“I started putting in those poles for the back fence.”
“And have you seen your girlfriend?”
The slight vulgarity and childishness of the expression struck Julian. It was as if his mother had spilled her tea on the table, or put her fingers in the sugar bowl.
“I’m going over tomorrow. I just wanted to get a start on that fence, as the rain was keeping off. I wish Kit would come home soon. I want her to meet Sandra’s mother. I want to know what she’ll think of her.”
So Sandra will be with us for another summer, Anna thought. With Julian you had to glean things, here and there.
A few days after the funeral, Emma went to the shrine at Walsing-ham. She was not sure why; her faith, if it still existed, was not something she displayed in public. But when you cannot cope with grief, she reasoned, you can do worse than observe the forms that have helped other people cope with it. At Felix’s funeral the minister had said that, even in the depth of misery, the familiar forms of prayer can lift the heart toward Christian joy. Very well, Emma thought grimly, let’s try it. Something is needed. For Ginny, there were undertakers. There was the question of probate. There was the business of organizing Mrs. Gleave and the vol-au-vents. But for me there is nothing. An empty space. A lack of occupation. It is as if I have been told of a death that has taken place in a distant country. It is as if I have no claim on sympathy, because I have heard of the death of a person my friends do not know. There is no body. There is no corpse. Just this absence, this feeling of something unfinished.
Skirting Fakenham, taking the back roads toward the shrine and the sea, she found her car alone on the road. Across the flat fields towers spiked the snow-charged sky, the clouds pregnant and bowed with cold; Norfolk is a land of churches, some open to the sky, their chancels colonized by nettles, their naves by blackthorn and brambles. In those not yet redundant, congregations dwindle; the Samaritans’ notices, flapping in the porches, attest to the quality and frequency of rural despair.
In Walsingham, the car park was empty. The streets were devoid of tourists and pilgrims, and the old buildings—half timber and brick and stone, steep roof and Dutch gable—seemed to have moved closer together, as if the town were closing itself down for the winter. By the Anglican shrine, plaster saints looked out from shop windows: and woven saints, with tapestry eyes. Touches of gilt glinted here and there on a cardboard halo; postcards were for sale, and prayers printed in mock black letter on mock scrolls. You could buy candles, which you might put to secular use; other windows displayed recordings of plainchant, and pots of honey in stoneware jars, and boxes of Norfolk Lavender soap. Walsingham tea towels were on offer, jars of chutney, tins of shortbread, Earl Grey tea bags in cod Victorian packaging; and there were herb pillows, Olde Englishe Peppermint Lumps, potpourri and fluffy toys, wall plaques, paperweights, and scented drawer-liners—all the appurtenances, in fact, that you would expect to find at an ancient pilgrim site. Trade was poor. The only visible inhabitant was a woman with a shopping basket over her arm and a pug dog on a lead. She nodded to Emma and walked on, huddling into the shadow of the Abbey’s wall.
Emma went up the path to the church. It was a building put up in the 1930s, and its exterior, disappointingly plain, hid its dim papistical contents: devotional candles blinking, sad-eyed virgins pouting in gold frames. She asked herself, what would my father have said, what would my father have said to a bauble-shop like this? Matthew Eldred seemed very far away, very old and dead and gone. Not so Felix. Alone in her cottage in Foulsham, she still listened for the sound of his key in the lock.
Emma lurked about toward the back of the church, away from the altar. Finally she sat down on a chair at the end of a row. She gave herself permission for tears, but she was not able to cry. Like her sister-in-law Anna, she had trained herself out of it. The thought of Felix lay like a stone inside her chest. Outside, some sort of building work seemed to be going on; she could hear the monotonous thump of hammers and the whirring of drills. In my family, she thought, we practice restraint and the keeping of secrets, and the thoughts we respect are unvoiced thoughts; even Felix, an open secret, was a secret of a kind. But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.
On the back wall were wooden plaques, names and dates: thanks given, intentions stated.
Near these plaques, the water from the Holy Well was made available in buckets. Pilgrims might help themselves, by dipping with assorted vessels; a table, stacked up with prayer books, held also the abandoned top of a thermos flask, some paper cups of the kind tea machines dispense, and some beakers of molded plastic, each one frilly at the rim, as if it had been gnawed. Emma thought the arrangements unsanitary. She went out, her gloves in her hand.
In the porch was a vast book, well-thumbed, its pages ruled into columns. A notice promised ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE SHRINE.
Emma took her pen out of her pocket, turned to a clean page, and wrote down the date. She did not put Felix’s name in the book, because she believed that energy should be directed toward the living, not the dead. She did not put her own name, because she believed she would manage well enough. But she wrote the names of her brother and his wife:
RALPH ELDRED
ANNA ELDRED
Beneath she wrote:
KATHERINE ELDRED
then hesitated, and skipped one line, before
JULIAN ELDRED
ROBERT ELDRED
REBECCA ELDRED
It was half dark when Emma left the porch. Between the church and the road there was no pavement; she crept uphill by the high wall, protected only by heaven’s benevolence from the cars behind her. Eddies of sleet swirled in a huddle of stone and flint, slapping at window glass and melting underfoot. Sitting in an almost empty cafe, her hands around a mug of hot chocolate, she thought of that other frozen afternoon, when Ralph’s curly head emerged up the staircase of the Holt tearoom, and dipped under the beam, and swiveled, gaze focusing … If Ralph had not come upon them that particular day, his sensibilities skinned by the cold, he would have continued in his obstinate and peculiar ignorance; when Felix died, they would have stood at his graveside as two old family friends, and Ralph would have given her not a word of sympathy except that due between decent people when a contemporary has quit the scene. And that, she thought, would have suited me.
Lines of poetry ran through Emma’s head. Auden, she thought. She was pleased at being able to identify it, because she was not a literary woman. They were insistent lines, stuffed with a crude menace.
