A Change of Climate: A Novel

Robin shivered, not from cold. “Surely, not that bad?”

“No.” Kit’s face was somber. “But of that order.”

Robin kissed his sister on the cheek. They parted without a word, crept into cold beds, slept at once.

Afternoon: on the beach at Brancaster, Ralph stretched out a hand to Amy Glasse, as if without his help she could not stand in the wind. “I used to bring Billy here,” she called. “Billy, my dog.” Stones and pebbles flew from under their feet.

It was high summer now. The sky was an inverted lapis bowl. Away from the sea, below the dunes and marram grass, a few families huddled behind windbreaks. Family dogs trembled by them, constrained by habit of obedience, quivering with a passion for the stones and air and waves. “Imagine when the seas were warm.” Ralph pulled her to his side. “There were tropical reefs. But in those days, there were no people to enjoy the sun.”

On the beach at Cromer they have found the bones of bison, the antlers of wild deer, the skeletal remains of wild horses. There were elephants at East Runton, bears at Overstrand; there were wild boars living at West Runton. Think of this, he tells her, as you watch the caravans roaming over the hills, as you catch the reek of onions from the seafront hot dog stalls.

“I found something as a boy,” he said. She pressed close to his side to catch his words. “A fossil. Gryphaea.”

“What’s that?”

He traced the curve into her palm. He did not tell her what the balaclava man had called it; didn’t want the Devil to come between them.

“A shell. Very old?” Pale eyes looked into his. “Will we find one today?”

“It wasn’t here—it was near Whitby. I never found anything as good again.”

“It’s luck,” she said.

She put her hand in his. He felt her loose wedding ring snag against his palm. His son had made a kite and flown it that weekend on the heath near Holt; the kite was called “The Sandra Glasse.” But Sandra was a child, and trifles amused her, and you cannot give a woman wood and canvas and the slight prospect of rising above

the weather. Amy belonged to this coast; its jewels are jasper, moss agate, chalcedony. She should have jet from striped cliffs, to make a mourning ring for the life that was. And amber, next March; it is washed ashore, it waits for the lucky, it is tangled with the seaweed thrown up by the spring gales.

“Enough,” she said. She wrapped her arms about herself, a parody of the athlete in pain. “I’ve walked far enough.” He held her upright, gathering her hair into one hand and holding it away from her face, sweeping it back into an unraveling topknot. He fitted her arm into his. They turned, and the wind was against them. It was a warm wind, and peppered their skin with sand. Through narrowed eyes they could see the sand swirling before them, like smoke. Sometimes they had to stop, and shield their faces. The sand blew into their mouths, between their teeth. It was like biting on diamonds.

He drove her home. They stopped at a store and bought peaches. They sat together in the kitchen. Amy Glasse took a sharp knife from the dresser and brought it to the table. She gave the knife to Ralph. He took one of the peaches and cut into it. It was a yellow-fleshed peach, its skin as rough as a cat’s tongue, and its ripeness spread out from the stone like a bloody graze.

Later still they went upstairs and lay in the double bed, under a quilt—the second—that Sandra Glasse had made. Amy put her long white arms around him and locked his body into hers. It was as if there were a key and she had found it: a code, and she had broken it. Afterward she cried for a moment, almost without a sound, her head turned into the pillow. He did not know what he felt: not guilt, not yet. Love, certainly; yes, he felt that. Her hair spread over her shoulders like a fan of feathers; her spine seemed dipped into her flesh, like a shallow channel scraped through wax.

That afternoon, Kit was at her aunt’s house in Foulsham. They sat together in the kitchen, the half door open to admit the sunshine, elbows propped on the table and a pot of tea cooling between them. “So what are you asking me?” Emma said. “About Daniel?”

“For your advice.”

“Kit! Come on now! You know I never give advice!”

“Make an exception.” Kit looked at the table top. Absently she scraped at it: delicately, with her fingernail. “Emma, what is this disgusting thing? It looks like the remnant of a squashed baked bean.”

“Quite likely.” Emma grinned. “You know they say every cloud has a silver lining, and the only good thing about losing Felix is that I no longer have to concoct a delicious little diner a deux every time we fall out of bed. Baked beans are very nutritious, let me tell you.” The light faded in her face; Kit watched her eyes fade, sharp blue to gray. “One thing about Felix, though, was how he was made happy with strong drink. Two big gins with a waft of vermouth and he’d be off back to Blakeney to dine a deux with Ginny, and some appetite still left. You know, Kit, they write all sorts of rubbish about people having affairs. Their tortured souls, and so on. But how is a man to eat two dinners? That’s the question they should look into.”

Kit’s hand lay on the table: large, white, capable. She wanted to place it over her aunt’s, but taste restrained her. Emma fitted her knuckles into her eye sockets, and ground them around, carefully. “Sorry, sweetheart. All I can say about Daniel is this—ask yourself, how will you feel if he goes off and marries someone like Ginny?”

Kit paused. “Okay, I think.”

“Then that’s not the real question, is it?”

She shook her head. “It’s home, you know. And me, me myself. I’m asking you for information, Emma.”

Emma looked up. “For information or knowledge?”

“Are they different?”

Emma didn’t reply.

SEVEN

At midnight the train stopped. Anna raised herself on one elbow, then scrambled from the top berth, reaching out with her bare toes for a foothold. She swung herself to the floor, pulled down her nightdress, and put her head out of the window. A man was walking by the side