returned. He, Ralph, wanted so badly to see Amy Glasse that it was like a physical pain. He didn’t want to drive to the farmhouse and run into Julian again, but what could he do? I am going to have to speak, he thought, tell Anna— or break this off—break it off now, because it’s already too serious—how could it not be? All these years I have never looked at another woman, never thought of one, my life in that direction was closed, there was no other woman in my calculations.
If only Julian would come home, he thought. Then I should make some excuse, get into the car, drive.
He looked up. Melanie was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at them. “Come on, my dear,” Anna said. “There’s plenty of food left. Pull up a chair.”
Melanie recoiled: as if she had been asked to sit down with tribesmen, and dine on sheep’s eyes. For another minute she studied them, poised as if for flight; then her big boots pounded up the stairs again, and her bedroom door slammed.
Summer heat had built up. White sky and a smear of sun. No wind. Heaven and earth met imperceptibly in a straw-colored haze, and the outlines of trees were indistinct. Through this thick summer soup Julian and Sandra walked together by the footpaths, tacking inland. There was thunder in the air.
“You can come and live with us, if you want,” Sandra said. “My mum would be glad to have you. And then— though you’d have to see Ralph—you wouldn’t have to go home and face Anna.”
“My father,” Julian says, “actually believes that you don’t know what’s going on.”
“There he’s wrong. The first thing I noticed, he was always there when he thought I was away.” Sandra raised her hands, and tucked her red hair modestly behind her ears. “He doesn’t see me, so he thinks I don’t see him. But I do see him—because you know my habit of coming home across country.”
“Through hedges and ditches.”
“If need be.” Sandra stopped, and looked directly at him. “I
brought this on you, Jule. If I’d never come to your house, this would never have happened.”
“But you did,” Julian said. “You did come. So what’s the use of talking like that?”
“I don’t know. It’s no use. But it’s a point of interest, isn’t it? If you hadn’t come to North Walsham that day, when I’d gone out with the motor bikes. Or if it had rained before, five minutes before, you’d never have seen me. You’d have turned up your coat collar and gone striding off back to your car, and I’d have taken shelter in the church. And your dad would be at home with your mum, and everybody would have been happy.”
“No, not happy,” Julian said. “That’s not how I’d describe us.”
They were heading toward Burnham Market. But before they reached the village she said, “Come in this church.”
“Why? It’s not raining.”
“No, but there’s a thing in it I look at. I want to show you.”
An iron gate in a grassy bank, a round tower; their shadows went faintly before them over the shorn grass. Inside, an uneven floor, cream-colored stone; silence, except for the distant hum of some agricultural machine. Light streamed in through windows of clear glass. “The old windows blew out in the war,” Sandra said. “So my grandmother told me.”
“I didn’t know you had a grandmother.”
“I called her my grandmother. She lived at Docking.”
“But who was she really?”
Sandra shrugged. “My mother, she never talks about her life. I don’t know who my dad was, so I’m not likely to know much about my grandmother, am I?”
The chill of the floor struck through his thin rope-soled shoes. He looked around. A square, massive ancient font, of the kind he had been dipped in, he supposed; he found it easy not to examine it. But there was something here worth attention; he saw a wineglass pulpit, delicate and frail. “Is this it?” he asked Sandra.
He stood before the pulpit: I should not touch it, what if everyone touched, it would dissolve. He made himself an exception: his fingertip grazed the outlines of church fathers in their mitres and cardinals’ hats, their quills inscribing scrolls: deep green and crimson scratched and flaking away to show the wood beneath, so that the faces were half of paint flake, half of the wood’s grain. On the walls he could pick out the curve of a halo, a line of color faint as thought; he would not have seen it if Sandra had not traced it for him with her finger.
Then she touched his arm. “But look, Julian. Come here. This is what I want to show you.”
She led him away from the pulpit to the south aisle, turned him with his back to the altar. She pointed to the flags at their feet, and to one stone, gray-black, mottled, scarred: yet each letter perfectly incised and clear. “This one,” she said.
They stood for a moment without speaking. Then Sandra touched his arm. “They say that people in those days didn’t love their children, but it can’t be true, Julian, can it?”
“No.” He dropped his head. “Of course they must have loved her. Because they counted up every day.”
Again, silence. Sandra said. “Listen, this thing about Becky—
