A Change of Climate: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  So it proved. Enock, his mouth moving around words unspoken, dropped his gaze and turned, his head down, and moved hunch-shouldered toward his own quarters.

  There was a silence. Anna looked down at her dusty sandals, as if her eyes were worn out from the effort. Salome spoke, taking her own time, and her voice had a sick gladness in it. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred, oh, madam. You know it is a thing you must not say, you must not say to a person, you are rubbish.”

  “What?” Anna said. She looked up again. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say he was rubbish. I said his excuses were rubbish.”

  “It is the same,” Salome said complacently.

  Anna felt a quiver of doubt inside. There were, she knew, these forbidden phrases in every language; phrases that seemed harmless in themselves, but contained some deadly insult. Uncertainly, she asked, “I’ve said something bad?”

  Salome nodded. “Enock will go away now,” she said.

  “Good,” Anna said. “That is what I want. I don’t like to sack him, you understand? But if he goes because I have spoken the truth, I can hardly be responsible for that. We can have another gardener now. One of the people who lives in the huts may come.” She heard her strange, stilted speech, but didn’t regard it. That was how she talked these days.

  That morning would always stay in her mind. It was many months since rain had fallen. There were bush fires on the hills, ringing the village and the settlements near by. They smouldered, sometimes flared: at night you could see them moving slowly, like an affliction in the blood.

  It was just as Salome had predicted; Enock was gone by nightfall. His room had been cleared, and there was nothing left of him but his distinctive footprints dragged through the dust. Anna found them next morning on the cement steps of the back stoep, outside the kitchen. Perhaps he had come to make amends, to plead his case? If so he had thought better of it, and turned away, and vanished into the bush. By afternoon they had engaged another gardener from among the visitors, and the whitewashed room was occupied. Enock had taken the curtains with him, and Anna sat down at her sewing machine to make another pair.

  She brooded while she worked: so much unpleasantness, over so little. She was reluctant to have perpetrated even the smallest injustice, though she tended to be practical in these matters; to be brisk about other people’s squabbles, as schoolteachers are. Nothing would ever be taught or learned, if you stopped the lesson every two minutes, to hold a court of inquiry: Madam, madam, Moses is stealing my pencil, Tebogo is sitting in my chair, Effat is hitting me and calling me a cat. It seemed to her that this was a case of the schoolroom kind. Perhaps Salome had taken the skirt, out of spite. It was possible. And Salome herself had been claiming for the past month or more that she had seen the gardener leaving Felicia’s room in the early morning. Would Enock steal from his mistress?

  Yes, quite likely, Ralph said, when she put it to him. He seemed to have grown tired suddenly. Or tired of this situation, anyway. “You were right,” he said. “We should have sacked Enock long ago. Anyway, he’s out of our hair now. Not that you have much,” he said to his son. He lifted Matthew above his head. “Up to the roof,” he said. “Up to the roof and up to the moon. What a big strong boy! But when will you get a head of hair like your sister?” Kit watched from her cot, a finger in her mouth, her face dubious. “Up to the moon,” Ralph said. “Up to the moon, baby. And down again.”

  Next day Salome said, “Storms tonight, madam. The weather is corning up.”

  It was August now, and not warm; there were clouds blowing over the hills. “Good,” Anna said. “We need the rain.”

  Let it be a good storm, she thought, one that fills the water tanks. I don’t mind tomorrow’s cold and the damp, even tomorrow’s snakes, as long as we have water to see us through the winter.

  Early in the afternoon, just after school was over, Potluck came in from the garden—plodding, poor dog, as if his feet were lead. It was not like him; usually he bounded and bounced. “What is it, Potluck?” He staggered toward Anna, falling against her legs. “What’s the matter, chicken?” His great butter-colored head drooped, nuzzling her shin. Then suddenly his body contorted. He seemed to shiver all over, in a violent spasm or fit; then his ribs arched, and he began to vomit.

  Anna watched him, stepping back in shock, calling out to Ralph to come and see; but Ralph was not in the house. Potluck’s body seemed to shrink, as if his bones were contracted by his efforts. And yet there was no effort, because a stinking liquid seemed to flow from him as if a tap had been turned on inside. Yellow-green, viscous, the fluid pooled about his feet, washed across the carpet, widened about the room. Its stench rose up; it hit Anna like a fist. She herself gagged; it was like nothing she had smelled before, a hellish compound of rotting plant life and burnt rubber, a smell of panic and morbidity and flesh revolted against itself. On and on it went, a ceaseless flow. She had heard of cancers, of malignities that are so foul that even the most Christian of nurses must enter the rooms with masks. Was that what she was inhaling now? She wanted to turn and run, skitter down the steps of the front stoep and out into the air. But pity for the creature gripped her; it held her to the spot. She saw the dog’s ribs heave, saw his eyes turn up into his skull; hand over her mouth, she saw his whipped crouch, his buckling joints. Potluck fell, lurching stiffly onto his side; but still that revolting fluid pumped on, and on. How could his body contain so much? She moaned his name; oh, Potluck, my little dog, what has happened to you? She crouched beside him and put her hands on him. His fur was wet, and a thousand pulses seemed to jump at her through his side.

  But as she touched him, the flow stopped. The feculent pool ceased to grow. With a final expulsive effort the dog heaved his body clear of the floor, like an animal galvanized in an experiment. He dropped back, thudding against the floorboards. He drew a great breath, shuddering as a human being might. His whole body twitched, and his lips curled back from his teeth. He closed his eyes.

  But Potluck was not dead. When she put her hand on his head, his tail moved, once. It beat the floor, spreading the hideous efflux to her skirt. She looked up, saw Ralph in the doorway, staring down at them. “Poisoned?” he whispered.

  They said nothing further. They were afraid to speak. They picked up the dog and carried him to the veranda next to their bedroom; they sponged the filth from his coat, wrapped him in blankets, and dabbed water on to his dry muzzle, hoping he would lick. Anna sat by him while Ralph dragged the ruined carpet into the air, and threw buckets of water and disinfectant onto the floor, and swept out the froth and scum.

  When he finished, and returned to Anna, Potluck was licking water from her fingers. His eyes were still closed, and the orbs danced and jerked under his lids. “I think he’s saved himself,” Ralph said. “God knows what it was, but no doubt if it had been in his system another hour it would have killed him.”

  Potluck is a big dog, Anna thought. The poison for a dog would kill a child, kill two babies. A horrible rush of fear swept over her, left her nauseous, weak, clinging to the windowsill. “What can it have been?” Her voice shook. “What can he have eaten?”

  “Something left for him,” Ralph said. “Bait.” He dropped his head. “I’m sorry, Anna. Enock’s final act of spite, I think. He never liked Potluck and he knew that we loved him, I have seen his lip curl when he has heard me talk to him. You were quite right about the man, I should have listened, you were completely right and I was completely wrong.” He held out his hand. She took it. “Anyway, he’s failed.” He stooped, patted the animal’s side. He looked vindicated, as if good had won out. As if it had prevailed. As if it always would.

  For the rest of the day Anna checked Potluck at intervals, first every ten minutes, then every half hour, then on the hour; keeping a fearful vigil, as she had for the twins in their first months. She would have brought him to a more convenient place, but he was an outdoor dog, and did not understand carpets and furniture; to lie on the stoep was as much as he could tolerate. By dus
k he had heaved himself from his side into a more alert position, and his strange swivel-mounted ears had begun to move in accordance with the sounds of the household and the compound. But he was halfhearted about his vigilance, and when he tried a bark he had to ponder it; the sound was muffled, and afterwards he looked bemused and exhausted. “Never mind, Potluck,” Anna said, rubbing his head. “You’re off duty tonight.”

  “He’ll be all right now, won’t he?” Ralph said. “I would have cried, I think, if we’d lost Potluck. I love him for his simple and greedy character.”

  “He’s like the twins,” Anna said. “That is their character, exactly.”

  He took Anna in his arms, pressing her head against his shoulder, feeling her shiver from the stresses of the day. He stroked her back, murmuring meaningless, reassuring words, pet names; but he was shot through by self-doubt, shaken inside by it. This business with the gardener, it had bothered him, disturbed him a good deal. Anna would say, oh, of course there are injustices, there are miscalculations: they all even out. But he did not believe that. He did not say so to his wife, but he thought her attitude faintly repulsive; it is fatalistic, he thought, it releases us from the responsibility which we should properly take. We should do our best, he felt, always our best—consult our consciences, consult our capabilities, then, whenever we can, push out against unjust circumstance.

  Enock was a crook, a petty criminal, perhaps accused of the one crime he didn’t commit; all acts of injustice are magnified in the victim’s eyes. The error may be irretrievable, Ralph thought; we have made a choice about him, perhaps the wrong one, but what can we do now? The situation could not stand still. We had to choose.

  Lying awake sometimes, listening to the sounds of the bush, he brooded on the larger thoughts that routine keeps at bay. This I could do, or that … Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe. If in the course of his life he had done one thing differently, one tiny thing, perhaps he would not be where he is now; his frail wife in his arms, his twins on the knee of their dark nanny, his convalescent dog at his feet, ribs heaving with delight at mere survival. Everything in the universe declines to chaos and waste; he knows this, he is not so poor a scientist. But he believes that his choices have been the right ones, that this is where he wishes to be; believes it simply, as he believed in Bible stories when he was a child. If his choices have led to this, have brought him to this moment, they have an intrinsic rightness; as for those other worlds, the alternative universes, he will not inquire. And surely, in the end, he says, my will is free? The world is not as Anna says. There is no dispensation that guarantees or provides for an evening-up of the score. If we are not to be mere animals, or babies, we must always choose, and choose to do good.

  In choosing evil we collude with the principle of decay, we become mere vehicles of chaos, we become subject to the laws of a universe which tends back toward dissolution, the universe the Devil owns. In choosing to do good we show we have free will, that we are God-designed creatures who stand against all such laws.

  So I will be good, Ralph thought. That is all I have to do.

  The storm broke that night, around nine o’clock. Ralph and Anna had lit a fire in the twins’ room, and left them, warm and drowsy, under Felicia’s eye. The twins did not wake much at night now, and Anna was happy to attend to them when they did; so usually the nanny would have been back in her own quarters. But the rain was heavy, unrelenting, cold like frozen metal and falling like metal rods. On her haunches before the fire, Felicia rubbed her shins and indicated that she would stay; and her own bedstead, with its two plump pillows and crocheted blanket, was more inviting than the battering wind outside.

  The world was full of noise, you had to raise your voice against it; the metal rain drummed the roof, and the wind moaned. Anna stood at the window, watching sheet lightning illuminate the garden, the fig tree, the mutilated fig tree that was part of Enock’s legacy. It lit up the straggling boundary fence of the mission compound, the shacks of their visitors—lighting them as they had never been lit before, because there were people in those shacks who could not afford candles. The inhabitants would be awash in brown water and mud, their roofs carried off perhaps, their cooking fires dowsed, their cardboard suitcases spoiled and their bundles and blankets and Sunday clothes now sodden. Tomorrow, she thought, we will tackle everything. Nothing can be done tonight, nothing can be done while this rain is still falling. She shivered. Ralph put into her hand a glass half full of Cape brandy. She stood sipping it, still at the window; behind her the paraffin lamp guttered and flared. The coarse spirit warmed her. “Fetch Potluck,” she said to Ralph. “Carry him in. We could put him by the fire, it would do him good. I know he doesn’t like to be inside but he might like the fire. Besides, if the wind veers round, that stoep will be awash within a minute.”

  Ralph went out, a torch in his hand, down the passage to the back of the house. No respite; still the wind howled, the rain slashed in its rhythm against roof and wall and window. He heard the dog lift his head and whimper. Ralph clicked his tongue at him. “Come on, Potluck.”

  Potluck tried to get to his feet, his paws scraping on the polished floor. But the effort was beyond him; he fell back and lay miserably on his side. Ralph put down his torch, squatted by him, heaved him into his arms; his legs thrust out stiffly, Potluck grunted, half in indignation and half in relief.

  It was dark in the house’s central corridor, and Ralph guided himself by letting his shoulder brush the wall; he was on his way back to the sitting room, to Anna standing by the fire with her brandy. Now Potluck kicked his legs, as if he would like to make efforts for himself—so outside the kitchen Ralph lowered him gently onto his feet. Wagging his tail feebly, the dog crawled away under the kitchen table. “Come to the fire,” Ralph said to him. “Come on with me, Potluck.”

  From outside the back door, Ralph heard a little noise, a scrape, a cry. It was a woman’s voice, very small: Baas, let us in. He thought, it is our visitors, the poor people in their shacks; they are panic-stricken, their houses are carried off, they want shelter. The thought crossed his mind: your dog has been poisoned today, there is a man with a grudge against you, you are not entirely safe. Then he heard the voice again, little and pleading: Baas, we are washed away, we are frightened, let us in.

  And so, without more thought, he made his choice; he turned the key, stepped back, and drew the stiff bolt. As he swung open the broad, heavy back door, he felt it pushed, smashed back into his face; and he was not then surprised that Enock stood there, his face mild, curious, composed. Enock reached inside his jacket. As calmly as a man takes out his wallet—as calmly as a man in a grocer’s shop, offering to pay—Enock took from inside his coat a small hatchet.

  At once, Ralph smashed it from his hand. He had time to think, and he thought at once of his superior strength; so many years of full-cream milk, of lean beef, of muscle-building protein, and beneath his hand this poor felon, whose cloth jacket tore under his hand, ripping at the seam. Enock slid along the wall, his hands thrown up in front of his face.

  Ralph smashed his fist into the man’s jaw. He felt the intricate resistance of tooth and bone, felt pain in his own hand; and as he closed in on the man to throttle him he felt the slithering resistance of his sinews, of his stringy muscles and green bones. He had ripped away not just the jacket but the familiar sweat-soaked, third-hand shirt, and he pushed against the wall clammy hairless flesh, pounding his fist above the man’s heart as if that would stop it, adding this rhythm, thump, thump, to the drumming of the rain. He wanted nothing but death, nothing but to feel Enock wilt and stagger, droop, retch, fall, and then his feet would do the rest; and already in a kind of red-out of thought, a bloody dream, he saw his booted foot kicking in the delicate skull, splintering bone, scattering teeth, thudding and rebounding, thudding and
rebounding like a machine, until the creature was dead.

  He saw this in his mind; yet at the same time sensed movement in the darkness behind him. He heard the dog stir, try to get to his feet, fall back. Then a dull blow, very hard, between his shoulder blades. He believed he had been hit with some huge, blunt object, like a fence pole. His mind filled with a picture of damage, of a huge bruise like a black sun. He turned around on this presence behind him, moving more slowly than before, and put the palm of his hand against a looming face, and shoved it away. It was a stranger’s face, and though later he would think and think about it he would never be able to identify it. He also wondered, later, at how long it had taken him to realize that he was bleeding. The dull blow was a knife wound, a wound between his ribs; and as his blood began to flow, he fell against the kitchen wall.

  The next moments were lost, would always be lost. He had a vague consciousness of his own heart, an organ he had given no thought before. Unregarded, unpraised, heart beats and beats: but heart jibs now.

  He lay down, passively, curiously tired. He was waiting to die. Let me die, his mind said, dying is not too bad. It is too much trouble to stay alive. I am warm now. This easy emission of blood is to be desired; flow on, and on. I am warm now, and soon I will be safe.

  When the stranger entered the room where she stood by the fireplace, her drink in her hand, Anna did not scream, because she found she had no voice; she knew the essence of fear, which is like a kind of orgasm, and she was numb and white and still as she listened to the man’s demand for money, as she took the keys from the top drawer of the sideboard, opened up the mission cashbox and gave him what was inside. Without looking at them, the man thrust the notes into his pockets with his free hand. He spilled some coins; he did not seem to care about them, and yet those coins too were money, a lot of money. She watched them roll away, under the furniture. The man kept his eyes on her face. So, she thought, have they come here to kill us?