The Realms of Gold (23 page)

On the other side, lived a retired civil servant and his wife. The wife never went into the garden, but he was there constantly, digging and hoping for a word. Janet tried to avoid him too, because he was a bore and also nosy, asking difficult and intimate questions, but at least she could take satisfaction in disliking him. At least he did not fill her with dread.

The back yard, at last, seemed unobserved, and Janet opened her back door and emptied the brown leaves down the disinfected grate. As she straightened herself up, she caught sight of the huge sky, which was an amazing colour, dark blue, with a foreground of dark pink and purple clouds, light but regular clouds, a whole heaven of them, spread like flowing hair or weed over the growing darkness. It arrested her. She stood there, and stared upwards. It was beautiful, beyond anything. The two colours were charged and heavy, and against them stood the black boughs of the tree at the end of the small garden, where black leaves, left desolate, struggled to fall in their death throes. The day before she had watched from the bedroom window a single leaf on that tree, twisting and turning and tugging at its stalk, in a frenzy of death, rattling dry with death, pulling for its final release. So must the soul leave the body, when its time comes. The amazing splendour of the shapes and colours held her there, the tea pot in her hand. I will lift up mine eyes, she thought to herself. I should lift them up more often.

When she went in again, she found Hugh eating a magazine, and smiled at him in quite friendly fashion as she took it from him and put it back in the magazine rack. It was after all time for Hugh's tea. She wiped up his spittle off the floor (how nice the wood was looking, it was quite a pleasure to wipe something off it) and took him into the kitchen and popped him into the high chair and boiled him an egg. How she liked eggs, particularly boiled eggs—so solid and hygienic and tidy and neat and organic and healthy they were, so much nicer than a baby tin, so much neater than a squashed banana or a sieved tomato. They were getting expensive these days, but even so they were good value, and at least one knew what was in them. She sliced some bread and butter, thinly, into strips, and let him squash them into his mouth himself, though she would much have preferred to chop them into tiny morsels and pop them tidily in—and she fed him the egg on a small stainless steel egg spoon efficiently, smartly, catching the dribble, scraping his chin with the spoon when it got buttery, keeping
him as
neat as she could, and smiling at him when she heard the spoon clank on his two small teeth. ‘You'll have some more soon,' she said to him, and he smiled back at her and kicked his legs and blew some bubbles.

When she had wiped him up, she took him into the other room and sat him in front of the television, which he liked, though he was far too young to know what was happening on it, she supposed. She would set the table, then give him his bath and his bottle and put him to bed, then she would just have time to change before Mark and the others arrived. Mark was going straight from work with Bill to pick up Anthea in the car, because they hadn't got a car at the moment—they were in a conservationist phase and thought it was smart to do without one, which meant that their friends had to drive them around all the time in a most inconvenient fashion.

She enjoyed setting the table. Hugh gazed at the end of a cartoon and the beginning of the News (more strikes, a fuel crisis, threatened power cuts, an Irish bomb in distant London). He sucked his thumb happily. She gave a final wipe to the white formica dining table top, and began to get out the place mats from the drawers. She would use the brown and gold ones. They were some of the nicest, they went with the season, and Anthea would think they were smart—she herself rather liked the Redoute roses, but she wasn't quite sure if Anthea would. She remembered with dismay the time when she had put out the Stately Homes place mats, and Mark's friend Christopher had made such horrible jokes about them, when she'd honestly thought that they'd be just the kind of thing that he (rather a county type, Mark had proudly described him) would like.

Mark and Janet had been given four different sets of place mats as wedding presents. They had been given two more as subsequent anniversary and Christmas presents. And the formica table was in fact heat proof, and that was why they had bought it.

Six brown and gold mats on the white circular top looked very good. She added six cut-glass Waterford goblets, and paused. Would Anthea prefer those chunky Italian glasses with thick bottoms? Maybe. But the cut glass ones looked so lovely, winking and glittering and jewelled in the orange light. (She pulled the lamp over the table down, on its extending cord, so it gave a more discreet, intimate glow.) She would leave the Waterford. They couldn't possibly be the wrong thing, they were so stunningly expensive.

There was no problem with the cutlery, as they had only the one set, a stainless steel set specially designed to go in the dishwasher they couldn't yet afford. (Janet pretended she didn't want a dishwasher, and really didn't want one either. She wondered how the two attitudes to dishwashers could be combined in one person, sometimes.) But choice arose again when it came to a question of plates. They had two dinner services, the best and the everyday. The everyday was quite attractive and she had always rather liked it (she'd chosen it herself, after all, as her present from Auntie Barbara from Lincoln) until one day she saw a rather similar though not identical set in Woolworth's, and ever after she'd wondered if it hadn't after all looked rather cheap. In fact, she wouldn't even have thought of using it, had it not been for the fact that the best set had two pieces missing. The best set was Royal Worcester, white, with a thin gold band round the edges, but the last time she'd used it, somebody (had it been Jackie Price?) had made a remark about how plates got broken in the happiest of homes, and how she'd thrown one herself at her husband's head only a week before, and Janet had been deeply upset, because she would at that stage simply never have been able to throw a plate at Mark's head, and did not believe that other people did either; she thought that throwing plates was just a convention of marriage, a film convention, a romantic notion, like happy union, or eternal love. She was beginning to wonder about this now—she had doubted her certainties, ever since she had first felt like sticking a knife in her husband—but nevertheless, indeed all the more, she did not want any more jokes about broken plates.

However, her social doubts about the ordinary set were by now so profound that she used the Royal Worcester after all, giving herself the odd side plate, and covering them all with brown napkins. Then she stood back, and surveyed her arrangement. She was pleased with it. If only there weren't any guests involved, she would be quite happy, setting tables.

 

(Her second cousin Frances Wingate had always taken the opposite view. In the old days, when she had given dinner parties, she hadn't minded the guests; it was the bore of feeding them and setting tables for them to which she had objected. She never had anything that went with anything: all her sets were broken, and elderly professors or middle-aged stockbrokers were obliged to eat off children's plates decorated with pictures of Babar, and drink out of glasses from the Green Shield stamp shop. Being however indirectly related to the heritage of Janet Bird née Ollerenshaw, she hadn't felt quite as indifferent to these deficiencies as she might have done, and had always been slightly anxious each time she was forced to survey the confusion of her dining table: but she had usually forgotten her anxiety in what she took to be the brilliance of her own conversation. She had the great advantage of being a confident cook: greedy people usually are.

She consoled herself not only with the wit of her conversation for her deficiencies as a hostess: she also argued with herself that if she
really
cared about appearances, as she seemed to care for a few moments when people came to dinner, then she would go out and buy some new sets of crockery and cutlery—being, unlike Janet Bird, well supplied with money. And as she didn't, then she couldn't care, could she? Such arguments were commonplace in her circle. She would sometimes, even, expound them over the cheese.

The last dinner party that Frances Wingate had given, as a wife and hostess, had been eight years earlier, and at the end of it she had thrown all her coffee cups, one after the other, at her husband's head, and advised him to get out of the house forever. He had done as advised.)

 

The table set, Janet carried the baby off for his bath: she was always slightly nervous about bathing him, he was such a slippery creature, and particularly since she'd read a book about a woman who'd drowned her baby in the bath after having a drink too many. But he seemed quite peaceful tonight: perhaps the new tooth would be through the next day. However could one let oneself get low enough to batter one's baby? She couldn't imagine it. She was glad she couldn't imagine it.

He went to bed like a lamb. He didn't even yell when she put him in his cot, and went off to get changed. She'd already decided to wear her long brown skirt, but wasn't sure what to wear on top: Anthea, of course, always over-dressed, she went in for kaftans and high boots and that kind of thing, so perhaps she'd better wear her low-cut sleeveless top. It looked all right, except for her collar bones, but there was nothing she could do about her collar bones.

(Frances Wingate, pouring herself a glass of gin, was worrying about getting fat. I can't give up both drinking
and
eating, she was saying to herself, and isn't it odd how the one kind of leads to the other?)

Downstairs, Janet fiddled around in the kitchen, and got out some sherry glasses. It was nearly seven, they would arrive soon. She drew the orange curtains, to shut out the night, and poured herself a tiny glass of sherry: she'd read an article about alcoholism amongst housewives only the week before, one had to be careful, she could see how people got that way. She sat down, and started to look through the pages of the magazine that Hugh had been chewing, and thought about evening classes, and the art instructor at Leicester, with his florid beard and messy jersey and dirty nails. He had attacked the very heart of her, out of malice. She wasn't going to expose herself to that kind of thing again. She sipped her sherry. The meal was all right, the soup couldn't go wrong, the chicken at least looked all right, the orange dessert was dull but foolproof, Hugh was asleep. Maybe it would all be all right. She looked at the table, she looked at herself, and she told herself not to worry: and then she heard the car draw up in the road outside, and she felt herself stiffen, and the cat jumped up in fear and off her, and all the certainty drained out of her like water from a cracked cup, and she felt her breath coming faster with agitation, and her heart beating, and she rose to her feet nervously, hearing steps on the path and voices, and all the fine pretence was over, and she was nothing again, anxious, waiting for pain, waiting for things to go wrong, as they surely would, and perfectly on cue, as though attached to her by a living cord, before the door was even opened, the baby began to cry.

So Mark Bird, coming through his own front door into his hall, with its telephone table, book case, linoleum tiles, and vase full of beech leaves, was greeted with the sound of wailing, and found his wife standing in the lounge door, tense, thin, pale and indecisive, smiling hard.

 

(Frances, that evening, at this moment, was chopping up leeks for her children's supper of soup: they eat early in the provinces, and children go to bed late in London. Is one meant to admire the one or the other style? One has to ask oneself, at least. She was already slightly drunk, for her peak drinking time, as has already been witnessed in a hotel room in some deliberately nameless city, was from six until seven: on the other hand, she tended to sober up thereafter, and was sometimes known to work quite late at night. She had long given up worrying about the alcoholism of housewives—or rather, being what she was, she worried about it as fleetingly and ineffectively as she worried about her cutlery.

What she was worrying about was her approaching visit to Adra. Should she have accepted the offer? Why had she accepted the offer? Would she be killed in the aeroplane? Had she prepared her paper well enough? Was she right in thinking that it might lead to some new archaeological venture of possible magnitude? Would she have time to pack properly when she got back from Hugh and Natasha's, where she meant to spend the next weekend? And should she take her black dress, or her brown dress, or both?

While she was thinking these things over, and slicing the concentric rings of strong-smelling leek, with much the same satisfaction as Janet had sliced her mushrooms, two of her children burst in disrupting all thought, and yelled that one had stolen the other's pistol, that the other had pinched the one's pellets, and that Daisy, poor responsible eldest, was weeping over her Physics homework, and would Frances like to sort all these things out? Frances, smiling dreamily, removed from and amused by these transitory and soluble disputes, tipped the sliced leeks into a pan of melting butter, and went off to see what she could do about Daisy, the most serious of these problems, having clipped the two youngest smartly over the ears, and thrown their pistol (or whoever's pistol, she was not sure) into the back garden, through the cat door. A lucky woman, you may say.)

 

Janet's baby wailed on, and Anthea and Cynthia proved full of good advice. Bring him down, said Anthea. Leave him, said Cynthia. Then they turned back to talk to the men. They were both rather talkative women, and had no intention of letting Ted, Bill and Mark discuss the gravel pit unaided.

The subject of the gravel pit did not interest Janet greatly, and she did not really understand why it aroused such strong feeling in the others. She sipped her sherry (her second glass) and listened anxiously to Hugh's muffled cries, and dutifully to animated chat about local politics, and Councillor Biggs-Anderson (a local Tory villain) and the gravel pit, and the principle of the thing, and conservation. She could never quite tell who was on whose side in politics—national politics were bad enough, but Tockley affairs were worse. For instance, she did not quite see why Mark and Ted, who worked at a plastics factory trying to invent new kinds of indestructible matter, should be so interested in conservation, unless perhaps it was for guilt reasons. Maybe it was easier to understand Bill David's attitude—he was a lecturer at the local College of Education, and had a strange habit of getting very worked up about things that had absolutely nothing to do with him at all, as far as Janet could see, like railways, or nuclear power stations, or corruption in local government. He would talk about these things with such passion that Janet always felt he must be meaning to talk about something else really. Again, she couldn't understand why Mark and the Davids and the Streets all voted Labour—she'd nothing against voting Labour, but she'd been brought up to think that nice people voted Conservative, and they were all, at least by her mother's definition, ‘nice'. She couldn't think what they were playing at. They were all ambitious, they all had mortgages, they all complained about income tax, they all made jokes about working-class ignorance, so what were they doing voting Labour? She could have understood it if they really hadn't liked people like Councillor Biggs-Anderson, but the truth was that they were all delighted when the Tory council invited them to functions, and the highlight of Anthea and Bill's life had been when Mrs Reed-Wisbech had asked them to her New Year party.