A Change of Climate: A Novel

Ralph invited them to Norfolk sometimes, for a week’s country air. He would bring the clients too, packing them carefully into his car with their Tesco bags and driving them through Essex and Suffolk toward a warm family home—though because of the state of the central heating, “warm” was only a figure of speech. Anna, he believed, liked to see new faces. The children were used to what they called Visitors. But nowadays they would look at the arrivals, and affect a greater bewilderment than they felt: “Is she a Sad Case, or a Good Soul?”

There were nights when Ralph sat up till dawn, talking on the telephone to some suicidal adolescent in London; there were nights when he would jump into the car and roar off—this too being a qualified term, considering the state of the Citroen—to deal with some catastrophe that Richard’s jargon was not equal to. Ralph had a plainer way of doing things than Richard could imagine. He was calm and patient, he expected the best from people, he never gave up on them. They recognized this; and often, from plain weariness in the face of his implacable optimism, they would decide to live, and to behave better.

Sometimes, rude questioners would ask him why the Trust didn’t move its entire operation to London, since the need was such a crying need. Then Ralph would talk about the glum, silent forms of rural deprivation: the bored teenagers kicking their heels at a bus stop waiting for a bus that never came; the pensioners in isolated cottages by overgrown railway lines, without telephone and heat and mains drainage. He would talk so long and hard about branch-line closures that his questioner would wish he had never opened his mouth.

The fact was—he was the first to admit it—Ralph and the dwindling resources he could command were wanted in too many places. He was torn, divided. The demands of the world dragged on his conscience; but did he do enough for his own family? Sometimes he felt a strange physical force—little hands pulling at him, invisible hands plucking at his clothes.

So, today—he had just one more letter to do: Church of England Children’s Society. Then Norwich for the committee—and then he would race back for dinner, because Kit was coming home, and Anna was cooking a big meal, and Julian would be bringing his girl over from her farm near the sea.

He applied stamps to his letters. Yawned. But, he told himself, don’t despise these little things; they add up. A tiny series of actions, of small duties well performed, eventually does some good in the world.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Midafternoon, Emma collected her niece Kit from the station in Norwich. Kit ran across the forecourt with her bag; an Easter breeze lifted her hair, fanned it out around her head. Jumping into the car, she shook it like a lion shaking his mane. She kissed her aunt, squeezed her shoulders. Her eyes were leonine: wide, golden and vigilant. How handsome she’s become, Emma thought: a heartbreaker. She remembered Ralph in his National Service days, coming home on leave. Ralph had been too remote to break hearts.

“You can have tea with me,” Emma said. “Then I’ll take you home. Oh, don’t worry, I’ve bought a shop cake. I haven’t launched myself on anything ambitious.”

Emma lived in a neat, double-fronted, red-brick cottage, which stood on the High Street in Foulsham. Foulsham is not a town, by the standards of the rest of England: it has a few small shops, a post office, a church, a Baptist Chapel, and a number of public houses. It has a war memorial and a parish magazine, a village hall, a Playing Fields Committee, a Women’s Institute, and a mobile wet-fish van. A hundred yards from Emma’s house was the school Kit attended when she was five; fifty yards away was the shop where she used to buy sweets after school on her way to her aunt’s house.

In those days Emma seldom held an afternoon surgery; she put in the hours at other times, evenings and weekends when her partners wanted to get away. At four o’clock she had been there to open her front door to the children, to bring them in, listen to the news of their day and give them lemonade and a plain bun and then drive them home. Often Mr. Palmer the Estate Agent was leaving just as Kit arrived. He was, she knew, a very great friend of Aunt Emma’s; she suspected him of getting there before them, to eat buns with icing, have treats that children were denied. Sometimes Mr. Palmer was exceptionally happy. He would throw her up in the air, toss her— giggling, hair flying—to the ceiling, and then give her a two-shilling piece. She’d got quite rich, out of Mr. Palmer. Her small brother Robin, when he started school, complained he didn’t get the same money. Mr. Palmer would ruffle his hair and give him sixpence. Well, she said to Robin: you don’t know, perhaps he’s fallen into poverty. People do. It’s in books.

Now fifteen years had passed, and she put makeup on and went out to eat oysters with Mr. Palmer’s son.

Emma, though not fifty, now described herself as “semiretired.” You’d want to steal away, she said to Ralph, after a lifetime of pallid pregnant wives, and screaming mites with measles spots, and old men wheezing in: “Missus, the old chest—I’m bronical.” She filled in for holidays and weekends off, kept up with the medical literature, and took the occasional family-planning session. This last had always been her interest. She would turn up at outlying cottages, and talk in blunt terms. They would call her in to attend to shingles or lumbago, and she would leave them with some rubber device. Robin had once introduced her to a schoolfriend as “My aunt Emma, who has done so much to depopulate East Anglia.” She was in demand these days for talks in schools and colleges throughout the county. Heads liked her because she talked straight, but did not embarrass their young people. After all, she was old. They did not have to think of her doing it.

Emma’s house was warm and tidy. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. Kit threw herself at a chair. What a lot of energy she had—but then, just as suddenly, it would seem to drain out of her.

“I went to Walsingham,” Emma said. “To pray about Felix. Wasn’t that odd of me?”

“Did you go to the wells?”

“No, just to the shrine.”

“There’s one well, you know, the round one—I used to know a girl who believed that if you drank the water you’d have a secret wish come true within a year and a day.”

“A secret wish?” Emma said. “Secret from the rest of the world, or secret from yourself, I wonder.”

Kit smiled. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? It’s like—didn’t somebody say there’s no such thing as unanswered prayers? All prayers are answered, but not in the way that you notice.”

Emma filled the teapot and brought in plates. She had managed to mash the shop cake, somehow, in getting it out of its packet. She had always described herself as a freethinker in matters of nutrition. Her house guests were fed at uncertain intervals, at unorthodox hours and on strange combinations of food.

I wonder, Kit thought now, how much of that was because of Felix; because she never knew when he’d turn up, and perhaps sometimes she’d cook him a meal and he’d say, no, I’m expected home, and then hours later she’d heat it up for herself …

“Cake that bad?” Emma inquired.

“The cake? No, it’s fine.” Kit cultivated a hedge of yellow crumbs at the side of her plate. “Emma, can I ask you