A Change of Climate: A Novel

about to speak of her feelings! Gosh, it must be late! Better run!”

Daniel smiled: meekly, sheepishly. Bowed a little, at the kitchen door. “May I call again, Miss Katherine?”

Kit shook her hair, made a low growling noise. Daniel clicked the door shut as he went. Kit sat back in her chair, her arms around herself. She found she had tears in her eyes. She did not understand this.

Kit had been at home for many days now. It had been the usual arrangement—Emma collected her at the station at Norwich. It was a way of easing herself back into the family, her tea with Emma. But Emma seemed preoccupied and in low spirits. “What’s the matter?” Kit asked. She misses Felix, she thought; she must be lonely.

When she walked into the Red House, the atmosphere hit her at once. “Hit” was the wrong word; seeped into her, that was more like it. It was a cold fog of dismay; her first impression was that something was happening, slowly and stupidly, which the people concerned could not comprehend.

It sapped her strength, whatever it was; she was tired, desperately tired. She had left London healthy enough, only dogged by that usual feeling of anticlimax the end of exams brings. After this, you think, after my papers are over, I will do, and I will do … and then you don’t. You are a shell, enclosing outworn effort. You expect a sense of freedom, and yet you feel trapped in the same old body, the same drab routines; you expect exhilaration, and you only feel a kind of habitual dullness, a letdown, a perverse longing for the days when you read and made notes and sat up all night.

But now, she had gone beyond this disappointed state. A new exhaustion made her shake at any effort, mental or physical. She discovered the curious, unsung, regressive pleasure of going to bed while it is still light. She moved her bed, so that it faced the window. She found herself two extra pillows, and composed herself against them. Eyes open, she watched the sky rush past, and the birds wheel and swoop.

Anna brought her food on trays: a boiled egg, an orange carefully peeled and divided, thin cinnamon biscuits warm from the oven. “Don’t,” Kit said. “Don’t bother. Really.” It was a strange comfort to her to go past the point of hunger; she had never been a thin girl, particularly, so she knew she wasn’t going to waste away.

But it pleased her to push her situation to extremes. She fantasized that she was dying. She was old, very feeble, very weak. Her life was draining from her. But she had lived. She had no regrets, her will was made, and nothing was left undone. She was dying in the odor of sanctity. And indeed she was more and more tired, as if a lifetime’s fatigue had banked up behind her eyes … perhaps, she thought, I have glandular fever, some special disease suited to my time of life …

She slept then, only to be roused by the sounds of the house below as it woke up for the evening: the shrilling of the telephone, the crunch and scrape as the family cars ground home, the slamming of doors and clattering of pans for dinner, the hard stony shower of coal going into the range; and Robin’s feet stampeding upstairs to the next floor, Julian after him, sometimes Sandra Glasse’s high clear voice from the kitchen: “Shall I scrape the carrots, Anna?”

Home life. Sandra had been the first person she saw when her aunt dropped her at the gate. The girl was by the side of the house, with a laundry basket. As Kit stepped out of the car she saw Sandra stretch up to peg on the washing line the white nightdress—chaste, elaborately pin-tucked—which Daniel had given her as a present the previous Christmas. Sandra’s cheeks were flushed from exertion and the wind. She looked very pretty. “Your mother lent it,” she said. “I stayed over. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll iron it and it will be just as nice as you left it. I’m a good ironer.”

Kit’s brows had drawn together. “Have it, if you want,” she said. “Another bit of Daniel’s ersatz tat.”

She’d hauled her bags into the house, and then sat in the kitchen for an hour, brushing off Sandra’s attempts to look after her, to scramble some eggs, to drag luggage upstairs; not even making tea for herself, or going to the lavatory, or washing the metropolitan grime off her face. She seemed unable to do anything to bridge this gap between her former life and the life that was to come.

Then the days passed; she felt ill, a vague, nameless malaise. A white space seemed to grow around her, a vacancy. She felt that it was she who should be able to diagnose and treat the unease in the house, the sudden deficit of happiness, its draining away.

In time, as she knew he would, her father made occasion for a talk. He wanted a talk; she had nothing to say. But she had to decide soon whether she would go back to London to work for the Trust. Live in the hostel: get on democratically with all sections of society: not use expressions like “ersatz tat.” Not make judgments on people.

“I don’t want to push you,” her father said. “We’ve given Julian leeway—I don’t want you to think that we’re discriminating against you. But you see, I have a list of applications from people who want a job, they want the experience before they do social-work courses—”

“Yes,” Kit said. “I’m being selfish.” She combed her fingers through her long hair. He remembered Emma doing that, years ago, in Norwich. “You see, Dad, up to a point it’s easy. You go to

school. You go to university. You don’t have any thoughts, from day to day. You just do what’s expected of you. Then somebody asks you to make a choice and you find yourself … slowly … grinding … to a halt. That’s how I am.” She started to plait her hair now, loosely winding, looping. “I’m a mechanism winding down.”

“A life crisis,” Ralph said.

“Yes, I should have known there’d be some jargon for it.”

“I’m sorry. But that’s what it is.”

“Have you ever had one?”

“Oh, several, I’d say. The first when I was seventeen or so …”

“When you had the row with Granny and Grandad.”

“Yes … well, you know all about that. For months after it I felt as if I were walking around in fog. It was a kind of depression, suffocation—very disabling, because all the time I wasn’t taking decisions for myself other people were taking them for me. That’s how I ended up in teaching, for which, God knows, by temperament I am not suited.”

“Aren’t you? I’d have thought you’d have been a good teacher.”

“No … Teachers need all sorts of large certainties.”

She looked at him in arrogant disbelief. “And you don’t have them?”