The Realms of Gold (10 page)

They met the next day, and the next, and the next. They met every day, in the three weeks before she went off to Africa, though she was busy with preparations for her journey, and he was working full time. But they made time. While she was in Africa, they corresponded, in so far as the postal service and the remoteness of her position admitted. In his letters, he said that he loved her. She replied, saying that she loved him, and suggesting that he should fly out to see her to check up on it. He said he was too busy and couldn't afford it. I'll wait till you come back, he said. It will keep till then.

And it kept. When she got back to England, he met her at the airport, and drove her and her vast amounts of luggage home to Putney. Shortly after their reunion, they started to sleep together. For Frances, it was one of the most amazing patches of her altogether amazing life. She couldn't believe it. She'd been sleeping with people for years, on principle almost, but nothing much had ever happened to her. Some affairs had been more interesting than others, but none had been serious. With Karel, it was serious. The first time she slept with him, (and the first time wasn't even very satisfactory, from some points of view) she knew that it was serious, that she had entered a new world of events. She heard herself cry out with astonishment, again and again.

She couldn't explain what it was in him that affected her so profoundly. He was beautiful, but even she could still see hovering behind his real self the ghost of the seedy ageing harassed family man who had met her on a Southern Region station. Anyway, she decided, it couldn't be just the look of him. She liked the way he talked, the things he said. But it couldn't be just that, either. She liked the things he did to her, she liked them very much indeed. Altogether, perhaps all these things added up to love. Though perhaps love had nothing to do with any of them.

In short, she loved him. She didn't know why, but she did. She could tell that she did because she had never loved anyone before, though she had sometimes fancied that she had. She could tell, because this was so different. Otherwise, it was a bit of a mystery, to them both. It wasn't even as though she were blind to his irritating qualities—there were many things about him that annoyed her; his friends, his wife, his indecisiveness, his unpunctuality, the way in which he let his colleagues and his students exploit him; his meaningless conscientious time-wasting inefficiency. He was one of those people who are hopelessly inefficient through an excess of goodwill—he never liked to say no, was always promising to do things that conflicted with other things that he had already promised to do, could never leave a conversation or a room for fear of hurting other people's feelings, and thus was frequently late and frequently causing offence. When he had caused offence, he would, on randomly selected occasions, lose his temper. Frances, an efficient woman, found such conduct exasperating, and longed to intervene when she overheard him make totally impossible assignations—I'll see you in half an hour, he would say from Putney, arranging to meet someone twenty miles away on the other side of London in the rush hour. But it was impossible to intervene. His conduct had its own logic. She learned to adapt herself to it.

They got on well: they learned to get on better. They talked to each other a great deal about their work, a pleasure neither had ever before experienced, finding that with a little ingenuity their subjects could be made to have a considerable overlap. (After all, it was in a professional context that they had first met: it was Karel who had selected Frances's name from a list of possible external lecturers.) They talked of students and colleagues, of history and progress; also of their children, and what was in the newspapers. They argued about Northern Ireland and over-population. It was a good time, for Frances. With Tizouk behind her and Karel before her, she felt herself a made woman, in every sense. Flattered and courted, she flourished and blossomed. She enjoyed the attentions of the public: she enjoyed even more her ability to live at last, in private.

It was so good that at times she would tell herself: I must remember, I must record for myself, how good it is, in case things go wrong again. But she knew in her heart that it was as impossible to recall the good times during the bad, as it was to recall the bad during the good. One moved from one state to another helplessly, in forgetfulness, with merely a dry shadowy knowledge of the other, as unlike the real thing as a dried hard seed pod, a hard dry brittle box full of small black seeds of forgetfulness, is unlike the living flower. At times, during the flowering, one could hear the dry seeds rattle, ominously: moods, depressions, meaningless distortions of consciousness. This was why she persevered, and tried to make a conscious effort to control the process, to remember moments, to store them and preserve them, as though she could in some way carry them with her through the dark winter when it closed in; like a talisman, a seed, a pledge of the unimaginable spring. For how had the first sowers ever learnt to trust the wheat to survive the winter? On such acts of faith has human life been built. And if the spring were never to come again, she told herself, I must at least know that it has been. I owe it to fate, to chance, to Karel.

Moments. The children in the garden on swing and seesaw (struck into silence by the harmony of the double glazing), herself watching from an upstairs room. A meal in the Poly canteen. A game of poker with Karel and the children. Bed, of course. One of the days that she remembered most often, in her effort to trick time (as she was later to remember the frogs in the pipe), was a day when she and Karel had been together in Surrey. It had been very early spring, her favourite season, the safest season. (A long time, till winter.) Karel had been to give a lecture in Farnham, she to visit a colleague to consult him about her Tizouk figurines. Karel had picked her up from her friend's house, after his lecture, and they had chatted a while, all three, watching through the window the sunlight on the brown earth and the pale garden green of January, on a pink primula, a Christmas rose, and a little white honeysuckle, timorously blossoming. She liked the early plants of the year: her own garden had aconites, now. She and Jeremy Harding and Karel spoke of aconites a little while (she was proud of Karel, she liked to be with him in company), and then they declined a cup of tea, and set off home.

In the car, they agreed that they would have liked a cup of tea, really. They discussed why they had declined. To be together, they agreed, alone together.

It was early afternoon; the light was bright but fading. They drove through the suburban countryside, through the pine woods and the bracken, as the colour deepened. It was pink and silver, russet and coral, the silver birches pink in the faint premonition of a sunset, the bark of the pine trees darkening to a wilder Scots redness, a few leaves of last year pink and copper, but above all the bracken, the dead bracken, with its lovely, special, eccentric cold burnished leafy metallic dead but promising beauty. A countryside tamed but burning. She kept her hand on his knee. A lovely afternoon it was, a lovely evening it would be. Karel's lecture had gone well: her friend had been helpful. She should wash Spike's hair when they got back, then they would have spaghetti carbonara for supper, and some salad, and go to bed early. Thinking of the spaghetti, she realized how hungry she was, and as though reading her mind, he said, ‘Let's stop, shall we, for acup of tea?'

They stopped at a cafe by the roadside: standing at the counter, Karel ordered two teas, one with and one without, and she saw him looking hungrily at the sandwiches, and hunger overcame her too, for the sandwiches (unlike the doughnuts and the fruit pies) looked so delicious, and she and Karel looked at one another, by the formica-topped counter, and both hesitated, and he said, ‘Shall we have one, then?' and she said, ‘Yes
please
.'

All the sandwiches looked so good that they could not decide which to get. Cheese and chutney, cheese and tomato, ham? She watched him, as he examined the sandwiches in their several-storied glass steel-rimmed box.

‘I love you, Karel,' she said. ‘I really love you.'

‘Do you, my darling?' he said. ‘Shall we have cheese and tomato?'

She had never enjoyed a sandwich so much in her life. Sitting together at the small table amongst the ketchup bottles.

‘There's nothing like a sandwich, is there,' said Karel, after a pause, ‘when it's what one really wants?'

They looked down at the two halves on the plate, each with large bites taken out of the soft white bread, lying together. Both had taken identical-sized bites.

‘I enjoyed deciding to buy this sandwich,' said Karel. ‘And now I'm going to enjoy eating it.'

And hearing him speak, she shivered slightly, as though a moment of intense joy had come to its proper completion, and it occurred to her that she had never been as happy in her life as she was there, sitting at that shabby table gazing through a white net curtain at the A3, with two half-eaten sandwiches in front of her, signifying union. To have it was one thing: to know one was having it was something else, more than one could ever have hoped for.

Of such things did life consist. She enjoyed it all. At times she said to herself, it's so good it can't last; but not very often. There was no reason why one should not enjoy sandwiches and love forever. Unlike some pleasures, they seemed to have no inbuilt destructive elements.

 

There were, however, other elements in the affair that were destructive, of course. They became more obtrusive with time, though at first she hardly noticed them. The chief of these elements was Karel's wife. Frances had little idea what his relations with her were, and did not intend to upset herself by inquiring more closely: she resolutely ignored the guilt she at times suffered. But she was compelled, after a year or two, to notice that the wife existed, and that Karel did not seem to intend to leave her. Frances had never expected him to. She was used to admiring men who didn't want to leave their wives. Unlike most of them, Karel did leave his wife from time to time, and came to live with Frances, but then he would go back home again. He seemed eager to keep everybody happy. As he was successfully keeping her happy, Frances accepted his arrivals and disappearances without question. She wasn't even sure if she wanted him to come and live with her permanently. She was all right on her own. And he was, in his own way, thoroughly reliable: even if he went away, at least he always came back again, which is more than one could say of most people. And she had to go away herself, quite often for professional reasons, so why should she complain? The strange tempo of their life suited her quite well.

She was obliged to admit, after a couple of years, however, that the situation wasn't quite as simple as she assumed. It was Karel's wife who forced this awareness rather violently upon her. She called round late one night, and started throwing things through the windows. In order not to have all her windows broken, Frances got out of bed and went down and let her in. She had not met her before, and did not need an introduction. Karel's wife had come round to look for Karel: he wasn't there, a fact which seemed to surprise her, but which did not deter her from throwing more objects around the sitting room, some of them quite valuable, though luckily she didn't seem to have grasped the principle that the duller the object in appearance, the greater its archaeological value: she went for the showy items, the nineteenth-century African masks, and spared the boring, priceless, irreplaceable bits of Saharan sherd. While she wrecked the place, she screamed loudly and hysterically that Frances was a wicked wealthy promiscuous whore who was simply amusing herself at Karel's expense, that if she knew the
hovel
where she and Karel lived in squalor she would know what Karel was after her for, that Frances grossly neglected her children, that Frances's mother was a murderer, that Frances's entire family was part of the vicious power structure of the land, and deserved to have bombs thrown at its country houses.

Such a welter of emotional misapprehensions, albeit mingled with a little truth, had left Frances speechless: she had stood and watched in amazement, smiling in what she later realized must have been an infuriating manner, though at the time she had meant it to be soothing and encouraging. After a while Karel's wife (her name was Joy) seemed to run out of insults, and sank down on a corner of the settee. Frances half-expected her to burst into tears, but she was made of sterner stuff. She sat there, grimly, and after a while she said, ‘I'm sitting here till he turns up.'

‘You might have to wait a long time,' said Frances, ‘because I'm not really expecting him.'

‘I'll wait,' said Joy.

‘Do you mind if I go back to bed?' said Frances: an ill-judged remark, for Joy leapt to her feet, seized another glass, chucked it at Frances's head, hit her, then followed it up by a personal assault, which resulted in her pulling out a lump or two of Frances's hair. Frances, who was a much bigger woman, retaliated by kicking her smartly in the shins.

Joy sat down again. Frances poured herself a drink, but didn't feel that the laws of hospitality demanded that she should pour one for Joy, who had clearly had a drop too much already. Quietly, she started to pick up some of the broken objects from the floor, in as unobtrusive a way as possible, watching Joy out of the corner of her eye, and recalling the descriptions of similar incidents recounted to her by friends and neighbours. It was her first experience of such a scene, though these days they seemed to be a commonplace: marriage in the middle classes had become a violent affair. She and her husband Anthony had thrown things at each other, but that had been an internal matter. She'd never yet come up against a third party, and was not sure of the rules of the game. She had heard of strange alliances between wives and mistresses. Of one thing she was certain; she did not wish to ally herself with Joy at all.