Matthew became, more than ever, subject to sudden outbursts of temper, to seizures of indignation about the state of the world. The sight of Julian—his second grandson—made him want his first; it made him rage with disbelief and dismay. “Why did you go?” he said to Ralph one day. “You didn’t need to go. The missions must be staffed, but you needn’t have gone, you shouldn’t have gone, there were plenty more experienced people to go. Pride made you do it, I think—pride, and being above yourself, knowing better than other people. That’s always been your fault, boy.”

Ralph said, “You want to know why I went to Africa? I’ll tell you. I went to get away from you.”

The day after the quarrel, Matthew suffered a stroke. Ralph never spoke to him again—or rather, he spoke, but the old man gave no sign of hearing or comprehending, though somehow Ralph believed he did both. Ralph whispered to him: forgive me, for the things I have done that hurt you, and for the things that hurt you that I didn’t know I had done.

By his father’s deathbed he felt himself begin to grow up. He said, after all, my father was not so old himself in the days when he treated me so badly. He was still learning the world, he felt responsibility heavy on his back. It is hard to be a father; no doubt he was not malicious, no doubt he did the best he could. “Please forgive me, because I forgive you,” he whispered. His father died after three days, the pardon ungranted.

What to do now, with ordinary grief, ordinary guilt? All emotions seem attenuated in the wake of the one great disaster. “Nothing can hurt you worse,” Ralph’s mother said. “Nothing can hurt you worse than you have been hurt already. I don’t expect you to cry for him, Ralphie. Let’s just get him buried.”

After this, Dorcas moved in with them, a carpet-slippered presence in the drafty hall of their new house.

It’s not so easy to return from Africa, even when circumstances are favorable and the return is planned. Hostilities against the cockroach and the ant cease only gradually. A mark on the wall converts itself into a crawling tick, and there is effort and vigilance all the time—it is hard to sit in the fitful English sunshine, in the heat without threat, harmless insects brushing your bare arms. It was more than a year before Anna could bring herself to leave a plate or a cup on a table; after it had been used, she would snatch it away and wash it, to thwart the advancing carpet of crawling greed. “Poor Anna,” people said. “She’s always on the go. She’ll wear herself out, that girl.” The words used about her, the trite kindnesses, had a sting of their own. There had been a tragedy in her life, and no one here had the terms for it. In winter the weight of her clothes oppressed her; wool and shoe leather chafed and cramped and squeezed.

And how England looks like itself! After the white light, the sun that bleaches out color and destroys perspective, here are the discrete, exclusive Old Master tints, sienna, burnt umber, indigo: the dense conifers in shadowed ranks, the tan flash of stripped bark, the flush on the trunk of silver birch at sunset; breath on the raw air, and owls calling at dead of night. Another spring will come, and summer: green layered on green, the mossy wall, the lichened fence; and drowsing horses beneath an elm, flanks fly-buzzed, necks bowed, dreaming of George Stubbs.

So now, where should they begin? How should they coordinate their slow crawl back from the desert? What should they say? What could they tell people? Who was entitled to the whole story, and who could be kept at a distance with a half-truth?

Anna’s parents knew the facts—knew the probabilities, that is— but they settled for not talking about them. They pretended that they were sparing their daughter’s feelings, but really they were sparing their own. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for catastrophe. They worshipped routine; events were dubious matters, and often in bad taste. It was a form of showing off, to have things happen to you. “Of course, it’s terrible, a horrible thing, dreadful,” Mrs. Martin said, “but although I don’t say so, of course, I blame him for taking her there in the first place. He could have had a nice job with his father, there was no need to trail halfway across the globe.”

The Martins had spent much of their lives beating the drum for the Christian faith, getting up jumble sales and flower shows so that the dark races could have the benefit of the company of brisk young Englishmen who were familiar with the Psalms and (among other Books) the Book of Job. But they did not expect to have one of these young Englishmen in their back parlor behind the shop, frozen and speechless with misery. They did not expect the Book of Job to have any practical application.

And friends of the families—what to tell them? They flinched from detail, and Ralph flinched more than Anna. He thought, if we tell them what we think has happened, we will pander to their filthy prejudices, we will seem to traduce a whole nation: savages, they will say.

It was possible to say, “We lost our son.” That covered everything. Few people inquired further. Rather, they would shy away, as if the bereaved might break down in front of them, lie on the floor and howl. It was surprising how vague people were, even the people who claimed they had been praying for them every Sunday. I thought the young Eldreds had two children, people would say, didn’t I hear from somewhere that they had twins? Unease would cross their faces; was there some story about it, an accident perhaps, or was it just that the child succumbed to a tropical fever? Ralph had feared intrusive questions, but instead there was an indifference that he felt as an insult. He made a discovery, common to those who expatriate themselves and then return: that when he and Anna went abroad they had ceased to be regarded as real people. Out of sight, out of mind. Nobody, even the most generous donor to mission appeals, wanted to hear anything about Africa.

In the early years after their return, huge areas of reference were excluded by their family, their close friends. They were surrounded by acres laid waste, acres of silence. Slowly, cautiously, normality tiptoed back; the family no longer censored themselves, guarding conversation from all mention of Africa. After a while they ceased to flinch when a picture of a lost child appeared in the newspapers. Finally the dimensions of the tragedy shrunk; there was a little barbed area in which no one trod, in which the secret was sequestered and locked away. Was it less potent, confined? No: it was more potent, Ralph felt. He dreamt of scrubbing blood away, scrubbing his own blood off a cement floor; but the stain always returned, like the blood in Bluebeard’s room. He understood, then, what the fairy tale means; blood is never wiped out. No bad action goes away. Evil is energy, and perpetuates itself; only its form changes.

Over the next few years Ralph made himself busy, burying the past under a weight of daily preoccupation. Anna watched him change, cultivate a sort of shallow and effortless bonhomie—beneath which, she imagined, his real thoughts teemed on, guilty and seething and defrauded. In daily life he became an exacting, demanding man, who gave her only glimpses of the gentleness of those early years; she had to look at his sons, as they grew up, to see the kind of man Ralph had once been. She had realized very early, when they lived in Elim, that his kindness had a detachment about it, that his care for people was studied and willed; now it became a hard-driving virtue, combative.

During the 1970s the Trust became one of the better-funded small charities, and attracted a member of the royal family as patron. Ralph was contemptuous of the young man, but he would put up with anyone’s company to further his aims. He must see progress everywhere; he must see improvement. All day there must be action, or the simulation of it; letters in every direction, telephone calls, driving about the county and up and down to London; there must be advertising and exhortation, press campaigns and fund-raising drives. He took charge of policy, of the broader picture, engaged the services of a freelance public-relations expert; he rebuilt the hostel, updated its aims and methods. He granted an interview to the Guardian and one to New

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