The Realms of Gold (21 page)

The insurance form wanted to know who was his next of kin. He had no wife, no brothers, no sisters, no children, and he did not wish to enter the names of his ageing parents, with whom his contact was almost non-existent: he did not like the thought of a police officer calling on them to tell them that his desiccated corpse had been found in the Hoggar Mountains. (He was looking forward particularly to the Hoggar.) So he put down the name of his friend and ex-colleague Banks, with whom he was to have dinner that night. Lying, he declared that Banks was his cousin. He had got some real cousins, up in Tockley, but he didn't want to embarrass them with his corpse either. Banks, a hardened earthquake inspector, wouldn't care either way about David Ollerenshaw's corpse. That was one of the reasons why David kept in fitful touch with him.

 

Janet, half an hour later, woke to the angry wails of Hugh. Furious at being tricked into unawareness, tricked out of the masochistic satisfaction of the toothache, he yelled and bawled so loudly that she bundled him up in his dried-out anorak and shoved him in his pram in the back garden with a load of broken toys. He could sit out there, she said firmly, while she made the soup and peeled the vegetables. Then he could come in again. Her violent handling of him seemed to silence him: he sat there, pink cheeked and a little awestruck, plucking at his yellow harness and watching the leaves fall off the trees. What a boring life, being a baby, she thought to herself, as she went in to her neat and tidy kitchen and put on her apron, and waved to him through the window. He waved back, rather grudgingly.

She started to peel the mushrooms, heaping up a little pile of thin papery silky skin, and slicing them neatly with her sharp knife. The shape of them, the white moonlike crescent and its stalk, with its darker pink brown fringe, satisfied her. If one sliced neatly and thinly, one could make a perfect section of each, like a specimen for a slide in biology. Mushrooms round here were still sometimes proper, perfect mushrooms—not those huge black gilled fraying things that one could sometimes get cheap, nor the other extreme, those so white and over-cultured underground that they were deformed, embryonic, with no proper distinction between stalk and cap. These were really lovely ones. She arranged them on the chopping board, and went to melt the butter in the pan. One could not go wrong with mushroom soup, Di Hutchins had told her, if one put enough sherry and cream in it. That was the kind of advice people were always giving her, and it was all very well, but sherry and cream were expensive, and Mark had been so difficult about money lately, and it was indeed true that the mortgage was crippling and going up as it seemed every day, and the baby had proved more expensive than she had dreamed possible. She would thicken the soup with a tin of Heinz, and perhaps put a spot of cream in later, leaving the rest for the coffee and the sweet. She must remember never to give mushroom soup to the Hutchins. And come to think of it, what had she given Cynthia and Ted for their main course last time? and Bill and Anthea? She honestly couldn't remember. Too bad if it had been chicken. Too bad if any of them had yet tried on each other the chicken recipe in last month's
Femina
. It looked all right, and not too complicated and expensive. After all, how the hell was one expected to know what other people in Tockley were eating every night? One couldn't go and snoop through their windows of an evening, could one, spying on their supper, one couldn't trail them to the butcher and the greengrocer. And anyway, that wouldn't do much good these days, as everyone but herself seemed to have a deep freeze. She didn't know how they afforded all the things they had. Cynthia David, she thought firmly, should have taken her lamb out of her deep freeze much much earlier. It had been tough and bloody.

She got the mushroom soup simmering, looked out of the window and saw that Hugh had been joined by the cat and seemed quite happy for the moment, and started to joint the chicken, a job which always drove her into a frenzy. It was so messy, the meat was so translucent and slimy and slippery, the joints were never quite where they ought to be, but she had to do it, the recipe said so, and anyway the last time she had left a chicken whole Mark had made such a hash of carving it that he had sulked for the rest of the evening. How cruel he was to her. What pleasure did it give him, to be so unkind? She sawed at the knobbly thigh bone of the fowl, severing a tattered drumstick, and hoped that he would not provoke her so much that she would be obliged to stick a knife in him one day. It was unlikely, she was a very feeble timid person. He counted on that, she was sure. But people did stick knives into one another. When younger she had never been able to understand why, she had always thought of knife-stickers as another species, a breed apart. Now she knew that she was one of them in her spirit. Now she knew why people did it. It was a wonder to her that people did not do it more often. The self-restraint around in the world filled her with awestruck admiration. How wonderful people were, herself included, to control themselves so well. And how nasty, bloodless and underground chickens are: yellow skin, purple and white flesh. Reared in a battery. Not as good quality as the mushrooms, but doubtless nobody would notice, when she had sufficiently covered them with tinned peach sauce. She hacked away. Odd, how the flesh seemed to disappear as one hacked. There was never much left on a jointed chicken.

The cat sat on the baby's pram. She was glad that it liked it there, and that Hugh accepted it so nicely. She had been so fond of her little cat, before Hugh's arrival, but everybody had tried to stop her from feeling fond—repressed maternal instincts, the clever ones had said. You're a spinster at heart, Mark would say in company, and in private he would push the cat around, not quite cruelly, but as though he resented its very existence. He would shut the door too sharply on the cat's tail, he would tip it too abruptly off chairs, he would push it away from its own dish with his foot if he wanted to go out by the back door, though he could perfectly well have walked round it. And when the baby was born, people tried to make her get rid of the poor creature, implying that it would be sure to suffocate the baby if she didn't, that it was unhygienic, that she wouldn't miss it if she had a baby instead. She had been really upset by these arguments, as she was terrified of germs, and had never thought of her little cat as being dirty before. She was even more upset by the vigour and venom with which her neighbours and relations pursued these arguments—it was almost as though they
wanted
to kill her cat, as though they enjoyed the idea of killing her cat. It was their zeal that finally persuaded her to keep it—she burst into tears one day, heavily pregnant, when a neighbour had called in one evening for a cup of coffee and started to tell her yet more horror stories of suffocated babies, and said, ‘You can kill her yourself, now, if you like, but if you don't do it right now, here and now, in this room, I'm keeping her.' And the neighbour had looked with shocked and narrow eyes at the little black and white cat sitting there so innocently and peacefully, and had changed the subject, and backed away without the cat's blood on her hands. Poor Janet, she said later, vaguely, to both Janet and Mark, she's upset, she's overwrought, we all know how upset people get when the time gets near—and Janet, the palm of one hand flat on the swell of her lower ribs, had felt like saying who's she, the cat's mother, but her moment of rebellion was past, and she had to accept sympathy, excuses made on her behalf for her own bad behaviour, and meekly bow her head, as though she admitted her folly, her pregnancy-induced folly. Extraordinary, the way people had of explaining away in quite false but oddly plausible terms one's own most violent emotions.

She accepted reproof, but the cat lived. She had equipped herself with cat nets and DDT (but hadn't dared to use the DDT because it said not to put it near babies), she had washed blankets and brushed cushions, she had sterilized teething rings and dummies ten times more frequently than she needed, and she had let the cat live. Somewhere, deep inside herself, she knew that the cat wasn't going to kill the baby. She didn't know where this knowledge came from, for she had no such instinctive feeling about slightly-old soup, or unboiled water, or extremes of temperature. The baby had responded perfectly. He liked the cat. He never hurt her or pulled her about or dropped things on her. And there she sat, on the end of his pram, while he chewed on a plastic beaker and mumbled (she couldn't hear him, but she could see he was mumbling) and let spittle drip once more onto his anorak.

She had nearly finished the chicken when she heard the door bell. Her heart sank, for it could not conceivably be anyone she wanted to see. Still, she had to answer it. Once she had hidden under the front room window sill, so horrified had she been by the approach of a neighbour down the front path, but people always got one in the end. They just came back later. Wiping her hands on the door, hoping it would be a tradesman she could send away, she went to the front door. But it wasn't a tradesman, it was her mother.

‘Getting dark early, isn't it?' said her mother, by way of greeting, as she stepped in. ‘Yes, it is,' said Janet, though it wasn't, it was only three o'clock, and not yet dark or even very cloudy.

‘I thought I'd better just pop in,' said her mother, with no explanation.

‘Yes,' said Janet.

‘You're busy, I see,' said her mother, following her into the kitchen.

‘Yes,' said Janet.

‘People coming for the evening?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's nice for you then.'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘A lot of work, though,' said her mother, wandering around, peering at the simmering soup, and almost-jointed chicken, the bowl of peaches, the peeled carrots, the green beans, the salad. ‘Messy, too.'

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mummy?' said Janet. ‘Would you mind putting the kettle on? My hands are all chickeny.'

‘Don't let me hold you up,' said her mother, going to fill the kettle, noting, as Janet had known she would, the persistent stain in the sink, and the cat on the baby's pram in the garden.

‘You're having a lot of people then?' asked her mother, and Janet sighed and said, ‘No, not really.'

Her mother waited expectantly.

‘We're having the Streets, and Anthea and Bill David,' said Janet patiently.

‘Ah,' said her mother, paused, and then said, ‘I don't think I know the Davids, do I?'

‘I don't know, Mummy. Bill works at Patterson's. I'm sure you must have seen Anthea around in town. Very smart, she is.'

‘Oh? Smart? Would I have met her here, then?'

‘I'm not sure. I don't know her very well really.'

‘I like the Streets
very
much,' said her mother, in a speculative tone, as though she meant the opposite, and was waiting for her daughter to contradict her. ‘I'll never forget how kind they were that day when I'd been waiting so long at the bus stop at the end of your road and they gave me a lift. I thought that was
very
nice of them.'

‘Well, it was no trouble to them,' said Janet, neutrally. It was difficult, this game of non-admission, because even neutrality could be interpreted.

Her mother made the tea, while Janet finished the chicken, and started the sauce. She found it difficult to do things with her mother watching: the deliberately careful silence, the tactful lack of comment unnerved her, and she sliced her thumb on the last assault. She did not even like to look for a plaster. The carcases stood there, hollow and ribby. Her own chest felt like that sometimes. Her mother would take her blood to be chicken blood.

‘You'll make soup, I suppose, with the bones,' said her mother, drinking her tea.

‘Yes, I suppose so,' said Janet, who had thought of bundling the nasty objects into a newspaper and bunging them in the bin.

‘Is that a
peach
sauce you're making? For the chicken? How unusual.'

‘Yes, it is, rather.'

‘Did one of your friends give it to you?'

‘I got it out of
Femina
.'

‘Oh? Really? I've never heard of peaches and chicken. That's very unusual.'

‘Yes, it is, isn't it,' said Janet, almost prepared to admit that the combination was not only unusual but potentially disgusting, but as that was the kind of thing her friends cooked, that was the kind of thing they were going to get back in return.

‘And what will you serve it with?'

‘Rice,' said Janet, with a new note of finality. She could, occasionally, put her foot down, and she had had this rice-potato debate too often to be able to face it again. Her mother still seemed to believe that potatoes were an essential accompaniment to every meal, and that rice was a foreign, unsatisfying, and unwelcome substitute. Janet had actually, on previous occasions, been obliged to support her own use of rice by detailed descriptions of the menus and habits of her acquaintances, and she had found the process, tainted as it was with defensiveness, and laying her open as it did to further prying (as long as her mother didn't
know
what she was doing, it was safe)—she had found the process painful, and had no wish ever to repeat it. So now she said ‘Rice,' with authority, and her mother repeated ‘Oh, rice,' with submission, and changed her tack.

‘Hugh's being very good,' she said, after a while. ‘He doesn't seem to mind the cat at all.'

‘He likes the cat,' said Janet.

‘I do admire your confidence,' said her mother. ‘I'd never have dared. But you mothers these days are so sure of yourselves.'

‘Would you like a piece of cake?' asked Janet. ‘I think I've got a cake somewhere.'

‘I wouldn't say no,' said her mother. Janet could have sworn that her mother was positively hoping that there would be no cake, so that she could make a show of not minding not having any—but if that were so, why on earth had she offered her a piece? The minutest attention to Mrs Ollerenshaw's behaviour could not have discerned a suppressed desire for cake, nor a desire to catch Janet out at not having any: it was perfectly respectable to have a cup of tea at half past three without cake, and as Mrs Ollerenshaw was always going on about getting fat and dieting she ought not to want cake anyway. The fact remained that Janet had, unwilled, compelled, drawn by fatal threads, offered cake, and was not sure if there was a presentable piece in the cake tin. She didn't eat much cake herself. Still, the cake had at least provided a distraction from Hugh, the cat and motherhood, and when she looked in the blue enamel tin she found to her relief a few Garibaldi biscuits in the end of a cellophane wrapper, the end of a ginger cake, and a few digestive biscuits. If only her mother hadn't been sitting so close, she would have been able to make them look quite proper and attractive, on a cake plate, but as it was she could see that she was going to have to thrust the tin at her, crumbs and all, tatty bits of cellophane and all, brand names and all. Not that one could ever have pretended that such a cake was home made.