Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010

First published by Viking 1994

Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1994 PS section © Sarah O’Reilly 2010

PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

The lines from W.H. Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening’ are reprinted from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, by kind permission of Faber & Faber.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007172900

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007354948

Version: 2019-06-07

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

To Jenny Naipaul

Note

All the characters in this book are fictitious, except that of the Archbishop of Cape Town, which is based on his real-life counterpart, Geoffrey Clayton. I have used some of his words, taken from writings and sermons.

The settlement of Mosadinyana is fictional. The township of Elim is invented too, but I am indebted to the memoirs of Hannah Stanton, who served in the township of Lady Selborne.

Cases similar to that of the Eldreds may be found in the Law Reports of Botswana.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871:

‘We are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability…’

Job 4:7:

‘Consider, what innocent ever perished, or where have the righteous been destroyed?’

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note

Epigraph

1970 SAD CASES, GOOD SOULS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

Keep Reading

P.S.

About the Author

A Kind of Alchemy

LIFE at a Glance

A Writing Life

Read on

Have You Read?

About the Author

Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1970 SAD CASES, GOOD SOULS

One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.

The woman Joan was sixty years old, and wore a polyester dress from a charity shop. A housewifely type, she had chosen to drip her blood into the kitchen sink. When Kit touched her on the elbow, she threw down the knife on to the draining board and attempted with her good hand to cover Kit’s eyes.

By this stage in her life Kit was not much surprised by anything. As she ducked under the woman’s arm she thought, that’s our bread-knife, if you don’t mind; but she said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that, Joan, why don’t you come away from the sink, why don’t you sit down on this chair and I’ll get the first-aid kit?’

The woman allowed herself to be led to a chair at the kitchen table. Kit pulled a clean tea-towel out of a drawer and wrapped it around Joan’s wrist. The towel was a checked one, red and white; Joan’s reluctant blood seeped black against the cloth. Her cuts were light, early, indecisive: the practice cuts. ‘Just wiggle your fingers,’ Kit said, ‘make sure you haven’t done any damage.’ The woman looked down at her hand in dry-eyed dread, while the child scrambled on a stool and brought down a box from a cupboard.

‘Lucky it’s half-term,’ Kit said, unpacking the bandages and the round-ended scissors. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have been here. I was upstairs. I was reading a book. It’s called Children of the New Forest. Have you read it? It’s about a family like ours, two boys and two girls, but they live a long time ago, in the olden days.’

I’m all fingers and thumbs, she thought. She heard her voice, running on. She was learning first aid at school. They told you, ‘Reassure the patient.’ ‘They live in the forest by themselves.’ Joan nodded: again her dumb dazed nod. ‘They’re Royalists. They have to hide from their enemies.’

Kit was afraid that Joan might faint, dropping as a dead weight to the flagstoned floor. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water,’ she said. ‘Or I dare say you could have hot sweet tea.’

She thought, poor Joan. Perhaps dead is what she wants to be. It’s just as Dad always says: you can never find a sharp knife when you need one.

As she stood filling the kettle, she heard her mother’s car. She knew the crunch and scrape and wheeze of it, as it lurched up the drive. Relief washed through her body, turned her legs to water. She put the kettle on the hob, and was wiping out the sink with disinfectant when her mother came in.

Anna put her bags down on the table. She saw, more in sorrow than in surprise, Joan’s figure slumped across it. ‘Tea for me as well, Kit,’ she said.

That night Kit caught the tail-end of a whispered conversation: ‘You didn’t say she was a suicide risk, Ralph.’

‘I didn’t say because I didn’t know.’ She closed her bedroom door; she didn’t want to listen to her parents’ private thoughts.

Three days later, she came into the kitchen and found her mother on her hands and knees by the sink, working on the flags with a scrubbing brush. ‘The blood’s gone,’ Kit said, puzzled. ‘I wiped it up.’

Anna didn’t answer her, but rose from the floor, lifted the bucket and threw the soapy water into the sink.

By this time Joan had left, taking everything she owned in the two carrier bags with which she had arrived. Sudden exits were not infrequent among their visitors; they were not like the visitors that other households get. Ralph made inquiries of the police, the Salvation Army, and the Department of Health and Social Security, but he drew a blank. When Anna came to check the first-aid kit – restocking it was one of her responsibilities – she noticed that Joan had taken an extra bandage with her. They saw this as a hopeful sign.

In those years, when the children were growing up, the house was full of people like Joan. Ralph brought some of them from the hostel in London, which was maintained by the charitable trust for which he worked. Others he took in when Social Services didn’t know what to do with them, or when there were no beds at the local psychiatric hospital. Sometimes they turned up of their own accord, crouching out of the wind in one of the outhouses until he came home. ‘So-and-so’s a sad case,’ he would say; and over the years, this was what the family came to call them: the Sad Cases. Other people he called Good Souls. ‘Your Aunt Emma is giving so-and-so a lift to her drugs clinic in Norwich – she’s a good soul.’

And this was how the world was divided, when Kit was growing up – into Good Souls and Sad Cases. There was no wickedness in it.

ONE

On the day of Felix Palmer’s funeral, his wife, Ginny, met his mistress, Emma. They had met before, of course. The county of Norfolk is not so populous that they could have avoided each other. Their conduct at these meetings had been shaped by Ginny’s lofty and wilful ignorance of the situation: by Emma’s sang-froid: by Felix’s natural desire to maintain an arrangement that suited him.

Over the years they had coincided in draughty parish halls, in charity committee rooms and at the caucuses of local groups concerned with the protection of what, in the decade just beginning, would be known as ‘the environment’. They had bumped into each other in Norwich, shopping in Jarrold’s department store; they had exchanged. small-talk at exhibitions of craftwork, and occupied neighbouring seats at the theatre.

Once, travelling to London, they had found themselves sole occupants of a first-class carriage. For half an hour they had found enough that was anodyne to pass the time. Then Ginny, excusing herself with a smile, delved into her bag and pulled out a fat paperback book. She retired behind it. Emma examined its cover. A svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple, stood before a manor house with anachronistic chimney-stacks. The title was in florid gold script: Wyfe to Crookback. Emma looked out of the window. The landscape was a sad East England green; crows wheeled over the fields. As they moved from the edge of England to its heart, Emma herself took out a book.

They parted at sooty Liverpool Street with a nod and a smile. London forced no collusion on them, but Norfolk did. A handful of farming and professional families played host to both. At a round of weddings and christenings they had made polite, even warm conversation. At a dozen New Year’s Eve parties they had wished each other luck and happiness: and sometimes almost meant it.

Now, on this February morning, Ginny stood surrounded by a knot of mourners. Friends and business associates had turned out for the occasion; Felix had been well-liked in the district. The church occupied high ground, and a ripping wind billowed coats and snapped at woollen head-scarves and brought a flush to aching faces. The mourners could sense the presence of the sea, hidden from them by a belt of pines.

Some of them lingered in the church porch, reading the notices about flower rotas, dusting and brass-cleaning; others stood among the gravestones, looking depressed. They had double-parked in the open area beyond the church gate, and would have to wait their turn to get away. Ginny, leaning on the arm of her son, moved from group to group, offering a few tactful words to soothe their feelings; she understood that death is embarrassing.

Her own family – her son Daniel, who was an architect, her daughter Claire, who was a buyer at Harrods – had been as gentle and as careful of her feelings as anyone could wish. But – even as she deferred the moment – Ginny felt that it was Emma to whom she wished to speak, to whom naturally she should be speaking. Patting her son’s arm, smiling up and dismissing him, she made her way across the grass with a short, precisely regulated stride, her high heels spiking holes in the ground like some primitive seed drill.

Ginny Palmer was a sharp, neat, Wallis Simpson sort of woman, to whom black lent an added definition. As she advanced on Emma, she took from her pocket a crisp lace-edged handkerchief, folded it very small and polished the tip of her nose: a gesture quite unnecessary, but somehow drawn out of her by the occasion. You see me, the widow: fastidious but distraught.

Emma Eldred kept her hands in her pockets; she had forgotten her gloves. She wore the coat that she had worn for years, to go out on her doctor’s rounds, to go shopping, to go out walking and to meet Felix. She saw no need for any other coat, in her ordinary life or on a day like this; it was dark, it was decent, and – she felt obscurely – it was something Felix would have recognized.

Emma Eldred was not a large woman, but gave the appearance of it: forty-eight years old, her face innocent of cosmetics, her broad feet safely encased in scuffed shoes decorated by leather tassels which somehow failed to cut a dash. Emma had known Ginny’s husband since childhood. She might have married him; but Felix was not what Emma considered a serious man. Their relationship had, she felt, borne all the weight it could. As Ginny approached, Emma shrunk into herself, inwardly but not outwardly. A stranger, only partly apprised of the situation, would have taken Ginny for the smart little mistress, and Emma for the tatty old wife.

The women stood together for a moment, not speaking; then as the wind cut her to the bird-bones, Ginny took a half-step closer, and stood holding her mink collar up to her throat. ‘Well, Ginny,’ Emma said, after a moment. ‘I’m not here to act as a wind-break.’ She drew her right hand from her pocket, and gave Ginny a pat on the shoulder. It was a brusque gesture, less of consolation than of encouragement; what you might give a weary nag, as it faces the next set of hurdles.

Ginny averted her face. Tears sprang into her eyes. She took out her tiny handkerchief again. ‘Why, Emma?’ she said. She sounded fretful, but as if her fretfulness might turn to rage. ‘Tell me why. You’re a doctor.’

‘But not his doctor.’

‘He wasn’t ill. He never had a day’s illness.’

Emma fixed her gaze on the tassels of her shoes. She imagined herself looking right through her dead lover; through his customary tweed jacket, his lambswool pullover, his striped shirt, through the skin, through the flesh, into the arteries where Felix’s blood moved slowly, a dark underground stream with silted banks. ‘No one could have known,’ she said. ‘No one could have spared you this shock, Ginny. Will you be all right, my dear?’

‘There’s plenty of insurance,’ Ginny said. ‘And the house. I’ll move of course. But not just yet.’

‘Don’t do anything in a hurry,’ Emma said. She had meant her question in a broad sense, not as an inquiry into Ginny’s financial standing. She raised her head, and saw that they were being watched. The eyes of the other mourners were drawn to them, however hard those mourners tried to look away. What do they all think, Emma wondered: that there will be some sort of embarrassing scene? Hardly likely. Not at this time. Not in this place. Not amongst people like ourselves, who have been reared in the service of the great god Self-Control. ‘Ginny,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t stand about here. Let Daniel drive you home.’

‘A few people are coming back,’ Ginny said. She looked at Emma in faint surprise, as if it were natural that she would know the arrangements. ‘You should come back too. Let me give you some whisky. A freezing day like this…Still, better than rain. Claire’s staying on over the weekend.’ Ginny raised her hand, and twitched at her collar again. ‘Emma, I’d like to see you. Like you to come to the house…Mrs Gleave is making vol-au-vents…’ Her voice tailed off entirely.

Emma’s brother, Ralph Eldred, loomed purposefully behind them: a solid figure, hands scrunched into the pockets of his dark wool overcoat. Ginny looked up. The sight of Ralph seemed to restore her. ‘Ralph, thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Come back with us and have some whisky.’

‘I should take myself off,’ Ralph said. ‘I have to go to Norwich this afternoon to a meeting. But naturally if you want me to, Ginny…if I can be of any help…’ He was weighing considerations, as he always did; his presence was wanted on every hand, and it was simply a question of where he was needed most.

‘Why, no,’ Ginny said. ‘It was a courtesy, Ralph. Do run along.’

She managed a smile. It was her husband’s under-occupation that had freed him for his long years of infidelity; but Ralph’s days were full, and everybody knew it. There were advantages, she saw, in being married to a man who thought only of work, God and family; even though the Eldred children did look so down at heel, and had been so strangely brought up, and even though Ralph’s wife was worn to a shadow slaving for his concerns.

Ralph’s wife Anna wore a neat black pillbox hat. It looked very smart, though it was not remotely in fashion. Lingering in the background, she gave Ginny a nod of acknowledgement and sympathy. It was an Anna Eldred nod, full of I-do-not-intrude. Ginny returned it; then Ralph took his wife’s arm, and squired her away at a good clip towards their parked car.

Ginny looked after them. ‘You wonder about marriage,’ she said suddenly. ‘Are marriages all different, or all alike?’

Emma shrugged, shoulders stiff inside her old coat. ‘No use asking me, Ginny.’

Inside the car, Ralph said, ‘It’s not right, you know. It’s not, is it? For Emma to find out like that. More or less by chance. And only when it was all over.’

‘It was all over very quickly,’ Anna said. ‘From what I gather.’

‘Yes, but to have no priority in being told – ’

‘I expect you think Ginny should have rung her from the hospital, do you? Just given her a tinkle from the intensive-care unit?’

‘ – to have no right to know. That’s what galls me. It’s inhuman. And now Ginny gets all the sympathy, all the attention. I’m not saying she doesn’t need and deserve it. But Emma gets nothing, not a word. Only this public embarrassment.’

‘I see – you think that as Emma was the maîtresse en titre, she should be allowed to put on a show of her own?’ Anna sighed. ‘I’m sure Felix has left her some fine diamonds, and a château for her old age.’

A contractor’s van drew up in front of the Eldreds’ car, adding to the traffic jam; restoration work was going on at the church. Two workmen got out, and began to untie a ladder from the roof-rack. A lesser man with Ralph’s schedule would have fretted at the delay. But Ralph showed his impatience only by a little tapping of his forefinger against the steering wheel. There was a school nearby, and the voices of children drifted from the playground, carried on the wind like gulls’ cries.

The couple who blocked them drove off, nodding, raising hands in a stiff-fingered wave. The contractor moved his van. Ralph pulled out on to the road. Anna saw the children dashing and bumping and careening behind a fence: bullets trussed in duffle coats, their faces hidden under hoods.

The 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.

TWO

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 on his arm: ‘Yes, Felix. It was, it was a long time ago.’

Felix nodded. ‘I remember saying to you – it’s the sort of place you come to grips with 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 go home and tell.

Ask him how he knew, that moment he swivelled his head under the beam and met the bland blue eye of Felix: ask him how he knew, and he couldn’t tell you. The knowledge simply penetrated his bone-marrow. When 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 have come home for the funeral.’

‘It was mainly our generation,’ Anna said. ‘There were a lot of people there. I think three Eldreds were enough.’

‘An elegant sufficiency,’ Julian said.

His mother laughed. ‘Where did you get that expression?’

‘I heard Kit say it. But didn’t you think she’d have wanted to be there? As she’s so friendly with Daniel Palmer these days.’

Felix’s son, the architect, had a flat above his office in Holt. He was interested in Kit; he had taken her to the theatre, and out to dinner, and invited her to go out in the boat he kept at Blakeney. Anna said, ‘I think Kit regards Daniel as a provider of treats. A funeral is not a treat.’

‘When will she be coming home, then?

‘Not till Easter. She’s got her exams in a matter of weeks, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know. You don’t have to keep mentioning things like that. Terms. Exams.’

‘We have to talk about you, Julian. But perhaps not this afternoon.’ She looked over the rim of her cup. ‘What have you done today?’

‘I started putting in those poles for the back fence.’

‘And have you seen your girlfriend?’

The slight vulgarity and childishness of the expression struck Julian. It was as if his mother had spilled her tea on the table, or put her fingers in the sugar bowl.

‘I’m going over tomorrow. I just wanted to get a start on that fence, as the rain was keeping off. I wish Kit would come home soon. I want her to meet Sandra’s mother. I want to know what she’ll think of her.’

So Sandra will be with us for another summer, Anna thought. With Julian you had to glean things, here and there.

A few days after the funeral, Emma went to the shrine at Walsingham. She was not sure why; her faith, if it still existed, was not something she displayed in public. But when you cannot cope with grief, she reasoned, you can do worse than observe the forms that have helped other people cope with it. At Felix’s funeral the minister had said that, even in the depth of misery, the familiar forms of prayer can lift the heart towards Christian joy. Very well, Emma thought grimly, let’s try it. Something is needed. For Ginny, there were undertakers. There was the question of probate. There was the business of organizing Mrs Gleave and the vol-au-vents. But for me there is nothing. An empty space. A lack of occupation. It is as if I have been told of a death that has taken place in a distant country. It is as if I have no claim on sympathy, because I have heard of the death of a person my friends do not know. There is no body. There is no corpse. Just this absence, this feeling of something unfinished.

Skirting Fakenham, taking the back roads towards the shrine and the sea, she found her car alone on the road. Across the flat fields towers spiked the snow-charged sky, the clouds pregnant and bowed with cold; Norfolk is a land of churches, some open to the sky, their chancels colonized by nettles, their naves by blackthorn and brambles. In those not yet redundant, congregations dwindle; the Samaritans’ notices, flapping in the porches, attest to the quality and frequency of rural despair.

In Walsingham, the car park was empty. The streets were devoid of tourists and pilgrims, and the old buildings – half-timber and brick and stone, steep roof and Dutch gable – seemed to have moved closer together, as if the town were closing itself down for the winter. By the Anglican shrine, plaster saints looked out from shop windows: and woven saints, with tapestry eyes. Touches of gilt glinted here and there on a cardboard halo; postcards were for sale, and prayers printed in mock black-letter on mock scrolls. You could buy candles, which you might put to secular use; other windows displayed recordings of plainchant, and pots of honey in stoneware jars, and boxes of Norfolk Lavender soap. Walsingham tea-towels were on offer, jars of chutney, tins of shortbread, Earl Grey teabags in cod Victorian packaging; and there were herb pillows, Olde Englishe Peppermint Lumps, pot-pourri and fluffy toys, wall-plaques, paperweights and scented drawer-liners – all the appurtenances, in fact, that you would expect to find at an ancient pilgrim site. Trade was poor. The only visible inhabitant was a woman with a shopping basket over her arm and a pug dog on a lead. She nodded to Emma and walked on, huddling into the shadow of the Abbey’s wall.

Emma went up the path to the church. It was a building put up in the 1930s, and its exterior, disappointingly plain, hid its dim papistical contents: devotional candles blinking, sad-eyed virgins pouting in gold frames. She asked herself, what would my father have said, what would my father have said to a bauble-shop like this? Matthew Eldred seemed very far away, very old and dead and gone. Not so Felix. Alone in her cottage in Foulsham, she still listened for the sound of his key in the lock.

Emma lurked about towards the back of the church, away from the altar. Finally she sat down on a chair at the end of a row. She gave herself permission for tears, but she was not able to cry. Like her sister-in-law Anna, she had trained herself out of it. The thought of Felix lay like a stone inside her chest. Outside, some sort of building work seemed to be going on; she could hear the monotonous thump of hammers and the whirring of drills. In my family, she thought, we practise restraint and the keeping of secrets, and the thoughts we respect are unvoiced thoughts; even Felix, an open secret, was a secret of a kind. But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.

On the back wall were wooden plaques, names and dates: thanks given, intentions stated. Thanks for preservation in a motor accident, 1932. For reunion of husband and wife, after prayer at the shrine, 1934. Success in an examination, Thanks, 1935. What minute considerations we expect God to entertain, Emma thought. Thanks for a happy death, prayed for at the Holy House. Who put that here, and how did they know it was happy? Some plaques gave nothing away. Upon these the visitor might exercise imagination: Prayers Answered.

Near these plaques, the water from the Holy Well was made available in buckets. Pilgrims might help themselves, by dipping with assorted vessels; a table, stacked up with prayer books, held also the abandoned top of a Thermos flask, some paper cups of the kind tea machines dispense, and some beakers of moulded plastic, each one frilly at the rim, as if it had been gnawed. Emma thought the arrangements unsanitary. She went out, her gloves in her hand.

In the porch was a vast book, well-thumbed, its pages ruled into columns. A notice promised ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE SHRINE.

Emma took her pen out of her pocket, turned to a clean page and wrote down the date. She did not put Felix’s name in the book. because she believed that energy should be directed towards the living, not the dead. She did not put her own name, because she believed she would manage well enough. But she wrote the names of her brother and his wife:

RALPH ELDRED

ANNA ELDRED

Beneath she wrote:

KATHERINE ELDRED

then hesitated, and skipped one line, before

JULIAN ELDRED

ROBERT ELDRED

REBECCA ELDRED

It was half dark when Emma left the porch. Between the church and the road there was no pavement; she crept uphill by the high wall, protected only by heaven’s benevolence from the cars behind her. Eddies of sleet swirled in a huddle of stone and flint, slapping at window glass and melting underfoot. Sitting in an almost empty café, her hands around a mug of hot chocolate, she thought of that other frozen afternoon, when Ralph’s curly head emerged 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.

THREE

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, of inky scholarship, Sabbatarian dullness; their religion was active, proselytizing, strenuous and 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 came within hailing distance. They closed in on him, with their ribbed stockings and their cold-weather complexions.

There was a woman among them, her sharp nose scarlet above a swaddling of scarves. She stared at the fossil in his hand; she pulled off her gloves, hauled them off with her teeth. He dropped the fossil into her hand. She turned it over and back again, ran her forefinger down its mottled curve, feeling the ridges. She laid it against her face; she tasted it with her tongue. ‘Gryphaea,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know?’

He shook his head; stood before her, like the dumb unconverted heathen. ‘It’s a bivalve – like an oyster, you know?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He was disappointed; something so ordinary after all.

She said, ‘It’s a hundred and fifty million years old.’ He stared at her. ‘You know how an oyster lives in its shell? This is the ancestor of oysters.’ He nodded. ‘It lived here when the sea was warm – if you can imagine that. Here was its soft body, inside this shell, with its heart and blood vessels and gills. When it died all those soft parts rotted, and the sand filled up the cavity. And then the sand compacted and turned into rock.’

There was a circle of people around them, their breath streaming on the air, eyes fixed on her hand; they were coveting what he had found, as if it were a jewel. ‘The sea moved,’ a man said. His face was a raw ham beneath a bobble hat. ‘I mean to say, what had been sea became land. But now the sea’s eating away the land again – all this east coast,’ he waved his arm, gesturing towards the Wash – ‘you can see it going in your lifetime.’

A man in a balaclava – green, ex-army – said, ‘I served with a bloke from Suffolk whose grandfather had a smallholding, and it’s in the sea now. Whole churchyards have gone down the cliff. Whole graveyards, and the bones washed out.’

The woman said, ‘You’ve stopped this little creature, my dear. On its way back to the sea where it came from.’

‘When it was alive – ’

‘Yes?’

‘What did it eat?’

‘It cemented itself on the sea-bed, and sucked in water. It got its nourishment from that, from the larvae in the water, you see. It had a stomach, kidneys, intestines, everything you have.’

‘Could it think?’

‘Well, can an oyster think these days? What would an oyster have to think about?’

He blushed. Stupid question. What he had meant to say was, are you sure it was alive? Can you truly swear to me that it was? ‘Are these rare?’ he asked.

‘Not if you want a smashed-up one. Not if you’re content with fragments.’

The woman held his find for a moment, clenched and concealed in her fist; then put it into his outstretched palm, and worked her fingers back painfully into her gloves. She wanted the fossil so much that he almost gave it to her; but then, he wanted it himself. Bobble-hat said, ‘I’ve been coming here man and boy, and never got anything as good as that. Two-a-penny brachiopods, that’s what I get. Sometimes I think we’re looking so hard we can’t see.’

‘Beginner’s luck,’ the balaclava said. He stabbed a woolly finger at the object he craved. ‘Do you know what they call them? Devil’s toenails.’ He chuckled. ‘I reckon you can see why.’

Ralph looked down at the fossil and almost dropped it. Saw the thick, ridged, ogreish curve, that greenish, sinister sheen…All the way home in the bus he forced himself to hold the object in his hand, his feelings seesawing between attraction and repulsion; wondering how he could have found it, when he was not looking at all.

When he arrived at the house he was very cold and slightly nauseated. He smiled at the cousin who let him in and said he had better go upstairs right away and wash his hands. ‘Did you enjoy yourself, love?’ his aunt asked; he gave a monosyllabic reply, a polite mutter which translated to nothing. The ticking of the parlour clock was oppressive, insistent; he could imagine it buried in the earth, ticking away for a hundred and fifty million years. He took his place on one of the leather chairs, and wondered about the animal whose back the leather had adorned: what skin, what hair, what blood through living veins? His aunt quibbled about how the table had been laid, twitching the fish knives about with her forefinger. Smoked haddock came, with its thin-cut bread and butter, a pale juice oozing across the plate. He ate a flake or two, then put down his fork. His aunt said, ‘No appetite?’ He thought of the bones spilled down the cliff, into the salty whispering of the tides; Gryphaea sucking in its nourishment, the aeons rolling by, the devil walking abroad.

His mother made Satan into the likeness of some strict schoolmaster: ‘The devil finds work for idle hands to do.’

The toenail was upstairs, locked in his suitcase.

When Ralph came home from Yorkshire, he and Emma played their Bible games. They always played them when they had some decision to make. Now Emma said, ‘I want to decide whether when I grow up I’m going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or just a broody hen who stays at home like my mama.’

You were supposed to pick a verse at random, and it would give you guidance; but you needed a keen imagination to make anything of the verses they turned up. ‘Try this one,’ Emma said. “‘And thou shalt anoint the laver and his foot, and sanctify it.” Exodus 40:11. Very helpful, I’m sure.’ She began to sing a hymn of her own composition: ‘How daft the name of Jesus sounds…’

Ralph took out the fossil from his coat pocket, where he was keeping it for the while. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘It’s the devil’s toenail.’

Emma gave a startled wail. ‘It’s horrible. Whatever is it?’

He told her. Her face brightened. ‘Give it me.’ He dropped it into her cupped hand. ‘Can I take it to school to frighten girls with?’

‘No, you certainly can’t. It’s valuable. It’s mine.’

‘I’m an atheist,’ Emma said.

‘Not an atheist a minute ago, were you?’

These were the books on their shelves, old, crumbling: The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. And dusty, brown: Christ is All, H. C. G. Moule, London, 1892. Slime-trailed, musty: F. R. Havergal, 1880: Kept for the Master’s Use. Earwiggy, fading: Hymns of Faith and Hope. And A Basket of Fragments, R. M. McCheyne, published Aberdeen, no date, pages uncut.

A year later Ralph went back to Yorkshire. His request surprised his family, and gave some pale gratification to the Synod, who had found him a quiet boy who offered no offence, and were glad that someone in the family seemed to like them. He spent his days on the beaches and in the town museum. He did not speak of his discoveries at home, but he found a schoolmaster to encourage him – a man whom, he realized later, he should have enlisted on his side when the quarrel came. He studied alone after school, sent for books with his pocket-money and puzzled over geological maps; he walked fields, hills, coastal paths, examined ditches and road-cuttings. When he was tired and discouraged and there were things he could not understand he thought of the woman on the Yorkshire beach, putting out the purple tip of her tongue to taste the fossil, its silt and grit, its coldness and its age.

There was a trick he had to perfect: to look at a landscape and strip away the effect of man. England transforms itself under the geologist’s eye; the scavenger sheep are herded away into the future, and a forest grows in a peat bog, each tree seeded by imagination. Where others saw the lie of the land, Ralph saw the path of the glacier; he saw the desert beneath copse and stream, and the glories of Europe stewing beneath a warm, clear, shallow sea.

Today his fossil collection is in cardboard boxes, in one of the attics of his house. Rebecca, his youngest child, had nightmares about them when she was five or six. He blamed himself, for not giving a proper explanation; it was Kit who had told her they were stone animals, stone lives, primitive creatures that once had swum and crawled. The baby saw them swimming and crawling again, mud-sucking and breathing at her bedroom door.

But in those days, when he was a boy, Ralph kept his finds in his bedroom, arranged on top of his bookcase and on the painted mantelpiece over the empty grate. Norfolk did not yield much for his collection. He combed the Weymouth and Cromer beaches for ammonites and echinoids, but his luck was out; he had to wait for the summer, for his exile to the slippery chairs. He endured all: his uncle’s homilies, the piano practice of his female cousins. His mother dusted the fossils twice a week, but didn’t understand what they were. ‘It’s Ralph’s interest,’ she told people. ‘Old bits of stone, and pottery, things of that nature, little bits and pieces that he brings back from his holidays.’ Geology and archaeology were thoroughly confused in her mind. ‘Ralph is a collector,’ she would say. ‘He likes anything that’s old. Emma – now, Emma – she’s much more your modern miss.’

Emma said to her brother, ‘Ralph, how can you talk so casually about 500 million years? Most of us have trouble with…well, Christmas for example. Every December it puts people into a panic, as if it had come up on them without warning. It’s only very exceptional people who can imagine Christmas in July.’

Ralph said, ‘What you must do is to think of yourself walking through time. To go back, right back, to the very beginning of geological time, you’d have to go round the world forty-six times. Suppose you want to go back to the last Ice Age. That’s very recent, as we think of it. It would be like a cross-channel trip. London to Paris.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a trip to Paris,’ Emma said. ‘Do you think it’s any good me asking?’

‘Then, to reach the time of the dinosaurs, you’d have to go right around the world.

‘I feel confined, myself,’ Emma said. ‘To the here and now.’ She sat twisting at one of her plaits, pulling at it, finally undoing it and combing her fingers through her heavy brown hair. She glanced at herself covertly in mirrors these days. ‘Geese turn into swans’, her mother said; she meant well, but it was hardly science.

A frieze of evolution marched through Ralph’s head. Each form of life has its time and place: sea-snail and sea-lily, water-scorpion and lungfish, fern tree and coral. Shark and flesh-eating reptile; sea-urchin and brontosaurus; pterodactyl and magnolia tree; cuttle fish and oyster. Then the giant flightless bird, opossum in his tree, elephant in his swamp; it was as clear in his mind as it might be in a child’s picture book, or a poster on a nursery wall. The sabre-toothed cat, the little horse three feet tall; the Irish elk, the woolly mammoth; then man, stooped, hairy, furrow-browed. It is a success story.

At seventeen Ralph could be taken for a man, but not of this primitive textbook kind. He was tall, strong, with a clear skin and clear eyes, like a hero in a slushy book. Sometimes women looked at him with interest on the street: with a speculative pity, as if they feared other women might exploit him.

Ralph would go back to the Brecklands, in those years after the war, threading his bicycle along the narrow roads, between concrete emplacements and through lanes churned up by heavy vehicles. What he saw was victory: fences broken, orchards cut down, avenues of trees mutilated. Gates hung from a hinge, posters flapped on walls. Everywhere was a proliferation of little huts made of corrugated iron – rusting now, and without their doors. Farm workers ran about in scrapped jeeps they had salvaged. Heaps of rubbish festered amid the pines. The wind was the same, its low hum through the stiff branches. The thread-like trunks of birch trees were the same, viewed across tussocky fields; herons flapped from the meres.

The Ministry of Defence did not mean to relinquish its hold on the district. Its fences and KEEP OUT notices divided the fields. Ralph would pull his bicycle on to the grass verge, while a convoy rumbled past. Once, holding his handlebars and standing up to his knees in damp grass, he reached down for what caught his eye; it was a flint arrow-head. He turned it over in his palm, then put it in his pocket. He remembered the moment when he had found the fossil; here was another secret, buried life. He need not take it to a museum; these things are common enough. He took it home and put it on his mantelpiece, meaning to save it for his Uncle James to see when he was next in England. ‘Ah, an elfshot,’ his mother said, and smiled.

‘You like that old country, Ralph,’ his father said; the thought did not displease him. Matthew himself had kept friends in the area, church people, other businessmen of a charitable, socially responsible bent. These were the days of meeting-room hysteria and sudden conversion, of dipping people in rivers and calling it baptism. American preachers had come to the bases to service the raw spirituality of their compatriots, and found a ready audience in the poor, cold towns. ‘A plain font is requisite,’ said Matthew. ‘Nothing else.’ He hated display: Roman Catholic display, evangelists’ display, emotional display. A plain mind is requisite: nothing else.

Emma said she wanted to be a doctor. His father said, ‘Yes, if you wish to, Emma.’

Everything was permitted to her, it seemed to Ralph. She was a decisive girl, bossy, full of strong opinions strongly expressed. When Emma’s opinions cut across those of her parents, they saw contrariness; they saw a defect of character. They tried, therefore, to correct her character; it did not seem important to them to correct her opinions, for Emma was a female, and what influence could the opinion of a female have in the real world? Her opinions might damage her, and she would then revise them – but they would not damage the social order.

At least, that was how Ralph supposed they thought. For when it came to his opinions, his desires, it was a very different story.

‘So you don’t want to go into the business, Ralphie.’

This was how his father joined battle: obliquely, from the flank. He made it seem that there were only simple issues at stake, a change in family expectations. But soon enough, his weighty battalions were deployed. The issues went beyond the family. They became larger than Ralph had bargained for. They became universal.

First his father said: ‘Ralph, you’ve never given me any trouble. I thought you believed in the religion that you were brought up in.’

‘I do,’ Ralph said.

‘But now you are setting yourself up against it.’

‘No.’

‘But you must be, Ralph. We believe that God created the world, as is set down in the Bible. I believe it. Your mother believes it.’

‘Uncle James doesn’t believe it.’

‘James is not here,’ his father said flatly. It was incontrovertible; James was in the Diocese of Zanzibar.

‘I believe it as a metaphor,’ Ralph said. ‘But I believe in evolution too.’

‘Then you are a very muddle-headed young man,’ his father said. ‘How can you entertain two contradictory beliefs at the same time?’

‘But they aren’t contradictory. Father, most people got all this over with by the turn of the century. Nobody thinks what you think any more. Nobody thinks there’s God on one side and Darwin on the other.’

‘When I was a young man,’ Matthew said, ‘I attended a lecture. It was given by a professor, he was a distinguished scholar, he was no fool or half-baked schoolboy. He said to us, “What is Darwinism? I will tell you. Darwinism is atheism,” he said. I have always remembered those words. I have seen nothing in my life since to convince me that he was wrong.’

‘But if you thought about it now,’ Ralph said, ‘if you thought about it all over again, you might be able to see that he was wrong.’ Something bubbled inside him: intellectual panic? ‘What’s the point of just repeating what you were told when you were a boy? You can be an evolutionist, Darwinian or some other kind, and still believe that everything that exists is intended by God. It’s an old debate, it’s stale, it was never necessary in the first place.’

‘My own beliefs,’ his father said, ‘have never been subject to the vagaries of fashion.’

Days of war followed. Silences. Ralph couldn’t eat. Food stuck in his dry mouth; it was like trying to swallow rocks, he thought. He hated quarrels, hated silences too: those silences that thickened the air in rooms and made it electric.

Matthew closed in on him, and so did his mother: a pincer movement. ‘Are you going to take evidence, what you call evidence, from a few bones and shells, and use them to oppose the word of God?’

‘I told you,’ Ralph said, ‘that there is no opposition.’

‘There is opposition from me,’ his father said: shifting the ground.

‘It is impossible to have a discussion with you.’

‘No doubt,’ Matthew said. ‘I am not a scientist, am I? I am so backward in my outlook that I wonder you condescend to talk to me at all. I wonder you condescend to stay under my roof. Good God, boy – look around you. Look at the design of the world. Do you think some blind stupid mechanism controls it? Do you think we got here out of chance?’

‘Please be calm,’ Ralph said. He tried to take a deep breath, but it seemed to stick half-way. ‘It’s no good waving your arms at me and saying, look at God’s creation. You don’t have to force it down my throat, the miracles of nature, the design of the universe – I know about those, more, I’d say, than you.’ (More than you, he thought, who have lived your life with your eyes on your well-blacked boots.) ‘If I believe in God I believe from choice. Not because of evidence. From choice. Not because I’m compelled.’

‘You believe from choice’?’ Matthew was revolted. ‘From choice? Where did you get this stupid notion from?’

‘I thought of it myself.’

‘Can you believe in anything you like, then? Can you believe the moon is made of green cheese? Is there no truth you recognize?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said quietly. ‘We used to go to sermons that said the truth was what God revealed, that you don’t find the truth by looking for it. At least, that’s what I think they were saying. Well – not to put too fine a point on it – I can’t wait around all my life. If I’ve been given the faculty of reasoning, I may as well use it to dig out what truth I can.’

‘You’ll kill me, Ralph,’ his father said. ‘Your pride and your self-regard will kill me.’

Ralph was afraid his father might ask, with one old divine, ‘What can the geologist tell you about the Rock of Ages?’ He spared him that, but not episodes of choking rage, which terrified Ralph and made him regret what he had begun.

His mother took him aside. ‘You are making your father very unhappy,’ she said. ‘I have never seen him more miserable. And he has done everything for you, and would give you anything. If you do this thing, if you insist on it, if you insist on this as your life’s work, I’ll not be able to hold my head up before our friends. They’ll say we have not brought you up properly.’

‘Look,’ Ralph said, ‘what I want is to go to university. I want to read geology. Just that, that’s all. I didn’t set out to upset anybody. That was the last thing on my mind.’

‘I know you have your ambitions,’ Dorcas said, with that frayed sigh only mothers can perform. ‘But your abilities, Ralph, are not for you to enjoy – they are given to you to use for the Christian community.’

‘Yes. All right. I will use them.’

‘You’ve closed your mind,’ she said.

Astonishment wrenched him out of his misery. She left him incoherent. ‘Me? I’ve closed my mind?’

‘You spoke to your father of reason,’ she said. ‘You’ll find there is a point where reason fails.’

‘Stop talking at me,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’

His mother left him alone. Her mouth drew in as though she were eating sour plums. If James were here it would be different, Ralph thought; he wanted to cry like a child for his uncle, of whom he knew so little. James could talk to them, he believed, James could ridicule them out of their caution and their scruples and their superstitions, James could talk them into the twentieth century. James is not like them, he knows it from his letters; James is liberal, educated, sympathetic. Ralph saw himself losing, being driven into the ground. All he believed, all he wished to believe – the march of order, progress – all diminished by his father’s hard deriding stare and his mother’s puckered mouth.

Why didn’t he fetch in the schoolmaster who encouraged him? Why didn’t he appeal to his headmaster, who knew him to be a bright, studious, serious boy? Why didn’t he get some other, reasonable adult to weigh in on his behalf – at least to referee the argument, make sure his father obeyed the laws of war?

Because he was ashamed of his father’s stupidity, ashamed of the terms of the quarrel. Because in families, you never think of appealing for help to the outside world; your quarrels are too particular, too specific, too complex. And because you never think of these reasonable solutions, till it is far too late.

‘Ralph,’ his father said, ‘be guided by me. You are a mere boy. Oh, you don’t want to hear that, I know. You think you are very adult and smart. But you will come to thank me, Ralphie, in the days ahead.’

Ralph felt he was trapped in an ancient argument. These are the things sons say to fathers; these are the things fathers say to sons. The knowledge didn’t help him; nor did the knowledge that his father was behaving like a caricature of a Victorian patriarch. His family had always been cripplingly old-fashioned; till now he had not realized the deformity’s extent. Why should he, when all his family’s friends were the same, and he had spent his life hobbling along with them? They were churchgoers; not great readers; not travellers, but people who on principle entertained narrow ideas and stayed at home. He saw them for the first time as the outside world might see them – East Anglian fossils.

‘There will be no money for you, Ralphie,’ his father said. ‘And you will hardly be able to support yourself through your proposed course at university. You may try, of course.’

‘James will help me,’ Ralph said, without believing it.

‘Your Uncle James has not a brass farthing of his own. And you’re quite mistaken if you think he would set himself up against his own brother.’

‘Of course, I could see it coming,’ Emma said. ‘After all the fine theories and pieties have been aired, what it comes down to is their hand on the purse-strings. That’s their final argument.’

Ralph said, ‘It isn’t God who’s diminished by Darwin’s theory, it’s man. Man isn’t any more lord of the universe. He’s just a part of the general scheme of things. But there is a scheme of things, and you can put God at the top of it if you like.’

‘But you don’t like,’ his father said. Another flat statement. It was not evolution that was the issue now, it was obedience. Even if his father had taken that last point, Ralph thought, he had done himself no service by raising it. If Man was diminished, then Matthew Eldred was diminished: a lord of the universe was precisely what he wished to be.

‘If you like,’ Ralph said, ‘and I do like – you can still believe that Man has a unique place in creation. You can still believe that he has a special dignity. Only Man is rational. Only Man is an intellectual animal.’

‘Bandying words,’ his father said. He seemed satisfied with the phrase, as if he were a doctor and this were his diagnosis.

I except you, Ralph thought. I wouldn’t call you rational, not any more.

When the conflict was at its height – when the family were barely speaking to each other, and a Synod-like hush possessed the rooms – Matthew absented himself for a night. He went to King’s Lynn, to discuss with some of his business cronies the charitable trust that they were setting up. It was to be an ambitious enterprise, with broad Christian interests: money for the missions, money for the East End doss house with which James kept a connection; money above all for the deserving poor of Norfolk, the aged and indigent farm labourers, those church-going rural folk who had been mangled by agricultural machinery or otherwise suffered some disabling mischance.

It was to be called the St Walstan Trust; Walstan is the patron saint of farmers and farm labourers, and his image is found through the county on screens and fonts. The suggestion came from William Martin, a shopkeeper at Dereham; it was a little High Church for Matthew’s taste, but Martin was generally sound, very sound, and the county connection pleased him. Matthew was a local patriot now, a sitter on committees, treasurer of this and chairman of that. Ralph said to Emma, ‘I wish that charity would begin at home.’

That evening, the event took place which broke Ralph’s resolve. His mother came to his bedroom, upstairs on her noiseless feet. She tapped at the door, and waited till he had asked her to enter; this arch, stiff politeness had come upon the family since the row blew up.

Ralph looked up from his books, adjusting his desk lamp so that it cast a little light into the room. It pooled at his mother’s slippered feet as she sat on the bed. She wore her cardigan draped over her shoulders; she took the cuffs of the empty sleeves in her hands, and twisted them as she spoke. Her wedding ring gleamed, big and broad like a brass washer. She had lost weight, perhaps, for it hung loose on her finger, and her knuckle bones seemed huge.

Ralph listened to what she had to say. If he would not capitulate, she said – but she did not use that word – if he would not fall into line, fall in with the plans his father had formulated for him, then she could not say what his father would do about Emma. He might think that as Ralph had gone so badly off course, Emma needed guidance. He might like to have her at home, under his eye. There might, in fact, be no medical school for Emma at all.

His mother sighed as she said all this; her manner was tentative, and her eyes travelled over the peg-rug and the bookcase and the desk, they roamed the wall and flickered over the dark window at which the curtains were not yet drawn. But she was not afraid; and Ralph understood her. She had volunteered, he believed, for this piece of dirty work; she and her husband, his father, had planned it between them, so that there would be no more shouting, no more scenes, only his certain silent defeat.

‘Emma might like to be a nurse, perhaps,’ his mother said. ‘Your father might let her do that, but I only say might. His frame of mind so much depends on you.’

Ralph said, ‘You are a wicked woman.’

He didn’t know that she was sick then, and that within a few months she would have the first of her many spells in hospital. Despite her sufferings she would have a long life. He was never sure that he forgave her completely. But he tried.

After his capitulation, his father began to backtrack at once. ‘For a hobby, Ralphie,’ he said. ‘Keep it for a hobby. But not for what you are seen to do in the eyes of the world. Not for your life’s work.’

‘I don’t want the business,’ he told his father. ‘I want my own life. I don’t want anything to do with all that.’

‘Very well,’ Matthew said equably. ‘I’ll sell – when the time is right.’ He frowned then, as if he might be misunderstood. ‘There’ll be money for you, Ralph. And there’ll be money for your children. I’ll put it in trust, I’ll arrange it all. You’ll not be poor.’

‘This is premature,’ Ralph said.

‘Oh, you’ll be married and have children soon enough, the years go by…you could be a teacher, Ralphie. You could go to Africa, like your uncle. They have a great need of people, you know. I would never try to confine you. I would never sentence you to a dull life.’ He paused, and added, ‘But I hope one day you will come home to Norfolk.’

For months afterwards Ralph never seemed to smile; that was what Emma thought. He kept his shoulders hunched as he walked, as if he wore disappointment like a tight old coat. ‘Why did you give in to them?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you stick by your principles, why didn’t you stick out for the life you had planned?’

He wouldn’t talk to her; occasionally, he would just remark that things were not as they seemed, that he saw there were hidden depths to people.

She did not know how he had been defeated. He made sure he did not tell her.

He had his National Service to do; it would fail to broaden his horizons. He would spend it behind a desk, employed in menial clerical work; or in transit in trucks and trains. He began to recognize his character, as it was reflected back to him by other people. He saw a solid, polite, always reasonable young man, who would sort out problems for the dim and timid, who kept his patience and who did not patronize or sneer; who never cultivated his superiors, either, who seemed to have no ambition and no idea how to make life easy for himself. Was he really like that? He didn’t know.

He was not excessively miserable. It seemed to him that the boredom, the routine discomforts and humiliations, the exile from home, the futility of his daily round, were all simple enough to endure. What he could not endure were the thoughts of his heart, and the frequent dreams he had, in which he murdered his father. Or rather, dreams in which he plotted the murder; or in which he was arrested and tried, when the murder was already done. The bloody act itself was always offstage.

When he was twenty years old these dreams were so persistent that the memory of them stained and dislocated his waking life. By day he entertained, he thought, little animosity to Matthew. Their quarrel had not affected what he believed, it had only affected the course of his career; and one day Matthew would die, or become senile, or concede the point, and he could resume that career. He must be the winner in the long run, he thought.

So these dreams, these inner revolts, bewildered him. He was forced to concede that large areas of his life were beyond his control.

On one of his leaves, instead of going home to Norwich, he went to London with a friend. They stayed at his friend’s sister’s house, Ralph sleeping on the sofa. By day, he went sightseeing; he had never been to London before. One night he lost his virginity for cash, in a room near one of the major railway termini. Afterwards he could never remember which station it had been, or the name of the street, so that in later life he couldn’t be sure whether he ever walked along it; and although the woman told him her name was Norah he had no reason to believe her. He did not feel guilt afterwards; it was something to be got through. He had not embarrassed himself; there was that much to be said about it.

On his next leave he was introduced to Anna Martin, only child of the very sound shopkeeper from Dereham.

Three years later, Ralph was teaching in London, in the East End. James had come home and was director of what had been the doss house and was now St Walstan’s Hostel. Ralph went there most weekends. He slept on a folding bed in the director’s office, and was called during the night to new admissions banging on the door, to men taken sick and to residents who had unexpectedly provided themselves with alcohol first, and then with broken bottles, knives, pokers or iron bars. He arbitrated in disputes about the ownership of dog-ends, lumpy mattresses and soiled blankets, and became familiar with the customs and rituals and shibboleths of welfare officers and policemen.

On a Sunday night he collected the week’s bedding, and listed it for the laundry, counting the sheets stained with vomit and semen, with excrement and blood. On a Wednesday evening he would drop by for an hour to count the linen in again. The sheets were patched and darned, but stainless. They smelled of the launderer’s press; they were stiff and utterly white. How do they do it, he wondered; how do they make them so utterly white?

He became engaged to Anna. They planned to marry when she graduated from her teacher-training college, and go straight out to Dar-es-Salaam, where a dear friend of James was a headmaster and where a pleasant house would be waiting for them, and two jobs as teachers of English to young men training for the ministry. Sometimes, on the London pavements, Ralph tried to imagine himself translated to this alien place, to the heat and colour of this other life. Letters passed to and fro. Arrangements were in hand.

Anna received all this with equanimity. She was planning the wedding, the quiet wedding. A quiet girl altogether; she wore grey, charcoal, dark blue, simple clothes with clear lines. Ralph thought she was setting herself apart, cultivating almost a nun-like air. They did not discuss their religious beliefs; a certain amount was implied, understood. She had taken on the prospect of Africa without demur. ‘She hasn’t really said much about it,’ Ralph told James.

James said, ‘Good – I suspect enthusiasm.’

The kind of person not wanted in those climes, he said, was someone who rushed with open arms to embrace the romantic deprivations of the life. Anna’s reasoned agreement was a better foundation for their future than constant chatter about what that future might hold.

Later Ralph would think, when we married it was a leap into the dark: we didn’t know each other at all. But perhaps when you are so young, you don’t even begin to comprehend what there is to know.

As for those nun-like clothes – when he had seen more of the world, and was more accustomed to looking at women, he realized that Anna’s style was deliberate, ingenious and contrived by the exercise of a stifled artistic talent. She had made her own dresses in those days; she could not buy what she wanted in Norfolk, and with her tiny means she would not have dared to enter a London shop. She spent what she had on fabric, buttons and trimmings; she cut, pressed and stitched, obsessively careful, tyrannically neat. And so what Anna possessed was unique among the people he knew – it was not sanctity, but chic.

‘Freud said,’ Emma told him, ‘that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis.’ She looked at him over her glasses. ‘Tell me now…what happened to the dinosaurs, Ralph?’

‘Their habitat altered,’ he said. ‘A change of climate.’ She smiled crookedly. He saw that she hadn’t expected an answer. ‘The trouble with our parents,’ she said, ‘is that their habitat doesn’t change. It hardly varies from one end of the county to the next. Give them a pew, and they’re right at home.’

Emma had got her wish. She was at medical school; and home now for Ralph’s wedding, her book open on her lap and her feet up on the old sofa that she had thrashed so thoroughly in 1939. Emma had grown heavy; the hospital food, she said, was all dumplings, pastry, suet, and that was what she was turning into, dumplings, pastry, suet. Despite this, she had a suitor, a smart local boy called Felix, not one of their Bible-study set. She dealt with him by ignoring him most of the time, and did not always answer his letters.

She had grumbled with vigour about the business of a new frock for the wedding, even though her father had paid for it; she would pay herself, she said, if Matthew would go and choose the thing, converse with shop assistants and track down a hat to match. Emma resisted the attentions of hairdressers. Anna, the bride-to-be, offered to take her in hand and see that she got a perm. Emma swore when she heard this, so violently that she surprised herself.

‘So, Ralph,’ Emma said, ‘the news from Freud is not all bad. “Devout believers” – that’s you and Anna – “are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses: their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them from the task of constructing a personal one.” In other words, one sort of madness is enough for anybody.’

‘Do you think it is madness?’ Ralph asked. ‘Madness and nothing else?’

‘I don’t think it has any reality, Ralph. I think faith is something people chase after, simply to give life meaning.’

She spoke quite kindly, he thought later. ‘And doesn’t it have meaning?’ he asked.

Emma reserved judgement.

That night his father took him aside. ‘I want to talk about the arrangements,’ he said.

‘It’s all in hand. All done. You don’t have to concern yourself.’

‘I don’t mean arrangements for the wedding. Why should I concern myself with the women’s business?’ His father slid out a drawer of his desk, took out some papers, looked through them as he spoke; this was a family whose members no longer met each other’s eyes. ‘I mean the arrangements for the future. I have taken advice, and I am going to sell the press. I have a good offer from a publisher of educational books.’ Unable to find anything of interest in the papers, he turned them over and stared at their back. ‘Education, you know – it’s the coming thing.’

‘I should hope it is,’ Ralph said. He felt at a loss. He ought to be able to give an opinion. ‘Well, if your accountant – ’ he began.

Matthew cut him short. ‘Yes, yes, yes. Now then, I propose to invest a certain amount, the interest to be paid to Walstan’s Trust.’ He had managed to drop the Saint, Ralph noticed. ‘I propose to place a smaller amount into a family trust for yourself and Anna and your children. When you come back from the missions, you will sit on the committee of Walstan’s Trust, which five years from now will need a full-time paid administrator. If you seem fit for it, you will be able to fill that position.’

‘Other people may have claims,’ Ralph said. This was all he could do – raise small objections. He could not imagine himself in five years’ time. He could not imagine what kind of man he might be, or imagine these notional children of his. I might die in Africa, he thought. There are tropical diseases, and all sorts of strange accidents.

‘Well, they may,’ said his father. ‘But I cannot see very clearly who they would be. Your Uncle James will be wanting a rest by then, and the children of my colleagues on the committee are pursuing their own paths in life.’

‘It seems to be looking too far ahead,’ Ralph said.

‘Oh,’ Matthew said, ‘I thought the millennia were as naught to you. Really, you know, to plan five years or ten years ahead is nothing. All businessmen do it. We do it when we invest money – though you would know nothing of that.’

‘I suppose I wouldn’t.’

‘My object, my plan – and here I may say the other trustees agree with me – is that the Trust should be forever administered from Norfolk, no matter how wide its interests may become. It is local money that has set it up – and we must keep our feet on the ground. So you will want to base yourself here in Norwich, or elsewhere in the county if you prefer. When you return I will buy you a house, because you will make no money while you are out in Africa. That goes without saying.’

If that is so, Ralph thought, why say it? He said, ‘Had you any particular house in mind?’ But he could not summon the strength of purpose to put venom into his tone.

‘I want the Trust to benefit my own countrymen,’ Matthew said, ‘not just James’ collection of drunks and wastrels. Don’t mistake me – I have respect for James’ work – ’

‘Yes, I understand you,’ Ralph said. ‘You don’t have to talk to me as if you were addressing the County Council.’

He thought, from now on I shall take control, I shall order my own life, just as I like. I am going to Africa because I want to go, because Anna wants it. When I return I shall be my own man.

He did not feel demeaned when his father wrote out a cheque for a wedding present and put it into his hand. Payment was due, he reckoned, a tribute from the past to the future.

Four days before the wedding James telephoned from London to say that there was a spot of trouble, could Ralph possibly get on the train and come right away? He was due to appear in court as a witness, one of his inmates having assaulted a police constable; his assistant appeared to be having a nervous breakdown, and there was no one but Ralph who could be trusted to oversee the hostel for a day.

Ralph said, ‘What will you do when I go out to Dar?’

His uncle said, ‘That’s another thing – I want to talk to you about that. Don’t hang about – take a taxi from Liverpool Street. St Walstan will pay.’

Ralph picked up his coat and hat and strode off to the station. He feared the worst. His uncle was going to tell him that he was needed here, in the East End; that the tropics could wait, and that he and Anna should see about renting some rooms a bus-ride from the hostel. He wondered whether he would say yes and supposed he would. Anna would have to unpack her cotton dresses and put them in mothballs, and begin her married life as an East End housewife visiting street markets with a basket over her arm. He rehearsed some inner rebellions: let James sacrifice himself, James is a clergyman, he has no life of his own. He bought a cup of tea in a café near Liverpool Street. He thought of going back into the station and taking the next train back to Norwich; or alternatively, the next train to somewhere else.

It was half-past five when James came back from court, and the hostel was almost full that night, so before he had any conversation with his nephew he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves and began to help with the day’s last meal. It was stew – it usually was stew of some sort – but there was all the bread to be cut and margarined. The inmates always wanted bread, three slices per man, whatever the rest of their meal was. They grumbled if they did not get it, as if their rights had been violated.

When the meal was over and the men on the washing-up rota had been identified and corralled and set to their task, James with a twitch of his head beckoned Ralph into his office. They closed the door and with a single purpose, without a word, heaved a filing cabinet at the back of it; they knew from experience that it was the only way they could get a minute without interruption.

‘Is it about the posting?’ Ralph asked. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘No, no problem.’ James sat down at his desk, and found space for his elbows among the unpaid bills and begging letters and rubber bands. ‘Why do I have these rubber bands?’ he wondered. ‘What are they for? No, Ralphie, there is no problem with Dar-es-Salaam, it is just that something more urgent has come up, and I thought that you should have the chance to consider it.’

Here it comes, Ralph thought: my future on the Mile End Road.

James said, ‘Would you like to go to South Africa?’

On the outskirts of Swaffham today there is a goodly selection of dinky bungalows. They have wrought-iron gates and birdbaths, trellises, hanging baskets, shutters and dwarf walls. They have raw brickwork and shining windows, and scarlet floribundas in well-weeded beds. Their carriage lamps are the light of the twentieth century. In the market-place Ralph hears the broad drawling accent in which his grandfather spoke moderated to the foul contemporary tones of middle England.

These bungalow dwellers repopulated the villages of Breckland, which were empty when Ralph went to Africa. Between settlements, there are still tracts of heather and furze, and black pine plantations: barren, monotonous, funereal, like the contents of an East European nightmare. But the bowed, arthritic pines that line the roads creep to the edges of the small towns, intruding themselves among the DIY merchants and filling stations and furniture warehouses; they gather round the new housing estates, like witches at a christening.

It is only in the land marked off by the military’s fences that the old country can be seen. ‘Danger areas,’ they are called on the map. It is said the army builds models there, of life-sized Belfast streets, and that snipers and marksmen creep behind empty windows and false walls. From the roads you can see Nissen huts, like slugs in formation. Signs read ‘No Entry without Permit – Ministry of Defence Property’. Vegetation creeps like serpents around their metal poles. The wind topples them.

To the east, where Ralph and his children now live at the county’s heart, the great wheat fields roll on to the horizon, denatured, over-fertile, factory fields. A farm that employed eighty-five men now employs six; the descendants of the other seventy-nine have delivered themselves from rural squalor, from midden and rotting thatch, and live in the bungalows, or in redbrick council houses with long gardens. In spring, primroses struggle in the verges. In June, there are dog-roses in such hedgerows as remain.

Ralph dreams; again, he is three years old. Somewhere behind him, unseen, his father walks, and Uncle James. He curls down inside his grandfather’s coat.

They are going to the church. His grandfather will show him the angels in the roof, and the Pedlar of Swaffham carved on a stall end, and the pedlar’s dog with its round ears and big chain.

The Pedlar of Swaffham: John Chapman was his name. He dreamt one night that if he went to London, and stood on London Bridge, he would meet a man who would tell him how to make his fortune.

The day after this dream, Chapman put his pack on his back and with his dog set off to London. On London Bridge he stood about, until a shopkeeper asked him what he thought he was doing. ‘I’m here because of a dream,’ the pedlar said.

‘Dream?’ said the shopkeeper. ‘If I took any notice of dreams, I would be in some country place called Swaffham, in the garden of some yokel called Chapman, digging under his damn-fool pear tree.’ With a sneer, the fellow retreated to his merchandise.

John Chapman and his dog returned to Swaffham and dug under the pear tree. There they found a pot of gold. Around the pot ran an inscription. It said, ‘Under this pot is another, twice as good.’ The pedlar began digging again, and found a second crock: and now his fortune was made.

John Chapman gave candlesticks to the church, and rebuilt the north aisle when it fell down, and gave £120 to the steeple fund. His wife Cateryne and his dog were carved on the stalls, the wife with her rosary and the dog with his chain. John Chapman became a churchwarden, and wore an ermine gown.

But Ralph’s dreams? He has shelved them: packed away his specimens and consigned his maps and monographs to a space under the eaves of his father’s house in Norwich. He has consented to another kind of life from the life he had planned for himself. It happens to people at Ralph’s age, at twenty-five, you realize you are no longer the person you were, and will never become the person you meant to be. But he thinks, after all, there is a living to be made; there is a row to be hoed, and at least I am not a clergyman. He is serving God – a bit – and Mammon – a bit; his father’s friends say he has not committed himself, not wholly, and he knows he has very little money in the bank. He comforts himself that he understands something of the nature of life, of the nature of hidden things: at least, he has classifications for what lies beneath the surface, he has categories and terms.

From a jelly speck to man the line improves, edging nearer all the time to the summit of God’s design. As the species has evolved, the child in the womb grows, grows through its gills and its fur and becomes human. So society creeps forward, from savagery to benevolence: from cold and hunger and murder, to four walls and hearth stones and arts and parliaments and cures for diseases. At twenty-five Ralph believes this; he believes too in the complex perfectibility of the human heart.

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