The Realms of Gold (30 page)

‘He could have left her. For you,' said Hugh firmly. ‘I don't approve of all this messing about.'

‘You mess about yourself,' said Frances, deciding not to cry after all. Crying would mean giving up hope, and she wouldn't, she refused, she couldn't.

‘Oh well, to a certain extent we all do,' said Hugh, complacently. ‘It's our age, after all.'

‘I don't,' said Frances. ‘I haven't slept with anyone for years. Almost literally years. Well for months, anyway.'

‘Good heavens,' said Hugh. ‘How interesting. What does it feel like?'

‘Like a stone in my chest,' she said, and laughed, feeling suddenly better.

‘What a
terrible
thing,' said Hugh, with exaggerated concern. ‘It can't be good for you, you must do something about it. You usen't to be like that, did you? It can't be for want of opportunities, can it?' he said gallantly.

‘Not exactly,' said Frances. ‘Though it's a funny thing, people really don't try very hard when they know they're not going to get anywhere, but how they know it, I don't know, if you know what I mean. The most stupid people are quick, you know. When Anthony left I was overwhelmed with offers. But when Karel left, they just left me alone.' She paused. ‘Of course, it's partly that being with Karel meant that I didn't know anyone else. I was so happy with him.'

‘I never understood why you two split up.'

‘Perhaps I didn't like being happy? It stopped me working, being happy!'

‘What's work?'

‘You're right, what's work. Ambition is just another form of defect.'

‘As Freud doubtless said.'

‘As Freud did in fact say.'

‘Well, I'm sure Freud wouldn't like you to sit around like this. I'm sure he'd recommend you sleep with somebody. You can't sleep with me because I'm your brother, and I believe it's not considered nice, but I could find you some agreeable lovers when you get back from Adra.'

‘Bankers?'

‘What about a nice financial journalist I know?'

‘Why can't I have a banker?'

‘Perhaps you'll find an archaeologist in Adra. Or an oil man. Or what about the Minister of Culture? Isn't he a good friend of yours?'

‘He is, and you mustn't make jokes about him. He's a very exceptional man.'

‘All the better.'

‘He's got a wife already.'

‘So has everybody of your age who's normal.' He tossed a pine cone into the fire. ‘It's time for the second round. In your case, it's more than time.'

‘What about you, then?'

‘Oh, I'm all right. Well, I have been all right. But only, as you know, because there's something wrong with Natasha. But now even Natasha is thinking of moving. She pulled herself together one day and set off to go to a series of group analysis sessions. To see why she put up with me for so long.'

‘You're not serious.'

‘Perfectly serious.'

‘So that's why you're so anti-Freud.'

‘Partly. I mean, fuck it, if she can't work out what's wrong with her herself she doesn't deserve to know, does she? Group analysis. It's just an excuse for a party without drink.'

‘So you think she'll find out?'

‘How the hell can she find out? None of those cunts is going to have the wit to say to her, the reason why you've stayed with your husband, Mrs Ollerenshaw, is because in the total scale of human beings, taking a wide view of the spectrum, and forgetting his little personal failings, taking a wide view, your husband is an exceptionally nice man.'

‘No, they're not. Do you really think you're exceptionally nice, Hugh?'

‘Well, I'm not bad, am I?'

‘
I
like you. But I don't have to live with you.'

‘Eel Cottage. I remember Eel Cottage. We slept in the same bedroom and I used to explain to you the mysteries of sex. Do you think it's had a bad effect on us?'

‘Could have. I remember finding it much more interesting than the mysteries of finance. But it must have been that, that set you in your role of pedagogue.'

‘Did I used to demonstrate? I hope not.'

‘Not much.' She gazed at him. The conversation was drawing them apart through its intimacy, finally, into their separate darknesses. She felt its pull.

‘Perhaps my children are awake up there now, discussing the same subject. Do you think?'

‘Imagine what it's like, when one of yours knows so much about it that you wake up and find yourself a grandfather. Or in your case, a grandmother.'

‘I've surely got a year or two to go.'

‘How old is Daisy? Fourteen? Not long, I'd say.'

Hugh was thinking of Frances's nine-year-old body, its long round lines, its hard and skinny power. She had been tall and blond, long legged, round bottomed, freckled, her skin white. She had been histrionic, an exhibitionist—she would dance naked round the room with a towel round her, she would pose in front of the spotted peeling tilted mirror, making faces at herself, sticking her bum from side to side, stretching her neck, making her eyes roll seductively. Her pubic hair grew blond and early. Hugh's grew black and late. This had interested them both greatly. They had had their estrangements, but on the whole he had looked after her carefully. And now she sat there, hardened, thickened, with a stone in her chest, her skin not white but a curious colonial yellow, her hair thick and straight, lone and untidy, her legs stretched out (still long) with cracked shoes on her narrow feet, her hands dangling limp and even, evenly spaced on the arms of the easy chair, and a large lump of diamond shining from one knuckle. She was off to Africa, to give a paper at a conference. Presumably that was what she wanted to do, or she wouldn't be doing it. Even as a child, she had seemed to have a reserve strength, a strength greater than his own: she had liked solitude, spending hours alone watching bugs and beetles (as their father before them), whereas he had liked solitude only out of defence, because nothing else was offered. Now, he could not spend an hour alone, and had organized his life so that he never was obliged to.

She was a career woman. He had always thought that she put her career first, in selfish ruthlessness, and that for it she had lost Anthony and Karel. But perhaps it wasn't so. She stared into space, with a look like their father's on her face. He did not like it. But he couldn't think of anything to say to her. There was no need for her to be alone, she was a good-looking woman, much sought after. She sat inside a thorny palisade of her own making, cross and contemplative, not a captive but a queen. A queen of a small muddy village.

‘Fran,' he said, ‘do you remember what you've grown up to look like? It's amazing. Do you remember that picture book at the Eel,
Historical Figures through the Ages
? D'you remember the one of Boadicea? She looked
exactly
like you.'

It came back to him so vividly, and he could see that she too remembered—Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, sitting in her hut contemplating the overthrow of the Romans. She was staring into the peat fire, much as Frances was staring now, a goblet of wine at her elbow, a skin map spread on the floor at her feet. She was unhistorically clad in long flowing pre-Raphaelite robes of purple and red, with a low belt with studs round her hips, and her hair hung loose and matted round her hawk-like features. On the next page, one saw her in action in her chariot, wheels flashing, knives flashing, hair flying, a spear in her hand.

Frances smiled. ‘Thank you,' she said. ‘I always liked that picture. I've been modelling myself on Boadicea for years. Victorious in defeat. Wasn't that the caption?'

‘Something like that.' He stood up, stretched. ‘I must go to bed. It's late. I'll just go and see to the Aga.'

She gathered up the coffee things, and followed him into the kitchen with them. He was riddling the ash from the bottom of the stove. She stacked the cups in the sink.

‘If you open the back door,' he said, ‘you might see the hedgehog. He comes at this time, sometimes, for his milk.'

‘Isn't he hibernating?' she said, but she opened the door and smelt the amazing damp sweetness of the English air, heavy with the smell of leaves and moss and graveyard. An owl hooted. The hedgehog's saucer stood empty, but as she picked it up she saw him approach, bundling blindly across the yard towards the light of the open door. He scuttled and bundled on small feet, hesitating when he found the saucer had gone. She filled it quickly, and put it down for him, and he approached again and drank. She and Hugh stood and watched him.

‘He's nice, isn't he?' said Hugh. ‘But terribly stupid. I was trying to get the car in once, and he was there waiting. But he wouldn't get out of the way, he just rolled up into a ball and lay there. Natasha had to get out and pick him up to move him. She wrapped him in her headscarf, she didn't like to touch him. Then she had to burn the headscarf because of the fleas.'

‘What does he do when you're not here?'

‘He must go somewhere else, I suppose, or drink something else. I can't think why they like milk anyway, can you?'

They shut the door on him.

‘You go up first,' said Hugh, ‘and have your turn in the bathroom. I'll just finish tidying up down here.'

She wasn't halfway up the stairs before he had poured himself a large, final, oblivion-inducing drink: looking back (the stairs led straight from the room) she saw him holding it. He raised his glass to her, she sighed and mounted the stairs.

Before she got to bed, she had to go through the room with the children. There they all were, lying tossed and dishevelled in their green and blue sleeping bags. Daisy, Joshua, Spike and Pru. The glow of extreme health burned in their cheeks, their tousled hair glowed on the pillows, their lips were parted, and they heaved and sighed slightly, with respectful vibration, as she watched them. They smelt lovely, of hair and skin. They slept well, they were good children, they had worn themselves out. But Hugh was right, they were growing up. Even the baby was eight now. They had kept her so busy, worrying about them even when she wasn't with them had kept her so busy, guilt about them (not very profound, she had to admit) had occupied the surface reaches of her being with its endless little squalls and tempests, so that she had hardly had time to worry about herself. She had reeled from job to job, from country to country, from Karel to children, organizing meals and washing machines and schools and laundries, buying socks for Spike in Alexandria, rushing home from Glasgow to take Josh to the doctor about his balls, writing shopping lists even in the middle of lectures and seminars, consulting time tables, ringing stations, arranging fantastically elaborate schedules, shouting at domestic agencies, swearing at gasmen, bursting into tears one shaming day in front of her accountant because she'd left her bank statements in her lecture folder, never going to a hairdresser, wearing the same clothes till they fell to pieces, and listening to other people telling her how busy she must be till she believed it herself. And now it all seemed to be slowing down. They no longer needed her very much, the children. When she was at home, they would go off for hours on end, for whole days, swimming, fishing, to the cinema, playing football. They went on trains to visit friends in other parts of London, in other parts of the country. They were independent, they had learned independence early, the time would come when they would not need her at all. And what would she do then? Who would then be hers?

Stephen Ollerenshaw lay on his bed in his weird fake-raftered attic comer, and listened to the breathing of his daughter. Every sigh, every rustle went through him. He hadn't slept properly since she was born. It didn't seem right, to spend so much effort, simply to stay alive, to fear death so much, not only for oneself, but for others. Why weren't the human race like rabbits or sheep? Why were they so hard to rear, yet so insistent on survival?

He thought of Frances, and his father Hugh. Hugh drank, and Frances travelled. He hadn't yet worked out what he would choose to do with his adult life. Their responses seemed to him to be luxuries, expensive evasions. (He didn't know much about other people: he would have been surprised to hear that alcoholism, like schizophrenia, flourished amongst the working classes. He thought that it was a City disease.) He was right, of course, about travel. Frances had struck lucky, in that her cure and her evasion were of a singular purity, they had a fine creative therapeutic halo. But a halo for the rich and the clever and the lucky. He himself was neither lucky nor clever, though he supposed that by most standards he was rich.

He didn't resent the good luck of Frances. He wished her well. She had a splendid carelessness, he wished he could catch it. Her children didn't keep her awake at nights; they slept well, heavily, healthily. But she was no use as a model, she was a freak. Her talents were freakish, her perceptions were freakish. He had hoped, at one point, that by staying close to her (in her kitchen, in her Putney garden, by visiting her in hospital) he could catch her disease of survival, her mad tricks of recuperation. But now, it wasn't so. He was too normal, too dull. He hadn't got the stamina for living like that, at that pace, with that kind of energy. He saw himself as an ordinary person, as a member of the cooling human race. There seemed to him to be something nineteenth century about Frances's explorations and affairs, about Hugh's drinking. Grand, it was, but out of date and futile. There was even something sordid about so much will to live. He found himself speculating more and more about dead Alice. But nobody would tell him about Alice. It was as though she had passed out of life and out of memory. He rather suspected that Alice had not done it properly. By that, he meant that she had wished to be loved, had wished to be recovered, had wished for attention, as she knelt down by her unlit gas fire with her head in a towel. That, too, was sordid.