“And passed up his chance,” Anna said. “And what will happen to him if he gets tied up with Sandra?”
“He could do worse.”
“I’m aware,” Anna said, “that Sandra is a charity case of yours.”
Ralph said gently, “I hope we can be charitable. Now that the need exists.”
“Hasn’t it always?”
“I mean, in our own family.”
“I suppose I’m not charitable,” Anna said.
Ralph didn’t answer. But he thought, I will never be party to bullying and hectoring my children as my father bullied and hectored me.
Julian explained to Sandra and to Mrs. Glasse what he had not felt able to explain at home. As he talked, he remembered the place in which he had been stranded, this Midlands place, where mean slivers of sky showed between tower blocks. “Homesick,” Sandra said. “Wouldn’t you get over it in time?”
She was not vain; it did not seem to enter her head that—partly, anyway—he might have come back for her.
“You don’t know anything about it, Sandra,” Mrs. Glasse said. “You’ve never been away. It’s like an illness, that’s why it’s called homesickness. People don’t realize. Are they blaming you, your mum and dad?”
“I couldn’t give a reason like homesickness,” Julian said. “They’d think it was feeble. They weren’t that old when they went to South Africa.”
“Did they?” Sandra said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Some people just aren’t cut out for traveling,” Mrs. Glasse said.
Ralph said to Anna, “You are right, of course. About Julian. I apologize.” She stared at the spectacle: this sudden attack of public humility. “I probably ought to find out more about the whole thing,” he said. “I think, after Easter, I’ll go over and see Mrs. Glasse.”
SIX
The week after Easter the winds were so violent that they seemed likely to tear up small trees by the roots. There was never a moment, day or night, when the world was quiet.
Mrs. Glasse had no telephone, so Ralph couldn’t contact her to arrange a time to meet. “Should I drive over with you?” Anna said.
“No. It would look like a deputation. As if we’d come to complain about her.”
“You wonder what sort of woman she can be,” Anna said. “Strange life they lead.”
His car joined the coast road at Wells. The sky was patchy, clouds moving fast, rushing above him as he skirted the dusky red walls of Holkham Hall: parting now and then to reveal a pacific blue. The sea was not visible at once; but as the road turned he saw on the broken line of the horizon a strip of gray, indefinite, opaque.
It was ten o’clock when he rattled down the stony incline to the Glasses’ house. The door opened before he had switched off the engine. Mrs. Glasse stood waiting in the doorway.
His first thought: how young she is, she can’t be more than thirty-five, thirty-six. She was pale, straight-backed, red-haired: the hair a deeper red than her daughter’s, long and fine. The wind ripped at his clothes as he stepped out of the car, billowing out his jacket like a cloak. “This weather!” Mrs. Glasse said. She smiled at him. “Hello, Julian’s dad.”
It was a low house, old; its bones protested, creaked under the onslaught of the weather. He heard its various sounds, as she stood hesitating inside the door; he thought, it is a house like a ship, everything in movement, a ship breasting a storm. “On your left there,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Go in the parlor. There’s a fire lit, and the kettle’s on.”
“You might have been expecting me,” he said.
He sat by the fire, in a Windsor chair, waiting for her to bring them tea. The wind dropped; it was as if a noisy lout had left the room. In the sudden silence he heard the mantel clock ticking. She returned. Handed him a mug. “I didn’t put sugar in. Did you want it? No, I didn’t think you were the sugar sort.”
“Goodness,” he said. “What does that mean?”
She pushed her hair back. “Sugar’s for comfort,” she said.
“You think I don’t need comfort?”
Mrs. Glasse didn’t reply. She pulled up a stool to the fire. Ralph half rose from his chair; “Thanks, I’m comfortable here,” she said.
“That clock up there.” Ralph shook his head. “We had one just like it at home when I was a boy. It was my father’s. His pride and joy. He wouldn’t let anybody else touch it.”
“You’re not going to tell me,” Mrs. Glasse said drily, “that it stopped the day he died?”
“No, not exactly. My mother threw it out.”
“That was extreme.”
“For her, yes, it was. She couldn’t stand the chime.”
“Did she ever mention it? In his lifetime, I mean?”
“I shouldn’t think so. She was a self-effacing woman. At least, she effaced herself before him.”
She had fine hands, Mrs. Glasse; the calloused hands of a woman used to outdoor work, but still white, long-
