“I think he’s given up on it. Julian wouldn’t do in London, would he? He’d be back within days.” Emma leaned across to kiss her niece. “I’m not coming in. The partners are going to the King’s Arms tonight, we’re going to paint the town red.”
“Have a good time.” Kit put her head in at the car window. “Maybe I’ll do it, instead. Do a year … it wouldn’t hurt. Or would it?”
Emma was surprised. “I thought you were doing postgrad? I thought it was all fixed?”
Kit shook her head. Her face was placid, almost sad. “Nothing’s fixed. I had this idea—I wrote home to Dad—I said I didn’t want to be in London … but I suppose I could face it, if it were for the Trust, if I could be any use there.” She looked away. “I don’t know what to think, though. I’ve lost my … no, I don’t know what I’ve lost.”
Your virginity? Emma wondered. The thought must have shown on her face. “It’s not Daniel,” Kit said. “I wouldn’t stay around here for Daniel. Though if I needed an excuse, I suppose he could be one.”
Emma drove away. The door of the house was thrown open and Julian came out, pretending to peer into the bushes, and calling “Come in for your dinner, kitty kitty kitty.”
Rebecca, behind him, said, “Kate of Kate Hall.”
Her brother looked well, Kit thought at once, he looked happy. He straightened up to his impressive height, put his arms around her and hugged her. Behind him was his red-haired girlfriend, Sandra Glasse.
Kit found Daniel Palmer in the kitchen with the rest of the family. All of them were watching carefully, to assess how pleased she was to see him.
“Hello,” Kit said. “I didn’t expect you, where’s your car?”
“I put it under cover.” Daniel did not know his status with Kit; did not know her mood; wondered what the family thought his status was. “Welcome home,” he said. He picked up a strand of Kit’s hair and touched the end of it to his lips.
“He’s got a new car, you see,” Julian said. “He’s afraid rain will fall on it.”
“It’s my Morgan,” Daniel said. Amazed delight showed on his face. Kit retrieved her hair and tucked it back, among those strands romance had not distinguished. “Handbuilt,” Daniel said. “I’ve been waiting four years for it.”
“Goodness,” Kit said. She wondered how desire could last so long.
Ralph said, “I’d be afraid to drive it, I think.”
Becky said, “It pretends to be old, but it’s not.”
“Where’s Robin?”
Ralph said, “He’s playing in it.”
Daniel displayed the car’s keys, holding them as if diamonds trickled from his fingers. “Don’t worry. He won’t get far.”
Sandra Glasse had not spoken at all. She did not seem to know what the others were talking about. She had just arrived, Kit saw: she had a paper bag in her hand, which she cradled against her old jersey. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” she said, “I’ve brought you some hen’s eggs.”
Daniel, who had not met Sandra before, looked around at her with a quizzical smile. It seemed to him she must have dropped in from another world.
They had decided to eat in the kitchen as usual, because the evenings were cold and the central heating was playing up again. Earlier Ralph had met Anna dragging into the boiler room with a scuttle of coal. “Anna,” he had said, “with two sons in the house, I don’t expect to see you—”
“This effort is voluntary,” Anna said. “I’m doing it to warm myself up.”
By the time they had fought a bout with the boiler, they were both warm. “The poor desperate thing,” Ralph said. “I suppose it would be a mercy to knock it out and send it wherever boilers go to die. Still, I can’t see us changing over to oil. Not this year. Besides, with oil, it’s so political, the prices shoot up, they hold you to ransom.”
“Daniel explained to me once,” Anna said, “that when the price of one sort of fuel goes up, the price of all the others goes up soon after.”
“But the installation …” Ralph said. “Honestly, the bills just at the moment … the telephone bill alone.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Yet when anyone comes by and says “Can I use your phone?” you say, “Of course, go ahead,” and when they offer to pay for the call you say, “No, I won’t hear of it.” You remember that volunteer—Abigail, was it?—the one who said could she phone her boyfriend? And it turned out he’d gone to be a jackaroo for a year?”
“An extreme case. Anyway, it stopped her fretting.”
“People should have less expensive emotions,” Anna said.
“They should have them when it’s cheap rate.” Then she said, “By the way—while we’ve got a private moment—what do you think of Daniel these days?”
He was all right really, was Ralph’s opinion. He had always felt comfortable with Felix’s son. Daniel wore the same clothes as he did—corduroy trousers, old tweed jackets, Fair Isle and lambswool from September through to May. Only recently had he become aware that Daniel’s clothes were not, like his, organic developments. Daniel went to London to get them at vast expense, it seemed. They looked old because they were made that way. Ralph wore his clothes because they were what was in the wardrobe. Daniel wore them for another reason—to become someone. To become a country gentleman, Robin said; it was a pose.
Robin knew these things. Still, he was enthusiastic about the two-seater, the Morgan, could hardly be dragged inside to eat. Later Ralph went out too, to pass a hand over its gleaming body and murmur its praises. Daniel was like a child at Christmas, beside himself with glee; it would have been churlish not to admire. But he felt uneasy about the car and what it might mean. Modern mechanics purred beneath its hood; as Rebecca said, it purported to be what it was not.
All the same, he thought, if Daniel was Kit’s choice, you wouldn’t find him raising objections. Daniel would look after her. There was nothing fake about his bank balance, and the architects of the county were coming men. He could afford the car and he could afford Kit. He would design them a house, no doubt, and built it on a prime site, and Kit would have a cleaning lady and hot water whenever she wanted it, and …
An awful spasm of grief took hold of Ralph; he stood in the outhouse with Daniel and Robin, an old mac around his shoulders, rain and blue evening air gusting in at the door, and felt grief take him by the windpipe, grief shake him like a mugger. He turned away; no one must see his face.
This happened sometimes. More, lately. And trying to separate himself from the emotion, to pull away from it, he wondered: why is this? He went back into the house. In the kitchen, Sandra was washing up; Becky was drying; Anna was decanting the leftovers into boxes for the fridge. A usual kind of family: 1980, and all’s well.
It was a year now since Julian had met Sandra Glasse.
It was a Sunday in April; Julian could not mistake the date, because the Scouts in North Walsham had been holding their St. George’s Day parade. And what was he doing in North Walsham? He had wanted to get out of the house. There were some particularly nasty Visitors, Sad Cases. Robin had the excuse of some sporting fixture or other; he always had a means of escape.
His mother, who was sensitive about the Visitors, had seen Julian’s plight. “Would you go to North Walsham for me? I have a bundle of clothes for the church jumble sale, which includes some things of your father’s that I particularly wish to see the back of. If you could just drop them in at this address I’ll give you—leave them in the garage if they’re out—then you could have the car for the afternoon. How would that be?”
Nothing doing in North Walsham; nothing doing, in a little market town on a Sunday afternoon. Only the Scouts marching down the street with their band, and a gang of bike boys jeering at them. He parked the car, delivered the bundle to a house near the church, walked up the empty street in fitful sunshine. He stopped to stare for no good reason into the window of Boots the Chemist. There was a razzmatazz of vitamin supplements and glucose tablets, and a come-and-get-’em pyramid of Kodak f
ilms, and an alluring display of hot-water bottles, for pessimists who might be buying them in for the summer ahead.
The bike boys had gathered around the Market Cross, their machines at rest, and they in their leather jackets pushing and shoving about its venerable dome. Julian always liked to see the Market Cross, but he shied away from approaching them. He was not afraid—or he did not want to think so; but like the Scouts he would have been an incitement to them. He was tidily dressed, like a good schoolboy at weekend, in a loose cream cotton shirt and well-ironed denims—no one could stop his mother pressing clothes. His hair was the color called dishwater blond; still, it was too blond, and conspicuously shiny and clean. He knew his own features: his unformed face, his large unclouded blue eyes. He knew what they represented—provoking innocence. It did not seem to matter that he was physically stronger than most people. Strength’s not much good without permission to use it.
The boys leaning on the columns of the Market Cross had leather jackets with studs and hair shaved off to stubble. The girls with them had long metal earrings and aggrieved faces. They sprawled against the machines or pawed at the boys’jackets, keeping up a braying cackling conversation of sorts. One girl hitched up her thin skirt and threw a leg over one of the bikes; she slithered across the saddle and rode it in seesaw movements, in a mimicry of copulation.
Another girl stood slightly apart from the group. She was with them, but didn’t seem to belong to them at all. She had a shaggy head of thick, dark red hair; he could hardly see her face or shape, and it was the oddity of her that made him give her a second look. She wore a black-and-white tweed jacket that was several sizes too big; it was well-worn, and the kind of thing that a settled Norfolk matron of fifty might call “my old gardening coat.” No pretence at fashion in it, or even anti-fashion. She had lace-up school shoes: also not a rebel’s possessions. Someone spoke to her, and she shook her red head violently, and started across the road, cantering off, like an animal, in the direction of the church.
Julian turned and put the car keys in his pocket. He crossed the road too, followed her into the church grounds. She stood beneath the broken, collapsed tower, whose craggy top overbore the streets, the Market Cross, the bike boys. Seeing him, she seemed to shake herself inside the vast stiff jacket, and trotted further off, to the far side of the churchyard. There she sat down on a bench (put there by the Old Folks’ Welfare Committee) and waited for him to catch her up.
At first he hardly dared sit down beside her, in case she took fright and hurtled off again. Her animal quality seemed pronounced, and he wished he had something to offer, a sugar lump or even a piece of bread, to show that he meant well. As if reading his mind, she reached into the jacket and took out an apple, then a second. She offered one to him, holding it out at arm’s length, without a smile.
“Do you always carry your supplies with you?” he asked.
She said, “Yes, certainly.”
He tossed his head back toward the marketplace. “Do you know that lot?”
“Not really.”
“I thought you were with them.”
“I picked up with them this morning. I’d nothing else to do. I went to Cromer with them. Nobody had any money. We came on here. They fetched me.”
He took the apple and sat down on the bench beside her. She wiped the fruit on the sleeve of her jacket and bit into it. She chewed gloomily, reflectively, eyes on gravestones and the church’s ancient walls.
“Are you going back with them?”
“No.” She was angry. “They’re senseless.”
“Where do you live?”
“In the Burnhams. You know it round there?”
“You’re a fair way from home.”
“You can get a fair way when you go on the motor bikes, that’s one thing about them. Still, I don’t care for it. I ought to be getting back.” She threw her apple core on the ground, but didn’t move, just huddled into her jacket. It began to drizzle. “I’ll take shelter in the church,” she said.
Later, it seemed to him that Sandra knew all the county’s churches, great and small. She treated them as other people treated bus shelters and waiting rooms. He had to stride to keep up with her, as she bolted for the porch. “If you’re not going to eat your apple,” she said, “I’ll have it back, I might need it later.”
He said, “I could take you home.”
“Have you got a car?”
“Yes.”
“You’re young to have a car.”
“It’s my mother’s car. I don’t mind taking you. You’ll never get back any other way, and this rain’s setting in.”
“All right,” she said. They stood in the church porch for a minute and watched the rain fall. “Sanctuary,” she said, unexpectedly.
“Do you know about this church?” Julian looked sideways at her, into her face. Such pale eyes. “When they were building it, it was the Peasants’ Revolt. There was a battle near here. It was the last battle, I think. Some of the rebels came in here begging sanctuary, but the church wasn’t finished, so it didn’t count. The Bishop of Norwich came after them and killed them all.”
The girl blinked at him. “I never heard that,” she said.
He loathed himself, spouting semifacts. Why had he done it? He laughed and said, “Didn’t they tell you about it at school?” He loathed himself more. What had made him go on about the Peasants’ Revolt, for God’s sake? She unnerved him, that was it. She had not told him her name. Her sandy-gilt lashes drooped onto her cheek.
“I don’t recall anything about it,” she said. But then, very kindly, “I’m always glad to know anything about old places, so if you’ve anything to tell me you needn’t be afraid I won’t like it.”
It seemed she expected a long acquaintance. The rain slackened a little. Julian took her jacket by its bulky sleeve and hurried her to the car. The bike boys had scattered. She was his responsibility.
A fine drizzle hit the windscreen. The sea, on their right as they drove, was obliterated by a rising mist. The Sheringham caravan sites loomed out of it, and the wind plucked at the blossom on the cherry trees in the bungalow gardens. The trees looked as if they had been left outside by mistake, or transported from some softer country.
Between Cley and Weybourne, the heathland melted invisibly into the marshes. Bird-watchers, hung about like pedlars with the tools of their trade, strode toward the invisible sea. There were sheep in the fields; among their ambling forms they saw the necks of resting swans, as hard and clear as marble, startlingly white in the thick air. By the roadside, signs—crudely chalked blackboards, or painted boards—advertised FRESH SEA BAIT, SHRIMPS, COCKLES, FRESH CRABS, DRESSED CRABS, KIPPERS. The tourist season was beginning.
They drove in what seemed to be a companionable silence. At Blakeney—the salt marshes a nebulous blend of earth, sea, air— Sandra turned in her seat. “I’m sorry if I was angry back there. I’m not usually angry.”
What Julian saw, from the tail of his eye, was a face set on placid lines; a face with a translucent pallor, and those pale eyes. She seemed strong, composed; she held her white hands on her lap, the one reposing confidingly in the other.
“What did the bikers say to you, to make you run offlike that?”
Sandra thought, then said, “They criticized my garment.”
After a moment, they both yelled with laughter, the noise filling the shabby body of Anna’s car. A gust of wind, blowing inland, peppered the rain against the glass.
“Well, I admit “…” Julian said. “Why do you wear it?”
“We got it donated,” Sandra said. “I can’t afford clothes like they’ve got. It’s funny, I always think—when you’ve got a bit of money you can afford cheap clothes, you can throw them away when they fall apart. But if you’re poor your clothes go on for ever. You get given things the Queen would be proud to wear.”
“Who was it gave it you?”
“Some church. My mum has her contacts. She used to clean for a churchwarden’
s wife. So we get remembered when it’s jumble sales.” She paused. “It’s just our size she forgets.”
They began to laugh again. The windscreen wipers swished; ahead of them, toward Wells, the horizon had the pearl sheen of brighter weather. “I dare say it’ll outlast me, this old jacket,” Sandra said. “I once ran through a hedge in it, and it didn’t flinch.”
By the time they reached Holkham, the mist was clearing. Flashes of light struck from the dwarves’ windows of flint cottages, little houses tumbling toward the coast; flint sparkled like gemstones in the wall of a round-towered church. “Turn off here,” Sandra said, directing him toward the sea. They turned between high hedgerows, leaving behind a wide view of windmills and the red roofs of distant barns. The road narrowed. “I live down this track,” Sandra said. “Do you want to come in? You could have a cup of tea.”
The car bumped down an incline. “My mother calls this ’one of the foremost hills in Norfolk,’ “ Sandra said. “Okay—stop here.”
They came to a halt in front of a huddle of low buildings, the doors facing inward, out of the wind. There was a pear tree on a sheltered wall, geese on a pond, a vegetable plot screened off by an amateur windbreak. There were some rotting henhouses, an old cartwheel leaning on a fence, and by the front door a wheelbarrow filled with something shrouded in polythene. They got out of the car. A woman came to the door. “That’s my mother,” Sandra said.
Mrs. Glasse seemed taller than Sandra, not very old. She wore patched jeans and two shapeless pullovers, the one underneath longer than the one on top. She had red hair too, longer than her daughter’s, scooped up with pins. Julian saw that bits of it straggled down her back as she turned to lead the way inside. For the first time, he wondered how his own mother managed to keep her hair fixed in its dark cloudy shapes, arrested in its whirls and coils. There must be an art to it.
Mrs. Glasse had been working outside. Her muddy gumboots stood by the door. There was a wide lobby, full of swirling air—peg rugs on the floor, an accumulation of dark furniture.
A Change of Climate: A Novel Page 13
