“I see—you think that as Emma was the
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.
The route home lay inland, through narrow lanes between farms; flat airy fields, where tractors lay at rest. Ralph pulled up to let a duck dawdle across the road, on its way from a barnyard to nowhere. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it. Emma’s got nothing. Nothing. She’s given twenty years to Felix and now she’s on her own.”
“Emma’s given something,” Anna said. “I think to say that she’s given twenty years is being melodramatic.”
“Why is it,” Ralph said, “that women manage to be so cool in these situations? What’s all this keeping up a good front? Why do they think they have to do it? I heard Ginny talking about
“I only mean, that Emma’s life has suited her. She had what she wanted—a part-time man. Felix didn’t use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If she’d chosen to. She didn’t have to wait on Felix.”
“Married? Could she?” Ralph turned his head.
“Look out,” Anna said, with a languor born of experience. Ralph put his foot on the brake; a farm truck slowly extruded its back end from a muddy and half-concealed driveway.
“Sorry,” Ralph said. “Could she? Who could she have married then?”
“Oh Ralph, I don’t mean any one person, not this particular man or that particular man … I only mean that if she had wanted to marry, if that had been what she preferred, she could have done it. But marriage entails things, like learning to boil eggs. Things that are beyond Emma.”
“I can’t see men beating a path to her door.” Ralph edged the car painfully down the lane, squeezing it past the truck, which had got stuck. “Not Emma. No beauty.”
“Felix liked her.”
“Felix was a creature of habit.”
“Most men are.”
Ralph fell silent. He was very fond of his sister; no one should think otherwise. Emma was kind, clever, wise … and lonely, he’d supposed: a little figure glimpsed on a river bank, while the pleasure craft sped by. This notion of her as a manipulator, of Felix as a little fish that she played at the end of her stick and hook … Seems unlikely to me, he thought. But then, what do I know?
The journey took them a half hour, through back roads and lanes, through straggling hamlets of red brick or flint cottages, whose only amenity was a postbox; between agribusiness fields, wide open to a vast gray sky. Ralph pulled up with a jolt at the gate of their house. Anna shot forward, one hand on the dashboard and one on her hat. “Can I leave you here? I’m late.”
As she unraveled her seat belt, Ralph turned to look at her. “Those people at the funeral, all those friends of Felix’s, how many of them do you think knew about him and Emma?”
Anna took her house keys from her bag. “Every one of them.”
“How did Ginny bear it?”
“Easily. Or so everyone says.” Anna swung her door open and her legs out, setting her high heels daintily into the mud. “What time will you be back?”
“Seven o’clock. Maybe eight.”
Nine, then, Anna thought. “Everybody knew except you,” she said. “I suppose you still feel a fool.”
“I suppose I do.” Ralph reached over to close the passenger door. “But then, I still don’t see why I should have known. Not as if their affair was the flamboyant sort. Not as if it was …“—he searched for the word—”… torrid.”
Torrid, Anna thought. She watched him drive away. Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.
TWO
Anna, as Ralph vanished from view, plucked the afternoon post from the wooden mailbox by the gate; then picked her way over rutted ground to the front door. The drive was more of a farm track than anything else; often it looked as if a herd of beasts had been trampling it. The mailbox was something new. Julian, her eldest boy, had made it. Now the postman’s legs were spared, if not the family’s.
The Red House was a farmhouse that had lost its farm; it retained a half acre of ground upon which grew sundry bicycle sheds, a dog kennel and a wire dog run with the wire broken, a number of leaning wooden huts filled with the detritus of family life, and an unaccountable horse trough, very ancient and covered with lichen. Recently, since Julian had been at home, the hedges had been cut back and some ground cleared, and the rudiments of a vegetable garden were appearing. The house and its ramshackle surroundings formed a not-displeasing organic whole; Julian’s attempt at agriculture seemed an imposition on the natural state of things, as if it were the bicycle sheds that were the work of nature, and the potatoes the work of man.
The house itself was built of red brick, and stood side-on to the road. It had a tiled roof, steeply pitched; in
