that I made choices and they were wrong, but then I think, too, that our lives have been ruined by malign chance. I do not see any pattern here, any sense, any reason why this had to happen.
James, in his office in the hostel in the East End, turned over the letter. On its back he wrote, “If it is chance, can it be malign? If it is malign, can it be chance?”
From beyond the flimsy partition he heard the broken and shabby men in his care, going about their evening routine. He heard the thump and scrape of furniture, the clink of spoon against tin mug. He heard the reiterated wild shout of a frequent customer of his, a tramp with presenile dementia: “Tommy didn’t do it. Tommy didn’t do it, Tommy didn’t … he never.”
Tommy didn’t do it, he thought. No, no, he pushes off the blame, he places it elsewhere. And Enock didn’t do it? God did it. Ralph will think so, anyway. How not—if God made us, if God made us as we are, if he is all powerful, all knowing—could he not have stretched out his arm? In Ralph’s mind, God works through Enock now, just as once God worked through Hitler. He will think it is God that plunged the knife into his back and took his child and cut him into pieces, dissected his child alive.
A wash of bile and saliva rose into James’s mouth. He struggled not to vomit. He rose from his chair, gripping the arms. Let no one come in; he cannot face them, cannot meet human eyes. Animals are better than we are, he thought; they do what they must. Pounce, tear, suck the blood; it is their nature, God has made them so and given them no choice.
He moved heavily across the room to the small window, which was barred against thieves. He looked out at an East End evening: wastepaper scudding in autumn gutters, and cabbage leaves from some street market, white veins shining in the dusk. Early darkness: months ahead of rain and fog, slush and thaw. God had to permit his creations to do evil; it was the penalty of giving them a choice. Animals have no choice; it is why they are different from us. If we could not choose to do evil, we would not be human. I will tell him this, he thought, tell his poor wife. I will not say what I have often thought: that animals, who have no choice and so commit no crime, may have a guarantee of heaven, but that we, who are God’s apes, may be shut out for eternity in the cold and the dark.
From beyond the office door the banging and clattering grew louder. He heard cursing. No doubt there was a fight about to break out; perhaps one of the old men had fallen over, or pulled out a knife. James turned from the window, caught sight of himself in a square of dusty mirror that hung on the opposite wall; saw a spare and desiccated old man, worn by humility, sucked dry by the constant effort of belief. He spoke aloud for a moment, as if Ralph and his wife were in the room with him. “Anna, there is nothing, there is nothing worse, there is nothing so burdensome … there is nothing so appallingly hard … as the business of being human …” His voice died in his throat. I should take that mirror down, he thought, I have often meant to do it, glass is a danger in a place like this.
When Ralph and Anna returned to England they began at once upon the business of finding a house. Practical considerations would not go away; there were decisions to make. Anna had talked only briefly, grudgingly, about her missing child. What was the point of talking? she asked. No one could share her feelings. No one could enter into them.
“Anna, don’t injure yourself more,” James said. “There is a thing people do—when they have been hurt, they hurt themselves again, they compound the damage. Don’t become bitter. That’s all I ask.”
“It’s a great deal to ask,” Ralph said.
“Next, James,” Anna said, “you’ll be asking me to forgive.” A kind of hard jauntiness had entered her voice; it was her usual tone now.
“No, I wouldn’t ask that. Not yet.”
“Good,” Anna said. “I am not up to the effort.”
“If you could think,” James said, “that there are some things that God does not control or will, then you could ask God for comfort … but it’s very difficult, Anna.”
“It’s impossible,” she said. “I asked God for comfort when I came home to Elim every night, and saw these beaten people waiting for me on the stoep—but God kept very quiet, James. God did nothing. It was up to me to do something, but I acted within constraints—I tried to be good, you see, I felt the love of God biting into my wrists like a pair of handcuffs. So what did I offer these people? Bandages and platitudes. Suppose my training had been different? I might have stepped on the train to Cape Town with a revolver in my bag, I might have shot Dr. Verwoerd—then I might have done some good in the world. Now, James—when I had in the room with me the man who was going to kill my child—when I had in my hand a broken bottle, suppose I had drawn the edges across his eyes? Suppose I had sliced his eyes to ribbons, suppose I had severed his veins and made him bleed to death? Then I would have done some good in the world.”
“Anna—” he said.
She saw the fear in his face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You leave me alone, James, and I’ll leave you alone. You don’t come at me with your theology, and I won’t stop Ralph doing his job. It was planned that he should take over the Trust, yes? So there’s no reason to change the plan. It doesn’t matter what I think, inside myself. Nobody could imagine or know what I think, inside myself. But I promise you I won’t stand up in church and bawl out that it’s all a sham. We’re professional Christians, aren’t we, Ralph and me? That’s how we make our living. Why should we be poor, when every hypocrite is rich?”
No one had seen her cry, not once; not from the beginning. Emma knew right away, when she met them at the airport: “Anna is too angry to cry. She is almost too angry to breathe.”
They found a house quite easily. Emma’s friend Felix drove them through the country lanes, away from the bustle of Norwich: which seemed to them, after their time in the wilderness, like some vast metropolis. Felix stopped his car under a tree by a red-brick, rambling, ill-proportioned house: “It needs work,” he said. “But it will accommodate both your office and your family.”
He looked over his shoulder at Anna, in the backseat. No point trying to avoid the word. Anna was expecting another baby. Everyone said it was the best thing that could have happened.
They went inside. “The drawing room,” Felix said.
They moved into the light of the long windows. Anna noticed how they were liberally bespattered with mud; Ralph noticed the paneled shutters of old pine. He admired the wide staircase, the lofty ceilings; she breathed the house’s air, the compound of strange molds and the trapped smoke of long-dead fires. “We must have it,” he said. Anna shook her head. But then she felt—or thought she felt—the child move inside her. She registered its claims. She thought of having more children, many children, to fill the aching void of grief.
They moved into the house three months before Julian’s birth; two months after the birth, Ralph’s father died. It was a shock, because he had seemed a fit man; but last year’s news from abroad, the news carried in Ralph’s first incomprehensible and distressing letter, had dealt him a terrible blow. The whole business perplexed and maddened him; he was used to taking control of life, but now here was a problem without a solution, the theft of a child he had not seen in a country he could not imagine. When his son came home he seemed unable to speak to him, barely able to be in the same room. James said, “To some people, great grief is an indecency. They cannot look at it. They blame the bereaved.”
