A Change of Climate: A Novel (14 page)

“I suppose so,” Kit said.

A ray of grace shone through Emma, from some long-ago Sunday-school afternoon. She said it again, gently: “You mustn’t be greedy, Kit.”

Emma had tried to stop Ralph’s children calling her “Aunt.” What you are called you become, she said; she did not want to become something out of P. G. Wodehouse. She had tried to make their lives easier for them, but it was not easy being Ralph’s children.

His standards were high, but different from other people’s. When they were small the children had played with their friends from the row of council houses that straggled up the lane beyond the church, a quarter of a mile from the Red House. Ralph’s children had better manners, Emma thought; but the council-house children were better dressed.

It was lucky that the young Eldreds had schoolmates in similar plights, or they would have thought themselves hard done-by. Kit, for instance, had a friend whose father wouldn’t let a television set in the house. Robin knew a boy whose mother knitted his trousers to her own design. Norfolk breeds such people; huddling indoors out of the wind, they give birth to strange notions.

Emma had been a refuge for the children once; they still liked to be at her house, even if she could not assemble a sandwich without the filling dropping out. She thoroughly understood her practical value to them. She provided money for heart’s desires—for vital clothes and sudden causes, and treats that Ralph disdained. Poor Ralph, she thought. He made them all have music lessons, but they were neither musical nor grateful. Robin had said last year, “Dad’s supposed to be good with young people, but it’s other young people he’s good with. Not us.”

Emma and Kit finished their tea, drove the three miles to the Red House. As they pulled up, Kit said, “Is Dad still on Julian’s back—about doing a year for the Trust?”

“I think he’s given up on it. Julian wouldn’t do in London, would he? He’d be back within days.” Emma leaned across to kiss her niece. “I’m not coming in. The partners are going to the King’s Arms tonight, we’re going to paint the town red.”

“Have a good time.” Kit put her head in at the car window. “Maybe I’ll do it, instead. Do a year … it wouldn’t hurt. Or would it?”

Emma was surprised. “I thought you were doing postgrad? I thought it was all fixed?”

Kit shook her head. Her face was placid, almost sad. “Nothing’s fixed. I had this idea—I wrote home to Dad—I said I didn’t want to be in London … but I suppose I could face it, if it were for the Trust, if I could be any use there.” She looked away. “I don’t know what to think, though. I’ve lost my … no, I don’t know what I’ve lost.”

Your virginity? Emma wondered. The thought must have shown on her face. “It’s not Daniel,” Kit said. “I wouldn’t stay around here for Daniel. Though if I needed an excuse, I suppose he could be one.”

Emma drove away. The door of the house was thrown open and Julian came out, pretending to peer into the bushes, and calling “Come in for your dinner, kitty kitty kitty.”

Rebecca, behind him, said, “Kate of Kate Hall.”

Her brother looked well, Kit thought at once, he looked happy. He straightened up to his impressive height, put his arms around her and hugged her. Behind him was his red-haired girlfriend, Sandra Glasse.

Kit found Daniel Palmer in the kitchen with the rest of the family. All of them were watching carefully, to assess how pleased she was to see him.

“Hello,” Kit said. “I didn’t expect you, where’s your car?”

“I put it under cover.” Daniel did not know his status with Kit; did not know her mood; wondered what the family thought his status was. “Welcome home,” he said. He picked up a strand of Kit’s hair and touched the end of it to his lips.

“He’s got a new car, you see,” Julian said. “He’s afraid rain will fall on it.”

“It’s my Morgan,” Daniel said. Amazed delight showed on his face. Kit retrieved her hair and tucked it back, among those strands romance had not distinguished. “Handbuilt,” Daniel said. “I’ve been waiting four years for it.”

“Goodness,” Kit said. She wondered how desire could last so long.

Ralph said, “I’d be afraid to drive it, I think.”

Becky said, “It pretends to be old, but it’s not.”

“Where’s Robin?”

Ralph said, “He’s playing in it.”

Daniel displayed the car’s keys, holding them as if diamonds trickled from his fingers. “Don’t worry. He won’t get far.”

Sandra Glasse had not spoken at all. She did not seem to know what the others were talking about. She had just arrived, Kit saw: she had a paper bag in her hand, which she cradled against her old jersey. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” she said, “I’ve brought you some hen’s eggs.”

Daniel, who had not met Sandra before, looked around at her with a quizzical smile. It seemed to him she must have dropped in from another world.

They had decided to eat in the kitchen as usual, because the evenings were cold and the central heating was playing up again. Earlier Ralph had met Anna dragging into the boiler room with a scuttle of coal. “Anna,” he had said, “with two sons in the house, I don’t expect to see you—”

“This effort is voluntary,” Anna said. “I’m doing it to warm myself up.”

By the time they had fought a bout with the boiler, they were both warm. “The poor desperate thing,” Ralph said. “I suppose it would be a mercy to knock it out and send it wherever boilers go to die. Still, I can’t see us changing over to oil. Not this year. Besides, with oil, it’s so political, the prices shoot up, they hold you to ransom.”

“Daniel explained to me once,” Anna said, “that when the price of one sort of fuel goes up, the price of all the others goes up soon after.”

“But the installation …” Ralph said. “Honestly, the bills just at the moment … the telephone bill alone.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “Yet when anyone comes by and says “Can I use your phone?” you say, “Of course, go ahead,” and when they offer to pay for the call you say, “No, I won’t hear of it.” You remember that volunteer—Abigail, was it?—the one who said could she phone her boyfriend? And it turned out he’d gone to be a jackaroo for a year?”

“An extreme case. Anyway, it stopped her fretting.”

“People should have less expensive emotions,” Anna said.

“They should have them when it’s cheap rate.” Then she said, “By the way—while we’ve got a private moment—what do you think of Daniel these days?”

He was all right really, was Ralph’s opinion. He had always felt comfortable with Felix’s son. Daniel wore the same clothes as he did—corduroy trousers, old tweed jackets, Fair Isle and lambswool from September through to May. Only recently had he become aware that Daniel’s clothes were not, like his, organic developments. Daniel went to London to get them at vast expense, it seemed. They looked old because they were made that way. Ralph wore his clothes because they were what was in the wardrobe. Daniel wore them for another reason—to become someone. To become a country gentleman, Robin said; it was a pose.

Robin knew these things. Still, he was enthusiastic about the two-seater, the Morgan, could hardly be dragged inside to eat. Later Ralph went out too, to pass a hand over its gleaming body and murmur its praises. Daniel was like a child at Christmas, beside himself with glee; it would have been churlish not to admire. But he felt uneasy about the car and what it might mean. Modern mechanics purred beneath its hood; as Rebecca said, it purported to be what it was not.

All the same, he thought, if Daniel was Kit’s choice, you wouldn’t find him raising objections. Daniel would look after her. There was nothing fake about his bank balance, and the architects of the county were coming men. He could afford the car and he could afford Kit. He would design them a house, no doubt, and built it on a prime site, and Kit would have a cleaning lady and hot water whenever she wanted it, and …

An awful spasm of grief took hold of Ralph; he stood in the outhouse with Daniel and Robin, an old mac around his shoulders, rain and blue evening air gusting in at the door, and felt grief take him by the windpipe, grief shake him like a mugger. He turned away; no one must see his face.

This happened sometimes. More, lately. And trying to separate himself from the emotion, to pull away from it, he wondered: why is this? He went back into the house. In the kitchen, Sandra was washing up; Becky was drying; Anna was decanting the leftovers into boxes for the fridge. A usual kind of family: 1980, and all’s well.

It was a year now since Julian had met Sandra Glasse.

It was a Sunday in April; Julian could not mistake the date, because the Scouts in North Walsham had been holding their St. George’s Day parade. And what was he doing in North Walsham? He had wanted to get out of the house. There were some particularly nasty Visitors, Sad Cases. Robin had the excuse of some sporting fixture or other; he always had a means of escape.

His mother, who was sensitive about the Visitors, had seen Julian’s plight. “Would you go to North Walsham for me? I have a bundle of clothes for the church jumble sale, which includes some things of your father’s that I particularly wish to see the back of. If you could just drop them in at this address I’ll give you—leave them in the garage if they’re out—then you could have the car for the afternoon. How would that be?”

Nothing doing in North Walsham; nothing doing, in a little market town on a Sunday afternoon. Only the Scouts marching down the street with their band, and a gang of bike boys jeering at them. He parked the car, delivered the bundle to a house near the church, walked up the empty street in fitful sunshine. He stopped to stare for no good reason into the window of Boots the Chemist. There was a razzmatazz of vitamin supplements and glucose tablets, and a come-and-get-’em pyramid of Kodak films, and an alluring display of hot-water bottles, for pessimists who might be buying them in for the summer ahead.

The bike boys had gathered around the Market Cross, their machines at rest, and they in their leather jackets pushing and shoving about its venerable dome. Julian always liked to see the Market Cross, but he shied away from approaching them. He was not afraid—or he did not want to think so; but like the Scouts he would have been an incitement to them. He was tidily dressed, like a good schoolboy at weekend, in a loose cream cotton shirt and well-ironed denims—no one could stop his mother pressing clothes. His hair was the color called dishwater blond; still, it was too blond, and conspicuously shiny and clean. He knew his own features: his unformed face, his large unclouded blue eyes. He knew what they represented—provoking innocence. It did not seem to matter that he was physically stronger than most people. Strength’s not much good without permission to use it.

The boys leaning on the columns of the Market Cross had leather jackets with studs and hair shaved off to stubble. The girls with them had long metal earrings and aggrieved faces. They sprawled against the machines or pawed at the boys’jackets, keeping up a braying cackling conversation of sorts. One girl hitched up her thin skirt and threw a leg over one of the bikes; she slithered across the saddle and rode it in seesaw movements, in a mimicry of copulation.

Another girl stood slightly apart from the group. She was with them, but didn’t seem to belong to them at all. She had a shaggy head of thick, dark red hair; he could hardly see her face or shape, and it was the oddity of her that made him give her a second look. She wore a black-and-white tweed jacket that was several sizes too big; it was well-worn, and the kind of thing that a settled Norfolk matron of fifty might call “my old gardening coat.” No pretence at fashion in it, or even anti-fashion. She had lace-up school shoes: also not a rebel’s possessions. Someone spoke to her, and she shook her red head violently, and started across the road, cantering off, like an animal, in the direction of the church.

Julian turned and put the car keys in his pocket. He crossed the road too, followed her into the church grounds. She stood beneath the broken, collapsed tower, whose craggy top overbore the streets, the Market Cross, the bike boys. Seeing him, she seemed to shake herself inside the vast stiff jacket, and trotted further off, to the far side of the churchyard. There she sat down on a bench (put there by the Old Folks’ Welfare Committee) and waited for him to catch her up.

At first he hardly dared sit down beside her, in case she took fright and hurtled off again. Her animal quality seemed pronounced, and he wished he had something to offer, a sugar lump or even a piece of bread, to show that he meant well. As if reading his mind, she reached into the jacket and took out an apple, then a second. She offered one to him, holding it out at arm’s length, without a smile.

“Do you always carry your supplies with you?” he asked.

She said, “Yes, certainly.”

He tossed his head back toward the marketplace. “Do you know that lot?”

“Not really.”

“I thought you were with them.”

“I picked up with them this morning. I’d nothing else to do. I went to Cromer with them. Nobody had any money. We came on here. They fetched me.”

He took the apple and sat down on the bench beside her. She wiped the fruit on the sleeve of her jacket and bit into it. She chewed gloomily, reflectively, eyes on gravestones and the church’s ancient walls.

“Are you going back with them?”

“No.” She was angry. “They’re senseless.”

“Where do you live?”

“In the Burnhams. You know it round there?”

“You’re a fair way from home.”

“You can get a fair way when you go on the motor bikes, that’s one thing about them. Still, I don’t care for it. I ought to be getting back.” She threw her apple core on the ground, but didn’t move, just huddled into her jacket. It began to drizzle. “I’ll take shelter in the church,” she said.

Later, it seemed to him that Sandra knew all the county’s churches, great and small. She treated them as other people treated bus shelters and waiting rooms. He had to stride to keep up with her, as she bolted for the porch. “If you’re not going to eat your apple,” she said, “I’ll have it back, I might need it later.”

He said, “I could take you home.”

“Have you got a car?”

“Yes.”

“You’re young to have a car.”