“I could live like a duchess,” Mrs. Glasse suggested.
“Well, not quite that.”
“If I had a cottage, I might have to get rid of my ducks and hens. I wouldn’t have eggs to sell. Not to mention vegetables.”
“You could get jobs. It would be more secure for you.”
“Oh, we do get jobs sometimes. In the high season. Hun-stanton, Burnham Market. We might go and waitress for a week or two. Not that we’re good waitresses. We’re not used to it.”
He was struck by the slow and thoughtful way in which she spoke, as if she weighed every word. Struck too by how she spoke of her daughter and herself as if they were of the same generation; as if they had one opinion between them, and what one felt, the other felt. She said, “Sandra and me, we don’t mind hard work, nobody could say that. But we prefer to keep each other company at home.”
“You’re very close.”
“Aren’t you close to your children?”
“I don’t know. I like to think I am. But there are so many other things I have to do.”
“I think that parents ought to take care of their children, and that children ought to take care of their parents. That’s the main thing, that’s what comes first.”
“I’ve said too much,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interfere. I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s all right, you can’t help it. You’re used to putting people’s lives to rights, aren’t you, and giving them advice?” She looked up, full into his face. “God knows, nobody has ever advised me, it might have been better if they had. The thing is, me and Sandra, we manage. Hand to mouth, I know. But there’s always something you can do. Sometimes we’ve gone out housecleaning. And I know where the best blackberries are. At Brancaster—I could get you some this year. We get basketfuls, we bake pies, blackberry and apple, use our own apples, sell them up there on the road.” She shrugged. “There’s always something.”
“I admire you, Mrs. Glasse,” Ralph said. “You live the kind of life you believe in.”
She looked down, and blushed. “What is it, Ralph? Don’t you?”
The Easter holidays ended. Kit went back to London for her last few weeks. Robin began the term at his day school in Norwich; early mornings still so chilly, getting up in blue light to walk a mile to the crossroads and wait for the first bus. His efforts would be rewarded, his parents thought. Robin wanted a place at medical school, and would get it. Yet he seemed to have no humanitarian concerns. He marked off the seasons by a change of games kit; now, spring having arrived, he tossed his hockey stick up in the attics and packed his cricket bag. Weekends saw him bussed about the county, playing away. Sunday nights he bounced, or trailed, back: sad tales of full-length balls on the off-stump, or glory sagas that put color in his cheeks and made him look like his father when his father was young: sixty-five off the first twenty overs, he would say, and then we accelerated, run-a-ball, finished it off just after tea with five wickets in hand. “Do you know what Robin’s talking about?” Anna would say—deriving a pale routine gratification from the child’s health and simplicity, from his resemblance to the other boy she had once known.
“Good God, I was nothing like Robin,” Ralph would say. “My father thought cricket was High Church. Do you think he’ll ever do any work when he goes away? Suppose he became a heart surgeon, and he had to do a transplant, and there was a Test Match on?”
But Emma would say, speaking from experience, “Robin will make a good doctor. Only half his mind will be on his work. That will limit the damage he can do.”
And Rebecca? She rode off on her bike, on the first day of term, to her school two or three miles away; a flouncy, sulky, pretty little girl, who had reached the stage when her family embarrassed her. Soon her embarrassment was to be compounded.
On the Monday morning, the week after term began, Julian came down to the kitchen with his car keys in his hand. “I’ll run you,” he said to her. “Put your bike in the shed.”
Rebecca dropped her spoon into her cornflakes, spattering milk on the table. “Suddenly so kind,” she said. “But how will I get home, sir?”
“I’ll collect you.”
“In your so-called car?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t want you to.”
“Beks, life’s not just a matter of what you want.”
Rebecca sat up and looked pert. “Yours seems to be.”
Julian was not drawn. “Hurry up now, finish your breakfast,” he said. “Don’t argue.”
“What will my friends say when they see me turn up in that thing?” She popped her eyes and pointed, to show what her friends would do. “They’ll take the piss all week. I’ll be a social outcast, a—what is it? Not a parishioner— you know what I mean.”
“A pariah,” Julian said. “Come on now, girl.”
Rebecca saw that he was serious; about what, she didn’t know. She turned to her mother, wailing. “Mum, I don’t have to go with him, do I?”
Anna was loading towels from a basket into her temperamental and aged twin-tub washing machine. “Let Julian take you. It’s kind of him. It’s a nasty morning, very cold.”
Sulking, Rebecca zipped herself into her anorak and picked up her lunchbox and followed him out. “When we get there you can stop round the corner, out of sight …” she was saying, as the back door slammed behind them.
When Julian got back, Ralph was on the phone to London, defusing the latest crisis at the hostel. The office door was ajar, and Julian could hear snatches of the conversation. “What occurs to me,” Ralph was saying, “is that she won’t be able to buy much with our petty cash, with the street price what it is, so what will she do to get the
