He followed her to the kitchen. It was a big room, light, square, tiled underfoot. Two hard chairs stood by an old-fashioned range, in front of which some clothes were drying. There was a smell of burning wood and wet wool. Mrs. Glasse hoisted the clothes away, and dragged up a third chair, manipulating it with an agile foot in a fisherman’s sock. “Where d’you find him, Sandra?”
Expecting no answer, she gave him a mug of tea, the sugar already stirred into it. Julian could not think of anything to say. Mrs. Glasse did not make small talk, or ask again where her daughter had been. He sat facing the back of the house, watching the light fade. Through an arched doorway, down steps, he caught a glimpse of a small dairy, with its deep stone shelves and recessed windows. Feeling the draft, Mrs. Glasse leaped up and closed the door. He snapped his gaze away. He had wanted to step into the dairy, and run a hand over the icy, ecclesiastical curves of the walls.
As he left the house and drove away, he noticed a glasshouse, its panes shattered; a gate, off its hinges. He felt like stopping the car, going back, offering his services. But then he thought, you can’t ask people to rely on you, if you’re going away at the end of the summer. Between now and October I couldn’t make much of an impression on that place. It would only break my heart.
After this, Julian did not see Sandra for some weeks. But in June, driving back from a friend’s house in Hunstanton on a bright windy day, he saw by the roadside two women selling vegetables from a trestle table. He knew them at once, with their white faces and long flapping scarves. He pulled over and climbed out of the car. “Hello there, Julian,” Mrs. Glasse said. She had a bag of money slung about her waist, like a market trader. Sandra pulled her woolen hat further over her brows, and smiled shyly at him.
“We’ll have strawberries shortly,” Mrs. Glasse said. “That fetches ’em.”
“Is there a lot of trade?”
“Passing trade,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Golfers on their way home, full of golf courses this place is.” The wind ripped the words out of her mouth. “In high season we get the self-caterings. I do vegetables, peeled and quartered, slice the carrots, whatever, put them in polythene bags, if they don’t sell we have to eat them. I do samphire, not that the self-caterings know what that is. We make bread when we’ve got the oven going, when we’re in the mood. I’m learning from a book to make bread into patterns. I can do plaited loaves, wheatsheafs, prehistoric monsters, frogs, and armadillos. The armadillos get a lot of admiration—but all you do is make a monster, and squash it, and bake the top in points.”
“It must be hard work,” Julian said.
“Labor-intensive,” Sandra said. “Of me.”
“We get bird-watchers, I make them sandwiches. We get that lot going to Brancaster and Burnham Thorpe, studying the haunts of Lord Nelson.”
“Early haunts,” Sandra said. “Birthplace.”
“We do goats’ milk, duck eggs. Sandra pushes it all up in the wheelbarrow. This table’s a bugger, though. We have to carry it up between us.”
“Up the foremost hill,” Sandra said. “We tried putting it on the barrow but it barged our legs.”
“Couldn’t you leave it up here?” Julian said. He looked around. “By the wall?”
“Self-caterings steal it,” Mrs. Glasse said. She clapped her hands together, to warm them, hopped from foot to foot. “Summer coming on,” she observed.
“I’m sure I could fix up something,” Julian said. “I could drive a post in behind that wall, nobody would see it, I could chain the table to it. Wrap a chain around the legs and get a padlock.”
“We never thought of that, did we?” Sandra said to her mother. “Well, we did actually, but we’re busy, we didn’t get round to it yet. It’d have to be weather-proofed, though. We couldn’t have our table rotting.”
“Perhaps Julian could build it a house,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Seems cruel to leave it out in the open air, chained up like something dangerous.”
The two women exchanged a glance. They laughed; comfortably enough. Julian felt almost comforted.
The following day, Julian went back to the Glasses’ farm. The women were very busy; Mrs. Glasse sitting by the stove, knitting in an effortful fury, and Sandra, after she had let him in, returning to her task of stuffing dozens of sisal doormats into black plastic bin-liners.
“For the market at Hunstanton,” Mrs. Glasse said. “We’re going tomorrow, we have a stall. Doormats do well, because people live amid such a quantity of mud. And basketwork of all types.”
“Where do you get the doormats?” Julian asked.
“I buy them cheap from a fool.”
“Baskets we make ourselves,” Sandra said. “She taught me. We do it in the winter when the weather keeps us in.”
“How do you get to Hunstanton?”
Mrs. Glasse rolled her eyes. “He do ask questions,” she said.
“Do you like her verb?” Sandra asked. “She does it for the tourists.”
“I only thought, with all your stuff—”
“We have a vehicle,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Of sorts. We try not to take it out more than once a week because of the summonses.”
“She got done for no tax,” Sandra said.
“We have to hide the bloody thing,” Mrs. Glasse said. “The police come down from time to time, sniffing, seeing what they can do us for. We used to have a dog, Billy, they didn’t care for him, weren’t so keen then. But he died.”
“You should get another dog,” Julian said, “if that’s what keeps you safe. I’m sure I could get you a dog.”
“No,” Mrs. Glasse said. He was sitting facing her, and he saw that her large light eyes filled with tears. She was pretty, he thought, might have been pretty, must have been. As if angry with herself, she gave the weighty knitting a push and watched it slither off her lap. “Billy wanted meat,” she said. “I used to feel sorry for him, you can’t expect a dog to get by on carrot and turnip.” She stood up. “That’s enough doormats,” she said. “We’ll bag up the baskets later on, we’ll just have a sit now and a cup of tea.”
Julian said, “I’ll come with you when you do the market. Do you have to take the table? I’ll help you load and unload.”
“You needn’t,” Sandra said. “We’ve always managed.”
“I can do anything you want,” Julian said. “I can patch up the roof if you’ve got a ladder, you’ve got some tiles off. I can do carpentry. I could put you on some new wallpaper if you want. I could lift your potatoes for you.”
Mrs. Glasse said, “Sit down, boy. There’s no need to do anything.”
Julian sat down and drank his tea. He could never remember a time when he had been commanded to do nothing—when it had been enjoined on him.
That summer, it seemed to Ralph, Sandra became a fixture in his house. She was to be found in the kitchen, occupying the rocking chair, her hands folded together, her legs tucked beneath the chair, her ankles crossed. He liked to talk to her if he found her sitting there. She had her wits about her, he told Anna, despite her quaint way of talking; she had a native clarity of mind which the educative process had not succeeded in clouding. School had been an interruption to Sandras life. She had left as soon as she could. “I didn’t see the point of it,” she told Ralph. “It was such a long way, it took hours getting there. It used to be dark by the time I got home.”
Sandra never turned up empty-handed. She brought perhaps a modest present of a lettuce, or some fresh bread; once, when they had not baked, a can of peaches from their store cupboard.
Anna was touched, then exasperated. “Sandra,” she said, “you don’t have to bring us presents. You’re welcome to come here and eat every day and stay as long as you like, nobody who comes here has ever had to pay for their keep.” No one else has ever offered, she thought.
Sometimes Sandra brought a cake; but they baked cakes only as a last resort, when they had nothing else to take to market. They only had to get their fingers amid the eggy stretch and cascading currants, t
o start cursing and swearing; they were fair set, Sandra said, to slap each other with their wooden spoons. Mrs. Glasse’s cakes had something sad and flat about them, a melancholy Fenlands quality. Sandra’s cakes rose, but in a violent, volcanic way: then cracked on top. How two cakes containing opposite faults could come out of an oven at the same (albeit unreliable) temperature was, Sandra said, one of the mysteries of East Anglia.
But despite their appearance, the cakes sold well enough. People like to buy the fruits of other people’s labor; they like to put the small coin into the very hand that has toiled. Julian thought that it was not the wares that drew the customers, but the women’s full, gray, mesmeric eyes.
That summer he spent market days at Hunstanton, behind the Glasses’ stall; flapping canvas divided him from neighboring stalls, from the shiny acrylic clothing, the check workshirts, the nylon leopard-skin car-seat covers and rubber mats, the cheap lace tablecloths, the bright plastic kitchen gadgets, the inflatable toys for the beach. He felt himself grow an inch taller, his hair tousled, his face sunburned, a canvas bag of change thrown across his body in ammunition-belt style. As summer ended the sea turned to the color of mud, and soon came the wind that cut through the clothes, cut to the bone, propelling the shoppers inland toward the teashops and the amusement arcades.
Ralph said to him: “Look, I know you’re old enough to make up your own mind, but don’t get too involved, will you? Remember you’re off to university in October. You’ve worked hard for it, I don’t want you to be upset by anything, to have any, you know, regrets, or things pulling you back.”
Julian went over to the Glasses’ farm most days. He oversaw the vegetable plots, sawed logs, and mended fences. He thought about reglazing the greenhouse, but did not get around to it before it was autumn, and he had to go away.
Ralph worried. Possibly Anna worried, too; but he did not ask her to talk about it. He remembered Julian as a little boy at his first school, unable to tie his shoelaces or learn his times tables or do up his tie. Tears had been shed, about the tie. Julian did not mind that his mum or dad put it on for him, every morning; but there would be PE lessons, and he would have to take it off. Then he would not be able to put it back, he sobbed. And this was the problem: he would have to scramble it into some knot of his own devising, he could not manage the knot that society required; he would have to stretch and mangle it and treat it like a piece of string. Then, he wailed each morning, they would all know he was a spastic.
“You’re not a spastic,” Ralph said. “Is that what they say? It’s very naughty of them to call you that.” Ralph felt, when he placed the length of cloth around his child’s neck each day, that he was snaring him in a noose.
Then one tear-stained Wednesday afternoon, Kit had taken the situation in hand. She had re-formed the tangled mess which Julian had created, into its approved shape; then simply loosened it, eased it from beneath his collar, and lifted it over his head still knotted. She hung it on the end of his bed. “There,” she had said. “Now, in the morning, you see, just put it over your head.”
“Oh yes.” Julian’s face lit up. “Then all I have to do is—”
“Just pull the knot up,” Kit said. “Here you go.” She fastened his fingers around the short end of the tie. “Gentle, now—not too tight. That’s it. Lovely. Just you wait and see. They’ll all be copying you soon.”
Years later, Julian remembered Kit’s good idea with a pathetic gratitude. Even now when he was grown up, he said, no one had ever taught him anything so useful. Ralph wished he had thought of it.
He had not known how to help Julian; ordinary patience did not seem to be enough. He was slow to learn to read, slow to tell the time; when he tried to learn to write he seemed to be using a foreign alphabet. Even when he had mastered the letter shapes his progress was slow. He was always stopping to rub out what he had written and start again. His collection of erasers was something he prized. Robin sneaked to his mother that he had names for each one: Mouse and Cat and Mother Bear. Julian fell asleep over his reading books, exhausted by the effort of trying to comprehend them.
They took him for an eye test but his sight was perfect. Anna thought of him as a baby: his eyes always on their way from his mother’s face to somewhere else.
Julian had a long memory, longer than seemed possible. One day when he was six he said, where did the cat go, Emma?
“I haven’t got a cat,” Emma said.
“But you had, you had Freddie.”
He described the ancient tabby, vast and slow like a sofa on the move, its lop ear, its tail without a tip. Emma was astonished. Freddie had died long ago, before Julian could walk or talk. It was a prodigious feat of memory, truly extraordinary: Emma reported it to Anna and Ralph. Anna said, “He must have heard him described. I’m sure we’ve often talked about Freddie.”
Kit was listening. “Julian does have lots of memories,” she said. “And so do I. We can remember from before we were born.”
“Don’t be silly,” Anna said. “You know better. No one can do that.”
They plucked Julian out of the village school, saying that they had got him a place in a prep, weathering the skepticism of the headmistress. They kept him at home for a term, feeling guilty about it, and tried to teach him themselves. Mostly he played with bricks, building houses then knocking them down. But he started to look at books, just for the pictures. His fright diminished. Imperceptibly, very slowly and cautiously, he began to read.
The problems were not over; at least, his new teachers did not think so. Hard not to nag such a child, at home and at school. Julian was unpunctual, dreamy, sweetly polite but deeply uncaring. His conversation was intelligent but elliptical. He was seldom on time for anything; he did not seem to see the point of punctuality. Even when he reached his teens, he never wore a watch. “He’s a natural animal,” Kit said. “He goes by the sun.”
Julian was wary of surfaces, it seemed. When he drew a house he began with its contents. Pots and pans came first, objects in cupboards. Then beds and chairs; only then, walls and doors and windows. When he drew a tree he drew not just the trunk and leaves and branches but the roots, running deep under the soil, beyond the range of normal vision.
By the time he reached his teens Julian had adapted to the world, learned to fit in. Sporadically attentive, he passed just enough exams, with just the grades he needed; and passed them doggedly, until the prospect of university loomed—if that was what he wanted. Ralph tried to interest him in geology, thinking that the strenuous, outdoor aspect of it might appeal. But Julian associated the subject with the wrapped, labeled specimens which Ralph still kept in boxes in the attics. He seemed to have a peculiar horror of them: their broken traces, their dead-and-gone lives. Then Rebecca began to have her nightmares about the fossils. “You might get rid of them, give them to a museum,” Anna suggested. “You never look at them.”
True, he thought. I never do. He went up there one weekend, spent a bit of time unwrapping them, labeling them in his mind. There was the Devil’s toenail, fresh and horrible and impressive as ever, lying cold in his palm and smelling of the sea. Phylum: Mol-lusca. Class: Pelecypoda. Order: Pterioda. Family: Gryphacidae. Genus: Gryphaea. Species: arcuata. Old Nick’s remnant … he knew people, or his father had known people, who maintained that all fossils were planted in the rocks by Satan, to tempt scholars into scientific hypotheses, which led them from the knowledge of God. He put arcuata into his pocket and, downstairs, transferred it to the drawer of his desk. Why not keep it to hand? It was his trophy, taken in the battle for reason.
As soon as he arrived at his university, Julian wrote a long letter to Sandra Glasse. He received a picture postcard two weeks later, showing countryside views, clouds and church towers. He wrote again, asking her to visit him. She didn’t answer. He thought that probably she did not have the money for a train ticket; but if he sent the money, would she answer even then? Perhaps his letters were not arriving: perhaps the postman couldn’t be bothere
d to turn down the track.
He wrote to his father: would he consider driving over to. the farm to see if everything was all right? His father wrote back in surprise, to say that of course everything was all right; Sandra had been over a couple of times, turned up unexpectedly, hitched lifts, coast road to Fakenham, Fakenham to Bawdeswell, then walked to the house. He didn’t like her hitching lifts, in fact he was very upset, but she wouldn’t be told. Julian should write to her on that topic. He shouldn’t expect much by way of reply, she said she wasn’t used to writing letters.
Just before Christmas Julian wrote another letter, to his head of department. Then he packed his bags and took the train to Norwich; then hitched lifts and, changing his suitcase from hand to hand, walked the last few miles from the main road to the Red House. There he had stayed, ever since.
When he was not at the market, or working on the Glasses’ small-holding, he was underneath his new car; his old car that is, the one Emma had given him the money to buy. He coaxed it along; it got him to the coast and back. His new skills were undeniably useful; Anna’s car was now a barely coherent assemblage of rattles and squeaks, and the Citroen caused oily boys at garages to titter and roll their eyes and cast their rags to the ground.
Then there was the Glasses’ Morris Traveller to be rescued from its decrepitude and illegality. He told Ralph about the tax and insurance problem; Ralph immediately handed over some cash that had been earmarked for a new vacuum cleaner and some school clothes for Rebecca. Julian promised to mend the old Hoover; it had value as a technological curiosity, Ralph said, in a year or two they might be able to take it to London and flog it to the Science Museum. Rebecca did not really need new clothes—she would, on the whole, fit into her old ones. With school uniform, it is often heartening if you look a little different from the other girls.
Julian gave the money to Mrs. Glasse. No question of paying it back, he said, it wasn’t like that. “I just don’t want to think about you being pulled up,” he said, “or about the police coming round when I’m not here.”