season, the crop-spraying plane buzzed its chimney stacks and complicated arrangements of television aerials. There were a number of small windows under the eaves, and these gave the house a restless look: as if it would just as soon wander across the lane and put down its foundations in a different field.
Two years before, when it seemed that the older children would shortly be off their hands, Anna had suggested they should look for a smaller place. It would be cheaper to run, she had said, knowing what line of reasoning would appeal to Ralph. With his permission she had rung up Felix Palmer’s firm, to talk about putting the house on the market. “You can’t mean it,” Felix had said. “Leave, Anna? After all these years? I hope and trust you wouldn’t be going far?”
“Felix,” Anna had said, “do you recall that you’re an estate agent? Aren’t you supposed to encourage people to sell their houses?”
“Yes, but not my friends. I should be a poor specimen if I tried to uproot my friends.”
“Shall I try someone else, then?”
“Oh, no need for that … If you’re sure …”
“I’m far from sure,” Anna said. “But you might send someone to look around. Put a value on it.”
Felix came himself, of course. He brought a measuring tape, and took notes as he went in a little leather-bound book. On the second story, he grew bored. “Anna, dear girl, let’s just say … a wealth of versatile extra accommodation … attics, so forth … an abundance of storage space. Leave it at that, shall we? Buyers don’t want, you know, to have to exercise their brains.” He sighed, at the foot of the attic stairs. “I remember the day I brought you here, you and Ralph, to talk you into it …” His eyes crept over her, assessing time’s work. “You were fresh from Africa then.”
I was tired and cold that day, she thought, tired and cold and pregnant, rubbing my chilblains in that drafty wreck of a drawing room; the Red House smelled of mice and molds, and there were doors banging overhead, and cracked window glass, and spiders. To preempt his next comment, she put her hand on his arm: “Yes, Felix. It was, it was a long time ago.”
Felix nodded. “I remember saying to you—it’s the sort of place you come to grips with in your own good time.”
“And we never have.” She smiled.
“You filled it with children. That’s the main thing.”
“Yes. And for all their presence improved it, we might as well have stabled horses. Well, Felix—what’s the verdict?”
“There’d be interest,” he said cautiously. “London people per-haps.”
“Oh—fancy prices,” Anna said.
“But consider, Anna—do you really want to do this rather dras-tic thing?”
Felix closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. They went downstairs, and had a glass of sherry. Felix stared gloomily over the garden. Slowly the conventions of his calling seemed to occur to him. “Useful range of outbuildings,” he muttered, and jotted this phrase in his book.
That evening Felix telephoned Ralph. “Why don’t you hang on?” he said. “Prices are going up all over East Anglia. A year from now you might make a killing. Tell Anna I advise staying put.”
“I will.” Ralph was relieved. “I take her point, of course—Kit and Julian away, Robin will be off in a year or so, and then there’ll be just the two of us and Becky, we’ll be rattling around. But of course, it’s not often that we’re just the family. We get a lot of visitors.”
“You do, rather,” Felix said.
“And we have to have somewhere to put them.”
Two days later, while Ralph and Anna were still debating the matter, their boy Julian turned up with his suitcase. He wasn’t going back to university, he said. He was finished with all that. He dumped his case in his old room in the attics, next door to Robin; they had put the boys up there years ago, so that they could make a noise. Julian offered no explanation of himself, except that he did not like being away, had worried about his family and constantly wondered how they were. He made himself pleasant and useful about the house and neighborhood, and showed no inclination to move out, to move on, to go anywhere else at all.
Then Kit wrote from London; she phoned her parents every week, but sometimes things are easier in a letter.
I’m not sure yet what I should do after my finals. There’s still more than a term to go and I have various ideas, but I keep changing my mind. It isn’t that I want to sit about wasting time, but I would like to come home for a few weeks, just to think things through. Dad, I know you mentioned to me that I could work for the Trust for a year, but the truth is I’ve had enough of London—for the moment, anyway. I wondered if there was something I could do in Norwich …
“Well,” Ralph said, rereading the letter. “This is unexpected. But of course she must come home, if she wants to.”
“Of course,” Anna said.
Her perspective altered. She felt that she must settle to it, give way to the house’s demands, perhaps until she was an old woman.
When on the afternoon of the funeral Anna let herself into the wide square hall, she peeled off her gloves slowly, and placed them on the hallstand, a vast and unnecessary article of furniture that Ralph had picked up in an antique shop in Great Yarmouth. “No other family in the county,” she had said at the time, “feels they need an object like this.” She looked with a fresh sense of wonder and dislike at its barley-sugar legs and its many little drawers and its many little dust-trapping ledges and its brass hooks for gentlemen’s hats, and she saw her face in the dim spotted oval of mirror, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead, then took off her coat and threw it over the banisters.
The Norfolk climate gave Anna a bloodless look, tinged her thin hands with violet. Every winter she would think of Africa; days when, leaving her warm bed in a hot early dawn, she had felt her limbs grow fluid, and the pores of her face open like petals, and her ribs, free from their accustomed tense gauge, move to allow her a full, voluptuary’s breath. In England she never felt this confidence, not even in a blazing July. The thermometer might register the heat, but her body was skeptical. English heat is fitful; clouds pass before the sun.
