topic. He shouldn’t expect much by way of reply, she said she wasn’t used to writing letters.
Just before Christmas Julian wrote another letter, to his head of department. Then he packed his bags and took the train to Norwich; then hitched lifts and, changing his suitcase from hand to hand, walked the last few miles from the main road to the Red House. There he had stayed, ever since.
When he was not at the market, or working on the Glasses’ small-holding, he was underneath his new car; his old car that is, the one Emma had given him the money to buy. He coaxed it along; it got him to the coast and back. His new skills were undeniably useful; Anna’s car was now a barely coherent assemblage of rattles and squeaks, and the Citroen caused oily boys at garages to titter and roll their eyes and cast their rags to the ground.
Then there was the Glasses’ Morris Traveller to be rescued from its decrepitude and illegality. He told Ralph about the tax and insurance problem; Ralph immediately handed over some cash that had been earmarked for a new vacuum cleaner and some school clothes for Rebecca. Julian promised to mend the old Hoover; it had value as a technological curiosity, Ralph said, in a year or two they might be able to take it to London and flog it to the Science Museum. Rebecca did not really need new clothes—she would, on the whole, fit into her old ones. With school uniform, it is often heartening if you look a little different from the other girls.
Julian gave the money to Mrs. Glasse. No question of paying it back, he said, it wasn’t like that. “I just don’t want to think about you being pulled up,” he said, “or about the police coming round when I’m not here.”
“They’ll still come if they want,” Mrs. Glasse said. “You’d be surprised how many offenses there are, that a person can commit just without thinking about it. You know, I don’t want to take your money. But I can see that you want to give it.”
Even now they were legal, she would only take the car out on market days, she said. There was the problem of money for petrol. “You can’t knit petrol,” she said. “And they won’t let you barter for it.”
He did not tell Sandra about his sister’s school uniform, or about the row his parents had when the story came out. Privately, he agreed with his father; it was Anna’s fault, it was the fault of her habit of saving bits of money in pots and jars around the house, like some old granny in a cottage. It was too tempting for other people, when they had a prior need.
He did not tell Sandra because he knew she would think the row was ridiculous. She thought his family was rich; she said so.
“Oh, come on,” Julian said. “There’s four of us and none of us has earned anything yet. My mum’s a teacher but she had an illness and she hasn’t been able to work for years. My dad works for a charity, he doesn’t draw a big stipend, he just draws enough to keep us solvent.”
“There you are,” Sandra said. “Stipend. Solvent. Of course, we’re mostly solvent, because we never buy anything if we can help it. Money doesn’t enter into our calculations. I learned it in geography, it’s the only thing I recall. We’re a subsistence economy.”
“I think you’re proud of being poor,” Julian said.
“No, we’re not proud. We just don’t think about it. We just go along.”
“You could get benefits,” Julian said. “Other people do it.”
“Oh, we know all about that. My mum’s been to offices appealing for benefits. Sometimes you get things, other times you don’t. The trouble is, they keep you sitting in a waiting room for hours when you could be out trying to earn something. You get coughs and colds from the other people. Last time my mum went they asked her if she had a man friend. She said, better eat turnips all winter than talk to bureaucrats of romance.”
After Julian’s own household, constantly full of Visitors and their noisy upsets, the silence and peace of the Glasses’ farm was like a convalescence. Only one thing had changed: during his term away, somebody had given them a black-and-white television set. They watched all the soap operas, and discussed them in terms of gentle surprise, as if the characters were people they knew. They explained the characters to him, and he sat with them and watched, predicting the plot developments out loud, as they did. It was something new for him. There was a television set at home, but it was kept in the cold back sitting room, like an impoverished relative whom it was best not to encourage.
Also, they had discovered a big enthusiasm for storybooks. When Sandra had been over at the house one day Anna had taken her into Dereham to help with the weekly shopping, and at the secondhand bookstall Sandra had bought a book called
“The die is cast,” said Sandra.
Julian was confused by them. He was only a geographer; that, at least, had been his subject before he ran away. People from other faculties claimed that geography was a subject studied by slightly dim, marginal students, who enjoyed superfluous good health. It might be true: among those few people in his year with whom he had casual conversation, three or four said they were going to be schoolteachers, teach geography and games. He could not imagine teaching children anything—least of all, to kick footballs about or swing from ropes. If he was going to be healthy and stupid, he could do that at home.
So he reasoned. It didn’t seem to convince his mother. His father didn’t ask him any questions; strangely, though, this seemed to make him like his mother more and his father less. He’s not bothered about me, he said to Robin. He can’t get me to be a Good Soul, and I’m not enough of a Sad Case. He’s only worried about those spotty kids with carrier bags.
Not yet, you’re not enough of a Sad Case, Robin said.
One day in February, he went to bed with Sandra, upstairs in her large brass bed. Mrs. Glasse, downstairs, carried on knitting. Sandra bled all over the sheets.
“He’s drifting—that’s all.” Anna said. “When I ask him what he wants to do with his life, he changes the subject.”
Ralph said, “He’s always been like that. Anyway—is there any point in knowing what you want to do with your life? There are so many things that can go wrong.”
Anna’s voice was strained. “So you just drift with the tide?”
“Remember when he was little,” Ralph said. “We thought he would never learn to read, never do anything. But we cured him just by letting him be. Those few weeks of peace cured him. If we’d have left him at school, with ignorant infant teachers bawling at him, he’d never have made anything. As it is, he got to university—”
