It is in the nature of betrayal, she thought, that it not only changes the present, but that it reaches back with its dirty hands and changes the past.
She could not be still. She wandered through the rooms, then returned to the kitchen to make herself some more coffee. She sat at the table, trying to subdue her ragged breathing. She got up and went to the sink again. She saw from the kitchen clock that only half an hour had passed since she put the phone down on Ralph. You cannot pass the time like this, she thought: washing your cup and washing your cup.
Darkness had fallen. Autumn would choose a day like this, to announce its presence: stealthy feet, chilling the rooms. Ralph had lit the boiler this morning, but she had forgotten to attend to it. A major salvage operation would be needed now. She felt she did not have the strength for it. She took a blanket from the airing cupboard and walked downstairs with it gathered about her, African-style. She went into the sitting room. Did not put on the light. Chose herself a chair. She wrapped the blanket around her and pulled it almost over her head. She was swaddled now, like an ambulance casualty.
There had been times before, when she had thought they could not survive. There had been times when she had wished to erase her husband and children, her whole biography. There had not been a day, in twenty years, when she had not thought about her lost child. Sometimes on the television—they often watched the ten o’clock news together—they had seen the parents of missing children, shaking, bleating, heads sagging: making what was called an appeal, trying to wring some killer’s heart. No such appeal had been open to her. They had left the corpse behind, in another country. The verdict was final. When you have suffered together as she had, she and Ralph, what lies between you can’t be called romance. You can’t talk about a marriage, in the normal terms people use: a happy marriage, a marriage under strain. You are not partners, but the survivors of a disaster. You see each other and remember, every day. So how can you live together?
But how can you not?
She fingered the blanket’s satin-bound edge, and sat, apart from this fingering, without moving. When the room grew quite dark she put a hand out of her wrappings and switched on a lamp which stood by her on a round table. This table had a white cloth, on which Sandra Glasse had embroidered a scatter of daisies, violet and deep blue, their centres black like poppies: fantasy flowers, bouquets from an alternative world. Ralph said that every action contained its opposite. That nothing was fixed, nothing in creation; that cells made choices all the time. If we could rewind the tape of the universe, play it over again, we might find ourselves to be different: six-legged intelligent creatures, crawling on the sea bed, and speaking like birds, in song. But no, she thought, perhaps that is not what Ralph says. Perhaps I have got it wrong, he would be talking to the children and I would not be listening properly, that is usually the case with me. Have I not imagined, often enough, a universe in which other choices were made? The girl, Felicia, we turned out of the house. Some instinct warned me, so that night I kept my son in my arms. Or, Ralph took no pity on the wanderers in the storm, kept the bolts drawn, the key turned in the lock. She shivered. She felt closer to that night, now, than she did to the light and air of this morning: to the sea wind and coastal showers, the truculent girl in the backseat of the car, Kit with her hair streaming about her as she ran calling for Melanie through the streets.
The telephone rang, in the next room. She did not stir. It would be Emma, perhaps, wanting to know what was happening. Or Ralph, calling from the hospital. She still had nothing to say to him, so what was the point of answering? She withdrew her hand into the safety of her blanket. An hour passed. The phone rang again. It was raining outside, and now the house was very cold. Anna thought of nothing at all. Her ideas seemed to have stopped, as if chilled and narrow conduits no longer carried blood to heart and brain.
Very late—it must have been toward midnight—she heard the doorbell. She sat listening; someone had a finger pressed on it, insistent. Ralph would have his key, so would the children. Emma? She pulled the blanket around her. She did not want to see Ralph’s sister. Emma had a key for emergencies, but who was to know what she would consider an emergency? The person was knocking now, thudding at the door.
The police again? That’s possible. She could not ignore the noise. She extricated herself from the blanket. Her legs felt stiff. She fumbled for the light switch in the hall. “I’m coming,” she called. “Don’t break down the door.” Her voice sounded peculiar, precarious. She opened the door.
“Anna? Kit telephoned me from her aunt’s.”
He was the last person she had expected. “Daniel, come in from the night.” Rain blew in with him. “What did Kit tell you?”
“About the young girl you have staying. And that the police came. That you had gone off after them to find Ralph. You did find him, I suppose.”
“So Kit knew.”
“Had an idea.”
“A shrewd one, I’ll bet. And Julian would know of course, and Robin, I suppose. And you, now. The whole county, soon.”
“No, Anna, it’s nothing like that.”
She began to fasten her hair up; saw herself dimly in the hall-stand mirror. “I used to laugh at Ralph because he went on for
years without knowing about Emma and your father. Now the laugh’s on me, isn’t it?”
“Believe me, I knew nothing,” Daniel said. “Not until today. When Kit telephoned I found it hard to take in. Ralph, I mean … it doesn’t seem possible.” He looked down at his shoes. How young he is, Anna thought. A boy.
“And Kit asked you to come here, did she?”
“She wants to come home herself, but she promised you she’d stay and look after Becky. Becky’s asking all sorts of questions, but Emma can deal with that.”
Questions suitable to her time of life, Anna thought. Between us, we will have to come up with some suitable answers. “Yes, I made Kit promise to stay at Foulsham … you see, I can’t face anybody.” She looked up at him. “I have to prepare myself, Daniel. I have to think out what I am going to say.”
“I don’t think you should stay here on your own. Have you … I mean, Ralph, has he been in touch?”
“The phone’s been ringing. I didn’t answer it.”
“He’s probably still at the hospital. Kit would like to know how the child is.”
“I don’t care,” Anna said.
