The Realms of Gold (3 page)

She read a few pages of
The Years
, but she couldn't concentrate for long. Such gallant old people lived in those pages, but the writer died young by her own hand. Shall I become a lonely gallant old lady, thought Frances Wingate? All in all, it seemed quite likely. She did seem to have amazing powers of survival and adaptation. And it wasn't surprising, at all, that she had felt bad, here in this city. It had been quite a significant place, in her life. A strange place, with its bleached salty buildings, its fortifications, its serious naval power, its fish bones and conferences, and a few luxury yachts moored amongst the fishing boats, well away from the tankers and the destroyers. She had been here quite often. The first time, many years ago, she had been eighteen years old, and she had sat on that bench on the sea front, and cried and cried—the disaster had been so petty that she had often laughed about it, when recalling or recounting it, but it had seemed the end of the world at the time. She'd been on her way home from a fortnight's hitch-hiking in Calabria, and here, in this city, where she and her friend were to part, and her friend to catch her train home, she found that she had lost her passport. It must have been stolen from her bag, on their last lift, for nothing else was gone. Bravely she had waved her friend goodbye (she was off back to England, the lucky girl; Frances still had a week more abroad to endure), and then she had wandered down from the station, back down the long steps from the height of the town to its depth, down to the sea front, and there she had sat on the bench, and watched the oily sea. Hopeless, she felt, hopeless and stateless. She hadn't even got anywhere to spend the night, and two days to wait before her next companion reached her. She wept, tired and dirty. In the end, she pulled herself together and found herself a bed in a convent: it had been a frightening place, with rows of girls sleeping in uncurtained beds, and a curtained nun shuffling behind a screen in a corner, where a candle burned, as though it were a hospital, not a youth centre.

The candle had upset her. Was it for religion, or for surveillance, she had wondered then, and wondered now? She had had a bad night. But in the morning, she had got up and gone off to the Consulate and bought herself a new passport, it had been as simple as that, as easy as that to reinstate oneself, in those days. And now she did not sleep with rows of girls and a nun, but in the best room in the best hotel. Alone.

Her second visit had been three years later, with the man she was just about to marry. She had known at the time that it was a mistake to marry him, that on no account ought she to marry him, that she would be no use to him nor he to her. She also knew it was inevitable that the mistake would be made. It was partly that he was so insistent. He thought he loved her; he could not be dissuaded from this fixed and neurotic idea, and in the end she had decided that he could find out for himself that he didn't. But oh, how long and horrible the process of discovery had been. He hadn't been a man to give in easily. Anthony Wingate. She rarely thought of him now, though she bore his name. On that evening, when she was twenty-one, she had escaped from him for half an hour, and had sat watching the sea and thinking of what it would be like, married to Anthony.

Her third visit had been with Anthony and some of their children, on their way south, on holiday. (How many children? She could hardly remember. Two? Three? Or maybe even four??) How odd these family holidays had been, how painful, and yet at times how poignant, how lovely the moments salvaged. They had been bitter with one another most of the time, she and her husband: he was a cold man with a violent temper, and she was frightened of him, but she was not easily intimidated, she refused to submit. Obstinate to the last degree, she had pursued her career, her interests, her own self, in his despite. She had hardened herself on him. On holidays, she had tried to soften, for the children's sake, but it was impossible—they would quarrel in the car, fight bitter disputes over meal times, shout and throw things at one another at night, quarrel over trivia—where to stop, where to stay, what to eat, what to buy, how to treat the children. (The children, tough, resilient, good-natured, ignored their parents' folly, and amused themselves.) Holidays, from the adult point of view, had been largely an occasion for intensive, undistracted warfare. But even then, there had been strange lakes of time when a view of a mountain, a tree in flower, a courtyard, had seemed to retain its own self despite their destructive passions, when, they would have, the two of them, even a moment of peace in the face of some more powerful natural phenomenon. They had been overcome, from time to time, in their littleness. It had not happened here: it was one of the most famous views in the world, but it had not done its famous trick, for they had spent their two hours here (they were passing through, they had stopped for lunch) arguing about where to have lunch. Anthony had wanted an expensive meal, she could tell, but hadn't been able to stand the thought of the children larking around in a good restaurant. Frances didn't give a damn what the children did, they never embarrassed her. They had compromised, and both had sulked, looking over the famous bay. But later that day, a little further south, they had had a moment of remission: they had driven through a small forest, high over the sea, and the roots of the trees had been crazily exposed and twisted, and strange undergrowth flourished, and they had stopped the car, and looked at the improbable vegetation in some awe. Fungi, odd fleshy plants, brown leaves, spotted leaves, thin needle leaves, mould and heaped curving interweaving branches, like nothing in nature, showing what?—that there was hope, that there were more manifestations than man's miserable limited mind could dream of, that not even she, all-thoughtful, never-resting, never-rested, could either create or destroy by her own misery the variety of the earth's creation, for such a sight she had never dreamed of.

She thought of the octopus again and smiled. Why did she love it so? She had loved its grey fleshy body, its lovely tinted iridescent grey muscles, its faint blushes and changes, its round suckers, its responsiveness, its sensibility, its grace. And, smiling, she thought of that last, that most significant visit to this city. She had been here with Karel. They had had two days here together, a lifetime. On one of the days they had gone out for a walk, and with their usual lack of success they had found the most terrible place in the world for walking—Karel, a city man, had no sense of maps or countryside, and would always deliver them, thus, in some impossible place. This time he had looked at the map, at the empty spaces on either side of the port—it must be good there, he said, pointing at a large flat patch without towns or villages, and they had set off, along the coast road, hoping for seclusion, and indeed seclusion they had found, for they ended up in a fiat yellow swamp, crossed by long straight muddy tracks. They left the road and turned down a track through what seemed to be fields, though what they were growing who could have said, for the soil was both yellow and salty, an unpromising combination. There were ditches by either side of the track: the tracks intersected, regularly, at right angles. They aimed for the sea, but the terrain grew more and more difficult, the mud clinging to the tyres of Karel's car, and the ditches turning in a sinister fashion into banks, until finally they were driving along a kind of yellow muddy tunnel, and then the car went into a deep rut, and stopped. They hadn't much cared: they had sat and kissed and talked for a while of other matters, and then they'd got out to investigate. The car was deeply embedded: they would clearly have to push it out and reverse back the way they had come. They stood there in the mud, holding hands, his shoes sinking, her sandals full of wet clay. It was one of the most unattractive spots one could have imagined. Frances, being a practical woman and used to excavations, hadn't worried much: she was more worried about losing Karel the next day than about standing there forever in a muddy estuary. She said this to him. I'll never leave you, he said, with his usual air of slight panic. You're leaving me tomorrow, she said, unable to keep a plaintive tremor from her voice. I'll see you next week, he said. And they stood there, in the immense wet flat silence, where nothing grew.

Only it wasn't silence. As they stood and listened, they became aware of a most peculiar noise—a kind of honking and squawking and bubbling, a comic and sinister sound.

‘What on earth is that?' said Karel.

‘I've no idea,' she said.

It continued, rhythmically: it came from the end of the canal they were stuck in. They went to see what it was, curious, like children, and located its source: it was coming from a round erect drainage pipe, about four feet across, standing at an arbitrary cross roads. Shall we look down? said Frances, standing at a safe distance, her feet squelching. I think we must, said Karel.

So they went up to the yellow pot pipe, and stared down it. And there they saw a most amazing sight. Hundreds and hundreds of frogs were sitting down that pipe, and they were all honking, all of them, not in unison but constantly, their little throats going, their mouths open, their eyes staring up with curiosity at Karel and Frances and their large human shadows. Honk, honk, koax, koax, they cried. They were all different shapes and sizes—the same species, probably, all a yellowy grey in colour, but madly, but crazily varied in size, as though some law of nature had gone wrong. Huge big ones, tiny little ones, fat ones, skinny ones, they all sat and honked. Down the pipe they sat, as happy as can be, croaking for joy. Karel and Frances stared, awestruck, amused: the sight was repulsive and at the same time profoundly comic, they loved the little frogs and the big ones. Oh, I love them, said Frances. They looked as though they had been bred from the clay, as in some medieval natural history. A natural product of the landscape, they were. And every time she thought of them, in later years, she felt such pleasure and amusement deep within her, a deep source of it, much deeper than that pipe.

It had taken them some time to get the car out, she remembered, as she finished up her omelette and chewed a lettuce leaf. In fact, they had given up the attempt for a while, and had made their way finally down to the sea—a strange sea, derelict and morbid, not at all the same sea that filled the bay a few miles down the coast. There had been no beach to speak of, but a clay shore where the tideless Mediterranean dully curved its idle dirty little waves. Long reeds and rushes grew. But it had at least been secluded, so they lay down on the mud and made love, which was, after all, the purpose of their expedition. Frances kept her filthy sandals on, because she knew that although they felt quite nice, almost part of her foot at that moment, she would never be able to face putting them back on again once they had caked and dried. She could remember the sight of that dirty sandal, somewhere up behind Karel's shoulder. She thought of Karel's shoulder, forever lost, renounced forever.

Then they had gone back to the car, and pulled it out. She, expert in dislodging jeeps and landrovers, had finally taken off her dress, and used it to give the wheels some grip: she'd arrived back at the hotel in a quite amazing condition.

The next day, when Karel drove back to his wife, it crossed her mind that she would leave him. She was tired of being treated so badly—abandoned in inconvenient places, pushed into muddy ditches. She had had enough of it. Something in her finally rebelled—pride, conscience, something like that—and when she got back to England she found herself behaving, somewhat to her own surprise, quite oddly. She told Karel that they should part, and stuck to it. He didn't believe her at first: he refused to let her go, suggesting ludicrous compromises (but not, she noted, marriage). She became equally persistent. They were ruining one another's lives, she said, and off she went, firmly, after a fortnight of recrimination, to North Africa, on a perfectly legitimate piece of work. He could not pursue her there: she had always had the upper hand, as far as mobility went. She stayed there for a month, half-expecting each day to see him appear on a camel, sun struck, across the sands to rescue her, as he had threatened to do: but he didn't. And when she got back to England, she didn't see him, didn't hear from him. She was rather surprised. They had left it that if she ever changed her mind, she had only to let him know, but she hadn't exactly changed her mind. It was as though he had ceased to exist. She was not likely to come across him by accident. They did not move in the same circles. And now she had not seen him or heard of him for months.

Going over this old ground, she poked through the pile of papers she had brought with her to chaperone her during her dinner. There was the card for the children, there were the lecture notes, there was the note she had written to Karel. She tore it up, and pushed the pieces into the folder. The folder was full of such scraps. Then, wavering, she lit upon another new postcard—well, it wasn't exactly new, she'd picked it up a year or two ago on another lecture tour in Florence, round the Uffizi she'd been, and there she must have bought this rather attractive card. (Her folder was full of such things also—a sediment of past journeys, tickets, old cards, street plans, hotel bills, letters, addresses.) The card was a detail from a painting by Hugo van der Goes, of the adoration of the shepherds: it showed a bunch of straw, a glass with some canterbury bells, a painted pot with two red lilies, two white irises, and one blue iris. It was extraordinarily beautiful. She looked at it and her eyes filled with easy tears. Beautiful, beautiful. She turned it over, and she wrote

 

Karel Schmidt Esq.

    11 Huntingdon Rd,

        London SW6

 

She stared at that for some time, and then she filled in the message space. First of all she put the date. Carefully then she wrote:
I miss you
. Then, underneath that, she wrote,
I love you
.