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 doctors 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 Ginnys 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. Im 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. Youre a doctor.
But not his doctor.
He wasnt ill. He never had a days 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 Felixs 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?
Theres plenty of insurance, Ginny said. And the house. Ill move of course. But not just yet.
Dont do anything in a hurry, Emma said. She had meant her question in a broad sense, not as an inquiry into Ginnys 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 mustnt 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 thisStill, better than rain. Claires staying on over the weekend. Ginny raised her hand, and twitched at her collar again. Emma, Id like to see you. Like you to come to the houseMrs Gleave is making vol-au-vents Her voice tailed off entirely.
Emmas 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, Ginnyif 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 husbands under-occupation that had freed him for his long years of infidelity; but Ralphs 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 Ralphs wife was worn to a shadow slaving for his concerns.
Ralphs 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 wifes 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, Its not right, you know. Its 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. Thats what galls me. Its inhuman. And now Ginny gets all the sympathy, all the attention. Im not saying she doesnt 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. Im sure Felix has left her some fine diamonds, and a château for her old age.
A contractors 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 Ralphs 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. Ill tell you, he said. Ill tell you whats the worst of it. Emmas got nothing. Nothing. Shes given twenty years to Felix and now shes on her own.
Emmas given something, Anna said. I think to say that shes given twenty years is being melodramatic.
Why is it, Ralph said, that women manage to be so cool in these situations? Whats all this keeping up a good front? Why do they think they have to do it? I heard Ginny talking about insurance policies, for Gods sake.
I only mean, that Emmas life has suited her. She had what she wanted a part-time man. Felix didnt use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If shed chosen to. She didnt have to wait on Felix.
I only mean, that Emmas life has suited her. She had what she wanted a part-time man. Felix didnt use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If shed chosen to. She didnt 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 dont mean any one person, not this particular man or that particular manI 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 cant 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, wiseand lonely, hed 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 hookSeems 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? Im late.
As she unravelled her seat-belt, Ralph turned to look at her. Those people at the funeral, all those friends of Felixs, 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 oclock. 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 dont 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 brides 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 postmans legs were spared, if not the familys.
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; Julians 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 Palmers firm, to talk about putting the house on the market. You cant mean it, Felix had said. Leave, Anna? After all these years? I hope and trust you wouldnt be going far?
Felix, Anna had said, do you recall that youre an estate agent? Arent 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 thatIf youre sure
Im 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, lets just saya wealth of versatile extra accommodationattics, so forthan abundance of storage space. Leave it at that, shall we? Buyers dont 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 times 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 its 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. Thats the main thing.
Yes. And for all their presence improved it, we might as well have stabled horses. Well, Felix whats the verdict?
Thered 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 dont 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.