The route home lay inland, through narrow lanes between farms; flat airy fields, where tractors lay at rest. Ralph pulled up to let a duck dawdle across the road, on its way from a barnyard to nowhere. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it. Emma’s got nothing. Nothing. She’s given twenty years to Felix and now she’s on her own.”
“Emma’s given something,” Anna said. “I think to say that she’s given twenty years is being melodramatic.”
“Why is it,” Ralph said, “that women manage to be so cool in these situations? What’s all this keeping up a good front? Why do they think they have to do it? I heard Ginny talking about insurance policies, for God’s sake.”
“I only mean, that Emma’s life has suited her. She had what she wanted—a part-time man. Felix didn’t use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If she’d chosen to. She didn’t have to wait on Felix.”
“Married? Could she?” Ralph turned his head.
“Look out,” Anna said, with a languor born of experience. Ralph put his foot on the brake; a farm truck slowly extruded its back end from a muddy and half-concealed driveway.
“Sorry,” Ralph said. “Could she? Who could she have married then?”
“Oh Ralph, I don’t mean any one person, not this particular man or that particular man … I only mean that if she had wanted to marry, if that had been what she preferred, she could have done it. But marriage entails things, like learning to boil eggs. Things that are beyond Emma.”
“I can’t see men beating a path to her door.” Ralph edged the car painfully down the lane, squeezing it past the truck, which had got stuck. “Not Emma. No beauty.”
“Felix liked her.”
“Felix was a creature of habit.”
“Most men are.”
Ralph fell silent. He was very fond of his sister; no one should think otherwise. Emma was kind, clever, wise … and lonely, he’d supposed: a little figure glimpsed on a river bank, while the pleasure craft sped by. This notion of her as a manipulator, of Felix as a little fish that she played at the end of her stick and hook … Seems unlikely to me, he thought. But then, what do I know?
The journey took them a half hour, through back roads and lanes, through straggling hamlets of red brick or flint cottages, whose only amenity was a postbox; between agribusiness fields, wide open to a vast gray sky. Ralph pulled up with a jolt at the gate of their house. Anna shot forward, one hand on the dashboard and one on her hat. “Can I leave you here? I’m late.”
As she unraveled her seat belt, Ralph turned to look at her. “Those people at the funeral, all those friends of Felix’s, how many of them do you think knew about him and Emma?”
Anna took her house keys from her bag. “Every one of them.”
“How did Ginny bear it?”
“Easily. Or so everyone says.” Anna swung her door open and her legs out, setting her high heels daintily into the mud. “What time will you be back?”
“Seven o’clock. Maybe eight.”
Nine, then, Anna thought. “Everybody knew except you,” she said. “I suppose you still feel a fool.”
“I suppose I do.” Ralph reached over to close the passenger door. “But then, I still don’t see why I should have known. Not as if their affair was the flamboyant sort. Not as if it was …“—he searched for the word—”… torrid.”
Torrid, Anna thought. She watched him drive away. Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.
TWO
Anna, as Ralph vanished from view, plucked the afternoon post from the wooden mailbox by the gate; then picked her way over rutted ground to the front door. The drive was more of a farm track than anything else; often it looked as if a herd of beasts had been trampling it. The mailbox was something new. Julian, her eldest boy, had made it. Now the postman’s legs were spared, if not the family’s.
The Red House was a farmhouse that had lost its farm; it retained a half acre of ground upon which grew sundry bicycle sheds, a dog kennel and a wire dog run with the wire broken, a number of leaning wooden huts filled with the detritus of family life, and an unaccountable horse trough, very ancient and covered with lichen. Recently, since Julian had been at home, the hedges had been cut back and some ground cleared, and the rudiments of a vegetable garden were appearing. The house and its ramshackle surroundings formed a not-displeasing organic whole; Julian’s attempt at agriculture seemed an imposition on the natural state of things, as if it were the bicycle sheds that were the work of nature, and the potatoes the work of man.
The house itself was built of red brick, and stood side-on to the road. It had a tiled roof, steeply pitched; in season, the crop-spraying plane buzzed its chimney stacks and complicated arrangements of television aerials. There were a number of small windows under the eaves, and these gave the house a restless look: as if it would just as soon wander across the lane and put down its foundations in a different field.
Two years before, when it seemed that the older children would shortly be off their hands, Anna had suggested they should look for a smaller place. It would be cheaper to run, she had said, knowing what line of reasoning would appeal to Ralph. With his permission she had rung up Felix Palmer’s firm, to talk about putting the house on the market. “You can’t mean it,” Felix had said. “Leave, Anna? After all these years? I hope and trust you wouldn’t be going far?”
“Felix,” Anna had said, “do you recall that you’re an estate agent? Aren’t you supposed to encourage people to sell their houses?”
“Yes, but not my friends. I should be a poor specimen if I tried to uproot my friends.”
“Shall I try someone else, then?”
“Oh, no need for that … If you’re sure …”
“I’m far from sure,” Anna said. “But you might send someone to look around. Put a value on it.”
Felix came himself, of course. He brought a measuring tape, and took notes as he went in a little leather-bound book. On the second story, he grew bored. “Anna, dear girl, let’s just say … a wealth of versatile extra accommodation … attics, so forth … an abundance of storage space. Leave it at that, shall we? Buyers don’t want, you know, to have to exercise their brains.” He sighed, at the foot of the attic stairs. “I remember the day I brought you here, you and Ralph, to talk you into it …” His eyes crept over her, assessing time’s work. “You were fresh from Africa then.”
I was tired and cold that day, she thought, tired and cold and pregnant, rubbing my chilblains in that drafty wreck of a drawing room; the Red House smelled of mice and molds, and there were doors banging overhead, and cracked window glass, and spiders. To preempt his next comment, she put her hand on his arm: “Yes, Felix. It was, it was a long time ago.”
Felix nodded. “I remember saying to you—it’s the sort of place you come to grips with in your own good time.”
“And we never have.” She smiled.
“You filled it with children. That’s the main thing.”
“Yes. And for all their presence improved it, we might as well have stabled horses. Well, Felix—what’s the verdict?”
“There’d be interest,” he said cautiously. “London people per-haps.”
“Oh—fancy prices,” Anna said.
“But consider, Anna—do you really want to do this rather dras-tic thing?”
Felix closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. They went downstairs, and had a glass of sherry. Felix stared gloomily over the garden. Slowly the conventions of his calling seemed to occur to him. “Useful range of outbuildings,” he muttered, and jotted this phrase in his book.
That evening Felix telephoned Ralph. “Why don’t you hang on?” he said. “Prices are going up all over East Anglia. A yea
r from now you might make a killing. Tell Anna I advise staying put.”
“I will.” Ralph was relieved. “I take her point, of course—Kit and Julian away, Robin will be off in a year or so, and then there’ll be just the two of us and Becky, we’ll be rattling around. But of course, it’s not often that we’re just the family. We get a lot of visitors.”
“You do, rather,” Felix said.
“And we have to have somewhere to put them.”
Two days later, while Ralph and Anna were still debating the matter, their boy Julian turned up with his suitcase. He wasn’t going back to university, he said. He was finished with all that. He dumped his case in his old room in the attics, next door to Robin; they had put the boys up there years ago, so that they could make a noise. Julian offered no explanation of himself, except that he did not like being away, had worried about his family and constantly wondered how they were. He made himself pleasant and useful about the house and neighborhood, and showed no inclination to move out, to move on, to go anywhere else at all.
Then Kit wrote from London; she phoned her parents every week, but sometimes things are easier in a letter.
I’m not sure yet what I should do after my finals. There’s still more than a term to go and I have various ideas, but I keep changing my mind. It isn’t that I want to sit about wasting time, but I would like to come home for a few weeks, just to think things through. Dad, I know you mentioned to me that I could work for the Trust for a year, but the truth is I’ve had enough of London—for the moment, anyway. I wondered if there was something I could do in Norwich …
“Well,” Ralph said, rereading the letter. “This is unexpected. But of course she must come home, if she wants to.”
“Of course,” Anna said.
Her perspective altered. She felt that she must settle to it, give way to the house’s demands, perhaps until she was an old woman.
When on the afternoon of the funeral Anna let herself into the wide square hall, she peeled off her gloves slowly, and placed them on the hallstand, a vast and unnecessary article of furniture that Ralph had picked up in an antique shop in Great Yarmouth. “No other family in the county,” she had said at the time, “feels they need an object like this.” She looked with a fresh sense of wonder and dislike at its barley-sugar legs and its many little drawers and its many little dust-trapping ledges and its brass hooks for gentlemen’s hats, and she saw her face in the dim spotted oval of mirror, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead, then took off her coat and threw it over the banisters.
The Norfolk climate gave Anna a bloodless look, tinged her thin hands with violet. Every winter she would think of Africa; days when, leaving her warm bed in a hot early dawn, she had felt her limbs grow fluid, and the pores of her face open like petals, and her ribs, free from their accustomed tense gauge, move to allow her a full, voluptuary’s breath. In England she never felt this confidence, not even in a blazing July. The thermometer might register the heat, but her body was skeptical. English heat is fitful; clouds pass before the sun.
Anna went into the kitchen. Julian had heard her come in, and was setting out cups for tea.
“How did it go?”
“It went well, I suppose,” Anna said. “We buried him. The main object was achieved. How do funerals ever go?”
“How was Mrs. Palmer?”
“Ginny was very much herself. A party of them were going back to the house, for vol-au-vents provided by Mrs. Gleave.” Anna made a face. “And whiskey. She seemed very insistent on the whiskey. If you’d have asked for gin—well, I don’t know what!”
Julian reached for the teapot. “Nobody would have gin, would they, at a funeral?”
“No, it would be unseemly,” Anna said. Mother’s ruin, she thought. The abortionist’s drink. A mistress’s tipple. Flushed complexions and unbuttoned afternoons.
“And how was Emma?”
“Emma was staunch. She was an absolute brick. She turned up in that old coat, by the way.”
“You wouldn’t have expected her to get a new one.”
“Oh, I don’t know. A lesser woman might have hired sables for the day. And implied that Felix had given them to her.” Anna smiled, her hands cradling her teacup. “Your old dad and I were talking on the way home. About how he went on for so long, without knowing about Felix and Emma.”
“Twit,” Julian said.
Some three years earlier, the year before Kit went to university, Ralph Eldred had been in Holt for the afternoon. It was a Wednesday, late in the year; at Gresham’s School, blue-kneed boys were playing hockey. The small town’s streets were empty of tourists; the sky was the color of pewter.
Ralph decided—and it was an unaccustomed indulgence on his part—to have some tea. The girl behind the counter directed him upstairs; wrapped in bakery smells, he climbed a steep staircase with a rickety handrail, and found himself in a room where the ceiling was a scant seven foot high, and a half dozen tables were set with pink cloths and white china. At the top of the stairs, Ralph, who was a man of six foot, bent his head to pass under a beam; as he straightened up and turned his head, he looked directly into the eye of Felix Palmer, who was in the act of pouring his sister Emma a second cup of Darjeeling.
The twenty minutes which followed were most peculiar. Not that anything Emma did was strange; for she simply looked up and greeted him, and said, “Why don’t you get that chair there and put it over here, and would you like a toasted teacake or would you like a bun or would you like both?” As for Felix, he just lowered his Harris tweed elbow, replaced the teapot on its mat, and said, “Ralph, you old bugger, skiving off again?”
Ralph sat down; he looked ashen; when the waitress brought him a cup, his hand trembled. The innocent sight that had met his eyes when he came up the staircase had suddenly and shockingly revealed its true meaning, and what overset Ralph was not that his sister was having an affair, but his instant realization that the affair was part of the world order, one of the givens, one of the assumptions of the parish, and that only he, Ralph—stupid, blind, and emotionally inept—had failed to recognize the fact: he and his wife, Anna, whom he must go home and tell.
Ask him how he knew, that moment he swiveled his head under the beam and met the bland blue eye of Felix: ask him how he knew, and he couldn’t tell you. The knowledge simply penetrated his bone marrow. When they brought the toasted teacake, he took a bite, and replaced the piece on the plate, and found that what he had bitten turned into a pebble in his mouth, and he couldn’t swallow it. Felix took a brown paper bag out of his pocket, and said, “Look, Emma, I’ve got that wool that Ginny’s been wanting for her blasted tapestry, the shop’s had it on order for three months, I just popped in on the off-chance, and they said it came in this morning.” He laid the skein out on the white cloth; it was a dead bracken color. “Hope to heaven it’s the right shade,” he said. “Ginny goes on about dye batches.”
Emma made some trite reply; Felix began to tell about a church conversion over in Fakenham that had come onto the firm’s books earlier that week. Then they had talked about the salary of the organist at the Palmers’ parish church; then about the price of petrol. Ralph could not make conversation at all. The loop of brown wool remained on the table. He stared at it as if it were a serpent.
Ralph arrived home alone that evening—which surprised Anna. No cronies, no hangers-on, no fat file of papers in his hand; no rushing to the telephone either, no flinging of a greeting over his shoulder, no distracted inquiries about where this and where that and who rang and what messages. He sat down in the kitchen; and when Anna came in, to see why he was so subdued, he was rocking on the back legs of his chair and staring at the wall. “You know, Anna,” he said, “I think I’d like a drink. I’ve had a shock.”
Alcohol, for Ralph, was a medicinal substance only. Brandy might be taken for colic, when other remedies had failed. Hot whiskey and lemon might be taken for colds, for Ralph recognized that people with colds need cheering up, and he was
all for cheerfulness. But drink as social unction was something that had never been part of his life. His parents did not drink, and he had never freed himself from his parents. He had nothing against drinking in others, of course; the house was well stocked, he was a hospitable man. When the tongue-tied or the chilled called on him, Ralph was ready with glasses and ice buckets. His eye was inexpert and his nature generous, so the drinks he poured were four times larger than ordinary measures. A local councillor, upon leaving the Red House, had been Breathalyzed by the police in East Dereham, and found to be three times over the legal limit. On another occasion, a female social worker from Norwich had been sick on the stairs. When these things happened, Ralph would say, “My uncle, Holy James, he was right, I think. Total abstinence is best. Things run out of control so quickly, don’t they?”
So now, when Anna poured him a normal-sized measure of whiskey, he judged it to be mean and small. He looked at it in bewilderment, but said nothing. After a while, still rocking back on the chair, he said, “Emma is having an affair with Felix Palmer. I saw them today.”
“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?”