The Realms of Gold (2 page)

She honestly couldn't tell whether it was the depth of her being that she fell towards, at such moments, or whether it was some squalid muddy intersecting gutter or canal, from which she would struggle wisely back to dry land. At times she would willingly have fallen further. But never achieved it. Always, the struggling back, the drying of eyes, the reassembling of parts.

She still didn't feel exactly cheerful, though the worst was over. She walked up and down for half an hour or more, muttering to herself, trying to divert the energy of the experience to some more useful end, but she was exhausted. It was, after all, as though some bad weather had passed over her, leaving her a little flattened, like a field after heavy rain. It would take her some time to shake it off and slowly uncrackle and unfurl herself again. Meanwhile, she walked up and down, and had another drink. She was a large woman and could drink more than was good for her, and moreover had got into the habit of doing so. Sometimes she had thought she could drown her bad moments in drink, but had never managed to yet; they always lurked and waited for her, and got her later, when she had a hangover. (Her brother, of much the same temperament, had pursued drink more effectively, and seemed to have had good results, though accompanied by deplorable side effects.) At one patch in her life, the bad moments had been so frequent (this was just before she decided, finally, to leave her husband) that she had gone to her doctor like an adult woman and asked for tranquillizers, as all her friends did: she'd swallowed the things, mouthfuls of them, and waited for some Nirvana of happy irresponsibility to take over, but nothing at all had happened. Absolutely nothing. She'd been back to the doctor and complained, and he'd tried her with some others, and again, nothing at all had happened. (She'd found much the same resistance to purple hearts, at Oxford.) She still wept endlessly, and moaned and beat her head on the wall, in almost incessant stormy weather. After a while, she'd abandoned the whole idea of drugs, and had subsequently been relieved that they hadn't worked: it made her misery more, not less, respectable, she felt; she was glad it hadn't been so feeble as to respond to a few chemicals. As soon avert an avalanche with a wall, or quench a volcano with firehoses, as they had vainly and recently tried to do in Iceland.

(In fact, it was largely Frances Wingate's own fault that she did not respond to drugs: it is true that she had a happy constitution, a metabolism able to deal with large quantities of foreign substances, but it is also true that she never followed instructions on bottles, and failed to grasp the point that many pills are geared for cumulative or long-term effect, not for instant relief. Her doctor, unable to believe that Frances could be so stupid, never thought to question her more closely about her pill-taking habits, and remained puzzled by her resistance. But then, he had never been convinced that there was anything much wrong with her.)

When she left her husband, the thing stopped altogether, for a while. Aha, she had said to herself.

It started up again some time later, and had continued, though very intermittently, through the happiest years of her life. It was back again now, but not surprisingly. She poured herself another drink, and wandered over to the gilt-edged mirror and looked at herself, while thinking of the happiest years of her life, and wondered if they could really be over, as it now seemed. She looked at herself, red and blotchy, her skin with broken veins (drink, of course, as much as age), and thought that she certainly didn't look as though she had much future. The notion amused her, because she was after all only in her mid-thirties, and doing very well for herself in other ways. She blew her nose, and decided to feel better, if she possibly could.

It was partly her own fault that she was feeling so bad. She must, in some way, have wanted it. Otherwise, she wouldn't have come back to this very town, where she had parted from the only man she had ever loved, the only man in Europe. (She liked that phrase and said it to herself from time to time, and in a sense it was appropriate as well as melodramatic, for the man in question had been a middle European, born in Pilsen though reared in Palmers Green.) She deserved to feel bad, after all. One had to relive one's own worst moments. (Part of her said, if one must be miserable, one might as well have something to be miserable
about
.)

Though she was feeling, distinctly, better. Blowing her nose, powdering her nose, wiping her eyes. It's all your own fault, she said to herself, you shouldn't spend so much time alone. You should have gone to dinner with Andersson, as you were supposed to.

But I didn't
want
to, she answered herself. I'd seen enough people, I'd met too many people.

Oh heavens, she said to herself, and looked at her watch. It was, amazingly, mercifully, ten to eight. One good thing about one's bad moments, they did speed up once they got going. It was only the approach that was so laboriously, so boringly, so painfully slow. It was rather like work. Settling down to work was agonizingly tedious, and yet once one got into it the time flew away. Ten to eight. If she went out now for dinner, and had a little walk on the way there, and a little walk on the way back, it would be time to go to bed when she got back to the hotel, and the whole evening would be over, polished off, finished forever. She looked at herself. Did she look ill, did she look drunk? She must not shame the Institute, whose honoured guest she was. She didn't look too bad, surely, she would pass.

She put on her coat, picked up her bag, walked smartly down the stairs, and handed in her key, with a familiar deceptive briskness, as though she were very busy and slightly late for an important assignation.

Over a plate of soup, a little later, she thought about the only man in Europe, that man from Palmers Green. (He lived in Fulham now.) She thought about him a great deal of the time. She wondered again why it was that she had left him, and why she was sitting here alone, and whether it had been her fault or his. Had he driven her away, or had she departed? The latter, surely. The issue had become confused, by her insistence that it wasn't in any way his fault that she was leaving, that it had been entirely her own, and that it was her wicked nature that was to blame. As she recalled, she had blamed her bad nature, and her work. He was ruining both, she had said. He was making her better natured, and he was preventing her from wanting to work. This had been true, but she doubted if it could really have been her reason for leaving him—more like a reason for staying, it sounded now, after the event. Why on earth had she left him? She added pepper to her soup. Pride? Fear?

She had been rather afraid of him. He had been something of a Salvationist, he had wished to save her, with evangelical passion, and she was afraid of disappointing him, and simultaneously rather afraid of being saved. So she had told him firmly that she was mad and beyond redemption and that he'd better leave her alone or he'd be in for some nasty disappointments. Out she had gone into the wilderness, and now she stayed in expensive hotel bedrooms, in beds large enough at least for two. (Perhaps it was the third that had really driven her away, though she and he had never talked about it much, and she never thought about it if she could possibly prevent herself.)

She certainly wasn't going to start thinking about his wife now. It was neither the time nor the place. She stirred her soup vigorously, It was full of fish bones. Amazing, how keen one was to eat even when thoroughly depressed. Or was one simply keen to pass the time? The man at the other end of the restaurant was staring at her rather nastily, a large moustached huge-chested person. He was the only other customer in the place. It was a horrid little eating house, as cheap as she could find, tucked away down a dark back street strewn with cabbage stalks and fish heads, slapping with washing. One could say this for Frances Wingate, she really didn't care where she went or what she did or what she ate, she didn't care what risks she ran. (She was careful about foreign water these days, but with good cause.) And yet, of course, she didn't really run any risks, she had an excellent sense of judgement, she was well used to eating alone, and she had recognized at once, from the outside, that this place, though a dump, was in no way a sinister dump, and the man who was staring at her was doing it idly, and the fat proprietor and his fat wife and skinny daughter who were sitting in a sulky group round a table at the other end of the room would protect her interests, though with some contempt. Safe, safe as houses. She took out a little embossed hotel notepaper and started to write a long drunken unpostable letter to her long-lost lover (six-months-lost, he was in fact, but it seemed like an age). Darling, darling, beautiful darling, I love you forever, I miss you forever, she wrote idly. There wasn't really much to say in a love letter. He had been good at the genre, inventive and devious. He had also been good at telegrams. I love you, she wrote again, underlining the words for emphasis.

The she wrote a real postcard to her children: that one, she would post. And another to her parents, and one to her alcoholic brother Hugh and his wife Natasha. And another to her brother Hugh's son Stephen, who had (rather early in life) a new baby, which he took as seriously as a mother octopus would its many offspring. There were various other friends to whom she would have liked to send cards, but she did not know their addresses. Her family was hardly a close-knit one, but at least she knew where most of its immediate members lived. She made a note or two, for her lecture in the morning, thinking of ex-colleagues who would have been pleased and surprised to hear from her, if only she knew where they were. The past had been so full: over-full. What of the future? What on earth could it still hold for her? Her mind hovered over her soup plate, contemplating its skeletal omens. There must surely still be something in store. Hope springs eternal, she said to herself. Such cliches amused her. But it was not hope that seemed to be springing and flourishing in her spiritual breast, it was a malignant and meaningless growth of grief. She felt as though she had swallowed a stone, or a whole hard-boiled egg. A dull sad ache. Perhaps the soup would cure it, but she doubted it.

The soup was really quite good, though bony. She had told the children about the octopus on the postcard—they would be pleased, they had watched the television programme with her about the programmed octopus, indeed they had summoned her with cries from the kitchen to watch it, one of them with tears in her eyes about the poor mother dying in her nest, and it was because of them really, that she'd told Professor Andersson that she'd like to see the research laboratory. They'd be interested in that. Though she might well get home before the postcard, the post was dreadfully slow. Somebody told her there'd been a postal strike in this country, but that wasn't so bad, in fact, because they were delivering all the most recently posted things, it was the very old ones that had to wait, lingering in the boxes for months till all the backlog was cleared, and if it wasn't cleared before the next inevitable strike, well, too bad, there they would stay for another few months. Not that it mattered, she'd be home soon.

A piece of bone had lodged itself between her wisdom tooth and her back molar. Annoying. She prodded at it with her tongue, but failed to dislodge it. She had another glass of wine, swilling it around hopefully—weren't fish bones supposed to melt? And this wine was acid enough to melt anything, even Cleopatra's pearl. Wine of the house, in a smeared carafe. Sometimes she did wish she didn't drink so much. Though she'd only just finished that bottle of brandy, hadn't she? But then she'd been dined out every night. An eighth of a bottle a day, on top of what she'd been given and the experimental little bottles she'd taken out of the convenient little refrigerators. Modest, really, quite a reassuring calculation. Though not quite so reassuring, because there'd also been that open half bottle of scotch, that she'd finished off on the first night with Peter Borg, and she'd noticed he'd hardly had any. Oh dear. It would be too awful to become a real alcoholic, and to have to make these little self-deceiving calculations all the time—but I only had three doubles, and wine doesn't count, and I'm sure John drank
some
of that bottle, and anyway I'm going to give it up tomorrow—all that kind of thing. This wine really was sour. She quite liked sour wine. She had another half glass, and then began to prod at the bone with a toothpick—funny how they were so lavish with toothpicks abroad, even in places like this. (She'd come here really because it would have been too embarrassing to meet Andersson or Galletti or any of her other contacts in any other restaurant when she'd promised them she was going to eat in the hotel and go to bed early. Which she might even have done, but eating in the hotel wouldn't have filled in enough of the evening. It was still only nine o'clock.) She was prodding at her teeth more energetically than she would have done if she had been entirely sober, as she thought these dull thoughts, and so she was not particularly surprised, though rather alarmed, when she dislodged not only the fish bone, but also a fair sized piece of filling from her wisdom tooth. As the tooth consisted of little but filling (the dentist had wanted to pull it out last time, and she hadn't let him, because it seemed such a bad omen, to lose a wisdom tooth), she couldn't believe she had lost anything very important—he'd warned her that he was filling it for the last time. But the lump of silvery metal which she extracted, delicately, with her finger, and laid upon the side of her soup plate, did look rather large. Nervously, she explored what was left. There seemed to be very little left, but at least it didn't hurt. She washed a little more wine around it, and was grateful that she had ordered an omelette for her next course. Stringy foreign biftek would have been the end.

She was beginning to feel quite cheerful. The man at the other table, right across the other side of the room, was staring at her. She stared back and he dropped his eyes. That done, she decided to have a little read of her book. She was reading a novel by Virginia Woolf,
The Years
. One had to be so careful what one read on journeys, because the book would forever bear the mark of the journey, so she always tried to read something not too important but not too trivial either. She remembered reading a volume of short stories by Wells—why, she couldn't remember—while waiting for Karel to arrive at some incredibly elaborate and doubtful assignation, and the book had been ruined forever: she had to turn its spine to the wall nowadays so she couldn't read its lettering. And while one of the children had been having his appendix out, she had read Iris Murdoch. On a train, when she had just left her husband forever, she had read
Mr Norris Changes Trains
. Crying, turning the pages, gazing out of the window, crying again, reading a few more pages. Just like now, in fact. The soup plate and the filling were removed by the proprietor's sulky daughter, the omelette arrived.