commonsensical. They saw no need to inquire into God’s nature; they approached Him through early rising, Bible study and earnest, futile attempts at humility. The Eldreds were as clever in charity as they were in business – casting their bread on the waters, and rubbing their hands in anticipation of the plump milky loaves that would come back to stack upon the shelves of their family and friends.
Matthew Eldred’s brother James, who was four years his junior, was ordained in the Church of England just after the end of the Great War. He left almost at once for the African missions, and so he missed Matthew’s wedding; Matthew married a grey-eyed girl called Dorcas Carey, whose father was a local wood merchant, and whose connections outside the county – her elder sister had married a Yorkshireman – had been examined and then forgiven.
James reappeared a decade later – thinner, cheerful, somewhat jaundiced – for the baptism of his brother’s first child, Ralph. Dorcas wore a look of bewilderment; after a decade, she had got something right. Another baby, a daughter, followed two years later. James was still, as he termed it, on furlough, but he was not idle; he was working in the East End of London in a home for derelicts and drunks. When Ralph was four years old, Africa opened and swallowed Uncle James again. Only letters came, on tissue-thin sheets of paper, and photographs of naked native children and round thatched huts: of unnamed clergymen and lady assistants with large teeth and white sun-hats: of catechumens in white gloves and white frocks.
Ralph has these photographs still. He keeps them in brown envelopes, their subjects named on the back (when Uncle James’ memory has obliged) in Ralph’s own large, energetic handwriting. And dated? Sometimes. Uncle James peers at some fading spinster, weathered by the African sun; at some wriggling black child clothed only in a string of beads. ‘How would I know? 1930?’ Ralph makes the record on the back of each one; makes it in soft pencil, in case Uncle James should reconsider. He has respect for dates; he cares for the past. He files the envelopes in his bureau drawers. One day, he thinks, he might write the history of his family. But then his mind shies away, thinking of what would have to be omitted.
His father and mother stand in pewter frames on his bureau, watching him as he works. Matthew Eldred has grown stout; his watch chain stretches across his belly. Self-conscious before the photographer, he fingers his lapel. In middle age, Dorcas has the face of a Voortrekker or an American plainswoman: a transparent face, that waits for God to do his worst.
When Ralph was eight years old and his sister Emma was six, Matthew moved his family and his business from Swaffham to Norwich. He began by printing ration books, and ended by growing rich.
The war came. ‘Do you wish,’ Emma asked Ralph, ‘that you were big enough to fight?’ Emma doubled up her fist and pounded at the drawing-room sofa, till her fist bounced back at her and dust flew up, and her mother came from the kitchen and slapped her.
A year or so later, they heard talk behind closed doors. ‘Yarmouth Grammar School moved to the Midlands…Lowestoft evacuated yesterday…’ They had visited the seaside – a pointless excursion, the children thought, because the beaches were mined – and seen the first wave of London evacuees, decanted from pleasure steamers, fetching up in coastal villages with their gas masks. They stood by the road and stared, these children, stubble-headed and remote. Now the children were moving on again, deeper into England.
Emma turned her eyes on Ralph. ‘What is it like, evacuated?’ she hissed.
He shook his head. ‘It won’t happen to us, I don’t think. It’s the ones from the coast that are going.’
‘I mean,’ Emma said, ‘how do you fix it?’
He put his finger to his lips. He did not think, then or later, that his parents were cruel: only staid, elderly, without imagination.
When the war ended, there was more whispered discussion. His parents debated taking in an orphan – perhaps the child of some local girl who had given way to an airman. Or an older child, a companion for Ralph…They had heard through some church connection of a most unfortunate Lowestoft case, a boy of Ralph’s age exactly: whose father, a gas-company worker, had been killed when the bomb fell on Lorne Park Road, and whose mother had died when Waller’s Restaurant received a direct hit. ‘What was she doing in a restaurant, that’s what I’d like to know?’ Mrs Eldred said. There was some suggestion that the child might have lived a giddy life before his bereavement. The project was dropped; Ralph’s companion faded away, into the realms of might-have-been.
For when you surveyed – his father said – when you surveyed the want in this world, when you peered into the bottomless pit of human improvidence and foolishness, it occurred to you that if there was to be charity it must be systematic.
Much later rationing ended. In the Eldred household it continued. ‘There’s nothing wrong with economy,’ his mother said. If you wanted anything nice to eat, you had to eat it outside the house.
When Ralph was fifteen years old, he went to stay with his aunt in Yorkshire. The Synod of Whitby, his Uncle James called the Yorkshire set; they were too dour, cramped and narrow for James’ High Church tastes. The trip north had been intended as a holiday, Ralph supposed; by now he was beginning to be critical of his family, and it seemed congruent with everything else in his life that a holiday and a penance should be so very alike.
The Synod occupied a dark house, and inside it were brown shadows. It contained an unreasonable number of upright chairs, with seats of slippery polished brown leather; it was as if preparations were constantly in hand for a public meeting, a chapel get-together. In the dining room the chairs were high-backed and unyielding, of a particularly officious type. Small meals were sanctified by a lengthy grace. The bookcases had glass fronts, and they were locked; upon the sideboard stood vases of dark glass, like cups of blood.
His cousins crept on slippered feet; clocks ticked. His uncle sat at his desk, making up accounts; his aunt slid her knitting down the cushion of her chair. She sat and stared at him, a bloodless woman the image of his mother; her pale lips moved. ‘You should get out, Ralph. Go on the bus. Go up the coast a bit. A boy needs fresh air.’
Ralph left the house. He took the first bus he saw out of the town. It was a normal, hostile east coast day; no one else was on a pleasure jaunt. There were points where the road hugged the coast; a few isolated houses tumbled away towards a sea less glimpsed than felt, towards an impression of sliding subsiding rocks, of coal boats and fishing boats, of salt and chill.
He got off the bus. The place was nowhere he knew. The weather now was overcast but blustery; chinks of blue sky showed here and there, like cracks in a thick white basin. He fastened his coat, as his aunt, if she had seen him, would have enjoined him; and he wrapped his despised muffler around his throat. He descended a hill, one-in-four, and saw before him the cold sweep of a bay.
The tide was going out. A solitary walker picked his way along the cliffs. In the middle distance were other figures, with rucksacks and boots; their heads were down, their eyes searching the sands. Ralph, too, lowered his eyes to his shoes, and threaded his way among the seaweed and rock pools.
Ralph had gone twenty yards towards the ocean. Its sound was subdued, congruous, a rustle not a roar. He bent down and plucked from the sand at his feet what he took to be some muddy stone. A sharp pang of delight took hold of him, a feeling that was for a moment indistinguishable from fear. He had picked up a fossil: a ridged, grey-green curl, glassy and damp like a descending wave. It lay in his palm: two inches across, an inch and a half at its crest.
He stood still, examining it and turning it over. Inside it was a gentle hollow; he saw that it was a kind of shell, smoothness concealed beneath grit and silt. He looked up across the beach. The melancholy and windblown figures wheeled towards him, and
