Author: Hilary Mantel
Category: Literature
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“They’ll still come if they want,” Mrs. Glasse said. “You’d be surprised how many offenses there are, that a person can commit just without thinking about it. You know, I don’t want to take your money. But I can see that you want to give it.”
Even now they were legal, she would only take the car out on market days, she said. There was the problem of money for petrol. “You can’t knit petrol,” she said. “And they won’t let you barter for it.”
He did not tell Sandra about his sister’s school uniform, or about the row his parents had when the story came out. Privately, he agreed with his father; it was Anna’s fault, it was the fault of her habit of saving bits of money in pots and jars around the house, like some old granny in a cottage. It was too tempting for other people, when they had a prior need.
He did not tell Sandra because he knew she would think the row was ridiculous. She thought his family was rich; she said so.
“Oh, come on,” Julian said. “There’s four of us and none of us has earned anything yet. My mum’s a teacher but she had an illness and she hasn’t been able to work for years. My dad works for a charity, he doesn’t draw a big stipend, he just draws enough to keep us solvent.”
“There you are,” Sandra said. “Stipend. Solvent. Of course, we’re mostly solvent, because we never buy anything if we can help it. Money doesn’t enter into our calculations. I learned it in geography, it’s the only thing I recall. We’re a subsistence economy.”
“I think you’re proud of being poor,” Julian said.
“No, we’re not proud. We just don’t think about it. We just go along.”
“You could get benefits,” Julian said. “Other people do it.”
“Oh, we know all about that. My mum’s been to offices appealing for benefits. Sometimes you get things, other times you don’t. The trouble is, they keep you sitting in a waiting room for hours when you could be out trying to earn something. You get coughs and colds from the other people. Last time my mum went they asked her if she had a man friend. She said, better eat turnips all winter than talk to bureaucrats of romance.”
After Julian’s own household, constantly full of Visitors and their noisy upsets, the silence and peace of the Glasses’ farm was like a convalescence. Only one thing had changed: during his term away, somebody had given them a black-and-white television set. They watched all the soap operas, and discussed them in terms of gentle surprise, as if the characters were people they knew. They explained the characters to him, and he sat with them and watched, predicting the plot developments out loud, as they did. It was something new for him. There was a television set at home, but it was kept in the cold back sitting room, like an impoverished relative whom it was best not to encourage.
Also, they had discovered a big enthusiasm for storybooks. When Sandra had been over at the house one day Anna had taken her into Dereham to help with the weekly shopping, and at the secondhand bookstall Sandra had bought a book called Middlemarch, with the back off, priced 20p. They called this book “the book we’re reading,” and talked about Dorothea all the time, with the same mild interest, the same mild censoriousness. “That’s it,” Mrs. Glasse said. “When you’re young you just don’t know what you want in life. You’ve messed everything up before you find out.”
“The die is cast,” said Sandra.
Julian was confused by them. He was only a geographer; that, at least, had been his subject before he ran away. People from other faculties claimed that geography was a subject studied by slightly dim, marginal students, who enjoyed superfluous good health. It might be true: among those few people in his year with whom he had casual conversation, three or four said they were going to be schoolteachers, teach geography and games. He could not imagine teaching children anything—least of all, to kick footballs about or swing from ropes. If he was going to be healthy and stupid, he could do that at home.
So he reasoned. It didn’t seem to convince his mother. His father didn’t ask him any questions; strangely, though, this seemed to make him like his mother more and his father less. He’s not bothered about me, he said to Robin. He can’t get me to be a Good Soul, and I’m not enough of a Sad Case. He’s only worried about those spotty kids with carrier bags.
Not yet, you’re not enough of a Sad Case, Robin said.
One day in February, he went to bed with Sandra, upstairs in her large brass bed. Mrs. Glasse, downstairs, carried on knitting. Sandra bled all over the sheets.
“He’s drifting—that’s all.” Anna said. “When I ask him what he wants to do with his life, he changes the subject.”
Ralph said, “He’s always been like that. Anyway—is there any point in knowing what you want to do with your life? There are so many things that can go wrong.”
Anna’s voice was strained. “So you just drift with the tide?”
“Remember when he was little,” Ralph said. “We thought he would never learn to read, never do anything. But we cured him just by letting him be. Those few weeks of peace cured him. If we’d have left him at school, with ignorant infant teachers bawling at him, he’d never have made anything. As it is, he got to university—”
“And passed up his chance,” Anna said. “And what will happen to him if he gets tied up with Sandra?”
“He could do worse.”
“I’m aware,” Anna said, “that Sandra is a charity case of yours.”
Ralph said gently, “I hope we can be charitable. Now that the need exists.”
“Hasn’t it always?”
“I mean, in our own family.”
“I suppose I’m not charitable,” Anna said.
Ralph didn’t answer. But he thought, I will never be party to bullying and hectoring my children as my father bullied and hectored me.
Julian explained to Sandra and to Mrs. Glasse what he had not felt able to explain at home. As he talked, he remembered the place in which he had been stranded, this Midlands place, where mean slivers of sky showed between tower blocks. “Homesick,” Sandra said. “Wouldn’t you get over it in time?”
She was not vain; it did not seem to enter her head that—partly, anyway—he might have come back for her.
“You don’t know anything about it, Sandra,” Mrs. Glasse said. “You’ve never been away. It’s like an illness, that’s why it’s called homesickness. People don’t realize. Are they blaming you, your mum and dad?”
“I couldn’t give a reason like homesickness,” Julian said. “They’d think it was feeble. They weren’t that old when they went to South Africa.”
“Did they?” Sandra said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Some people just aren’t cut out for traveling,” Mrs. Glasse said.
Ralph said to Anna, “You are right, of course. About Julian. I apologize.” She stared at the spectacle: this sudden attack of public humility. “I probably ought to find out more about the whole thing,” he said. “I think, after Easter, I’ll go over and see Mrs. Glasse.”
SIX
The week after Easter the winds were so violent that they seemed likely to tear up small trees by the roots. There was never a moment, day or night, when the world was quiet.
Mrs. Glasse had no telephone, so Ralph couldn’t contact her to arrange a time to meet. “Should I drive over with you?” Anna said.
“No. It would look like a deputation. As if we’d come to complain about her.”
“You wonder what sort of woman she can be,” Anna said. “Strange life they lead.”
His car joined the coast road at Wells. The sky was patchy, clouds moving fast, rushing above him as he skirted the dusky red walls of Holkham Hall: parting now and then to reveal a pacific blue. The sea was not visible at once; but as the road turned he saw on the broken line of the horizon a strip of gray, indefinite, opaque.
It was ten o’clock when he rattled down the stony incline to the Glasses’ house. The door opened before he had switched off the engine. Mrs. Glasse stood waiting in the doorway.
His first thoug
ht: how young she is, she can’t be more than thirty-five, thirty-six. She was pale, straight-backed, red-haired: the hair a deeper red than her daughter’s, long and fine. The wind ripped at his clothes as he stepped out of the car, billowing out his jacket like a cloak. “This weather!” Mrs. Glasse said. She smiled at him. “Hello, Julian’s dad.”
It was a low house, old; its bones protested, creaked under the onslaught of the weather. He heard its various sounds, as she stood hesitating inside the door; he thought, it is a house like a ship, everything in movement, a ship breasting a storm. “On your left there,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Go in the parlor. There’s a fire lit, and the kettle’s on.”
“You might have been expecting me,” he said.
He sat by the fire, in a Windsor chair, waiting for her to bring them tea. The wind dropped; it was as if a noisy lout had left the room. In the sudden silence he heard the mantel clock ticking. She returned. Handed him a mug. “I didn’t put sugar in. Did you want it? No, I didn’t think you were the sugar sort.”
“Goodness,” he said. “What does that mean?”
She pushed her hair back. “Sugar’s for comfort,” she said.
“You think I don’t need comfort?”
Mrs. Glasse didn’t reply. She pulled up a stool to the fire. Ralph half rose from his chair; “Thanks, I’m comfortable here,” she said.
“That clock up there.” Ralph shook his head. “We had one just like it at home when I was a boy. It was my father’s. His pride and joy. He wouldn’t let anybody else touch it.”
“You’re not going to tell me,” Mrs. Glasse said drily, “that it stopped the day he died?”
“No, not exactly. My mother threw it out.”
“That was extreme.”
“For her, yes, it was. She couldn’t stand the chime.”
“Did she ever mention it? In his lifetime, I mean?”
“I shouldn’t think so. She was a self-effacing woman. At least, she effaced herself before him.”
She had fine hands, Mrs. Glasse; the calloused hands of a woman used to outdoor work, but still white, long-fingered. They were hands that rings might adorn, and that one did adorn: a plain red-gold wedding band, an old ring, one that might have been in a family for generations. Her skin had begun to line a little round the eyes: so many years of looking into the wind. All this he saw in the vibrant light that spilled into the room, morning light: sliding over the cream walls, turning them the color of butter.
He said, “We have a problem about Julian. Well, not a problem.”
“A problem, but not a problem,” Mrs. Glasse said.
“We thought, Anna and I—Anna, that’s my wife—that perhaps he talked to you. He doesn’t talk to us.”
“Do you see a reason for that?”
“There’s no reason, I hope. It’s just his nature.”
“Well then,” Mrs. Glasse said placidly. “If it’s his nature, what is there to be done?”
Ralph leaned forward, to engage her attention. “You see, Julian’s never been communicative. And a bit of a drifter—you could call him that. Still, we believe in letting him work things through for himself, at his own pace—we always have pursued that policy.”
“Sandra is the same,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Resistant to direction. Not that I try.”
“Yes … so we wondered, Anna and I, if he had said anything to you, about his plans.”
“Plans,” Mrs. Glasse said: as if the word were new to her. “He’s not mentioned any. He’s done a lot for me, around the place. I don’t ask him, he just does it. You can’t say he’s not industrious. He fills his time.”
“But where’s it leading?” Ralph said. “I can’t help but worry.”
There was a pause. They looked into the fire; the flames now were pale as air, the sun drawing their color out. Only the flicker held their eyes. Tinny, grating, the clock struck the quarter hour. Ralph looked up at it in wonder. The sound seemed to tremble in the air. She laughed. “You can have it,” she said, “if it means so much to you.”
He shook his head. “It’s very kind. But no—on the whole I think I share my mother’s opinion.”
“Was he a Norfolk man, your father?”
“Oh, yes. From Swaffham originally—but we moved to Norwich when I was a child.”
“A city boy,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Imagine. I’ve never moved much.”
“Did it belong in your family, this house?”
“Oh, no.” She seemed puzzled. “Nothing like that.”
“It is a very nice house. Very peaceful. I’m not surprised Julian wants to spend his time here. The dairy, he said—”
“Yes—would you like to look around?” Ralph protested, politely. She got to her feet, put her mug down on the mantelpiece by the clock. She led him into the kitchen, where she and Sandra spent most of their leisure time, their chairs set one either side of the range; led him from there to the dairy, its chaste stone slabs, its chill. The tiles were cracked, and the turning world had stopped beneath their glaze; cows trod forever through squares of blue grass, through fields of blue blossom. She turned to him and smiled. “Make our own butter is one thing we don’t do,” she said, “but I did have a cow, at one time. Daisy, she was called—that was original, wasn’t it? I’d sell milk up at the top of the track there. It’s against all the rules, so I had to stop.”
“You’re very enterprising,” Ralph said.
“I have a couple of ponies in my top field now, look after them for weekenders. We didn’t know anything about horses when we took them on. But they couldn’t, we thought, be as complicated as people.”
“And it’s worked out?”
“Yes—Sandra has her talents.” She took him back through the hall, up the low-rising stairs. There were four bedrooms, each of them square and neat, each with the same cream walls; and the furniture of dark wood, chests and tallboys, massive and claw-footed. “All this furniture was my grandmother’s,” she said. “This is Sandra’s room.”
“It’s like a room in a picture book,” he said. “Do you know what I mean? The bed.”
“Yes, Sandra made that quilt for herself, it was the first she ever made, I taught her. She’s a careful worker, she’s slow but she’s neat enough. The trouble is, people don’t want them. Or they want them, but they won’t pay the price, there’s months of work in a quilt, People go for something cheap, something run up on a machine. They can’t tell the difference. But there is a difference, if you look.”
Downstairs she put the kettle on again. They sat in the kitchen waiting for it; “I’m a woman who drinks a lot of tea,” she said, as if in apology.
“It occurs to me,” Ralph said, “it must be worth a bit, this place.”
“I’d never thought about it.”
“Prices are rocketing. You’d be amazed. Would you be interested? I know a good firm of estate agents, old friend of mine but he’s dead now. If you follow me.”
“Of course,” she said. “He’d give me a price from beyond the grave?” She turned her head to him: such pale eyes.
“Actually, he has a son—Daniel, he’s an architect, a nice lad, he sees a bit of my daughter Kit. He’d probably come out here for nothing, give you a rough figure, he knows the market as well as anybody. He’d be interested to see the place.”
“But then where would we live?” Mrs. Glasse said.
“I thought … well, I don’t want to intrude, of course, but I know money’s a problem. You could buy yourselves a cottage, and you’d have a tidy sum left to invest, and it would give you an income.”
“I could live like a duchess,” Mrs. Glasse suggested.
“Well, not quite that.”
“If I had a cottage, I might have to get rid of my ducks and hens. I wouldn’t have eggs to sell. Not to mention vegetables.”
“You could get jobs. It would be more secure for you.”
“Oh, we do get jobs sometimes. In the high season. Hun-stanton, Burnham Market. We might go and waitress for a week or
two. Not that we’re good waitresses. We’re not used to it.”
He was struck by the slow and thoughtful way in which she spoke, as if she weighed every word. Struck too by how she spoke of her daughter and herself as if they were of the same generation; as if they had one opinion between them, and what one felt, the other felt. She said, “Sandra and me, we don’t mind hard work, nobody could say that. But we prefer to keep each other company at home.”
“You’re very close.”
“Aren’t you close to your children?”
“I don’t know. I like to think I am. But there are so many other things I have to do.”
“I think that parents ought to take care of their children, and that children ought to take care of their parents. That’s the main thing, that’s what comes first.”
“I’ve said too much,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interfere. I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s all right, you can’t help it. You’re used to putting people’s lives to rights, aren’t you, and giving them advice?” She looked up, full into his face. “God knows, nobody has ever advised me, it might have been better if they had. The thing is, me and Sandra, we manage. Hand to mouth, I know. But there’s always something you can do. Sometimes we’ve gone out housecleaning. And I know where the best blackberries are. At Brancaster—I could get you some this year. We get basketfuls, we bake pies, blackberry and apple, use our own apples, sell them up there on the road.” She shrugged. “There’s always something.”
“I admire you, Mrs. Glasse,” Ralph said. “You live the kind of life you believe in.”
She looked down, and blushed. “What is it, Ralph? Don’t you?”
The Easter holidays ended. Kit went back to London for her last few weeks. Robin began the term at his day school in Norwich; early mornings still so chilly, getting up in blue light to walk a mile to the crossroads and wait for the first bus. His efforts would be rewarded, his parents thought. Robin wanted a place at medical school, and would get it. Yet he seemed to have no humanitarian concerns. He marked off the seasons by a change of games kit; now, spring having arrived, he tossed his hockey stick up in the attics and packed his cricket bag. Weekends saw him bussed about the county, playing away. Sunday nights he bounced, or trailed, back: sad tales of full-length balls on the off-stump, or glory sagas that put color in his cheeks and made him look like his father when his father was young: sixty-five off the first twenty overs, he would say, and then we accelerated, run-a-ball, finished it off just after tea with five wickets in hand. “Do you know what Robin’s talking about?” Anna would say—deriving a pale routine gratification from the child’s health and simplicity, from his resemblance to the other boy she had once known.