A Change of Climate: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  A CHANGE OF

  CLIMATE

  ALSO BY HILARY MANTEL

  Every Day Is Mother’s Day

  Vacant Possession

  A Place of Greater Safety

  Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

  An Experiment in Love

  The Giant, O’Brien

  Fluid Giving Up the Ghost

  A CHANGE OF

  CLIMATE

  HILARY MANTEL

  Picador

  Henry Holt and Company

  New York

  A CHANGE OF CLIMATE. Copyright © 1994 by Hilary Mantel. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  The lines from W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” are reprinted from Collected Poems, by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Designed by Paula R. Szafranski

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mantel, Hilary.

  A change of climate : a novel / by Hilary Mantel

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-42288-1

  I. Title

  PR6063.A438C44 1997 96-39843

  823’.914—dc21 CIP

  First published in the United Kingdom by Viking

  First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

  First Picador Edition: September 2003

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Jenny Naipaul

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, except that of the Archbishop of Cape Town, which is based on his real-life counterpart, Geoffrey Clayton. I have used some of his words, taken from writings and sermons.

  The settlement of Mosadinyana is fictional. The township of Elim is invented too, but I am indebted to the memoirs of Hannah Stanton, who served in the township of Lady Selborne.

  Cases similar to that of the Eldreds may be found in the Law Reports of Botswana.

  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871:

  “We are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability …”

  Job 4:7:

  “Consider, what innocent ever perished, or where have the righteous been destroyed?”

  A CHANGE OF

  CLIMATE

  1970

  Sad Cases, Good Souls

  One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.

  The woman Joan was sixty years old, and wore a polyester dress from a charity shop. A housewifely type, she had chosen to drip her blood into the kitchen sink. When Kit touched her on the elbow, she threw down the knife onto the draining board and attempted with her good hand to cover Kit’s eyes.

  By this stage in her life Kit was not much surprised by anything. As she ducked under the woman’s arm she thought, that’s our bread knife, if you don’t mind; but she said, “You shouldn’t be doing that, Joan, why don’t you come away from the sink, why don’t you sit down on this chair and I’ll get the first-aid kit?”

  The woman allowed herself to be led to a chair at the kitchen table. Kit pulled a clean tea towel out of a drawer and wrapped it around Joan’s wrist. The towel was a checked one, red and white; Joan’s reluctant blood seeped black against the cloth. Her cuts were light, early, indecisive: the practice cuts. “Just wiggle your fingers,” Kit said, “make sure you haven’t done any damage.” The womanlooked down at her hand in dry-eyed dread, while the child scrambled on a stool and brought down a box from a cupboard.

  “Lucky it’s half term,” Kit said, unpacking the bandages and the round-ended scissors. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been here. I was upstairs. I was reading a book. It’s called Children of the New Forest. Have you read it? It’s about a family like ours, two boys and two girls, but they live a long time ago, in the olden days.”

  I’m all fingers and thumbs, she thought. She heard her voice, running on. She was learning first aid at school. They told you, “Reassure the patient.” “They live in the forest by themselves.” Joan nodded: again her dumb, dazed nod. “They’re Royalists. They have to hide from their enemies.”

  Kit was afraid that Joan might faint, dropping as a dead weight to the fiagstoned floor. “I’ll get you a glass of water,” she said. “Or I dare say you could have hot sweet tea.”

  She thought, poor Joan. Perhaps dead is what she wants to be. It’s just as Dad always says: you can never find a sharp knife when you need one.

  As she stood filling the kettle, she heard her mother’s car. She knew the crunch and scrape and wheeze of it, as it lurched up the drive. Relief washed through her body, turned her legs to water. She put the kettle on the hob, and was wiping out the sink with disinfectant when her mother came in.

  Anna put her bags down on the table. She saw, more in sorrow than in surprise, Joan’s figure slumped across it. “Tea for me as well, Kit,” she said.

  That night Kit caught the tail-end of a whispered conversation: “You didn’t say she was a suicide risk, Ralph.”

  “I didn’t say because I didn’t know.” She closed her bedroom door; she didn’t want to listen to her parents’ private thoughts.

  Three days later, she came into the kitchen and found her mother on her hands and knees by the sink, working on the fiags with a scrubbing brush. “The blood’s gone,” Kit said, puzzled. “I wiped it up.”

  Anna didn’t answer her, but rose from the floor, lifted the bucket, and threw the soapy water into the sink.

  By this time Joan had left, taking everything she owned in the two carrier bags with which she had arrived. Sudden exits were not infrequent among their visitors; they were not like the visitors that other households get. Ralph made inquiries of the police, the Salvation Army, and the Department of Health and Social Security, but he drew a blank. When Anna came to check the first-aid kit— restocking it was one of her responsibilities—she noticed that Joan had taken an extra bandage with her. They saw this as a hopeful sign.

  In those years, when the children were growing up, the house was full of people like Joan. Ralph brought some of them from the hostel in London, which was maintained by the charitable trust for which he worked. Others he took in when Social Services didn’t know what to do with them, or when there were no beds at the local psychiatric hospital. Sometimes they turned up of their own accord, crouching out of the wind in one of the outhouses until he came home. “So-and-so’s a sad case,” he would say; and over the years, this was what the family came to call them: the Sad Cases. Other people he called Good Souls. “Your aunt Emma is giving so-and-so a lift to her drugs clinic in Norwich—she’s a good soul.”

  And this was how the world was divided, when Kit was growing up—into Good Souls and Sad Cases. There was no wickedness in it.

  ONE

  On the day of Felix Palmer’s funeral, his wife, Ginny, met his mistress, Emma. They had met before, of course. The coun
ty of Norfolk is not so populous that they could have avoided each other. Their conduct at these meetings had been shaped by Ginny’s lofty and willful ignorance of the situation: by Emma’s sangfroid: by Felix’s natural desire to maintain an arrangement that suited him.

  Over the years they had coincided in drafty parish halls, in charity committee rooms, and at the caucuses of local groups concerned with the protection of what, in the decade just beginning, would be known as “the environment.” They had bumped into each other in Norwich, shopping in Jarrold’s department store; they had ex-changed small talk at exhibitions of craftwork, and occupied neigh-boring seats at the theater.

  Once, traveling to London, they had found themselves sole oc-cupants of a first-class carriage. For half an hour they had found enough that was anodyne to pass the time. Then Ginny, excusing herself with a smile, delved into her bag and pulled out a fat paper-back book. She retired behind it. Emma examined its cover. A svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple, stood before a manor house with anachronistic chimney stacks. The title was in florid gold script: Wyfe to Crookback. Emma looked out of the window. The landscape was a sad East England green; crows wheeled over the fields. As they moved from the edge of England to its heart, Emma herself took out a book.

  They parted at sooty Liverpool Street with a nod and a smile. London forced no collusion on them, but Norfolk did. A handful of farming and professional families played host to both. At a round of weddings and christenings they had made polite, even warm conversation. At a dozen New Year’s Eve parties they had wished each other luck and happiness: and sometimes almost meant it.

  Now, on this February morning, Ginny stood surrounded by a knot of mourners. Friends and business associates had turned out for the occasion; Felix had been well liked in the district. The church occupied high ground, and a ripping wind billowed coats and snapped at woolen head scarves and brought a flush to aching faces. The mourners could sense the presence of the sea, hidden from them by a belt of pines.

  Some of them lingered in the church porch, reading the notices about flower rotas, dusting, and brass cleaning; others stood among the gravestones, looking depressed. They had double-parked in the open area beyond the church gate, and would have to wait their turn to get away. Ginny, leaning on the arm of her son, moved from group to group, offering a few tactful words to soothe their feelings; she understood that death is embarrassing.

  Her own family—her son, Daniel, who was an architect, her daughter, Claire, who was a buyer at Harrods—had been as gentle and as careful of her feelings as anyone could wish. But—even as she deferred the moment—Ginny felt that it was Emma to whom she wished to speak, to whom naturally she should be speaking. Patting her son’s arm, smiling up and dismissing him, she made her way across the grass with a short, precisely regulated stride, her high heels spiking holes in the ground like some primitive seed drill.

  Ginny Palmer was a sharp, neat, Wallis Simpson sort of woman, to whom black lent an added definition. As she advanced on Emma, she took from her pocket a crisp lace-edged handkerchief, folded it very small and polished the tip of her nose: a gesture quite unnecessary, but somehow drawn out of her by the occasion. You see me, the widow: fastidious but distraught.

  Emma Eldred kept her hands in her pockets; she had forgotten her gloves. She wore the coat that she had worn for years, to go out on her doctor’s rounds, to go shopping, to go out walking, and to meet Felix. She saw no need for any other coat, in her ordinary life or on a day like this; it was dark, it was decent, and—she felt obscurely—it was something Felix would have recognized.

  Emma Eldred was not a large woman, but gave the appearance of it: forty-eight years old, her face innocent of cosmetics, her broad feet safely encased in scuffed shoes decorated by leather tassels which somehow failed to cut a dash. Emma had known Ginny’s husband since childhood. She might have married him; but Felix was not what Emma considered a serious man. Their relationship had, she felt, borne all the weight it could. As Ginny approached, Emma shrunk into herself, inwardly but not outwardly. A stranger, only partly apprised of the situation, would have taken Ginny for the smart little mistress, and Emma for the tatty old wife.

  The women stood together for a moment, not speaking; then as the wind cut her to the bird bones, Ginny took a half step closer, and stood holding her mink collar up to her throat. “Well, Ginny,” Emma said, after a moment. “I’m not here to act as a windbreak.” She drew her right hand from her pocket, and gave Ginny a pat on the shoulder. It was a brusque gesture, less of consolation than of encouragement; what you might give a weary nag, as it faces the next set of hurdles.

  Ginny averted her face. Tears sprang into her eyes. She took out her tiny handkerchief again. “Why, Emma?” she said. She sounded fretful, but as if her fretfulness might turn to rage. “Tell me why. You’re a doctor.”

  “But not his doctor.”

  “He wasn’t ill. He never had a day’s illness.”

  Emma fixed her gaze on the tassels of her shoes. She imagined herself looking right through her dead lover; through his customary tweed jacket, his lambswool pullover, his striped shirt, through the skin, through the flesh, into the arteries where Felix’s blood moved slowly, a dark underground stream with silted banks. “No one could have known,” she said. “No one could have spared you this shock, Ginny. Will you be all right, my dear?”

  “There’s plenty of insurance,” Ginny said. “And the house. I’ll move of course. But not just yet.”

  “Don’t do anything in a hurry,” Emma said. She had meant her question in a broad sense, not as an inquiry into Ginny’s financial standing. She raised her head, and saw that they were being watched. The eyes of the other mourners were drawn to them, however hard those mourners tried to look away. What do they all think, Emma wondered: that there will be some sort of embarrassing scene? Hardly likely. Not at this time. Not in this place. Not among people like ourselves, who have been reared in the service of the great god Self-Control. “Ginny,” she said, “you mustn’t stand about here. Let Daniel drive you home.”

  “A few people are coming back,” Ginny said. She looked at Emma in faint surprise, as if it were natural that she would know the arrangements. “You should come back too. Let me give you some whiskey. A freezing day like this … Still, better than rain. Claire’s staying on over the weekend.” Ginny raised her hand, and twitched at her collar again. “Emma, I’d like to see you. Like you to come to the house … Mrs. Gleave is making vol-au-vents …” Her voice tailed off entirely.

  Emma’s brother, Ralph Eldred, loomed purposefully behind them: a solid figure, hands scrunched into the pockets of his dark wool overcoat. Ginny looked up. The sight of Ralph seemed to restore her. “Ralph, thank you for coming,” she said. “Come back with us and have some whiskey.”

  “I should take myself off,” Ralph said. “I have to go to Norwich this afternoon to a meeting. But naturally if you want me to, Ginny … if I can be of any help …” He was weighing considerations, as he always did; his presence was wanted on every hand, and it was simply a question of where he was needed most.

  “Why, no,” Ginny said. “It was a courtesy, Ralph. Do run along.”

  She managed a smile. It was her husband’s underoccupation that had freed him for his long years of infidelity; but Ralph’s days were full, and everybody knew it. There were advantages, she saw, in being married to a man who thought only of work, God, and family; even though the Eldred children did look so down-at-heel, and had been so strangely brought up, and even though Ralph’s wife was worn to a shadow slaving for his concerns.

  Ralph’s wife Anna wore a neat black pillbox hat. It looked very smart, though it was not remotely in fashion. Lingering in the background, she gave Ginny a nod of acknowledgment and sympa-thy. It was an Anna Eldred nod, full of I-do-not-intrude. Ginny returned it; then Ralph took his wife’s arm, and squired her away at a good clip toward their parked car.

  Ginny looked after them. “You wonde
r about marriage,” she said suddenly. “Are marriages all different, or all alike?”

  Emma shrugged, shoulders stiff inside her old coat. “No use asking me, Ginny.”

  Inside the car, Ralph said, “It’s not right, you know. It’s not, is it? For Emma to find out like that. More or less by chance. And only when it was all over.”

  “It was all over very quickly,” Anna said. “From what I gather.”

  “Yes, but to have no priority in being told—”

  “I expect you think Ginny should have rung her from the hospital, do you? Just given her a tinkle from the intensive care unit?”

  “—to have no right to know. That’s what galls me. It’s inhuman. And now Ginny gets all the sympathy, all the attention. I’m not saying she doesn’t need and deserve it. But Emma gets nothing, not a word. Only this public embarrassment.”

  “I see—you think that as Emma was the maitresse entitre, she should be allowed to put on a show of her own?” Anna sighed. “I’m sure Felix has left her some fine diamonds, and a chateau for her old age.”

  A contractor’s van drew up in front of the Eldreds’ car, adding to the traffic jam; restoration work was going on at the church. Two workmen got out, and began to untie a ladder from the roofrack. A lesser man with Ralph’s schedule would have fretted at the delay. But Ralph showed his impatience only by a little tapping of his forefinger against the steering wheel. There was a school nearby, and the voices of children drifted from the playground, carried on the wind like gulls’ cries.

  The couple who blocked them drove off, nodding, raising hands in’ a stiff-fingered wave. The contractor moved his van. Ralph pulled out onto the road. Anna saw the children dashing and bumping and careening behind a fence: bullets trussed in duffle coats, their faces hidden under hoods.