A Change of Climate: A Novel (20 page)

“I wish it were.” Robin sighed. “So … what are you going to do then? Slope about getting on everybody’s nerves?”

“Do I do that?”

“No, but fuck it—there’s Julian living out his rustic fantasies, and Becky with a mental age of seven, and nobody but me with any sense of purpose these days.”

“Oh, sure,” Kit said. “Jack the Lad, aren’t you? On with the hockey pads. On with the cricket pads. Why don’t you take up schoolboy boxing and then you can get a padded helmet too? With that on you’d be totally impervious to life.”

They sat in silence, Robin slumped on the sofa, Kit curled into the chair, her legs drawn up into the skirt of her chain-store nightdress, which was too tight under the arms, and neither short nor long. “All these questions, Robin. I’ve never had a sensible discussion with you before.”

“And you aren’t now.”

“But you do have thoughts?”

“Yes.”

“Such as?”

“Such as why are we so miserable these days? Creeping around Julian and his obsessions.”

“You’d think Dad would laugh him out of it.”

“He doesn’t seem disposed to laugh.” Robin turned his head back to the TV screen. “West Indies 518.” He looked glum. “Only rain can save us now. What was that you were saying the other day, about going to Africa?”

“Yes. I mean it.”

“Do you want to do what they did, is that it?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why, do you admire it?”

“How can I? I have no information, do I? I don’t have a basis, to admire or not admire. Oh, I know about them going to prison— but even Emma won’t say much, and so you wonder what really happened and whether they …”

“Were tortured,” Robin said.

She gazed at her brother. “I’ve never been able to say it.”

“It is hard to say. I’ve practiced.”

“But then again I ask myself, why were they there in the first place? It was only a kind of colonialism. I put that to Dad once, but he said, we did what seemed right at the time. And I know he is good, he is practical, he does help people now and I expect he helped them then. But what use would I be?”

“If you go off to some place in Africa,” Robin said, “it won’t be to do something for the country, it will be to do something for yourself.”

“Do you know what frustrates me?” she said. “That I was born there, in Bechuanaland—Botswana, it is now—but I don’t have any memories.”

When she thought of Africa she thought of a clean place, full of light and air, the sun so hot that everything was sterilized, scoured clean by its glare. When she saw the pitiful babies on the famine posters it damaged the image she held inside. She did not know what to think when she saw the pictures from South Africa: glum men in suit jackets and woolen hats, trudging by railway tracks, and smoke blowing into a granite sky.

“I do remember one thing,” she said. “No, two things really. The first thing I remember is the feeling of heat.”

“Hardly strange,” Robin said.

“Yes, it seems obvious—but do you think that your body has memories that your mind doesn’t have access to?” She thought, heat seemed knitted into me; it was as if the sun were moulded into my flesh. “Even now, I’m surprised if I’m cold. It seems unnatural, it doesn’t seem right.” She paused, looking up at him to see if he was following her. “There is another thing, a little thing—we had a nurse, I asked Mum and she said her name was Felicia. She used to carry me on her back. I remember my cheek pressed between her shoulder blades, the feel of it, the heat of her skin through her dress. Isn’t that funny? I must have been very small. And then I remember Julian—I must have been older then, and I must have been in my cot or somewhere—I remember seeing Julian on her back, being carried the same way, with his head turned sideways, and fat legs dangling down. And knowing exactly what he felt—your head skewed against her spine, the bone at your …” she hesitated, “your temple, I suppose, though you didn’t have such words, that feeling of each separate bone in her spine, and skin against hot skin, just this layer of cotton between.”

“That’s odd,” Robin said.

“Yes.”

“I mean—because Julian wasn’t born in Africa.”

“Surely,” Kit said. “Because I saw him.”

“No. You can’t have. Add it up. Count on your fingers. Julian was born after they came home.”

“Who then? Who do I remember?”

A silence. They turned it over in their minds. Kit thought, I do remember Felicia: her skin smelled of onions and harsh soap. Robin said, “Perhaps you remember wrong. You were a baby yourself. Perhaps you think you remember, but you’ve made it up.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not wrong. Could it have been a neighbor’s child? That must have been it. But what neighbors? I’ve asked them, you know, what was it like? They’ve always said, it was very remote, there was only us.”

“Insofar as they’ve said anything.” Robin yawned, threw out his arms; but she had his attention, he was listening to her now, and this was an act, which said, I wish to distract myself from the thought in my head. “Don’t you think it must have been Felicia’s child?” he asked. “Her own baby?”

“No,” she said. “Not Felicia’s child, a white child. It was Julian. Surely?”

Again, a silence. Then Robin got up and went to the kitchen and made more coffee for them, and brought it back, cool and comfortless as the first mug had been, put it into Kit’s hands. Kit said, “Do you remember Joan? That woman who cut her wrists in the kitchen?”

“No. When was that?”

“You’d be six, maybe seven.”

“There, you see,” Robin said cautiously. “I ought to remember. Memory’s odd, it doesn’t work like it should. It’s unreliable.”

“I think they kept it from you,” Kit said. “You’d be out playing somewhere.”

“What happened?”

“I bandaged her up. Then she disappeared—took her things and went. I often wondered where she ended up.”

“Dad probably knows.”

“Yes.” Kit sighed. “We labor in his shadow. At least, that’s what I was telling Daniel. Or something of that sort.”

They sat on until it was three o’clock and they were stiff with cold, Kit sunk into her own thoughts, and Robin into his; then without a word they stirred, stretched, rose from their chairs. At the top of the stairs, Kit said, “Robin, another area of mystery is this. The heart complaint. Mum’s heart complaint that she’s supposed to have. I used to wonder why, if she had heart trouble, she never seemed ill. But do you think it might have been the other kind of heart complaint? Like when people say ’she has a broken heart’?”

Robin shivered, not from cold. “Surely, not that bad?”

“No.” Kit’s face was somber. “But of that order.”

Robin kissed his sister on the cheek. They parted without a word, crept into cold beds, slept at once.

Afternoon: on the beach at Brancaster, Ralph stretched out a hand to Amy Glasse, as if without his help she could not stand in the wind. “I used to bring Billy here,” she called. “Billy, my dog.” Stones and pebbles flew from under their feet.

It was high summer now. The sky was an inverted lapis bowl. Away from the sea, below the dunes and marram grass, a few families huddled behind windbreaks. Family dogs trembled by them, constrained by habit of obedience, quivering with a passion for the stones and air and waves. “Imagine when the seas were warm.” Ralph pulled her to his side. “There were tropical reefs. But in those days, there were no people to enjoy the sun.”

On the beach at Cromer they have found the bones of bison, the antlers of wild deer, the skeletal remains of wild horses. There were elephants at East Runton, bears at Overstrand; there were wild boars living at West Runton. Think of this, he tells her, as you watch the caravans roaming over the hills, as you catch the reek of onions from the seafront hot dog stalls.

“I found something as a boy,” he said. She pressed close to his side to catch his words. “A fossil.
Gryphaea.”

“What’s that?”

He traced the curve into her palm. He did not tell her what the balaclava man had called it; didn’t want the Devil to come between them.

“A shell. Very old?” Pale eyes looked into his. “Will we find one today?”

“It wasn’t here—it was near Whitby. I never found anything as good again.”

“It’s luck,” she said.

She put her hand in his. He felt her loose wedding ring snag against his palm. His son had made a kite and flown it that weekend on the heath near Holt; the kite was called “The Sandra Glasse.” But Sandra was a child, and trifles amused her, and you cannot give a woman wood and canvas and the slight prospect of rising above

the weather. Amy belonged to this coast; its jewels are jasper, moss agate, chalcedony. She should have jet from striped cliffs, to make a mourning ring for the life that was. And amber, next March; it is washed ashore, it waits for the lucky, it is tangled with the seaweed thrown up by the spring gales.

“Enough,” she said. She wrapped her arms about herself, a parody of the athlete in pain. “I’ve walked far enough.” He held her upright, gathering her hair into one hand and holding it away from her face, sweeping it back into an unraveling topknot. He fitted her arm into his. They turned, and the wind was against them. It was a warm wind, and peppered their skin with sand. Through narrowed eyes they could see the sand swirling before them, like smoke. Sometimes they had to stop, and shield their faces. The sand blew into their mouths, between their teeth. It was like biting on diamonds.

He drove her home. They stopped at a store and bought peaches. They sat together in the kitchen. Amy Glasse took a sharp knife from the dresser and brought it to the table. She gave the knife to Ralph. He took one of the peaches and cut into it. It was a yellow-fleshed peach, its skin as rough as a cat’s tongue, and its ripeness spread out from the stone like a bloody graze.

Later still they went upstairs and lay in the double bed, under a quilt—the second—that Sandra Glasse had made. Amy put her long white arms around him and locked his body into hers. It was as if there were a key and she had found it: a code, and she had broken it. Afterward she cried for a moment, almost without a sound, her head turned into the pillow. He did not know what he felt: not guilt, not yet. Love, certainly; yes, he felt that. Her hair spread over her shoulders like a fan of feathers; her spine seemed dipped into her flesh, like a shallow channel scraped through wax.

That afternoon, Kit was at her aunt’s house in Foulsham. They sat together in the kitchen, the half door open to admit the sunshine, elbows propped on the table and a pot of tea cooling between them. “So what are you asking me?” Emma said. “About Daniel?”

“For your advice.”

“Kit! Come on now! You know I never give advice!”

“Make an exception.” Kit looked at the table top. Absently she scraped at it: delicately, with her fingernail. “Emma, what is this disgusting thing? It looks like the remnant of a squashed baked bean.”

“Quite likely.” Emma grinned. “You know they say every cloud has a silver lining, and the only good thing about losing Felix is that I no longer have to concoct a delicious little
diner a deux
every time we fall out of bed. Baked beans are very nutritious, let me tell you.” The light faded in her face; Kit watched her eyes fade, sharp blue to gray. “One thing about Felix, though, was how he was made happy with strong drink. Two big gins with a waft of vermouth and he’d be off back to Blakeney to dine
a deux
with Ginny, and some appetite still left. You know, Kit, they write all sorts of rubbish about people having affairs. Their tortured souls, and so on. But how is a man to eat two dinners? That’s the question they should look into.”

Kit’s hand lay on the table: large, white, capable. She wanted to place it over her aunt’s, but taste restrained her. Emma fitted her knuckles into her eye sockets, and ground them around, carefully. “Sorry, sweetheart. All I can say about Daniel is this—ask yourself, how will you feel if he goes off and marries someone like Ginny?”

Kit paused. “Okay, I think.”

“Then that’s not the real question, is it?”

She shook her head. “It’s home, you know. And me, me myself. I’m asking you for information, Emma.”

Emma looked up. “For information or knowledge?”

“Are they different?”

Emma didn’t reply.

At midnight the train stopped. Anna raised herself on one elbow, then scrambled from the top berth, reaching out with her bare toes for a foothold. She swung herself to the floor, pulled down her nightdress, and put her head out of the window. A man was walking by the side of the track. She could not see him, but she could hear the crunch of his boots. She could see the tip of his lighted cigarette, bobbing and dipping with each step.

Ralph said, “What time is it?” He eased himself from the lower berth, put out his head in turn. A moonless night. Not a breath of wind. Useless to ask, why have we stopped, when will we go again? Best just to wait. They had crossed the border. They were in Bech-uanaland, moving north through the night. Not moving now: becalmed. They had been late at Mafeking, late at Lobatsi; “I’ll give you a bed,” the conductor had told them. “You can try sleeping two hours, three. You’ll reach your station before dawn.” He brought two flat pillows and two railway blankets, and four sheets that were as white and crisp as paper.

“There must be a village.” Ralph had picked out the glow of a fire, far to their left. If there had been a wind, it might have brought voices to them. Closer at hand, a baby was crying, ignored, from some outlying hut: Anna heard the thin insistent wail.

She climbed back to her bed. She had wanted the top berth because she felt there was more air, with no other body stacked above hers. It was December now, midsummer; sunset brought some relief from the heat, but it was best if you kept moving. Ralph passed up their bottle of water. It was tepid and stale. She closed her eyes, and disposed her body carefully so that no part of it touched any other part. But the berth was narrow; she folded her hands across her ribs, till the heat and weight of them became unbearable.

The night settled about her like a black quilt. Lucy Moyo had packed a bag for her in Elim, and handed it to her at the prison gate; her cotton nightdress had been starched and smelled of the iron, but now it was a sodden rag. The sheets the guard had given them were rucked damply beneath her hips. Her hair stuck to her neck; she put her arms by her sides again, looked up at the roof of the train. It was a metal coffin lid, a coffin in the air. Hands folded, she made a decorous corpse.

She imagined her voice, floating down to earth. “I think I am pregnant, Ralph.”

What then? What if she said it? What would they do? Lurch from the train at some desert halt, and begin to navigate their passage back to civilization? How would they do it? The South Africans might not let them back over the border. They had been given the choice: take the plane home, or the train north.

She thought of herself decanted into the winter at East Dere-ham, her trunks bumping up the stairs of her parents’ house for storage in the attics; she imagined rubbing together her blue hands, while she tried to explain their situation.
You’ve been in prison, Anna? A daughter of ours, in jail?
And they would have no place in the world, no future mapped out for them; they would be like fish hauled out of the water, gasping in a strange element, writhing on the hooks of expectation unfulfilled.

No, she thought. My lips are sealed.

She dozed. The train began to move. It carried her onward, into a world of dust.

The Security Branch had come for them before dawn: parking their vehicles outside the compound, and knocking politely, persistently, on the front door of the Mission House until Ralph admitted them. “Will you get dressed, Mrs. Eldred, please? And pack a bag?”

They began another search. They emptied the contents of the wastepaper baskets into bags to take away, and noted the titles of the books on the shelves. They went through the out-tray and read the addresses on the envelopes waiting for the mail. “Who is Dr. Eldred, please?”

“My sister,” Ralph said.

The letter was laid down again. It would go all the way to Norwich, greased by a policeman’s fingertips.

When one of the men approached the filing cabinet, Ralph and Anna exchanged a glance. One impatient pull … they waited for the top drawer to sail from its runners and break the policeman’s toes. But these officers were circumspect, almost reverential. “We give a receipt for anything we take away,” one explained. The drawer remained anchored, innocuous. The policemen went about their work quietly, as if not to injure or alarm the incriminating evidence. The mission staff—Rosinah, Dearie, Clara the washerwoman, Jakob and his boy assistant—had been brought from their beds to stand in a line outside the back door. Their quarters were being searched. With the same creepy-fingered care? Ralph doubted that. “Let me speak to them,” he said. “Just to reassure them.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Eldred,” said the officer in charge. “My men will do all the reassuring that is needed.”

“Mrs. Eldred?” They had brought a female officer; she touched Anna’s arm. “I must come with you while you get your things together.”

“Things?” Anna said.

“For a time away from home,” the young woman said.

“Where do you think you are taking me?”

“You have to …” The girl looked aside. She had a tender skin, a north European skin, and blushed easily; she was not hardened to her trade. “To prison, Mrs. Eldred.”

“To prison.” Anna digested it. The pause made her sound cool. “To prison for how long? And why? On what charge?”

The female officer glanced at her superior. She didn’t know the answer. An expression of impatience crossed the man’s face. “Just take her,” he said.

In the bedroom Anna pulled drawers open, aimless and distracted. She could not stop her hands from trembling. The female officer sat on the bed. “You hurry up now,” she said, not unkindly. “Bring your nightie. Bring soap and your toothbrush. And your sanitary protection if you think you might need it.”

When her bag was packed the woman stood up and took it from her. She ushered her back to the sitting room. The double doors to the front stoep stood wide open. The two officers had gone, and taken Ralph with them.

It was only then that Anna understood that she and Ralph would be separated. She broke away. The woman officer leaped after her, catching at her arm. A man standing outside on the steps slammed the wire door of the stoep back into her face. She heard a car drive away. She put her fingers against the netting of the stoep, as if to force them through.

There was an iron bedstead and a stained mattress; traces of vomit, menstrual blood. She had to force herself to sit down on it, but she thought it was a good sign that they had not given her sheets and blankets. Perhaps they would ask some questions, and release her before the day was out. Dawn came, her first dawn in prison. She listened to the morning sounds, still and attentive: her hands in her lap, her spine sagging slightly. They had taken away her watch, but she estimated that it was about seven o’clock when the door was unlocked. A wardress brought in a tin tray, and put it down on the metal locker by the bed. She went out again without speaking. The key turned in the lock. She heard the stout shoes squeak away.

Left alone again, she investigated the tray. There was a bowl of mealie-porridge. The spoon seemed encrusted with the remains of other, long-ago breakfasts. Quelling her revulsion she brought a spoonful of the food to her mouth, but before she tasted it she gagged, and a wash of nausea lapped over her. It ebbed, left her shivering and light-headed. She dropped the spoon into the porridge and put the bowl back on the tray.

There was a beaker of coffee; it was no longer hot, but she held it between her hands for comfort. She took a sip; it tasted of nothing. Comfort receded.

The third item on the tray was a cob of brown bread. She broke some off and put it into her mouth. It stuck there, unnegotiable, like a stone. Last night at Flower Street, she had complained it was too hot to eat. She had meant to get up early, boil an egg predawn.

Some time later—perhaps an hour—the unspeaking wardress returned. She brought a water jug with a cover, and stood holding it while she waited for Anna to move the tray. In her other hand was a bucket. She put it down by the bed. “Is that what I must use?” Anna said; looking up, without belligerence, wanting nothing but to learn the rules.

The wardress indicated the tray. “You don’t want that?” She picked it up without waiting for an answer.

“Can I have my bag?” Anna said. “Can I have my watch?”

The door clicked shut. The key grated. She was alone again. Her hands returned to her lap. She examined the crack in the cell’s wall. From the base it ran a meandering course, to a height of four feet. Then other cracks seemed to spring from it, creeping wide of their source. It was like the delta of some great river. Anna took her handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed its corner into the water jug. She laid the damp linen first against one eyelid, then against the other. Don’t cry, dont cry, she said to herself. Let this be in place of tears.

At intervals, the spyhole in the door would flick open. She would raise her face to it: let them see that I have nothing to hide, she thought, not even a covert expression. She wondered if they came to stare at her on the hour; she began to count. She thought, by the heat in the cell and what she could see of the sunlight, that it might be midday when the door opened again.

A different wardress.
“Kom.”

“Where?”

“Fingerprints.”

They took her along the corridor to a room furnished only with a table and two chairs. A second wardress took her flinching hand, straightened her fingers and pressed them into the pad of black grease. On the waiting paper, she saw loops, whirls, smudges like ape prints. It was hard to believe they belonged to her.

They let her wash her hands then, but she could not get the slime from under her fingernails.

When she came out into the corridor, an African woman in a prison dress was kneeling, scrubbing brush in hand, a scum of soapy water widening around her in a pool. She was singing a hymn, her voice strong, unwavering. When she saw Anna she stopped singing. She sat back on her haunches to watch her pass. Anna looked down into her face; then over her shoulder, to see the woman bend her back again. The soles of her bare feet were a grayish-white, hard as hooves. The hymn followed her as they swung open the cell door:

“How dearly God must love us, And this poor world of ours, To spread blue skies above us, And deck the earth with flowers.”

When the light began to fail, they tossed two blankets into the cell, and brought in her bag. She had packed her hairbrush and a comb but she had no mirror. She could not think why it seemed so important to see her own face. She said to the wardress, “You haven’t got a mirror in your pocket, have you? That I could borrow just for a minute?”

“What do you think, that I’m a beauty queen?” the woman said. She laughed at her own joke. “It’s against the rules,” she said. “You might hurt yourself, you see? Try and sleep now.”

Early in the afternoon there had been another tin tray, with a bowl of broth this time. She had stirred the ingredients without much hope, disturbing cabbage and root vegetables and what might be scraps of meat. Globules of fat lay on the surface, and when she brought the spoon to her mouth the morning’s reaction repeated itself, and she thought she would vomit. The last meal of the day had been another beaker of weak coffee and a hunk of bread. She regretted now that she had let them take away the bread untasted. She was so hungry that her stomach seemed to be folding in on itself, curling into a hollowness above her navel. “Can you help me?” she said to the wardress. “I couldn’t eat earlier, I was feeling sick. Can I have some bread?”

The woman hesitated. “I’ll see,” she said.

She went out, banging the door, rattling her keys. An electric light flicked on overhead, taking Anna by surprise. Anna waited, unmoving, under its glare.

She’ll not come back, she thought. But after some time the woman did return, with bread on a plate and a smear of margarine.

“I can’t let you have a knife,” she said. “You’ll have to do the best you can.”

Anna took the plate. “I’m grateful.”

Then the woman took an apple out of her pocket. “Don’t tell anybody.” She put it down on the metal locker.

Anna said, “Do you know what is going to happen to me? Can you tell me where my husband is?”

“Don’t take advantage,” the wardress said.

“I want to write a letter. I have things to do. I work at a mission you see, in Elim, Flower Street, and there are things I have to take care of. I have to give instructions, or nothing will be done.”

“I dare say they got on all right before you came,” the woman said.

“I ought to be given access to a lawyer.”

“You must take that up with the colonel.”

“When can I see him?”

“In time.”

It was the least hopeful sentence she had heard that day. When the wardress had gone she broke open the cob of bread and tore out the middle, wiping it into the margarine and forcing it into her mouth. She held the apple for a long time before she ate it, running her fingers over its shape, admiring its innocence, its cleanness. She ate it in mouselike nibbles, and wrapped the core carefully in her handkerchief, so that tomorrow morning she would at least be able to taste the juice on her tongue. She held off using the bucket for as long as she could, but in the end she had to squat over it, the metal rim cold against her thighs. She felt debased by the dribble of urine that would be her companion all night, and would be there for her when she woke in the morning.

They did not take her to see the colonel the next day, but the wardress who had given her the apple brought in a pillow, a pillow case, and a pair of sheets. At least one more night then, Anna thought.

“Did you eat your breakfast this morning?” the woman asked.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You ought to try.”

“Will you get me another apple? I’d be so grateful.”

“Yes, I dare say you would.”

“Do you think they would let me have something to read?”

“That’s for the colonel to decide. I couldn’t decide that.”

“Would it be possible for someone to go to my house and get me a change of clothes?”