A Change of Climate

by Hilary Mantel

  “No,” Kit said. “Not really.”

  Anna picked up her car keys from beside the photograph. She has been waiting for this, Kit thought, waiting to go out, her bag ready and to hand.

  Anna followed the police car. They could have lost her, at this junction or that, but they preferred to dawdle and let her stick with them.

  It was evening now. The sky was striated, precise overlays of color working from regal purple to the palest blush. Amy Glasse woke and sat up in bed, stretching her arms and fingers, rippling her fingers through the liquid light like a stage pianist preparing to play. Ralph turned and reached for her as she slid from the bed; sleeping, he followed the heat trail of her body across the sheets. His arm, empty, cupped the space from which she had moved.

  From below, there was a monotonous thumping, a solid hammering, like the copulation of giants in a myth.

  “Oh, God,” Amy said. “We’re back in the old routine.”

  Ralph woke to see her shape against the window. Her long back, white in the dusk: “Sweetheart, come back to bed.” He put out a hand for her, drowsy; didn’t see why his peace should be disturbed.

  “Sorry,” Amy said. “I don’t know, shall I go down, or shall I pretend I’m not here? Ralph, you’re not awake, are you?” She cast around, snatched up the T-shirt she had taken off, and swabbed the area between her thighs. She looked around the room for something else to wear, then with a little laugh pulled the T-shirt over her head. She reached for her skirt. “What shall I do? If I don’t go down now they’ll only come back later.”

  “Who?” He had focused now, on that sound of fist on wood. “Who is it?”

  “Purvis and his mate,” she said. “The constabulary, my dear. Sometimes I wish I lived in the city, then you’d get a choice of bastards. Not always the same old pair.”

  He pushed back the covers. “Ralph,” she said, “don’t go down. No, listen to me.” She was at the window, the curtain parted minutely. “There’s two cars here. Just get dressed, but stay up here and be quiet. If they come up say nothing—don’t antagonize them.”

  Buttoning her skirt, she flitted from the room. No one could crouch and hide, and listen to that destructive thump-thump-thumping; Amy couldn’t do it, and neither’ could he. Panicking, he began to pull himself into his clothes. He must get there before her; feared violence. Once before he had imagined hitting Purvis. Once, a long time ago … his hand, clenched to pull in and fasten his belt, felt itself sink into belly flesh: propel a bully toward ridicule and the stoep door, one foot in a wastepaper basket. The body has its own memories; muscle and bone, marching its own ghost trail.

  He put his shoes on, straightened up: randomly buttoned his shirt, skittered down the stairs after Amy. The front door was open: he went out into a September evening, a confrontation, the air a golden rose; the past summer a memory, bloom of sea lavender, scent of tourist tires on narrow burning roads. Purvis said, “Mr. Eldred, isn’t it?” Yes, it is, he said, yes, I do: what’s happened, how is she?

  Anna’s car drew up behind the police car. It rattled to a halt. After a moment, Anna stepped out. She did not move away from the car, held the vehicle’s door before her like a shield; but she took the time to let her eyes rest on everything. She raised one foot, tucked an ankle behind her, balancing it on the car’s rusting door-sill. The policemen’s eyes slid like snakes over Amy Glasse, her creased homemade cotton skirt and her breasts bouncing beneath the stained white cloth. “Fuck off out of here, Purvis,” she said. “You were here last week and into everything, so what the fuck do you want now?”

  Ralph put his hand out, to take Amy’s wrist. “Calm down. It’s nothing. They want me, not you.”

  Amy’s eyes traveled: to Purvis, to Ralph’s face, to Anna still as a statue in the fading light.

  I have lost track of the time, Ralph thought; I should have been home an hour ago. Anna, without a word, climbed back into the car and drove away.

  When the police had given their news, and driven away in their turn—their eyes roaming around the farmyard and outbuildings— Ralph said to Amy, “I must go right now. You understand, don’t you? I have to go to Norwich and sort this out.”

  “Of course you must go.” Her smile was twisted, bleak. “Then you’ve your wife to face.”

  “Yes. That will be later.”

  “I’ll not be seeing you, then?”

  He didn’t reply. “We’ve seen it on the television,” she said. “Me and Sandra. Men always go back to their wives.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He felt shaky, weak; was not sure whether he was lying or not. “Unless I’m at the hospital, that is. There’ll be all sorts of people I have to talk to—social workers, and her parents if she’s really ill, and my own people, the Trust committee, because if there’s any possible legal problem I like them to know about it. I’ll be on the phone all day.”

  “Anna, she’s beautiful,” Amy said. “Sandra didn’t tell me. I had no idea. I thought she was some biddy in a print frock.”

  “I can’t talk about it. I haven’t time. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

  “I’ll not count on it,” Amy said. Her voice was light and bright. She was fighting back tears. Ralph felt inside him a great rolling mass of nausea and cold, of apprehension and self-hatred.

  At a phone box on the outskirts of Fakenham, he stopped the car and rang his home. He calculated that Anna would just have arrived; if she were walking in, he thought, that would be best, that would be the best time to get her.

  He let the phone ring for a long time. He checked his watch again. She should be home by now. Where would she go, except the Red House?

  As he was about to replace the receiver, he heard it picked up. “Anna? Anna, are you there?” Silence. “Please speak to me.” Silence. “I’m going to Norwich,” he said. “I have to. To the hospital. I’ll call again from there. Anna, please …”

  She had put the phone down. He got back in the car and drove away.

  I would have spoken, she thought: I would have spoken, except that I could not think of a single thing, not one thing to say. She went into the kitchen and made herself some instant coffee. She drank it standing up, by the sink. Then she washed her cup. There was a long night ahead, and she would be alone. Robin was playing in a school match, he would not be back, he was staying over in King’s Lynn. Julian, she supposed, was at the farm; and she had sent her daughters away. She dried her hands, folded the towel, laid it over the back of a chair.

  It is in the nature of betrayal, she thought, that it not only changes the present, but that it reaches back with its dirty hands and changes the past.

  She could not be still. She wandered through the rooms, then returned to the kitchen to make herself some more coffee. She sat at the table, trying to subdue her ragged breathing. She got up and went to the sink again. She saw from the kitchen clock that only half an hour had passed since she put the phone down on Ralph. You cannot pass the time like this, she thought: washing your cup and washing your cup.

  Darkness had fallen. Autumn would choose a day like this, to announce its presence: stealthy feet, chilling the rooms. Ralph had lit the boiler this morning, but she had forgotten to attend to it. A major salvage operation would be needed now. She felt she did not have the strength for it. She took a blanket from the airing cupboard and walked downstairs with it gathered about her, African-style. She went into the sitting room. Did not put on the light. Chose herself a chair. She wrapped the blanket around her and pulled it almost over her head. She was swaddled now, like an ambulance casualty.

  There had been times before, when she had thought they could not survive. There had been times when she had wished to erase her husband and children, her whole biography. There had not been a day, in twenty years, when she had not thought about her lost child. Sometimes on the television—they often watched the ten o’clock news together—they had seen the parents of missing children, shaking, bleating, heads sagging: making what was called an appeal,
trying to wring some killer’s heart. No such appeal had been open to her. They had left the corpse behind, in another country. The verdict was final. When you have suffered together as she had, she and Ralph, what lies between you can’t be called romance. You can’t talk about a marriage, in the normal terms people use: a happy marriage, a marriage under strain. You are not partners, but the survivors of a disaster. You see each other and remember, every day. So how can you live together?

  But how can you not?

  She fingered the blanket’s satin-bound edge, and sat, apart from this fingering, without moving. When the room grew quite dark she put a hand out of her wrappings and switched on a lamp which stood by her on a round table. This table had a white cloth, on which Sandra Glasse had embroidered a scatter of daisies, violet and deep blue, their centres black like poppies: fantasy flowers, bouquets from an alternative world. Ralph said that every action contained its opposite. That nothing was fixed, nothing in creation; that cells made choices all the time. If we could rewind the tape of the universe, play it over again, we might find ourselves to be different: six-legged intelligent creatures, crawling on the sea bed, and speaking like birds, in song. But no, she thought, perhaps that is not what Ralph says. Perhaps I have got it wrong, he would be talking to the children and I would not be listening properly, that is usually the case with me. Have I not imagined, often enough, a universe in which other choices were made? The girl, Felicia, we turned out of the house. Some instinct warned me, so that night I kept my son in my arms. Or, Ralph took no pity on the wanderers in the storm, kept the bolts drawn, the key turned in the lock. She shivered. She felt closer to that night, now, than she did to the light and air of this morning: to the sea wind and coastal showers, the truculent girl in the backseat of the car, Kit with her hair streaming about her as she ran calling for Melanie through the streets.

  The telephone rang, in the next room. She did not stir. It would be Emma, perhaps, wanting to know what was happening. Or Ralph, calling from the hospital. She still had nothing to say to him, so what was the point of answering? She withdrew her hand into the safety of her blanket. An hour passed. The phone rang again. It was raining outside, and now the house was very cold. Anna thought of nothing at all. Her ideas seemed to have stopped, as if chilled and narrow conduits no longer carried blood to heart and brain.

  Very late—it must have been toward midnight—she heard the doorbell. She sat listening; someone had a finger pressed on it, insistent. Ralph would have his key, so would the children. Emma? She pulled the blanket around her. She did not want to see Ralph’s sister. Emma had a key for emergencies, but who was to know what she would consider an emergency? The person was knocking now, thudding at the door.

  The police again? That’s possible. She could not ignore the noise. She extricated herself from the blanket. Her legs felt stiff. She fumbled for the light switch in the hall. “I’m coming,” she called. “Don’t break down the door.” Her voice sounded peculiar, precarious. She opened the door.

  “Anna? Kit telephoned me from her aunt’s.”

  He was the last person she had expected. “Daniel, come in from the night.” Rain blew in with him. “What did Kit tell you?”

  “About the young girl you have staying. And that the police came. That you had gone off after them to find Ralph. You did find him, I suppose.”

  “So Kit knew.”

  “Had an idea.”

  “A shrewd one, I’ll bet. And Julian would know of course, and Robin, I suppose. And you, now. The whole county, soon.”

  “No, Anna, it’s nothing like that.”

  She began to fasten her hair up; saw herself dimly in the hall-stand mirror. “I used to laugh at Ralph because he went on for

  years without knowing about Emma and your father. Now the laugh’s on me, isn’t it?”

  “Believe me, I knew nothing,” Daniel said. “Not until today. When Kit telephoned I found it hard to take in. Ralph, I mean … it doesn’t seem possible.” He looked down at his shoes. How young he is, Anna thought. A boy.

  “And Kit asked you to come here, did she?”

  “She wants to come home herself, but she promised you she’d stay and look after Becky. Becky’s asking all sorts of questions, but Emma can deal with that.”

  Questions suitable to her time of life, Anna thought. Between us, we will have to come up with some suitable answers. “Yes, I made Kit promise to stay at Foulsham … you see, I can’t face anybody.” She looked up at him. “I have to prepare myself, Daniel. I have to think out what I am going to say.”

  “I don’t think you should stay here on your own. Have you … I mean, Ralph, has he been in touch?”

  “The phone’s been ringing. I didn’t answer it.”

  “He’s probably still at the hospital. Kit would like to know how the child is.”

  “I don’t care,” Anna said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. I’ve had enough of all that.”

  “Yes, I can understand. But you’re doing yourself an injustice.”

  “Oh, I’m not good, Daniel. I’m not a good woman. Not at all.”

  Daniel hesitated. “It—your standard of goodness, Anna—I think it would defeat most of us.”

  “Oh, my standard, yes. But what I live up to, that’s another question.”

  Daniel became brisk. “Have you eaten? No, of course not. The house seems very cold. I think I ought to try to track down Ralph. The hospital’s number, do you have it? They could find him and bring him to a phone. You don’t have to speak to him. I’ll do it. Just to see what the situation is, what his immediate intentions are.”

  “Don’t bother.” She turned away. “As for the child—I’ve told you, I don’t want to know. Year after year he’s inflicted these dreadful children upon me, awful, hopeless children—” She stopped. “He will come home. Eventually.” She leaned against Daniel. He put an arm around her. She began to cry. “I can’t face him. I feel ashamed. It’s as if it’s me who’s done something wrong. I won’t be able to look him in the eye.”

  “Then you don’t need to stay here. Let me drive you over to Blakeney.”

  “To Ginny’s? Oh no, it’s late … and besides …”

  “She wouldn’t ask you questions, you know.”

  “Daniel, how can you believe that?”

  “I’m an optimist,” he said. His face looked grim, as if he were aging in a night. “Come back to my flat, then. Just bring what you need for now. I’ve got a spare bed. I’ll make you comfortable.”

  “Yes, take me to your flat. I want to be gone before Ralph gets here. I must be.” She moved slowly back down the hall. “I’ll be five minutes.”

  As she packed her toothbrush, nightdress, a change of clothes, she remembered the policewoman, standing over her in Elim: telling her what she would need. She should have a policewoman now; directionless, enfeebled, her hands moved among her possessions. She heard Daniel downstairs, talking on the telephone. “No, Kit, I don’t think she should come there to you, she’d have to think of something to say to Becky, she can’t face it … Just you and Emma hang on for now, can you? … Its very late, we’re all tired, tomorrow things will be … Yes, to Blakeney, why not? If she still feels she must keep away from Ralph.”

  They are making arrangements for me behind my back, she thought. As if I were a sick or injured person. Which I am, of course. She had an image of herself and Ralph, two sick or injured animals yoked together: dragging their burden, sometimes in circles.

  In the car she began to cry. The lanes were dark, the trees dripping, puddles shining in their headlights; the half-hour journey seemed a lifetime. Holt was deserted: a few shopfronts dimly lit, the pub doors bolted. Daniel parked his car, walked around it to help her out. She needed the help; slumped against him, leaned on his arm. “It’s clearing,” he said, looking up at the sky.

  “Yes.” She scrubbed at her face. Tried to smile.

  Daniel unlocked his door and flooded the night world with
a vast, white, hard light. She climbed a steep staircase, seeing the phantom outlines of drawing boards through a glass door. “Up to the top,” Daniel said.

  “You are being very kind to me.”

  “It’s nothing, Anna.”

  The staircase opened into a large and lofty room, sparely furnished: the walls of exposed flint, the timbers exposed, the floor bare and waxed: its expanse broken only by two dark fringed rugs, their design geometric, their colors somber. Flying carpets, she thought. No clutter anywhere, just those matte black machines that young men have: no windows, but skylights enclosing the weather and the night. Anna stood considering it. “Kit never told me about this.”

  “A way of being outside when you’re inside. Kit hardly comes here.”

  “True. I know.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Very much.” A life free of complexity, she thought. “Can you keep it warm?”

  “Not easily. Can’t have everything. Would you like to bathe your face?” She nodded. She sat on the sofa, and he brought her a bowl of water, some cotton balls, and a small cream towel. He sat down next to her, as if she must be supervised. “Lukewarm water is best,” he advised. “If you have ice, it makes your eyes swell even more.”

  “I’m sorry, Daniel,” she said.

  “Nothing to be sorry for. Better to cry among friends. Look, Anna—all this, with Ralph, it’s ridiculous. An aberration.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know it is. Just one of those things that happen in marriages.”

  “The marriages of middle-aged people, you mean.”

  “Look, everything is easier to face in daylight.” He ventured a smile; took from her fingertips one of the sodden balls of cotton. “In the morning you can have your choice. The greengrocer will be open, so you can have cucumber slices for your eyes. Or tea bags, if you like. I have Earl Grey, Assam, or Darjeeling.”

  “Goodness. What a lot you know about female grief.”

  “My mother, you see.”

  “Since your father died?”