The Realms of Gold (17 page)

She half-wished she had the car, but knew that her purpose, obscure as it was, could not have been accomplished with one, so she set off on foot, through the town centre, thinking that if she got tired she could catch a bus. The doctors had told her to take it easy, but not even they could object to her plodding along at an even pace along these exceedingly even streets.

The town had changed. Some of the old shops were still there, but those that remained looked shabby and full of old useless bits: only Elfrida Maple, a little dress shop that sold autumnal suits and felt hats, was unchanged. Even the suits and the hats were unchanged. But nearly everything else had gone. There were two new enormous supermarkets, filling a street each: Woolworth's had rebuilt itself into a characteristic tall blank-back-walled factory building, all the banks except the dignified Midland had new plate glass modern frontages. Instead of tea shops there were Wimpy Bars, dirty coffee shops and sandwich bars, a Chinese restaurant. A cake shop, showing faintly regional cakes, remained, and a butcher or two had hung on, with windows full of pork pies and home-made brawn and faggots and plastic parsley. A whole street full of shops was empty and derelict, awaiting demolition: notices on the doors said that new branches would be opening shortly in the Holland Shopping Centre. But what struck her most of all was the number of estate agents, building societies, investment societies, banks, central heating firms, and lighting firms that filled the best positions in the main streets. Had they always been there, and had she as a child never thought to register their names—the Norwich, the Leeds, the Loughborough, the Peterborough, the Leicester, the Lincoln, the Tockley, the Bradford and Bingley? What were they all doing, what was it all about, what was all this building and money, why had she never noticed it before? And it was a time, too, when building societies were desperately short of cash: the interest rate and the bank rate had never been higher. How had they managed to fill the whole of Tockley High Street with their gleaming panes?

She felt slightly ill, as she walked along, and decided she would have to visit the Ladies' Lavatory in the coach station. Her stomach felt upset; it was heaving ominously. She wondered whether it was nerves: nervousness often went straight to her guts. It was too soon for it to have been the King's Head shrimps, but it could have been the peculiar veal from the night before. It had been a very odd meal, the meal at High Table; the college, being a new one, appeared to have a policy of fine living, which manifested itself in extremely expensive modern china and silver and glass, and pretentious cooking the like of which she had never sampled. Elaborate dish had followed elaborate dish, but the curious thing about the courses was that there was something wrong with each of them. The fish soup, for instance, though excellent, was tepid, the rolls were dry, the piece of smoked trout was served with wilted lettuce, and the veal, with its accompaniment of strangely carved tomatoes, tinned asparagus, ice-cream shaped potatoes and cheese, had been tough. It had been rather depressing to see so much effort put to so little effect. She had felt sorry for her parents, but they assured her later that they didn't eat in Hall often.

It might well have been the veal. Or possibly the fish soup. She reached the Ladies in time, feeling shocking: her bowels had turned to water. At least, she thought with relief, I know it's not cholera, and very unlikely to be typhoid: salmonella at the worst. Or maybe simply fear.

The lavatory was unmodernized. It stank. Pools of water lay on the concrete floor, there was no lavatory paper, the door was covered with graffiti, boys' names, drawings of cocks and balls, sad declarations. Here am I, declared one of them, Sally Prince, I'll do it any time. Boredom stank in the dark closet. The walls were of a peculiarly nasty dark red granite and concrete chip mix: in other circumstances she could imagine herself admiring the texture in porphyry or marble. As there was no lavatory paper, she had to choose between using her last Kleenex and an unused airmail letter: she used the airmail letter. She felt much better as she emerged: her guts, though responsive, were also efficient, and she hoped that that would be that.

The coach station was much the same. So were the coaches. Single decker, green and red, Eastern Counties. She toyed with the idea of walking the six miles, decided it would be silly when she wasn't feeling too good, and went to the bus stop, resolving to get off a few stops before the cottage so she could approach it on foot. In fact, she would get off at the village before. She felt embarrassed about the nature of her expedition, afraid she would be caught out, almost afraid that somebody might recognize her.

She had remembered the route well, but it was utterly, utterly changed. Nothing was left as it had been. Landmarks had disappeared, new ones in the form of garages and discount stores had risen. And, to her mounting dismay, she realized that there was no country left. The whole road was built up, lined with houses. In the old days, it had taken five minutes to get out of the town, right out, into a dull but rural country. Now, it seemed, there was no country. After a quarter of an hour they were still driving through semi-detached houses, bungalows and estates: where country roads had once led off the main road there were signposts saying ‘Eastern Industry', ‘Industrial Estate', ‘Priestman's Plant'. By the time they had reached the village of Hesley, they had not passed a single field. And there was only a mile to go to Eel Cottage.

Frances got out and sat down in the bus shelter. She should have known it was going to be like this: things always were like this. She had known. This was what she feared. What had she expected, some untouched corner of Britain, a rustic paradise, unreached by road and supermarket and over-population? The town was thriving, anyone could see, it was expanding. One ought, almost, to be pleased: the fields of cabbage and spinach and onion had been depressing too, in their own way. Let the people choose. Agricultural wages were at subsistence level, no life was grimmer than tilling the soil.

She thought of the tomatoes and the new potatoes and the waist-high grasses by the ditch. She stood up, to walk on. She almost hoped the cottage had been pulled down, to make way for developers.

But in the last mile, things improved, slightly. The bungalows thinned out making way for undeveloped building plots covered with brown dock and thistle and bramble and groundsel: flights of small birds rose from the dry stalks as she passed. Eventually, she reached a field. It was full of onions. The smell, pungent, cressy, green, violent, rose all around. The air was full of triumphant onion. After all, one cannot do without the onion, she said to herself. A few houses later there was another field, containing black bean stalks, then another, with stubble. The houses had come to an end, and still she had not reached the cottage. Her heart rose, it was reprieved.

The road was so flat that one could see far ahead: there were no perspectives in this district. She came upon it almost unexpectedly: it had always been unexpected, like that, slightly hidden by a large tree on the wayside. It was still there. She stood, at a safe distance, and looked at it, wondering if she would have the courage to go and knock on the door: whoever had it would surely remember the Ollerenshaws, and let her in. If that was what she wanted. She wasn't sure what she wanted, or why she had come, but her heart was quick, the shape of the roof and the windows and the big tree, so long unseen, so often imagined in her inward eye was calling up some corresponding pattern in her mind, its lines were the lines of memory, a shorthand carving, like the graph of her heart or brain, like the points of its movements. There, that shape, imperfectly remembered, and yet perfectly there: an electrocardiagram of her childhood, a map of her past. The angle of roof and window, the shapes of the sheds, the colours of the tiles. Sick with excitement, faint with emotion, she went on: but there was no need to knock, for on the Nursery Garden notice—the same one, unchanged after ten years, a good solid wooden notice, there was another notice, saying ‘Gone on Holiday, back end of July'.

So even the garden was still there. There were still tomatoes. She paused, on the roadway, and looked around: there might be somebody here, they would have had to leave somebody looking after the produce, one can't just leave a garden, as her grandfather had said many a time, with happy submission. (He didn't like moving: once he went to London and came back on the next train, because he thought he'd forgotten to water the new seedlings. He hadn't forgotten to water them, of course.) But there seemed to be nobody there. She went up the garden path, past the notice, and tapped on the door just in case. Nobody answered. She peered through the small windows. There were still pots of plants on the window sills, as there always had been: ferns, cacti, flowering plants. She couldn't see into the rooms, it was too dark. The front lawn was as tidy as it had been in her grandfather's day, far tidier than in her grandmother's, and the barn walls had been newly pointed. She could have wept with relief: there were tears in her eyes.

Growing more confident, she went round the side of the house to the back. The glass houses were in good repair. Beyond them, she could see a field of roses, a field of cabbage. There were changes—there was a new garage (the Ollerenshaws had never had a car), and the old pump had gone. There was a plastic gyrating clothesdryer in the orchard, and a sandpit in a corner of the yard, and a new swing. So they had children. For some reason she was surprised, she thought of the cottage's inhabitants as inevitably old. She peered through the kitchen window, into that room which with its blackened range and white deal table and cats had been a source of so much misery and ancestral joy, and she saw that it was changed. The range had gone, and a new red Aga stood in its place. The floor, which had been stone in her day, covered with ants and peg rugs, was now done in Marley tiles. There was a new dresser, replacing the shelves of her Gran, and on the dresser plates and cups and—she peered harder—yes, books. She could not say why she was surprised to see books.

The white deal table was still there. Somebody had liked it, and kept it.

There was nothing else to be seen through the windows: she wondered if she dared set off through the fields and look at the ditch. There was nobody to stop her, she was harming nobody.

The walk to the ditch was less reassuring. Some of the land had clearly been sold off when the house was sold: she could tell that the farmer who owned the property on the right, a man whom her grandfather had always disliked for no known reason (perhaps merely because he was a neighbour) had got hold of the two fields he had always wanted, for they were now ploughed into his own, and a new ditch had been dug to cut them off. (It was a land without hedges.) And on the left, things were even worse. Her favourite ditch, which had run parallel to the road behind the whole property, turned finally towards the village behind: and as she approached the ditch, she could see that the village had spread to meet the main road. Like Tockley itself, it had overflowed. She couldn't believe it—a hamlet like Hussey, to overflow? There had been nothing there in her day except a few cottages, the big house, an empty church, a duckpond, and a hairdresser. Whoever would want to live in Hussey? Why on earth should Hussey flow along Back Lane to Eel Cottage?

Anxious for her ditch, she made her way through the cabbages, tripping in the deep dry ruts. It was a dry summer. The cabbages were grey and silver, and clouds of white butterflies rose from them at her approach. Perhaps the new Eel people were organic farmers and didn't believe in killing caterpillars. She recalled her happy days with the spray gun in the greenhouse, the lovely afternoon when they had smoked the ants out of the kitchen with a rag soaked in petrol.

The ditch was still there, but she could tell before she was close enough to peer into it that its prime days were over. There was a building site just on the other side of it, with concrete mixers and signs and heaps of bricks, where once there had been another pure and endless field of cabbages. Knowing the worst already, but unable to see, owing to the lie of the land, until the last moment, she climbed over the small ridge before the descent into the ditch, and saw what she had feared. A thick oily scum covered the water: bits of paper, fag ends, Coca Cola bottles, an old tyre, a chunk of polystyrene and a car seat floated in it. Bubbles, not from fish or newts, but from some invisible putrescence rose to the surface. There was still, surprisingly, a little greenery: a patch of slimy duck weed, a slippery moss. And that was that. Ah well, never mind, she said to herself, one could hope for no better. And she climbed out of the ditch, and went on to Hussey, to see what was going on in the new metropolis.

Nothing much was going on there, it appeared. There were some new houses, some new shops, a garage. Back Lane had been widened into a road. There were babies in prams in gardens, old men taking dogs for walks. It was much the same as it had been in her own day, but bigger: the people had the same faces, the same voices. It wasn't even Hussey translated into a commuter's suburb. It was simply Hussey up to date. Frances began to feel ashamed of her conservationist notions, as she watched two young mothers, babies on the hips, talking over their hedge on their brand new lawns in front of their brand new picture-window houses (one could see right through the houses, into the flat fields behind), by their brand new gold fish ponds. In her day, only Colonel Blake at Hinkley had had a gold fish pond, and it had been the wonder of the district.

Still, it was a pity about the scum on the ditch.

She walked through the village, thinking of her grandparents and of their circumscribed lives. Had her grandmother wanted more, was that why she had been so sour? And what had they made of her father's success? They never spoke of it much, and had dealt with her mother's superiority by ignoring it, in a manner that Frances at the time had found natural, and now found wholly admirable. Unruffled, they had fed her on strong tea and kippers: they had turned a deaf ear to her requests for coffee. They had listened blankly at her mannered praise of fresh vegetables and duck eggs (they had had a duck-keeping phase) and plied her with biscuits and cake. Thinking back, Frances remembered how she had loved the diet, and how incredibly greedy she had been all her life, a most undignified failing in a woman. What a fool she had made of herself over meals, at times. She wondered what the Station Hotel would provide for dinner. The salmon had really been very nice. What a miracle that she wasn't monstrously fat. Though of course she could survive on nothing, as she had proved, and had a capacity like a camel for doing without drink, except in the most appalling heat.