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 uncles homilies, the piano practice of his female cousins. His mother dusted the fossils twice a week, but didnt understand what they were. Its Ralphs 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 thats old. Emma now, Emma shes 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 withwell, Christmas for example. Every December it puts people into a panic, as if it had come up on them without warning. Its 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, youd have to go round the world forty-six times. Suppose you want to go back to the last Ice Age. Thats very recent, as we think of it. It would be like a cross-channel trip. London to Paris.
I wouldnt mind a trip to Paris, Emma said. Do you think its any good me asking?
Then, to reach the time of the dinosaurs, youd 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 Ralphs 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 childs 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 Emmas 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 dont 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, youve 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 doesnt 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 arent contradictory. Father, most people got all this over with by the turn of the century. Nobody thinks what you think any more. Nobody thinks theres God on one side and Darwin on the other.
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 arent contradictory. Father, most people got all this over with by the turn of the century. Nobody thinks what you think any more. Nobody thinks theres 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? Whats 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. Its an old debate, its 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 couldnt 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. Its no good waving your arms at me and saying, look at Gods creation. You dont have to force it down my throat, the miracles of nature, the design of the universe I know about those, more, Id 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 Im 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 dont know, Ralph said quietly. We used to go to sermons that said the truth was what God revealed, that you dont find the truth by looking for it. At least, thats what I think they were saying. Well not to put too fine a point on it I cant wait around all my life. If Ive been given the faculty of reasoning, I may as well use it to dig out what truth I can.
Youll 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 lifes work, Ill not be able to hold my head up before our friends. Theyll 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, thats all. I didnt 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.
Youve closed your mind, she said.
Astonishment wrenched him out of his misery. She left him incoherent. Me? Ive closed my mind?
You spoke to your father of reason, she said. Youll 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 fathers hard deriding stare and his mothers puckered mouth.
Why didnt he fetch in the schoolmaster who encouraged him? Why didnt he appeal to his headmaster, who knew him to be a bright, studious, serious boy? Why didnt 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 fathers 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 dont 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 didnt 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 deformitys extent. Why should he, when all his familys 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 youre quite mistaken if you think he would set himself up against his own brother.