route home lay inland, through narrow lanes between farms: flat airy fields, where tractors lay at rest. Ralph pulled up to let a duck dawdle across the road, on its way from a barnyard to nowhere. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it. Emma’s got nothing. Nothing. She’s given twenty years to Felix and now she’s on her own.’
‘Emma’s given something,’ Anna said. ‘I think to say that she’s given twenty years is being melodramatic.’
‘Why is it,’ Ralph said, ‘that women manage to be so cool in these situations? What’s all this keeping up a good front? Why do they think they have to do it? I heard Ginny talking about insurance policies, for God’s sake.’
‘I only mean, that Emma’s life has suited her. She had what she wanted – a part-time man. Felix didn’t use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If she’d chosen to. She didn’t have to wait on Felix.’
‘Married? Could she?’ Ralph turned his head.
‘Look out,’ Anna said, with a languor born of experience. Ralph put his foot on the brake; a farm truck slowly extruded its back end from a muddy and half-concealed driveway.
‘Sorry,’ Ralph said. ‘Could she? Who could she have married then?’
‘Oh Ralph, I don’t mean any one person, not this particular man or that particular man…I only mean that if she had wanted to marry, if that had been what she preferred, she could have done it. But marriage entails things, like learning to boil eggs. Things that are beyond Emma.’
‘I can’t see men beating a path to her door.’ Ralph edged the car painfully down the lane, squeezing it past the truck, which had got stuck. ‘Not Emma. No beauty.’
‘Felix liked her.’
‘Felix was a creature of habit.’
‘Most men are.’
Ralph fell silent. He was very fond of his sister; no one should think otherwise. Emma was kind, clever, wise…and lonely, he’d supposed: a little figure glimpsed on a river bank, while the pleasure craft sped by. This notion of her as a manipulator, of Felix as a little fish that she played at the end of her stick and hook…Seems unlikely to me, he thought. But then, what do I know?
The journey took them a half-hour, through back roads and lanes, through straggling hamlets of red brick or flint cottages, whose only amenity was a post-box; between agri-business fields, wide open to a vast grey sky. Ralph pulled up with a jolt at the gate of their house. Anna shot forward, one hand on the dashboard and one on her hat. ‘Can I leave you here? I’m late.’
As she unravelled her seat-belt, Ralph turned to look at her. ‘Those people at the funeral, all those friends of Felix’s, how many of them do you think knew about him and Emma?’
Anna took her house keys from her bag. ‘Every one of them.’
‘How did Ginny bear it?’
‘Easily. Or so everyone says.’ Anna swung her door open and her legs out, setting her high heels daintily into the mud. ‘What time will you be back?’
‘Seven o’clock. Maybe eight.’
Nine, then, Anna thought. ‘Everybody knew except you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you still feel a fool.’
‘I suppose I do.’ Ralph reached over to close the passenger door. ‘But then, I still don’t see why I should have known. Not as if their affair was the flamboyant sort. Not as if it was…’ he searched for the word, ‘…torrid.’
Torrid, Anna thought. She watched him drive away. Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.
Anna, as Ralph vanished from view, plucked the afternoon post from the wooden mail-box by the gate; then picked her way over rutted ground to the front door. The drive was more of a farm track than anything else; often it looked as if a herd of beasts had been trampling it. The mail-box was something new. Julian, her eldest boy, had made it. Now the postman’s legs were spared, if not the family’s.
The Red House was a farmhouse that had lost its farm; it retained a half-acre of ground upon which grew sundry bicycle sheds, a dog kennel and a wire dog-run with the wire broken, a number of leaning wooden huts filled with the detritus of family life, and an unaccountable horse-trough, very ancient and covered with lichen. Recently, since Julian had been at home, the hedges had been cut back and some ground cleared, and the rudiments of a vegetable garden were appearing. The house and its ramshackle surroundings formed a not-displeasing organic whole; Julian’s attempt at agriculture seemed an imposition on the natural state of things, as if it were the bicycle sheds that were the work of nature, and the potatoes the work of man.
The house itself was built of red brick, and stood side-on to the road. It had a tiled roof, steeply pitched; in season, the crop-spraying plane buzzed its chimney-stacks and complicated arrangements of television aerials. There were a number of small windows under the eaves, and these gave the house a restless look: as if it would just as soon wander across the lane and put down its foundations in a different field.
Two years before, when it seemed that the older children would shortly be off their hands, Anna had suggested they should look for a smaller place. It would be cheaper to run, she had said, knowing what line of reasoning would appeal to Ralph. With his permission she had rung up Felix Palmer’s firm, to talk about putting the house on the market. ‘You can’t mean it,’ Felix had said. ‘Leave, Anna? After all these years? I hope and trust you wouldn’t be going far?’
‘Felix,’ Anna had said, ‘do you recall that you’re an estate agent? Aren’t you supposed to encourage people to sell their houses?’
‘Yes, but not my friends. I should be a poor specimen if I tried to uproot my friends.’
‘Shall I try someone else, then?’
‘Oh, no need for that…If you’re sure…’
‘I’m far from sure,’ Anna said. ‘But you might send someone to look around. Put a value on it.’
Felix came himself, of course. He brought a measuring tape, and took notes as he went in a little leather-bound book. On the second storey, he grew bored. ‘Anna, dear girl, let’s just say…a wealth of versatile extra accommodation…attics, so forth…an abundance of storage space. Leave it at that, shall we? Buyers don’t want, you know, to have to exercise their brains.’ He sighed, at the foot of the attic stairs. ‘I remember the day I brought you here, you and Ralph, to talk you into it…’ His eyes crept over her, assessing time’s work. ‘You were fresh from Africa then.’
I was tired and cold that day, she thought, tired and cold and pregnant, rubbing my chilblains in that draughty wreck of a drawing room; the Red House smelled of mice and moulds, and there were doors banging overhead, and cracked window glass, and spiders. To pre-empt his next comment, she put her hand
