up the staircase of the Holt tea-room, and dipped under the beam, and swivelled, gaze focusing…If Ralph had not come upon them that particular day, his sensibilities skinned by the cold, he would have continued in his obstinate and peculiar ignorance; when Felix died, they would have stood at his graveside as two old family friends, and Ralph would have given her not a word of sympathy except that due between decent people when a contemporary has quit the scene. And that, she thought, would have suited me.
Lines of poetry ran through Emma’s head. Auden, she thought. She was pleased at being able to identify it, because she was not a literary woman. They were insistent lines, stuffed with a crude menace.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
Emma shared the café with one be-skirted cleric, who was reading the Daily Telegraph. An oil stove popped and hissed at her back. She thought again of crying, but she was afraid the man might put his newspaper down and try to console her. Instead she buttoned her coat, and braced herself for the twilight and cold, the drive home to Foulsham. I hardly know what I am any more she thought: a Good Soul, or a Sad Case.
O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless.
Kit sleeps, blanketed in heat. She rolls on to her back. Her lips move. What is she saying? Mama, mama: milk, milk, milk. Her wrist pushes her hair back from her forehead. She turns over again. The sheet creases beneath her, damp from her body. An institutional counterpane slides to the floor.
Kit’s hand clenches and unclenches – fat baby fist. The air is too hot to breathe. Soon Felicia will come, in her blue scarf, and lift her out of the mist of mosquito nets.
Her eyes open to an expanse of white wall. She turns her eyes, and sees the polished floor and the fallen bedcover, and her own bare arm dangling from the sheets, like someone else’s limb. It is 7.30, a dirty London morning, traffic building up. There is a hint of spring in the air.
In her dream, she has been to Africa.
She sits up slowly, pulling the top sheet across her breasts, as if someone had come into the room. She is in her term-time lodging, a women’s hall of residence. Her little gold watch ticks away on top of a pile of textbooks. Her jeans and warm plaid shirt are folded on a chair. Outside in the corridor her fellow residents are going in and out of bathrooms in their towelling robes, their hair in various arrangements of turbans and pins. They stop to exchange words, to say that the central heating is ridiculous, it is like being in the tropics, a complaint will definitely have to be made. Lavatories flush. From the basement drifts the aroma of breakfasts seething on a range, pallid scraps of bacon, mushrooms stewed black. Toast hardens in its racks.
In Norfolk, at the Red House, her mother Anna dreams of a cell. She feels against her bare legs the rasp of a prison blanket, and under her hand the metal of a prison bedstead. A woman’s voice tells her, ‘The colonel has refused your request for a mirror.’ Anna wakes.
The room is cold. Ralph has pulled the blankets over his head. She sits up, massages her temples with her fingertips. With little circular motions, as if it were vanishing cream, she rubs the dream away. She forgets it. Forgetting is an art like other arts. It needs dedication and practice.
As for Kit – she washes and dresses and goes down the big carved staircase, down the corridors smelling of parsnips and polish. On her way from breakfast she plucks a letter out of the pigeonhole marked ‘E’.
The letter is from her father. Ralph is a good correspondent – whereas in other families, as she knows, fathers never put pen to paper. She slides the letter into the pocket of her jeans, to read at lunchtime over her salad roll and yoghurt; jogs out across the dappled dampness of Russell Square, towards the Tube and the Thames and an airless lecture room.
Her dream trails after her, contaminating her day.
Julian, with no reason to wake, sleeps till half-past eight. Bright letters float from a summer sky, and form themselves into nonsense words. It is his usual dream; deprived of the terror it once held, it still carries its component of frustration.
Emma does not dream. She has taken to insomnia, walking the rooms of her cottage in the small hours, the hours of deep rural silence. She does not draw the curtains; outside her cottage a street light burns, and shines on her medical books in their orderly shelves, and the washing-up she has left in the sink.
Ralph dreams of his father.
This is the town, the date, the place, to which his dreams return him: Ralph walks on cobblestones, his wrist manacled in his grandfather’s hand, his eyes turning upwards to scan the column of his grandfather’s body. Wind soughs around the streets and the high stony houses and their chimney-pots. Ralph is three years old. His grandfather lifts him into his arms, and wraps him in his coat to keep out the cold.
‘In my day, Ralphie,’ he says, ‘we used to have donkey races round the market-place. And in my grandfather’s day, they used to have pig-hunts, and chimney sweeps dipping for pennies in a basin of flour. And then they used to have fireworks after, and burning of Boney.’
His Uncle James says, ‘Poor Ralphie! He does not know who Boney is.’
Ralph turns his head, against Grandpa’s woollen shoulder. He lifts his chin and wriggles his body, trying to turn in Grandpa’s arms. There is his father, Matthew Eldred, one step behind them. But the shoulder blocks his view; or perhaps it is Uncle James who stands between himself and Matthew. His father is there, he knows; but Ralph cannot see his face.
This is Ralph’s first memory: the cobbles, the deep moaning of the wind, the thick cloth of his grandfather’s overcoat sawing against his cheek.
The Eldred family belonged to the country which is called the Brecklands; it is a country bounded by chalk and peat, but covered by a mantle of shifting sand. Its open fields are strewn with flint or choked with bracken; they are edged by fir trees twisted into fantastic forms. It is a country of flint-knappers and warreners: latterly of archaeologists and military personnel. There are barrows and mounds, tumuli and ancient tracks; there are oaks and elms. The Romans have left their coins, their skeletons and their fragments of terracotta; the military have set down their huts and wire fences among the ruins of monasteries and castles. Everywhere one senses the presence of standing water, of wading birds, of alders and willow, and of swans rising against the sky.
This is meeting-house country, chapel country; the churches are decayed or badly restored, and the sense of the past is strong, seeping and sinister. Halls and churches have perished, fire eaten thatch, air eaten stone; buildings rejoin the landscape, their walls reduced to flint and rubble strewn across the fields. Some artefact you drop tonight may be lost by morning, but the plough turns up treasure trove. In this country, man’s work seems ephemeral, his influence transitory. Summer scorches the heath. Winter brings a pale damp light. The sky is dove-coloured; the sun breaks through it in broad glittering rays, like the rays which, in papist prints, signify the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Matthew Eldred, Ralph’s father, was born near the market town of Swaffham in the year 1890. His family were printers, lay preachers. His grandfather had printed pamphlets and tracts. His father had printed handbills and auction catalogues and stock lists, and the privately financed memoirs of clergymen and schoolmasters. Their homes, and the homes of their friends, were temples of right-thinking,
