TWO

      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.

      The Red House was a farmhouse that had lost its farm; it retained a half-acre of ground upon which grew sundry bicycle sheds, a dog kennel and a wire dog-run with the wire broken, a number of leaning wooden huts filled with the detritus of family life, and an unaccountable horse-trough, very ancient and covered with lichen. Recently, since Julian had been at home, the hedges had been cut back and some ground cleared, and the rudiments of a vegetable garden were appearing. The house and its ramshackle surroundings formed a not-displeasing organic whole; Julian’s attempt at agriculture seemed an imposition on the natural state of things, as if it were the bicycle sheds that were the work of nature, and the potatoes the work of man.

      The house itself was built of red brick, and stood side-on to the road. It had a tiled roof, steeply pitched; in season, the crop-spraying plane buzzed its chimney-stacks and complicated arrangements of television aerials. There were a number of small windows under the eaves, and these gave the house a restless look: as if it would just as soon wander across the lane and put down its foundations in a different field.

      Two years before, when it seemed that the older children would shortly be off their hands, Anna had suggested they should look for a smaller place. It would be cheaper to run, she had said, knowing what line of reasoning would appeal to Ralph. With his permission she had rung up Felix Palmer’s firm, to talk about putting the house on the market. ‘You can’t mean it,’ Felix had said. ‘Leave, Anna? After all these years? I hope and trust you wouldn’t be going far?’

      ‘Felix,’ Anna had said, ‘do you recall that you’re an estate agent? Aren’t you supposed to encourage people to sell their houses?’

      ‘Yes, but not my friends. I should be a poor specimen if I tried to uproot my friends.’

      ‘Shall I try someone else, then?’

      ‘Oh, no need for that…If you’re sure…’

      ‘I’m far from sure,’ Anna said. ‘But you might send someone to look around. Put a value on it.’

      Felix came himself, of course. He brought a measuring tape, and took notes as he went in a little leather-bound book. On the second storey, he grew bored. ‘Anna, dear girl, let’s just say…a wealth of versatile extra accommodation…attics, so forth…an abundance of storage space. Leave it at that, shall we? Buyers don’t want, you know, to have to exercise their brains.’ He sighed, at the foot of the attic stairs. ‘I remember the day I brought you here, you and Ralph, to talk you into it…’ His eyes crept over her, assessing time’s work. ‘You were fresh from Africa then.’

      I was tired and cold that day, she thought, tired and cold and pregnant, rubbing my chilblains in that draughty wreck of a drawing room; the Red House smelled of mice and moulds, and there were doors banging overhead, and cracked window glass, and spiders. To pre-empt his next comment, she put her hand on his arm: ‘Yes, Felix. It was, it was a long time ago.’

      Felix nodded. ‘I remember saying to you – it’s the sort of place you come to grips with in your own good time.’

      ‘And we never have.’ She smiled.

      ‘You filled it with children. That’s the main thing.’

      ‘Yes. And for all their presence improved it, we might as well have stabled horses. Well, Felix – what’s the verdict?’

      ‘There’d be interest,’ he said cautiously. ‘London people perhaps.’

      ‘Oh – fancy prices,’ Anna said.

      ‘But consider, Anna – do you really want to do this rather drastic thing?’

      Felix closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. They went downstairs, and had a glass of sherry. Felix stared gloomily over the garden. Slowly the conventions of his calling seemed to occur to him. ‘Useful range of outbuildings,’ he muttered, and jotted this phrase in his book.

      That evening Felix telephoned Ralph. ‘Why don’t you hang on?’ he said. ‘Prices are going up all over East Anglia. A year from now you might make a killing. Tell Anna I advise staying put.’

      ‘I will.’ Ralph was relieved. ‘I take her point, of course – Kit and Julian away, Robin will be off in a year or so, and then there’ll be just the two of us and Becky, we’ll be rattling around. But of course, it’s not often that we’re just the family. We get a lot of visitors.’

      ‘You do, rather,’ Felix said.

      ‘And we have to have somewhere to put them.’

      Two days later, while Ralph and Anna were still debating the matter, their boy Julian turned up with his suitcase. He wasn’t going back to university, he said. He was finished with all that. He dumped his case in his old room in the attics, next door to Robin; they had put the boys up there years ago, so that they could make a noise. Julian offered no explanation of himself, except that he did not like being away, had worried about his family and constantly wondered how they were. He made himself pleasant and useful about the house and neighbourhood, and showed no inclination to move out, to move on, to go anywhere else at all.

      Then Kit wrote from London; she phoned her parents every week, but sometimes things are easier in a letter.

      I’m not sure yet what I should