Ralph drove to Blakeney. Ginny let him in, twittering nervously and offering him a drink. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d like to talk to Anna alone, I suppose that’s all right with you?”
Ginny waved him toward her drawing room. The shock of the vast window: the gray day flooded in, its monochromes intermingled, the dun mud of the creek and the shiver of gulls’ wings.
Anna sat with her back to the light. She was wearing a gray dress, and he noticed it because it was not hers; it was too short, too narrow, and even as he came in she was pulling at its neckline, straining it away from her white throat. Seeing him, she let her hand settle on her thigh. “I hardly recognize you,” he said.
“We have that in common.” He understood that she had been crying. Her voice was coarsened, blurred, at her elbow was a glass of dissolving ice.
At first, she didn’t speak. The moment spun itself out. Her eyes rested on his face. Then she spoke all at once, in a rush.
“Ralph, I want you to know that I don’t want anything. The house, everything, you can have it. At first—last night—I didn’t think that. I thought, this woman, whatever backwoods berry-picking life she’s been leading, I don’t want her to improve her position at my expense. But now I realize—”
“Anna, you’re exhausted,” he said.
“Yes. But I think now, what’s the point, what’s the point of hanging on?”
“You give me up, Anna?”
“What choice have I?”
“Every choice.”
“Every choice? I don’t think you will indulge me while I consider them.”
“It’s not a matter of indulgence. You have every choice. Trust me.”
“You have no right to ask that, Ralph. Of all the things you could ask, you have least right to trust.”
He nodded. “I see that. I suppose I meant, trust me for the sake of the past, not the present.”
“I shall have to go back home for a little while. A few weeks. To work out where I am going to go after that, and what’s to happen about a school for Rebecca. So what I want—I want to make this agreement with you—”
“Anna, this is not what I meant.” Ralph was panic-stricken. “You can’t just—reinvent yourself like this, people don’t do it. I thought we should sit and talk—”
“Too much of that,” Anna said. “So much talk, but here we are.” Again her hand went to her throat, trying to pull the neckline of Ginny’s dress away from her skin. “I want to make this agreement. That you will come home and get your things and do it all at once. I mean that you should get yourself organized and move out. I don’t want sordid to-ing and fro-ing with suitcases.”
“So that’s the decision you have made?”
“That’s the first decision I have made.”
Ralph looked away. “I wish you would get back into your own clothes.”
“I didn’t bring any.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Ginny’s a friend.”
“Ginny is pernicious.”
“Oh—because she gave me a drink, and a dress to wear?”
“This is childish. A childish conversation.”
“True. And you, of course, are acting like a mature man.”
“You must not think,” Ralph said, “you must not think that this was some stupid fling.”
“Oh, wasn’t it? I see, I do see. Your emotions were engaged, were they? Your poor little emotions.” That first rush of energy had died out of Anna’s voice; it was low, toneless now. “Then let me congratulate you. You’ve found the love of your life, have you? Well, go to her then. Quick about it!”
“I don’t want to go. I want you to forgive me, if you can. That’s what I came here to ask you, but you didn’t give me a chance.”
She shook her head. “Ginny has been talking me through it, a woman’s options. A woman in middle life, whose husband flits off to something more juicy. But I don’t feel that I can consider these options, I feel that I’m not going to sit in the house, waiting and hoping. I have done it before, and I’m tired of it.”
Ralph sprung up from his chair. He wanted to cross the room to her, but he did not dare. “I’m not asking you to wait. Or hope. Or anything. Just talk to me, let’s talk it through. I wanted to explain my feelings—”
“Why should you think I might want them explained?”
“Because it is usual. In a marriage. To talk about feelings.”
“Oh yes. Perhaps. In a marriage.”
“Listen to me,” Ralph said. “There is nothing to be gained by bandying words and freezing me out. I wanted to tell you what had happened, I wanted to be truthful with you—and if you can’t forgive me now, which I well understand, I wanted to go away with the hope that you might forgive me—in time.”
“I’m no good at forgiving.” She looked down at her nails. “Don’t you know that? It doesn’t matter if the action is to be deferred. I can’t do it. The years pass and they don’t make a difference. I know, you see. Because I’ve been betrayed before.”
“It’s useless, then,” he said. “If you will insist on seeing this as some kind of continuation or extension of what happened to us twenty years ago.”
“All my life has been a continuation of it.” She raised her eyes. “I know you have put it behind you. You have been able to say, let us not hate, we are reasonable people. Even though what happened was not reasonable. Even though it was barbaric and foul.” She put her hand to her throat again. They had hanged Felicia.
“You were not the only person betrayed,” he said. “I was betrayed too.”
“Not so much. After all, you opened the door to them.”
“Yes. Is it the action of a human being, to throw that in my face now?”
“There is no limit to what human beings will do. We know that, don’t we? There is no depth to which human beings won’t sink. And I’ve never claimed to be more than human. Though you would have appreciated it, if I had been.”
He looked as if the breath had been knocked out of him. Sat down on one of Ginny’s fringed Dralon armchairs; on the edge. Wiped his hand across his face.
When evening came Anna and Ginny put on their coats and went to walk by the quay. The water was flat, motionless. The small boats were perched on it, like toys on a steel shelf.
“How are you now?” Anna asked her. “About Felix?”
“You mean him dying?”
She really is faintly stupid, Anna thought. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“Well, you get to a stage where you don’t think about it every day,” Ginny said. “At least, so I’m told. I haven’t reached it yet.”
Anna saw the bulk of the Blakeney Hotel, a ship of flint, bobbing at the quayside and showing its lights. She heard the evening complaints of cattle from the salt marshes, and the competing snicker of sheep. She said, “I don’t understand this thing about forgiveness, Ginny. You hear about these people in Ireland. Their husband’s been shot, or their children blown apart. And you have some woman propped up before the cameras, saying oh, I forgive the terrorists. Why forgive them? I don’t.”
“I thought you were religious,” Ginny said: her tone careful, distant.
“I’m barely a Christian. Never was.”
Somewhere in Ginny’s mind a door opened, just a crack; was there not some story, long ago, about a dead child?
“Why don’t we drop in to the hotel for a drink?” she said.
“A drink, for a change!” Anna said. “Yes, why not?”
They sat in the bar for half an hour, sipping gin among pseudomariners. Evening light on blazer buttons: early diners tripping in to their shellfish and game. “I could ask if they had a table,” Ginny said.
Anna shook her head. “It would be a waste. I couldn’t eat. And I hate to waste food.”
“I’ll make us an egg then, shall I? A nice scrambled egg, or would you prefer it boiled?”
“Whatever,” Anna said. Widow’s food, she thought; food for women alone, for
their pale little appetites. Who cares if the flesh drops from their bones, if the light fades from their eyes?
Ginny said, “Be careful, Anna. You’re fifty.”
“Whatever do you mean, I’m fifty?”
“I mean you might lose everything, if you don’t put up a fight.”
Anna sat eating peanuts from a glass dish, looking out at the mud flats. “Tomorrow I must go back to the Red House,” she said. “Everything must be faced.”
Foulsham: “Both our parents have run away from home,” Rebecca said. “I’ll have to come and live with you, Emma.”
“Your mother telephoned, my dear. She’ll be back in the morning. She wants you not to worry, she says she knows you’re a grown-up sensible girl—and soon everything will be explained.” Somehow, Emma added under her breath.
“Till then Kit has to be a mother to me. And Robin has to be my father.”
“That’s a very nice way to think of it,” Emma said admiringly. “But it’s really only for one night, you know. And you can stay with me if you like.”
“People who run away never go for long, do they?” Rebecca’s face was bright, avid, sharp with fear. “That girl who was here, Melanie. She used to run away all the time, Dad said. But people caught her. The police.”
She is too young for her age, Emma thought; they’ve kept her that way, her brothers and her capable sister, even with all the Visitors they get, even with all that’s happened under that roof, each summer’s tribulations: “It’s not the same when people are grown-up,” she said. “You see, they have to make their own decisions about where to live. And sometimes it happens …” Emma shut her eyes tight. What must I tell her? She felt weary. Perhaps it is premature to say anything, she thought, perhaps in some way the row will blow over. She remembered Anna’s voice on the telephone: obdurate, balanced on the steely edge of tears. They’ve been married for twenty-five years, Emma thought; can it fall apart in a night?
But what do I know about marriage?
Rebecca said, “When Dad comes home I’m going to ask him if we can have a donkey to live in the garden. He’ll say no, certainly not, but I’ll keep following him round saying “Donkey, donkey, donkey,” till he gets tired and says yes all right then if you must.”
“Is that how you usually get your way?”
“You have to ask,” Rebecca said. “Don’t ask and you don’t get. Did you know Julian came home?”
“No. Did he? When?”
“He came like a highwayman at dead of night. Two nights ago, or three, I don’t remember. He came climbing up—there’s a way the boys get in, you know, like burglars?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Oh, they’ve always done it. Kit says it’s to show off and they could just as well come in by the door.”
“So didn’t your mum and dad see Julian?”
“No. He stayed in Kit’s room. Robin came down. They had a very serious talk.”
“Where were you?”
“I was sitting on the stairs with my ears flapping.”
“And what did you hear?”
“I don’t know.” She jerked her head away, and began to cry. “I couldn’t understand,” she said. “I had a dream, that I was on my own in the house.”
Emma said, “It wasn’t a dream, was it, Becky? You mean that’s what you’re afraid of”
“Yes. Because what if they all go, what if everybody runs away? Jule’s gone already. And Kit said she was going to go to Africa.”
Emma drew the child against her. “Becky, put your arms around me. Take hold of me very tight. I’m here, aren’t I? Don’t I feel solid to you? Do I feel as if I’ll run away? No one will leave you in the house alone.”
There was no more she could say. She was incoherent with love for the child and anger at Ralph and dismay at what had overtaken them. At the beginning of summer, she thought, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined such a thing; but then that’s perhaps the problem, my dreams have never been wild enough. I don’t understand what drives people, who does? I don’t understand the process by which our lives have unraveled. Why this year, and not other years? Because they are growing up, I suppose, and there had to be a turning point; Ralph met this woman, spoke to her no doubt of certain things, and after that everything must change. When a secret has been kept for twenty years, reality has been built around it, in a special way: it is a carapace, it is a safe house. When the walls have been pulled down and the secret has been let out, even to one person, then it’s no good trying to rebuild the walls to the same plan—they are walls to hold in nothing. Life must change, it will, it has to.
She wondered about going to the coast to see this woman, Mrs. Glasse. Pleading with her in some way. She would be laughed at, of course.
“We ought to be spared this scene,” Amy Glasse said.
“Yes.” Usual kinds of words came tumbling out of Ralph’s mouth, lines that she could swear she had heard on the television. For the sake of the children I really feel … Ah yes, comedy half hour, she thought.
She said, “You look weary, my dear.”
“Yes. I seem to be on the road all the time, driving about between one place and another.” He had spent the best part of a night—by far the best part—sitting at Melanie’s bedside, while she dipped in and out of the conversations that were held around her, picking and mixing as she liked. Nobody had filled in the missing hours, and so they would keep her in hospital till they were sure there was no delayed liver damage from anything she might have taken. What was most likely, given the limited means at her disposal, was that she had been inhaling some type of volatile solvent, enough to make her almost comatose when they fetched her in; but he was aware of her history, the range and type and peculiar dosages of the various means she had used to effect escape, and his greatest concern was that her broken and incoherent conversation, her apparent thought-disorder, should be seen as a possible consequence of drug abuse and not madness. He had witnessed this before, a heavy amphetamine user become agitated, hear voices, hallucinate—and then a cell, and then a prison doctor, and then the liquid cosh: and then the inquest.
Slowly he dragged his mind back, from that sorry afternoon in court to this date and place. “For one thing,” he said, “I feel I would have nothing to offer you. I would probably lose my job, you see. I would have to offer my resignation to the Trust’s committee. They would be obliged to accept it.”
“Hypocrites then, aren’t they?” she said.
“People aren’t enlightened, you know, you think they move with the times but they don’t. I suppose it’s that they’re always looking for a stick to beat you with … there’s the press, if it got into the papers … you see it’s all complicated by the fact that Sandra is my son’s girlfriend and they would twist the whole story around—believe me, I know about the newspapers—into something that resembled incest.”
“Sandra is your son’s mistress,” she said. “Let’s get it right.”
“Yes, I know that. I can’t afford to damage the Trust, because if there is a scandal it affects our fund-raising, and then if we have less money it means we must disappoint people and turn them away.”
“Are you married to Anna, or the Trust?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Amy.”
He did know what she meant, of course, but he was buying time, thinking time; surely, he thought, no one could accuse me of being one of those who love mankind in general but not persons in particular? Perhaps I incline in that direction, no doubt I do, but I try to correct my fault: I love Amy, who is easy to love, and I love my children and Sandra Glasse, and I love Anna, who is another proposition and a tougher one. What person could be harder to love than Melanie, and even there I try; I have made a study of love, a science. He thought, I cannot let them admit the child to a mental hospital, because Melanie is clearly, reluctantly, spitefully sane; stupid perhaps, self-destructive, but in possession of her faculties when she is not under the influence of some dubious tablets bo
ught on the street, or cleaning fluid, or lighter fuel. If she is diagnosed as schizophrenic, or labeled as psychopathic, that will be the end of her, in effect, they may as well bury her now. But I can’t take her out of hospital, I can’t take her back to the Red House now Anna isn’t there, and if I offer to take her back to London and dump her on Richard and the staff she’ll run away again in hours, we can’t keep her under lock and key, we have no authority to do it.
He looked up. There was a smell of baking from the kitchen; the need of income was constant, and no crisis would make Amy alter her schedule. She said, “I think that if you leave me, Ralph, you must give me a proper reason.” Her voice shook. She put her hands to the back of her neck, raked her fingers upwards through her long hair, then let it fall. “You came this spring, and I was lonely. I’ve been on my own for many years now. Since Andrew Glasse walked out of this house when Sandra was two years old, I’ve never let a man over this threshold, if I could help it. You came here; and you were kind, you were very kind to me, Ralph.”
He nodded. “I see I had no right to be. Not in that way.”
“So you must give me a reason now. Don’t give me some stupid reason about how it will be in the News of the World. Tell me you love your wife. Tell me a reason that makes sense. Tell me you love your wife and children and you have to protect them.”
“Anna says she will never forgive me. She wants me to move out of the house.”
“That’s natural for her to say.”
“But she says that as soon as it can be arranged she is moving out herself. I can go back then, she says. The children—I don’t know.”
I will lose them anyway, he thought. It’s not a matter of who lives where, or what custody is sought and granted; I will lose them. I have taught them to discriminate, to know what is right and wrong and choose what is right. They will value the lesson now, and not the teacher. Because what I have done is so patently, so manifestly, so obviously, wrong. And not just wrong, but stupid. “You ask me do I love Anna,” he said. “It’s not the right question. It goes beyond that. You see, when we met, we were children. We made an alliance against the world. Then what held us together—”