A Change of Climate: A Novel

At least, that was how Ralph supposed they thought. For when it came to his opinions, his desires, it was a very different story.

“So you don’t want to go into the business, Ralphie.”

This was how his father joined battle: obliquely, from the flank. He made it seem that there were only simple issues at stake, a change in family expectations. But soon enough, his weighty battalions were deployed. The issues went beyond the family. They became larger than Ralph had bargained for. They became universal.

First his father said: “Ralph, you’ve never given me any trouble. I thought you believed in the religion that you were brought up in.”

“I do,” Ralph said.

“But now you are setting yourself up against it.”

“No.”

“But you must be, Ralph. We believe that God created the world, as is set down in the Bible. I believe it. Your mother believes it.”

“Uncle James doesn’t believe it.”

“James is not here,” his father said flatly. It was incontrovertible; James was in the Diocese of Zanzibar.

“I believe it as a metaphor,” Ralph said. “But I believe in evolution too.”

“Then you are a very muddle-headed young man,” his father said. “How can you entertain two contradictory beliefs at the same time?”

“But they aren’t contradictory. Father, most people got all this over with by the turn of the century. Nobody thinks what you think anymore. Nobody thinks there’s God on one side and Darwin on the other.”

“When I was a young man,” Matthew said, “I attended a lecture. It was given by a professor, he was a distinguished scholar, he was no fool or half-baked schoolboy. He said to us, ’What is Darwinism? I will tell you. Darwinism is atheism,’ he said. I have always remembered those words. I have seen nothing in my life since to convince me that he was wrong.”

“But if you thought about it now,” Ralph said, “if you thought about it all over again, you might be able to see that he was wrong.” Something bubbled inside him: intellectual panic? “What’s the point of just repeating what you were told when you were a boy? You can be an evolutionist, Darwinian or some other kind, and still believe that everything that exists is intended by God. It’s an old debate, it’s stale, it was never necessary in the first place.”

“My own beliefs,” his father said, “have never been subject to the vagaries of fashion.”

Days of war followed. Silences. Ralph couldn’t eat. Food stuck in his dry mouth; it was like trying to swallow rocks, he thought. He hated quarrels, hated silences too: those silences that thickened the air in rooms and made it electric.

Matthew closed in on him, and so did his mother: a pincer movement. “Are you going to take evidence, what you call evidence, from a few bones and shells, and use them to oppose the word of God?”

“I told you,” Ralph said, “that there is no opposition.”

“There is opposition from me,” his father said: shifting the ground.

“It is impossible to have a discussion with you.”

“No doubt,” Matthew said. “I am not a scientist, am I? I am so backward in my outlook that I wonder you condescend to talk to me at all. I wonder you condescend to stay under my roof. Good God, boy—look around you. Look at the design of the world. Do you think some blind stupid mechanism controls it? Do you think we got here out of chance?”

“Please be calm,” Ralph said. He tried to take a deep breath, but it seemed to stick halfway. “It’s no good waving your arms at me and saying, look at God’s creation. You don’t have to force it down my throat, the miracles of nature, the design of the universe—I know about those, more, I’d say, than you.” (More than you, he thought, who have lived your life with your eyes on your well-blacked boots.) “If I believe in God I believe from choice. Not because of evidence. From choice. Not because I’m compelled.”

“You believe from choice?’ Matthew was revolted. “From choice? Where did you get this stupid notion from?”

“I thought of it myself.”

“Can you believe in anything you like, then? Can you believe the moon is made of green cheese? Is there no truth you recognize?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said quietly. “We used to go to sermons that said the truth was what God revealed, that you don’t find the truth by looking for it. At least, that’s what I think they were saying. Well—not to put too fine a point on it—I can’t wait around all my life. If I’ve been given the faculty of reasoning, I may as well use it to dig out what truth I can.”

“You’ll kill me, Ralph,” his father said. “Your pride and your self-regard will kill me.”

Ralph was afraid his father might ask, with one old divine, “What can the geologist tell you about the Rock of Ages?” He spared him that, but not episodes of choking rage, which terrified Ralph and made him regret what he had begun.

His mother took him aside. “You are making your father very unhappy,” she said. “I have never seen him more miserable. And he has done everything for you, and would give you anything. If you do this thing, if you insist on it, if you insist on this as your life’s work, I’ll not be able to hold my head up before our friends. They’ll say we have not brought you up properly.”

“Look,” Ralph said, “what I want is to go to university. I want to read geology. Just that, that’s all. I didn’t set out to upset anybody. That was the last thing on my mind.”

“I know you have your ambitions,” Dorcas said, with that frayed sigh only mothers can perform. “But your