“Keep her wrapped up,” their GP advised, “keep her in bed, don’t let her get worked up about things.” When Emma came to see her late that afternoon she was dismayed by the old woman’s low spirits; she seemed in pain, could not rest, would not eat. “You know what I think?” Emma said. “I think she’s had enough.”
When a chest infection developed their GP arranged for Dorcas to go back into hospital. But because she fretted, and still would not eat, the hospital sent her home. She insisted that Ralph stay by her, then; she began to hold his hand tightly with her good hand, and to talk to him, talk with a grim fluency, about her girlhood, her courtship, her marriage, her husband. It was as if, on what she acknowledged to be her deathbed, she was giving birth to a new version of her life.
“You thought he didn’t believe in science, didn’t you, Ralph?” Her face was very small against the pillows. “But he broke my spirit, scientifically. I wasn’t always the carpet under his feet, I wasn’t born like that. No, I had a life, when I was a young girl—my family weren’t so strict. I used to go to dances.”
“Mum, don’t cry,” Ralph said.
“Let her,” Emma said. “Crying does no harm. It might ease her chest.”
“That Palmer boy, young Felix—that friend of yours, Emma—I knew his father. He was a good dancer, very light on his feet. And a gentleman. He’d buy me ginger beer.”
Emma sat on the bed. She lifted her mother’s hand and rubbed it between her own. “Was he sweet on you, Mum?”
“Oh yes.” Dorcas smiled, painfully. She seemed to sleep for a moment. But then she continued quite smoothly, just where she had left off. “The thing was though, your father came along, and I thought he was more of a man, really. His father was a lay preacher,” she said, as if they hadn’t known it, “and he had a fine voice.”
“Ah,” Emma said. “So you gave up Mr. Palmer?”
“Yes,” Dorcas said, “I did, I did give him up, I told him he should look elsewhere. He was a snappy dresser, you know, I’ll say that much for him—and oh, could he make you laugh! Still, that’s not life, is it … laughing, that’s not life. He married a bottle-blond from Cromer, went into the building trade, he did well I always heard, that’s how little Felix got his airs and graces. Your father was a serious man. We never went to a dance.”
“Mum, you’re tired,” Ralph said. “Why don’t you have a sleep now?”
“Don’t try to shut her up, or I’ll never forgive you,” Emma said mildly. “This is my mother, and—” she turned to him, and whispered—“and I’ve got to my present age without ever hearing her say anything of interest. So don’t you try to stop her now.”
Dorcas looked up. “You see, I always had to please him, Ralph. I was a good girl and went to church, but six months after I was married I gave up fearing God and started fearing your father. I mean that, you know. I don’t mean it as a blasphemy. He always seemed to me like a person from another age. Abraham. A patriarch. He wasn’t fair to you, Ralph, and the worst thing, you know—he made me take part in it. Oh, you hated me then. That night when I came into your room and said to you, you have to fall in with him, Ralph, or you’ll see your sister suffer for it.” She closed her eyes. “He knew you loved your sister.”
Emma said, “What does she mean?”
“Nothing,” Ralph said.
“What is it? Come on, Ralph! If you won’t tell me, she will.”
Ralph glanced at Dorcas; she seemed to be sleeping, but he had a feeling she was listening still. He reached out for his sister’s arm. “Emma, come with me, come, let’s get out a bit, let’s go and walk, or let’s make tea, do something, go and sit by ourselves … this is such old ground, I didn’t think I’d ever have to go over it.”
Emma seemed stunned. “But Ralph, why didn’t you tell me? All these years have gone by, events making no sense or partial sense … I used to say to you, why did you let him bully you?”
“Yes, you did.”
“How did you bear it?”
“There was no alternative.*’
“I thought you were spineless. Weak.” Emma looked very young, as if layers had peeled away. “He’d have done it, you know—he’d have kept me at home to punish you. With most fathers it would have been bluster, but with him—no, he meant every word he said.” She shook her head. “Imagine—it would have been a better revenge than anything he could have done to you directly. If you’d have insisted on your path in life, I’d have been turned off mine. And think of the hook of guilt it would have put into your flesh.”
“Yes.” He remembered a thorn that had once, at Mosadinyana, embedded itself in the pad of his middle finger, and made his arm numb to the elbow: an intricate thorn, like a medieval battle weapon, designed by man to do its worst. “But she, Mum—she’s no saint. She colluded with him.”
“She was frightened, Ralph.”
“Can’t you overcome fear?”
“You ask too much of people,” Emma said sadly.
They did not speak for a while. Then Ralph asked, “Will she live?”
His sister said, with professional accuracy, “She’ll die the day after tomorrow.”
It is a pity that she cannot, with similar accuracy, put a term to the afterlife of the missing child. It would be possible, if one were harsh, to regard this lost child not as an innocent, but as a malign half presence, a destroyer, a consumer of hope. Katherine grows up; they search her face for signs of what her brother would have been. As babies, they were not much alike. So no consolation there; but no further suffering, either. Except you cannot help but mark out the course of the shadow-life … he would be six years old, he would be seven years old, he would be seventeen. He has all we lack, he is everything we are not; we have our gross appetites, but he is the opposite of flesh. Somewhere in Africa the little heart rots, the bird bones crumble or—alternatively—the traces dry in their jar; their child becomes a bush-ghost, powder on the wind.
Norfolk, 1980: midsummer. Cyclists take to the road, with flapping shirts and fluorescent saddlebags. Women in loud print dresses, their cardigans over their arms, pad downhill in seaside streets, with wide feet like the feet of waders. There are fathers in cars, lost in country lanes: irate metropolitan faces behind glass, and wives tearfully slapping at maps that won’t fold.
There are poppies in the verges—indecent splashes, as if blood were welling up beneath the landscape. In every vegetable garden in the county, cabbage whites hover dangerously over the brassicas. Those hedges that remain are towering walls, walls of deep green; lemonade bottles perch in them, chucked out from passing cars. Small animals are smashed into the tarmac of the A149—so flattened, so thoroughly dead, that they look like animals in cartoons, who will instantly spring back into their old shape.
Sandra and Amy Glasse are selling samphire, cauliflower, lettuces, beans, and new potatoes. They are selling large fleshy tomatoes, because last winter Julian reglazed their greenhouse. Ralph is now in love with Mrs. Glasse, and sees her once a week, twice a week, three times if he can contrive it. Contriving is hard and goes against his nature; but when has his nature ever been what it should be?
Summer visitors came to Ralph’s house, children from the hostel. Ralph’s own children treated them with the usual distant tolerance. Kit had not resolved her future; she drifted around the house, and bickered with Daniel, who found himself in the neighborhood every other day.
The Visitors exhibited their customary bewilderment. They had grown up in cities, and spent a lot of their lives standing about in the street. Here, there was no street worth standing in—just a lane, its high verges choked with thistle and fern, cow parsley and rose-bay willow herb. They did not go out of the house much, because they did not like to walk anywhere or ride bicycles. Sometimes they begged lifts to Reepham, the nearest market town. They would swagger across the market square, then lean on the railings outside the Old Brewery, looking hopeless; stare into the butcher’s window, to see if the lamb chops were doing anything exc
iting; shove and barge into the post office, which sold stationery and newspapers and picture postcards of Norwich, and there shoplift packets of paper doilies, and marble-swirl pencils with erasers on the end. Then they would vandalize a few hanging baskets, and beg a lift back to the house again.
“If this goes on,” Kit said to Robin, “the people in Reepham will start complaining. They’ll get up a petition.”
“They’ll get up a mob, I should think.” Robin lurched unsteadily across the kitchen, pulling his forelock and pretending to be a vampire’s manservant. “My lord, the villagers are advancing, armed with staves.”
“No, seriously,” Kit said. “The Visitors seem worse than ever this year.”
“It’s you that’s changing. Getting old and mean.”
“And where’s Julian? He’s no help. He’s always over at Sandra’s house, you’d think he’d decided to leave home. When he’s here he doesn’t speak.”
“Well, he’s gone mad, hasn’t he?” Robin said. “Round the twist. I thought we’d established that. What I want to know is, how is he going to keep a grip on Becky now it’s the school holidays? He can’t be over there screwing Sandra and here guarding his little sister, not both at the same time.”
“No,” Kit said. “Think how he must be torn.”
“Very odd, our family.”
“I said that. A few weeks ago. You seemed to disagree. You seemed to think they were normal.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“A man’s privilege.”
“But Kit—can you make sense of it? Don’t watch television, it contaminates your brain. Don’t hang around with smart kids with money, or you might contract that fearful disease materialism. So what do we get instead, for entertainment and company? Child prostitutes from Brixton. Heroin addicts. Thieves.”
“We’re supposed to be proof against it,” Kit said. “We’ve been so well brought up that they’re not going to influence us, or do us any harm.”
“That’s the theory,” Robin said.
“It works, doesn’t it? I don’t see you shooting up, or selling your body.”
“True,” Robin said guardedly. “But Kit, isn’t it time you got away? Once I go off to medical school you won’t catch me hanging around here in summer. Not if summers are like this one. All this snapping and snarling, and creeping about.”
“Yes.” Kit turned away. She had been thinking a lot, since her midnight conversation with Robin, and she was uncomfortable with her thoughts. She didn’t want to risk having them exposed. “Anyway,” she said, changing the subject. “Anyway. The Visitors will have gone soon. All except this Melanie.”
“Oh yes, Melanie—when does she get here?”
“Tomorrow, I think.”
“Kit,” Ralph said, as the family sat down to eat, “do you have any nail polish remover?”
“Why, Dad, do you want to do yourself a revarnish?”
“Christ,” Robin said. “Dad’s a transvestite. He’s got a secret life.”
“Don’t worry,” Kit said. “There’s probably a self-help group we can join.”
“Yes,” Robin said. “Ask Dad. He’ll know.”
“For goodness sake,” Anna said. “Listen to your father and stop being so slick.”
“Ah,” Kit said. “Mum doesn’t like the thought that he’s got a secret life.”
“My problem is this,” Ralph said. “Melanie. She might inhale it.”
“Dad, look.” Kit held up her hands, “I am a stranger to the manicurist’s art.”
“Oh, good,” her father said.
“Not very observant, are you?” Robin put his chin on his hand and watched his father.
“I’m not,” Ralph said. “It’s a fault of mine.”
“People are just problems to you,” Kit said. “Problems on two legs. That’s why you don’t notice things.”
“Well, I—you may be right, but in my line of work—if you think about it—I don’t meet people without problems.”
“That’s not my point,” Kit said. “My point is that you don’t see—what’s her name, Melanie—you see ’persistent absconder, multiple addictions’—whatever the jargon is at the time.”
“Do I? Well, I yield to you in charity, you are my superior. The problem is that the nature of what I do is so contentious, so risky— wading into children’s lives and trying to put them right—that I’m always glad if I can identify a pattern of behavior. And there are such patterns, you see.”
“Everyone is unique,” Kit said. “Surely.”
“I used to think so. But then I see how they—my clients— behave or react in the same way as others who have gone before— or, let’s say, they have a small range of possible reactions.”
“Don’t they have free will?”
Ralph looked at his daughter appraisingly, as if to judge her seriousness. “I used to think that was the single question,” he said. “I used to think, of course they have free will. But then after a few years I saw these patterns repeat themselves, as if people were born into them. I read case files all the time, and sometimes, quite often really, I get one client’s story mixed up with another. People use certain drugs, perhaps, or drink, or whatever—they are as they are, and that is much as their parents were—they beat their children or neglect them, they go into prison and come out and go in again, and you feel that you could write the next page in the file, you know what their future is going to be, and their children’s future too. Nine times out of ten you’d be right. It depresses me, how seldom people do the unexpected. They start off down a path and they stick to it.”
“In my opinion,” Robin said, “stupidity has a lot to do with it. I know people can’t help being thick, but if they’re so thick that they can’t control their lives properly I don’t see how it matters if they have free will or not. That’s just theory. In practice they don’t have choices.”
Rebecca kicked her brother’s shin, under the table. “I asked you half an hour ago to pass the sweetcorn.”
“Shut up, Becky,” Kit said. “But Robin, you can be quite bright and not have choices. Take love, for instance.”
Anna sat back in her chair, putting her fork down. “Take love?” she said.
“Sorry,” Kit said, “I know I’m contradicting what I said earlier, but I do see your point, Dad. Love, you know, it’s a chemical thing. When people say they’re in love it’s just a set of physical reactions, there are all these substances whizzing around your brain, and hormones making you obsessed—”
“Very scientific,” Robin said.
“—and that’s why although everybody thinks that nobody in the world has ever felt like they do, they all listen to these schmaltzy songs and write poems and feel at one with the universe. They’re all going through the same process. We’re programmed for it.”
“You may be right,” Ralph said. “Are you in love, Kit?”
“No. I’m sure that if I were, I wouldn’t talk about it with such a lack of respect.”
“You’d be like everyone else,” Robin said. “You’d think you were unique.”
Kit made coffee. As if on cue, Daniel came to the front door. “How are you, young man?” Ralph said. He liked Daniel, he had decided, because he seemed to have evolved; in the present casual optimist, in his new stiff tweeds, you could seem to see his grandfather, the snappy dresser so slick on the dance floor and free with ginger beer.
“I came to thank Julian,” Daniel said. “Shame he’s not here. Peace is much better than war, isn’t it? Oh,” he looked around, “don’t you know what I’ve been up to?”
“Barn conversions?” Ralph suggested. “That’s the usual bone of contention, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore. You know Julian’s girlfriend? I’ve been over to their farm. Mrs. Glasse has this outbuilding that Julian wants to demolish because it’s falling down anyway. Mrs. Glasse was very mysterious about it and made objections, she said, ’I use it to keep buckets in.’ Anyway, when I had a look at it, I came in a
nd told her what I would pay for the roof tiles, which are beautiful, absolutely beautiful—and she said, quick, Sandra, let’s all go and lean on the bugger, it cant come down soon enough for me. I said, ’What about the buckets?’ and she said, ’They can be rehoused. Or get foster homes. Ralph knows all about it. He’ll get them a social worker if I ask him.’ “
“Oh,” Kit said, “so you’re best mates now, you and Jule?”
“He still says I’m a vandal, but I think he’s glad to find a way of reducing the damage. By the way,” he said to Anna, “have you met Sandra’s mother? She’d interest you.”
“In what respect?”
“She’s not what I expected—quite a clever woman, I’d think, very sharp, very, what’s the word, droll—but just absolutely content to stay on her patch. No wider ambitions, none at all.”
“You mean she’s like me?” Anna said.
“Oh no—I didn’t mean that.”
“You needn’t blush. She sounds an admirable type.”
“She’s so young,” Daniel said. “Of course, you know her, Ralph. I was amazed, she’s so attractive—I mean, Sandra’s not much to look at—don’t mention to Jule I said so—but Mrs. Glasse is quite stunning, in her way.”
“Did you tell her so?” Anna said.
“God, no,” Daniel said. “Mrs. Glasse? I wouldn’t dare.”
“I don’t see why not. She leads a solitary life, from what I hear. She probably goes short of compliments.”
There was a fine disgust in Anna’s voice. Ralph’s pulse rate rose when he heard it. Daniel looked covertly at Kit, to see if he had made her jealous. But Kit only smiled her placid smile.
It was a chilly evening, for August. Daniel’s pullover had a suggestion of cashmere, a certain Burlington Arcade air about it. Ralph was wearing an army-style sweater, with fabric elbow and shoulder patches, which Rebecca had given him last Christmas. Ralph disliked it, because it was shoddy, militaristic, and already fraying; but Becky had saved up for it, and thought it dashing, so he wore it to please her. Daniel seemed to be eyeing it—not covetously, Ralph thought. “How’s your car running, Daniel?” he asked. He lunged into the conversation as if at a runaway horse, trying to catch it and lead it away from Amy Glasse.
A Change of Climate: A Novel Page 26
