A Change of Climate: A Novel (34 page)

The police again? That’s possible. She could not ignore the noise. She extricated herself from the blanket. Her legs felt stiff. She fumbled for the light switch in the hall. “I’m coming,” she called. “Don’t break down the door.” Her voice sounded peculiar, precarious. She opened the door.

“Anna? Kit telephoned me from her aunt’s.”

He was the last person she had expected. “Daniel, come in from the night.” Rain blew in with him. “What did Kit tell you?”

“About the young girl you have staying. And that the police came. That you had gone off after them to find Ralph. You did find him, I suppose.”

“So Kit knew.”

“Had an idea.”

“A shrewd one, I’ll bet. And Julian would know of course, and Robin, I suppose. And you, now. The whole county, soon.”

“No, Anna, it’s nothing like that.”

She began to fasten her hair up; saw herself dimly in the hall-stand mirror. “I used to laugh at Ralph because he went on for

years without knowing about Emma and your father. Now the laugh’s on me, isn’t it?”

“Believe me, I knew nothing,” Daniel said. “Not until today. When Kit telephoned I found it hard to take in. Ralph, I mean … it doesn’t seem possible.” He looked down at his shoes. How young he is, Anna thought. A boy.

“And Kit asked you to come here, did she?”

“She wants to come home herself, but she promised you she’d stay and look after Becky. Becky’s asking all sorts of questions, but Emma can deal with that.”

Questions suitable to her time of life, Anna thought. Between us, we will have to come up with some suitable answers. “Yes, I made Kit promise to stay at Foulsham … you see, I can’t face anybody.” She looked up at him. “I have to prepare myself, Daniel. I have to think out what I am going to say.”

“I don’t think you should stay here on your own. Have you … I mean, Ralph, has he been in touch?”

“The phone’s been ringing. I didn’t answer it.”

“He’s probably still at the hospital. Kit would like to know how the child is.”

“I don’t care,” Anna said.

“Don’t you?”

“No. I’ve had enough of all that.”

“Yes, I can understand. But you’re doing yourself an injustice.”

“Oh, I’m not good, Daniel. I’m not a good woman. Not at all.”

Daniel hesitated. “It—your standard of goodness, Anna—I think it would defeat most of us.”

“Oh, my standard, yes. But what I live up to, that’s another question.”

Daniel became brisk. “Have you eaten? No, of course not. The house seems very cold. I think I ought to try to track down Ralph. The hospital’s number, do you have it? They could find him and bring him to a phone. You don’t have to speak to him. I’ll do it. Just to see what the situation is, what his immediate intentions are.”

“Don’t bother.” She turned away. “As for the child—I’ve told you, I don’t want to know. Year after year he’s inflicted these dreadful children upon me, awful, hopeless children—” She stopped. “He will come home. Eventually.” She leaned against Daniel. He put an arm around her. She began to cry. “I can’t face him. I feel ashamed. It’s as if it’s me who’s done something wrong. I won’t be able to look him in the eye.”

“Then you don’t need to stay here. Let me drive you over to Blakeney.”

“To Ginny’s? Oh no, it’s late … and besides …”

“She wouldn’t ask you questions, you know.”

“Daniel, how can you believe that?”

“I’m an optimist,” he said. His face looked grim, as if he were aging in a night. “Come back to my flat, then. Just bring what you need for now. I’ve got a spare bed. I’ll make you comfortable.”

“Yes, take me to your flat. I want to be gone before Ralph gets here. I must be.” She moved slowly back down the hall. “I’ll be five minutes.”

As she packed her toothbrush, nightdress, a change of clothes, she remembered the policewoman, standing over her in Elim: telling her what she would need. She should have a policewoman now; directionless, enfeebled, her hands moved among her possessions. She heard Daniel downstairs, talking on the telephone. “No, Kit, I don’t think she should come there to you, she’d have to think of something to say to Becky, she can’t face it … Just you and Emma hang on for now, can you? … Its very late, we’re all tired, tomorrow things will be … Yes, to Blakeney, why not? If she still feels she must keep away from Ralph.”

They are making arrangements for me behind my back, she thought. As if I were a sick or injured person. Which I am, of course. She had an image of herself and Ralph, two sick or injured animals yoked together: dragging their burden, sometimes in circles.

In the car she began to cry. The lanes were dark, the trees dripping, puddles shining in their headlights; the half-hour journey seemed a lifetime. Holt was deserted: a few shopfronts dimly lit, the pub doors bolted. Daniel parked his car, walked around it to help her out. She needed the help; slumped against him, leaned on his arm. “It’s clearing,” he said, looking up at the sky.

“Yes.” She scrubbed at her face. Tried to smile.

Daniel unlocked his door and flooded the night world with a vast, white, hard light. She climbed a steep staircase, seeing the phantom outlines of drawing boards through a glass door. “Up to the top,” Daniel said.

“You are being very kind to me.”

“It’s nothing, Anna.”

The staircase opened into a large and lofty room, sparely furnished: the walls of exposed flint, the timbers exposed, the floor bare and waxed: its expanse broken only by two dark fringed rugs, their design geometric, their colors somber. Flying carpets, she thought. No clutter anywhere, just those matte black machines that young men have: no windows, but skylights enclosing the weather and the night. Anna stood considering it. “Kit never told me about this.”

“A way of being outside when you’re inside. Kit hardly comes here.”

“True. I know.”

“Do you like it?”

“Very much.” A life free of complexity, she thought. “Can you keep it warm?”

“Not easily. Can’t have everything. Would you like to bathe your face?” She nodded. She sat on the sofa, and he brought her a bowl of water, some cotton balls, and a small cream towel. He sat down next to her, as if she must be supervised. “Lukewarm water is best,” he advised. “If you have ice, it makes your eyes swell even more.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel,” she said.

“Nothing to be sorry for. Better to cry among friends. Look, Anna—all this, with Ralph, it’s ridiculous. An aberration.”

“You think so?”

“I know it is. Just one of those things that happen in marriages.”

“The marriages of middle-aged people, you mean.”

“Look, everything is easier to face in daylight.” He ventured a smile; took from her fingertips one of the sodden balls of cotton. “In the morning you can have your choice. The greengrocer will be open, so you can have cucumber slices for your eyes. Or tea bags, if you like. I have Earl Grey, Assam, or Darjeeling.”

“Goodness. What a lot you know about female grief.”

“My mother, you see.”

“Since your father died?”

“Mainly before. Years before—always, really. We’d be alone in the house and she’d cry buckets. Horse troughs. Oceans. So,” he said, with a soft bleakness, “I’m used to comforting.”

She looked up. “You mean … this, it would be when your father was with Emma?”

“Where else?”

“She always appeared—I don’t know—so self-possessed.”

“Yes. Of course, the tea bags helped. The cucumber slices. And the fact that she’s got a nice sort of flippancy, my mother, a sort of veneer of stupidity. So you wouldn’t know—why should anybody know? Emma broke my mother’s heart.”

She took his hand. After a while he said, “Brandy, that’s the next thing. Can you drink brandy? It will warm your heart, Anna.”

He gave her a glass. It did warm her, stealing through to feelings, levels of comprehension, she had not known were there. “It would be nice to get drunk,” she said. “I don’t think I ever have. I see the attraction, though.”

“The bottle’s at your elbow.”

“One doesn’t know … one doesn’t know other people’s histories at all.”

“No, of course not. Not the half of what goes on.”

“I feel I have been stupid.”

“You were misled. People do mislead you, don’t they, they have an instinct to cover up the mess. It’s how we’re taught to live. I’ve always thought, or rather my concern is, that history shouldn’t repeat itself. I’ve thought, I don’t want to marry some poor girl who I’ll end up leaving for Kit.”

Anna tried to answer him, but the effort was almost beyond her. “I’m exhausted,” she said flatly.

“It’s emotion. It is exhausting. I dare say that’s why we try to get by without it.”

He helped her up. Her legs were jelly. He took her into the little spare room. “The bed’s made up. Do you want anything?”

“I’ll be fine.”

He touched her cheek. “You should know, Anna, that Kit’s going to Africa. She had a letter, she says, this morning. Some volunteer project has accepted her. She wants to see the place where she was born.”

Anna shuddered.

“I know,” he said. “Emma’s put me wise.”

She looked up. “Wise. And Kit? Has Emma put her wise?”

“That’s more than I can say. In the circumstances it would be very wrong of me to make assumptions about what other people know or don’t know.” He paused. “I think, Anna—for what it’s worth—that you are a very brave woman.”

She shook her head. “My heart failed me, Daniel. I had to be rescued from myself. And my kindness has failed me, many a time. I’ve harbored such thoughts—I couldn’t tell you, thoughts that there are no ordinary words for. Only this thing—with Ralph—I don’t deserve it. I know I don’t.”

He left her to put on her nightdress. She promised that if she could not sleep she would come for him. We can see the dawn together, he said. She eased herself into the narrow bed. He had put two hot-water bottles in it, one for her feet and one for her to hug to herself, burning her ribs, slapping and washing itself against her. The Red House is empty, she thought: for the first time in years. And she had not slept in such a little bed since she had been in prison.

There was another skylight above her, its glass containing the night. Oh, Daniel, she breathed, I might see the stars. She was afraid she had spoken out loud; but she was past that, too tired to have a voice at all. Her heart hammered, but then lay still: obedient creature. She turned on her back. The blankets were heavy; she pushed them back a little, to free her chest with its great weight of misery. The air was clearing, it was true; still, she was looking up through a veil of water. She saw two stars, then more. Very faint, old stars: light attenuated.

Kit woke her. She brought a tray with a glass of orange juice and a pot of coffee.

“Daniel promised me cucumber slices.” Anna said.

“You need them. You look awful.”

“What do you expect?”

“It’s ten o’clock. What would you like to do?”

Anna pushed herself upright in the bed. “What are the choices?”

“You could go home. I understand if you don’t want to. Daniel had to go and see a client, there was an appointment he couldn’t break. You can stay here, you’re welcome, he says. You can go to Emma. She’s very worried about you.”

“I seem to be homeless.”

“Not at all,” Kit said. She thought, it’s everyone else who is homeless, waiting for what will occur.

“Robin will be back, you know? Maybe five or six o’clock. He won’t know what’s happening.”

“I can intercept him. Don’t worry about that.” Kit seemed impatient. “Worry about yourself. What do you want to do?”

“What do I want to do? With the glorious prospect that stretches before me?”

“Dad rang. Last night. Said he was calling you but you wouldn’t answer. He was very upset, very concerned about you.”

“A bit late for that.”

“Melanie’s going to be okay, they’re pretty sure, but they’re keeping her for a few days, because she still won’t say what it was she took. Dad spent the night at the hospital.”

“At the hospital, did he? That was blameless, at any rate.”

Kit blushed. She looked stern, set. “How can you?”

“What?”

“Make these weak sarcastic little jokes?”

“I don’t know how I can. Do you happen to know your father’s schedule for the day?”

“He’s got a lot of calls to make.”

“He’ll want his office, then. To be at home.”

Kit sat down on the bed. The tray wobbled; she put out a hand to steady it. The coffee cooled in its pot. “You think we’ve let you down, don’t you?” she asked. “By not telling you?”

Anna didn’t reply. Kit said, “We would have told you. But it was too difficult. We couldn’t think of the right words.”

“Yes, I understand.” Anna sounded sad, remote, resigned. “It explains some things, though. This summer we’ve had.”

Some things, Kit thought, but not that uprush of strange fear. Who knows where a crisis comes from? The world should be more predictable. “Let me pour your coffee,” she said.

“I’d be sick,” Anna said. “How can you ask me to eat and drink?”

“Look, you must fight for him.”

“What? Like a dog with a bone?”

“No, but you must let it be known—let it be known that—” Kit pushed her hand back through her hair.

“Oh, Kit,” Anna said. “Don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”

“What will you do?”

“Go and see Ginny,” she said, unexpectedly.

Ginny’s house was a low, sprawling complex of buildings—boat-houses once, no doubt—by Blakeney Quay. It had been built for Ginny and Felix by a local firm, and its additions and extensions had been crafted with reverence for the vernacular; but its most startling feature was a huge picture window of staring, blank plate glass, which looked out over the creek to the invisible sea.

This window was one of the great acts of Ginny’s life. Some women die and leave only their children as memorial; but Ginny, like some anointed saint, would have a window. It represented a moral choice, an act of courage. Some would shudder at it, though secretly they would crave the vista. Questions of taste would cow them: questions of vulgarity, even. Ginny simply said, “Why live at Blakeney, if you don’t have the view?”

Midmorning, Ginny began to issue large drinks. When her hands were unoccupied, without a glass or a cigarette, she rubbed them nervously together, so that her rings clashed and chimed: her engagement ring with its gray solitaire, her broad yellow wedding ring, the “eternity rings,” studded with chips of sapphire and ruby, that Felix had given her at a constant rate through the years. She was never without these rings; perhaps, Anna thought, she used them from time to time to deliver a scarring blow. But Felix had never appeared scarred. She remembered his handsome, bland, betraying face.