Lucy Moyo took a bunch of keys out of the pocket of her apron. She was six foot tall, imposing, solid, like a black bolster inside her print frock; the bunch of keys lay in her hand like a toy.
‘This is the key for your office,’ she said. She held it up. ‘These little ones are for your desks and cupboards. This is for the cupboard where we keep the first-aid chest. This one is for the chest itself. Friday nights, Saturdays, you will be wanting that. These keys are for the inside doors of your house. This one is for the pantry and these are for the store cupboards inside the pantry.’
‘Are they really necessary?’ Anna asked. ‘Every one?’
Lucy smiled remotely. ‘Mrs Eldred, you will find that they are. This key is for the woodshed where the tools are kept. The baas must be sure that anything to stab and cut, anything with a sharp edge, you understand me, is shown to him or to you or some good person at the end of the day when it has been used and then it is locked up till it is wanted again.’
Lucy pressed the keys into Anna’s palm. She folded Anna’s fingers over them. ‘You must keep all these doors locked. These people are thieves.’
Her own people, Anna thought. And how casually she says it. ‘Is Lucy a cynic?’ she asked later.
‘I don’t think we ought to criticize her,’ Ralph said. ‘She’s kept the place ticking over.’ His hands moved over his desk, bewildered, flinching. ‘She probably knows what she’s talking about. It’s just the way she puts things, it’s a bit bald.’
Lucy said, ‘Mr and Mrs Standish, who were here before you, used to sit after their supper most nights and cry. It made me sad to see such old people crying.’
The voyage to Cape Town had taken three weeks. It had allowed Anna a pause for thought, a period of grace. Until the last year of her life, nothing had happened. Then everything had happened together. When she was thirteen or fourteen, she had made up her mind to go to a foreign country: preferably a distant one. Her idea was that she would say goodbye to her parents, and write to them twice a year.
Ralph understood her parents – which was a good thing, because of the time it saved. It would have been a lifetime’s work to explain them to someone who had been brought up in a different fashion. In families like yours and mine, Ralph said, it’s the girls who have the harder time. He knew, he said, what his sister had gone though. Anna reserved judgement. It seemed to her that Emma was not unduly marked by suffering.
The truth was that Emma frightened her; even her small-talk was inquisitorial, demanding, sarcastic. Without a word but with an impatient toss of her head, she implied that Anna was decorative but useless. At least, Anna took this to be the implication. Nothing could be less true. Her hands had never been idle.
Anyway, she was putting thousands of miles between herself and Emma. If she had stayed in Norfolk people would have expected them to be friends, they would always be saying, Anna and Emma, Emma and Anna. It was not a harmonious combination – not to her ear. As a child, it was true, she had sometimes wished for a sister. Any companions had to run through a parental censorship, an overview of their lives and antecedents. By the time a prospective friend was approved, the attraction had waned on both sides.
Her mother and father were shopkeepers, with the grocer’s habit of measuring out everything: especially their approval. Nothing is free; they stressed that. God has scales in which he weighs your inclinations against your actions, your needs against your desires. Pleasure is paid for in the coin of pain. Pay in the coin of faith, and God may return a measured quantity of mercy. Or then again, he may not.
Anna had been a great reader, as a child. Her parents gave her paper pamphlets, containing tales of black babies and Eskimos and how they came to Jesus. But what she liked were school stories, where the pupils lived away from home in a mansion by the sea, and played lacrosse and learned French from Mam’selle. Her parents said books were a good thing, but when they picked one up to inspect it – to permit or not permit – their faces expressed suspicion and latent hostility.
They eschewed the cinema and the theatre – they did not forbid them, but they knew how to make their views known. No alcohol passed their lips. Women who wore make-up – at least, any more than a smear of tan face-powder – were not their sort. Mr Martin looked at the newspaper, so his wife did not need to bother. She received each day a used opinion from him, just as she received a shirt for laundering, tainted with the smell of smoked bacon and ripe cheese.
Later, when she grew up, Anna realized that her parents were afflicted not simply by godliness, but by social snobbery. It seemed difficult for them to distinguish between the two. They looked up to those customers with big houses, to whom each week they delivered straw-packed boxes containing glacé fruits and tiny jars of chicken breasts in nutritious jelly. They looked down on ordinary customers, who queued in the shop for bags of sugar and quarters of tea. The former paid on account; of the latter, they naturally demanded cash. They were among the first in their district to get the ingenious, time-saving, pre-printed notice, which encapsulated so neatly their philosophy of life:
PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT, AS A REFUSAL OFTEN OFFENDS
All through her teens, Anna had been tormented by this notice, and by this thought: what if I fall in love, what if I fall in love with someone unsuitable? She knew the chances of this were high; there were so many unsuitable people in the world. But when she came home and said that Ralph Eldred wanted her to get engaged, the Martins looked in vain for a reason to oppose it. It was true that the boy’s future was unsettled; but then, his father was a county councillor.
Anna had been a compliant daughter. She had tried to do everything she could to suit her parents, while knowing that it would not be quite enough: please do not ask for credit…Some unhappy children have fantasies that they are adopted; Anna always knew she was theirs. In adolescence, she fell into reveries, irritating to the people about her, productive of sharp words from her mother. She dreamed of ways of being as unlike her parents as possible. But she didn’t know any ways. To despise them was one thing; to free herself from them was quite another.
And she wondered, now, as the ship moved south, whether she was sailing away from them or towards them. After all, they were such charitable people; weren’t they, in their own way, missionaries at home? There were no luxuries in their household; money was always needed for good causes. Besides, it was wicked to have luxuries when others had not the necessities: unless you were an account customer, of course.
And if the charity did not proceed from love, but from a sense of duty, did that matter? Were the results not the same?
Anna used to think so. The starving eat, whatever the motive of the bread’s donor; perhaps it does not become the starving to be nice about motives.
Ralph saw the issue differently. The Eldreds and the Martins, he said, acted from a desire to make the world conformable. Grocer Martin would like to raise all tramps to the condition of account customers; Betty the grocer’s wife would like to see chain-smoking unmarried mothers scrub their faces and take communion monthly. Cold, poverty, hunger must be remedied because they are extreme states, productive of disorder, of psychic convulsions, of demonstrations by the unemployed. They lead to socialism, and make the streets unsafe.
Ralph passed judgement on his father, and on hers. He knew a poem; he would laugh, and say:
‘God made the wicked Grocer For a mystery and a sign.
That men might shun the awful shops And go to inns to dine.’
There it was – Ralph hated nothing more than meanness. It seemed to her that he had a spontaneous, uncalculated kindness. She was looking for no more and no less. She slept with him before – just before – the engagement ring was on her finger.
It was she who had made him the offer. When the time came – the one occasion, perhaps in a year, when they had the house at Dereham to themselves – she was seized by fear. Even the touch of his warm hands made her shiver. But he was a young man with little experience – or none, as she supposed