Author: Hilary Mantel
Category: Literature
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“I don’t understand it,” Daniel said, “this reverence for the original. Because it’s not, you see. I’ve looked into it, its history. The whole roof pitch was altered sometime in the 1880s. Probably that’s when it began to fall down. For the last hundred years it’s been patched up anyhow.”
Julian thought of this crumbling barn, of its roof: lichened, sway-backed, with its many mottled and graduated shades. “It seems right,” he said, “however it got that way. It’s been that way as long as I’ve been seeing it.”
“I suppose we tend to exaggerate antiquity,” Kit said. “Take, for instance, Daniel’s coat.”
“Make sure you do it properly, then,” Julian said.
“Are you setting up as a vigilante, Julian? A barn warden?”
“Something like that.” He turned to Kit. “I’m off to Sandra’s now.”
“Where else?” Kit said.
Daniel said, when he’d gone, “He doesn’t like me much, your brother.”
“Oh, he likes you all right. He thinks you’re a visually illiterate money-grubbing poseur, but he likes you. More coffee? Ginger nut?” Kit rattled the biscuit tin at him, aggressively. “Come on, don’t take it to heart. None of us likes any of us at the moment. Julian insists on taking Becky to school every day and fetching her back, because he’s decided there are kidnappers about.”
“Kidnappers? What, the mafia or something?” Daniel smiled. “After robbing Becky’s pencil case, are they?”
“Nobody can talk sense into him. Becky’s driven mad with it. She calls his car his “so-called car,” and says she’d rather he walked her to school in those reins they put on toddlers. She keeps on at Mum and Dad to call him off but they won’t. The more tantrums she throws, the more silent they go. We think, me and Robin, that they must have had a big row about something, but we can’t work it out, because they never have a row, never.”
“All couples do. Surely.”
“That’s what you read in magazines,” Kit said. “But my parents are the exception to the rule. My father is so bloody saintly it would make you sick, but the trouble is it’s real, it’s all real. My mother has bad tempers but they’re over in a minute. You can see her, you know, getting worked up—and then she has second thoughts, and then she’s saintly too.”
“Well—how can you live up to it?” Daniel said.
“Precisely. That is what I ask myself.”
“Is that why you’re so depressed?”
“Am I? I suppose I am.”
“You haven’t made any plans yet? About going away?”
“No.” She put down her coffee mug. “I’m getting like Julian,” she said. “Manana. Couldn’t give a toss.”
“It would suit me if you stayed around,” Daniel said. “But you know that, Kit.”
He waited for some cross-patch response: I’m not here to suit you, am I? Instead she said, “Suppose—well, I’ve sent off for forms—suppose I went to Africa?”
“Like your parents?”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t go for a church group.”
“Too many strings attached?”
“Yes. And also I don’t believe in anything.”
“I see. You pretend, do you?”
She pushed her hair back, restless and bothered. “It doesn’t arise. I’d not like to hurt people.”
“You don’t feel you should stand up and be counted?”
“What—in the cause of atheism? Not much of a cause, is it? Better be a barn warden. It means more.”
“Yes, I see that. But you’d go as a volunteer, would you?”
“I could offer. They might not want me. I think they only want qualified people, engineers and well-diggers and so on. I could teach English, perhaps.”
“You’ve never mentioned this before.”
“No.” She looked at him balefully. “I don’t mention every thought in my head.”
“Have you talked to your parents?”
“I’ve talked to nobody, except you. Oh, and Robin, I did mention it to Robin, but he was practicing his forward defensive in front of the wardrobe mirror, and I don’t think he heard me.”
Daniel smiled, flicked a hand at his head. “He’s out of it, Robin.”
“Still, you can try your thoughts on him. Voice them. Feel them on the air. See if they sound too unreasonable before you present them to the rest of the human race.”
“To me it doesn’t seem unreasonable, though naturally I … from the purely selfish point of view … the thing is, why do you want to go?”
“Because I dream about it,” Kit said. “Most nights, now. Sorry if that sounds stupid. But there’s really no other reason I can give.”
He frowned. “Good or bad dreams?”
“Neither. They have atmosphere. They don’t have events. You know that kind?”
“Not really,” Daniel lied. “I seldom remember my dreams.”
“Oh, bloody men!” Kit said. “I think they’re a lower form of life. They exist in an eternal present, like dogs and cats.”
“Look, I think I ought to get on.” Daniel moved to the edge of his chair and began to do something with one of his flaps and buckles.
“Of course,” Kit said. “Don’t pause for ostentatious consultation of your Cartier. Good God, a woman may be about to speak of her feelings! Gosh, it must be late! Better run!”
Daniel smiled: meekly, sheepishly. Bowed a little, at the kitchen door. “May I call again, Miss Katherine?”
Kit shook her hair, made a low growling noise. Daniel clicked the door shut as he went. Kit sat back in her chair, her arms around herself. She found she had tears in her eyes. She did not understand this.
Kit had been at home for many days now. It had been the usual arrangement—Emma collected her at the station at Norwich. It was a way of easing herself back into the family, her tea with Emma. But Emma seemed preoccupied and in low spirits. “What’s the matter?” Kit asked. She misses Felix, she thought; she must be lonely.
When she walked into the Red House, the atmosphere hit her at once. “Hit” was the wrong word; seeped into her, that was more like it. It was a cold fog of dismay; her first impression was that something was happening, slowly and stupidly, which the people concerned could not comprehend.
It sapped her strength, whatever it was; she was tired, desperately tired. She had left London healthy enough, only dogged by that usual feeling of anticlimax the end of exams brings. After this, you think, after my papers are over, I will do, and I will do … and then you don’t. You are a shell, enclosing outworn effort. You expect a sense of freedom, and yet you feel trapped in the same old body, the same drab routines; you expect exhilaration, and you only feel a kind of habitual dullness, a letdown, a perverse longing for the days when you read and made notes and sat up all night.
But now, she had gone beyond this disappointed state. A new exhaustion made her shake at any effort, mental or physical. She discovered the curious, unsung, regressive pleasure of going to bed while it is still light. She moved her bed, so that it faced the window. She found herself two extra pillows, and composed herself against them. Eyes open, she watched the sky rush past, and the birds wheel and swoop.
Anna brought her food on trays: a boiled egg, an orange carefully peeled and divided, thin cinnamon biscuits warm from the oven. “Don’t,” Kit said. “Don’t bother. Really.” It was a strange comfort to her to go past the point of hunger; she had never been a thin girl, particularly, so she knew she wasn’t going to waste away.
But it pleased her to push her situation to extremes. She fantasized that she was dying. She was old, very feeble, very weak. Her life was draining from her. But she had lived. She had no regrets, her will was made, and nothing was left undone. She was dying in the odor of sanctity. And indeed she was more and more tired, as if a lifetime’s fatigue had banked up behind her eyes … perhaps, she thought, I have glandular fever, some special disease suited to my time of life …
She slept then, only to be roused by the s
ounds of the house below as it woke up for the evening: the shrilling of the telephone, the crunch and scrape as the family cars ground home, the slamming of doors and clattering of pans for dinner, the hard stony shower of coal going into the range; and Robin’s feet stampeding upstairs to the next floor, Julian after him, sometimes Sandra Glasse’s high clear voice from the kitchen: “Shall I scrape the carrots, Anna?”
Home life. Sandra had been the first person she saw when her aunt dropped her at the gate. The girl was by the side of the house, with a laundry basket. As Kit stepped out of the car she saw Sandra stretch up to peg on the washing line the white nightdress—chaste, elaborately pin-tucked—which Daniel had given her as a present the previous Christmas. Sandra’s cheeks were flushed from exertion and the wind. She looked very pretty. “Your mother lent it,” she said. “I stayed over. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll iron it and it will be just as nice as you left it. I’m a good ironer.”
Kit’s brows had drawn together. “Have it, if you want,” she said. “Another bit of Daniel’s ersatz tat.”
She’d hauled her bags into the house, and then sat in the kitchen for an hour, brushing off Sandra’s attempts to look after her, to scramble some eggs, to drag luggage upstairs; not even making tea for herself, or going to the lavatory, or washing the metropolitan grime off her face. She seemed unable to do anything to bridge this gap between her former life and the life that was to come.
Then the days passed; she felt ill, a vague, nameless malaise. A white space seemed to grow around her, a vacancy. She felt that it was she who should be able to diagnose and treat the unease in the house, the sudden deficit of happiness, its draining away.
In time, as she knew he would, her father made occasion for a talk. He wanted a talk; she had nothing to say. But she had to decide soon whether she would go back to London to work for the Trust. Live in the hostel: get on democratically with all sections of society: not use expressions like “ersatz tat.” Not make judgments on people.
“I don’t want to push you,” her father said. “We’ve given Julian leeway—I don’t want you to think that we’re discriminating against you. But you see, I have a list of applications from people who want a job, they want the experience before they do social-work courses—”
“Yes,” Kit said. “I’m being selfish.” She combed her fingers through her long hair. He remembered Emma doing that, years ago, in Norwich. “You see, Dad, up to a point it’s easy. You go to
school. You go to university. You don’t have any thoughts, from day to day. You just do what’s expected of you. Then somebody asks you to make a choice and you find yourself … slowly … grinding … to a halt. That’s how I am.” She started to plait her hair now, loosely winding, looping. “I’m a mechanism winding down.”
“A life crisis,” Ralph said.
“Yes, I should have known there’d be some jargon for it.”
“I’m sorry. But that’s what it is.”
“Have you ever had one?”
“Oh, several, I’d say. The first when I was seventeen or so …”
“When you had the row with Granny and Grandad.”
“Yes … well, you know all about that. For months after it I felt as if I were walking around in fog. It was a kind of depression, suffocation—very disabling, because all the time I wasn’t taking decisions for myself other people were taking them for me. That’s how I ended up in teaching, for which, God knows, by temperament I am not suited.”
“Aren’t you? I’d have thought you’d have been a good teacher.”
“No … Teachers need all sorts of large certainties.”
She looked at him in arrogant disbelief. “And you don’t have them?”
“Good God, do you think of me as a person who would have?”
“It’s the impression you’ve given. I mean, you seem to believe in your work, for instance. And in, well, family life, and God, and the Labour Party by and large—the whole package, really.”
“The package.” He thought about it. “I’d not deny that my own father believed in a package. But I dare hope his package seems more stupid than mine?”
She smiled. “Yes, to be a creationist and to have family rows about Darwinism … yes, it does seem stupid. Victorian.”
“So it seemed to me. Even then. But we’ve always been behind the times in Norfolk.”
“You should have stood up to them,” she said.
“Not that easy, Kit. There were penalties they could impose. People bullied other people, in those days.”
It was his oblique way of telling her that she had nothing to fear; not from him, anyway. “You must rest,” he said. “Then when you have rested, think. And then you will know how you want to go on with your life.”
She didn’t mention Africa, this idea she had. Better not; she was afraid of touching some wellspring of unhappiness. One night lately, walking the house in the small hours, he had found Robin alone in the cold back sitting room where the television skulked.
“Test Match highlights,” he explained. “Just finished. I was off to bed. Want a coffee?”
She nodded; sat down on a chair, picked at its upholstery, said, “Do you know, in any other family this chair would be put out for the dustmen to take.”
“I’d never noticed it,” Robin said.
“You’re just like your father. Don’t you ever see how shabby we are? How poor?”
“We’re not poor.” Robin was indignant. “Mrs. Glasse and Sandra, they’re poor. Beks was laughing at Sandra because she said, ’Do you like my skirt, I got it in a charity shop.’ “
“Beks is a brat. She knows nothing. When you’re that age you think you’re sensitive—well, I did, I remember. But you’re about as sensitive as a bouncer in a nightclub.”
“What would you know about nightclubs?”
“As much as a child of two saints should know.” She looked up. “What about that coffee?”
When Robin brought it back—modern coffee, gray and tepid and sugarless—she asked him, “But do you know what I mean? Mum works so hard to keep the house going, with that furnace to be fed, and that demented twin-tub, and that antique Hoover. All Dad does is bring home hulking great hallstands from Yarmouth, and then beam on us like Jehovah and think he’s done his duty by us. Don’t you ever wonder why we have to be good all the time, why we have to have such tender consciences, why we have to have these Visitors every summer?”
“We’ll be getting some new Visitors soon,” Robin said. “Morlocks, Yahoos, slags, and tarts.”
“Why can’t we be normal, and self-absorbed, and acquisitive?”
Robin’s eyes were fixed on the blank television screen. “Haynes 184,” he said thoughtfully. “Hit out to all parts of the ground. Viv Richards 145. God help England. I don’t know, Kit. If you want to be acquisitive, why don’t you marry Daniel?”
“He hasn’t asked me, and I don’t want to get married. Anyway, it’s not a career. What do you think this is, the era of W. G. Grace?”
“I wish it were.” Robin sighed. “So … what are you going to do then? Slope about getting on everybody’s nerves?”
“Do I do that?”
“No, but fuck it—there’s Julian living out his rustic fantasies, and Becky with a mental age of seven, and nobody but me with any sense of purpose these days.”
“Oh, sure,” Kit said. “Jack the Lad, aren’t you? On with the hockey pads. On with the cricket pads. Why don’t you take up schoolboy boxing and then you can get a padded helmet too? With that on you’d be totally impervious to life.”
They sat in silence, Robin slumped on the sofa, Kit curled into the chair, her legs drawn up into the skirt of her chain-store nightdress, which was too tight under the arms, and neither short nor long. “All these questions, Robin. I’ve never had a sensible discussion with you before.”
“And you aren’t now.”
“But you do have thoughts?”
“Yes.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why are we so miserable these days? Creeping around Julian and his obsessions.”
“You’d think Dad would laugh him out of it.”
“He doesn’t seem disposed to laugh.” Robin turned his head back to the TV screen. “West Indies 518.” He looked glum. “Only rain can save us now. What was that you were saying the other day, about going to Africa?”
“Yes. I mean it.”
“Do you want to do what they did, is that it?”
“Perhaps.”
“Why, do you admire it?”
“How can I? I have no information, do I? I don’t have a basis, to admire or not admire. Oh, I know about them going to prison— but even Emma won’t say much, and so you wonder what really happened and whether they …”
“Were tortured,” Robin said.
She gazed at her brother. “I’ve never been able to say it.”
“It is hard to say. I’ve practiced.”
“But then again I ask myself, why were they there in the first place? It was only a kind of colonialism. I put that to Dad once, but he said, we did what seemed right at the time. And I know he is good, he is practical, he does help people now and I expect he helped them then. But what use would I be?”
“If you go off to some place in Africa,” Robin said, “it won’t be to do something for the country, it will be to do something for yourself.”
“Do you know what frustrates me?” she said. “That I was born there, in Bechuanaland—Botswana, it is now—but I don’t have any memories.”
When she thought of Africa she thought of a clean place, full of light and air, the sun so hot that everything was sterilized, scoured clean by its glare. When she saw the pitiful babies on the famine posters it damaged the image she held inside. She did not know what to think when she saw the pictures from South Africa: glum men in suit jackets and woolen hats, trudging by railway tracks, and smoke blowing into a granite sky.
“I do remember one thing,” she said. “No, two things really. The first thing I remember is the feeling of heat.”
“Hardly strange,” Robin said.
“Yes, it seems obvious—but do you think that your body has memories that your mind doesn’t have access to?” She thought, heat seemed knitted into me; it was as if the sun were moulded into my flesh. “Even now, I’m surprised if I’m cold. It seems unnatural, it doesn’t seem right.” She paused, looking up at him to see if he was following her. “There is another thing, a little thing—we had a nurse, I asked Mum and she said her name was Felicia. She used to carry me on her back. I remember my cheek pressed between her shoulder blades, the feel of it, the heat of her skin through her dress. Isn’t that funny? I must have been very small. And then I remember Julian—I must have been older then, and I must have been in my cot or somewhere—I remember seeing Julian on her back, being carried the same way, with his head turned sideways, and fat legs dangling down. And knowing exactly what he felt—your head skewed against her spine, the bone at your …” she hesitated, “your temple, I suppose, though you didn’t have such words, that feeling of each separate bone in her spine, and skin against hot skin, just this layer of cotton between.”