A Change of Climate: A Novel (28 page)

Ralph said, “You want to know why I went to Africa? I’ll tell you. I went to get away from you.”

The day after the quarrel, Matthew suffered a stroke. Ralph never spoke to him again—or rather, he spoke, but the old man gave no sign of hearing or comprehending, though somehow Ralph believed he did both. Ralph whispered to him: forgive me, for the things I have done that hurt you, and for the things that hurt you that I didn’t know I had done.

By his father’s deathbed he felt himself begin to grow up. He said, after all, my father was not so old himself in the days when he treated me so badly. He was still learning the world, he felt responsibility heavy on his back. It is hard to be a father; no doubt he was not malicious, no doubt he did the best he could. “Please forgive me, because I forgive you,” he whispered. His father died after three days, the pardon ungranted.

What to do now, with ordinary grief, ordinary guilt? All emotions seem attenuated in the wake of the one great disaster. “Nothing can hurt you worse,” Ralph’s mother said. “Nothing can hurt you worse than you have been hurt already. I don’t expect you to cry for him, Ralphie. Let’s just get him buried.”

After this, Dorcas moved in with them, a carpet-slippered presence in the drafty hall of their new house.

It’s not so easy to return from Africa, even when circumstances are favorable and the return is planned. Hostilities against the cockroach and the ant cease only gradually. A mark on the wall converts itself into a crawling tick, and there is effort and vigilance all the time—it is hard to sit in the fitful English sunshine, in the heat without threat, harmless insects brushing your bare arms. It was more than a year before Anna could bring herself to leave a plate or a cup on a table; after it had been used, she would snatch it away and wash it, to thwart the advancing carpet of crawling greed. “Poor Anna,” people said. “She’s always on the go. She’ll wear herself out, that girl.” The words used about her, the trite kindnesses, had a sting of their own. There had been a tragedy in her life, and no one here had the terms for it. In winter the weight of her clothes oppressed her; wool and shoe leather chafed and cramped and squeezed.

And how England looks like itself! After the white light, the sun that bleaches out color and destroys perspective, here are the discrete, exclusive Old Master tints, sienna, burnt umber, indigo: the dense conifers in shadowed ranks, the tan flash of stripped bark, the flush on the trunk of silver birch at sunset; breath on the raw air, and owls calling at dead of night. Another spring will come, and summer: green layered on green, the mossy wall, the lichened fence; and drowsing horses beneath an elm, flanks fly-buzzed, necks bowed, dreaming of George Stubbs.

So now, where should they begin? How should they coordinate their slow crawl back from the desert? What should they say? What could they tell people? Who was entitled to the whole story, and who could be kept at a distance with a half-truth?

Anna’s parents knew the facts—knew the probabilities, that is— but they settled for not talking about them. They pretended that they were sparing their daughter’s feelings, but really they were sparing their own. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for catastrophe. They worshipped routine;
events
were dubious matters, and often in bad taste. It was a form of showing off, to have things happen to you. “Of course, it’s terrible, a horrible thing, dreadful,” Mrs. Martin said, “but although I don’t say so, of course, I blame him for taking her there in the first place. He could have had a nice job with his father, there was no need to trail halfway across the globe.”

The Martins had spent much of their lives beating the drum for the Christian faith, getting up jumble sales and flower shows so that the dark races could have the benefit of the company of brisk young Englishmen who were familiar with the Psalms and (among other Books) the Book of Job. But they did not expect to have one of these young Englishmen in their back parlor behind the shop, frozen and speechless with misery. They did not expect the Book of Job to have any practical application.

And friends of the families—what to tell them? They flinched from detail, and Ralph flinched more than Anna. He thought, if we tell them what we think has happened, we will pander to their filthy prejudices, we will seem to traduce a whole nation: savages, they will say.

It was possible to say, “We lost our son.” That covered everything. Few people inquired further. Rather, they would shy away, as if the bereaved might break down in front of them, lie on the floor and howl. It was surprising how vague people were, even the people who claimed they had been praying for them every Sunday. I thought the young Eldreds had two children, people would say, didn’t I hear from somewhere that they had twins? Unease would cross their faces; was there some story about it, an accident perhaps, or was it just that the child succumbed to a tropical fever? Ralph had feared intrusive questions, but instead there was an indifference that he felt as an insult. He made a discovery, common to those who expatriate themselves and then return: that when he and Anna went abroad they had ceased to be regarded as real people. Out of sight, out of mind. Nobody, even the most generous donor to mission appeals, wanted to hear anything about Africa.

In the early years after their return, huge areas of reference were excluded by their family, their close friends. They were surrounded by acres laid waste, acres of silence. Slowly, cautiously, normality tiptoed back; the family no longer censored themselves, guarding conversation from all mention of Africa. After a while they ceased to flinch when a picture of a lost child appeared in the newspapers. Finally the dimensions of the tragedy shrunk; there was a little barbed area in which no one trod, in which the secret was sequestered and locked away. Was it less potent, confined? No: it was more potent, Ralph felt. He dreamt of scrubbing blood away, scrubbing his own blood off a cement floor; but the stain always returned, like the blood in Bluebeard’s room. He understood, then, what the fairy tale means; blood is never wiped out. No bad action goes away. Evil is energy, and perpetuates itself; only its form changes.

Over the next few years Ralph made himself busy, burying the past under a weight of daily preoccupation. Anna watched him change, cultivate a sort of shallow and effortless bonhomie—beneath which, she imagined, his real thoughts teemed on, guilty and seething and defrauded. In daily life he became an exacting, demanding man, who gave her only glimpses of the gentleness of those early years; she had to look at his sons, as they grew up, to see the kind of man Ralph had once been. She had realized very early, when they lived in Elim, that his kindness had a detachment about it, that his care for people was studied and willed; now it became a hard-driving virtue, combative.

During the 1970s the Trust became one of the better-funded small charities, and attracted a member of the royal family as patron. Ralph was contemptuous of the young man, but he would put up with anyone’s company to further his aims. He must see progress everywhere; he must see improvement. All day there must be action, or the simulation of it; letters in every direction, telephone calls, driving about the county and up and down to London; there must be advertising and exhortation, press campaigns and fund-raising drives. He took charge of policy, of the broader picture, engaged the services of a freelance public-relations expert; he rebuilt the hostel, updated its aims and methods. He granted an interview to the
Guardian
and one to
New Society
and was sometimes called into television studios to engage in futile scraps with those who thought differently about drugs, housing policy, education. At the hostel he was available to oversee the minutest detail, the supply of paperclips and pillow cases; he spent a lot of time sitting with the sullen, inarticulate, unlikeable children who found themselves in his care. In Norfolk, too, he became well-known as one of those men who you telephone if you want something done; sometimes the novelty of his ideas outraged the
Eastern Daily Press.
The power of his will, he seemed to think, could pull the world into a better shape. Underneath, Anna thought, he must know it is all an illusion. A futility.

For a year or so after their return from Bechuanaland, she fought to keep her hold on the past, on every detail of it. She had been afraid to forget anything; to forget seemed a betrayal of her child who might—it was possible—still be alive. She rehearsed constantly in her mind the incidents of their life at Mosadinyana: from their arrival on the station platform under the stars, to their final exit, bags packed for them by commiserating strangers. But though the pain remained fresh, specific memories staled and faded; they receded from her, the little events of this day and that. The one night remained in her mind, indelible—the thunder snarling overhead, the hammering of the rain on the roof, Ralph’s blood coating her hands to the wrist. But after two years, three, her inner narrative slipped, became disjointed. What remained as memories were a series of pictures, some hard and sharp, some merely cross-hatched blurs of light and sound.

On the day Julian was born, Anna had no interest in resisting pain, or behaving well, or making the process pleasant for those who attended her. When a medical fist squashed a mask onto her face, she gulped oblivion; and she would not allow herself to come back. She wanted the gas and not the air; oblivion informed her, it was what she craved. When Julian was first placed in her arms—a neat, clean, pink little baby, held by the unfeeling hands of nurses, scrubbed and sanitized before they gave him to her—she felt a certain flinching, a pull away from him; she hated to place any burden of expectation on this fragile scrap of being wrapped in a shawl. She saw the tight folds of his lashless eyes, his sea-sponge mouth, forming and re-forming, the stiff mottled fingers that thrust through the cobweb knitting of the shawl: she tried to pretend she had no other son, that she was seeing a son for the first time. Julian had fair curls and soft eyes; he lay in his father’s arms and trusted him. He did not remind her unnecessarily of her sharp, small, dark child, his fragile skull still showing when she lost him, the pulses visible, beating beneath that fluttering baby skin.

Ralph’s mother, Dorcas, was a friend to her, in those early years; a close-mouthed, uncommunicative old woman, but always there, always attentive, always to be relied on. Anna shrank from her sister-in-law at first; bossy young GP, driving over from Norwich every other Saturday, full of specious knowledge, worldliness, vitality. She shrank from the world, indeed; there were days when she wouldn’t go out of the house, couldn’t go out, when a word from a stranger would make her blush and shake, when she could not bear to lift her head to meet another person’s eyes.

Sometimes she woke with her right hand contracted, clenched, as if she were still holding the neck of the bottle she had broken against the Instows’ sideboard. For a year and a half she kept Julian’s cot in her room, and only when Robin was born, and she had something frailer to concern her, did she cease to wake and check his breathing many times during the night. When Kit went to school, she could hardly be persuaded from the school gate.

Of course, people noticed her behavior. They said, Anna, you’re a trained teacher, you’ve got your mother-in-law to look after the children for you, why don’t you go back to work? You need an interest, it would take you out of yourself. They wondered why she was seen so seldom, outside her own house; why she did not take what her mother called “an active interest in charity work.”

After a year or two of this—the searing gaffs of other people’s demands—Ralph’s sister Emma took her aside and spoke to her, just in time to save her life. She saved it by small, usual words, trite in themselves, but very important if you were dying.

“Anna,” she had said, “you don’t seem well to me, you seem out of breath, shall I listen to your chest? I wouldn’t treat my own family, of course—but I could just tell you if there was anything obviously wrong.”

“It’s nothing,” Anna said, “it’s the cold weather, you know, it puts me out of breath—besides, I’ve always been like it.”

“Have you?” Emma said, interested.

“Oh yes … I’m strong enough, in myself, but I could never run much. Even when I was little. Don’t you notice me, when I dash upstairs?”

“No, what do you do?”

“My heart pounds.” She frowned. “I’ve always been like it. I told you. It was easier when we went to Africa. There were no stairs.”

“I never realized,” Emma said. “What an idiot I am.”

She was able to tell Ralph, after investigations, that Anna had a slight defect in a heart valve: nothing that required surgery, nothing that was going to kill her, nothing that would ever give her more than the minor inconvenience she had suffered all her life, and which she had never thought to speak of. “It’s common enough,” Emma said, trying to create the proper balance between reassurance and alarm. “But you must give her a quiet time, Ralph. She has enough with the house and the babies, you mustn’t let anyone try to prod her and pester her into supporting amateur dramatics and doing these damn flower festivals and calling on old gossips who are fitter than she is. You must protect her, you see. When people want her to do something, you can sit back in your chair, and frown, and say, well now, my wife, didn’t you know she is not precisely well?”

Not precisely well. Ralph wondered if it was fear that impeded Anna’s breathing, fear that stuck in her throat.

“It’s difficult,” Emma said, “to disentangle the causes and effects. Certainly, Anna has anxiety attacks. I’ve seen them, I’ve seen it happen. It’s not surprising at all that she has them, when you think what she’s gone through. After some great upset in your life you may think you’re coping, in your mind—you may feel you’re on top of life. Very well—the mind has strategies. But the body needs different ones. It has a memory of its own.”

“But this defect, in her heart, the valve—that’s not to do with anxiety attacks, it’s something in itself, you’re saying?”

Emma hesitated. “Yes, it’s something in itself—something and nothing. But Ralph, people are very ignorant and cruel, and they won’t accept mental suffering as an excuse to avoid anything. They say, “Pull yourself together.” I am afraid I couldn’t bear to hear anyone say that to Anna—and we are not far off the day when they will. But—trust me, I know what people are like—they’ll respect a heart complaint. A heart complaint is very respectable, very respectable indeed.”