“Yes. You don’t have to tell that story, ever again.” Her face was composed, he thought; pale, alight with pity. “One telling is enough for a lifetime. Don’t imagine I’ll forget it.” She stood behind his chair. “Ralph, listen to me. Look at any life—from the inside, I mean, from the point of view of the person who’s living it. What is it but defeats? It’s just knock-backs, one after the other, isn’t it? Everybody remembers the things they did wrong. But what about the thousands and thousands and thousands of things they did right? You lost a child. And every day you think about it. But think of the children you didn’t lose.”
“Nobody has ever said that to me before.”
She moved away and stood before the fireplace, putting her hands flat on the mantelpiece, at either side of the stupid ticking clock. “Just tell me. When you said you loved me, was that a lie?” The careful blankness of her profile seemed to show that she was prepared for any answer.
“No,” he said. “No, it wasn’t.”
She let out her breath. “It’s a brute of a world, Ralph. A brute, isn’t it?” She moved toward him. Her eyes had never been so pale and clear. “Take your coat, my dear. It’s time you left.”
“Sandra and Julian—where are they, do you know?”
She smiled. “Last time I saw them they were sitting in a hedge like ragamuffins, eating blackberries.”
“They must come home. To you, or to us.”
“Sandra’s got the key of a flat in Wells. It’s one of the places she cleans. The landlord will let them have it cheap, till next season.”
“I don’t see how they can afford it. Even cheap.”
“I suppose the Lord will provide.” She smiled tightly. For a moment she reminded him of Anna. “But of course, he won’t. I’ll see they get through the winter.”
She turned away, presenting her shoulder to him. Before she turned, he read the coming winter in her face. As he was leaving she called, “Ralph! Are you sure you don’t want that old clock?”
“Nowhere to put it,” he said. I am houseless, he thought; I should have carried my house on my back. “Be seeing you, Amy.”
Another night of rain; and then, fine windy weather. On the roads there were great standing pools, shattered by sunlight. The sun struck every spark of color from the landscape, revivifying the trees with green, dazing the driver of the early bus; even dead wood, even fence poles, quivered with their own green life.
At ten o’clock, Anna returned to the Red House. She put her key in the door: thought, could there ever be a time when I will not do this?
She remembered how she had tried to sell the place, only a couple of years ago. It was a house with no center, she had always felt, no room from which you could command other rooms. Sound traveled in its own way; from one of the attics, you could hear the downstairs telephone quite distinctly, but from nearer rooms it couldn’t be heard at all. The house had its own conduits, sight lines. Sometimes one of the children’s friends had stayed overnight, without her knowing. She didn’t make a practice of searching the rooms, scouring the cupboards and landings for fugitives or stowaways; the house would have its private life, whether she agreed or not. In the morning a parent would telephone, furious or distraught. She would say, “Your child is here to be collected. I make no charge for bed and breakfast.” And then, oblivious to the babble on the line, she would put down the phone. She had not lived her life in a way that attracted sympathy. She had made sure of that.
Already—in the course of her small absence—the house had acquired an air of neglect. The vast hallstand had a vast cobweb on it, and just off-center sat a small brown spider, its legs folded modestly. Dirty plates and cups were piled in the sink. The boiler was out. “Kit, couldn’t you manage?” she said, exasperated.
“Is that all that’s on your mind? Housework?”
Rebecca was tearful. Robin baffled. Julian absent. Kit hostile. Kit had heard—through Daniel, no doubt—that Ralph had been to Blakeney and had tried to patch things up. She propped a hand against the kitchen wall; her eyes were snapping and fiery. “What can a person do?” she asked. “Except say they were wrong, and try to put it right?”
Anna gazed at her. “You know nothing, Kit.”
“I’m not claiming worldly experience. It’s a general principle I’m talking about.”
Ralph and his daughter, she thought: their terrible moral energy, their relish for the large statement. She had been preoccupied all her life with the particular, the minute; the neat stitching of a seam, the correctness of a turn of phrase. She had thought that life was governed in that way: by details. She had learned as a child, she thought, that details were what you offered God; you couldn’t hope, in any larger way, to please Him.
“Oh, Kit.” She sat down on a kitchen chair. “Will you make me something? Some coffee, with hot milk in it?”
The light of combat died in Kit’s eyes. Docile, solid, efficient, her daughter moved: table to fridge, fridge to the Rayburn. “Why should you forgive?” Anna said.
Without looking at her, Kit said, “Because if you don’t, it will kill you.”
Anna nodded. She knew such a thing was possible. Already she was becoming lighter, skeletal; her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground. She had not been able to eat the little egg, the widow’s meal. This morning there was a dizzying lightness at her center, a space under her heart.
“I have always thought,” she said, “that before there is forgiveness there must be restitution.”
Kit took the pan from the heat. She poured the milk carefully into the cup. “So what do you want him to do?”
“It’s not just him. You see, Kit, I’ve never forgiven anybody. I’ve had no practice. I don’t know how to do it.”
She put her hand to her mouth, as if the secret might spill out. (Are you sick? Kit said. No, no, she said.) All summer she had felt the drag of it, dragging itself toward the light. But perhaps there are no words for it; it can express itself only through symbols, through shadows. And life has always been like this: something more than it appears. In safety, there is danger. In tears, the awful slicing comic edge. In moments of kindness and laughter, the murderer’s fist at the door.
And year after year, Anna thought, I have occupied this room. I have sat at this table making shopping lists and writing letters, reading my daily paper, some faculty below consciousness alert for signs of disintegration: the sighing of the pipes and dripping of gutters, the malfunctioning squeak of ancient domestic machines, the boiler’s cough and the squeak of old floorboards. Coal dust and mouse droppings and vegetable peelings, gas bills and school reports, bitter wrong, and bitter duty correctly performed. Year after year I have sat in the house, windows sealed against the cold, waiting for someone. Who will not come home: who will never come home now.
Ralph went back to the Red House to collect his belongings. He would stay with Emma, he supposed. Anna said she did not want the house, but of course when she had thought about it she would want it, and it would be his responsibility to support her and the children. When he thought of the possible consequences of their separation—of rent for him and rates for her, of the severing of bank accounts and the relative poverty in which they would both live—his mind sheered off and went in some other direction, toward the contemplation of his moral insufficiency. That was easier for him; he was used to abstractions. Perhaps most people are, he thought. We indulge in guilt, shame—but faced with the practical effects of these emotions, we call in a solicitor. No wonder lawyers are never out of work.
He went up to their bedroom and packed some clothes. Anna had said she did not want sordid to-ing and fro-ing—that was the expression she had used—but of course it is impossible to crush a life into two suitcases. He tried, and then gave up, and sat on the edge of their bed, his face in his hands.
He hoped Anna would come in. She would not, of course. What would she see? Nothing to lift her spirits. You wreck your family once … years pass … you wreck it twice. He had evo
lved very nicely, he thought: along the only possible route.
Perhaps I should leave my clothes, and take my papers, I will need to clear out my desk … He was conscious of Anna, moving elsewhere in the house. Wherever he was, she wasn’t; they skirted and avoided each other.
In his office, he sat down in his wooden swivel chair. He looked at his photograph, the picture taken on the stoep at Flower Street. He folded the frame, laid it face down. That would be the last thing Anna would want; he should never have taken it out, it had only made the children ask questions. Sightless, his mother and father stared down at him: sepia eyes. How his father’s face had coarsened, with age; the flesh swelling, the features seeming to shrink. Would he be like that? It was possible, of course, that when the picture was taken his father was no older than he was now. And surely, he thought, I’m going his way: two inches on the waist, the reading glasses, those shirts that are too small around the collar, and get put to the back of the wardrobe. I am in no shape for a new life, he thought. But, anyway. It seems I have to have one.
Will Anna just watch me go, he wondered. Or is she waiting for me to make some gesture, some sign—but how would I know what it was? She had said she meant him to go, and he must allow her to mean what she said, he must allow her that.
Everything’s gone, he thought: just pride remains.
But how terrible, perhaps the worst thing in the world: to be taken at your word.
His hand crept into the first drawer of his desk. Closed around stone: Gryphaea. He held it to his cheek, and then against his mouth. A child’s life; the salt and cold. He tasted it: Phylum: Mol-lusca. Class: Pelecypoda. Order: Pterioda. Such confidence, he’d felt as a child, about the order of the world. Family: Gryphaeidae. Genus: Gryphaea. Species: arcuata. The past doesn’t change, of course: it lies behind you, petrified, immutable. What changes it is the way you see it. Perception is everything. It turns villains into heroes and victims into collaborators. He held the object up between his fingers: took a sighting, and spun it across the room into the wastepaper basket.
Anna was in the kitchen: I will do something useful, she thought. She ran the hot tap, and rinsed the crumbs out of a dishcloth. She wrung it between her hands, flapped it out, shook it and straightened it and set it to dry, carefully squaring up the corners as it hung over the drain board.
Well … that was marginally useful, was it not? She remembered the night Ralph had left her: washing her cup and washing her cup. A phrase from an old letter came back to her, a letter James had written: “There is always some emergency, God-given or otherwise.” How very odd memory is: and not an ally, on the whole. She could not see how this phrase had any application to her circumstances.
In the other room, Ralph was no doubt going about his preparations.
She walked around the kitchen table, touching the back of the chairs. She had consulted their solicitor; she had better tell Ralph about this, she supposed, as a family solicitor cannot act for both parties when those parties are not to be a family any longer.
She sat down at the table, because she felt ill.
Will he go? Surely he will not? But what will stop him?
She felt she had set him a test, an examination; but he was not aware of it, and so he could not hope to pass.
Ralph picked up his bags. He went out into the hall. “Anna? I’m going now.”
After a moment she appeared. She wrapped her cardigan tight across her chest. He saw the gesture: elderly, a means of defense. “So,” she said.
“You can phone me at Emma’s.”
“Yes, of course.”
“If you want me.”
“I should tell you, Ralph, that I’ve been up to Norwich, to see Mr. Phillips. He agrees that there are grounds, advises I stay in the house, but I told him I don’t want to do that. You will have to find another solicitor—I’m sorry about that, but of course Mr. Phillips can’t act for us both. What I mean to do is to find a flat in Norwich for myself and Becky. Then you can come back here. Kit and Julian and Robin, they won’t mind. They’ll stay here with you, I suppose. The kind of mothering I’ve given them … they’ll probably barely miss it.”
He looked at her for a moment, considering; put down his cases. She thought, he has put down his cases, surely he will not go now? He said, “You are indulging yourself, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes, of course. Self-indulgence is my habit.”
“I mean, you are indulging a notion of failure …”
“Failure? How could I be a failure?” She smiled brightly. “I mean, haven’t I kept the twin-tub in trim? Haven’t I managed the boiler, all these years? And the hallstand—oh, yes, I’ve come to grips with the hallstand. Say anything, but never say the Red House has beaten me.”
He clenched his hand inside his pocket, frozen around the space where he had thought Gryphaea would be. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and picked up his cases.
She opened the front door for him, helpfully. Unbalanced by the bags, he stepped back to kiss her cheek. He saw that she was crying. “You don’t want this to happen,” he said.
“At least acknowledge that I know my own mind.”
The door of the Red House was an old and heavy door. When it was opened the cold morning came in: a big breezy presence, filling the hall. He hesitated on the threshold, scuffing a foot, dragging the time out.
Anna touched his arm. “Ralph …”
He looked away, unwilling to influence by any expression on his face the expression on hers. He glanced up, out into the garden—if garden it could be called: over the mud and the lawn churned up by bikes and neighbors’ dogs that the children played with, over the pond where they’d had fish once and over the rusty swing with its sodden ropes, and over Julian’s vegetable plots, and the wilderness of the dog runs and the outbuildings beyond. Something moved— dog-height—from one of the rotting sheds. Anna said, “What’s that? What on earth is it?”
A creature moved into their view, at a distance. It came slowly over the rough ground, crawling. It was a human being: its face a mask of despair, its body half clothed in a flapping gown, its hands and knees and feet bleeding; its strange head the color of the sun. It progressed toward them; they saw the heaving ribs, the small transparent features, the dirt-ingrained skin.
“I must put these cases down somewhere,” Ralph said. All he could think for the moment was that they were dragging his arms out of their sockets; he did not know whether to put them inside or outside the house. He wondered which of them would move first, he or Anna, toward this jetsam, this salvage; but wondered it idly, without that spirit of competition in goodness that had animated his life. Whichever, it didn’t matter … he put his baggage down, nowhere in particular, wedged across the threshold. “We must take her in,” he said to Anna. “Or she will die.”
“Yes,” Anna’s face was open, astonished. They left the Red House together, stumbling over the rough grass. As they approached the child, she stopped trying to crawl. She shrank into herself, her head sunk between her shoulder blades like some dying animal. But then, as they reached out toward her, Melanie began to breathe—painfully, slowly, deeply, sucking in the air—as if breathing were something she were learning, as if she had taken a class in it, and been taught how to get it right.
In November that year, Emma went back to Walsingham. It was seasonably cold, the light struggling against an obdurate bank of cloud. In the street she saw the pug dog and his woman; these months on, both were a little grayer, stouter, their feet and pads stepping gingerly on the cobbles.
As she walked up the flagged path of the Anglican church, Emma tried to edit her usual perception—that she was entering an extravagantly designed council house. A poor thing, but our own, she thought: noting the brick arches and brick columns, the stoup for holy water. Holy water, that’s going too far—and in fact there was no need for her to go any further, no need to go inside at all.
ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE
SHRINE. She stood in the porch, turning the pages of the great book. Back, right back to—when? What date? When had Felix died? Her eyes ran over the columns. The pages were damp, they stuck together and revealed only a clump of months at a time, a huge aggregation of prayers. Patience was required; she started to scuff up the corners, looking for dates, for clues. But yes, here it is at last: her own handwriting.
RALPH ELDRED
ANNA ELDRED
KATHERINE ELDRED
Then the missing line; then
JULIAN EDRED
ROBERT ELDRED
REBECCA ELDRED
Why did I think God would recognize our real names, our formal and never-used names, instead of the names we are called by? There: that’s a puzzle. She reached into her bag for her pen. Her pen was a present from Felix. It was a serious and expensive object, made of gold.
Damn; not there. Her fingers probed, scraped the worn silk lining. Perhaps a child had borrowed it. She plunged her hand into her coat pocket, and brought out a furred and leaking ballpoint, its plastic barrel cracked, its ink silted. She shook it, and tried a preliminary zigzag in a corner of the page. She shook the pen again, tapped it. If you could scribble the book over, make additions … But it did not seem decent to her to spoil the pages. Pray for Felix, she said to herself. Pray for Ginny. Pray for me.
She began to write. Her pen moved over the vacant line. The ballpoint marked the paper, but nothing appeared: only white marks. She shook it once, slammed it on the wooden desk. At last, like a slow cut, the ink began to bleed. Laboriously—the pen faltering, blotting—she filled in the missing line:
MATTHEW ELDRED
So that’s done, she thought. She ran her finger down the page. Prayers answered; after a fashion. She hesitated, her hand in the air, then placed the defective pen beside the book. You could not know what desperate soul would come along, with no means of writing at all.