A Change of Climate: A Novel (36 page)

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 bought 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—”

“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?”