A Change of Climate: A Novel (16 page)

That summer he spent market days at Hunstanton, behind the Glasses’ stall; flapping canvas divided him from neighboring stalls, from the shiny acrylic clothing, the check workshirts, the nylon leopard-skin car-seat covers and rubber mats, the cheap lace tablecloths, the bright plastic kitchen gadgets, the inflatable toys for the beach. He felt himself grow an inch taller, his hair tousled, his face sunburned, a canvas bag of change thrown across his body in ammunition-belt style. As summer ended the sea turned to the color of mud, and soon came the wind that cut through the clothes, cut to the bone, propelling the shoppers inland toward the teashops and the amusement arcades.

Ralph said to him: “Look, I know you’re old enough to make up your own mind, but don’t get too involved, will you? Remember you’re off to university in October. You’ve worked hard for it, I don’t want you to be upset by anything, to have any, you know, regrets, or things pulling you back.”

Julian went over to the Glasses’ farm most days. He oversaw the vegetable plots, sawed logs, and mended fences. He thought about reglazing the greenhouse, but did not get around to it before it was autumn, and he had to go away.

Ralph worried. Possibly Anna worried, too; but he did not ask her to talk about it. He remembered Julian as a little boy at his first school, unable to tie his shoelaces or learn his times tables or do up his tie. Tears had been shed, about the tie. Julian did not mind that his mum or dad put it on for him, every morning; but there would be PE lessons, and he would have to take it off. Then he would not be able to put it back, he sobbed. And this was the problem: he would have to scramble it into some knot of his own devising, he could not manage the knot that society required; he would have to stretch and mangle it and treat it like a piece of string. Then, he wailed each morning, they would all know he was a spastic.

“You’re not a spastic,” Ralph said. “Is that what they say? It’s very naughty of them to call you that.” Ralph felt, when he placed the length of cloth around his child’s neck each day, that he was snaring him in a noose.

Then one tear-stained Wednesday afternoon, Kit had taken the situation in hand. She had re-formed the tangled mess which Julian had created, into its approved shape; then simply loosened it, eased it from beneath his collar, and lifted it over his head still knotted. She hung it on the end of his bed. “There,” she had said. “Now, in the morning, you see, just put it over your head.”

“Oh yes.” Julian’s face lit up. “Then all I have to do is—”

“Just pull the knot up,” Kit said. “Here you go.” She fastened his fingers around the short end of the tie. “Gentle, now—not too tight. That’s it. Lovely. Just you wait and see. They’ll all be copying you soon.”

Years later, Julian remembered Kit’s good idea with a pathetic gratitude. Even now when he was grown up, he said, no one had ever taught him anything so useful. Ralph wished he had thought of it.

He had not known how to help Julian; ordinary patience did not seem to be enough. He was slow to learn to read, slow to tell the time; when he tried to learn to write he seemed to be using a foreign alphabet. Even when he had mastered the letter shapes his progress was slow. He was always stopping to rub out what he had written and start again. His collection of erasers was something he prized. Robin sneaked to his mother that he had names for each one: Mouse and Cat and Mother Bear. Julian fell asleep over his reading books, exhausted by the effort of trying to comprehend them.

They took him for an eye test but his sight was perfect. Anna thought of him as a baby: his eyes always on their way from his mother’s face to somewhere else.

Julian had a long memory, longer than seemed possible. One day when he was six he said, where did the cat go, Emma?

“I haven’t got a cat,” Emma said.

“But you had, you had Freddie.”

He described the ancient tabby, vast and slow like a sofa on the move, its lop ear, its tail without a tip. Emma was astonished. Freddie had died long ago, before Julian could walk or talk. It was a prodigious feat of memory, truly extraordinary: Emma reported it to Anna and Ralph. Anna said, “He must have heard him described. I’m sure we’ve often talked about Freddie.”

Kit was listening. “Julian does have lots of memories,” she said. “And so do I. We can remember from before we were born.”

“Don’t be silly,” Anna said. “You know better. No one can do that.”

They plucked Julian out of the village school, saying that they had got him a place in a prep, weathering the skepticism of the headmistress. They kept him at home for a term, feeling guilty about it, and tried to teach him themselves. Mostly he played with bricks, building houses then knocking them down. But he started to look at books, just for the pictures. His fright diminished. Imperceptibly, very slowly and cautiously, he began to read.

The problems were not over; at least, his new teachers did not think so. Hard not to nag such a child, at home and at school. Julian was unpunctual, dreamy, sweetly polite but deeply uncaring. His conversation was intelligent but elliptical. He was seldom on time for anything; he did not seem to see the point of punctuality. Even when he reached his teens, he never wore a watch. “He’s a natural animal,” Kit said. “He goes by the sun.”

Julian was wary of surfaces, it seemed. When he drew a house he began with its contents. Pots and pans came first, objects in cupboards. Then beds and chairs; only then, walls and doors and windows. When he drew a tree he drew not just the trunk and leaves and branches but the roots, running deep under the soil, beyond the range of normal vision.

By the time he reached his teens Julian had adapted to the world, learned to fit in. Sporadically attentive, he passed just enough exams, with just the grades he needed; and passed them doggedly, until the prospect of university loomed—if that was what he wanted. Ralph tried to interest him in geology, thinking that the strenuous, outdoor aspect of it might appeal. But Julian associated the subject with the wrapped, labeled specimens which Ralph still kept in boxes in the attics. He seemed to have a peculiar horror of them: their broken traces, their dead-and-gone lives. Then Rebecca began to have her nightmares about the fossils. “You might get rid of them, give them to a museum,” Anna suggested. “You never look at them.”

True, he thought. I never do. He went up there one weekend, spent a bit of time unwrapping them, labeling them in his mind. There was the Devil’s toenail, fresh and horrible and impressive as ever, lying cold in his palm and smelling of the sea. Phylum: Mol-lusca. Class: Pelecypoda. Order: Pterioda. Family: Gryphacidae. Genus:
Gryphaea.
Species:
arcuata.
Old Nick’s remnant … he knew people, or his father had known people, who maintained that all fossils were planted in the rocks by Satan, to tempt scholars into scientific hypotheses, which led them from the knowledge of God. He put
arcuata
into his pocket and, downstairs, transferred it to the drawer of his desk. Why not keep it to hand? It was his trophy, taken in the battle for reason.

As soon as he arrived at his university, Julian wrote a long letter to Sandra Glasse. He received a picture postcard two weeks later, showing countryside views, clouds and church towers. He wrote again, asking her to visit him. She didn’t answer. He thought that probably she did not have the money for a train ticket; but if he sent the money, would she answer even then? Perhaps his letters were not arriving: perhaps the postman couldn’t be bothered to turn down the track.

He wrote to his father: would he consider driving over to. the farm to see if everything was all right? His father wrote back in surprise, to say that of course everything was all right; Sandra had been over a couple of times, turned up unexpectedly, hitched lifts, coast road to Fakenham, Fakenham to Bawdeswell, then walked to the house. He didn’t like her hitching lifts, in fact he was very upset, but she wouldn’t be told. Julian should write to her on that topic. He shouldn’t expect much by way of reply, she said she wasn’t used to writing letters.

Just before Christmas Julian wrote another letter, to his head of department. Then he packed his bags and took the train to Norwich; then hitched lifts and, changing his suitcase from hand to hand, walked the last few miles from the main road to the Red House. There he had stayed, ever since.

When he was not at the market, or working on the Glasses’ small-holding, he was underneath his new car; his old car that is, the one Emma had given him the money to buy. He coaxed it along; it got him to the coast and back. His new skills were undeniably useful; Anna’s car was now a barely coherent assemblage of rattles and squeaks, and the Citroen caused oily boys at garages to titter and roll their eyes and cast their rags to the ground.

Then there was the Glasses’ Morris Traveller to be rescued from its decrepitude and illegality. He told Ralph about the tax and insurance problem; Ralph immediately handed over some cash that had been earmarked for a new vacuum cleaner and some school clothes for Rebecca. Julian promised to mend the old Hoover; it had value as a technological curiosity, Ralph said, in a year or two they might be able to take it to London and flog it to the Science Museum. Rebecca did not really need new clothes—she would, on the whole, fit into her old ones. With school uniform, it is often heartening if you look a little different from the other girls.

Julian gave the money to Mrs. Glasse. No question of paying it back, he said, it wasn’t like that. “I just don’t want to think about you being pulled up,” he said, “or about the police coming round when I’m not here.”

“They’ll still come if they want,” Mrs. Glasse said. “You’d be surprised how many offenses there are, that a person can commit just without thinking about it. You know, I don’t want to take your money. But I can see that you want to give it.”

Even now they were legal, she would only take the car out on market days, she said. There was the problem of money for petrol. “You can’t knit petrol,” she said. “And they won’t let you barter for it.”

He did not tell Sandra about his sister’s school uniform, or about the row his parents had when the story came out. Privately, he agreed with his father; it was Anna’s fault, it was the fault of her habit of saving bits of money in pots and jars around the house, like some old granny in a cottage. It was too tempting for other people, when they had a prior need.

He did not tell Sandra because he knew she would think the row was ridiculous. She thought his family was rich; she said so.

“Oh, come on,” Julian said. “There’s four of us and none of us has earned anything yet. My mum’s a teacher but she had an illness and she hasn’t been able to work for years. My dad works for a charity, he doesn’t draw a big stipend, he just draws enough to keep us solvent.”

“There you are,” Sandra said. “Stipend. Solvent. Of course, we’re mostly solvent, because we never buy anything if we can help it. Money doesn’t enter into our calculations. I learned it in geography, it’s the only thing I recall. We’re a subsistence economy.”

“I think you’re proud of being poor,” Julian said.

“No, we’re not proud. We just don’t think about it. We just go along.”

“You could get benefits,” Julian said. “Other people do it.”

“Oh, we know all about that. My mum’s been to offices appealing for benefits. Sometimes you get things, other times you don’t. The trouble is, they keep you sitting in a waiting room for hours when you could be out trying to earn something. You get coughs and colds from the other people. Last time my mum went they asked her if she had a man friend. She said, better eat turnips all winter than talk to bureaucrats of romance.”

After Julian’s own household, constantly full of Visitors and their noisy upsets, the silence and peace of the Glasses’ farm was like a convalescence. Only one thing had changed: during his term away, somebody had given them a black-and-white television set. They watched all the soap operas, and discussed them in terms of gentle surprise, as if the characters were people they knew. They explained the characters to him, and he sat with them and watched, predicting the plot developments out loud, as they did. It was something new for him. There was a television set at home, but it was kept in the cold back sitting room, like an impoverished relative whom it was best not to encourage.

Also, they had discovered a big enthusiasm for storybooks. When Sandra had been over at the house one day Anna had taken her into Dereham to help with the weekly shopping, and at the secondhand bookstall Sandra had bought a book called
Middlemarch,
with the back off, priced 20p. They called this book “the book we’re reading,” and talked about Dorothea all the time, with the same mild interest, the same mild censoriousness. “That’s it,” Mrs. Glasse said. “When you’re young you just don’t know what you want in life. You’ve messed everything up before you find out.”

“The die is cast,” said Sandra.

Julian was confused by them. He was only a geographer; that, at least, had been his subject before he ran away. People from other faculties claimed that geography was a subject studied by slightly dim, marginal students, who enjoyed superfluous good health. It might be true: among those few people in his year with whom he had casual conversation, three or four said they were going to be schoolteachers, teach geography and games. He could not imagine teaching children anything—least of all, to kick footballs about or swing from ropes. If he was going to be healthy and stupid, he could do that at home.

So he reasoned. It didn’t seem to convince his mother. His father didn’t ask him any questions; strangely, though, this seemed to make him like his mother more and his father less. He’s not bothered about me, he said to Robin. He can’t get me to be a Good Soul, and I’m not enough of a Sad Case. He’s only worried about those spotty kids with carrier bags.

Not yet, you’re not enough of a Sad Case, Robin said.

One day in February, he went to bed with Sandra, upstairs in her large brass bed. Mrs. Glasse, downstairs, carried on knitting. Sandra bled all over the sheets.

“He’s drifting—that’s all.” Anna said. “When I ask him what he wants to do with his life, he changes the subject.”