‘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 offence, 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 again, 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 500 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, you’d 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.
A frieze of evolution marched through Ralph’s head. Each form of life has its time and place: sea-snail and sea-lily, water-scorpion and lungfish, fern tree and coral. Shark and flesh-eating reptile; sea-urchin and brontosaurus; pterodactyl and magnolia tree; cuttle fish and oyster. Then the giant flightless bird, opossum in his tree, elephant in his swamp; it was as clear in his mind as it might be in a child’s picture book, or a poster on a nursery wall. The sabre-toothed cat, the little horse three feet tall; the Irish elk, the woolly mammoth; then man, stooped, hairy, furrow-browed. It is a success story.
At seventeen Ralph could be taken for a man, but not of this primitive textbook kind. He was tall, strong, with a clear skin and clear eyes, like a hero in a slushy book. Sometimes women looked at him with interest on the street: with a speculative pity, as if they feared other women might exploit him.
Ralph would go back to the Brecklands, in those years after the war, threading his bicycle along the narrow roads, between concrete emplacements and through lanes churned up by heavy vehicles. What he saw was victory: fences broken, orchards cut down, avenues of trees mutilated. Gates hung from a hinge, posters flapped on walls. Everywhere was a proliferation of little huts made of corrugated iron – rusting now, and without their doors. Farm workers ran about in scrapped jeeps they had salvaged. Heaps of rubbish festered amid the pines. The wind was the same, its low hum through the stiff branches. The thread-like trunks of birch trees were the same, viewed across tussocky fields; herons flapped from the meres.
The Ministry of Defence did not mean to relinquish its hold on the district. Its fences and KEEP OUT notices divided the fields. Ralph would pull his bicycle on to the grass verge, while a convoy rumbled past. Once, holding his handlebars and standing up to his knees in damp grass, he reached down for what caught his eye; it was a flint arrow-head. He turned it over in his palm, then put it in his pocket. He remembered the moment when he had found the fossil; here was another secret, buried life. He need not take it to a museum; these things are common enough. He took it home and put it on his mantelpiece, meaning to save it for his Uncle James to see when he was next in England. ‘Ah, an elfshot,’ his mother said, and smiled.
‘You like that old country, Ralph,’ his father said; the thought did not displease him. Matthew himself had kept friends in the area, church people, other businessmen of a charitable, socially responsible bent. These were the days of meeting-room hysteria and sudden conversion, of dipping people in rivers and calling it baptism. American preachers had come to the bases to service the raw spirituality of their compatriots, and found a ready audience in the poor, cold towns. ‘A plain font is requisite,’ said Matthew. ‘Nothing else.’ He hated display: Roman Catholic display, evangelists’ display, emotional display. A plain mind is requisite: nothing else.
Emma said she wanted to be a doctor. His father said, ‘Yes, if you wish to, Emma.’
Everything was permitted to her, it seemed to Ralph. She was a decisive girl, bossy, full of strong opinions strongly expressed. When Emma’s opinions cut across those of her parents, they saw contrariness; they saw a defect of character. They tried, therefore, to correct her character; it did not seem important to them to correct her opinions, for Emma was a female, and what influence could the opinion of a female have in the real world? Her opinions might damage her, and she would then revise them – but they would not damage the social order.
At least, that was how Ralph supposed they thought. For when it came to his opinions, his desires, it was a very different story.
‘So you don’t want to go into the business, Ralphie.’
This was how his father joined battle: obliquely, from the flank. He made it seem that there were only simple issues at stake, a change in family expectations. But soon enough, his weighty battalions were deployed. The issues went beyond the family. They became larger than Ralph had bargained for. They became universal.
First