A Change of Climate: A Novel (33 page)

“I don’t want to make it difficult. I just want things done properly.”

“If the young girl dies,” the second said, “you’ll be to blame.”

“I thought there was no question of her dying. I thought she was comfortable.”

“Mum—” Kit said. Her face was shocked; she thinks I’m a new woman, Anna thought. “Mum, look. It’s just to help Melanie.”

“There’s a principle,” Anna said to her daughter. “There’s a correct way. Once you depart from it, you leave yourself open.”

“It’s not South Africa,” Kit said.

“Not yet,” Anna snapped.

Her daughter was silent. A policeman said, “Well, madam, perhaps it would be better if we talked to your husband. What time are you expecting him?”

“No particular time.”

“Doesn’t he keep regular hours?”

“By no means.”

Kit said, “We usually know where to contact him, but today there seems to be some mix-up with his diary.”

“Oh yes?”

“So we don’t know how to get hold of him, you see.”

“That’s unlucky,” the second man said. “We’ll have to radio in. Say he can’t be found.”

“I can come to the hospital,” Anna said.

“Yes, madam, but it’s not you that’s
in loco parentis,
is it? Well now, we have got a problem.”

None of their language, Anna thought, means what it says. It is a special dialect, charged with implication. One of the men was looking over her shoulder. He seemed to be staring at the wall. She turned to see what he was looking at. “That picture there,” the policeman said. “That photo. That wouldn’t be Mr. Eldred, would it?”

“Yes.” She picked up the photograph, defensive, startled: Ralph on the stoep at Flower Street. “If you’re thinking of putting out a wanted poster, I’m afraid it won’t be much use to you. It’s twenty years old, this picture—more.”

“Is it, now? It’s not a bad likeness, not bad at all.” He turned to his colleague. “Brancaster way? Down the track? The market-trader?” He turned back to Anna. “We’ve had a few dealings with Mr. Eldred. We’ve seen him coming and going from a smallholding, just off that loop of road before you get to Burnham Deepdale. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where we’ll find him, madam.”

Each time he said this—“madam”—it was like a kick or a blow with his fist. He meant it so; he was watching her face, waiting for her to flinch. “Would
you
know a woman over that way, involved in market-trading?”

“A Mrs. Glasse?” Anna’s face seemed frozen. She nodded. “Will you go over there now?”

“It might be worth a try.”

“Kit,” Anna said, “when Rebecca comes home from her friend’s, will you see that she has something to eat? Then take her over to Foulsham and ask Emma to put you both up for the night.”

“What for?”

“Because I don’t want her here. Okay?”

“Can I take your car?”

“No. I need it.” She turned to the men. “I’ll follow you,” Anna said to the men.

“We can’t stop you, madam.”

Anna said to Kit, “You can bike over, can’t you? Just take your toothbrushes.”

“I’ll leave Becky with Emma, and I’ll come back.”

“No. Stay with your sister. Kit, look—do this one thing for me, please?”

Anna was brittle, exasperated; Kit knew the tone, it was familiar. But she saw how Anna’s nerves were stretched—tight, tight. “What shall I say to Emma?”

“I don’t know. Must I think of everything? Aren’t you old enough to help me?”

“No,” Kit said. “Not really.”

Anna picked up her car keys from beside the photograph. She has been waiting for this, Kit thought, waiting to go out, her bag ready and to hand.

Anna followed the police car. They could have lost her, at this junction or that, but they preferred to dawdle and let her stick with them.

It was evening now. The sky was striated, precise overlays of color working from regal purple to the palest blush. Amy Glasse woke and sat up in bed, stretching her arms and fingers, rippling her fingers through the liquid light like a stage pianist preparing to play. Ralph turned and reached for her as she slid from the bed; sleeping, he followed the heat trail of her body across the sheets. His arm, empty, cupped the space from which she had moved.

From below, there was a monotonous thumping, a solid hammering, like the copulation of giants in a myth.

“Oh, God,” Amy said. “We’re back in the old routine.”

Ralph woke to see her shape against the window. Her long back, white in the dusk: “Sweetheart, come back to bed.” He put out a hand for her, drowsy; didn’t see why his peace should be disturbed.

“Sorry,” Amy said. “I don’t know, shall I go down, or shall I pretend I’m not here? Ralph, you’re not awake, are you?” She cast around, snatched up the T-shirt she had taken off, and swabbed the area between her thighs. She looked around the room for something else to wear, then with a little laugh pulled the T-shirt over her head. She reached for her skirt. “What shall I do? If I don’t go down now they’ll only come back later.”

“Who?” He had focused now, on that sound of fist on wood. “Who is it?”

“Purvis and his mate,” she said. “The constabulary, my dear. Sometimes I wish I lived in the city, then you’d get a choice of bastards. Not always the same old pair.”

He pushed back the covers. “Ralph,” she said, “don’t go down. No, listen to me.” She was at the window, the curtain parted minutely. “There’s two cars here. Just get dressed, but stay up here and be quiet. If they come up say nothing—don’t antagonize them.”

Buttoning her skirt, she flitted from the room. No one could crouch and hide, and listen to that destructive thump-thump-thumping; Amy couldn’t do it, and neither’ could he. Panicking, he began to pull himself into his clothes. He must get there before her; feared violence. Once before he had imagined hitting Purvis. Once, a long time ago … his hand, clenched to pull in and fasten his belt, felt itself sink into belly flesh: propel a bully toward ridicule and the stoep door, one foot in a wastepaper basket. The body has its own memories; muscle and bone, marching its own ghost trail.

He put his shoes on, straightened up: randomly buttoned his shirt, skittered down the stairs after Amy. The front door was open: he went out into a September evening, a confrontation, the air a golden rose; the past summer a memory, bloom of sea lavender, scent of tourist tires on narrow burning roads. Purvis said, “Mr. Eldred, isn’t it?” Yes, it is, he said, yes, I do: what’s happened, how is she?

Anna’s car drew up behind the police car. It rattled to a halt. After a moment, Anna stepped out. She did not move away from the car, held the vehicle’s door before her like a shield; but she took the time to let her eyes rest on everything. She raised one foot, tucked an ankle behind her, balancing it on the car’s rusting door-sill. The policemen’s eyes slid like snakes over Amy Glasse, her creased homemade cotton skirt and her breasts bouncing beneath the stained white cloth. “Fuck off out of here, Purvis,” she said. “You were here last week and into everything, so what the fuck do you want now?”

Ralph put his hand out, to take Amy’s wrist. “Calm down. It’s nothing. They want me, not you.”

Amy’s eyes traveled: to Purvis, to Ralph’s face, to Anna still as a statue in the fading light.

I have lost track of the time, Ralph thought; I should have been home an hour ago. Anna, without a word, climbed back into the car and drove away.

When the police had given their news, and driven away in their turn—their eyes roaming around the farmyard and outbuildings— Ralph said to Amy, “I must go right now. You understand, don’t you? I have to go to Norwich and sort this out.”

“Of course you must go.” Her smile was twisted, bleak. “Then you’ve your wife to face.”

“Yes. That will be later.”

“I’ll not be seeing you, then?”

He didn’t reply. “We’ve seen it on the television,” she said. “Me and Sandra. Men always go back to their wives.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He felt shaky, weak; was not sure whether he was lying or not. “Unless I’m at the hospital, that is. There’ll be all sorts of people I have to talk to—social workers, and her parents if she’s really ill, and my own people, the Trust committee, because if there’s any possible legal problem I like them to know about it. I’ll be on the phone all day.”

“Anna, she’s beautiful,” Amy said. “Sandra didn’t tell me. I had no idea. I thought she was some biddy in a print frock.”

“I can’t talk about it. I haven’t time. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

“I’ll not count on it,” Amy said. Her voice was light and bright. She was fighting back tears. Ralph felt inside him a great rolling mass of nausea and cold, of apprehension and self-hatred.

At a phone box on the outskirts of Fakenham, he stopped the car and rang his home. He calculated that Anna would just have arrived; if she were walking in, he thought, that would be best, that would be the best time to get her.

He let the phone ring for a long time. He checked his watch again. She should be home by now. Where would she go, except the Red House?

As he was about to replace the receiver, he heard it picked up. “Anna? Anna, are you there?” Silence. “Please speak to me.” Silence. “I’m going to Norwich,” he said. “I have to. To the hospital. I’ll call again from there. Anna, please …”

She had put the phone down. He got back in the car and drove away.

I would have spoken, she thought: I would have spoken, except that I could not think of a single thing, not one thing to say. She went into the kitchen and made herself some instant coffee. She drank it standing up, by the sink. Then she washed her cup. There was a long night ahead, and she would be alone. Robin was playing in a school match, he would not be back, he was staying over in King’s Lynn. Julian, she supposed, was at the farm; and she had sent her daughters away. She dried her hands, folded the towel, laid it over the back of a chair.

It is in the nature of betrayal, she thought, that it not only changes the present, but that it reaches back with its dirty hands and changes the past.

She could not be still. She wandered through the rooms, then returned to the kitchen to make herself some more coffee. She sat at the table, trying to subdue her ragged breathing. She got up and went to the sink again. She saw from the kitchen clock that only half an hour had passed since she put the phone down on Ralph. You cannot pass the time like this, she thought: washing your cup and washing your cup.

Darkness had fallen. Autumn would choose a day like this, to announce its presence: stealthy feet, chilling the rooms. Ralph had lit the boiler this morning, but she had forgotten to attend to it. A major salvage operation would be needed now. She felt she did not have the strength for it. She took a blanket from the airing cupboard and walked downstairs with it gathered about her, African-style. She went into the sitting room. Did not put on the light. Chose herself a chair. She wrapped the blanket around her and pulled it almost over her head. She was swaddled now, like an ambulance casualty.

There had been times before, when she had thought they could not survive. There had been times when she had wished to erase her husband and children, her whole biography. There had not been a day, in twenty years, when she had not thought about her lost child. Sometimes on the television—they often watched the ten o’clock news together—they had seen the parents of missing children, shaking, bleating, heads sagging: making what was called an appeal, trying to wring some killer’s heart. No such appeal had been open to her. They had left the corpse behind, in another country. The verdict was final. When you have suffered together as she had, she and Ralph, what lies between you can’t be called romance. You can’t talk about a marriage, in the normal terms people use: a happy marriage, a marriage under strain. You are not partners, but the survivors of a disaster. You see each other and remember, every day. So how can you live together?

But how can you not?

She fingered the blanket’s satin-bound edge, and sat, apart from this fingering, without moving. When the room grew quite dark she put a hand out of her wrappings and switched on a lamp which stood by her on a round table. This table had a white cloth, on which Sandra Glasse had embroidered a scatter of daisies, violet and deep blue, their centres black like poppies: fantasy flowers, bouquets from an alternative world. Ralph said that every action contained its opposite. That nothing was fixed, nothing in creation; that cells made choices all the time. If we could rewind the tape of the universe, play it over again, we might find ourselves to be different: six-legged intelligent creatures, crawling on the sea bed, and speaking like birds, in song. But no, she thought, perhaps that is not what Ralph says. Perhaps I have got it wrong, he would be talking to the children and I would not be listening properly, that is usually the case with me. Have I not imagined, often enough, a universe in which other choices were made? The girl, Felicia, we turned out of the house. Some instinct warned me, so that night I kept my son in my arms. Or, Ralph took no pity on the wanderers in the storm, kept the bolts drawn, the key turned in the lock. She shivered. She felt closer to that night, now, than she did to the light and air of this morning: to the sea wind and coastal showers, the truculent girl in the backseat of the car, Kit with her hair streaming about her as she ran calling for Melanie through the streets.

The telephone rang, in the next room. She did not stir. It would be Emma, perhaps, wanting to know what was happening. Or Ralph, calling from the hospital. She still had nothing to say to him, so what was the point of answering? She withdrew her hand into the safety of her blanket. An hour passed. The phone rang again. It was raining outside, and now the house was very cold. Anna thought of nothing at all. Her ideas seemed to have stopped, as if chilled and narrow conduits no longer carried blood to heart and brain.

Very late—it must have been toward midnight—she heard the doorbell. She sat listening; someone had a finger pressed on it, insistent. Ralph would have his key, so would the children. Emma? She pulled the blanket around her. She did not want to see Ralph’s sister. Emma had a key for emergencies, but who was to know what she would consider an emergency? The person was knocking now, thudding at the door.