Matthew Eldred, Ralph’s father, was born near the market town of Swaffham in the year 1890. His family were printers, lay preachers. His grandfather had printed pamphlets and tracts. His father had printed handbills and auction catalogs and stock lists, and the privately financed memoirs of clergymen and schoolmasters. Their homes, and the homes of their friends, were temples of right-thinking, of inky scholarship, Sabbatarian dullness; their religion was active, proselytizing, strenuous, and commonsensical. They saw no need to inquire into God’s nature; they approached Him through early rising, Bible study and earnest, futile attempts at humility. The Eldreds were as clever in charity as they were in business—casting their bread on the waters, and rubbing their hands in anticipation of the plump milky loaves that would come back to stack upon the shelves of their family and friends.
Matthew Eldred’s brother James, who was four years his junior, was ordained in the Church of England just after the end of the Great War. He left almost at once for the African missions, and so he missed Matthew’s wedding; Matthew married a gray-eyed girl called Dorcas Carey, whose father was a local wood merchant, and whose connections outside the county—her elder sister had married a Yorkshireman—had been examined and then forgiven.
James reappeared a decade later—thinner, cheerful, somewhat jaundiced—for the baptism of his brother’s first child, Ralph. Dorcas wore a look of bewilderment; after a decade, she had got something right. Another baby, a daughter, followed two years later. James was still, as he termed it, on furlough, but he was not idle; he was working in the East End of London in a home for derelicts and drunks. When Ralph was four years old, Africa opened and swallowed Uncle James again. Only letters came, on tissue-thin sheets of paper, and photographs of naked native children and round thatched huts, of unnamed clergymen and lady assistants with large teeth and white sun-hats: of catechumens in white gloves and white frocks.
Ralph has these photographs still. He keeps them in brown envelopes, their subjects named on the back (when Uncle James’s memory has obliged) in Ralph’s own large, energetic handwriting. And dated? Sometimes. Uncle James peers at some fading spinster, weathered by the African sun; at some wriggling black child clothed only in a string of beads. “How would I know? 1930?” Ralph makes the record on the back of each one; makes it in soft pencil, in case Uncle James should reconsider. He has respect for dates; he cares for the past. He files the envelopes in his bureau drawers. One day, he thinks, he might write the history of his family. But then his mind shies away, thinking of what would have to be omitted.
His father and mother stand in pewter frames on his bureau, watching him as he works. Matthew Eldred has grown stout; his watch chain stretches across his belly. Self-conscious before the photographer, he fingers his lapel. In middle age, Dorcas has the face of a Voortrekker or an American plainswoman: a transparent face, that waits for God to do his worst.
When Ralph was eight years old and his sister Emma was six, Matthew moved his family and his business from Swaffham to Norwich. He began by printing ration books, and ended by growing rich.
The war came. “Do you wish,” Emma asked Ralph, “that you were big enough to fight?” Emma doubled up her fist and pounded at the drawing room sofa, till her fist bounced back at her and dust flew up, and her mother came from the kitchen and slapped her.
A year or so later, they heard talk behind closed doors. “Yarmouth Grammar School moved to the Midlands … Lowestoft evacuated yesterday …” They had visited the seaside—a pointless excursion, the children thought, because the beaches were mined— and seen the first wave of London evacuees, decanted from pleasure steamers, fetching up in coastal villages with their gas masks. They stood by the road and stared, these children, stubble-headed and remote. Now the children were moving on again, deeper into England.
Emma turned her eyes on Ralph. “What is it like, evacuated?” she hissed.
He shook his head. “It won’t happen to us, I don’t think. It’s the ones from the coast that are going.”
“I mean,” Emma said, “how do you fix it?”
He put his finger to his lips. He did not think, then or later, that his parents were cruel: only staid, elderly, without imagination.
When the war ended, there was more whispered discussion. His parents debated taking in an orphan—perhaps the child of some local girl who had given way to an airman. Or an older child, a companion for Ralph … They had heard through some church connection of a most unfortunate Lowestoft case, a boy of Ralph’s age exactly: whose father, a gas-company worker, had been killed when the bomb fell on Lome Park Road, and whose mother had died when Waller’s Restaurant received a direct hit. What was she doing in a restaurant, that’s what I’d like to know?” Mrs. Eldred said. There was some suggestion that the child might have lived a giddy life before his bereavement. The project was dropped; Ralph’s companion faded away, into the realms of might-have-been.
For when you surveyed—his father said—when you surveyed the want in this world, when you peered into the bottomless pit of human improvidence and foolishness, it occurred to you that if there was to be charity it must be systematic.
Much later rationing ended. In the Eldred household it contin-ued. “There’s nothing wrong with economy,” his mother said. If you wanted anything nice to eat, you had to eat it outside the house.
When Ralph was fifteen years old, he went to stay with his aunt in Yorkshire. The Synod of Whitby, his uncle James called the Yorkshire set; they were too dour, cramped, and narrow for James’s High Church tastes. The trip north had been intended as a holiday, Ralph supposed; by now he was beginning to be critical of his family, and it seemed congruent with everything else in his life that a holiday and a penance should be so very alike.
The Synod occupied a dark house, and inside it were brown shadows. It contained an unreasonable number of upright chairs, with seats of slippery polished brown leather; it was as if preparations were constantly in hand for a public meeting, a chapel get-together. In the dining room the chairs were high-backed and unyielding, of a particularly officious type. Small meals were sanctified by a lengthy grace. The bookcases had glass fronts, and they were locked; upon the sideboard stood vases of dark glass, like cups of blood.
His cousins crept on slippered feet; clocks ticked. His uncle sat at his desk, making up accounts; his aunt slid her knitting down the cushion of her chair. She sat and stared at him, a bloodless woman the image of his mother; her pale lips moved. “You should get out, Ralph. Go on the bus. Go up the coast a bit. A boy needs fresh air.”
Ralph left the house. He took the first bus he saw out of the town. It was a normal, hostile east coast day; no one else was on a pleasure jaunt. There were points where the road hugged the coast; a few isolated houses tumbled away toward a sea less glimpsed than felt, toward an impression of sliding subsiding rocks, of coal boats and fishing boats, of salt and chill.
He got off the bus. The place was nowhere he knew. The weather now was overcast but blustery; chinks of blue sky showed here and there, like cracks in a thick white basin. He fastened his coat, as his aunt, if she had seen him, would have enjoined him; and he wrapped his despised muffler around his throat. He descended a hill, one-in-four, and saw before him the cold sweep of a bay.
The tide was going out. A solitary walker picked his way along the cliffs. In the middle distance were other figures, with rucksacks and boots; their heads were down, their eyes searching the sands. Ralph, too, lowered his eyes to his shoes, and threaded his way among the seaweed and rock pools.
Ralph had gone twenty yards toward the ocean. Its sound was subdued, congruous, a rustle not a roar. He bent down and plucked from the sand at his feet what he took to be some muddy stone. A sharp pang of delight took hold of him, a feeling that was for a moment indistinguishable from fear. He had picked up a fossil: a ridged, grey-green curl, glassy and damp like a descending wave. It lay in his palm: two inches across, an inch and a half at its crest.
He stood
still, examining it and turning it over. Inside it was a gentle hollow; he saw that it was a kind of shell, smoothness concealed beneath grit and silt. He looked up across the beach. The melancholy and windblown figures wheeled toward him, and came within hailing distance. They closed in on him, with their ribbed stockings and their cold-weather complexions.
There was a woman among them, her sharp nose scarlet above a swaddling of scarves. She stared at the fossil in his hand; she pulled off her gloves, hauled them off with her teeth. He dropped the fossil into her hand. She turned it over and back again, ran her forefinger down its mottled curve, feeling the ridges. She laid it against her face; she tasted it with her tongue. (Gryphaea,” she said. “Don’t you know?”
He shook his head; stood before her, like the dumb unconverted heathen. “It’s a bivalve—like an oyster, you know?”
“Oh, yes.” He was disappointed; something so ordinary after all.
She said, “It’s a hundred and fifty million years old.” He stared at her. “You know how an oyster lives in its shell? This is the ancestor of oysters.” He nodded. “It lived here when the sea was warm—if you can imagine that. Here was its soft body, inside this shell, with its heart and blood vessels and gills. When it died all those soft parts rotted, and the sand filled up the cavity. And then the sand compacted and turned into rock.”
There was a circle of people around them, their breath streaming on the air, eyes fixed on her hand; they were coveting what he had found, as if it were a jewel. “The sea moved,” a man said. His face was a raw ham beneath a bobble hat. “I mean to say, what had been sea became land. But now the sea’s eating away the land again—all this east coast,” he waved his arm, gesturing toward the Wash— “you can see it going in your lifetime.”
A man in a balaclava—green, ex-army—said, “I served with a bloke from Suffolk whose grandfather had a smallholding, and it’s in the sea now. Whole churchyards have gone down the cliff. Whole graveyards, and the bones washed out.”
The woman said, “You’ve stopped this little creature, my dear. On its way back to the sea where it came from.”
“When it was alive—”
“Yes?”
“What did it eat?”
“It cemented itself on the sea bed, and sucked in water. It got its nourishment from that, from the larvae in the water, you see. It had a stomach, kidneys, intestines, everything you have.”
“Could it think?”
“Well, can an oyster think these days? What would an oyster have to think about?”
He blushed. Stupid question. What he had meant to say was, are you sure it was alive? Can you truly swear to me that it was? “Are these rare?” he asked.
“Not if you want a smashed-up one. Not if you’re content with fragments.”
The woman held his find for a moment, clenched and concealed in her fist; then put it into his outstretched palm, and worked her fingers back painfully into her gloves. She wanted the fossil so much that he almost gave it to her; but then, he wanted it himself. Bobble-hat said, “I’ve been coming here man and boy, and never got anything as good as that. Two-a-penny brachiopods, that’s what I get. Sometimes I think we’re looking so hard we can’t see.”
“Beginner’s luck,” the balaclava said. He stabbed a woolly finger at the object he craved. “Do you know what they call them? Devil’s toenails.” He chuckled. “I reckon you can see why.”
Ralph looked down at the fossil and almost dropped it. Saw the thick, ridged, ogreish curve, that greenish, sinister sheen … All the way home in the bus he forced himself to hold the object in his hand, his feelings seesawing between attraction and repulsion; wondering how he could have found it, when he was not looking at all.
When he arrived at the house he was very cold and slightly nauseated. He smiled at the cousin who let him in and said he had better go upstairs right away and wash his hands. “Did you enjoy yourself, love?” his aunt asked; he gave a monosyllabic reply, a polite mutter which translated to nothing. The ticking of the parlor clock was oppressive, insistent; he could imagine it buried in the earth, ticking away for a hundred and fifty million years. He took his place on one of the leather chairs, and wondered about the animal whose back the leather had adorned: what skin, what hair, what blood through living veins? His aunt quibbled about how the table had been laid, twitching the fish knives about with her forefinger. Smoked haddock came, with its thin-cut bread and butter, a pale juice oozing across the plate. He ate a flake or two, then put down his fork. His aunt said, “No appetite?” He thought of the bones spilled down the cliff, into the salty whispering of the tides; Gryphaea sucking in its nourishment, the aeons rolling by, the Devil walking abroad.
His mother made Satan into the likeness of some strict schoolmaster: “The Devil finds work for idle hands to do.”
The toenail was upstairs, locked in his suitcase.
When Ralph came home from Yorkshire, he and Emma played their Bible games. They always played them when they had some decision to make. Now Emma said, “I want to decide whether when I grow up I’m going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or just a broody hen who stays at home like my mama.”
You were supposed to pick a verse at random, and it would give you guidance; but you needed a keen imagination to make anything of the verses they turned up. “Try this one,” Emma said. “ ’And thou shalt anoint the laver and his foot, and sanctify it.’ Exodus 40:11. Very helpful, I’m sure.” She began to sing a hymn of her own composition: “How daft the name of Jesus sounds …”
Ralph took out the fossil from his coat pocket, where he was keeping it for the while. “Look at this,” he said. “It’s the Devil’s toenail.”
Emma gave a startled wail. “It’s horrible. Whatever is it?”
He told her. Her face brightened. “Give it me.” He dropped jit into her cupped hand. “Can I take it to school to frighten girls with?”
“No, you certainly can’t. It’s valuable. It’s mine.”
“I’m an atheist,” Emma said.
“Not an atheist a minute ago, were you?”
These were the books on their shelves, old, crumbling: The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. And dusty, brown: Christ Is All, H. C. G. Moule, London, 1892. Slime-trailed, musty: F. R. Havergal, 1880: Kept for the Master’s Use. Earwiggy, fading: Hymns of Faith and Hope. And A Basket of Fragments, R. M. McCheyne, published Aberdeen, no date, pages uncut.
A year later Ralph went back to Yorkshire. His request surprised his family, and gave some pale gratification to the Synod, who had found him a quiet boy who offered no offense, and were glad that someone in the family seemed to like them. He spent his days on the beaches and in the town museum. He did not speak of his discoveries at home, but he found a schoolmaster to encourage him—a man whom, he realized later, he should have enlisted on his side when the quarrel came. He studied alone after school, sent for books with his pocket money and puzzled over geological maps; he walked fields, hills, coastal paths, examined ditches and road cuttings. When he was tired and discouraged and there were things he could not understand he thought of the woman on the Yorkshire beach, putting out the purple tip of her tongue to taste the fossil, its silt and grit, its coldness and its age.
There was a trick he had to perfect: to look at a landscape and strip away the effect of man. England transforms itself under the geologist’s eye; the scavenger sheep are herded away into the future, and a forest grows in a peat bog, each tree seeded by imagination. Where others saw the lie of the land, Ralph saw the path of the glacier; he saw the desert beneath copse and stream, and the glories of Europe stewing beneath a warm, clear, shallow sea.
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 a
gain, 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 uncle’s homilies, the piano practice of his female cousins. His mother dusted the fossils twice a week, but didn’t understand what they were. “It’s Ralph’s 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 that’s old. Emma—now, Emma—she’s much more your modern miss.”
Emma said to her brother, “Ralph, how can you talk so casually about five hundred million years? Most of us have trouble with … well, Christmas for example. Every December it puts people into a panic, as if it had come up on them without warning. It’s 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. That’s very recent, as we think of it. It would be like a cross-channel trip. London to Paris.”
“I wouldn’t mind a trip to Paris,” Emma said. “Do you think it’s any good me asking?”
“Then, to reach the time of the dinosaurs, you’d 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.