A Change of Climate: A Novel (15 page)

“It’s my mother’s car. I don’t mind taking you. You’ll never get back any other way, and this rain’s setting in.”

“All right,” she said. They stood in the church porch for a minute and watched the rain fall. “Sanctuary,” she said, unexpectedly.

“Do you know about this church?” Julian looked sideways at her, into her face. Such pale eyes. “When they were building it, it was the Peasants’ Revolt. There was a battle near here. It was the last battle, I think. Some of the rebels came in here begging sanctuary, but the church wasn’t finished, so it didn’t count. The Bishop of Norwich came after them and killed them all.”

The girl blinked at him. “I never heard that,” she said.

He loathed himself, spouting semifacts. Why had he done it? He laughed and said, “Didn’t they tell you about it at school?” He loathed himself more. What had made him go on about the Peasants’ Revolt, for God’s sake? She unnerved him, that was it. She had not told him her name. Her sandy-gilt lashes drooped onto her cheek.

“I don’t recall anything about it,” she said. But then, very kindly, “I’m always glad to know anything about old places, so if you’ve anything to tell me you needn’t be afraid I won’t like it.”

It seemed she expected a long acquaintance. The rain slackened a little. Julian took her jacket by its bulky sleeve and hurried her to the car. The bike boys had scattered. She was his responsibility.

A fine drizzle hit the windscreen. The sea, on their right as they drove, was obliterated by a rising mist. The Sheringham caravan sites loomed out of it, and the wind plucked at the blossom on the cherry trees in the bungalow gardens. The trees looked as if they had been left outside by mistake, or transported from some softer country.

Between Cley and Weybourne, the heathland melted invisibly into the marshes. Bird-watchers, hung about like pedlars with the tools of their trade, strode toward the invisible sea. There were sheep in the fields; among their ambling forms they saw the necks of resting swans, as hard and clear as marble, startlingly white in the thick air. By the roadside, signs—crudely chalked blackboards, or painted boards—advertised
FRESH SEA BAIT, SHRIMPS, COCKLES,
FRESH
CRABS, DRESSED
CRABS,
KIPPERS.
The tourist season was beginning.

They drove in what seemed to be a companionable silence. At Blakeney—the salt marshes a nebulous blend of earth, sea, air— Sandra turned in her seat. “I’m sorry if I was angry back there. I’m not usually angry.”

What Julian saw, from the tail of his eye, was a face set on placid lines; a face with a translucent pallor, and those pale eyes. She seemed strong, composed; she held her white hands on her lap, the one reposing confidingly in the other.

“What did the bikers say to you, to make you run offlike that?”

Sandra thought, then said, “They criticized my garment.”

After a moment, they both yelled with laughter, the noise filling the shabby body of Anna’s car. A gust of wind, blowing inland, peppered the rain against the glass.

“Well, I admit “…” Julian said. “Why do you wear it?”

“We got it donated,” Sandra said. “I can’t afford clothes like they’ve got. It’s funny, I always think—when you’ve got a bit of money you can afford cheap clothes, you can throw them away when they fall apart. But if you’re poor your clothes go on for ever. You get given things the Queen would be proud to wear.”

“Who was it gave it you?”

“Some church. My mum has her contacts. She used to clean for a churchwarden’s wife. So we get remembered when it’s jumble sales.” She paused. “It’s just our size she forgets.”

They began to laugh again. The windscreen wipers swished; ahead of them, toward Wells, the horizon had the pearl sheen of brighter weather. “I dare say it’ll outlast me, this old jacket,” Sandra said. “I once ran through a hedge in it, and it didn’t flinch.”

By the time they reached Holkham, the mist was clearing. Flashes of light struck from the dwarves’ windows of flint cottages, little houses tumbling toward the coast; flint sparkled like gemstones in the wall of a round-towered church. “Turn off here,” Sandra said, directing him toward the sea. They turned between high hedgerows, leaving behind a wide view of windmills and the red roofs of distant barns. The road narrowed. “I live down this track,” Sandra said. “Do you want to come in? You could have a cup of tea.”

The car bumped down an incline. “My mother calls this ’one of the foremost hills in Norfolk,’ “ Sandra said. “Okay—stop here.”

They came to a halt in front of a huddle of low buildings, the doors facing inward, out of the wind. There was a pear tree on a sheltered wall, geese on a pond, a vegetable plot screened off by an amateur windbreak. There were some rotting henhouses, an old cartwheel leaning on a fence, and by the front door a wheelbarrow filled with something shrouded in polythene. They got out of the car. A woman came to the door. “That’s my mother,” Sandra said.

Mrs. Glasse seemed taller than Sandra, not very old. She wore patched jeans and two shapeless pullovers, the one underneath longer than the one on top. She had red hair too, longer than her daughter’s, scooped up with pins. Julian saw that bits of it straggled down her back as she turned to lead the way inside. For the first time, he wondered how his own mother managed to keep her hair fixed in its dark cloudy shapes, arrested in its whirls and coils. There must be an art to it.

Mrs. Glasse had been working outside. Her muddy gumboots stood by the door. There was a wide lobby, full of swirling air—peg rugs on the floor, an accumulation of dark furniture.

“You’re not one of the bike boys,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Come through, I’ve got the kettle on.”

He followed her to the kitchen. It was a big room, light, square, tiled underfoot. Two hard chairs stood by an old-fashioned range, in front of which some clothes were drying. There was a smell of burning wood and wet wool. Mrs. Glasse hoisted the clothes away, and dragged up a third chair, manipulating it with an agile foot in a fisherman’s sock. “Where d’you find him, Sandra?”

Expecting no answer, she gave him a mug of tea, the sugar already stirred into it. Julian could not think of anything to say. Mrs. Glasse did not make small talk, or ask again where her daughter had been. He sat facing the back of the house, watching the light fade. Through an arched doorway, down steps, he caught a glimpse of a small dairy, with its deep stone shelves and recessed windows. Feeling the draft, Mrs. Glasse leaped up and closed the door. He snapped his gaze away. He had wanted to step into the dairy, and run a hand over the icy, ecclesiastical curves of the walls.

As he left the house and drove away, he noticed a glasshouse, its panes shattered; a gate, off its hinges. He felt like stopping the car, going back, offering his services. But then he thought, you can’t ask people to rely on you, if you’re going away at the end of the summer. Between now and October I couldn’t make much of an impression on that place. It would only break my heart.

After this, Julian did not see Sandra for some weeks. But in June, driving back from a friend’s house in Hunstanton on a bright windy day, he saw by the roadside two women selling vegetables from a trestle table. He knew them at once, with their white faces and long flapping scarves. He pulled over and climbed out of the car. “Hello there, Julian,” Mrs. Glasse said. She had a bag of money slung about her waist, like a market trader. Sandra pulled her woolen hat further over her brows, and smiled shyly at him.

“We’ll have strawberries shortly,” Mrs. Glasse said. “That fetches ’em.”

“Is there a lot of trade?”

“Passing trade,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Golfers on their way home, full of golf courses this place is.” The wind ripped the words out of her mouth. “In high season we get the self-caterings. I do vegetables, peeled and quartered, slice the carrots, whatever, put them in polythene bags, if they don’t sell we have to eat them. I do samphire, not that the self-caterings know what that is. We make bread when we’ve got the oven going, when we’re in the mood. I’m learning from a book to make bread into patterns. I can do plaited loaves, wheatsheafs, prehistoric monsters, frogs, and armadillos. The armadillos get a lot of admiration—but all you do is make a monster, and squash it, and bake the top in points.”

“It must be hard work,” Julian said.

“Labor-intensive,” Sandra said. “Of me.”

“We get bird-watchers, I make them sandwiches. We get that lot going to Brancaster and Burnham Thorpe, studying the haunts of Lord Nelson.”

“Early haunts,” Sandra said. “Birthplace.”

“We do goats’ milk, duck eggs. Sandra pushes it all up in the wheelbarrow. This table’s a bugger, though. We have to carry it up between us.”

“Up the foremost hill,” Sandra said. “We tried putting it on the barrow but it barged our legs.”

“Couldn’t you leave it up here?” Julian said. He looked around. “By the wall?”

“Self-caterings steal it,” Mrs. Glasse said. She clapped her hands together, to warm them, hopped from foot to foot. “Summer coming on,” she observed.

“I’m sure I could fix up something,” Julian said. “I could drive a post in behind that wall, nobody would see it, I could chain the table to it. Wrap a chain around the legs and get a padlock.”

“We never thought of that, did we?” Sandra said to her mother. “Well, we did actually, but we’re busy, we didn’t get round to it yet. It’d have to be weather-proofed, though. We couldn’t have our table rotting.”

“Perhaps Julian could build it a house,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Seems cruel to leave it out in the open air, chained up like something dangerous.”

The two women exchanged a glance. They laughed; comfortably enough. Julian felt almost comforted.

The following day, Julian went back to the Glasses’ farm. The women were very busy; Mrs. Glasse sitting by the stove, knitting in an effortful fury, and Sandra, after she had let him in, returning to her task of stuffing dozens of sisal doormats into black plastic bin-liners.

“For the market at Hunstanton,” Mrs. Glasse said. “We’re going tomorrow, we have a stall. Doormats do well, because people live amid such a quantity of mud. And basketwork of all types.”

“Where do you get the doormats?” Julian asked.

“I buy them cheap from a fool.”

“Baskets we make ourselves,” Sandra said. “She taught me. We do it in the winter when the weather keeps us in.”

“How do you get to Hunstanton?”

Mrs. Glasse rolled her eyes. “He do ask questions,” she said.

“Do you like her verb?” Sandra asked. “She does it for the tourists.”

“I only thought, with all your stuff—”

“We have a vehicle,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Of sorts. We try not to take it out more than once a week because of the summonses.”

“She got done for no tax,” Sandra said.

“We have to hide the bloody thing,” Mrs. Glasse said. “The police come down from time to time, sniffing, seeing what they can do us for. We used to have a dog, Billy, they didn’t care for him, weren’t so keen then. But he died.”

“You should get another dog,” Julian said, “if that’s what keeps you safe. I’m sure I could get you a dog.”

“No,” Mrs. Glasse said. He was sitting facing her, and he saw that her large light eyes filled with tears. She was pretty, he thought, might have been pretty, must have been. As if angry with herself, she gave the weighty knitting a push and watched it slither off her lap. “Billy wanted meat,” she said. “I used to feel sorry for him, you can’t expect a dog to get by on carrot and turnip.” She stood up. “That’s enough doormats,” she said. “We’ll bag up the baskets later on, we’ll just have a sit now and a cup of tea.”

Julian said, “I’ll come with you when you do the market. Do you have to take the table? I’ll help you load and unload.”

“You needn’t,” Sandra said. “We’ve always managed.”

“I can do anything you want,” Julian said. “I can patch up the roof if you’ve got a ladder, you’ve got some tiles off. I can do carpentry. I could put you on some new wallpaper if you want. I could lift your potatoes for you.”

Mrs. Glasse said, “Sit down, boy. There’s no need to do anything.”

Julian sat down and drank his tea. He could never remember a time when he had been commanded to do nothing—when it had been enjoined on him.

That summer, it seemed to Ralph, Sandra became a fixture in his house. She was to be found in the kitchen, occupying the rocking chair, her hands folded together, her legs tucked beneath the chair, her ankles crossed. He liked to talk to her if he found her sitting there. She had her wits about her, he told Anna, despite her quaint way of talking; she had a native clarity of mind which the educative process had not succeeded in clouding. School had been an interruption to Sandras life. She had left as soon as she could. “I didn’t see the point of it,” she told Ralph. “It was such a long way, it took hours getting there. It used to be dark by the time I got home.”

Sandra never turned up empty-handed. She brought perhaps a modest present of a lettuce, or some fresh bread; once, when they had not baked, a can of peaches from their store cupboard.

Anna was touched, then exasperated. “Sandra,” she said, “you don’t have to bring us presents. You’re welcome to come here and eat every day and stay as long as you like, nobody who comes here has ever had to pay for their keep.” No one else has ever offered, she thought.

Sometimes Sandra brought a cake; but they baked cakes only as a last resort, when they had nothing else to take to market. They only had to get their fingers amid the eggy stretch and cascading currants, to start cursing and swearing; they were fair set, Sandra said, to slap each other with their wooden spoons. Mrs. Glasse’s cakes had something sad and flat about them, a melancholy Fenlands quality. Sandra’s cakes rose, but in a violent, volcanic way: then cracked on top. How two cakes containing opposite faults could come out of an oven at the same (albeit unreliable) temperature was, Sandra said, one of the mysteries of East Anglia.

But despite their appearance, the cakes sold well enough. People like to buy the fruits of other people’s labor; they like to put the small coin into the very hand that has toiled. Julian thought that it was not the wares that drew the customers, but the women’s full, gray, mesmeric eyes.