“Good God, I was nothing like Robin,” Ralph would say. “My father thought cricket was High Church. Do you think he’ll ever do any work when he goes away? Suppose he became a heart surgeon, and he had to do a transplant, and there was a Test Match on?”
But Emma would say, speaking from experience, “Robin will make a good doctor. Only half his mind will be on his work. That will limit the damage he can do.”
And Rebecca? She rode off on her bike, on the first day of term, to her school two or three miles away; a flouncy, sulky, pretty little girl, who had reached the stage when her family embarrassed her. Soon her embarrassment was to be compounded.
On the Monday morning, the week after term began, Julian came down to the kitchen with his car keys in his hand. “I’ll run you,” he said to her. “Put your bike in the shed.”
Rebecca dropped her spoon into her cornflakes, spattering milk on the table. “Suddenly so kind,” she said. “But how will I get home, sir?”
“I’ll collect you.”
“In your so-called car?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t want you to.”
“Beks, life’s not just a matter of what you want.”
Rebecca sat up and looked pert. “Yours seems to be.”
Julian was not drawn. “Hurry up now, finish your breakfast,” he said. “Don’t argue.”
“What will my friends say when they see me turn up in that thing?” She popped her eyes and pointed, to show what her friends would do. “They’ll take the piss all week. I’ll be a social outcast, a—what is it? Not a parishioner—you know what I mean.”
“A pariah,” Julian said. “Come on now, girl.”
Rebecca saw that he was serious; about what, she didn’t know. She turned to her mother, wailing. “Mum, I don’t have to go with him, do I?”
Anna was loading towels from a basket into her temperamental and aged twin-tub washing machine. “Let Julian take you. It’s kind of him. It’s a nasty morning, very cold.”
Sulking, Rebecca zipped herself into her anorak and picked up her lunchbox and followed him out. “When we get there you can stop round the corner, out of sight …” she was saying, as the back door slammed behind them.
When Julian got back, Ralph was on the phone to London, defusing the latest crisis at the hostel. The office door was ajar, and Julian could hear snatches of the conversation. “What occurs to me,” Ralph was saying, “is that she won’t be able to buy much with our petty cash, with the street price what it is, so what will she do to get the rest of the money?” An anxious babbling came back down the line. In the kitchen the washing machine rocked and danced over the flagstones, in a creaking thumping gavotte.
Anna was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up from the Eastern Daily Press. “What was all that, Julian?”
Julian began to cut himself a slice of bread to make toast. “It’s been on my mind,” he said abruptly. “That little girl in Devon, Genette Tate—do you remember, it was in the papers?”
“The child who disappeared?”
“They found her bike in a lane. She was thirteen. Some man took her away. They think she’s dead.”
Ralph came in. “Going to be one of those days,” he said. “That child, Melanie—do you remember I mentioned her? Swallows every banned substance she can lay her hands on, ran away from her foster parents, absconded from the children’s home?”
“What’s new?” Anna said tiredly. “Don’t they all do that?”
“Just got her off a shoplifting charge last week. Now she’s run away and taken our petty cash. Not that she’ll get far on it. So I was thinking … could we have her here for part of the summer?”
“That’s not really a question, is it?” Anna said. “It’s a command.”
“She really needs, you see, to be part of a normal family for a while.”
“And this is normal?” She rested her forehead on her hand, smiling. “Yes, Ralph, of course we can have her, we must have her, poor little thing.”
“I heard what you were saying just now,” Ralph said to Julian. He put his hand on his son’s head, lightly. “What’s sparked this off?”
“I told you. Well, I told Mum. This little girl in the West Country. I keep thinking about it.”
“But it was Devon. It’s miles away.”
“Use your imagination,” Julian said. “Crimes breed other crimes. People copy them.”
“Rebecca rides to school in a crowd. And back in a crowd. You ought to get behind them in a car, then you’d see.”
“Yes, but when she turns off the main road, she’s on her own for half a mile, isn’t she? It’s not fair, it’s not safe.” He moved his head irritably, pulling away from his father. “So I’ve made up my mind. If either of you will drive her, odd days, that’s okay. Otherwise I will. She’s my sister. I’m not prepared to take a chance.”
Anna looked up. “And will you be her escort for life, Julian? Thirteen-year-olds are at risk, but then so are eighteen-year-olds. So are forty-year-olds. You hear of battered grannies, don’t you?
“Anna,” Ralph said, “there’s no reason to be sarcastic. It’s just, the trouble is, Julian, if everyone thought like you no one would ever let their children out of the house.”
“Okay,” Julian said. “So you think it’s unreasonable? Look, let me tell you something. Ten years ago a boy vanished near Fakenham, he was eleven, he went up the road to see his friend and he never came back. The same year a girl was riding her bike along a track near Cromer—what do you think, is that close enough to home? April, she was called, and she was Rebecca’s age exactly. She set off to go to her sister’s house at Roughton. A man driving a tractor saw her, four hundred yards from her house, six minutes past two in the afternoon. At a quarter past two, three men who were mapping for the Ordnance Survey saw her bike in a field. There was no trace of her. She was six hundred yards from home. Nobody’s seen her since.”
His face set, he waited for their protests to begin. But his father only said, barely audible, his eyes on the table: “You’ve been studying these cases. Why is that?”
“I can’t explain any more than I have.”
“I can’t say you’re wrong. It is a dangerous world, of course.”
“There’ll be an argument every morning,” Anna said. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say to you, Julian.”
“I’m going over to Sandra’s now.” He glanced back from the doorway. Anna was gathering plates, noisily.
“Help me, please, Ralph.” Her tone was wounded, ragged. Ralph scraped his chair back. He began to clear the table slowly, with deliberation, his eyes on a plate, then a cup: anywhere, but not on Anna’s face.
Two days later Ralph went back to see Mrs. Glasse. His frame of mind was exhausted, distressed; he found it difficult to be in the same room with Anna.
Rebecca moaned and squalled; her social life was being ruined, she said. Julian explained patiently that he would drive her wherever she wanted to go; he would pick up her friends too, and see them all safe home. “I don’t want you on my back,” she snapped; Anna watched her without speaking, her face set and tense. Rain slashed against the windows; the air was thin, green, shivering toward summer. I must give the family a breathing space: that was the excuse Ralph made to himself.
And besides, he had been thinking of Amy Glasse. She was continually on his mind; she had established a hold over it, he felt, and he needed to see her again to break the hold, reduce her to an ordinary woman, naive, limited, down-at-heel. He remembered her in the doorway of the farmhouse, those white long-fingered hands flying up to drag back her hair. He thought of the dull gleam of her red-gold wedding ring, and of the curve of her mouth.
It was a finer day than on his last visit: a verdant dampness, a fresh breeze, the promise of a fine afternoon. The holiday caravans were beginning to take to the roads, and behind their flowered curtains, caught back coyly, you could catch glimpses of the owners and their miniaturized liv
es. Soon the coast road would be nose to tail with cars, each one with its freight of fractious children bawling, elbowing each other, complaining of hunger and boredom and heat.
Again, Mrs. Glasse was waiting for him in the doorway. “I heard the car,” she explained.
“Yes, it does have a distinctive note.”
He stood looking up at the sky. “Good day to be alive.”
“Yes. When you consider the alternative.”
“I was passing,” he said. “I thought, it’s lunchtime. I wondered if I could take you out, you and Sandra.”
“Sandra’s not here. She’s gone cleaning out some holiday flats in Wells, getting them ready for the visitors starting.”
“Well then—just you?”
She dropped back from the doorway. “Come in.” She glanced2 down at her jeans. “I’d better have a word with my fairy godmother, hadn’t I?”
“You don’t need to dress up—I thought, just a pub lunch or something?”
“Give me five minutes.”
When she came back she was wearing a different pair of jeans, faded but clean and pressed, and a white shirt open at the neck. She had let down her hair and brushed it out; it fell over her shoulders to the small of her back. The sunlight made it liquid. It was the color of the cream sherry that his father’s friends, with guilty abandon, had sipped each Christmas: “Just half a glass for me, Mr. Eldred.” He picked up a strand of it, ran it through his fingers; she stood passive, like a kindly animal. “It reminds me of something,” he said.
“Something good?”
“Something sad.”
They drove along the coast. Past Brancaster the sea encroached on their view, its grey line fattening. They stopped at a small hotel he knew, whose windows looked out over the reedbeds and marshes. They were the first lunchers. A girl brought them a menu. “Drink?” she asked.
“I’ll have whiskey,” Mrs. Glasse decided. Two tumblers were fetched, set side by side by considerate fingers. A small wood fire burned in a stone hearth, sighing with its own life; its heart palely burning, but the logs at its margins charred from ash gray to white, from wood to dust. Parrot tulips stood on a dresser; their stems drooped, and the vivid flowerheads seemed to swarm away from the vase, hurtling into the air.
“They have lobster today,” Ralph said. “Would you like that?”
“Thank you, but I couldn’t touch it,” Mrs. Glasse said. “I have an ingrained dislike of animals with shells. My husband was a crab fisherman, he worked out of Sheringham. Well, the life must have palled. I haven’t seen him for sixteen years.”
“Sandra would have been—how old, two?”
She nodded. “But he wasn’t Sandra’s father.” She looked up. “Are you shocked?”
“Oh, God, Amy—it would take a lot more than that to shock me. I don’t lead a sheltered life, you know.”
“When Sandra told me about you at first I thought you did. I said to her, what does Julian’s father do for a living? She said, ’He goes about doing good.’ I thought you were a clergyman.”
“I would have been, I suppose, if things had been a bit different. It would have pleased my family. But I wasn’t concerned to please them, when I was a boy.”
“But you were a missionary, weren’t you? It just shows how ignorant I am—until Julian explained to me I thought all missionaries were clergymen.”
“Oh no, you get doctors, teachers—just people who are generally useful. We didn’t go around converting people.”
“They’d been converted already, I suppose.”
“Yes, largely. But we weren’t like missionaries in cartoons. We didn’t have a portable organ, and shout ’Praise the Lord!’ “
“I’m glad not to have to picture it.” Her smile faded. “But Julian told me, you know—about you being put in prison.”
Ralph nodded. “It was nothing,” he said: writing off the second worst thing that had ever happened to him.
“Julian’s very proud of you.”
“Is he? We never talk about it.”
“No. He said you don’t like to.”
“All that part of our lives, we prefer to forget it, Anna and me. It’s—we’ve closed the door on it.”
“Did they treat you very badly, when you were in prison?”
“No. I told you, it was nothing. If it had been very bad we would have come home after we were released, but we didn’t, you see, we went north, we went up to Bechuanaland. We stayed on.”
“It’s a bit of a mystery. To Julian. He wonders why you won’t talk about it. He builds reasons, in his head.”
“Kit went through a phase, you know how children do—she wanted to make us into heroes. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t go on marches, join Anti-Apartheid, sit down in the road in front of the South African Embassy.”
“And why don’t you?”
“Because it’s more complicated than they think, witless people parading around with their banners. I get sick of them using South Africa to make themselves feel good. Being so bloody moral about a country they’ve never seen, about the lives of people of whom they know nothing. Especially when there is so little morality in their own lives.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Ralph shook his head. “Sorry, I get—well, I lose my patience. I’m sure it is a mystery, to the children.”
“You’ve not been open with them, have you?”
“No.” He picked up his glass and drank off his whiskey and asked for another.
They ate their ham and chicken and baked potatoes, and he turned the conversation, from past to the present, parents to children. He was curious about her life but he could not expect her to reveal anything, when he had been so obstinately unrevealing himself. They ordered some chocolate mousse and some coffee and another whiskey, and then she said, “Better get on with the day, I suppose.”
He drove her home. As he prepared to turn down the incline to the house a police car pushed its snout into the road. Its two occupants, carefully expressionless, turned to look at Mrs. Glasse. One of them spoke to the other. Ralph waited for them to pull out. After a moment they did so, and drove away.
“It’s a good thing I don’t have a gun,” Amy said, “or I’d probably have shot that pair by now. They’re always grubbing about round here. They made sure they took a good look at you.”
“Is it because you had that trouble with your tax disc?”
She looked sideways at him. “Ralph, you gave me the money. Thank you.”
“No, I—no, forget it, I wasn’t trying to remind you or anything.”
“What it is, it’s because we do the markets, me and Sandra. They think we’re receiving. Stolen goods, I mean.”
“And are you?”
“Would I tell you if I were?”
“I would like to know.”
“For your son’s sake,” Amy said, finishing his thought for him. “Well, I can understand that. But you can put your mind at rest. Do you think I’m stupid? I know they watch me. Do you think I want to see Sandra dragged in front of a court?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“I couldn’t go to jail. Not like you. Anna must be a very brave woman, it seems to me. I’d bash my head against the bars until they let me out or it killed me.”
“If they’re harassing you, you must tell me. I can make a complaint.”
“And where would you be when the complaint came home to roost?” She smiled, to take the offence out of the words. “Come in. I’ll make us another cup of coffee.”
“Better not. I ought to get on.”
If she’d said, do come, do, it will only take five minutes, he would have agreed. He wanted to be persuaded. But she said, “Okay, I know you must be busy.” She opened the car door. “I did like that, it was a treat for me, a change. Nobody ever takes me out.” She leaned back into the car, kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Ralph.”
He said nothing. Drove away.
Three weeks passed, in which he sometimes returned.
On each occasion, he made sure his son was somewhere else.
Ten o’clock, a blustery morning, Daniel Palmer at the back door: he did not like to turn up uninvited, but this morning he had prepared an excuse. “Hello, Kit. So you’re home for good.”
“I’m home for the summer,” she said.
“How did the finals go?”
She shrugged. He followed her into the kitchen. “Me and Jule have just put the kettle on,” Kit said; not ungraciously, but so that Daniel would realize that no special effort was to be made on his behalf.
“How are you, Julian?” Julian nodded. Daniel began to take off his new acquisition, his riding mac; it was a complex coat, with many flaps and buckles, and pockets in unlikely places. “Been over to Wood Dalling to look at that barn,” he said, “you know the one? For a conversion. Get four beds out of it.”
“If you must,” Julian said.
Kit raised her eyebrows at him.
Julian said, “They put in windows where no windows should be, and doors where no doors should be.”
“What do you expect people to do?” Kit said. “Go in and out of the big doors, as if they were cart horses? And live in the dark?”
“Of course, you would side with your boyfriend,” Julian said.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Look,” Daniel said easily, “I take your point, but the alternative to conversion is to let the barn fall down.”
“At least that would be honest.”