Ralph said, “I’d be afraid to drive it, I think.”
Becky said, “It pretends to be old, but it’s not.”
“Where’s Robin?”
Ralph said, “He’s playing in it.”
Daniel displayed the car’s keys, holding them as if diamonds trickled from his fingers. “Don’t worry. He won’t get far.”
Sandra Glasse had not spoken at all. She did not seem to know what the others were talking about. She had just arrived, Kit saw: she had a paper bag in her hand, which she cradled against her old jersey. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” she said, “I’ve brought you some hen’s eggs.”
Daniel, who had not met Sandra before, looked around at her with a quizzical smile. It seemed to him she must have dropped in from another world.
They had decided to eat in the kitchen as usual, because the evenings were cold and the central heating was playing up again. Earlier Ralph had met Anna dragging into the boiler room with a scuttle of coal. “Anna,” he had said, “with two sons in the house, I don’t expect to see you—”
“This effort is voluntary,” Anna said. “I’m doing it to warm myself up.”
By the time they had fought a bout with the boiler, they were both warm. “The poor desperate thing,” Ralph said. “I suppose it would be a mercy to knock it out and send it wherever boilers go to die. Still, I can’t see us changing over to oil. Not this year. Besides, with oil, it’s so political, the prices shoot up, they hold you to ransom.”
“Daniel explained to me once,” Anna said, “that when the price of one sort of fuel goes up, the price of all the others goes up soon after.”
“But the installation …” Ralph said. “Honestly, the bills just at the moment … the telephone bill alone.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Yet when anyone comes by and says “Can I use your phone?” you say, “Of course, go ahead,” and when they offer to pay for the call you say, “No, I won’t hear of it.” You remember that volunteer— Abigail, was it?—the one who said could she phone her boyfriend? And it turned out he’d gone to be a jackaroo for a year?”
“An extreme case. Anyway, it stopped her fretting.”
“People should have less expensive emotions,” Anna said.
“They should have them when it’s cheap rate.” Then she said, “By the way—while we’ve got a private moment—what do you think of Daniel these days?”
He was all right really, was Ralph’s opinion. He had always felt comfortable with Felix’s son. Daniel wore the same clothes as he did—corduroy trousers, old tweed jackets, Fair Isle and lambswool from September through to May. Only recently had he become aware that Daniel’s clothes were not, like his, organic developments. Daniel went to London to get them at vast expense, it seemed. They looked old because they were made that way. Ralph wore his clothes because they were what was in the wardrobe. Daniel wore them for another reason—to become someone. To become a country gentleman, Robin said; it was a pose.
Robin knew these things. Still, he was enthusiastic about the two-seater, the Morgan, could hardly be dragged inside to eat. Later Ralph went out too, to pass a hand over its gleaming body and murmur its praises. Daniel was like a child at Christmas, beside himself with glee; it would have been churlish not to admire. But he felt uneasy about the car and what it might mean. Modern mechanics purred beneath its hood; as Rebecca said, it purported to be what it was not.
All the same, he thought, if Daniel was Kit’s choice, you wouldn’t find him raising objections. Daniel would look after her. There was nothing fake about his bank balance, and the architects of the county were coming men. He could afford the car and he could afford Kit. He would design them a house, no doubt, and built it on a prime site, and Kit would have a cleaning lady and hot water whenever she wanted it, and …
An awful spasm of grief took hold of Ralph; he stood in the outhouse with Daniel and Robin, an old mac around his shoulders, rain and blue evening air gusting in at the door, and felt grief take him by the windpipe, grief shake him like a mugger. He turned away; no one must see his face.
This happened sometimes. More, lately. And trying to separate himself from the emotion, to pull away from it, he wondered: why is this? He went back into the house. In the kitchen, Sandra was washing up; Becky was drying; Anna was decanting the leftovers into boxes for the fridge. A usual kind of family: 1980, and all’s well.
It was a year now since Julian had met Sandra Glasse.
It was a Sunday in April; Julian could not mistake the date, because the Scouts in North Walsham had been holding their St. George’s Day parade. And what was he doing in North Walsham? He had wanted to get out of the house. There were some particularly nasty Visitors, Sad Cases. Robin had the excuse of some sporting fixture or other; he always had a means of escape.
His mother, who was sensitive about the Visitors, had seen Julian’s plight. “Would you go to North Walsham for me? I have a bundle of clothes for the church jumble sale, which includes some things of your father’s that I particularly wish to see the back of. If you could just drop them in at this address I’ll give you—leave them in the garage if they’re out—then you could have the car for the afternoon. How would that be?”
Nothing doing in North Walsham; nothing doing, in a little market town on a Sunday afternoon. Only the Scouts marching down the street with their band, and a gang of bike boys jeering at them. He parked the car, delivered the bundle to a house near the church, walked up the empty street in fitful sunshine. He stopped to stare for no good reason into the window of Boots the Chemist. There was a razzmatazz of vitamin supplements and glucose tablets, and a come-and-get-’em pyramid of Kodak films, and an alluring display of hot-water bottles, for pessimists who might be buying them in for the summer ahead.
The bike boys had gathered around the Market Cross, their machines at rest, and they in their leather jackets pushing and shoving about its venerable dome. Julian always liked to see the Market Cross, but he shied away from approaching them. He was not afraid—or he did not want to think so; but like the Scouts he would have been an incitement to them. He was tidily dressed, like a good schoolboy at weekend, in a loose cream cotton shirt and well-ironed denims—no one could stop his mother pressing clothes. His hair was the color called dishwater blond; still, it was too blond, and conspicuously shiny and clean. He knew his own features: his unformed face, his large unclouded blue eyes. He knew what they represented—provoking innocence. It did not seem to matter that he was physically stronger than most people. Strength’s not much good without permission to use it.
The boys leaning on the columns of the Market Cross had leather jackets with studs and hair shaved off to stubble. The girls with them had long metal earrings and aggrieved faces. They sprawled against the machines or pawed at the boys’jackets, keeping up a braying cackling conversation of sorts. One girl hitched up her thin skirt and
