in your own good time.’
‘And we never have.’ She smiled.
‘You filled it with children. That’s the main thing.’
‘Yes. And for all their presence improved it, we might as well have stabled horses. Well, Felix – what’s the verdict?’
‘There’d be interest,’ he said cautiously. ‘London people perhaps.’
‘Oh – fancy prices,’ Anna said.
‘But consider, Anna – do you really want to do this rather drastic thing?’
Felix closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. They went downstairs, and had a glass of sherry. Felix stared gloomily over the garden. Slowly the conventions of his calling seemed to occur to him. ‘Useful range of outbuildings,’ he muttered, and jotted this phrase in his book.
That evening Felix telephoned Ralph. ‘Why don’t you hang on?’ he said. ‘Prices are going up all over East Anglia. A year from now you might make a killing. Tell Anna I advise staying put.’
‘I will.’ Ralph was relieved. ‘I take her point, of course – Kit and Julian away, Robin will be off in a year or so, and then there’ll be just the two of us and Becky, we’ll be rattling around. But of course, it’s not often that we’re just the family. We get a lot of visitors.’
‘You do, rather,’ Felix said.
‘And we have to have somewhere to put them.’
Two days later, while Ralph and Anna were still debating the matter, their boy Julian turned up with his suitcase. He wasn’t going back to university, he said. He was finished with all that. He dumped his case in his old room in the attics, next door to Robin; they had put the boys up there years ago, so that they could make a noise. Julian offered no explanation of himself, except that he did not like being away, had worried about his family and constantly wondered how they were. He made himself pleasant and useful about the house and neighbourhood, and showed no inclination to move out, to move on, to go anywhere else at all.
Then Kit wrote from London; she phoned her parents every week, but sometimes things are easier in a letter.
I’m not sure yet what I should do after my finals. There’s still more than a term to go and I have various ideas, but I keep changing my mind. It isn’t that I want to sit about wasting time, but I would like to come home for a few weeks, just to think things through. Dad, I know you mentioned to me that I could work for the Trust for a year, but the truth is I’ve had enough of London – for the moment, anyway. I wondered if there was something I could do in Norwich…
‘Well,’ Ralph said, re-reading the letter. ‘This is unexpected. But of course she must come home, if she wants to.’
‘Of course,’ Anna said.
Her perspective altered. She felt that she must settle to it, give way to the house’s demands, perhaps until she was an old woman.
When on the afternoon of the funeral Anna let herself into the wide square hall, she peeled off her gloves slowly, and placed them on the hall-stand, a vast and unnecessary article of furniture that Ralph had picked up in an antique shop in Great Yarmouth. ‘No other family in the county,’ she had said at the time, ‘feels they need an object like this.’ She looked with a fresh sense of wonder and dislike at its barley-sugar legs and its many little drawers and its many little dust-trapping ledges and its brass hooks for gentlemen’s hats, and she saw her face in the dim spotted oval of mirror, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead, then took off her coat and threw it over the banisters.
The Norfolk climate gave Anna a bloodless look, tinged her thin hands with violet. Every winter she would think of Africa; days when, leaving her warm bed in a hot early dawn, she had felt her limbs grow fluid, and the pores of her face open like petals, and her ribs, free from their accustomed tense gauge, move to allow her a full, voluptuary’s breath. In England she never felt this confidence, not even in a blazing July. The thermometer might register the heat, but her body was sceptical. English heat is fitful; clouds pass before the sun.
Anna went into the kitchen. Julian had heard her come in, and was setting out cups for tea.
‘How did it go?’
‘It went well, I suppose,’ Anna said. ‘We buried him. The main object was achieved. How do funerals ever go?’
‘How was Mrs Palmer?’
‘Ginny was very much herself. A party of them were going back to the house, for vol-au-vents provided by Mrs Gleave.’ Anna made a face. ‘And whisky. She seemed very insistent on the whisky. If you’d have asked for gin – well, I don’t know what!’
Julian reached for the teapot. ‘Nobody would have gin, would they, at a funeral?’
‘No, it would be unseemly,’ Anna said. Mother’s ruin, she thought. The abortionist’s drink. A mistress’s tipple. Flushed complexions and unbuttoned afternoons.
‘And how was Emma?’
‘Emma was staunch. She was an absolute brick. She turned up in that old coat, by the way.’
‘You wouldn’t have expected her to get a new one.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. A lesser woman might have hired sables for the day. And implied that Felix had given them to her.’ Anna smiled, her hands cradling her tea-cup. ‘Your old dad and I were talking on the way home. About how he went on for so long, without knowing about Felix and Emma.’
‘Twit,’ Julian said.
Some three years earlier, the year before Kit went to university, Ralph Eldred had been in Holt for the afternoon. It was a Wednesday, late in the year; at Gresham’s School, blue-kneed boys were playing hockey. The small town’s streets were empty of tourists; the sky was the colour of pewter.
Ralph decided – and it was an unaccustomed indulgence on his part – to have some tea. The girl behind the counter directed him upstairs; wrapped in bakery smells, he climbed a steep staircase with a rickety handrail, and found himself in a room where the ceiling was a scant seven foot high, and a half-dozen tables were set with pink cloths and white china. At the top of the stairs, Ralph, who was a man of six foot, bent his head to pass under a beam; as he straightened up and turned his head, he looked directly into the eye of Felix Palmer, who was in the act of pouring his sister Emma a second cup of Darjeeling.
The twenty minutes which followed were most peculiar. Not that anything Emma did was strange; for she simply looked up and greeted him, and said, ‘Why don’t you get that chair there and put it over here, and would you like a toasted tea-cake or would you like a bun or would you like both?’ As for Felix, he just lowered his Harris tweed elbow, replaced the teapot on its mat and said, ‘Ralph, you old bugger, skiving off again?’
Ralph sat down; he looked ashen; when the waitress brought him a cup, his hand trembled. The innocent sight that had met his eyes when he came up the staircase had suddenly and shockingly revealed its true meaning, and what overset Ralph was not that his sister was having an affair, but his instant realization that the affair was part of the world-order, one of the givens, one of the assumptions of the parish, and that only he, Ralph – stupid, blind and emotionally inept – had failed to recognize the fact: he and his wife Anna, whom he must
