On a Sunday night he collected the week’s bedding, and listed it for the laundry, counting the sheets stained with vomit and semen, with excrement and blood. On a Wednesday evening he would drop by for an hour to count the linen in again. The sheets were patched and darned, but stainless. They smelled of the launderer’s press; they were stiff and utterly white. How do they do it, he wondered; how do they make them so utterly white?
He became engaged to Anna. They planned to marry when she graduated from her teacher-training college, and go straight out to Dar-es-Salaam, where a dear friend of James was a headmaster and where a pleasant house would be waiting for them, and two jobs as teachers of English to young men training for the ministry. Sometimes, on the London pavements, Ralph tried to imagine himself translated to this alien place, to the heat and colour of this other life. Letters passed to and fro. Arrangements were in hand.
Anna received all this with equanimity. She was planning the wedding, the quiet wedding. A quiet girl altogether; she wore grey, charcoal, dark blue, simple clothes with clear lines. Ralph thought she was setting herself apart, cultivating almost a nun-like air. They did not discuss their religious beliefs; a certain amount was implied, understood. She had taken on the prospect of Africa without demur. ‘She hasn’t really said much about it,’ Ralph told James.
James said, ‘Good – I suspect enthusiasm.’
The kind of person not wanted in those climes, he said, was someone who rushed with open arms to embrace the romantic deprivations of the life. Anna’s reasoned agreement was a better foundation for their future than constant chatter about what that future might hold.
Later Ralph would think, when we married it was a leap into the dark: we didn’t know each other at all. But perhaps when you are so young, you don’t even begin to comprehend what there is to know.
As for those nun-like clothes – when he had seen more of the world, and was more accustomed to looking at women, he realized that Anna’s style was deliberate, ingenious and contrived by the exercise of a stifled artistic talent. She had made her own dresses in those days; she could not buy what she wanted in Norfolk, and with her tiny means she would not have dared to enter a London shop. She spent what she had on fabric, buttons and trimmings; she cut, pressed and stitched, obsessively careful, tyrannically neat. And so what Anna possessed was unique among the people he knew – it was not sanctity, but chic.
‘Freud said,’ Emma told him, ‘that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis.’ She looked at him over her glasses. ‘Tell me now…what happened to the dinosaurs, Ralph?’
‘Their habitat altered,’ he said. ‘A change of climate.’ She smiled crookedly. He saw that she hadn’t expected an answer. ‘The trouble with our parents,’ she said, ‘is that their habitat doesn’t change. It hardly varies from one end of the county to the next. Give them a pew, and they’re right at home.’
Emma had got her wish. She was at medical school; and home now for Ralph’s wedding, her book open on her lap and her feet up on the old sofa that she had thrashed so thoroughly in 1939. Emma had grown heavy; the hospital food, she said, was all dumplings, pastry, suet, and that was what she was turning into, dumplings, pastry, suet. Despite this, she had a suitor, a smart local boy called Felix, not one of their Bible-study set. She dealt with him by ignoring him most of the time, and did not always answer his letters.
She had grumbled with vigour about the business of a new frock for the wedding, even though her father had paid for it; she would pay herself, she said, if Matthew would go and choose the thing, converse with shop assistants and track down a hat to match. Emma resisted the attentions of hairdressers. Anna, the bride-to-be, offered to take her in hand and see that she got a perm. Emma swore when she heard this, so violently that she surprised herself.
‘So, Ralph,’ Emma said, ‘the news from Freud is not all bad. “Devout believers” – that’s you and Anna – “are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses: their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them from the task of constructing a personal one.” In other words, one sort of madness is enough for anybody.’
‘Do you think it is madness?’ Ralph asked. ‘Madness and nothing else?’
‘I don’t think it has any reality, Ralph. I think faith is something people chase after, simply to give life meaning.’
She spoke quite kindly, he thought later. ‘And doesn’t it have meaning?’ he asked.
Emma reserved judgement.
That night his father took him aside. ‘I want to talk about the arrangements,’ he said.
‘It’s all in hand. All done. You don’t have to concern yourself.’
‘I don’t mean arrangements for the wedding. Why should I concern myself with the women’s business?’ His father slid out a drawer of his desk, took out some papers, looked through them as he spoke; this was a family whose members no longer met each other’s eyes. ‘I mean the arrangements for the future. I have taken advice, and I am going to sell the press. I have a good offer from a publisher of educational books.’ Unable to find anything of interest in the papers, he turned them over and stared at their back. ‘Education, you know – it’s the coming thing.’
‘I should hope it is,’ Ralph said. He felt at a loss. He ought to be able to give an opinion. ‘Well, if your accountant – ’ he began.
Matthew cut him short. ‘Yes, yes, yes. Now then, I propose to invest a certain amount, the interest to be paid to Walstan’s Trust.’ He had managed to drop the Saint, Ralph noticed. ‘I propose to place a smaller amount into a family trust for yourself and Anna and your children. When you come back from the missions, you will sit on the committee of Walstan’s Trust, which five years from now will need a full-time paid administrator. If you seem fit for it, you will be able to fill that position.’
‘Other people may have claims,’ Ralph said. This was all he could do – raise small objections. He could not imagine himself in five years’ time. He could not imagine what kind of man he might be, or imagine these notional children of his. I might die in Africa, he thought. There are tropical diseases, and all sorts of strange accidents.
‘Well, they may,’ said his father. ‘But I cannot see very clearly who they would be. Your Uncle James will be wanting a rest by then, and the children of my colleagues on the committee are pursuing their own paths in life.’
‘It seems to be looking too far ahead,’ Ralph said.
‘Oh,’ Matthew said, ‘I thought the millennia were as naught to you. Really, you know, to plan five years or ten years ahead is nothing. All businessmen do it. We do it when we invest money – though you would know nothing of that.’
‘I suppose I wouldn’t.’
‘My object, my plan – and here I may say the other trustees agree with me – is that the Trust should be forever administered from Norfolk, no matter how wide its interests may become. It is local money that has set it up – and we must keep our feet on the ground. So you will want to base yourself here in Norwich, or elsewhere in the county if you prefer. When you return I will buy you a house, because you will make no money while you are out in Africa. That goes without saying.’
If that is so, Ralph thought, why say it? He said, ‘Had you any particular house in mind?’ But he could not summon the strength of purpose to put venom into his tone.
‘I