A Change of Climate: A Novel (3 page)

“What,
in flagrante?”
Anna said.

“No. Having a cup of tea in Holt.”

Anna said nothing for a time; then, “Ralph, may I explain something to you?” She sat down at the table and clasped her hands on the scrubbed white wood. It was as if she were going to pray aloud, but did not know what to pray for. “You must remember how Emma and Felix used to go around together, when they were young. Now, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. He stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair came down with a clunk. “But that’s going right back—that’s going back to the fifties, before she was qualified, when she was in London and she’d come up for the odd weekend. That was before we went abroad. And then he married Ginny. Oh God,” he said. “You mean it’s been going on for years.”

“I do. Years and years and years.”

“Would it be … for instance … when we came back from Africa?”

Anna nodded. “Oh, yes. It’s so many years, you see, that people no longer bother to talk about it.”

“And you knew. Why didn’t I know?”

“It’s hard to imagine. Perhaps because you don’t notice people.”

“But people are all my life,” Ralph said. “God help me. Everything I do concerns people. What else do I ever think about?”

“Perhaps you don’t think about them in quite the right way. Perhaps there’s a—gap—in the way that you think about them.”

“Something missing,” Ralph said. “Well, there must be, mustn’t there? If that’s the case I’ll have to sit down and talk to myself and try to examine it, whatever it is, this lack, won’t I? Otherwise it’s obvious I’m not fit to be at large.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you what puzzles me, though. There’s Emma living in her cottage right on the main street in Foulsham, and there’s Felix over at Blakeney, and since we know innumerable people in between—”

“Yes, we know people. But it’s as I say, they don’t talk about it anymore.”

“But why didn’t somebody tell me?”

“Why should they? How would they have broached the topic?”

“Why didn’t
you
tell me?”

“What would you have done with the information?”

Ralph was still shaking his head. He couldn’t take this in—that his discovery, so exciting to him, was stale and soporific to everyone else. “What I can’t understand is how in a place like this they could conduct what must be so blatantly obvious—I mean, the comings and goings, she can’t go to Blakeney I suppose so he must come to Foulsham, his car must be parked there, all hours of the night—”

Anna smiled.

“No,” Ralph said. “I don’t suppose it’s like that, is it? I suppose they go to teashops quite a lot. I suppose it’s a—mental companionship, is it?”

“I think it might be, largely. But people like Felix and Emma can get away with a lot, you know. They have everything well under control.”

“It’s never damaged their standing,” Ralph said. “I mean, their standing in the community. Do the children know?”

“Kit knows. The boys know, I suppose, but they never mention it. It wouldn’t interest them, would it?”

“What does Kit think?”

“You know she always admires her aunt.”

“I hope her life won’t be like that,” Ralph said. “My God, I hope it won’t. I don’t want Kit to turn into some plain woman driving about the countryside in a tweed coat to share a pot of tea with some old bore. I hope somebody flashy and rich comes and carries her off and gives her diamonds. I don’t mind if she isn’t steady. I want Kit to have a good time.”

“How old-fashioned you are!” Anna laughed. “You talk about her as if she were a chorus girl. Kit will buy her own diamonds, if it crosses her mind to want any.” Anna looked down at the minute solitaire that had winked for twenty-five years above her wedding ring. “And Ralph, there is no need to insult Felix. You like him, you always have, we all like him.”

“Yes. I know. But things look different now.”

He put his empty glass down on the table. This is more than a failure of knowledge, he thought, it is a failure of self-knowledge. Anna poured him another whiskey. He ignored it, so she drank it herself.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Julian said, “I thought Kit would have come home for the funeral.”

“It was mainly our generation,” Anna said. “There were a lot of people there. I think three Eldreds were enough.”

“An elegant sufficiency,” Julian said.

His mother laughed. “Where did you get that expression?”

“I heard Kit say it. But didn’t you think she’d have wanted to be there? As she’s so friendly with Daniel Palmer these days.”

Felix’s son, the architect, had a flat above his office in Holt. He was interested in Kit; he had taken her to the theater, and out to dinner, and invited her to go out in the boat he kept at Blakeney. Anna said, “I think Kit regards Daniel as a provider of treats. A funeral is not a treat.”

“When will she be coming home, then?

“Not till Easter. She’s got her exams in a matter of weeks, you know.”

“Yes, I do know. You don’t have to keep mentioning things like that. Terms. Exams.”

“We have to talk about you, Julian. But perhaps not this afternoon.” She looked over the rim of her cup. “What have you done today?”

“I started putting in those poles for the back fence.”

“And have you seen your girlfriend?”

The slight vulgarity and childishness of the expression struck Julian. It was as if his mother had spilled her tea on the table, or put her fingers in the sugar bowl.

“I’m going over tomorrow. I just wanted to get a start on that fence, as the rain was keeping off. I wish Kit would come home soon. I want her to meet Sandra’s mother. I want to know what she’ll think of her.”

So Sandra will be with us for another summer, Anna thought. With Julian you had to glean things, here and there.

A few days after the funeral, Emma went to the shrine at Walsing-ham. She was not sure why; her faith, if it still existed, was not something she displayed in public. But when you cannot cope with grief, she reasoned, you can do worse than observe the forms that have helped other people cope with it. At Felix’s funeral the minister had said that, even in the depth of misery, the familiar forms of prayer can lift the heart toward Christian joy. Very well, Emma thought grimly, let’s try it. Something is needed. For Ginny, there were undertakers. There was the question of probate. There was the business of organizing Mrs. Gleave and the vol-au-vents. But for me there is nothing. An empty space. A lack of occupation. It is as if I have been told of a death that has taken place in a distant country. It is as if I have no claim on sympathy, because I have heard of the death of a person my friends do not know. There is no body. There is no corpse. Just this absence, this feeling of something unfinished.

Skirting Fakenham, taking the back roads toward the shrine and the sea, she found her car alone on the road. Across the flat fields towers spiked the snow-charged sky, the clouds pregnant and bowed with cold; Norfolk is a land of churches, some open to the sky, their chancels colonized by nettles, their naves by blackthorn and brambles. In those not yet redundant, congregations dwindle; the Samaritans’ notices, flapping in the porches, attest to the quality and frequency of rural despair.

In Walsingham, the car park was empty. The streets were devoid of tourists and pilgrims, and the old buildings—half timber and brick and stone, steep roof and Dutch gable—seemed to have moved closer together, as if the town were closing itself down for the winter. By the Anglican shrine, plaster saints looked out from shop windows: and woven saints, with tapestry eyes. Touches of gilt glinted here and there on a cardboard halo; postcards were for sale, and prayers printed in mock black letter on mock scrolls. You could buy candles, which you might put to secular use; other windows displayed recordings of plainchant, and pots of honey in stoneware jars, and boxes of Norfolk Lavender soap. Walsingham tea towels were on offer, jars of chutney, tins of shortbread, Earl Grey tea bags in cod Victorian packaging; and there were herb pillows, Olde Englishe Peppermint Lumps, potpourri and fluffy toys, wall plaques, paperweights, and scented drawer-liners—all the appurtenances, in fact, that you would expect to find at an ancient pilgrim site. Trade was poor. The only visible inhabitant was a woman with a shopping basket over her arm and a pug dog on a lead. She nodded to Emma and walked on, huddling into the shadow of the Abbey’s wall.

Emma went up the path to the church. It was a building put up in the 1930s, and its exterior, disappointingly plain, hid its dim papistical contents: devotional candles blinking, sad-eyed virgins pouting in gold frames. She asked herself, what would my father have said, what would my father have said to a bauble-shop like this? Matthew Eldred seemed very far away, very old and dead and gone. Not so Felix. Alone in her cottage in Foulsham, she still listened for the sound of his key in the lock.

Emma lurked about toward the back of the church, away from the altar. Finally she sat down on a chair at the end of a row. She gave herself permission for tears, but she was not able to cry. Like her sister-in-law Anna, she had trained herself out of it. The thought of Felix lay like a stone inside her chest. Outside, some sort of building work seemed to be going on; she could hear the monotonous thump of hammers and the whirring of drills. In my family, she thought, we practice restraint and the keeping of secrets, and the thoughts we respect are unvoiced thoughts; even Felix, an open secret, was a secret of a kind. But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.

On the back wall were wooden plaques, names and dates: thanks given, intentions stated.
Thanks for preservation in a motor accident, 1932. For reunion of husband and wife, after prayer at the shrine, 1934. Success in an examination, Thanks, 1935.
What minute considerations we expect God to entertain, Emma thought.
Thanks for a happy death, prayed for at the Holy House.
Who put that here, and how did they know it was happy? Some plaques gave nothing away. Upon these the visitor might exercise imagination:
Prayers Answered.

Near these plaques, the water from the Holy Well was made available in buckets. Pilgrims might help themselves, by dipping with assorted vessels; a table, stacked up with prayer books, held also the abandoned top of a thermos flask, some paper cups of the kind tea machines dispense, and some beakers of molded plastic, each one frilly at the rim, as if it had been gnawed. Emma thought the arrangements unsanitary. She went out, her gloves in her hand.

In the porch was a vast book, well-thumbed, its pages ruled into columns. A notice promised
ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE SHRINE
.

Emma took her pen out of her pocket, turned to a clean page, and wrote down the date. She did not put Felix’s name in the book, because she believed that energy should be directed toward the living, not the dead. She did not put her own name, because she believed she would manage well enough. But she wrote the names of her brother and his wife:

RALPH ELDRED
ANNA ELDRED

Beneath she wrote:

KATHERINE ELDRED

then hesitated, and skipped one line, before

JULIAN ELDRED
ROBERT ELDRED
REBECCA ELDRED

It was half dark when Emma left the porch. Between the church and the road there was no pavement; she crept uphill by the high wall, protected only by heaven’s benevolence from the cars behind her. Eddies of sleet swirled in a huddle of stone and flint, slapping at window glass and melting underfoot. Sitting in an almost empty cafe, her hands around a mug of hot chocolate, she thought of that other frozen afternoon, when Ralph’s curly head emerged up the staircase of the Holt tearoom, and dipped under the beam, and swiveled, gaze focusing … If Ralph had not come upon them that particular day, his sensibilities skinned by the cold, he would have continued in his obstinate and peculiar ignorance; when Felix died, they would have stood at his graveside as two old family friends, and Ralph would have given her not a word of sympathy except that due between decent people when a contemporary has quit the scene. And that, she thought, would have suited me.

Lines of poetry ran through Emma’s head. Auden, she thought. She was pleased at being able to identify it, because she was not a literary woman. They were insistent lines, stuffed with a crude menace.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

Emma shared the cafe with one be-skirted cleric, who was reading the
Daily Telegraph.
An oil stove popped and hissed at her back. She thought again of crying, but she was afraid the man might put his newspaper down and try to console her. Instead she buttoned her coat, and braced herself for the twilight and cold, the drive home to Foulsham. I hardly know what I am anymore she thought: a Good Soul, or a Sad Case.

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

Kit sleeps, blanketed in heat. She rolls onto her back. Her lips move. What is she saying? Mama, mama: milk, milk, milk. Her wrist pushes her hair back from her forehead. She turns over again. The sheet creases beneath her, damp from her body. An institutional counterpane slides to the floor.

Kit’s hand clenches and unclenches—fat baby fist. The air is too hot to breathe. Soon Felicia will come, in her blue scarf, and lift her out of the mist of mosquito nets.

Her eyes open to an expanse of white wall. She turns her eyes, and sees the polished floor and the fallen bedcover, and her own bare arm dangling from the sheets, like someone else’s limb. It is seven-thirty, a dirty London morning, traffic building up. There is a hint of spring in the air.

In her dream, she has been to Africa.

She sits up slowly, pulling the top sheet across her breasts, as if someone had come into the room. She is in her term-time lodging, a women’s hall of residence. Her little gold watch ticks away on top of a pile of textbooks. Her jeans and warm plaid shirt are folded on a chair. Outside in the corridor her fellow residents are going in and out of bathrooms in their toweling robes, their hair in various arrangements of turbans and pins. They stop to exchange words, to say that the central heating is ridiculous, it is like being in the tropics, a complaint will definitely have to be made. Lavatories flush. From the basement drifts the aroma of breakfasts seething on a range, pallid scraps of bacon, mushrooms stewed black. Toast hardens in its racks.

In Norfolk, at the Red House, her mother, Anna, dreams of a cell. She feels against her bare legs the rasp of a prison blanket, and under her hand the metal of a prison bedstead. A woman’s voice tells her, “The colonel has refused your request for a mirror.” Anna wakes.

The room is cold. Ralph has pulled the blankets over his head. She sits up, massages her temples with her fingertips. With little circular motions, as if it were vanishing cream, she rubs the dream away. She forgets it. Forgetting is an art like other arts. It needs dedication and practice.

As for Kit—she washes and dresses and goes down the big carved staircase, down the corridors smelling of parsnips and polish. On her way from breakfast she plucks a letter out of the pigeonhole marked “E.”

The letter is from her father. Ralph is a good correspondent— whereas in other families, as she knows, fathers never put pen to paper. She slides the letter into the pocket of her jeans, to read at lunchtime over her salad roll and yogurt; jogs out across the dappled dampness of Russell Square, toward the Tube and the Thames and an airless lecture room.

Her dream trails after her, contaminating her day.

Julian, with no reason to wake, sleeps till half past eight. Bright letters float from a summer sky, and form themselves into nonsense words. It is his usual dream; deprived of the terror it once held, it still carries its component of frustration.

Emma does not dream. She has taken to insomnia, walking the rooms of her cottage in the small hours, the hours of deep rural silence. She does not draw the curtains; outside her cottage a street light burns, and shines on her medical books in their orderly shelves, and the washing-up she has left in the sink.

Ralph dreams of his father.

This is the town, the date, the place, to which his dreams return him: Ralph walks on cobblestones, his wrist manacled in his grandfather’s hand, his eyes turning upward to scan the column of his grandfather’s body. Wind soughs around the streets and the high stony houses and their chimney pots. Ralph is three years old. His grandfather lifts him into his arms, and wraps him in his coat to keep out the cold.

“In my day, Ralphie,” he says, “we used to have donkey races round the marketplace. And in my grandfather’s day, they used to have pig hunts, and chimney sweeps dipping for pennies in a basin of flour. And then they used to have fireworks after, and burning of Boney.”

His uncle James says, “Poor Ralphie! He does not know who Boney is.”

Ralph turns his head, against Grandpa’s woolen shoulder. He lifts his chin and wriggles his body, trying to turn in Grandpa’s arms. There is his father, Matthew Eldred, one step behind them. But the shoulder blocks his view; or perhaps it is Uncle James who stands between himself and Matthew. His father is there, he knows; but Ralph cannot see his face.

This is Ralph’s first memory: the cobbles, the deep moaning of the wind, the thick cloth of his grandfather’s overcoat sawing against his cheek.

The Eldred family belonged to the country which is called the Brecklands; it is a country bounded by chalk and peat, but covered by a mantle of shifting sand. Its open fields are strewn with flint or choked with bracken; they are edged by fir trees twisted into fantastic forms. It is a country of flint-knappers and warreners: latterly of archaeologists and military personnel. There are barrows and mounds, tumuli and ancient tracks; there are oaks and elms. The Romans have left their coins, their skeletons, and their fragments of terra-cotta; the military have set down their huts and wire fences among the ruins of monasteries and castles. Everywhere one senses the presence of standing water, of wading birds, of alders and willow, and of swans rising against the sky.

This is meeting-house country, chapel country; the churches are decayed or badly restored, and the sense of the past is strong, seeping, and sinister. Halls and churches have perished, fire eaten thatch, air eaten stone; buildings rejoin the landscape, their walls reduced to flint and rubble strewn across the fields. Some artifact you drop tonight may be lost by morning, but the plow turns up treasure trove. In this country, man’s work seems ephemeral, his influence transitory. Summer scorches the heath. Winter brings a pale damp light. The sky is dove-colored; the sun breaks through it in broad glittering rays, like the rays which, in papist prints, signify the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew Eldred, Ralph’s father, was born near the market town of Swaffham in the year 1890. His family were printers, lay preachers. His grandfather had printed pamphlets and tracts. His father had printed handbills and auction catalogs and stock lists, and the privately financed memoirs of clergymen and schoolmasters. Their homes, and the homes of their friends, were temples of right-thinking, of inky scholarship, Sabbatarian dullness; their religion was active, proselytizing, strenuous, and commonsensical. They saw no need to inquire into God’s nature; they approached Him through early rising, Bible study and earnest, futile attempts at humility. The Eldreds were as clever in charity as they were in business—casting their bread on the waters, and rubbing their hands in anticipation of the plump milky loaves that would come back to stack upon the shelves of their family and friends.

Matthew Eldred’s brother James, who was four years his junior, was ordained in the Church of England just after the end of the Great War. He left almost at once for the African missions, and so he missed Matthew’s wedding; Matthew married a gray-eyed girl called Dorcas Carey, whose father was a local wood merchant, and whose connections outside the county—her elder sister had married a Yorkshireman—had been examined and then forgiven.

James reappeared a decade later—thinner, cheerful, somewhat jaundiced—for the baptism of his brother’s first child, Ralph. Dorcas wore a look of bewilderment; after a decade, she had got something right. Another baby, a daughter, followed two years later. James was still, as he termed it, on furlough, but he was not idle; he was working in the East End of London in a home for derelicts and drunks. When Ralph was four years old, Africa opened and swallowed Uncle James again. Only letters came, on tissue-thin sheets of paper, and photographs of naked native children and round thatched huts, of unnamed clergymen and lady assistants with large teeth and white sun-hats: of catechumens in white gloves and white frocks.

Ralph has these photographs still. He keeps them in brown envelopes, their subjects named on the back (when Uncle James’s memory has obliged) in Ralph’s own large, energetic handwriting. And dated? Sometimes. Uncle James peers at some fading spinster, weathered by the African sun; at some wriggling black child clothed only in a string of beads. “How would I know? 1930?” Ralph makes the record on the back of each one; makes it in soft pencil, in case Uncle James should reconsider. He has respect for dates; he cares for the past. He files the envelopes in his bureau drawers. One day, he thinks, he might write the history of his family. But then his mind shies away, thinking of what would have to be omitted.

His father and mother stand in pewter frames on his bureau, watching him as he works. Matthew Eldred has grown stout; his watch chain stretches across his belly. Self-conscious before the photographer, he fingers his lapel. In middle age, Dorcas has the face of a Voortrekker or an American plainswoman: a transparent face, that waits for God to do his worst.

When Ralph was eight years old and his sister Emma was six, Matthew moved his family and his business from Swaffham to Norwich. He began by printing ration books, and ended by growing rich.

The war came. “Do you wish,” Emma asked Ralph, “that you were big enough to fight?” Emma doubled up her fist and pounded at the drawing room sofa, till her fist bounced back at her and dust flew up, and her mother came from the kitchen and slapped her.

A year or so later, they heard talk behind closed doors. “Yarmouth Grammar School moved to the Midlands … Lowestoft evacuated yesterday …” They had visited the seaside—a pointless excursion, the children thought, because the beaches were mined— and seen the first wave of London evacuees, decanted from pleasure steamers, fetching up in coastal villages with their gas masks. They stood by the road and stared, these children, stubble-headed and remote. Now the children were moving on again, deeper into England.

Emma turned her eyes on Ralph. “What is it like, evacuated?” she hissed.

He shook his head. “It won’t happen to us, I don’t think. It’s the ones from the coast that are going.”

“I mean,” Emma said, “how do you fix it?”

He put his finger to his lips. He did not think, then or later, that his parents were cruel: only staid, elderly, without imagination.

When the war ended, there was more whispered discussion. His parents debated taking in an orphan—perhaps the child of some local girl who had given way to an airman. Or an older child, a companion for Ralph … They had heard through some church connection of a most unfortunate Lowestoft case, a boy of Ralph’s age exactly: whose father, a gas-company worker, had been killed when the bomb fell on Lome Park Road, and whose mother had died when Waller’s Restaurant received a direct hit. What was she doing in a restaurant, that’s what I’d like to know?” Mrs. Eldred said. There was some suggestion that the child might have lived a giddy life before his bereavement. The project was dropped; Ralph’s companion faded away, into the realms of might-have-been.

For when you surveyed—his father said—when you surveyed the want in this world, when you peered into the bottomless pit of human improvidence and foolishness, it occurred to you that if there was to be charity it must be systematic.

Much later rationing ended. In the Eldred household it contin-ued. “There’s nothing wrong with economy,” his mother said. If you wanted anything nice to eat, you had to eat it outside the house.

When Ralph was fifteen years old, he went to stay with his aunt in Yorkshire. The Synod of Whitby, his uncle James called the Yorkshire set; they were too dour, cramped, and narrow for James’s High Church tastes. The trip north had been intended as a holiday, Ralph supposed; by now he was beginning to be critical of his family, and it seemed congruent with everything else in his life that a holiday and a penance should be so very alike.

The Synod occupied a dark house, and inside it were brown shadows. It contained an unreasonable number of upright chairs, with seats of slippery polished brown leather; it was as if preparations were constantly in hand for a public meeting, a chapel get-together. In the dining room the chairs were high-backed and unyielding, of a particularly officious type. Small meals were sanctified by a lengthy grace. The bookcases had glass fronts, and they were locked; upon the sideboard stood vases of dark glass, like cups of blood.