“Yes. When you consider the alternative.”
“I was passing,” he said. “I thought, it’s lunchtime. I wondered if I could take you out, you and Sandra.”
“Sandra’s not here. She’s gone cleaning out some holiday flats in Wells, getting them ready for the visitors starting.”
“Well then—just you?”
She dropped back from the doorway. “Come in.” She glanced
“You don’t need to dress up—I thought, just a pub lunch or something?”
“Give me five minutes.”
When she came back she was wearing a different pair of jeans, faded but clean and pressed, and a white shirt open at the neck. She had let down her hair and brushed it out; it fell over her shoulders to the small of her back. The sunlight made it liquid. It was the color of the cream sherry that his father’s friends, with guilty abandon, had sipped each Christmas: “Just half a glass for me, Mr. Eldred.” He picked up a strand of it, ran it through his fingers; she stood passive, like a kindly animal. “It reminds me of something,” he said.
“Something good?”
“Something sad.”
They drove along the coast. Past Brancaster the sea encroached on their view, its grey line fattening. They stopped at a small hotel he knew, whose windows looked out over the reedbeds and marshes. They were the first lunchers. A girl brought them a menu. “Drink?” she asked.
“I’ll have whiskey,” Mrs. Glasse decided. Two tumblers were fetched, set side by side by considerate fingers. A small wood fire burned in a stone hearth, sighing with its own life; its heart palely burning, but the logs at its margins charred from ash gray to white, from wood to dust. Parrot tulips stood on a dresser; their stems drooped, and the vivid flowerheads seemed to swarm away from the vase, hurtling into the air.
“They have lobster today,” Ralph said. “Would you like that?”
“Thank you, but I couldn’t touch it,” Mrs. Glasse said. “I have an ingrained dislike of animals with shells. My husband was a crab fisherman, he worked out of Sheringham. Well, the life must have palled. I haven’t seen him for sixteen years.”
“Sandra would have been—how old, two?”
She nodded. “But he wasn’t Sandra’s father.” She looked up. “Are you shocked?”
“Oh, God, Amy—it would take a lot more than that to shock me. I don’t lead a sheltered life, you know.”
“When Sandra told me about you at first I thought you did. I said to her, what does Julian’s father do for a living? She said, ’He goes about doing good.’ I thought you were a clergyman.”
“I would have been, I suppose, if things had been a bit different. It would have pleased my family. But I wasn’t concerned to please them, when I was a boy.”
“But you were a missionary, weren’t you? It just shows how ignorant I am—until Julian explained to me I thought all missionaries were clergymen.”
“Oh no, you get doctors, teachers—just people who are generally useful. We didn’t go around converting people.”
“They’d been converted already, I suppose.”
“Yes, largely. But we weren’t like missionaries in cartoons. We didn’t have a portable organ, and shout ’Praise the Lord!’ “
“I’m glad not to have to picture it.” Her smile faded. “But Julian told me, you know—about you being put in prison.”
Ralph nodded. “It was nothing,” he said: writing off the second worst thing that had ever happened to him.
“Julian’s very proud of you.”
“Is he? We never talk about it.”
“No. He said you don’t like to.”
“All that part of our lives, we prefer to forget it, Anna and me. It’s—we’ve closed the door on it.”
“Did they treat you very badly, when you were in prison?”
“No. I told you, it was nothing. If it had been very bad we would have come home after we were released, but we didn’t, you see, we went north, we went up to Bechuanaland. We stayed on.”
“It’s a bit of a mystery. To Julian. He wonders why you won’t talk about it. He builds reasons, in his head.”
“Kit went through a phase, you know how children do—she wanted to make us into heroes. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t go on marches, join Anti-Apartheid, sit down in the road in front of the South African Embassy.”
“And why don’t you?”
“Because it’s more complicated than they think, witless people parading around with their banners. I get sick of them using South Africa to make themselves feel good. Being so bloody moral about a country they’ve never seen, about the lives of people of whom they know nothing. Especially when there is so little morality in their own lives.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
