A Change of Climate
Hilary Mantel
From the double Man Booker prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’, and ’Bring Up the Bodies’ this is an epic yet subtle family saga about broken trusts and buried secrets.Ralph and Anna Eldred live in the big Red House in Norfolk, raising their four children and devoting their lives to charity. The constant flood of ‘good souls and sad cases’, children plucked from the squalor of the East London streets for a breath of fresh countryside air, hides the growing crises in their own family, the disillusionment of their children, the fissures in their marriage. Memories of their time as missionaries in South Africa and Botswana, of the terrible African tragedies that have shaped the rest of their lives, refuse to be put to rest and threaten to destroy the fragile peace they have built for themselves and their children.This is a breathtakingly intelligent novel that asks the most difficult questions. Is there anything one can never forgive? Is tragedy ever deserved? Can you ever escape your own past? A literary family saga written with the skill and subtlety of a true master, this is Hilary Mantel at her best.
Copyright (#ulink_97737d46-eef5-5bab-aef4-d64d2cf083cd)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010
First published by Viking 1994
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1994 PS section © Sarah O’Reilly 2010
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
The lines from W.H. Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening’ are reprinted from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, by kind permission of Faber & Faber.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007172900
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007354948
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To Jenny Naipaul
Note (#ulink_ce3e0bb7-27b3-531b-9474-aa8cad12c1f4)
All the characters in this book are fictitious, except that of the Archbishop of Cape Town, which is based on his real-life counterpart, Geoffrey Clayton. I have used some of his words, taken from writings and sermons.
The settlement of Mosadinyana is fictional. The township of Elim is invented too, but I am indebted to the memoirs of Hannah Stanton, who served in the township of Lady Selborne.
Cases similar to that of the Eldreds may be found in the Law Reports of Botswana.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871:
‘We are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability…’
Job 4:7:
‘Consider, what innocent ever perished, or where have the righteous been destroyed?’
Contents
Cover Page (#uc02ca25c-99ea-5e66-9007-ff9453d57519)
Title Page (#u6516e40d-f178-58e8-a309-e64016834570)
Copyright (#uef42ad03-038e-561b-8a36-1ba416491638)
Dedication (#uf1319618-257c-56ba-b0ee-74690df2e312)
Note (#u3cf0a180-5325-5562-ae0a-d716ab099236)
Epigraph (#u4de931ec-f1a8-593e-a2f9-195ecfadd015)
1970 SAD CASES, GOOD SOULS (#u1dfdbe5e-0b84-58c9-aad7-11f0b28ec9d1)
ONE (#u4d6d9aed-0229-52ad-9c65-d87300395377)
TWO (#u929fa299-50ed-5c1e-81ba-cb5591453296)
THREE (#ubf233c58-83e5-5c71-bdee-cc3b462a1b9c)
FOUR (#ua9d8c194-3386-50a9-aeb7-cef5fcfa44a3)
FIVE (#u8a3f7ebd-6337-5124-bc9c-1eea9e82c740)
SIX (#u3320ad51-63c8-5c6b-b73d-cd84faafbaf3)
SEVEN (#udc733c8e-4926-53da-9bcb-063304960959)
EIGHT (#u72f7d901-860e-53e5-9e0d-962d3c1b2b59)
NINE (#uc64584c9-35a0-5e04-b8e7-9e2b5b81b36a)
TEN (#u6268dc19-312b-5b86-b6fe-ddaf6f650b59)
Keep Reading (#u6c9fcf92-068c-5830-9792-94d21f227a24)
P.S. (#u33f1a1d0-4f83-51fe-9075-f39797f43020)
About the Author (#ua3731bb7-d119-5e76-93d5-3997288e0a7f)
A Kind of Alchemy (#u5c10de5c-091c-5322-8bb6-0aba93c9b3c3)
LIFE at a Glance (#uf9af3c9c-6286-52ca-b747-f1edc5738900)
A Writing Life (#uf2e62ec3-8d82-5ec9-ac65-ca3721918028)
Read on (#u064ad82d-a411-5440-a2df-4e26164724a0)
Have You Read? (#u205c667b-437b-5f9b-b4c0-720367d1d909)
About the Author (#ua24466c2-3aff-597a-a15c-a77672102dd3)
Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (#u4c2dd0d6-c5d9-5d03-8424-bb0f313e2d07)
Praise (#ua7974c7d-dccc-58a2-89ca-420074681d76)
Also by the Author (#u21b2fbfd-5996-5a63-83ea-0db39c6aae90)
About the Publisher (#ue7aa5b79-2b61-5961-911e-24e97312f614)
1970 SAD CASES, GOOD SOULS (#ulink_1f415bdf-5720-558c-94ae-f154252e3e15)
One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.
The woman Joan was sixty years old, and wore a polyester dress from a charity shop. A housewifely type, she had chosen to drip her blood into the kitchen sink. When Kit touched her on the elbow, she threw down the knife on to the draining board and attempted with her good hand to cover Kit’s eyes.
By this stage in her life Kit was not much surprised by anything. As she ducked under the woman’s arm she thought, that’s our bread-knife, if you don’t mind; but she said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that, Joan, why don’t you come away from the sink, why don’t you sit down on this chair and I’ll get the first-aid kit?’
The woman allowed herself to be led to a chair at the kitchen table. Kit pulled a clean tea-towel out of a drawer and wrapped it around Joan’s wrist. The towel was a checked one, red and white; Joan’s reluctant blood seeped black against the cloth. Her cuts were light, early, indecisive: the practice cuts. ‘Just wiggle your fingers,’ Kit said, ‘make sure you haven’t done any damage.’ The woman looked down at her hand in dry-eyed dread, while the child scrambled on a stool and brought down a box from a cupboard.
‘Lucky it’s half-term,’ Kit said, unpacking the bandages and the round-ended scissors. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have been here. I was upstairs. I was reading a book. It’s called Children of the New Forest. Have you read it? It’s about a family like ours, two boys and two girls, but they live a long time ago, in the olden days.’
I’m all fingers and thumbs, she thought. She heard her voice, running on. She was learning first aid at school. They told you, ‘Reassure the patient.’ ‘They live in the forest by themselves.’ Joan nodded: again her dumb dazed nod. ‘They’re Royalists. They have to hide from their enemies.’
Kit was afraid that Joan might faint, dropping as a dead weight to the flagstoned floor. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water,’ she said. ‘Or I dare say you could have hot sweet tea.’
She thought, poor Joan. Perhaps dead is what she wants to be. It’s just as Dad always says: you can never find a sharp knife when you need one.
As she stood filling the kettle, she heard her mother’s car. She knew the crunch and scrape and wheeze of it, as it lurched up the drive. Relief washed through her body, turned her legs to water. She put the kettle on the hob, and was wiping out the sink with disinfectant when her mother came in.
Anna put her bags down on the table. She saw, more in sorrow than in surprise, Joan’s figure slumped across it. ‘Tea for me as well, Kit,’ she said.
That night Kit caught the tail-end of a whispered conversation: ‘You didn’t say she was a suicide risk, Ralph.’
‘I didn’t say because I didn’t know.’ She closed her bedroom door; she didn’t want to listen to her parents’ private thoughts.
Three days later, she came into the kitchen and found her mother on her hands and knees by the sink, working on the flags with a scrubbing brush. ‘The blood’s gone,’ Kit said, puzzled. ‘I wiped it up.’
Anna didn’t answer her, but rose from the floor, lifted the bucket and threw the soapy water into the sink.
By this time Joan had left, taking everything she owned in the two carrier bags with which she had arrived. Sudden exits were not infrequent among their visitors; they were not like the visitors that other households get. Ralph made inquiries of the police, the Salvation Army, and the Department of Health and Social Security, but he drew a blank. When Anna came to check the first-aid kit – restocking it was one of her responsibilities – she noticed that Joan had taken an extra bandage with her. They saw this as a hopeful sign.
In those years, when the children were growing up, the house was full of people like Joan. Ralph brought some of them from the hostel in London, which was maintained by the charitable trust for which he worked. Others he took in when Social Services didn’t know what to do with them, or when there were no beds at the local psychiatric hospital. Sometimes they turned up of their own accord, crouching out of the wind in one of the outhouses until he came home. ‘So-and-so’s a sad case,’ he would say; and over the years, this was what the family came to call them: the Sad Cases. Other people he called Good Souls. ‘Your Aunt Emma is giving so-and-so a lift to her drugs clinic in Norwich – she’s a good soul.’
And this was how the world was divided, when Kit was growing up – into Good Souls and Sad Cases. There was no wickedness in it.
ONE (#ulink_6164aac0-f6c4-5eeb-8a8b-07f274fe4d37)
On the day of Felix Palmer’s funeral, his wife, Ginny, met his mistress, Emma. They had met before, of course. The county of Norfolk is not so populous that they could have avoided each other. Their conduct at these meetings had been shaped by Ginny’s lofty and wilful ignorance of the situation: by Emma’s sang-froid: by Felix’s natural desire to maintain an arrangement that suited him.
Over the years they had coincided in draughty parish halls, in charity committee rooms and at the caucuses of local groups concerned with the protection of what, in the decade just beginning, would be known as ‘the environment’. They had bumped into each other in Norwich, shopping in Jarrold’s department store; they had exchanged. small-talk at exhibitions of craftwork, and occupied neighbouring seats at the theatre.
Once, travelling to London, they had found themselves sole occupants of a first-class carriage. For half an hour they had found enough that was anodyne to pass the time. Then Ginny, excusing herself with a smile, delved into her bag and pulled out a fat paperback book. She retired behind it. Emma examined its cover. A svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple, stood before a manor house with anachronistic chimney-stacks. The title was in florid gold script: Wyfe to Crookback. Emma looked out of the window. The landscape was a sad East England green; crows wheeled over the fields. As they moved from the edge of England to its heart, Emma herself took out a book.
They parted at sooty Liverpool Street with a nod and a smile. London forced no collusion on them, but Norfolk did. A handful of farming and professional families played host to both. At a round of weddings and christenings they had made polite, even warm conversation. At a dozen New Year’s Eve parties they had wished each other luck and happiness: and sometimes almost meant it.
Now, on this February morning, Ginny stood surrounded by a knot of mourners. Friends and business associates had turned out for the occasion; Felix had been well-liked in the district. The church occupied high ground, and a ripping wind billowed coats and snapped at woollen head-scarves and brought a flush to aching faces. The mourners could sense the presence of the sea, hidden from them by a belt of pines.
Some of them lingered in the church porch, reading the notices about flower rotas, dusting and brass-cleaning; others stood among the gravestones, looking depressed. They had double-parked in the open area beyond the church gate, and would have to wait their turn to get away. Ginny, leaning on the arm of her son, moved from group to group, offering a few tactful words to soothe their feelings; she understood that death is embarrassing.
Her own family – her son Daniel, who was an architect, her daughter Claire, who was a buyer at Harrods – had been as gentle and as careful of her feelings as anyone could wish. But – even as she deferred the moment – Ginny felt that it was Emma to whom she wished to speak, to whom naturally she should be speaking. Patting her son’s arm, smiling up and dismissing him, she made her way across the grass with a short, precisely regulated stride, her high heels spiking holes in the ground like some primitive seed drill.
Ginny Palmer was a sharp, neat, Wallis Simpson sort of woman, to whom black lent an added definition. As she advanced on Emma, she took from her pocket a crisp lace-edged handkerchief, folded it very small and polished the tip of her nose: a gesture quite unnecessary, but somehow drawn out of her by the occasion. You see me, the widow: fastidious but distraught.
Emma Eldred kept her hands in her pockets; she had forgotten her gloves. She wore the coat that she had worn for years, to go out on her doctor’s rounds, to go shopping, to go out walking and to meet Felix. She saw no need for any other coat, in her ordinary life or on a day like this; it was dark, it was decent, and – she felt obscurely – it was something Felix would have recognized.
Emma Eldred was not a large woman, but gave the appearance of it: forty-eight years old, her face innocent of cosmetics, her broad feet safely encased in scuffed shoes decorated by leather tassels which somehow failed to cut a dash. Emma had known Ginny’s husband since childhood. She might have married him; but Felix was not what Emma considered a serious man. Their relationship had, she felt, borne all the weight it could. As Ginny approached, Emma shrunk into herself, inwardly but not outwardly. A stranger, only partly apprised of the situation, would have taken Ginny for the smart little mistress, and Emma for the tatty old wife.
The women stood together for a moment, not speaking; then as the wind cut her to the bird-bones, Ginny took a half-step closer, and stood holding her mink collar up to her throat. ‘Well, Ginny,’ Emma said, after a moment. ‘I’m not here to act as a wind-break.’ She drew her right hand from her pocket, and gave Ginny a pat on the shoulder. It was a brusque gesture, less of consolation than of encouragement; what you might give a weary nag, as it faces the next set of hurdles.
Ginny averted her face. Tears sprang into her eyes. She took out her tiny handkerchief again. ‘Why, Emma?’ she said. She sounded fretful, but as if her fretfulness might turn to rage. ‘Tell me why. You’re a doctor.’
‘But not his doctor.’
‘He wasn’t ill. He never had a day’s illness.’
Emma fixed her gaze on the tassels of her shoes. She imagined herself looking right through her dead lover; through his customary tweed jacket, his lambswool pullover, his striped shirt, through the skin, through the flesh, into the arteries where Felix’s blood moved slowly, a dark underground stream with silted banks. ‘No one could have known,’ she said. ‘No one could have spared you this shock, Ginny. Will you be all right, my dear?’
‘There’s plenty of insurance,’ Ginny said. ‘And the house. I’ll move of course. But not just yet.’
‘Don’t do anything in a hurry,’ Emma said. She had meant her question in a broad sense, not as an inquiry into Ginny’s financial standing. She raised her head, and saw that they were being watched. The eyes of the other mourners were drawn to them, however hard those mourners tried to look away. What do they all think, Emma wondered: that there will be some sort of embarrassing scene? Hardly likely. Not at this time. Not in this place. Not amongst people like ourselves, who have been reared in the service of the great god Self-Control. ‘Ginny,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t stand about here. Let Daniel drive you home.’
‘A few people are coming back,’ Ginny said. She looked at Emma in faint surprise, as if it were natural that she would know the arrangements. ‘You should come back too. Let me give you some whisky. A freezing day like this…Still, better than rain. Claire’s staying on over the weekend.’ Ginny raised her hand, and twitched at her collar again. ‘Emma, I’d like to see you. Like you to come to the house…Mrs Gleave is making vol-au-vents…’ Her voice tailed off entirely.
Emma’s brother, Ralph Eldred, loomed purposefully behind them: a solid figure, hands scrunched into the pockets of his dark wool overcoat. Ginny looked up. The sight of Ralph seemed to restore her. ‘Ralph, thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Come back with us and have some whisky.’
‘I should take myself off,’ Ralph said. ‘I have to go to Norwich this afternoon to a meeting. But naturally if you want me to, Ginny…if I can be of any help…’ He was weighing considerations, as he always did; his presence was wanted on every hand, and it was simply a question of where he was needed most.
‘Why, no,’ Ginny said. ‘It was a courtesy, Ralph. Do run along.’
She managed a smile. It was her husband’s under-occupation that had freed him for his long years of infidelity; but Ralph’s days were full, and everybody knew it. There were advantages, she saw, in being married to a man who thought only of work, God and family; even though the Eldred children did look so down at heel, and had been so strangely brought up, and even though Ralph’s wife was worn to a shadow slaving for his concerns.
Ralph’s wife Anna wore a neat black pillbox hat. It looked very smart, though it was not remotely in fashion. Lingering in the background, she gave Ginny a nod of acknowledgement and sympathy. It was an Anna Eldred nod, full of I-do-not-intrude. Ginny returned it; then Ralph took his wife’s arm, and squired her away at a good clip towards their parked car.
Ginny looked after them. ‘You wonder about marriage,’ she said suddenly. ‘Are marriages all different, or all alike?’
Emma shrugged, shoulders stiff inside her old coat. ‘No use asking me, Ginny.’
Inside the car, Ralph said, ‘It’s not right, you know. It’s not, is it? For Emma to find out like that. More or less by chance. And only when it was all over.’
‘It was all over very quickly,’ Anna said. ‘From what I gather.’
‘Yes, but to have no priority in being told – ’
‘I expect you think Ginny should have rung her from the hospital, do you? Just given her a tinkle from the intensive-care unit?’
‘ – to have no right to know. That’s what galls me. It’s inhuman. And now Ginny gets all the sympathy, all the attention. I’m not saying she doesn’t need and deserve it. But Emma gets nothing, not a word. Only this public embarrassment.’
‘I see – you think that as Emma was the maîtresse en titre, she should be allowed to put on a show of her own?’ Anna sighed. ‘I’m sure Felix has left her some fine diamonds, and a château for her old age.’
A contractor’s van drew up in front of the Eldreds’ car, adding to the traffic jam; restoration work was going on at the church. Two workmen got out, and began to untie a ladder from the roof-rack. A lesser man with Ralph’s schedule would have fretted at the delay. But Ralph showed his impatience only by a little tapping of his forefinger against the steering wheel. There was a school nearby, and the voices of children drifted from the playground, carried on the wind like gulls’ cries.
The couple who blocked them drove off, nodding, raising hands in a stiff-fingered wave. The contractor moved his van. Ralph pulled out on to the road. Anna saw the children dashing and bumping and careening behind a fence: bullets trussed in duffle coats, their faces hidden under hoods.
The route home lay inland, through narrow lanes between farms: flat airy fields, where tractors lay at rest. Ralph pulled up to let a duck dawdle across the road, on its way from a barnyard to nowhere. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it. Emma’s got nothing. Nothing. She’s given twenty years to Felix and now she’s on her own.’
‘Emma’s given something,’ Anna said. ‘I think to say that she’s given twenty years is being melodramatic.’
‘Why is it,’ Ralph said, ‘that women manage to be so cool in these situations? What’s all this keeping up a good front? Why do they think they have to do it? I heard Ginny talking about insurance policies, for God’s sake.’
‘I only mean, that Emma’s life has suited her. She had what she wanted – a part-time man. Felix didn’t use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If she’d chosen to. She didn’t have to wait on Felix.’
‘Married? Could she?’ Ralph turned his head.
‘Look out,’ Anna said, with a languor born of experience. Ralph put his foot on the brake; a farm truck slowly extruded its back end from a muddy and half-concealed driveway.
‘Sorry,’ Ralph said. ‘Could she? Who could she have married then?’
‘Oh Ralph, I don’t mean any one person, not this particular man or that particular man…I only mean that if she had wanted to marry, if that had been what she preferred, she could have done it. But marriage entails things, like learning to boil eggs. Things that are beyond Emma.’
‘I can’t see men beating a path to her door.’ Ralph edged the car painfully down the lane, squeezing it past the truck, which had got stuck. ‘Not Emma. No beauty.’
‘Felix liked her.’
‘Felix was a creature of habit.’
‘Most men are.’
Ralph fell silent. He was very fond of his sister; no one should think otherwise. Emma was kind, clever, wise…and lonely, he’d supposed: a little figure glimpsed on a river bank, while the pleasure craft sped by. This notion of her as a manipulator, of Felix as a little fish that she played at the end of her stick and hook…Seems unlikely to me, he thought. But then, what do I know?
The journey took them a half-hour, through back roads and lanes, through straggling hamlets of red brick or flint cottages, whose only amenity was a post-box; between agri-business fields, wide open to a vast grey sky. Ralph pulled up with a jolt at the gate of their house. Anna shot forward, one hand on the dashboard and one on her hat. ‘Can I leave you here? I’m late.’
As she unravelled her seat-belt, Ralph turned to look at her. ‘Those people at the funeral, all those friends of Felix’s, how many of them do you think knew about him and Emma?’
Anna took her house keys from her bag. ‘Every one of them.’
‘How did Ginny bear it?’
‘Easily. Or so everyone says.’ Anna swung her door open and her legs out, setting her high heels daintily into the mud. ‘What time will you be back?’
‘Seven o’clock. Maybe eight.’
Nine, then, Anna thought. ‘Everybody knew except you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you still feel a fool.’
‘I suppose I do.’ Ralph reached over to close the passenger door. ‘But then, I still don’t see why I should have known. Not as if their affair was the flamboyant sort. Not as if it was…’ he searched for the word, ‘…torrid.’
Torrid, Anna thought. She watched him drive away. Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.
TWO (#ulink_4e0361c6-8550-5672-ac28-8d65c95c74d8)
Anna, as Ralph vanished from view, plucked the afternoon post from the wooden mail-box by the gate; then picked her way over rutted ground to the front door. The drive was more of a farm track than anything else; often it looked as if a herd of beasts had been trampling it. The mail-box was something new. Julian, her eldest boy, had made it. Now the postman’s legs were spared, if not the family’s.
The Red House was a farmhouse that had lost its farm; it retained a half-acre of ground upon which grew sundry bicycle sheds, a dog kennel and a wire dog-run with the wire broken, a number of leaning wooden huts filled with the detritus of family life, and an unaccountable horse-trough, very ancient and covered with lichen. Recently, since Julian had been at home, the hedges had been cut back and some ground cleared, and the rudiments of a vegetable garden were appearing. The house and its ramshackle surroundings formed a not-displeasing organic whole; Julian’s attempt at agriculture seemed an imposition on the natural state of things, as if it were the bicycle sheds that were the work of nature, and the potatoes the work of man.
The house itself was built of red brick, and stood side-on to the road. It had a tiled roof, steeply pitched; in season, the crop-spraying plane buzzed its chimney-stacks and complicated arrangements of television aerials. There were a number of small windows under the eaves, and these gave the house a restless look: as if it would just as soon wander across the lane and put down its foundations in a different field.
Two years before, when it seemed that the older children would shortly be off their hands, Anna had suggested they should look for a smaller place. It would be cheaper to run, she had said, knowing what line of reasoning would appeal to Ralph. With his permission she had rung up Felix Palmer’s firm, to talk about putting the house on the market. ‘You can’t mean it,’ Felix had said. ‘Leave, Anna? After all these years? I hope and trust you wouldn’t be going far?’
‘Felix,’ Anna had said, ‘do you recall that you’re an estate agent? Aren’t you supposed to encourage people to sell their houses?’
‘Yes, but not my friends. I should be a poor specimen if I tried to uproot my friends.’
‘Shall I try someone else, then?’
‘Oh, no need for that…If you’re sure…’
‘I’m far from sure,’ Anna said. ‘But you might send someone to look around. Put a value on it.’
Felix came himself, of course. He brought a measuring tape, and took notes as he went in a little leather-bound book. On the second storey, he grew bored. ‘Anna, dear girl, let’s just say…a wealth of versatile extra accommodation…attics, so forth…an abundance of storage space. Leave it at that, shall we? Buyers don’t want, you know, to have to exercise their brains.’ He sighed, at the foot of the attic stairs. ‘I remember the day I brought you here, you and Ralph, to talk you into it…’ His eyes crept over her, assessing time’s work. ‘You were fresh from Africa then.’
I was tired and cold that day, she thought, tired and cold and pregnant, rubbing my chilblains in that draughty wreck of a drawing room; the Red House smelled of mice and moulds, and there were doors banging overhead, and cracked window glass, and spiders. To pre-empt his next comment, she put her hand on his arm: ‘Yes, Felix. It was, it was a long time ago.’
Felix nodded. ‘I remember saying to you – it’s the sort of place you come to grips with in your own good time.’
‘And we never have.’ She smiled.
‘You filled it with children. That’s the main thing.’
‘Yes. And for all their presence improved it, we might as well have stabled horses. Well, Felix – what’s the verdict?’
‘There’d be interest,’ he said cautiously. ‘London people perhaps.’
‘Oh – fancy prices,’ Anna said.
‘But consider, Anna – do you really want to do this rather drastic thing?’
Felix closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. They went downstairs, and had a glass of sherry. Felix stared gloomily over the garden. Slowly the conventions of his calling seemed to occur to him. ‘Useful range of outbuildings,’ he muttered, and jotted this phrase in his book.
That evening Felix telephoned Ralph. ‘Why don’t you hang on?’ he said. ‘Prices are going up all over East Anglia. A year from now you might make a killing. Tell Anna I advise staying put.’
‘I will.’ Ralph was relieved. ‘I take her point, of course – Kit and Julian away, Robin will be off in a year or so, and then there’ll be just the two of us and Becky, we’ll be rattling around. But of course, it’s not often that we’re just the family. We get a lot of visitors.’
‘You do, rather,’ Felix said.
‘And we have to have somewhere to put them.’
Two days later, while Ralph and Anna were still debating the matter, their boy Julian turned up with his suitcase. He wasn’t going back to university, he said. He was finished with all that. He dumped his case in his old room in the attics, next door to Robin; they had put the boys up there years ago, so that they could make a noise. Julian offered no explanation of himself, except that he did not like being away, had worried about his family and constantly wondered how they were. He made himself pleasant and useful about the house and neighbourhood, and showed no inclination to move out, to move on, to go anywhere else at all.
Then Kit wrote from London; she phoned her parents every week, but sometimes things are easier in a letter.
I’m not sure yet what I should do after my finals. There’s still more than a term to go and I have various ideas, but I keep changing my mind. It isn’t that I want to sit about wasting time, but I would like to come home for a few weeks, just to think things through. Dad, I know you mentioned to me that I could work for the Trust for a year, but the truth is I’ve had enough of London – for the moment, anyway. I wondered if there was something I could do in Norwich…
‘Well,’ Ralph said, re-reading the letter. ‘This is unexpected. But of course she must come home, if she wants to.’
‘Of course,’ Anna said.
Her perspective altered. She felt that she must settle to it, give way to the house’s demands, perhaps until she was an old woman.
When on the afternoon of the funeral Anna let herself into the wide square hall, she peeled off her gloves slowly, and placed them on the hall-stand, a vast and unnecessary article of furniture that Ralph had picked up in an antique shop in Great Yarmouth. ‘No other family in the county,’ she had said at the time, ‘feels they need an object like this.’ She looked with a fresh sense of wonder and dislike at its barley-sugar legs and its many little drawers and its many little dust-trapping ledges and its brass hooks for gentlemen’s hats, and she saw her face in the dim spotted oval of mirror, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead, then took off her coat and threw it over the banisters.
The Norfolk climate gave Anna a bloodless look, tinged her thin hands with violet. Every winter she would think of Africa; days when, leaving her warm bed in a hot early dawn, she had felt her limbs grow fluid, and the pores of her face open like petals, and her ribs, free from their accustomed tense gauge, move to allow her a full, voluptuary’s breath. In England she never felt this confidence, not even in a blazing July. The thermometer might register the heat, but her body was sceptical. English heat is fitful; clouds pass before the sun.
Anna went into the kitchen. Julian had heard her come in, and was setting out cups for tea.
‘How did it go?’
‘It went well, I suppose,’ Anna said. ‘We buried him. The main object was achieved. How do funerals ever go?’
‘How was Mrs Palmer?’
‘Ginny was very much herself. A party of them were going back to the house, for vol-au-vents provided by Mrs Gleave.’ Anna made a face. ‘And whisky. She seemed very insistent on the whisky. If you’d have asked for gin – well, I don’t know what!’
Julian reached for the teapot. ‘Nobody would have gin, would they, at a funeral?’
‘No, it would be unseemly,’ Anna said. Mother’s ruin, she thought. The abortionist’s drink. A mistress’s tipple. Flushed complexions and unbuttoned afternoons.
‘And how was Emma?’
‘Emma was staunch. She was an absolute brick. She turned up in that old coat, by the way.’
‘You wouldn’t have expected her to get a new one.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. A lesser woman might have hired sables for the day. And implied that Felix had given them to her.’ Anna smiled, her hands cradling her tea-cup. ‘Your old dad and I were talking on the way home. About how he went on for so long, without knowing about Felix and Emma.’
‘Twit,’ Julian said.
Some three years earlier, the year before Kit went to university, Ralph Eldred had been in Holt for the afternoon. It was a Wednesday, late in the year; at Gresham’s School, blue-kneed boys were playing hockey. The small town’s streets were empty of tourists; the sky was the colour of pewter.
Ralph decided – and it was an unaccustomed indulgence on his part – to have some tea. The girl behind the counter directed him upstairs; wrapped in bakery smells, he climbed a steep staircase with a rickety handrail, and found himself in a room where the ceiling was a scant seven foot high, and a half-dozen tables were set with pink cloths and white china. At the top of the stairs, Ralph, who was a man of six foot, bent his head to pass under a beam; as he straightened up and turned his head, he looked directly into the eye of Felix Palmer, who was in the act of pouring his sister Emma a second cup of Darjeeling.
The twenty minutes which followed were most peculiar. Not that anything Emma did was strange; for she simply looked up and greeted him, and said, ‘Why don’t you get that chair there and put it over here, and would you like a toasted tea-cake or would you like a bun or would you like both?’ As for Felix, he just lowered his Harris tweed elbow, replaced the teapot on its mat and said, ‘Ralph, you old bugger, skiving off again?’
Ralph sat down; he looked ashen; when the waitress brought him a cup, his hand trembled. The innocent sight that had met his eyes when he came up the staircase had suddenly and shockingly revealed its true meaning, and what overset Ralph was not that his sister was having an affair, but his instant realization that the affair was part of the world-order, one of the givens, one of the assumptions of the parish, and that only he, Ralph – stupid, blind and emotionally inept – had failed to recognize the fact: he and his wife Anna, whom he must go home and tell.
Ask him how he knew, that moment he swivelled his head under the beam and met the bland blue eye of Felix: ask him how he knew, and he couldn’t tell you. The knowledge simply penetrated his bone-marrow. When they brought the toasted tea-cake, he took a bite, and replaced the piece on the plate, and found that what he had bitten turned into a pebble in his mouth, and he couldn’t swallow it. Felix took a brown paper bag out of his pocket, and said, ‘Look, Emma, I’ve got that wool that Ginny’s been wanting for her blasted tapestry, the shop’s had it on order for three months, I just popped in on the off-chance, and they said it came in this morning.’ He laid the skein out on the white cloth; it was a dead bracken colour. ‘Hope to heaven it’s the right shade,’ he said. ‘Ginny goes on about dye batches.’
Emma made some trite reply; Felix began to tell about a church conversion over in Fakenham that had come on to the firm’s books earlier that week. Then they had talked about the salary of the organist at the Palmers’ parish church; then about the price of petrol. Ralph could not make conversation at all. The loop of brown wool remained on the table. He stared at it as if it were a serpent.
Ralph arrived home alone that evening – which surprised Anna. No cronies, no hangers-on, no fat file of papers in his hand: no rushing to the telephone either, no flinging of a greeting over his shoulder, no distracted inquiries about where this and where that and who rang and what messages. He sat down in the kitchen; and when Anna came in, to see why he was so subdued, he was rocking on the back legs of his chair and staring at the wall. ‘You know, Anna,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like a drink. I’ve had a shock.’
Alcohol, for Ralph, was a medicinal substance only. Brandy might be taken for colic, when other remedies had failed. Hot whisky and lemon might be taken for colds, for Ralph recognized that people with colds need cheering up, and he was all for cheerfulness. But drink as social unction was something that had never been part of his life. His parents did not drink, and he had never freed himself from his parents. He had nothing against drinking in others, of course; the house was well-stocked, he was a hospitable man. When the tongue-tied or the chilled called on him, Ralph was ready with glasses and ice-buckets. His eye was inexpert and his nature generous, so the drinks he poured were four times larger than ordinary measures. A local councillor, upon leaving the Red House, had been breathalyzed by the police in East Dereham, and found to be three times over the legal limit. On another occasion, a female social worker from Norwich had been sick on the stairs. When these things happened, Ralph would say, ‘My uncle, Holy James, he was right, I think. Total abstinence is best. Things run out of control so quickly, don’t they?’
So now, when Anna poured him a normal-sized measure of whisky, he judged it to be mean and small. He looked at it in bewilderment, but said nothing. After a while, still rocking back on the chair, he said, ‘Emma is having an affair with Felix Palmer. I saw them today.’
‘What, in flagrante?’ Anna said.
‘No. Having a cup of tea in Holt.’
Anna said nothing for a time: then, ‘Ralph, may I explain something to you?’ She sat down at the table and clasped her hands on the scrubbed white wood. It was as if she were going to pray aloud, but did not know what to pray for. ‘You must remember how Emma and Felix used to go around together, when they were young. Now, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Ralph said. He stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair came down with a clunk. ‘But that’s going right back – that’s going back to the fifties, before she was qualified, when she was in London and she’d come up for the odd weekend. That was before we went abroad. And then he married Ginny. Oh God,’ he said. ‘You mean it’s been going on for years.’
‘I do. Years and years and years.’
‘Would it be…for instance…when we came back from Africa?’
Anna nodded. ‘Oh, yes. It’s so many years, you see, that people no longer bother to talk about it.’
‘And you knew. Why didn’t I know?’
‘It’s hard to imagine. Perhaps because you don’t notice people.’
‘But people are all my life,’ Ralph said. ‘God help me. Everything I do concerns people. What else do I ever think about?’
‘Perhaps you don’t think about them in quite the right way. Perhaps there’s a – gap – in the way that you think about them.’
‘Something missing,’ Ralph said. ‘Well, there must be, mustn’t there? If that’s the case I’ll have to sit down and talk to myself and try to examine it, whatever it is, this lack, won’t I? Otherwise it’s obvious I’m not fit to be at large.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you what puzzles me, though. There’s Emma living in her cottage right on the main street in Foulsham, and there’s Felix over at Blakeney, and since we know innumerable people in between – ’
‘Yes, we know people. But it’s as I say, they don’t talk about it any more.’
‘But why didn’t somebody tell me?’
‘Why should they? How would they have broached the topic?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What would you have done with the information?’
Ralph was still shaking his head. He couldn’t take this in – that his discovery, so exciting to him, was stale and soporific to everyone else. ‘What I can’t understand is how in a place like this they could conduct what must be so blatantly obvious – I mean, the comings and goings, she can’t go to Blakeney I suppose so he must come to Foulsham, his car must be parked there, all hours of the night – ’
Anna smiled.
‘No,’ Ralph said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s like that, is it? I suppose they go to teashops quite a lot. I suppose it’s a – mental companionship, is it?’
‘I think it might be, largely. But people like Felix and Emma can get away with a lot, you know. They have everything well under control.’
‘It’s never damaged their standing,’ Ralph said. ‘I mean, their standing in the community. Do the children know?’
‘Kit knows. The boys know, I suppose, but they never mention it. It wouldn’t interest them, would it?’
‘What does Kit think?’
‘You know she always admires her aunt.’
‘I hope her life won’t be like that,’ Ralph said. ‘My God, I hope it won’t. I don’t want Kit to turn into some plain woman driving about the countryside in a tweed coat to share a pot of tea with some old bore. I hope somebody flashy and rich comes and carries her off and gives her diamonds. I don’t mind if she isn’t steady. I want Kit to have a good time.’
‘How old-fashioned you are!’ Anna laughed. ‘You talk about her as if she were a chorus girl. Kit will buy her own diamonds, if it crosses her mind to want any.’ Anna looked down at the minute solitaire that had winked for twenty-five years above her wedding ring. ‘And Ralph, there is no need to insult Felix. You like him, you always have, we all like him.’
‘Yes. I know. But things look different now.’
He put his empty glass down on the table. This is more than a failure of knowledge, he thought, it is a failure of self-knowledge. Anna poured him another whisky. He ignored it, so she drank it herself.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Julian said, ‘I thought Kit would have come home for the funeral.’
‘It was mainly our generation,’ Anna said. ‘There were a lot of people there. I think three Eldreds were enough.’
‘An elegant sufficiency,’ Julian said.
His mother laughed. ‘Where did you get that expression?’
‘I heard Kit say it. But didn’t you think she’d have wanted to be there? As she’s so friendly with Daniel Palmer these days.’
Felix’s son, the architect, had a flat above his office in Holt. He was interested in Kit; he had taken her to the theatre, and out to dinner, and invited her to go out in the boat he kept at Blakeney. Anna said, ‘I think Kit regards Daniel as a provider of treats. A funeral is not a treat.’
‘When will she be coming home, then?
‘Not till Easter. She’s got her exams in a matter of weeks, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know. You don’t have to keep mentioning things like that. Terms. Exams.’
‘We have to talk about you, Julian. But perhaps not this afternoon.’ She looked over the rim of her cup. ‘What have you done today?’
‘I started putting in those poles for the back fence.’
‘And have you seen your girlfriend?’
The slight vulgarity and childishness of the expression struck Julian. It was as if his mother had spilled her tea on the table, or put her fingers in the sugar bowl.
‘I’m going over tomorrow. I just wanted to get a start on that fence, as the rain was keeping off. I wish Kit would come home soon. I want her to meet Sandra’s mother. I want to know what she’ll think of her.’
So Sandra will be with us for another summer, Anna thought. With Julian you had to glean things, here and there.
A few days after the funeral, Emma went to the shrine at Walsingham. She was not sure why; her faith, if it still existed, was not something she displayed in public. But when you cannot cope with grief, she reasoned, you can do worse than observe the forms that have helped other people cope with it. At Felix’s funeral the minister had said that, even in the depth of misery, the familiar forms of prayer can lift the heart towards Christian joy. Very well, Emma thought grimly, let’s try it. Something is needed. For Ginny, there were undertakers. There was the question of probate. There was the business of organizing Mrs Gleave and the vol-au-vents. But for me there is nothing. An empty space. A lack of occupation. It is as if I have been told of a death that has taken place in a distant country. It is as if I have no claim on sympathy, because I have heard of the death of a person my friends do not know. There is no body. There is no corpse. Just this absence, this feeling of something unfinished.
Skirting Fakenham, taking the back roads towards the shrine and the sea, she found her car alone on the road. Across the flat fields towers spiked the snow-charged sky, the clouds pregnant and bowed with cold; Norfolk is a land of churches, some open to the sky, their chancels colonized by nettles, their naves by blackthorn and brambles. In those not yet redundant, congregations dwindle; the Samaritans’ notices, flapping in the porches, attest to the quality and frequency of rural despair.
In Walsingham, the car park was empty. The streets were devoid of tourists and pilgrims, and the old buildings – half-timber and brick and stone, steep roof and Dutch gable – seemed to have moved closer together, as if the town were closing itself down for the winter. By the Anglican shrine, plaster saints looked out from shop windows: and woven saints, with tapestry eyes. Touches of gilt glinted here and there on a cardboard halo; postcards were for sale, and prayers printed in mock black-letter on mock scrolls. You could buy candles, which you might put to secular use; other windows displayed recordings of plainchant, and pots of honey in stoneware jars, and boxes of Norfolk Lavender soap. Walsingham tea-towels were on offer, jars of chutney, tins of shortbread, Earl Grey teabags in cod Victorian packaging; and there were herb pillows, Olde Englishe Peppermint Lumps, pot-pourri and fluffy toys, wall-plaques, paperweights and scented drawer-liners – all the appurtenances, in fact, that you would expect to find at an ancient pilgrim site. Trade was poor. The only visible inhabitant was a woman with a shopping basket over her arm and a pug dog on a lead. She nodded to Emma and walked on, huddling into the shadow of the Abbey’s wall.
Emma went up the path to the church. It was a building put up in the 1930s, and its exterior, disappointingly plain, hid its dim papistical contents: devotional candles blinking, sad-eyed virgins pouting in gold frames. She asked herself, what would my father have said, what would my father have said to a bauble-shop like this? Matthew Eldred seemed very far away, very old and dead and gone. Not so Felix. Alone in her cottage in Foulsham, she still listened for the sound of his key in the lock.
Emma lurked about towards the back of the church, away from the altar. Finally she sat down on a chair at the end of a row. She gave herself permission for tears, but she was not able to cry. Like her sister-in-law Anna, she had trained herself out of it. The thought of Felix lay like a stone inside her chest. Outside, some sort of building work seemed to be going on; she could hear the monotonous thump of hammers and the whirring of drills. In my family, she thought, we practise restraint and the keeping of secrets, and the thoughts we respect are unvoiced thoughts; even Felix, an open secret, was a secret of a kind. But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.
On the back wall were wooden plaques, names and dates: thanks given, intentions stated. Thanks for preservation in a motor accident, 1932. For reunion of husband and wife, after prayer at the shrine, 1934. Success in an examination, Thanks, 1935. What minute considerations we expect God to entertain, Emma thought. Thanks for a happy death, prayed for at the Holy House. Who put that here, and how did they know it was happy? Some plaques gave nothing away. Upon these the visitor might exercise imagination: Prayers Answered.
Near these plaques, the water from the Holy Well was made available in buckets. Pilgrims might help themselves, by dipping with assorted vessels; a table, stacked up with prayer books, held also the abandoned top of a Thermos flask, some paper cups of the kind tea machines dispense, and some beakers of moulded plastic, each one frilly at the rim, as if it had been gnawed. Emma thought the arrangements unsanitary. She went out, her gloves in her hand.
In the porch was a vast book, well-thumbed, its pages ruled into columns. A notice promised ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE SHRINE.
Emma took her pen out of her pocket, turned to a clean page and wrote down the date. She did not put Felix’s name in the book. because she believed that energy should be directed towards the living, not the dead. She did not put her own name, because she believed she would manage well enough. But she wrote the names of her brother and his wife:
RALPH ELDRED
ANNA ELDRED
Beneath she wrote:
KATHERINE ELDRED
then hesitated, and skipped one line, before
JULIAN ELDRED
ROBERT ELDRED
REBECCA ELDRED
It was half dark when Emma left the porch. Between the church and the road there was no pavement; she crept uphill by the high wall, protected only by heaven’s benevolence from the cars behind her. Eddies of sleet swirled in a huddle of stone and flint, slapping at window glass and melting underfoot. Sitting in an almost empty café, her hands around a mug of hot chocolate, she thought of that other frozen afternoon, when Ralph’s curly head emerged up the staircase of the Holt tea-room, and dipped under the beam, and swivelled, gaze focusing…If Ralph had not come upon them that particular day, his sensibilities skinned by the cold, he would have continued in his obstinate and peculiar ignorance; when Felix died, they would have stood at his graveside as two old family friends, and Ralph would have given her not a word of sympathy except that due between decent people when a contemporary has quit the scene. And that, she thought, would have suited me.
Lines of poetry ran through Emma’s head. Auden, she thought. She was pleased at being able to identify it, because she was not a literary woman. They were insistent lines, stuffed with a crude menace.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
Emma shared the café with one be-skirted cleric, who was reading the Daily Telegraph. An oil stove popped and hissed at her back. She thought again of crying, but she was afraid the man might put his newspaper down and try to console her. Instead she buttoned her coat, and braced herself for the twilight and cold, the drive home to Foulsham. I hardly know what I am any more she thought: a Good Soul, or a Sad Case.
O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless.
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