taken that last point, Ralph thought, he had done himself no service by raising it. If Man was diminished, then Matthew Eldred was diminished: a lord of the universe was precisely what he wished to be.
‘If you like,’ Ralph said, ‘and I do like – you can still believe that Man has a unique place in creation. You can still believe that he has a special dignity. Only Man is rational. Only Man is an intellectual animal.’
‘Bandying words,’ his father said. He seemed satisfied with the phrase, as if he were a doctor and this were his diagnosis.
I except you, Ralph thought. I wouldn’t call you rational, not any more.
When the conflict was at its height – when the family were barely speaking to each other, and a Synod-like hush possessed the rooms – Matthew absented himself for a night. He went to King’s Lynn, to discuss with some of his business cronies the charitable trust that they were setting up. It was to be an ambitious enterprise, with broad Christian interests: money for the missions, money for the East End doss house with which James kept a connection; money above all for the deserving poor of Norfolk, the aged and indigent farm labourers, those church-going rural folk who had been mangled by agricultural machinery or otherwise suffered some disabling mischance.
It was to be called the St Walstan Trust; Walstan is the patron saint of farmers and farm labourers, and his image is found through the county on screens and fonts. The suggestion came from William Martin, a shopkeeper at Dereham; it was a little High Church for Matthew’s taste, but Martin was generally sound, very sound, and the county connection pleased him. Matthew was a local patriot now, a sitter on committees, treasurer of this and chairman of that. Ralph said to Emma, ‘I wish that charity would begin at home.’
That evening, the event took place which broke Ralph’s resolve. His mother came to his bedroom, upstairs on her noiseless feet. She tapped at the door, and waited till he had asked her to enter; this arch, stiff politeness had come upon the family since the row blew up.
Ralph looked up from his books, adjusting his desk lamp so that it cast a little light into the room. It pooled at his mother’s slippered feet as she sat on the bed. She wore her cardigan draped over her shoulders; she took the cuffs of the empty sleeves in her hands, and twisted them as she spoke. Her wedding ring gleamed, big and broad like a brass washer. She had lost weight, perhaps, for it hung loose on her finger, and her knuckle bones seemed huge.
Ralph listened to what she had to say. If he would not capitulate, she said – but she did not use that word – if he would not fall into line, fall in with the plans his father had formulated for him, then she could not say what his father would do about Emma. He might think that as Ralph had gone so badly off course, Emma needed guidance. He might like to have her at home, under his eye. There might, in fact, be no medical school for Emma at all.
His mother sighed as she said all this; her manner was tentative, and her eyes travelled over the peg-rug and the bookcase and the desk, they roamed the wall and flickered over the dark window at which the curtains were not yet drawn. But she was not afraid; and Ralph understood her. She had volunteered, he believed, for this piece of dirty work; she and her husband, his father, had planned it between them, so that there would be no more shouting, no more scenes, only his certain silent defeat.
‘Emma might like to be a nurse, perhaps,’ his mother said. ‘Your father might let her do that, but I only say might. His frame of mind so much depends on you.’
Ralph said, ‘You are a wicked woman.’
He didn’t know that she was sick then, and that within a few months she would have the first of her many spells in hospital. Despite her sufferings she would have a long life. He was never sure that he forgave her completely. But he tried.
After his capitulation, his father began to backtrack at once. ‘For a hobby, Ralphie,’ he said. ‘Keep it for a hobby. But not for what you are seen to do in the eyes of the world. Not for your life’s work.’
‘I don’t want the business,’ he told his father. ‘I want my own life. I don’t want anything to do with all that.’
‘Very well,’ Matthew said equably. ‘I’ll sell – when the time is right.’ He frowned then, as if he might be misunderstood. ‘There’ll be money for you, Ralph. And there’ll be money for your children. I’ll put it in trust, I’ll arrange it all. You’ll not be poor.’
‘This is premature,’ Ralph said.
‘Oh, you’ll be married and have children soon enough, the years go by…you could be a teacher, Ralphie. You could go to Africa, like your uncle. They have a great need of people, you know. I would never try to confine you. I would never sentence you to a dull life.’ He paused, and added, ‘But I hope one day you will come home to Norfolk.’
For months afterwards Ralph never seemed to smile; that was what Emma thought. He kept his shoulders hunched as he walked, as if he wore disappointment like a tight old coat. ‘Why did you give in to them?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you stick by your principles, why didn’t you stick out for the life you had planned?’
He wouldn’t talk to her; occasionally, he would just remark that things were not as they seemed, that he saw there were hidden depths to people.
She did not know how he had been defeated. He made sure he did not tell her.
He had his National Service to do; it would fail to broaden his horizons. He would spend it behind a desk, employed in menial clerical work; or in transit in trucks and trains. He began to recognize his character, as it was reflected back to him by other people. He saw a solid, polite, always reasonable young man, who would sort out problems for the dim and timid, who kept his patience and who did not patronize or sneer; who never cultivated his superiors, either, who seemed to have no ambition and no idea how to make life easy for himself. Was he really like that? He didn’t know.
He was not excessively miserable. It seemed to him that the boredom, the routine discomforts and humiliations, the exile from home, the futility of his daily round, were all simple enough to endure. What he could not endure were the thoughts of his heart, and the frequent dreams he had, in which he murdered his father. Or rather, dreams in which he plotted the murder; or in which he was arrested and tried, when the murder was already done. The bloody act itself was always offstage.
When he was twenty years old these dreams were so persistent that the memory of them stained and dislocated his waking life. By day he entertained, he thought, little animosity to Matthew. Their quarrel had not affected what he believed, it had only affected the course of his career; and one day Matthew would die, or become senile, or concede the point, and he could resume that career. He must be the winner in the long run, he thought.
So these dreams, these inner revolts, bewildered him. He was forced to concede that large areas of his life were beyond his control.
On one of his leaves, instead of going home to Norwich, he went to London with a friend. They stayed at his friend’s sister’s house, Ralph sleeping on the sofa. By day, he went sightseeing; he had never been to London before. One night he lost his virginity for cash, in a room near one of the major railway termini. Afterwards he could never remember which station it had been, or the name of the street, so that in later life he couldn’t be sure whether he ever walked along it; and although the woman told him her name was Norah he had no reason to believe her. He did not feel guilt afterwards; it was something to be got through. He had not embarrassed himself; there was that much to be said about it.
On his next leave he was introduced to Anna Martin, only child of the very sound shopkeeper
