“Emma might like to be a nurse, perhaps,” his mother said. “Your father might let her do that, but I only say might. His frame of mind so much depends on you.”
Ralph said, “You are a wicked woman.”
He didn’t know that she was sick then, and that within a few months she would have the first of her many spells in hospital. Despite her sufferings she would have a long life. He was never sure that he forgave her completely. But he tried.
After his capitulation, his father began to backtrack at once. “For a hobby, Ralphie,” he said. “Keep it for a hobby. But not for what you are seen to do in the eyes of the world. Not for your life’s work.”
“I don’t want the business,” he told his father. “I want my own life. I don’t want anything to do with all that.”
“Very well,” Matthew said equably. “I’ll sell—when the time is right.” He frowned then, as if he might be misunderstood. “There’ll be money for you, Ralph. And there’ll be money for your children. I’ll put it in trust, I’ll arrange it all. You’ll not be poor.”
“This is premature,” Ralph said.
“Oh, you’ll be married and have children soon enough, the years go by … you could be a teacher, Ralphie. You could go to Africa, like your uncle. They have a great need of people, you know. I would never try to confine you. I would never sentence you to a dull life.” He paused, and added, “But I hope one day you will come home to Norfolk.”
For months afterward Ralph never seemed to smile; that was what Emma thought. He kept his shoulders hunched as he walked, as if he wore disappointment like a tight old coat. “Why did you give in to them?” she asked. “Why didn’t you stick by your principles, why didn’t you stick out for the life you had planned?”
He wouldn’t talk to her; occasionally, he would just remark that things were not as they seemed, that he saw there were hidden depths to people.
She did not know how he had been defeated. He made sure he did not tell her.
He had his National Service to do; it would fail to broaden his horizons. He would spend it behind a desk, employed in menial clerical work; or in transit in trucks and trains. He began to recognize his character, as it was reflected back to him by other people. He saw a solid, polite, always reasonable young man, who would sort out problems for the dim and timid, who kept his patience and who did not patronize or sneer; who never cultivated his superiors, either, who seemed to have no ambition and no idea how to make life easy for himself. Was he really like that? He didn’t know.
He was not excessively miserable. It seemed to him that the boredom, the routine discomforts and humiliations, the exile from home, the futility of his daily round, were all simple enough to endure. What he could not endure were the thoughts of his heart, and the frequent dreams he had, in which he murdered his father. Or rather, dreams in which he plotted the murder; or in which he was arrested and tried, when the murder was already done. The bloody act itself was always offstage.
When he was twenty years old these dreams were so persistent that the memory of them stained and dislocated his waking life. By day he entertained, he thought, little animosity to Matthew. Their quarrel had not affected what he believed, it had only affected the course of his career; and one day Matthew would die, or become senile, or concede the point, and he could resume that career. He must be the winner in the long run, he thought.
So these dreams, these inner revolts, bewildered him. He was forced to concede that large areas of his life were beyond his control.
On one of his leaves, instead of going home to Norwich, he went to London with a friend. They stayed at his friend’s sister’s house, Ralph sleeping on the sofa. By day, he went sightseeing; he had never been to London before. One night he lost his virginity for cash, in a room near one of the major railway terminals. Afterward he could never remember which station it had been, or the name of the street, so that in later life he couldn’t be sure whether he ever walked along it; and although the woman told him her name was Norah he had no reason to believe her. He did not feel guilt afterward; it was something to be got through. He had not embarrassed himself; there was that much to be said about it.
On his next leave he was introduced to Anna Martin, only child of the very sound shopkeeper from Dereham.
Three years later, Ralph was teaching in London, in the East End. James had come home and was director of what had been the doss house and was now St. Walstan’s Hostel. Ralph went there most weekends. He slept on a folding bed in the director’s office, and was called during the night to new admissions banging on the door, to men taken sick and to residents who had unexpectedly provided themselves with alcohol first, and then with broken bottles, knives, pokers, or iron bars. He arbitrated in disputes about the ownership of dog-ends, lumpy mattresses and soiled blankets, and became familiar with the customs and rituals and shibboleths of welfare officers and policemen.
On a Sunday night he collected the week’s bedding, and listed it for the laundry, counting the sheets stained with vomit and semen, with excrement and blood. On a Wednesday evening he would drop by for an hour to count the linen in again. The sheets were patched and darned, but stainless. They smelled of the launderer’s press; they were stiff and utterly white. How do they do it, he wondered; how do they make them so utterly white?
He became engaged to Anna. They planned to marry when she graduated from her teacher-training college, and go straight out to Dar es Salaam, where a dear friend of James was a headmaster and where a pleasant house would be waiting for them, and two jobs as teachers of English to young men training for the ministry. Sometimes, on the London pavements, Ralph tried to imagine himself translated to this alien place, to the heat and color of this other life. Letters passed to and fro. Arrangements were in hand.
Anna received all this with equanimity. She was planning the wedding, the quiet wedding. A quiet girl altogether; she wore gray, charcoal, dark blue, simple clothes with clear lines. Ralph thought she was setting herself apart, cultivating almost a nunlike air. They did not discuss their religious beliefs; a certain amount was implied, understood. She had taken on the prospect of Africa without demur. “She hasn’t really said much about it,” Ralph told James.
James said, “Good—I suspect enthusiasm.”
The kind of person not wanted in those climes, he said, was someone who rushed with open arms to embrace the romantic deprivations of the life. Anna’s reasoned agreement was a better foundation for their future than constant chatter about what that future might hold.
Later Ralph would think, when we married it was a leap into the dark: we didn’t know each other at all. But perhaps when you are so young, you don’t even begin to comprehend what there is to know.
As for those nunlike clothes—when he had seen more of the world, and was more accustomed to looking at
