At ten o’clock, Anna returned to the Red House. She put her key in the door: thought, could there ever be a time when I will not do this?
She remembered how she had tried to sell the place, only a couple of years ago. It was a house with no center, she had always felt, no room from which you could command other rooms. Sound traveled in its own way; from one of the attics, you could hear the downstairs telephone quite distinctly, but from nearer rooms it couldn’t be heard at all. The house had its own conduits, sight lines. Sometimes one of the children’s friends had stayed overnight, without her knowing. She didn’t make a practice of searching the rooms, scouring the cupboards and landings for fugitives or stowaways; the house would have its private life, whether she agreed or not. In the morning a parent would telephone, furious or distraught. She would say, “Your child is here to be collected. I make no charge for bed and breakfast.” And then, oblivious to the babble on the line, she would put down the phone. She had not lived her life in a way that attracted sympathy. She had made sure of that.
Already—in the course of her small absence—the house had acquired an air of neglect. The vast hallstand had a vast cobweb on it, and just off-center sat a small brown spider, its legs folded modestly. Dirty plates and cups were piled in the sink. The boiler was out. “Kit, couldn’t you manage?” she said, exasperated.
“Is that all that’s on your mind? Housework?”
Rebecca was tearful. Robin baffled. Julian absent. Kit hostile. Kit had heard—through Daniel, no doubt—that Ralph had been to Blakeney and had tried to patch things up. She propped a hand against the kitchen wall; her eyes were snapping and fiery. “What can a person do?” she asked. “Except say they were wrong, and try to put it right?”
Anna gazed at her. “You know nothing, Kit.”
“I’m not claiming worldly experience. It’s a general principle I’m talking about.”
Ralph and his daughter, she thought: their terrible moral energy, their relish for the large statement. She had been preoccupied all her life with the particular, the minute; the neat stitching of a seam, the correctness of a turn of phrase. She had thought that life was governed in that way: by details. She had learned as a child, she thought, that details were what you offered God; you couldn’t hope, in any larger way, to please Him.
“Oh, Kit.” She sat down on a kitchen chair. “Will you make me something? Some coffee, with hot milk in it?”
The light of combat died in Kit’s eyes. Docile, solid, efficient, her daughter moved: table to fridge, fridge to the Rayburn. “Why should you forgive?” Anna said.
Without looking at her, Kit said, “Because if you don’t, it will kill you.”
Anna nodded. She knew such a thing was possible. Already she was becoming lighter, skeletal; her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground. She had not been able to eat the little egg, the widow’s meal. This morning there was a dizzying lightness at her center, a space under her heart.
“I have always thought,” she said, “that before there is forgiveness there must be restitution.”
Kit took the pan from the heat. She poured the milk carefully into the cup. “So what do you want him to do?”
“It’s not just him. You see, Kit, I’ve never forgiven anybody. I’ve had no practice. I don’t know how to do it.”
She put her hand to her mouth, as if the secret might spill out. (Are you sick? Kit said. No, no, she said.) All summer she had felt the drag of it, dragging itself toward the light. But perhaps there are no words for it; it can express itself only through symbols, through shadows. And life has always been like this: something more than it appears. In safety, there is danger. In tears, the awful slicing comic edge. In moments of kindness and laughter, the murderer’s fist at the door.
And year after year, Anna thought, I have occupied this room. I have sat at this table making shopping lists and writing letters, reading my daily paper, some faculty below consciousness alert for signs of disintegration: the sighing of the pipes and dripping of gutters, the malfunctioning squeak of ancient domestic machines, the boiler’s cough and the squeak of old floorboards. Coal dust and mouse droppings and vegetable peelings, gas bills and school reports, bitter wrong, and bitter duty correctly performed. Year after year I have sat in the house, windows sealed against the cold, waiting for someone. Who will not come home: who will never come home now.
Ralph went back to the Red House to collect his belongings. He would stay with Emma, he supposed. Anna said she did not want the house, but of course when she had thought about it she would want it, and it would be his responsibility to support her and the children. When he thought of the possible consequences of their separation—of rent for him and rates for her, of the severing of bank accounts and the relative poverty in which they would both live—his mind sheered off and went in some other direction, toward the contemplation of his moral insufficiency. That was easier for him; he was used to abstractions. Perhaps most people are, he thought. We indulge in guilt, shame—but faced with the practical effects of these emotions, we call in a solicitor. No wonder lawyers are never out of work.
He went up to their bedroom and packed some clothes. Anna had said she did not want sordid to-ing and fro- ing—that was the expression she had used—but of course it is impossible to crush a life into two suitcases. He tried, and then gave up, and sat on the edge of their bed, his face in his hands.
He hoped Anna would come in. She would not, of course. What would she see? Nothing to lift her spirits. You wreck your family once … years pass … you wreck it twice. He had evolved very nicely, he thought: along the only possible route.
Perhaps I should leave my clothes, and take my papers, I will need to clear out my desk … He was conscious of Anna, moving elsewhere in the house. Wherever he was, she wasn’t; they skirted and avoided each other.
In his office, he sat down in his wooden swivel chair. He looked at his photograph, the picture taken on the stoep at Flower Street. He folded the frame, laid it face down. That would be the last thing Anna would want; he should never have taken it out, it had only made the children ask questions. Sightless, his mother and father stared down at him: sepia eyes. How his father’s face had coarsened, with age; the flesh swelling, the features seeming to shrink. Would he be like that? It was possible, of course, that when the picture was taken his father was no older than he was now. And surely, he thought, I’m going his way: two inches on the waist, the reading glasses, those shirts that are too small around the collar, and get put to the back of the wardrobe. I am in no shape for a new life, he thought. But, anyway. It seems I have to have one.
Will Anna just watch me go, he wondered. Or is she waiting for me to make some gesture, some sign—but how would I know what it was? She had said she meant him to go, and he must allow her to mean what she said, he must allow her that.
