A Change of Climate: A Novel (27 page)

Dawn came late. Felicia had gone, and taken everything from her hut, all her possessions; she had packed and flitted, in an orderly and premeditated way. There was blood on the kitchen walls, and less noticeable blood, dark and slippery, on the red cement floors. Ralph, white as a bandage, lay cocooned in other bandages. The light was splintered, refracted, full of water; the grass moved, the bush moved, the earth seemed to shiver and shift.

Anna walked, tottering, between Salome and an Englishman who appeared to be an official, perhaps a kind of policeman. Everything will be done, she was told; for, Mrs. Eldred, this is unprecedented, we have never before in the history of this country recorded the abduction of a white child, of two white babies, and from their family’s compound at night—no, Mrs. Eldred, there has been nothing like it.

She thought, because there is no precedent, they wish to believe it cannot be true. They wish me to say that, finding myself alone, finding this shattered bottle welded to my palm, I ventured out, saw my husband half dead on the floor, saw by the light of my lamp the blood on the walls; that I proceeded then into my children’s room, saw that their nurse was gone, saw the doors open, saw all the doors of the house open, saw the wind and rain flying in—saw my children’s beds empty, but no: no, there I was mistaken, for there is no precedent for it, it has never been heard of, such monstrosities cannot be entertained. I was mistaken when I thought my twins were gone; my son, Matthew, my daughter, Kit. They were safe all the time, dear policeman. My husband’s lifeblood had to be washed from the walls, and I am the woman who did it; but no, in this matter of my twin children, I was mistaken. I must be. You cannot bear it, otherwise, your official burden is too great. For if they are really missing, you must track them now, in the fractured light of the day after the storm: the country awash, the mud sliding, the fords in flood … Anna broke away from them, from the supporting restraining hands, and walked alone in the gardens, red mud caking her bare legs, her arms wrapped across her chest, walking, walking, while living creatures scattered from her feet.

It was nine o’clock that morning when Anna found her daughter. The party on the stoep saw her stumble toward them, holding in her arms what they believed to be a baby’s corpse. They saw her approach them through a shivering silver light: like a woman breaking through sheets of glass, like a woman plowing through mirrors. One child in her arms, but only one: plucked from the snake-seething ditch, plucked from muddy-brown water, blood-caked, rigid, frozen. Hands reached out again—to pull into the circle of humanity the bereft woman, the tiny carcass.

“Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” Salome moaned. “That God in all his goodness should send this trouble to you.”

But then the child began to utter: not to cry, but to make a jarring, convulsive, sucking sound, louder and louder with each breath, as if her tiny ribcage were an uncoiling spring.

After a month Ralph wrote to his uncle James:

There is no news. If in two weeks there is still no news we are to return to England. After all, they say, they can carry on the search without us—and they will carry it on, and thoroughly, I have confidence in that, if in nothing else. Still, I dread the thought of leaving here, because the day we leave we will be admitting to ourselves that there is no hope.

I am much better than when I wrote last. I was “lucky,” the doctor said. I’m afraid I laughed in his face. Anna and I, we dislike being in different rooms now, and we never let Kit out of our sight. The same doctor who told me I was lucky said that this was a shock reaction and it would wear off, and that we must expect to find in ourselves certain oddities of behavior, jump at any noise, suffer nightmares, and so on. I don’t suffer nightmares, because I don’t sleep.

I feel I am living in an alien world now. I know that is one of those phrases that your brain reaches for when it’s tired, but I can’t think of any other way to express it. To be more exact I feel that I am suspended, that I am like someone hanged, that the ground has been dug out from under me, or my support kicked away. This woman, Felicia, the children’s nanny, how could she do it? There is no doubt that it was planned. I must have told you in my earlier letter that Felicia had packed her clothes—everything in her room was gone. The two men brought a truck—the police found the tire tracks. And Felicia stayed in the house that night, whereas for some months she had been in the habit of going back to her own room as soon as the twins were settled. I thought it was the storm that made her want to stay by the fire—but she was staying for another purpose. If I had not let the men in, she would have let them in. I suppose that might be some comfort to me. But then, it isn’t. There is no comfort. I am the one who opened the door to them. They said they wanted shelter. I decided to do a good action, and by it my life has been split open and destroyed.

James, can you please explain to my mother and father and to Emma what we think has happened—I mean, can you explain to them that it is not likely Matthew has been taken for ransom? I can’t write it in a letter. Besides, people in England wouldn’t believe that crimes of such a nature occur. I would not have believed it myself, but when we were in Elim our doctor, Koos, told me one day about medicine murders. So when I asked the police why anyone would take my boy—and they told me—I knew I should believe them. They don’t know how many children are stolen in a year and sold to the witch doctors. Sometimes children, older children, wander into the bush. The disappearance is not reported because there is no one to report it to. These children never come back. Perhaps animals kill them, or they starve. That is possible, of course.

Anna believes that Matthew may still be alive, and that is what she fears most. She says “If he is dead, he is not suffering now.” But she is not sure. There is not a moment when we can be sure of anything.

There is of course a hope, a possibility, that the police will arrest these people. After all, we can identify Felicia and Enock, though I could not swear to recognize the man who stabbed me. If they are caught, perhaps they will tell us what happened to Matthew, but I am given every reason to doubt it. When these cases come to court no one will ever give evidence. They are too afraid of the witch doctors, I am told. If they are caught, they will probably be hanged. That matters nothing to me, one way or the other. I have no feelings about it. I would only want them to speak—so that I can know, so that we can know our little boy is dead, so that we can mourn for him. It is hard to mourn when there is no body to bury. I think—I try to imagine—how many people have said that in the history of the world. But most of them have entertained some hope, I suppose, whereas we must accept that there probably never will be a funeral. In these cases the police never find an identifiable victim. One man said to me, “Sometimes we find traces.” I asked him what he meant by traces, and he said, “Substances, in bottles and jars.”

Why was Kit spared? They wanted the boy, that’s clear. They could have taken and killed her too, but perhaps there would have been no money in it for them. It seems a strange impulse of grace, to lay a baby down in a ditch, with a storm raging. She could have drowned in that ditch, or have died of cold before we found her, or have been savaged by an animal. It seems to me that she has been selected for life, and her brother for death. I shall always have to think about this. And I do not think the years that pass will make it easier to understand. Do you?

Kit is a strong child. She cries a lot now—for her brother, we suppose—but she is too little for us to explain anything to her. It is a blessing, in a way—you see that I am looking very hard for blessings, James. She will never remember what has happened. We mean never to tell her. Because how, in God’s name, would we begin? I want you to impress this, to impress this very strongly, on my mother and father and on Emma, that as Kit grows up she must be protected from knowledge of this horrible thing. If she learns about it, it will contaminate her life.

I wish we had never left England. I do not believe that any good we have done here can compensate for a hundredth part of what we have suffered, and for what we will suffer as our lives go on. It seems to me impossible that we will ever lead lives like other people, or that anything ordinary and normal and safe will ever be within our reach again.

Don’t advise me to pray, because I don’t feel that prayers meet the case. I wonder about the nature of what I have been praying to. Before now I have looked at the world and I have seen no compelling evidence of the goodness of God, but I chose to believe in it, because I thought it was more constructive to do so. I thought that not to believe in it was a vote for chaos. I thought there was order in the world, at least—a kind of progress, a meaning, a pattern. But where is the pattern now? We’ve tried blaming ourselves, but we are not very convincing at it. If I had dealt earlier with this man Enock, if Anna had not insulted him … if I had not opened the door. I accept that I made choices and they were wrong, but then I think, too, that our lives have been ruined by malign chance. I do not see any pattern here, any sense, any reason why this had to happen.

James, in his office in the hostel in the East End, turned over the letter. On its back he wrote, “If it is chance, can it be malign? If it is malign, can it be chance?”

From beyond the flimsy partition he heard the broken and shabby men in his care, going about their evening routine. He heard the thump and scrape of furniture, the clink of spoon against tin mug. He heard the reiterated wild shout of a frequent customer of his, a tramp with presenile dementia: “Tommy didn’t do it. Tommy didn’t do it, Tommy didn’t … he never.”

Tommy didn’t do it, he thought. No, no, he pushes off the blame, he places it elsewhere. And Enock didn’t do it? God did it. Ralph will think so, anyway. How not—if God made us, if God made us as we are, if he is all powerful, all knowing—could he not have stretched out his arm? In Ralph’s mind, God works through Enock now, just as once God worked through Hitler. He will think it is God that plunged the knife into his back and took his child and cut him into pieces, dissected his child alive.

A wash of bile and saliva rose into James’s mouth. He struggled not to vomit. He rose from his chair, gripping the arms. Let no one come in; he cannot face them, cannot meet human eyes. Animals are better than we are, he thought; they do what they must. Pounce, tear, suck the blood; it is their nature, God has made them so and given them no choice.

He moved heavily across the room to the small window, which was barred against thieves. He looked out at an East End evening: wastepaper scudding in autumn gutters, and cabbage leaves from some street market, white veins shining in the dusk. Early darkness: months ahead of rain and fog, slush and thaw. God had to permit his creations to do evil; it was the penalty of giving them a choice. Animals have no choice; it is why they are different from us. If we could not choose to do evil, we would not be human. I will tell him this, he thought, tell his poor wife. I will not say what I have often thought: that animals, who have no choice and so commit no crime, may have a guarantee of heaven, but that we, who are God’s apes, may be shut out for eternity in the cold and the dark.

From beyond the office door the banging and clattering grew louder. He heard cursing. No doubt there was a fight about to break out; perhaps one of the old men had fallen over, or pulled out a knife. James turned from the window, caught sight of himself in a square of dusty mirror that hung on the opposite wall; saw a spare and desiccated old man, worn by humility, sucked dry by the constant effort of belief. He spoke aloud for a moment, as if Ralph and his wife were in the room with him. “Anna, there is nothing, there is nothing worse, there is nothing so burdensome … there is nothing so appallingly hard … as the business of being human …” His voice died in his throat. I should take that mirror down, he thought, I have often meant to do it, glass is a danger in a place like this.

When Ralph and Anna returned to England they began at once upon the business of finding a house. Practical considerations would not go away; there were decisions to make. Anna had talked only briefly, grudgingly, about her missing child. What was the point of talking? she asked. No one could share her feelings. No one could enter into them.

“Anna, don’t injure yourself more,” James said. “There is a thing people do—when they have been hurt, they hurt themselves again, they compound the damage. Don’t become bitter. That’s all I ask.”

“It’s a great deal to ask,” Ralph said.

“Next, James,” Anna said, “you’ll be asking me to forgive.” A kind of hard jauntiness had entered her voice; it was her usual tone now.

“No, I wouldn’t ask that. Not yet.”

“Good,” Anna said. “I am not up to the effort.”

“If you could think,” James said, “that there are some things that God does not control or will, then you could ask God for comfort … but it’s very difficult, Anna.”

“It’s impossible,” she said. “I asked God for comfort when I came home to Elim every night, and saw these beaten people waiting for me on the stoep—but God kept very quiet, James. God did nothing. It was up to me to do something, but I acted within constraints—I tried to be good, you see, I felt the love of God biting into my wrists like a pair of handcuffs. So what did I offer these people? Bandages and platitudes. Suppose my training had been different? I might have stepped on the train to Cape Town with a revolver in my bag, I might have shot Dr. Verwoerd—then I might have done some good in the world. Now, James—when I had in the room with me the man who was going to kill my child—when I had in my hand a broken bottle, suppose I had drawn the edges across his eyes? Suppose I had sliced his eyes to ribbons, suppose I had severed his veins and made him bleed to death? Then I would have done some good in the world.”

“Anna—” he said.

She saw the fear in his face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You leave me alone, James, and I’ll leave you alone. You don’t come at me with your theology, and I won’t stop Ralph doing his job. It was planned that he should take over the Trust, yes? So there’s no reason to change the plan. It doesn’t matter what I think, inside myself. Nobody could imagine or know what I think, inside myself. But I promise you I won’t stand up in church and bawl out that it’s all a sham. We’re professional Christians, aren’t we, Ralph and me? That’s how we make our living. Why should we be poor, when every hypocrite is rich?”

No one had seen her cry, not once; not from the beginning. Emma knew right away, when she met them at the airport: “Anna is too angry to cry. She is almost too angry to breathe.”

They found a house quite easily. Emma’s friend Felix drove them through the country lanes, away from the bustle of Norwich: which seemed to them, after their time in the wilderness, like some vast metropolis. Felix stopped his car under a tree by a red-brick, rambling, ill-proportioned house: “It needs work,” he said. “But it will accommodate both your office and your family.”

He looked over his shoulder at Anna, in the backseat. No point trying to avoid the word. Anna was expecting another baby. Everyone said it was the best thing that could have happened.

They went inside. “The drawing room,” Felix said.

They moved into the light of the long windows. Anna noticed how they were liberally bespattered with mud; Ralph noticed the paneled shutters of old pine. He admired the wide staircase, the lofty ceilings; she breathed the house’s air, the compound of strange molds and the trapped smoke of long-dead fires. “We must have it,” he said. Anna shook her head. But then she felt—or thought she felt—the child move inside her. She registered its claims. She thought of having more children, many children, to fill the aching void of grief.

They moved into the house three months before Julian’s birth; two months after the birth, Ralph’s father died. It was a shock, because he had seemed a fit man; but last year’s news from abroad, the news carried in Ralph’s first incomprehensible and distressing letter, had dealt him a terrible blow. The whole business perplexed and maddened him; he was used to taking control of life, but now here was a problem without a solution, the theft of a child he had not seen in a country he could not imagine. When his son came home he seemed unable to speak to him, barely able to be in the same room. James said, “To some people, great grief is an indecency. They cannot look at it. They blame the bereaved.”

Matthew became, more than ever, subject to sudden outbursts of temper, to seizures of indignation about the state of the world. The sight of Julian—his second grandson—made him want his first; it made him rage with disbelief and dismay. “Why did you go?” he said to Ralph one day. “You didn’t need to go. The missions must be staffed, but you needn’t have gone, you shouldn’t have gone, there were plenty more experienced people to go. Pride made you do it, I think—pride, and being above yourself, knowing better than other people. That’s always been your fault, boy.”