Hilary Mantel - A Change of Climate

By this time Joan had left, taking everything she owned in the two carrier bags with which she had arrived. Sudden exits were not infrequent among their visitors; they were not like the visitors that other households get. Ralph made inquiries of the police, the Salvation Army, and the Department of Health and Social Security, but he drew a blank. When Anna came to check the first-aid kit – restocking it was one of her responsibilities – she noticed that Joan had taken an extra bandage with her. They saw this as a hopeful sign.

In those years, when the children were growing up, the house was full of people like Joan. Ralph brought some of them from the hostel in London, which was maintained by the charitable trust for which he worked. Others he took in when Social Services didn’t know what to do with them, or when there were no beds at the local psychiatric hospital. Sometimes they turned up of their own accord, crouching out of the wind in one of the outhouses until he came home. ‘So-and-so’s a sad case,’ he would say; and over the years, this was what the family came to call them: the Sad Cases. Other people he called Good Souls. ‘Your Aunt Emma is giving so-and-so a lift to her drugs clinic in Norwich – she’s a good soul.’

And this was how the world was divided, when Kit was growing up – into Good Souls and Sad Cases. There was no wickedness in it.

On the day of Felix Palmer’s funeral, his wife, Ginny, met his mistress, Emma. They had met before, of course. The county of Norfolk is not so populous that they could have avoided each other. Their conduct at these meetings had been shaped by Ginny’s lofty and wilful ignorance of the situation: by Emma’s sang-froid: by Felix’s natural desire to maintain an arrangement that suited him.

Over the years they had coincided in draughty parish halls, in charity committee rooms and at the caucuses of local groups concerned with the protection of what, in the decade just beginning, would be known as ‘the environment’. They had bumped into each other in Norwich, shopping in Jarrold’s department store; they had exchanged. small-talk at exhibitions of craftwork, and occupied neighbouring seats at the theatre.

Once, travelling to London, they had found themselves sole occupants of a first-class carriage. For half an hour they had found enough that was anodyne to pass the time. Then Ginny, excusing herself with a smile, delved into her bag and pulled out a fat paperback book. She retired behind it. Emma examined its cover. A svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple, stood before a manor house with anachronistic chimney-stacks. The title was in florid gold script: Wyfe to Crookback. Emma looked out of the window. The landscape was a sad East England green; crows wheeled over the fields. As they moved from the edge of England to its heart, Emma herself took out a book.

They parted at sooty Liverpool Street with a nod and a smile. London forced no collusion on them, but Norfolk did. A handful of farming and professional families played host to both. At a round of weddings and christenings they had made polite, even warm conversation. At a dozen New Year’s Eve parties they had wished each other luck and happiness: and sometimes almost meant it.

Now, on this February morning, Ginny stood surrounded by a knot of mourners. Friends and business associates had turned out for the occasion; Felix had been well-liked in the district. The church occupied high ground, and a ripping wind billowed coats and snapped at woollen head-scarves and brought a flush to aching faces. The mourners could sense the presence of the sea, hidden from them by a belt of pines.

Some of them lingered in the church porch, reading the notices about flower rotas, dusting and brass-cleaning; others stood among the gravestones, looking depressed. They had double-parked in the open area beyond the church gate, and would have to wait their turn to get away. Ginny, leaning on the arm of her son, moved from group to group, offering a few tactful words to soothe their feelings; she understood that death is embarrassing.

Her own family – her son Daniel, who was an architect, her daughter Claire, who was a buyer at Harrods – had been as gentle and as careful of her feelings as anyone could wish. But – even as she deferred the moment – Ginny felt that it was Emma to whom she wished to speak, to whom naturally she should be speaking. Patting her son’s arm, smiling up and dismissing him, she made her way across the grass with a short, precisely regulated stride, her high heels spiking holes in the ground like some primitive seed drill.

Ginny Palmer was a sharp, neat, Wallis Simpson sort of woman, to whom black lent an added definition. As she advanced on Emma, she took from her pocket a crisp lace-edged handkerchief, folded it very small and polished the tip of her nose: a gesture quite unnecessary, but somehow drawn out of her by the occasion. You see me, the widow: fastidious but distraught.

Emma Eldred kept her hands in her pockets; she had forgotten her gloves. She wore the coat that she had worn for years, to go out on her doctor’s rounds, to go shopping, to go out walking and to meet Felix. She saw no need for any other coat, in her ordinary life or on a day like this; it was dark, it was decent, and – she felt obscurely – it was something Felix would have recognized.

Emma Eldred was not a large woman, but gave the appearance of it: forty-eight years old, her face innocent of cosmetics, her broad feet safely encased in scuffed shoes decorated by leather tassels which somehow failed to cut a dash. Emma had known Ginny’s husband since childhood. She might have married him; but Felix was not what Emma considered a serious man. Their relationship had, she felt, borne all the weight it could. As Ginny approached, Emma shrunk into herself, inwardly but not outwardly. A stranger, only partly apprised of the situation, would have taken Ginny for the smart little mistress, and Emma for the tatty old wife.

The women stood together for a moment, not speaking; then as the wind cut her to the bird-bones, Ginny took a half-step closer, and stood holding her mink collar up to her throat. ‘Well, Ginny,’ Emma said, after a moment. ‘I’m not here to act as a wind-break.’ She drew her right hand from her pocket, and gave Ginny a pat on the shoulder. It was a brusque gesture, less of consolation than of encouragement; what you might give a weary nag, as it faces the next set of hurdles.

Ginny averted her face. Tears sprang into her eyes. She took out her tiny handkerchief again. ‘Why, Emma?’ she said. She sounded fretful, but as if her fretfulness might turn to rage. ‘Tell me why. You’re a doctor.’

‘But not his doctor.’

‘He wasn’t ill. He never had a day’s illness.’

Emma fixed her gaze on the tassels of her shoes. She imagined herself looking right through her dead lover; through his customary tweed jacket, his lambswool pullover, his striped shirt, through the skin, through the flesh, into the arteries where Felix’s blood moved slowly, a dark underground stream with silted banks. ‘No one could have known,’ she said. ‘No one could have spared you this shock, Ginny. Will you be all right, my dear?’

‘There’s plenty of insurance,’ Ginny said. ‘And the house. I’ll move of course. But not just yet.’

‘Don’t do anything in a hurry,’ Emma said. She had meant her question in a broad sense, not as an inquiry into Ginny’s financial standing. She raised her head, and saw that they were being watched. The eyes of the other mourners were drawn to them, however hard those mourners tried to look away. What do they all think, Emma wondered: that there will be some sort of embarrassing scene? Hardly likely. Not at this time. Not in this place. Not amongst people like ourselves, who have been reared in the service of the great god Self-Control. ‘Ginny,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t stand about here. Let Daniel drive you home.’