West Indies 518.” He looked glum. “Only rain can save us now. What was that you were saying the other day, about going to Africa?”

“Yes. I mean it.”

“Do you want to do what they did, is that it?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why, do you admire it?”

“How can I? I have no information, do I? I don’t have a basis, to admire or not admire. Oh, I know about them going to prison— but even Emma won’t say much, and so you wonder what really happened and whether they …”

“Were tortured,” Robin said.

She gazed at her brother. “I’ve never been able to say it.”

“It is hard to say. I’ve practiced.”

“But then again I ask myself, why were they there in the first place? It was only a kind of colonialism. I put that to Dad once, but he said, we did what seemed right at the time. And I know he is good, he is practical, he does help people now and I expect he helped them then. But what use would I be?”

“If you go off to some place in Africa,” Robin said, “it won’t be to do something for the country, it will be to do something for yourself.”

“Do you know what frustrates me?” she said. “That I was born there, in Bechuanaland—Botswana, it is now—but I don’t have any memories.”

When she thought of Africa she thought of a clean place, full of light and air, the sun so hot that everything was sterilized, scoured clean by its glare. When she saw the pitiful babies on the famine posters it damaged the image she held inside. She did not know what to think when she saw the pictures from South Africa: glum men in suit jackets and woolen hats, trudging by railway tracks, and smoke blowing into a granite sky.

“I do remember one thing,” she said. “No, two things really. The first thing I remember is the feeling of heat.”

“Hardly strange,” Robin said.

“Yes, it seems obvious—but do you think that your body has memories that your mind doesn’t have access to?” She thought, heat seemed knitted into me; it was as if the sun were moulded into my flesh. “Even now, I’m surprised if I’m cold. It seems unnatural, it doesn’t seem right.” She paused, looking up at him to see if he was following her. “There is another thing, a little thing—we had a nurse, I asked Mum and she said her name was Felicia. She used to carry me on her back. I remember my cheek pressed between her shoulder blades, the feel of it, the heat of her skin through her dress. Isn’t that funny? I must have been very small. And then I remember Julian—I must have been older then, and I must have been in my cot or somewhere—I remember seeing Julian on her back, being carried the same way, with his head turned sideways, and fat legs dangling down. And knowing exactly what he felt—your head skewed against her spine, the bone at your …” she hesitated, “your temple, I suppose, though you didn’t have such words, that feeling of each separate bone in her spine, and skin against hot skin, just this layer of cotton between.”

“That’s odd,” Robin said.

“Yes.”

“I mean—because Julian wasn’t born in Africa.”

“Surely,” Kit said. “Because I saw him.”

“No. You can’t have. Add it up. Count on your fingers. Julian was born after they came home.”

“Who then? Who do I remember?”

A silence. They turned it over in their minds. Kit thought, I do remember Felicia: her skin smelled of onions and harsh soap. Robin said, “Perhaps you remember wrong. You were a baby yourself. Perhaps you think you remember, but you’ve made it up.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not wrong. Could it have been a neighbor’s child? That must have been it. But what neighbors? I’ve asked them, you know, what was it like? They’ve always said, it was very remote, there was only us.”

“Insofar as they’ve said anything.” Robin yawned, threw out his arms; but she had his attention, he was listening to her now, and this was an act, which said, I wish to distract myself from the thought in my head. “Don’t you think it must have been Felicia’s child?” he asked. “Her own baby?”

“No,” she said. “Not Felicia’s child, a white child. It was Julian. Surely?”

Again, a silence. Then Robin got up and went to the kitchen and made more coffee for them, and brought it back, cool and comfortless as the first mug had been, put it into Kit’s hands. Kit said, “Do you remember Joan? That woman who cut her wrists in the kitchen?”

“No. When was that?”

“You’d be six, maybe seven.”

“There, you see,” Robin said cautiously. “I ought to remember. Memory’s odd, it doesn’t work like it should. It’s unreliable.”

“I think they kept it from you,” Kit said. “You’d be out playing somewhere.”

“What happened?”

“I bandaged her up. Then she disappeared—took her things and went. I often wondered where she ended up.”

“Dad probably knows.”

“Yes.” Kit sighed. “We labor in his shadow. At least, that’s what I was telling Daniel. Or something of that sort.”

They sat on until it was three o’clock and they were stiff with cold, Kit sunk into her own thoughts, and Robin into his; then without a word they stirred, stretched, rose from their chairs. At the top of the stairs, Kit said, “Robin, another area of mystery is this. The heart complaint. Mum’s heart complaint that she’s supposed to have. I used to wonder why, if she had heart trouble, she never seemed ill. But do you think it might have been the other kind of heart complaint? Like when people say ’she has a broken heart’?”

Robin shivered, not from cold. “Surely, not that bad?”

“No.” Kit’s face was somber. “But of that order.”

Robin kissed his sister on the cheek. They parted without a word, crept into cold beds, slept at once.

Afternoon: on the beach at Brancaster, Ralph stretched out a hand to Amy Glasse, as if without his help she could not stand in the wind. “I used to bring Billy here,” she called. “Billy, my dog.” Stones and pebbles flew from under their feet.

It was high summer now. The sky was an inverted lapis bowl. Away from the sea, below the dunes and marram grass, a few families huddled behind windbreaks. Family dogs trembled by them, constrained by habit of obedience, quivering with a passion for the stones and air and waves. “Imagine when the seas were warm.” Ralph pulled her to his side. “There were tropical reefs. But in those days, there were no people to enjoy the sun.”

On the beach at Cromer they have found the bones of bison, the antlers of wild deer, the skeletal remains of wild horses. There were elephants at East Runton, bears at Overstrand; there were wild boars living at West Runton. Think of this, he tells her, as you watch the caravans roaming over the hills, as you catch the reek of onions from the seafront hot dog stalls.

“I found something as a boy,” he said. She pressed close to his side to catch his words. “A fossil. Gryphaea.”

“What’s that?”

He traced the curve into her palm. He did not tell her what the balaclava man had called it; didn’t want the Devil to come between them.

“A shell. Very old?” Pale eyes looked into his. “Will we find one today?”

“It wasn’t here—it was near Whitby. I never found anything as good again.”

“It’s luck,” she said.

She put her hand in his. He felt her loose wedding ring snag against his palm. His son had made a kite and flown it that weekend on the heath near Holt; the kite was called “The Sandra Glasse.” But Sandra was a child, and trifles amused her, and you cannot give a woman wood and canvas and the slight prospect of rising above

the weather. Amy belonged to this coast; its jewels are jasper, moss agate, chalcedony. She should have jet from striped cliffs, to make a mourning ring for the life that was. And amber, next March; it is washed ashore, it waits for the lucky, it is tangled with the seaweed thrown up by the spring gales.

“Enough,” she said. She wrapped her arms about herself, a parody of the athlete in pain. “I’ve walked far enough.” He held her upright, gathering her hair into one hand and holding it away from her face, sweeping it back into an unraveling topknot. He fitted her arm into his. They turned, and the wind was against them. It was a warm wind, and peppered their skin with sand. Through narrowed eyes they could see the sand swirling before them, like smoke. Sometimes they had to stop, and shield their faces. The sand blew into their mouths, between their teeth. It was like biting on diamonds.

He drove her home. They stopped at a store and bought peaches. They sat together in the kitchen. Amy Glasse took a sharp knife from the dresser and brought it to the table. She gave the knife to Ralph. He took one of the peaches and cut into it. It was a yellow-fleshed peach, its skin as rough as a cat’s tongue, and its ripeness spread out from the stone like a bloody graze.

Later still they went upstairs and lay in the double bed, under a quilt—the second—that Sandra Glasse had made. Amy put her long white arms around him and locked his body into hers. It was as if there were a key and she had found it: a code, and she had broken it. Afterward she cried for a moment, almost without a sound, her head turned into the pillow. He did not know what he felt: not guilt, not yet. Love, certainly; yes, he felt that. Her hair spread over her shoulders like a fan of feathers; her spine seemed dipped into her flesh, like a shallow channel scraped through wax.

That afternoon, Kit was at her aunt’s house in Foulsham. They sat together in the kitchen, the half door open to admit the sunshine, elbows propped on the table and a pot of tea cooling between them. “So what are you asking me?” Emma said. “About Daniel?”

“For your advice.”

“Kit! Come on now! You know I never give advice!”

“Make an exception.” Kit looked at the table top. Absently she scraped at it: delicately, with her fingernail. “Emma, what is this disgusting thing? It looks like the remnant of a squashed baked bean.”

“Quite likely.” Emma grinned. “You know they say every cloud has a silver lining, and the only good thing about losing Felix is that I no longer have to concoct a delicious little diner a deux every time we fall out of bed. Baked beans are very nutritious, let me tell you.” The light faded in her face; Kit watched her eyes fade, sharp blue to gray. “One thing about Felix, though, was how he was made happy with strong drink. Two big gins with a waft of vermouth and he’d be off back to Blakeney to dine a deux with Ginny, and some appetite still left. You know, Kit, they write all sorts of rubbish about people having affairs. Their tortured souls, and so on. But how is a man to eat two dinners? That’s the question they should look into.”

Kit’s hand lay on the table: large, white, capable. She wanted to place it over her aunt’s, but taste restrained her. Emma fitted her knuckles into her eye sockets, and ground them around, carefully. “Sorry, sweetheart. All I can say about Daniel is this—ask yourself, how will you feel if he goes off and marries someone like Ginny?”

Kit paused. “Okay, I think.”

“Then that’s not the real question, is it?”

She shook her head. “It’s home, you know. And me, me myself. I’m asking you for information, Emma.”

Emma looked up. “For information or knowledge?”

“Are they different?”

Emma didn’t reply.