The Realms of Gold (15 page)

‘No, I was born in Oxford. But I used to go and stay with my grandmother. My father's mother. She's dead now, of course. But I used to know it quite well. There are still members of the family there, I think, though we don't see them. I haven't been back for years.' She paused, prodding at the tablecloth with her knife, thoughtfully. ‘You know,' she said, slowly, ‘I've often thought that there must be something in the
soil
there, in the very earth and water, that sours the nature. I often think that in our family—we've got some hereditary deficiency. Or excess. I wouldn't know which. Like fluoride. And that, combined with the flatness of the landscape, was what did it.'

‘Did what?'

‘Oh, I don't know. Created the family temperament, I suppose I mean. If there is such a thing. Though, quite obviously, there is. Don't you agree?'

‘In general, do you mean, or in your family? I couldn't say about your family. I've only met you and your father. Oh, and once, I think, your brother. In general, I think I agree. Of course certain families have very pronounced characteristics—take your mother's for example, or the Huxleys, or the Darwins, or the Mitchisons . . . '

‘I wasn't so much meaning families like that,' said Frances, flatly. ‘I meant just ordinary families. Rat families. Without genius or too much inbreeding. I'm certain,' she said, rousing herself slightly, ‘that there must be something positively
poisoning
the whole of South Yorkshire and the Midlands, or they wouldn't all be so bloody miserable up there, and live in such
appalling
conditions. One day they'll work out what it is, and give everyone a pill to counteract it. Meanwhile, we've all got to accommodate ourselves to it as best we can.'

‘To the Midlands sickness?' He laughed, politely.

‘That's it. One could call it that.' She too laughed, to prove that she wasn't serious. ‘I manage to accommodate myself quite well. I'm never there. I'm always abroad.'

‘But you carry it with you in your bones.'

‘Oh yes. Even in the middle of the Sahara, it flattens me out if I'm not careful.'

‘You're lucky to be able to move.'

‘Oh yes, I believe in keeping on the move. I get quite upset when I think about all the people that can't.'

‘They probably like it there.'

‘Do you think so? How could they?'

‘Lucky for you that your father got out, anyway.'

‘Yes, I suppose so.' She looked down the table at her father, who was staring blankly into the far distance. ‘But he's a bad case,' she confided, conspiratorially. ‘A bad case of the Midlands.' And, disloyally, they both laughed.

 

She thought about this conversation in bed, at length. She had been joking, or so she thought: the psychologist's description of his rats and his discoveries about social and anti-social behaviour had both depressed and excited her, as did all suggestions of mechanism in behaviour, and she had tried to change the subject. But she had not succeeded. The more she thought about it, the more she feared that Stephen was suffering from some incurable and ratlike family disease, yet another manifestation of the same illness that had killed her sister, driven Hugh manic to the bottle, and driven her father into a world of silent brooding. She herself suffered from the same thing: it would come over her, periodically, meaninglessly. She had learned to deal with it by ignoring it, by denying its significance: she had refused to take it too seriously, but had let it sweat itself out like a dose of malaria. She had clung to activity and movement as an escape, and on the whole her remedy had worked: she had been able to evade the effects of the sickness, if not the sickness itself. At times she thought Hugh in his own way had been as successful: though often in a hopeless condition, he could still operate, he still by some freak which she failed to understand managed to do well in the City, and when drunk he was sometimes quite amusing. Not always, but sometimes. But was this all she was doing, feverishly seeking health by trying to avoid illness? And what of her convictions, when in the illness, that the illness had some deep spiritual significance? She suspected that her father thought it had: any talk of chemical imbalance or hereditary disorder upset him wildly. He thought God was after him alone. Frances could not give herself such dignity, but, lying awake at night, feeling the stitches in her once perfect breast, she felt that she would like to know where she began and the family ended. God was certainly not hounding her down the nights and down the days, but on the other hand it was possible that she had set up her individual will too firmly against him, had tried too much to cheat him, had ignored his portents too coldly. Where would it take her? She had often thought it would take her to a spectacular collapse in her forties, at the approach of the change of life, maybe. That was now not too far ahead. Would there be some stunning reckoning, would she crawl round the walls and stick forever in one of those black phases, eating her own excrement?

The family history was in fact far from cheerful. Without exaggeration (and often she and Hugh exaggerated, carelessly, for effect, to dispel the gloom), the record was not too good. It was not on her mother's brilliant side that things were black: there, eccentricity and talent had mingled and expressed themselves happily, collecting Nobel prizes on the way, and condemning only an odd maiden aunt or two to a quiet Retreat. It was her father's family, that so-called ordinary family, that gave rise to alarm.

Thinking of them, she thought with a sudden panic of her own children. As an adolescent, she had sworn that she would have no children: she seriously feared that she and they would go mad. And then, through some quirk of nature, she had quite forgotten her doubts, she had married, had given birth cheerfully, and produced as it seemed cheerful children. Maybe she shouldn't have done it? Maybe she had had a brief period of light between two darknesses, long enough to condemn four others to perpetual gloom, before returning there herself? Why hadn't she listened to her fifteen-year-old self? Those violent forebodings hadn't been adolescent extravagances, they had been true warnings, as she had known at the time.

Nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, turning in some discomfort. This is post-operative depression I am suffering from, and worry about poor Stephen.

She resolved to ring Stephen in the morning.

But still she couldn't get to sleep. Thoughts of her childhood, of the flat Midlands, obtruded. She thought of her visits to her grandmother, visits both dreaded and desired. She remembered stories of the great-uncle who had hanged the cat and then himself, of the distant cousin who had thrown himself under a train, of aunts in lunatic asylums and another ancient cousin who had tramped the country preaching the word until he was found dead in a ditch. Some said murdered, though it was never known. With such stories her grandmother would lighten dark evenings, though she would never tell all: she always implied there was worse to tell, if she only could, if Hugh and Frances and Alice were only old enough to hear it. It had been such a fascinating mixture of morbidity and cosiness, her grandmother's house. She wondered whether it was still standing.

After she had rung Stephen, she would leave her parents, and spend a few days in Tockley. Her children were all with their father for the week, while she convalesced. She would take herself off to the Fens, and stay in a hotel, and visit all the old places, and find out what it was that was worrying her. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe the old black bird would flap off on its dirty old wings if she went to catch it.

Morbid, morbid, said Frances to herself, as she curled up more comfortably, her hand tucked between her legs, ceasing to finger the irritating stitches. She felt better already. The prospect of action always cheered her up.

 

As Frances Wingate sat in a first class carriage (her car was in for service) on the way to Tockley, her second cousin Janet Bird (née Ollerenshaw) pushed her baby and her pram along Tockley High Street.

They had never met, and were not yet to meet.

Frances Wingate had not been to Tockley for many years—she could not remember how many. Her grandfather had died when she was fourteen, and her grandmother ten years later, but she had been out of the country at the time and had not gone to the funeral. In fact, after her grandfather's death she had hardly visited Tockley at all, she now remembered guiltily: the place had begun to weigh on her adolescent spirits, she could no longer stand the slow pace, the solitude, the emptiness, the very things which had charmed her as a small child, and her grandmother had turned odd and crabby, even more short-tempered than she had been when younger, even more given to disconcerting attacks and long silences.

She thought of it, then as now, as ‘going to Tockley,' but the house wasn't really in Tockley: it was about six miles out, a distance that had then seemed enormous, as it had to be negotiated by a bus. The town was a medium-sized ordinary provincial town, with much light industry: it was easy enough to get to, but it was the kind of place one goes through, rather than stops at. Frances had booked herself into the British Rail hotel, because it was next to the station, and because her guide book said it was well run and that the food was acceptable. She looked out of the window and wondered what she remembered of the town. Little, she thought. It hadn't meant much to her grandparents: they went there once a fortnight, to shop, depending otherwise on the shop in the nearest village, and on their own produce. There was a famous church, rising out of the flat plain, a landmark for miles: her guide book gave it a star and a glowing description, but she didn't remember that she had ever been in it. She remembered, vaguely, the wool shop, the shoe shop, Woolworth's. It had probably all changed by now.

The cottage, too, had probably changed. She remembered it with a peculiar intensity. It had been the one fixed point in her childhood, for her parents had been itinerant, constantly moving as they climbed the academic ladder of promotion—five years here, three years there, had been the pattern. Granny Ollerenshaw, in the cottage, had been immovable, unchanged and unchanging. They called it Eel Cottage: over the doorway there was a square which announced EEL, 1779. For years Frances had thought that the eel was the eel of the fens and ditches: only later, looking more closely, did she consider that the mysterious and evocative word must have represented the builder's or owner's initials. The cottage was a basic cottage, the kind that children draw: low, a door in the middle, two windows with small panes downstairs, two windows with small panes upstairs. It was in red brick, the brick of the district, with a red tiled fluted roof. There were no rose bushes on either side of the door; though there were plenty in the fields behind, for it was a good district for roses, as for other things. On either side was a long low red-roofed barn: behind and around stretched fields and glass houses. It stood a little back from the road, in the middle of nowhere in particular, alone, with a strange look of basic survival as well as basic shape about it. It looked old, part of the landscape, and yet in some way uncertain and pathetic, as though the landscape would never really accept it. In the front garden was a large notice, which said ‘Nursery Garden. Please call at house for—' and then would follow a list of seasonal treats: stick beans, peas, cut flowers (tulips, gladioli, daffodils), apples, pears, lettuce, marrows. It was a paradise for children.

Perhaps the uneasiness of the landscape sprang from the fact that it was all reclaimed land. Its very fertility was unnatural. The country needed drainage, and it was crossed and crossed again by dykes and ditches, sometimes many feet deeper than the land surface, sometimes, frighteningly, banked higher than the fields. If man did not cherish it the earth would sink beneath the sea, as the Romans had sunk beneath the Midlands marshes: bits of Roman pot sunk into the marsh were forever being unearthed by local ploughmen. Not for nothing was a neighbouring district called after Holland. Frances remembered being enthralled and terrified, as a child, by stories of Dutch courage: the boy with his finger in the hole in the dyke, Hans Brinker and the silver skates, and just beyond, the raging water. A small tilt of the earth's surface and everything would be swamped and disappear forever. She and Alice had been frightened, on the car journey from Oxford, or Leeds, or Bristol: the car (a small Austin) had seemed so low, the country so flat, the ditches so deep, the banks so high, the cabbages so huge. And then, at Eel Cottage, one reached safety: one went into the small low rooms where the paraffin lamps glowed and the small panes shut out the darkness, one went into a small-scale human world, with pot plants instead of shrub-sized cauliflowers, with knick-knacks and sewing boxes and souvenirs and proximity. It was a tiny cottage: her father, not a tall man, banged his head on the door frames, and her mother would fill the living room with her presence when she sat on the immensely decayed, patched and cat-filled couch. She never sat there for long: she would never stay the night. There wasn't room for her.

The children would stay there alone. For Frances, at first, it was like paradise, like the original garden. She was fascinated by tne garden itself, and would hang around helping while her grandfather, a fat round man with check trousers and boots and muddy finger nails and a moustache, would dig, or hoe, or sow, or mutter to himself. She sprayed insects, dug up weeds, picked tomatoes. It was a little business, just enough to live on nicely. It supplied various local greengrocers and florists, and did a little passing trade at the door. Frances adored the passing trade, and would wait passionately for the moment when her grandfather would be out in the field, and her gran in the orchard hanging out the washing, so that she could rush importantly to answer the bell, to weigh out a pound of tomatoes or sell a bunch of tulips. She would often be given a sixpence for her trouble, which she pocketed with pleasure, though there was nothing in the neighbourhood to spend it on except more tomatoes or more dahlias. Hugh, for some reason which she could never discover, didn't like answering the bell: he would hide in the shed if anyone called. He spent most of his time there, in fact, reading books: Dickens, Walter Scott, Shakespeare, the
Reader's Digest
, whatever the cottage had to offer. Alice didn't like serving either: she would slink off, then slink back enviously as Frances collected her sixpence. Sometimes she crept back just in time to get a penny herself, which always annoyed Frances: a sign of weakness of character, she thought, to want to get something for nothing.