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. Thats their final argument.
Ralph said, It isnt God whos diminished by Darwins theory, its man. Man isnt any more lord of the universe. Hes 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 dont 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 wouldnt 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 Kings 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 Matthews 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 Ralphs 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 mothers 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 didnt 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 lifes work.
I dont want the business, he told his father. I want my own life. I dont want anything to do with all that.
Very well, Matthew said equably. Ill sell when the time is right. He frowned then, as if he might be misunderstood. Therell be money for you, Ralph. And therell be money for your children. Ill put it in trust, Ill arrange it all. Youll not be poor.
This is premature, Ralph said.
Oh, youll be married and have children soon enough, the years go byyou 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 didnt you stick by your principles, why didnt you stick out for the life you had planned?
He wouldnt 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 didnt 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.
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 friends sisters 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 couldnt 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 Walstans Hostel. Ralph went there most weekends. He slept on a folding bed in the directors 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 weeks 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 launderers 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 hasnt 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. Annas 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 didnt know each other at all. But perhaps when you are so young, you dont 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 Annas 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 nowwhat happened to the dinosaurs, Ralph?
Their habitat altered, he said. A change of climate. She smiled crookedly. He saw that she hadnt expected an answer. The trouble with our parents, she said, is that their habitat doesnt change. It hardly varies from one end of the county to the next. Give them a pew, and theyre right at home.
Emma had got her wish. She was at medical school; and home now for Ralphs 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 thats 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 dont 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 doesnt it have meaning? he asked.
Emma reserved judgement.
That night his father took him aside. I want to talk about the arrangements, he said.
Its all in hand. All done. You dont have to concern yourself.
I dont mean arrangements for the wedding. Why should I concern myself with the womens 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 others 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 its 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 Walstans 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 Walstans 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.