A Change of Climate: A Novel (13 page)

In the event, the police checked themselves; as if, here on the mission steps, some notion of civility still held sway. “It’s you,” Ralph said, opening the door; Quintus stood there. He had feared unknown faces, Special Branch perhaps. Haifa dozen men trooped in. Quintus introduced his colleague, Sergeant van Zyl. They had hardly got through the pleasantries when the men began to stomp through the house, looking in the cupboards and under the bed. “Of course, Sergeant,” Ralph said, you spotted at once that I’m the type to run a still. Me and my wife, aren’t we just your typical shebeen-owners?”

Sergeant van Zyl said, “We are looking for a person we have reason to believe may be on your premises.”

“What person? Dr. Verwoerd? Mickey Mouse?” Van Zyl looked baleful. He was a big man; hitching his thumbs into his belt, he moved the burden of his belly a little. “You wrote a letter to the
Pretoria News,
Mr. Eldred. Don’t do that again.”

Let’s stay calm, Ralph said to himself. “My letter was only to tell people what really happened the day of your baton charge. I wrote to invite people to come up here and look at Elim for themselves. To look at our churches and our schools, and ask themselves if we are the hotbed of vice and crime they are constantly told that we are. To look at what we do here, and ask themselves if we deserve to be destroyed.”

“We know what your letter said,” van Zyl told him. “We have read it ourselves in the newspaper. The brigadier doesn’t like your tone, Mr. Eldred.”

“Well, if it’s only my tone,” Ralph said easily. “The content doesn’t trouble him?”

“You’d have more idea about crime,” van Zyl said, “if you spent some time with us at the police station.”

“But I do spend time. I could hardly spend any more. Unless I moved in with you.”

“I suppose that might be arranged,” van Zyl said.

The police had given up on the mysterious person, whoever he was. They were in Ralph’s office, rummaging through his papers. Sergeant van Zyl settled on his desk. Again he twitched at his belt, settling his bulk comfortably, as if his gut were something apart from him, a pet animal he kept.

“If I knew what you wanted,” Ralph said, “I could perhaps help you out.”

“Help yourself out, man,” van Zyl said. “Keep out of our way.”

Quintus attempted covert signals. He looked sick. Ralph would not meet his eyes. His clear meaning was, be careful, for van Zyl is not your decent type of policeman. And that was evident; there was no need to collude on it. If Quintus felt bad, let him quit; he, Ralph, was not going to do anything to ease a policeman’s conscience.

The search was a perfunctory one, but as messy as could be contrived. They had done it for the nuisance value, Ralph thought. Even so, he knew that Anna, standing against the wall, was trembling. He would have liked to turn to her, hold her in his arms, but he did not want to take his eyes from van Zyl’s eyes. He would not be the one to look away first.

Quintus ushered them from the office, grumbling. “I don’t know how you find anything in this place.”

“We’ve always managed,” Anna said. “But I don’t suppose we’ll manage now.”

Her voice was cool. Quintus shook his head. He spoke in Afrikaans to his colleague. Enough’s enough, he seemed to be saying. The men trooped out. They were left alone, with their papers scattered about the Mission House, as if a gale had blown through, or some apocalyptic wind.

The same day, late afternoon, Quintus turned up with a truck. “Got something for you,” he said, smiling as if he had not seen them earlier that day.

Two black boys leapt down from the back of the truck, and maneuvered onto the stoep a large filing cabinet, battered and scratched, dark green in color. “Just what you need, eh?” Quintus said.

“Oh, Quintus, a donation,” Anna said. She smiled, as if deeply touched.

Quintus did not know the difference between affectation and reality. “No need to thank me, man,” he said modestly. “It’s just scrap metal. We were throwing it out. A drawer fell out and broke the brigadier’s toe, that’s why.” He addressed Ralph. “So you take care and don’t be rough when you pull it out.”

“Cup of coffee?” Anna said. Like Ralph, she felt a sneaking pity for the man. Quintus sat down at the kitchen table. He said, “I know you don’t like me coming round here. But we’ve been told to keep an eye on you. Look, there are worse people in the force.”

“I know. We’ve met him,” Ralph said. The sergeant sat brooding over his cup. “Hell, man, you think I
like
my job? A man’s got to earn a living.”

“I get tired of hearing that,” Anna said. “There are other ways, surely?”

The sergeant reached into a pocket of his uniform, took out his wallet. To Ralph’s deep embarrassment, he drew from it a family snapshot. “My girls,” he said.

Ralph looked at it. Three daughters. Twelve, ten, and eight they might be. Graded by height, the arms of one sister around the waist of the next, blond heads leaning back onto the shoulder of a woman slighter, more modest than they, scarcely taller than the eldest girl. Filaments of hair escaped from their plaits, and stood out like halos as they smiled into the sun. Hitler’s wet dreams, he thought. He handed the photograph to Anna. “Beauties,” he said. “Your wife, Quintus, she looks a lovely girl.”

“When you’re a family man you’ll understand a lot you don’t understand now,” the policeman promised. “You think about them all the time, Jesus, you
worry.
What sort of a world are they going to grow up in? Are they going to marry kaffirs?”

“We don’t use that word here.”

“Oh, words,” the sergeant said. “That’s what gets to me about you people. Words.”

He didn’t explain his objection; he stood up, said he must be going. “Next time we come,” he said, indicating the filing cabinet, “you’ll have everything in the one place for us?” Tentatively, he touched his uniformed chest and winced. “Mrs. Eldred, could I trouble you? Have you got anything to take the acid off my stomach?”

“Quintus wants to be human,” Anna said, when he left.

“He must get another job then.”

That evening Koos came to the back door. Just for a few minutes; he wouldn’t eat with them. Couldn’t, really, he said. His jaw was swollen. He had lost two teeth. The police had called on him too. They had smashed their way through the front of his surgery, smashed in the windows—though everybody knew he slept in the room at the back. They said they wanted to talk to Luke Mbatha, the dispenser. They’d given Luke’s shack a going-over, and taken Luke away in a van.

Koos wanted Ralph to come down to the station, bringing what money he had by him, to try and bail Luke out. “God knows he’s no innocent,” Koos said. “But you know what happens to black men in police cells.” He had, he explained, no money of his own. The matter was urgent, he said, looking away. Otherwise he would not have come. They might have taken Luke Mbatha down the hill to Pretoria by now, and perhaps they would never find him again.

“Why didn’t you come before?” Ralph said.

“Because I can’t walk when I’m unconscious,” Koos said. His pale eyes were bloodshot, and his hands shook. One of the policemen had hit him in the face with a pistol butt, and then presumably hit him on the head, because he had come to at the house of one of his patients, lying on a pallet and covered with one of Anna’s knitted blankets. “A good blanket,” he said. “Very warm. Thank you, Anna.” He couldn’t remember much of what had happened. The policeman who hit him had called him a white kaffir. That sergeant, he said—not van Zyl. The thin one. The other. Quintus Brink.

They realized, over the next few days, that it was no longer safe to make telephone calls. They knew there was nothing seditious in their conversation. But anything could be twisted, and would be, and they knew that there were listeners on the line.

Van Zyl came by again—just visiting, he said—and it went badly. He stared at the filing cabinet as if he knew it from somewhere. “Any visitors last night?” he said.

“No.”

“You surprise me. You’re sure no visitors after dark?”

“I’m quite sure.”

“Any visitors in your servants’ quarters?”

“I can’t help you there. But I’m sure no one was on the compound whom you would be interested in.”

“Luke Mbatha has given them the slip,” Anna said from the doorway. She spoke derisively. Van Zyl was not pleased.

“Where did you hear that rubbish?”

“It’s not rubbish. I heard it on the street. Everybody knows it. How did he get away, Sergeant? Did he bewitch you? Did he bewitch the brigadier?”

Van Zyl got up from his chair, and tossed his paunch threateningly. “Tell your woman to watch her mouth,” he said. “Or she’ll feel my hand across it.”

“Out,” Ralph said.
“Voetsak,
Sergeant. Out of this house.”

It is the word you use to a dog, and only then if it is a dog of bad character. But van Zyl would not hesitate to use it, to a man of inferior race; Ralph believed now that there were inferior races, distinguished not by culture or genes, but by some missing faculty of pity.
“Voetsak,
Sergeant,” he said again, and moved toward him as if to push him out of the front door, across the stoep and down the steps into the yard.

Sergeant van Zyl knew he should not fight; he had received warnings about his excess of zeal. He attempted some sort of lumbering side step—so when Ralph did push him, he was not truly on course for the door. “You must be a stinking Jew,” the policeman told Ralph. “In my opinion, Hitler was right.” Ralph’s fists against his belly, he careered backward. His right arm flailed out, swept to the floor the papers from Anna’s temporary desk. He backed his calves into the wastepaper basket, overturned it, and, attempting to regain his balance, trod in it. Ralph would never forget the feeling of his hands sinking into the sergeant’s flesh. It gave him a shock, how easy it was to topple that great bulk.

The Special Branch came at three the following morning, and took them both away.

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

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

“Not quite,” Ralph said, frowning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have to go out,” Ralph said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the theory, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you go to the wells?”

“No, just to the shrine.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Cake that bad?” Emma inquired.

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps he shouldn’t have done.”

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

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

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

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

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