A Change of Climate: A Novel (4 page)

His cousins crept on slippered feet; clocks ticked. His uncle sat at his desk, making up accounts; his aunt slid her knitting down the cushion of her chair. She sat and stared at him, a bloodless woman the image of his mother; her pale lips moved. “You should get out, Ralph. Go on the bus. Go up the coast a bit. A boy needs fresh air.”

Ralph left the house. He took the first bus he saw out of the town. It was a normal, hostile east coast day; no one else was on a pleasure jaunt. There were points where the road hugged the coast; a few isolated houses tumbled away toward a sea less glimpsed than felt, toward an impression of sliding subsiding rocks, of coal boats and fishing boats, of salt and chill.

He got off the bus. The place was nowhere he knew. The weather now was overcast but blustery; chinks of blue sky showed here and there, like cracks in a thick white basin. He fastened his coat, as his aunt, if she had seen him, would have enjoined him; and he wrapped his despised muffler around his throat. He descended a hill, one-in-four, and saw before him the cold sweep of a bay.

The tide was going out. A solitary walker picked his way along the cliffs. In the middle distance were other figures, with rucksacks and boots; their heads were down, their eyes searching the sands. Ralph, too, lowered his eyes to his shoes, and threaded his way among the seaweed and rock pools.

Ralph had gone twenty yards toward the ocean. Its sound was subdued, congruous, a rustle not a roar. He bent down and plucked from the sand at his feet what he took to be some muddy stone. A sharp pang of delight took hold of him, a feeling that was for a moment indistinguishable from fear. He had picked up a fossil: a ridged, grey-green curl, glassy and damp like a descending wave. It lay in his palm: two inches across, an inch and a half at its crest.

He stood still, examining it and turning it over. Inside it was a gentle hollow; he saw that it was a kind of shell, smoothness concealed beneath grit and silt. He looked up across the beach. The melancholy and windblown figures wheeled toward him, and came within hailing distance. They closed in on him, with their ribbed stockings and their cold-weather complexions.

There was a woman among them, her sharp nose scarlet above a swaddling of scarves. She stared at the fossil in his hand; she pulled off her gloves, hauled them off with her teeth. He dropped the fossil into her hand. She turned it over and back again, ran her forefinger down its mottled curve, feeling the ridges. She laid it against her face; she tasted it with her tongue.
(Gryphaea,”
she said. “Don’t you know?”

He shook his head; stood before her, like the dumb unconverted heathen. “It’s a bivalve—like an oyster, you know?”

“Oh, yes.” He was disappointed; something so ordinary after all.

She said, “It’s a hundred and fifty million years old.” He stared at her. “You know how an oyster lives in its shell? This is the ancestor of oysters.” He nodded. “It lived here when the sea was warm—if you can imagine that. Here was its soft body, inside this shell, with its heart and blood vessels and gills. When it died all those soft parts rotted, and the sand filled up the cavity. And then the sand compacted and turned into rock.”

There was a circle of people around them, their breath streaming on the air, eyes fixed on her hand; they were coveting what he had found, as if it were a jewel. “The sea moved,” a man said. His face was a raw ham beneath a bobble hat. “I mean to say, what had been sea became land. But now the sea’s eating away the land again—all this east coast,” he waved his arm, gesturing toward the Wash— “you can see it going in your lifetime.”

A man in a balaclava—green, ex-army—said, “I served with a bloke from Suffolk whose grandfather had a smallholding, and it’s in the sea now. Whole churchyards have gone down the cliff. Whole graveyards, and the bones washed out.”

The woman said, “You’ve stopped this little creature, my dear. On its way back to the sea where it came from.”

“When it was alive—”

“Yes?”

“What did it eat?”

“It cemented itself on the sea bed, and sucked in water. It got its nourishment from that, from the larvae in the water, you see. It had a stomach, kidneys, intestines, everything you have.”

“Could it think?”

“Well, can an oyster think these days? What would an oyster have to think about?”

He blushed. Stupid question. What he had meant to say was, are you sure it was alive? Can you truly swear to me that it was? “Are these rare?” he asked.

“Not if you want a smashed-up one. Not if you’re content with fragments.”

The woman held his find for a moment, clenched and concealed in her fist; then put it into his outstretched palm, and worked her fingers back painfully into her gloves. She wanted the fossil so much that he almost gave it to her; but then, he wanted it himself. Bobble-hat said, “I’ve been coming here man and boy, and never got anything as good as that. Two-a-penny brachiopods, that’s what I get. Sometimes I think we’re looking so hard we can’t see.”

“Beginner’s luck,” the balaclava said. He stabbed a woolly finger at the object he craved. “Do you know what they call them? Devil’s toenails.” He chuckled. “I reckon you can see why.”

Ralph looked down at the fossil and almost dropped it. Saw the thick, ridged, ogreish curve, that greenish, sinister sheen … All the way home in the bus he forced himself to hold the object in his hand, his feelings seesawing between attraction and repulsion; wondering how he could have found it, when he was not looking at all.

When he arrived at the house he was very cold and slightly nauseated. He smiled at the cousin who let him in and said he had better go upstairs right away and wash his hands. “Did you enjoy yourself, love?” his aunt asked; he gave a monosyllabic reply, a polite mutter which translated to nothing. The ticking of the parlor clock was oppressive, insistent; he could imagine it buried in the earth, ticking away for a hundred and fifty million years. He took his place on one of the leather chairs, and wondered about the animal whose back the leather had adorned: what skin, what hair, what blood through living veins? His aunt quibbled about how the table had been laid, twitching the fish knives about with her forefinger. Smoked haddock came, with its thin-cut bread and butter, a pale juice oozing across the plate. He ate a flake or two, then put down his fork. His aunt said, “No appetite?” He thought of the bones spilled down the cliff, into the salty whispering of the tides;
Gryphaea
sucking in its nourishment, the aeons rolling by, the Devil walking abroad.

His mother made Satan into the likeness of some strict schoolmaster: “The Devil finds work for idle hands to do.”

The toenail was upstairs, locked in his suitcase.

When Ralph came home from Yorkshire, he and Emma played their Bible games. They always played them when they had some decision to make. Now Emma said, “I want to decide whether when I grow up I’m going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or just a broody hen who stays at home like my mama.”

You were supposed to pick a verse at random, and it would give you guidance; but you needed a keen imagination to make anything of the verses they turned up. “Try this one,” Emma said. “ ’And thou shalt anoint the laver and his foot, and sanctify it.’ Exodus 40:11. Very helpful, I’m sure.” She began to sing a hymn of her own composition:
“How daft the name of Jesus sounds …”

Ralph took out the fossil from his coat pocket, where he was keeping it for the while. “Look at this,” he said. “It’s the Devil’s toenail.”

Emma gave a startled wail. “It’s horrible. Whatever is it?”

He told her. Her face brightened. “Give it me.” He dropped jit into her cupped hand. “Can I take it to school to frighten girls with?”

“No, you certainly can’t. It’s valuable. It’s mine.”

“I’m an atheist,” Emma said.

“Not an atheist a minute ago, were you?”

These were the books on their shelves, old, crumbling:
The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.
And dusty, brown:
Christ Is All,
H. C. G. Moule, London, 1892. Slime-trailed, musty: F. R. Havergal, 1880:
Kept for the Master’s Use.
Earwiggy, fading:
Hymns of Faith and Hope.
And
A Basket of Fragments,
R. M. McCheyne, published Aberdeen, no date, pages uncut.

A year later Ralph went back to Yorkshire. His request surprised his family, and gave some pale gratification to the Synod, who had found him a quiet boy who offered no offense, and were glad that someone in the family seemed to like them. He spent his days on the beaches and in the town museum. He did not speak of his discoveries at home, but he found a schoolmaster to encourage him—a man whom, he realized later, he should have enlisted on his side when the quarrel came. He studied alone after school, sent for books with his pocket money and puzzled over geological maps; he walked fields, hills, coastal paths, examined ditches and road cuttings. When he was tired and discouraged and there were things he could not understand he thought of the woman on the Yorkshire beach, putting out the purple tip of her tongue to taste the fossil, its silt and grit, its coldness and its age.

There was a trick he had to perfect: to look at a landscape and strip away the effect of man. England transforms itself under the geologist’s eye; the scavenger sheep are herded away into the future, and a forest grows in a peat bog, each tree seeded by imagination. Where others saw the lie of the land, Ralph saw the path of the glacier; he saw the desert beneath copse and stream, and the glories of Europe stewing beneath a warm, clear, shallow sea.

Today his fossil collection is in cardboard boxes, in one of the attics of his house. Rebecca, his youngest child, had nightmares about them when she was five or six. He blamed himself, for not giving a proper explanation; it was Kit who had told her they were stone animals, stone lives, primitive creatures that once had swum and crawled. The baby saw them swimming and crawling again, mud sucking and breathing at her bedroom door.

But in those days, when he was a boy, Ralph kept his finds in his bedroom, arranged on top of his bookcase and on the painted mantelpiece over the empty grate. Norfolk did not yield much for his collection. He combed the Weymouth and Cromer beaches for ammonites and echinoids, but his luck was out; he had to wait for the summer, for his exile to the slippery chairs. He endured all: his uncle’s homilies, the piano practice of his female cousins. His mother dusted the fossils twice a week, but didn’t understand what they were. “It’s Ralph’s interest,” she told people. “Old bits of stone, and pottery, things of that nature, little bits and pieces that he brings back from his holidays.” Geology and archaeology were thoroughly confused in her mind. “Ralph is a collector,” she would say. “He likes anything that’s old. Emma—now, Emma—she’s much more your modern miss.”

Emma said to her brother, “Ralph, how can you talk so casually about five hundred million years? Most of us have trouble with … well, Christmas for example. Every December it puts people into a panic, as if it had come up on them without warning. It’s only very exceptional people who can imagine Christmas in July.”

Ralph said, “What you must do is to think of yourself walking through time. To go back, right back, to the very beginning of geological time, youd have to go round the world forty-six times. Suppose you want to go back to the last Ice Age. That’s very recent, as we think of it. It would be like a cross-channel trip. London to Paris.”

“I wouldn’t mind a trip to Paris,” Emma said. “Do you think it’s any good me asking?”

“Then, to reach the time of the dinosaurs, you’d have to go right around the world.”

“I feel confined, myself,” Emma said. “To the here and now.” She sat twisting at one of her plaits, pulling at it, finally undoing it and combing her fingers through her heavy brown hair. She glanced at herself covertly in mirrors these days. “Geese turn into swans,” her mother said; she meant well, but it was hardly science.

A frieze of evolution marched through Ralph’s head. Each form of life has its time and place: sea snail and sea lily, water scorpion and lungfish, fern tree and coral. Shark and flesh-eating reptile; sea urchin and brontosaurus; pterodactyl and magnolia tree; cuttle fish and oyster. Then the giant flightless bird, opossum in his tree, elephant in his swamp; it was as clear in his mind as it might be in a child’s picture book, or a poster on a nursery wall. The saber-toothed cat, the little horse three feet tall; the Irish elk, the woolly mammoth; then man, stooped, hairy, furrow-browed. It is a success story.

At seventeen Ralph could be taken for a man, but not of this primitive textbook kind. He was tall, strong, with a clear skin and clear eyes, like a hero in a slushy book. Sometimes women looked at him with interest on the street: with a speculative pity, as if they feared other women might exploit him.

Ralph would go back to the Brecklands, in those years after the war, threading his bicycle along the narrow roads, between concrete emplacements, and through lanes churned up by heavy vehicles. What he saw was victory: fences broken, orchards cut down, avenues of trees mutilated. Gates hung from a hinge, posters flapped on walls. Everywhere was a proliferation of little huts made of corrugated iron—rusting now, and without their doors. Farm workers ran about in scrapped jeeps they had salvaged. Heaps of rubbish festered amid the pines. The wind was the same, its low hum through the stiff branches. The threadlike trunks of birch trees were the same, viewed across tussocky fields; herons flapped from the meres.

The Ministry of Defence did not mean to relinquish its hold on the district. Its fences and
KEEP OUT
notices divided the fields. Ralph would pull his bicycle on to the grass verge, while a convoy rumbled past. Once, holding his handlebars and standing up to his knees in damp grass, he reached down for what caught his eye; it was a flint arrowhead. He turned it over in his palm, then put it in his pocket. He remembered the moment when he had found the fossil; here was another secret, buried life. He need not take it to a museum; these things are common enough. He took it home and put it on his mantelpiece, meaning to save it for his uncle James to see when he was next in England. “Ah, an elfshot,” his mother said, and smiled.