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.
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 therell be just the two of us and Becky, well be rattling around. But of course, its not often that were 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 wasnt 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.
Im not sure yet what I should do after my finals. Theres still more than a term to go and I have various ideas, but I keep changing my mind. It isnt 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 Ive 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 houses 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 gentlemens 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, voluptuarys 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 youd have asked for gin well, I dont know what!
Julian reached for the teapot. Nobody would have gin, would they, at a funeral?
No, it would be unseemly, Anna said. Mothers ruin, she thought. The abortionists drink. A mistresss 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 wouldnt have expected her to get a new one.
Oh, I dont 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 Greshams School, blue-kneed boys were playing hockey. The small towns 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 dont 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 couldnt 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 couldnt swallow it. Felix took a brown paper bag out of his pocket, and said, Look, Emma, Ive got that wool that Ginnys been wanting for her blasted tapestry, the shops 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 its 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 firms 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 Id like a drink. Ive 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, dont 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, dont you?
Yes, Ralph said. He stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair came down with a clunk. But thats going right back thats going back to the fifties, before she was qualified, when she was in London and shed come up for the odd weekend. That was before we went abroad. And then he married Ginny. Oh God, he said. You mean its been going on for years.
I do. Years and years and years.
Would it befor instancewhen we came back from Africa?
Anna nodded. Oh, yes. Its so many years, you see, that people no longer bother to talk about it.
And you knew. Why didnt I know?
Its hard to imagine. Perhaps because you dont 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 dont think about them in quite the right way. Perhaps theres a gap in the way that you think about them.
Something missing, Ralph said. Well, there must be, mustnt there? If thats the case Ill have to sit down and talk to myself and try to examine it, whatever it is, this lack, wont I? Otherwise its obvious Im not fit to be at large. He shook his head. Ill tell you what puzzles me, though. Theres Emma living in her cottage right on the main street in Foulsham, and theres Felix over at Blakeney, and since we know innumerable people in between
Yes, we know people. But its as I say, they dont talk about it any more.
But why didnt somebody tell me?
Why should they? How would they have broached the topic?
Why didnt you tell me?
What would you have done with the information?
Ralph was still shaking his head. He couldnt take this in that his discovery, so exciting to him, was stale and soporific to everyone else. What I cant understand is how in a place like this they could conduct what must be so blatantly obvious I mean, the comings and goings, she cant 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 dont suppose its like that, is it? I suppose they go to teashops quite a lot. I suppose its 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.
Its 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 wouldnt interest them, would it?
What does Kit think?
You know she always admires her aunt.
I hope her life wont be like that, Ralph said. My God, I hope it wont. I dont 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 dont mind if she isnt 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 didnt you think shed have wanted to be there? As shes so friendly with Daniel Palmer these days.
Felixs 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. Shes got her exams in a matter of weeks, you know.
Yes, I do know. You dont 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.