A Change of Climate: A Novel

Everything’s gone, he thought: just pride remains.

But how terrible, perhaps the worst thing in the world: to be taken at your word.

His hand crept into the first drawer of his desk. Closed around stone: Gryphaea. He held it to his cheek, and then against his mouth. A child’s life; the salt and cold. He tasted it: Phylum: Mol-lusca. Class: Pelecypoda. Order: Pterioda. Such confidence, he’d felt as a child, about the order of the world. Family: Gryphaeidae. Genus: Gryphaea. Species: arcuata. The past doesn’t change, of course: it lies behind you, petrified, immutable. What changes it is the way you see it. Perception is everything. It turns villains into heroes and victims into collaborators. He held the object up between his fingers: took a sighting, and spun it across the room into the wastepaper basket.

Anna was in the kitchen: I will do something useful, she thought. She ran the hot tap, and rinsed the crumbs out of a dishcloth. She wrung it between her hands, flapped it out, shook it and straightened it and set it to dry, carefully squaring up the corners as it hung over the drain board.

Well … that was marginally useful, was it not? She remembered the night Ralph had left her: washing her cup and washing her cup. A phrase from an old letter came back to her, a letter James had written: “There is always some emergency, God-given or otherwise.” How very odd memory is: and not an ally, on the whole. She could not see how this phrase had any application to her circumstances.

In the other room, Ralph was no doubt going about his preparations.

She walked around the kitchen table, touching the back of the chairs. She had consulted their solicitor; she had better tell Ralph about this, she supposed, as a family solicitor cannot act for both parties when those parties are not to be a family any longer.

She sat down at the table, because she felt ill.

Will he go? Surely he will not? But what will stop him?

She felt she had set him a test, an examination; but he was not aware of it, and so he could not hope to pass.

Ralph picked up his bags. He went out into the hall. “Anna? I’m going now.”

After a moment she appeared. She wrapped her cardigan tight across her chest. He saw the gesture: elderly, a means of defense. “So,” she said.

“You can phone me at Emma’s.”

“Yes, of course.”

“If you want me.”

“I should tell you, Ralph, that I’ve been up to Norwich, to see Mr. Phillips. He agrees that there are grounds, advises I stay in the house, but I told him I don’t want to do that. You will have to find another solicitor—I’m sorry about that, but of course Mr. Phillips can’t act for us both. What I mean to do is to find a flat in Norwich for myself and Becky. Then you can come back here. Kit and Julian and Robin, they won’t mind. They’ll stay here with you, I suppose. The kind of mothering I’ve given them … they’ll probably barely miss it.”

He looked at her for a moment, considering; put down his cases. She thought, he has put down his cases, surely he will not go now? He said, “You are indulging yourself, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes, of course. Self-indulgence is my habit.”

“I mean, you are indulging a notion of failure …”

“Failure? How could I be a failure?” She smiled brightly. “I mean, haven’t I kept the twin-tub in trim? Haven’t I managed the boiler, all these years? And the hallstand—oh, yes, I’ve come to grips with the hallstand. Say anything, but never say the Red House has beaten me.”

He clenched his hand inside his pocket, frozen around the space where he had thought Gryphaea would be. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and picked up his cases.

She opened the front door for him, helpfully. Unbalanced by the bags, he stepped back to kiss her cheek. He saw that she was crying. “You don’t want this to happen,” he said.

“At least acknowledge that I know my own mind.”

The door of the Red House was an old and heavy door. When it was opened the cold morning came in: a big breezy presence, filling the hall. He hesitated on the threshold, scuffing a foot, dragging the time out.

Anna touched his arm. “Ralph …”

He looked away, unwilling to influence by any expression on his face the expression on hers. He glanced up, out into the garden—if garden it could be called: over the mud and the lawn churned up by bikes and neighbors’ dogs that the children played with, over the pond where they’d had fish once and over the rusty swing with its sodden ropes, and over Julian’s vegetable plots, and the wilderness of the dog runs and the outbuildings beyond. Something moved— dog-height—from one of the rotting sheds. Anna said, “What’s that? What on earth is it?”

A creature moved into their view, at a distance. It came slowly over the rough ground, crawling. It was a human being: its face a mask of despair, its body half clothed in a flapping gown, its hands and knees and feet bleeding; its strange head the color of the sun. It progressed toward them; they saw the heaving ribs, the small transparent features, the dirt-ingrained skin.

“I must put these cases down somewhere,” Ralph said. All he could think for the moment was that they were dragging his arms out of their sockets; he did not know whether to put them inside or outside the house. He wondered which of them would move first, he or Anna, toward this jetsam, this salvage; but wondered it idly, without that spirit of competition in goodness that had animated his life. Whichever, it didn’t matter … he put his baggage down, nowhere in particular, wedged across the threshold. “We must take her in,” he said to Anna. “Or she will die.”

“Yes,” Anna’s face was open, astonished. They left the Red House together, stumbling over the rough grass. As they approached the child, she stopped trying to crawl. She shrank into herself, her head sunk between her shoulder blades like some dying animal. But then, as they reached out toward her, Melanie began to breathe—painfully, slowly, deeply, sucking in the air—as if breathing were something she were learning, as if she had taken a class in it, and been taught how to get it right.

In November that year, Emma went back to Walsingham. It was seasonably cold, the light struggling against an obdurate bank of cloud. In the street she saw