For a year or so after their return from Bechuanaland, she fought to keep her hold on the past, on every detail of it. She had been afraid to forget anything; to forget seemed a betrayal of her child who might—it was possible— still be alive. She rehearsed constantly in her mind the incidents of their life at Mosadinyana: from their arrival on the station platform under the stars, to their final exit, bags packed for them by commiserating strangers. But though the pain remained fresh, specific memories staled and faded; they receded from her, the little events of this day and that. The one night remained in her mind, indelible—the thunder snarling overhead, the hammering of the rain on the roof, Ralph’s blood coating her hands to the wrist. But after two years, three, her inner narrative slipped, became disjointed. What remained as memories were a series of pictures, some hard and sharp, some merely cross-hatched blurs of light and sound.
On the day Julian was born, Anna had no interest in resisting pain, or behaving well, or making the process pleasant for those who attended her. When a medical fist squashed a mask onto her face, she gulped oblivion; and she would not allow herself to come back. She wanted the gas and not the air; oblivion informed her, it was what she craved. When Julian was first placed in her arms—a neat, clean, pink little baby, held by the unfeeling hands of nurses, scrubbed and sanitized before they gave him to her—she felt a certain flinching, a pull away from him; she hated to place any burden of expectation on this fragile scrap of being wrapped in a shawl. She saw the tight folds of his lashless eyes, his sea-sponge mouth, forming and re-forming, the stiff mottled fingers that thrust through the cobweb knitting of the shawl: she tried to pretend she had no other son, that she was seeing a son for the first time. Julian had fair curls and soft eyes; he lay in his father’s arms and trusted him. He did not remind her unnecessarily of her sharp, small, dark child, his fragile skull still showing when she lost him, the pulses visible, beating beneath that fluttering baby skin.
Ralph’s mother, Dorcas, was a friend to her, in those early years; a close-mouthed, uncommunicative old woman, but always there, always attentive, always to be relied on. Anna shrank from her sister-in-law at first; bossy young GP, driving over from Norwich every other Saturday, full of specious knowledge, worldliness, vitality. She shrank from the world, indeed; there were days when she wouldn’t go out of the house, couldn’t go out, when a word from a stranger would make her blush and shake, when she could not bear to lift her head to meet another person’s eyes.
Sometimes she woke with her right hand contracted, clenched, as if she were still holding the neck of the bottle she had broken against the Instows’ sideboard. For a year and a half she kept Julian’s cot in her room, and only when Robin was born, and she had something frailer to concern her, did she cease to wake and check his breathing many times during the night. When Kit went to school, she could hardly be persuaded from the school gate.
Of course, people noticed her behavior. They said, Anna, you’re a trained teacher, you’ve got your mother-in- law to look after the children for you, why don’t you go back to work? You need an interest, it would take you out of yourself. They wondered why she was seen so seldom, outside her own house; why she did not take what her mother called “an active interest in charity work.”
After a year or two of this—the searing gaffs of other people’s demands—Ralph’s sister Emma took her aside and spoke to her, just in time to save her life. She saved it by small, usual words, trite in themselves, but very important if you were dying.
“Anna,” she had said, “you don’t seem well to me, you seem out of breath, shall I listen to your chest? I wouldn’t treat my own family, of course—but I could just tell you if there was anything obviously wrong.”
“It’s nothing,” Anna said, “it’s the cold weather, you know, it puts me out of breath—besides, I’ve always been like it.”
“Have you?” Emma said, interested.
“Oh yes … I’m strong enough, in myself, but I could never run much. Even when I was little. Don’t you notice me, when I dash upstairs?”
“No, what do you do?”
“My heart pounds.” She frowned. “I’ve always been like it. I told you. It was easier when we went to Africa. There were no stairs.”
“I never realized,” Emma said. “What an idiot I am.”
She was able to tell Ralph, after investigations, that Anna had a slight defect in a heart valve: nothing that required surgery, nothing that was going to kill her, nothing that would ever give her more than the minor inconvenience she had suffered all her life, and which she had never thought to speak of. “It’s common enough,” Emma said, trying to create the proper balance between reassurance and alarm. “But you must give her a quiet time, Ralph. She has enough with the house and the babies, you mustn’t let anyone try to prod her and pester her into supporting amateur dramatics and doing these damn flower festivals and calling on old gossips who are fitter than she is. You must protect her, you see. When people want her to do something, you can sit back in your chair, and frown, and say, well now, my wife, didn’t you know she is not precisely well?”
Not precisely well. Ralph wondered if it was fear that impeded Anna’s breathing, fear that stuck in her throat.
“It’s difficult,” Emma said, “to disentangle the causes and effects. Certainly, Anna has anxiety attacks. I’ve seen them, I’ve seen it happen. It’s not surprising at all that she has them, when you think what she’s gone through. After some great upset in your life you may think you’re coping, in your mind—you may feel you’re on top of life. Very well—the mind has strategies. But the body needs different ones. It has a memory of its own.”
“But this defect, in her heart, the valve—that’s not to do with anxiety attacks, it’s something in itself, you’re saying?”
Emma hesitated. “Yes, it’s something in itself—something and nothing. But Ralph, people are very ignorant and cruel, and they won’t accept mental suffering as an excuse to avoid anything. They say, “Pull yourself together.” I am afraid I couldn’t bear to hear anyone say that to Anna—and we are not far off the day when they will. But—trust me, I know what people are like—they’ll respect a heart complaint. A heart complaint is very respectable, very respectable indeed.”
Ralph said, “Sometimes I feel panic too. And a …” he put his hand to his throat, “something here, a heaviness, it won’t move. Still, I … I keep going.”
“That’s what men do,” Emma said. “Keep going. Often at the expense, don’t you think, of the people around
