Ralph glanced at Dorcas; she seemed to be sleeping, but he had a feeling she was listening still. He reached out for his sister’s arm. “Emma, come with me, come, let’s get out a bit, let’s go and walk, or let’s make tea, do something, go and sit by ourselves … this is such old ground, I didn’t think I’d ever have to go over it.”
Emma seemed stunned. “But Ralph, why didn’t you tell me? All these years have gone by, events making no sense or partial sense … I used to say to you, why did you let him bully you?”
“Yes, you did.”
“How did you bear it?”
“There was no alternative.*’
“I thought you were spineless. Weak.” Emma looked very young, as if layers had peeled away. “He’d have done it, you know—he’d have kept me at home to punish you. With most fathers it would have been bluster, but with him—no, he meant every word he said.” She shook her head. “Imagine—it would have been a better revenge than anything he could have done to you directly. If you’d have insisted on your path in life, I’d have been turned off mine. And think of the hook of guilt it would have put into your flesh.”
“Yes.” He remembered a thorn that had once, at Mosadinyana, embedded itself in the pad of his middle finger, and made his arm numb to the elbow: an intricate thorn, like a medieval battle weapon, designed by man to do its worst. “But she, Mum—she’s no saint. She colluded with him.”
“She was frightened, Ralph.”
“Can’t you overcome fear?”
“You ask too much of people,” Emma said sadly.
They did not speak for a while. Then Ralph asked, “Will she live?”
His sister said, with professional accuracy, “She’ll die the day after tomorrow.”
It is a pity that she cannot, with similar accuracy, put a term to the afterlife of the missing child. It would be possible, if one were harsh, to regard this lost child not as an innocent, but as a malign half presence, a destroyer, a consumer of hope. Katherine grows up; they search her face for signs of what her brother would have been. As babies, they were not much alike. So no consolation there; but no further suffering, either. Except you cannot help but mark out the course of the shadow-life … he would be six years old, he would be seven years old, he would be seventeen. He has all we lack, he is everything we are not; we have our gross appetites, but he is the opposite of flesh. Somewhere in Africa the little heart rots, the bird bones crumble or—alternatively—the traces dry in their jar; their child becomes a bush-ghost, powder on the wind.
Norfolk, 1980: midsummer. Cyclists take to the road, with flapping shirts and fluorescent saddlebags. Women in loud print dresses, their cardigans over their arms, pad downhill in seaside streets, with wide feet like the feet of waders. There are fathers in cars, lost in country lanes: irate metropolitan faces behind glass, and wives tearfully slapping at maps that won’t fold.
There are poppies in the verges—indecent splashes, as if blood were welling up beneath the landscape. In every vegetable garden in the county, cabbage whites hover dangerously over the brassicas. Those hedges that remain are towering walls, walls of deep green; lemonade bottles perch in them, chucked out from passing cars. Small animals are smashed into the tarmac of the A149—so flattened, so thoroughly dead, that they look like animals in cartoons, who will instantly spring back into their old shape.
Sandra and Amy Glasse are selling samphire, cauliflower, lettuces, beans, and new potatoes. They are selling large fleshy tomatoes, because last winter Julian reglazed their greenhouse. Ralph is now in love with Mrs. Glasse, and sees her once a week, twice a week, three times if he can contrive it. Contriving is hard and goes against his nature; but when has his nature ever been what it should be?
Summer visitors came to Ralph’s house, children from the hostel. Ralph’s own children treated them with the usual distant tolerance. Kit had not resolved her future; she drifted around the house, and bickered with Daniel, who found himself in the neighborhood every other day.
The Visitors exhibited their customary bewilderment. They had grown up in cities, and spent a lot of their lives standing about in the street. Here, there was no street worth standing in—just a lane, its high verges choked with thistle and fern, cow parsley and rose-bay willow herb. They did not go out of the house much, because they did not like to walk anywhere or ride bicycles. Sometimes they begged lifts to Reepham, the nearest market town. They would swagger across the market square, then lean on the railings outside the Old Brewery, looking hopeless; stare into the butcher’s window, to see if the lamb chops were doing anything exciting; shove and barge into the post office, which sold stationery and newspapers and picture postcards of Norwich, and there shoplift packets of paper doilies, and marble-swirl pencils with erasers on the end. Then they would vandalize a few hanging baskets, and beg a lift back to the house again.
“If this goes on,” Kit said to Robin, “the people in Reepham will start complaining. They’ll get up a petition.”
“They’ll get up a mob, I should think.” Robin lurched unsteadily across the kitchen, pulling his forelock and pretending to be a vampire’s manservant. “My lord, the villagers are advancing, armed with staves.”
“No, seriously,” Kit said. “The Visitors seem worse than ever this year.”
“It’s you that’s changing. Getting old and mean.”
“And where’s Julian? He’s no help. He’s always over at Sandra’s house, you’d think he’d decided to leave home. When he’s here he doesn’t speak.”
“Well, he’s gone mad, hasn’t he?” Robin said. “Round the twist. I thought we’d established that. What I want to know is, how is he going to keep a grip on Becky now it’s the school holidays? He can’t be over there screwing Sandra and here guarding his little sister, not both at the same time.”
“No,” Kit said. “Think how he must be torn.”
“Very odd, our family.”
“I said that. A few weeks ago. You seemed to disagree. You seemed to think they were normal.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“A man’s privilege.”
“But Kit—can you make sense of it? Don’t watch television, it contaminates your brain. Don’t hang around with smart kids with money, or you might contract that fearful disease materialism. So what do we get instead, for entertainment and company? Child prostitutes from Brixton. Heroin addicts. Thieves.”
“We’re supposed to be proof against it,” Kit said. “We’ve been so well brought up that they’re not going to
