they brought the toasted tea-cake, he took a bite, and replaced the piece on the plate, and found that what he had bitten turned into a pebble in his mouth, and he couldn’t swallow it. Felix took a brown paper bag out of his pocket, and said, ‘Look, Emma, I’ve got that wool that Ginny’s been wanting for her blasted tapestry, the shop’s had it on order for three months, I just popped in on the off-chance, and they said it came in this morning.’ He laid the skein out on the white cloth; it was a dead bracken colour. ‘Hope to heaven it’s the right shade,’ he said. ‘Ginny goes on about dye batches.’
Emma made some trite reply; Felix began to tell about a church conversion over in Fakenham that had come on to the firm’s books earlier that week. Then they had talked about the salary of the organist at the Palmers’ parish church; then about the price of petrol. Ralph could not make conversation at all. The loop of brown wool remained on the table. He stared at it as if it were a serpent.
Ralph arrived home alone that evening – which surprised Anna. No cronies, no hangers-on, no fat file of papers in his hand: no rushing to the telephone either, no flinging of a greeting over his shoulder, no distracted inquiries about where this and where that and who rang and what messages. He sat down in the kitchen; and when Anna came in, to see why he was so subdued, he was rocking on the back legs of his chair and staring at the wall. ‘You know, Anna,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like a drink. I’ve had a shock.’
Alcohol, for Ralph, was a medicinal substance only. Brandy might be taken for colic, when other remedies had failed. Hot whisky and lemon might be taken for colds, for Ralph recognized that people with colds need cheering up, and he was all for cheerfulness. But drink as social unction was something that had never been part of his life. His parents did not drink, and he had never freed himself from his parents. He had nothing against drinking in others, of course; the house was well-stocked, he was a hospitable man. When the tongue-tied or the chilled called on him, Ralph was ready with glasses and ice-buckets. His eye was inexpert and his nature generous, so the drinks he poured were four times larger than ordinary measures. A local councillor, upon leaving the Red House, had been breathalyzed by the police in East Dereham, and found to be three times over the legal limit. On another occasion, a female social worker from Norwich had been sick on the stairs. When these things happened, Ralph would say, ‘My uncle, Holy James, he was right, I think. Total abstinence is best. Things run out of control so quickly, don’t they?’
So now, when Anna poured him a normal-sized measure of whisky, he judged it to be mean and small. He looked at it in bewilderment, but said nothing. After a while, still rocking back on the chair, he said, ‘Emma is having an affair with Felix Palmer. I saw them today.’
‘What, in flagrante?’ Anna said.
‘No. Having a cup of tea in Holt.’
Anna said nothing for a time: then, ‘Ralph, may I explain something to you?’ She sat down at the table and clasped her hands on the scrubbed white wood. It was as if she were going to pray aloud, but did not know what to pray for. ‘You must remember how Emma and Felix used to go around together, when they were young. Now, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Ralph said. He stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair came down with a clunk. ‘But that’s going right back – that’s going back to the fifties, before she was qualified, when she was in London and she’d come up for the odd weekend. That was before we went abroad. And then he married Ginny. Oh God,’ he said. ‘You mean it’s been going on for years.’
‘I do. Years and years and years.’
‘Would it be…for instance…when we came back from Africa?’
Anna nodded. ‘Oh, yes. It’s so many years, you see, that people no longer bother to talk about it.’
‘And you knew. Why didn’t I know?’
‘It’s hard to imagine. Perhaps because you don’t notice people.’
‘But people are all my life,’ Ralph said. ‘God help me. Everything I do concerns people. What else do I ever think about?’
‘Perhaps you don’t think about them in quite the right way. Perhaps there’s a – gap – in the way that you think about them.’
‘Something missing,’ Ralph said. ‘Well, there must be, mustn’t there? If that’s the case I’ll have to sit down and talk to myself and try to examine it, whatever it is, this lack, won’t I? Otherwise it’s obvious I’m not fit to be at large.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you what puzzles me, though. There’s Emma living in her cottage right on the main street in Foulsham, and there’s Felix over at Blakeney, and since we know innumerable people in between – ’
‘Yes, we know people. But it’s as I say, they don’t talk about it any more.’
‘But why didn’t somebody tell me?’
‘Why should they? How would they have broached the topic?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What would you have done with the information?’
Ralph was still shaking his head. He couldn’t take this in – that his discovery, so exciting to him, was stale and soporific to everyone else. ‘What I can’t understand is how in a place like this they could conduct what must be so blatantly obvious – I mean, the comings and goings, she can’t go to Blakeney I suppose so he must come to Foulsham, his car must be parked there, all hours of the night – ’
Anna smiled.
‘No,’ Ralph said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s like that, is it? I suppose they go to teashops quite a lot. I suppose it’s a – mental companionship, is it?’
‘I think it might be, largely. But people like Felix and Emma can get away with a lot, you know. They have everything well under control.’
‘It’s never damaged their standing,’ Ralph said. ‘I mean, their standing in the community. Do the children know?’
‘Kit knows. The boys know, I suppose, but they never mention it. It wouldn’t interest them, would it?’
‘What does Kit think?’
‘You know she always admires her aunt.’
‘I hope her life won’t be like that,’ Ralph said. ‘My God, I hope it won’t. I don’t want Kit to turn into some plain woman driving about the countryside in a tweed coat to share a pot of tea with some old bore. I hope somebody flashy and rich comes and carries her off and gives her diamonds. I don’t mind if she isn’t steady. I want Kit to have a good time.’
‘How old-fashioned you are!’ Anna laughed. ‘You talk about her as if she were a chorus girl. Kit will buy her own diamonds, if it crosses her mind to want any.’ Anna looked down at the minute solitaire that had winked for twenty-five years above her wedding ring. ‘And Ralph, there is no need to insult Felix. You like him, you always have, we all like him.’
‘Yes. I know. But things look different now.’
He put his empty glass down on the table. This is more than a failure of knowledge, he thought, it is a failure of self-knowledge. Anna poured him another whisky. He ignored it, so she drank it herself.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Julian said, ‘I thought Kit would
