Hilary Mantel - A Change of Climate

‘A few people are coming back,’ Ginny said. She looked at Emma in faint surprise, as if it were natural that she would know the arrangements. ‘You should come back too. Let me give you some whisky. A freezing day like this…Still, better than rain. Claire’s staying on over the weekend.’ Ginny raised her hand, and twitched at her collar again. ‘Emma, I’d like to see you. Like you to come to the house…Mrs Gleave is making vol-au-vents…’ Her voice tailed off entirely.

Emma’s brother, Ralph Eldred, loomed purposefully behind them: a solid figure, hands scrunched into the pockets of his dark wool overcoat. Ginny looked up. The sight of Ralph seemed to restore her. ‘Ralph, thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Come back with us and have some whisky.’

‘I should take myself off,’ Ralph said. ‘I have to go to Norwich this afternoon to a meeting. But naturally if you want me to, Ginny…if I can be of any help…’ He was weighing considerations, as he always did; his presence was wanted on every hand, and it was simply a question of where he was needed most.

‘Why, no,’ Ginny said. ‘It was a courtesy, Ralph. Do run along.’

She managed a smile. It was her husband’s under-occupation that had freed him for his long years of infidelity; but Ralph’s days were full, and everybody knew it. There were advantages, she saw, in being married to a man who thought only of work, God and family; even though the Eldred children did look so down at heel, and had been so strangely brought up, and even though Ralph’s wife was worn to a shadow slaving for his concerns.

Ralph’s wife Anna wore a neat black pillbox hat. It looked very smart, though it was not remotely in fashion. Lingering in the background, she gave Ginny a nod of acknowledgement and sympathy. It was an Anna Eldred nod, full of I-do-not-intrude. Ginny returned it; then Ralph took his wife’s arm, and squired her away at a good clip towards their parked car.

Ginny looked after them. ‘You wonder about marriage,’ she said suddenly. ‘Are marriages all different, or all alike?’

Emma shrugged, shoulders stiff inside her old coat. ‘No use asking me, Ginny.’

Inside the car, Ralph said, ‘It’s not right, you know. It’s not, is it? For Emma to find out like that. More or less by chance. And only when it was all over.’

‘It was all over very quickly,’ Anna said. ‘From what I gather.’

‘Yes, but to have no priority in being told – ’

‘I expect you think Ginny should have rung her from the hospital, do you? Just given her a tinkle from the intensive-care unit?’

‘ – to have no right to know. That’s what galls me. It’s inhuman. And now Ginny gets all the sympathy, all the attention. I’m not saying she doesn’t need and deserve it. But Emma gets nothing, not a word. Only this public embarrassment.’

‘I see – you think that as Emma was the maîtresse en titre, she should be allowed to put on a show of her own?’ Anna sighed. ‘I’m sure Felix has left her some fine diamonds, and a château for her old age.’

A contractor’s van drew up in front of the Eldreds’ car, adding to the traffic jam; restoration work was going on at the church. Two workmen got out, and began to untie a ladder from the roof-rack. A lesser man with Ralph’s schedule would have fretted at the delay. But Ralph showed his impatience only by a little tapping of his forefinger against the steering wheel. There was a school nearby, and the voices of children drifted from the playground, carried on the wind like gulls’ cries.

The couple who blocked them drove off, nodding, raising hands in a stiff-fingered wave. The contractor moved his van. Ralph pulled out on to the road. Anna saw the children dashing and bumping and careening behind a fence: bullets trussed in duffle coats, their faces hidden under hoods.

The route home lay inland, through narrow lanes between farms: flat airy fields, where tractors lay at rest. Ralph pulled up to let a duck dawdle across the road, on its way from a barnyard to nowhere. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it. Emma’s got nothing. Nothing. She’s given twenty years to Felix and now she’s on her own.’

‘Emma’s given something,’ Anna said. ‘I think to say that she’s given twenty years is being melodramatic.’

‘Why is it,’ Ralph said, ‘that women manage to be so cool in these situations? What’s all this keeping up a good front? Why do they think they have to do it? I heard Ginny talking about insurance policies, for God’s sake.’

‘I only mean, that Emma’s life has suited her. She had what she wanted – a part-time man. Felix didn’t use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If she’d chosen to. She didn’t have to wait on Felix.’

‘Married? Could she?’ Ralph turned his head.

‘Look out,’ Anna said, with a languor born of experience. Ralph put his foot on the brake; a farm truck slowly extruded its back end from a muddy and half-concealed driveway.

‘Sorry,’ Ralph said. ‘Could she? Who could she have married then?’

‘Oh Ralph, I don’t mean any one person, not this particular man or that particular man…I only mean that if she had wanted to marry, if that had been what she preferred, she could have done it. But marriage entails things, like learning to boil eggs. Things that are beyond Emma.’

‘I can’t see men beating a path to her door.’ Ralph edged the car painfully down the lane, squeezing it past the truck, which had got stuck. ‘Not Emma. No beauty.’

‘Felix liked her.’

‘Felix was a creature of habit.’

‘Most men are.’

Ralph fell silent. He was very fond of his sister; no one should think otherwise. Emma was kind, clever, wise…and lonely, he’d supposed: a little figure glimpsed on a river bank, while the pleasure craft sped by. This notion of her as a manipulator, of Felix as a little fish that she played at the end of her stick and hook…Seems unlikely to me, he thought. But then, what do I know?

The journey took them a half-hour, through back roads and lanes, through straggling hamlets of red brick or flint cottages, whose only amenity was a post-box; between agri-business fields, wide open to a vast grey sky. Ralph pulled up with a jolt at the gate of their house. Anna shot forward, one hand on the dashboard and one on her hat. ‘Can I leave you here? I’m late.’

As she unravelled her seat-belt, Ralph turned to look at her. ‘Those people at the funeral, all those friends of Felix’s, how many of them do you think knew about him and Emma?’

Anna took her house keys from her bag. ‘Every one of them.’

‘How did Ginny bear it?’

‘Easily. Or so everyone says.’ Anna swung her door open and her legs out, setting her high heels daintily into the mud. ‘What time will you be back?’

‘Seven o’clock. Maybe eight.’

Nine, then, Anna thought. ‘Everybody knew except you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you still feel a fool.’

‘I suppose I do.’ Ralph reached over to close the passenger door. ‘But then, I still don’t see why I should have known. Not as if their affair was the flamboyant sort. Not as if it was…’ he searched for the word, ‘…torrid.’

Torrid, Anna thought. She watched him drive away. Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.

Anna, as Ralph vanished from view, plucked the afternoon post from the wooden mail-box by the gate; then picked her way over rutted ground to the front door. The drive was more of a farm track than anything else; often it looked as if a herd of beasts had been trampling it. The mail-box was something new. Julian, her eldest boy, had made it. Now the postman’s legs were spared, if not the family’s.