A Change of Climate: A Novel (7 page)

It was half past five when James came back from court, and the hostel was almost full that night, so before he had any conversation with his nephew he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves and began to help with the day’s last meal. It was stew—it usually was stew of some sort—but there was all the bread to be cut and margarined. The inmates always wanted bread, three slices per man, whatever the rest of their meal was. They grumbled if they did not get it, as if their rights had been violated.

When the meal was over and the men on the washing-up rota had been identified and corralled and set to their task, James with a twitch of his head beckoned Ralph into his office. They closed the door and with a single purpose, without a word, heaved a filing cabinet at the back of it; they knew from experience that it was the only way they could get a minute without interruption.

“Is it about the posting?” Ralph asked. “Is there a problem?”

“No, no problem.” James sat down at his desk, and found space for his elbows among the unpaid bills and begging letters and rubber bands. “Why do I have these rubber bands?” he wondered. “What are they for? No, Ralphie, there is no problem with Dar es Salaam, it is just that something more urgent has come up, and I thought that you should have the chance to consider it.”

Here it comes, Ralph thought: my future on the Mile End Road.

James said, “Would you like to go to South Africa?”

On the outskirts of Swaffham today there is a goodly selection of dinky bungalows. They have wrought-iron gates and birdbaths, trellises, hanging baskets, shutters, and dwarf walls. They have raw brickwork and shining windows, and scarlet floribundas in well-weeded beds. Their carriage lamps are the light of the twentieth century. In the marketplace Ralph hears the broad drawling accent in which his grandfather spoke moderated to the foul contemporary tones of middle England.

These bungalow dwellers repopulated the villages of Breckland, which were empty when Ralph went to Africa. Between settlements, there are still tracts of heather and furze, and black pine plantations: barren, monotonous, funereal, like the contents of an East European nightmare. But the bowed, arthritic pines that line the roads creep to the edges of the small towns, intruding themselves among the DIY merchants and filling stations and furniture warehouses; they gather round the new housing estates, like witches at a christening.

It is only in the land marked off by the military’s fences that the old country can be seen. “Danger areas,” they are called on the map. It is said the army builds models there, of life-sized Belfast streets, and that snipers and marksmen creep behind empty windows and false walls. From the roads you can see Nissen huts, like slugs in formation. Signs read NO ENTRY WITHOUT PERMIT—MINISTRY
OF DEFENCE PROPERTY.
Vegetation creeps like serpents around their metal poles. The wind topples them.

To the east, where Ralph and his children now live at the county’s heart, the great wheat fields roll onto the horizon, denatured, overfertile, factory fields. A farm that employed eighty-five men now employs six; the descendants of the other seventy-nine have delivered themselves from rural squalor, from midden and rotting thatch, and live in the bungalows, or in red-brick council houses with long gardens. In spring, primroses struggle in the verges. In June, there are dog roses in such hedgerows as remain.

Ralph dreams; again, he is three years old. Somewhere behind him, unseen, his father walks, and Uncle James. He curls down inside his grandfather’s coat.

They are going to the church. His grandfather will show him the angels in the roof, and the Pedlar of Swaffham carved on a stall end, and the pedlar’s dog with its round ears and big chain.

The Pedlar of Swaffham: John Chapman was his name. He dreamed one night that if he went to London, and stood on London Bridge, he would meet a man who would tell him how to make his fortune.

The day after this dream, Chapman put his pack on his back and with his dog set off to London. On London Bridge he stood about, until a shopkeeper asked him what he thought he was doing. “I’m here because of a dream,” the pedlar said.

“Dream?” said the shopkeeper. “If I took any notice of dreams, I would be in some country place called Swaffham, in the garden of some yokel called Chapman, digging under his damn-fool pear tree.” With a sneer, the fellow retreated to his merchandise.

John Chapman and his dog returned to Swaffham and dug under the pear tree. There they found a pot of gold. Around the pot ran an inscription. It said, “Under this pot is another, twice as good.” The pedlar began digging again, and found a second crock: and now his fortune was made.

John Chapman gave candlesticks to the church, and rebuilt the north aisle when it fell down, and gave £120 to the steeple fund. His wife, Cateryne, and his dog were carved on the stalls, the wife with her rosary and the dog with his chain. John Chapman became a churchwarden, and wore an ermine gown.

But Ralph’s dreams? He has shelved them: packed away his specimens and consigned his maps and monographs to a space under the eaves of his father’s house in Norwich. He has consented to another kind of life from the life he had planned for himself. It happens to people at Ralph’s age, at twenty-five, you realize you are no longer the person you were, and will never become the person you meant to be. But he thinks, after all, there is a living to be made; there is a row to be hoed, and at least I am not a clergyman. He is serving God—a bit—and Mammon—a bit; his father’s friends say he has not
committed
himself, not
wholly,
and he knows he has very little money in the bank. He comforts himself that he understands something of the nature of life, of the nature of hidden things: at least, he has classifications for what lies beneath the surface, he has categories and terms.

From a jelly speck to man the line improves, edging nearer all the time to the summit of God’s design. As the species has evolved, the child in the womb grows, grows through its gills and its fur and becomes human. So society creeps forward, from savagery to benevolence: from cold and hunger and murder, to four walls and hearth stones and arts and parliaments and cures for diseases. At twenty-five Ralph believes this; he believes too in the complex perfectibility of the human heart.

Lucy Moyo took a bunch of keys out of the pocket of her apron. She was six foot tall, imposing, solid, like a black bolster inside her print frock; the bunch of keys lay in her hand like a toy.

“This is the key for your office,” she said. She held it up. “These little ones are for your desks and cupboards. This is for the cupboard where we keep the first-aid chest. This one is for the chest itself. Friday nights, Saturdays, you will be wanting that. These keys are for the inside doors of your house. This one is for the pantry and these are for the store cupboards inside the pantry.”

“Are they really necessary?” Anna asked. “Every one?”

Lucy smiled remotely. “Mrs. Eldred, you will find that they are. This key is for the woodshed where the tools are kept. The baas must be sure that anything to stab and cut, anything with a sharp edge, you understand me, is shown to him or to you or some good person at the end of the day when it has been used and then it is locked up till it is wanted again.”

Lucy pressed the keys into Anna’s palm. She folded Anna’s fingers over them. “You must keep all these doors locked. These people are thieves.”

Her own people, Anna thought. And how casually she says it. “Is Lucy a cynic?” she asked later.

“I don’t think we ought to criticize her,” Ralph said. “She’s kept the place ticking over.” His hands moved over his desk, bewildered, flinching. “She probably knows what she’s talking about. It’s just the way she puts things, it’s a bit bald.”

Lucy said, “Mr. and Mrs. Standish, who were here before you, used to sit after their supper most nights and cry. It made me sad to see such old people crying.”

The voyage to Cape Town had taken three weeks. It had allowed Anna a pause for thought, a period of grace. Until the last year of her life, nothing had happened. Then everything had happened together. When she was thirteen or fourteen, she had made up her mind to go to a foreign country: preferably a distant one. Her idea was that she would say goodbye to her parents, and write to them twice a year.

Ralph understood her parents—which was a good thing, because of the time it saved. It would have been a lifetime’s work to explain them to someone who had been brought up in a different fashion. In families like yours and mine, Ralph said, it’s the girls who have the harder time. He knew, he said, what his sister had gone though. Anna reserved judgment. It seemed to her that Emma was not unduly marked by suffering.

The truth was that Emma frightened her; even her small talk was inquisitorial, demanding, sarcastic. Without a word but with an impatient toss of her head, she implied that Anna was decorative but useless. At least, Anna took this to be the implication. Nothing could be less true. Her hands had never been idle.

Anyway, she was putting thousands of miles between herself and Emma. If she had stayed in Norfolk people would have expected them to be friends, they would always be saying, Anna and Emma, Emma and Anna. It was not a harmonious combination—not to her ear. As a child, it was true, she had sometimes wished for a sister. Any companions had to run through a parental censorship, an overview of their lives and antecedents. By the time a prospective friend was approved, the attraction had waned on both sides.

Her mother and father were shopkeepers, with the grocer’s habit of measuring out everything: especially their approval. Nothing is free; they stressed that. God has scales in which he weighs your inclinations against your actions, your needs against your desires. Pleasure is paid for in the coin of pain. Pay in the coin of faith, and God may return a measured quantity of mercy. Or then again, he may not.

Anna had been a great reader, as a child. Her parents gave her paper pamphlets, containing tales of black babies and Eskimos and how they came to Jesus. But what she liked were school stories, where the pupils lived away from home in a mansion by the sea, and played lacrosse and learned French from Mam’selle. Her parents said books were a good thing, but when they picked one up to inspect it—to permit or not permit—their faces expressed suspicion and latent hostility.

They eschewed the cinema and the theater—they did not forbid them, but they knew how to make their views known. No alcohol passed their lips. Women who wore makeup—at least, any more than a smear of tan face powder—were not their sort. Mr. Martin looked at the newspaper, so his wife did not need to bother. She received each day a used opinion from him, just as she received a shirt for laundering, tainted with the smell of smoked bacon and ripe cheese.

Later, when she grew up, Anna realized that her parents were afflicted not simply by godliness, but by social snobbery. It seemed difficult for them to distinguish between the two. They looked up to those customers with big houses, to whom each week they delivered straw-packed boxes containing glace fruits and tiny jars of chicken breasts in nutritious jelly. They looked down on ordinary customers, who queued in the shop for bags of sugar and quarters of tea. The former paid on account; of the latter, they naturally demanded cash. They were among the first in their district to get the ingenious, time-saving, preprinted notice, which encapsulated so neatly their philosophy of life:

PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT, AS A REFUSAL OFTEN OFFENDS

All through her teens, Anna had been tormented by this notice, and by this thought: what if I fall in love, what if I fall in love with someone
unsuitable?
She knew the chances of this were high; there were so many unsuitable people in the world. But when she came home and said that Ralph Eldred wanted her to get engaged, the Martins looked in vain for a reason to oppose it. It was true that the boy’s future was unsettled; but then, his father was a county councillor.

Anna had been a compliant daughter. She had tried to do everything she could to suit her parents, while knowing that it would not be quite enough:
please do not ask for credit …
Some unhappy children have fantasies that they are adopted; Anna always knew she was theirs. In adolescence, she fell into reveries, irritating to the people about her, productive of sharp words from her mother. She dreamed of ways of being as unlike her parents as possible. But she didn’t know any ways. To despise them was one thing; to free herself from them was quite another.

And she wondered, now, as the ship moved south, whether she was sailing away from them or toward them. After all, they were such charitable people; weren’t they, in their own way, missionaries at home? There were no luxuries in their household; money was always needed for good causes. Besides, it was wicked to have luxuries when others had not the necessities; unless you were an account customer, of course.

And if the charity did not proceed from love, but from a sense of duty, did that matter? Were the results not the same?

Anna used to think so. The starving eat, whatever the motive of the bread’s donor; perhaps it does not become the starving to be nice about motives.

Ralph saw the issue differently. The Eldreds and the Martins, he said, acted from a desire to make the world comformable. Grocer Martin would like to raise all tramps to the condition of account customers; Betty the grocer’s wife would like to see chain-smoking unmarried mothers scrub their faces and take communion monthly. Cold, poverty, hunger must be remedied because they are extreme states, productive of disorder, of psychic convulsions, of demonstrations by the unemployed. They lead to socialism, and make the streets unsafe.

Ralph passed judgment on his father, and on hers. He knew a poem; he would laugh, and say:

“God made the wicked Grocer
For a mystery and a sign.
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine.”

There it was—Ralph hated nothing more than meanness. It seemed to her that he had a spontaneous, uncalculated kindness. She was looking for no more and no less. She slept with him before—just before—the engagement ring was on her finger.

It was she who had made him the offer. When the time came— the one occasion, perhaps in a year, when they had the house at Dereham to themselves—she was seized by fear. Even the touch of his warm hands made her shiver. But he was a young man with little experience—or none, as she supposed—so perhaps the differ-ence between terror and passion was not readily apparent to him.

After the deed was done, she worried a good deal about whether she might be pregnant. She thought of praying not to be, but she did not think she would have God’s ear. And besides, in the one way, disgrace would have delivered her. “I’ll look after you,” Ralph had said. “If that happened, we’d just bring the wedding forward.” When her period came—four days late, late enough to put her into a daze of panic and hope—she leaned against the freezing wall of her parents’ bathroom, against the hostile dark-green paint, and cried over the chance lost.

After this she seemed to lose her equilibrium; she had not thought of herself as a complicated person, but now all sorts of wishes and fears were fighting inside her head. Ralph suggested that they should bring the wedding forward anyway; marry as soon as she left her teacher-training college, not wait until the end of the summer. Uncle James came to meet her parents, and talked about this very interesting post that was going in Dar es Salaam.

Her mother thought that the climate might be unsuitable, but conceded that Anna had never had a day’s illness and had not been brought up to be a shirker. Betty thought, further, that the natives might not be nice. But what surprised Anna was how easily they fell in with James’s suggestion, how quickly they agreed that though the engagement had been unusually short the marriage might as well be in June. For the first time it occurred to her that they might be glad to have her off their hands. Think of the expenditure of emotion a daughter entails! With their daughter married, and at the other side of the world, they would have more energy for the affairs of strangers.

Of course there was something improbable, even hilarious, about the idea of being a missionary in Africa. She said, “I won’t have to wear a sola topi, will I? And be boiled in a pot?”

Ralph said, “I don’t think so. Uncle James has never been boiled. Not so far, anyway.”

Then Ralph came to her with the change of plan. If she agreed, they were not to go to East Africa at all. A job was waiting for them elsewhere, in a township called Elim. It was near Johannesburg, north of the city—not far from Pretoria either, he said, as if that would help her place it. He brought a book, newly published, called
Naught for Your Comfort.
If she would read it, he suggested, she would know why people were needed and why perhaps if they valued their own comfort they ought not to go. Then she could weigh up the options, think what was best for them. “And best for other people, of course,” she said. At that time—the spring of 1956—she could say such a thing with no ironical intent.

She read the book at once. It painted a picture of a hungry, bloody, barely comprehensible world. She felt ready to enter it. She did not know what use she could be, but Ralph seemed to think their work was cut out for them. And after all, comfort had never been one of her expectations.

She had dreamed about the book too, those last nights before they left England. The dreams seemed to heighten but not betray the text. Policemen strutted in the streets with machine guns. Acts of Parliament were posted up on every street. The populace was cowed.

When she woke, she shuttled these nightmares out of her head. For one thing, the dream streets of Elim were too much like the streets of East Dereham. For another thing, they had to jostle for space in her imagination with the images already there: missionaries’ tales and childhood geography texts, smudgy photographs of mean proportions; women with their teeth filed sharp, men with cicatrized cheeks. Some other part of Africa, no doubt. Some other time. Still she imagined savannah, long horizons, thatched rondavels standing in kraals: a population simply religious, hymn-singing, tractable. In real life, she had almost never seen a black man.

Ralph had said to Uncle James, “I hardly think my work at the hostel is going to have prepared me for Africa.”

Uncle James had said cheerfully, “Don’t worry. Nothing could prepare you for Africa.”

Her mother had given her a book called
The Sun-Drenched Veld.
She could read it on the ship, Betty advised. “One of the
Windows on the World
series, Anna. It cost 9/6.” She picked it up on the day they quit Las Palmas, flicking its pages as they moved through waters where flying fish leaped.

It bore little resemblance to Father Huddleston’s text; but no doubt it was true, in its way. “In descriptions of African wildlife the zebra is often mentioned only in passing. Yet he is a lovely creature; a compact, sturdy little horse with neat mane and flowing tail. And no two of his kind are patterned alike! Having drawn his outline you can paint in the stripes as you please.”

When the sea made her dreamy, unable to concentrate, she gave up on the text, let the book close in her lap and rested her eyes on its cover. It beckoned the reader through arches of the coolest, palest peppermint, into an otherworldly landscape—pink and gold in the foreground, green hills rising in the middle ground, and beyond them the lilac haze of mountains. She wondered if the illustrator had confused it with heaven; got his commissions mixed up, perhaps. But then she remembered a book she had seen on Ralph’s shelves—a book from his years as a fossil hunter. The picture on the cover was much the same—strange, impossible colors. She had turned to the inside flap to see what was represented:
On the shores of a Jurassic lagoon,
the caption said. Amid the startling viridescence of the palms, archaeopteryx flopped and swooped, feathers glowing with the deep autumn tints of a game bird. A little dinosaur, glinting like steel, scurried on spindle legs. The sky was a delicate eggshell. In the background shone a deeper aqueous blue green—some vast and primitive ocean, with shores that had never been mapped.

But now, how small the sea appeared: a metallic dish, across which they inched. After dark the people who were sailing home stood at the rail, looking for the Southern Cross. And one night it appeared, lying just off south, exactly where everyone had predicted it would be. Anna saw four dull points of light, pale, hardly distinguishable from the meager scattering of stars around. She would not have noticed it, she thought, if it had not been pointed out.