‘Well,’ Ralph said, re-reading the letter. ‘This is unexpected. But of course she must come home, if she wants to.’
‘Of course,’ Anna said.
Her perspective altered. She felt that she must settle to it, give way to the house’s demands, perhaps until she was an old woman.
When on the afternoon of the funeral Anna let herself into the wide square hall, she peeled off her gloves slowly, and placed them on the hall-stand, a vast and unnecessary article of furniture that Ralph had picked up in an antique shop in Great Yarmouth. ‘No other family in the county,’ she had said at the time, ‘feels they need an object like this.’ She looked with a fresh sense of wonder and dislike at its barley-sugar legs and its many little drawers and its many little dust-trapping ledges and its brass hooks for gentlemen’s hats, and she saw her face in the dim spotted oval of mirror, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead, then took off her coat and threw it over the banisters.
The Norfolk climate gave Anna a bloodless look, tinged her thin hands with violet. Every winter she would think of Africa; days when, leaving her warm bed in a hot early dawn, she had felt her limbs grow fluid, and the pores of her face open like petals, and her ribs, free from their accustomed tense gauge, move to allow her a full, voluptuary’s breath. In England she never felt this confidence, not even in a blazing July. The thermometer might register the heat, but her body was sceptical. English heat is fitful; clouds pass before the sun.
Anna went into the kitchen. Julian had heard her come in, and was setting out cups for tea.
‘How did it go?’
‘It went well, I suppose,’ Anna said. ‘We buried him. The main object was achieved. How do funerals ever go?’
‘How was Mrs Palmer?’
‘Ginny was very much herself. A party of them were going back to the house, for vol-au-vents provided by Mrs Gleave.’ Anna made a face. ‘And whisky. She seemed very insistent on the whisky. If you’d have asked for gin – well, I don’t know what!’
Julian reached for the teapot. ‘Nobody would have gin, would they, at a funeral?’
‘No, it would be unseemly,’ Anna said. Mother’s ruin, she thought. The abortionist’s drink. A mistress’s tipple. Flushed complexions and unbuttoned afternoons.
‘And how was Emma?’
‘Emma was staunch. She was an absolute brick. She turned up in that old coat, by the way.’
‘You wouldn’t have expected her to get a new one.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. A lesser woman might have hired sables for the day. And implied that Felix had given them to her.’ Anna smiled, her hands cradling her tea-cup. ‘Your old dad and I were talking on the way home. About how he went on for so long, without knowing about Felix and Emma.’
‘Twit,’ Julian said.
Some three years earlier, the year before Kit went to university, Ralph Eldred had been in Holt for the afternoon. It was a Wednesday, late in the year; at Gresham’s School, blue-kneed boys were playing hockey. The small town’s streets were empty of tourists; the sky was the colour of pewter.
Ralph decided – and it was an unaccustomed indulgence on his part – to have some tea. The girl behind the counter directed him upstairs; wrapped in bakery smells, he climbed a steep staircase with a rickety handrail, and found himself in a room where the ceiling was a scant seven foot high, and a half-dozen tables were set with pink cloths and white china. At the top of the stairs, Ralph, who was a man of six foot, bent his head to pass under a beam; as he straightened up and turned his head, he looked directly into the eye of Felix Palmer, who was in the act of pouring his sister Emma a second cup of Darjeeling.
The twenty minutes which followed were most peculiar. Not that anything Emma did was strange; for she simply looked up and greeted him, and said, ‘Why don’t you get that chair there and put it over here, and would you like a toasted tea-cake or would you like a bun or would you like both?’ As for Felix, he just lowered his Harris tweed elbow, replaced the teapot on its mat and said, ‘Ralph, you old bugger, skiving off again?’
Ralph sat down; he looked ashen; when the waitress brought him a cup, his hand trembled. The innocent sight that had met his eyes when he came up the staircase had suddenly and shockingly revealed its true meaning, and what overset Ralph was not that his sister was having an affair, but his instant realization that the affair was part of the world-order, one of the givens, one of the assumptions of the parish, and that only he, Ralph – stupid, blind and emotionally inept – had failed to recognize the fact: he and his wife Anna, whom he must go home and tell.
Ask him how he knew, that moment he swivelled his head under the beam and met the bland blue eye of Felix: ask him how he knew, and he couldn’t tell you. The knowledge simply penetrated his bone-marrow. When they brought the toasted tea-cake, he took a bite, and replaced the piece on the plate, and found that what he had bitten turned into a pebble in his mouth, and he couldn’t swallow it. Felix took a brown paper bag out of his pocket, and said, ‘Look, Emma, I’ve got that wool that Ginny’s been wanting for her blasted tapestry, the shop’s had it on order for three months, I just popped in on the off-chance, and they said it came in this morning.’ He laid the skein out on the white cloth; it was a dead bracken colour. ‘Hope to heaven it’s the right shade,’ he said. ‘Ginny goes on about dye batches.’
Emma made some trite reply; Felix began to tell about a church conversion over in Fakenham that had come on to the firm’s books earlier that week. Then they had talked about the salary of the organist at the Palmers’ parish church; then about the price of petrol. Ralph could not make conversation at all. The loop of brown wool remained on the table. He stared at it as if it were a serpent.
Ralph arrived home alone that evening – which surprised Anna. No cronies, no hangers-on, no fat file of papers in his hand: no rushing to the telephone either, no flinging of a greeting over his shoulder, no distracted inquiries about where this and where that and who rang and what messages. He sat down in the kitchen; and when Anna came in, to see why he was so subdued, he was rocking on the back legs of his chair and staring at the wall. ‘You know, Anna,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like a drink. I’ve had a shock.’
Alcohol, for Ralph, was a medicinal substance only. Brandy might be taken for colic, when other remedies had failed. Hot whisky and lemon might be taken for colds, for Ralph recognized that people with colds need cheering up, and he was all for cheerfulness. But drink as social unction was something that had never been part of his life. His parents did not drink, and he had never freed himself from his parents. He had nothing against drinking in others, of course; the house was well-stocked, he was a hospitable man. When the tongue-tied or the chilled called on him, Ralph was ready with glasses and ice-buckets. His eye was inexpert and his nature generous, so the drinks he poured were four times larger than ordinary measures. A local councillor, upon leaving the Red House, had been breathalyzed by the police in East Dereham, and found to be three times over the legal limit. On another occasion, a female social worker from Norwich had been sick on the stairs. When these things happened, Ralph would say, ‘My uncle, Holy James, he was right, I think. Total abstinence is best. Things run out of control so quickly, don’t they?’
So now, when Anna poured him a normal-sized measure of whisky, he judged it to be mean and small. He looked at it in bewilderment, but said nothing. After a while, still rocking back on the chair, he said, ‘Emma is having an affair with Felix Palmer. I saw them today.’
‘What, in flagrante?’ Anna said.
‘No. Having a cup of tea in Holt.’
Anna said nothing for a time: then, ‘Ralph, may I explain something to you?’ She sat down at the table and clasped her hands on the scrubbed white wood. It was