The Realms of Gold (32 page)

Such observations about human behaviour had, naturally, crossed his mind often before, but he had never before taken them so seriously. He had always believed that people could not help what they were like, and that any misery, however apparently selfimposed, deserves attention. This, in a sense, had been the basis of his being. And now he found himself changing into something quite different, he found himself blaming people, criticizing them, noticing their least attractive features instead of their redeeming ones. When people were unhappy, he found himself thinking, it was invariably their own selfish fault. They got what they deserved.

This was a revolution for him. He did not feel any the better for the fact that he realized he had been driven into his new position by his own folly—if he'd had any common sense, he would have restricted his attention to a chosen few, and then would have been able to go on thinking them badly-done-by, abused, tragic, deserving of compassion. The fact that he now saw them as coldly calculating selfish manipulators, actually capable of taking pleasure in tormenting him, hungry for his blood rather than his tears, was a result of his own policy. He should have been more sensible, have turned more away hungry from the door.

But what had goodness to do with common sense? He had tried to do the right thing by people, he had responded to their claims. That was all. He had played at being God, which of course he wasn't. It was an unpleasant awakening. He looked back on his own stupidity with alarm. Doctors know they cannot help all patients, psychiatrists discriminate amongst their cases, knowing some beyond cure. Why couldn't he have done the same? And why ever had he imagined that he was indispensable?

His nastiest shock had come a few weeks ago, when he had actually lost his temper with one of them. Usually, he only lost his temper with people who could take it, like Joy, and one or two of his colleagues. But on this occasion he had lost it with an exstudent of his, who had called round while Karel was trying to write a lecture about agriculture and child labour in the late 1800s. He had called round to borrow a fiver, to complain about the way he was being treated at work, and to complain about his girlfriend. He was one of those self-denigrating men who think they are forever underappreciated by the rest of the world, and he would take his revenge by the most subtle and complicated form of bitching and malice. He had done this in class: though in fact reasonably competent, he had always taken the line that he was terribly stupid, a position from which he could safely sneer at the mistakes of those of his own level. Now almost thirty, he still continued in the same vein, and told Karel some lengthy story about his girlfriend's behaviour, full of overt praise and covert hatred. The poor girl was clearly deep in, too far committed and cleverly manipulated to escape: the behaviour which Slater described was quite clearly simply her desperate thrashing to be free. She, like Karel, had been too kind to tell Slater to bugger off, as she should have done years earlier, and all the thanks she got was this endless devious abuse. No wonder the poor girl was late for appointments, tried to go out with others occasionally, talked to other men at parties. ‘Of course I don't blame her,' said Slater, every now and then, drinking Karel's gin, ‘I don't
blame
her falling asleep over dinner, I mean she does get terribly tired at the hospital' (she was a nurse), ‘but you would think she'd have made a
bit
of an effort, wouldn't you? Of course, I don't
blame
her.'

Slater was an extremely unattractive and dreadful man. Karel had once been so worried by this that he had tried to see his good points, and had found some. Now he found himself wishing that his girlfriend would escape. Let her get away, while there was still time. For Slater was, simply, a dreadful man.

Having finished with his girl, Slater started on Karel himself. His approach with Karel was a mixture of flattery and malice, as doubtless it was with the girl. How was Karel? How was Joy? Joy was out at the moment, he saw. How was life at the Poly? Here followed some abuse of lecturers quite unknown to Slater. A man like you, with your intelligence, said Slater, you should have done better things. You can't want to waste your life at that place, can you? And more, much more, of the same. Karel, gazing miserably at his lecture notes (he had to deliver the lecture the next day, and the subject was one of his favourites, he had been hoping to produce something a little better than usual) listened for some time. He listened without patience. He was not at all interested in what Slater thought of his abilities, his own assessment of himself was grandiose beyond Slater's wildest dreams, though not perhaps in the terms Slater described. You ought to write a book, pursued Slater relentlessly. I don't
want
to write a book, said Karel, as pleasantly as possible. You're wasting yourself, all your students thought so, we all thought so much of you, said Slater.

And that was the point at which Karel lost his temper. There was no satisfaction in it, it was so long overdue. He told Slater that he might well have been able to do better for himself if he hadn't wasted so much time on people like Slater, who were so insensitive to other people's problems that they would call in without warning and stay for hours when their host was clearly trying to snatch an odd couple of hours to work. ‘I don't know about writing a book,' he yelled, standing up and tugging at his hair rather desperately, ‘I can't even write a
lecture
because of bloody bores like you dropping in and drinking my drink and borrowing my money and boring my
mind
out.'

All right, all right, Slater said, rising to his feet, looking secretly satisfied by this response from his hero. It was that look of secret delight that finished Karel. Though he felt guilty enough—after all, how can one call a bore a bore and not feel guilty?—to respond when, two days later Slater rang up, full of apologies, so sorry he had intruded, he hadn't realized Karel was so tired, he must have been overworking, and hadn't he been having personal troubles too? (How gossip about himself and Frances had reached the dingy mad suburbs of Slater's mind, Karel never knew—he had always assumed that she had inhabited a world where people didn't gossip, that she was somehow of another order, exempt.) Why don't you come and have a drink with me, and let me give you back the fiver, said Slater.

Reluctantly, Karel agreed. He went to the agreed place at the agreed time, and Slater was not there. Karel waited a quarter of an hour, then left.

Slater rang again, the next day. So sorry he hadn't got there on time, he must have arrived just after Karel left. What about a meal? The nurse, who had always wanted to meet Karel, would cook it.

Groaning inwardly at the prospect, knowing he was being manoeuvred into a position of extreme disadvantage, Karel accepted. And the night before Slater rang to say awfully sorry, he had flu, they'd have to put it off.

That was the end of Slater. He had had his revenge. Karel never heard another word from him, though he heard indirectly that he always spoke of him, when he spoke, with extreme venom. He transferred his allegiance to another ex-teacher, who was not very patient with him.

Karel had often wondered whether Slater had thought that Karel would actually be disappointed not to have dinner with him on that last occasion, or whether he had finely calculated the degree of relief, fury, and disgust that Karel had, at that moment of refusal, actually felt. Impossible to know what mad people think, how aware or unaware they are of their own devious games.

Karel was so relieved to have got rid of Slater that sometimes he toyed with the idea of getting rid of everybody, in one fell swoop, in one drastic reorganization. He would become a complete recluse. But this, of course was impracticable. However would one find the nervous energy to annoy everybody, as he had managed to annoy Slater? The strain would kill him.

Another irony of the situation was that Joy, nowadays, seemed to be resolved on a course of getting rid of him. Why she couldn't have done this some time ago, when Frances was still available, he could all too well imagine. How extremely unpleasant people are, he reflected, and wrote out another cheque.

Joy had recently decided to become a Lesbian. In her new view, she had always been one, but Karel couldn't really go along with that. It's true she'd never been very enthusiastic about sex with him, but that was for other reasons, surely. Anyway, it was now quite the fashion to be Lesbian, and Joy was carrying on with the girl from the tobacconist's down the road. She claimed to have been carrying on for years, but this Karel doubted. Anyway, whatever the length of the affair, she had now brought it out into the open, and whenever anything at home annoyed her (which was often) she would flounce off to the tobacconist. She used Vera (this was the other woman's name) as a counter in the complex game of bargaining that makes up any less than totally happy marriage. Sometimes she said she was going to move out completely, abandoning the children, who in her view were now old enough to look after themselves. Sometimes she said she would take the children with her and set up house somewhere else, in the country preferably. But she in fact did neither, preferring to move up and down the road at her own convenience, or rather at Karel's inconvenience. The whole affair was like some grotesque parody of his own affair with Frances, inflicted, he could not help thinking, as a conscious revenge. She was down the road now, while he wrote out cheques, and the children were all out with friends.

He couldn't really blame her. He tried hard not to blame her. On the other hand, as ever, she wished to be blamed, and would taunt him so much that in the end, when her mockery went beyond the bounds of the tolerable, he would beat her up. With blackened eyes, a bleeding nose, bruises on face and arms, she would stagger off triumphantly to the tobacconist's, to bewail the violence of men. Then she would come back and begin again. He sometimes thought he would have minded less if her methods had been more sophisticated: she had in the old days had a fine style of invective, which he had found perversely attractive (indeed, he could still remember a time when the savagery of her attack on life had impressed him, through its complete abandon, through its lack of the devious subterfuges of such as Mrs Mayfield, Slater and Stuart), but of late she had become less inventive, more crude. On the last occasion when he had attacked her, she had been sitting in the armchair late at night while he was marking some papers. After a while, bored, simply bored, she had started to pick a quarrel, about how he shouldn't have criticized one of the children for not finishing his supper. Karel, not caring much one way or the other, replied and went on with his work. She continued with the theme until he began to shout back, but he had just enough self-control left to confine himself to a little brief abuse. Then he went back to marking his papers. Joy, however, was not satisfied. She had started to throw things at him. Anything at hand—fag ends, paper clips, pencils. He wondered, not for the first time, whether she had gone mad. What should one do, with a mad woman? He remained indecisive while she finished off all the small objects in reach, and then picked up her coffee mug, a flowered pottery mug. She threw that at him, and missed, and began to look around for something else. It flashed across his mind, as he felt himself lose his temper, as he felt that dangerous spring unlock, that she was like a caged animal in a zoo, throwing bits of its dinner at its mate, and the comparison horrified him: it horrified him even while he took her by the hair and shook her up and down and banged her head on the floor.

As usual, when he had finished, she lay there with an air of smug triumph, then got up and went off to tell Vera.

Karel wondered how much more of it he would take, and how, if ever, the end would come. Perhaps he would murder her with the bread knife. Maybe that was what she was waiting for.

He hadn't felt murderous with Frances. He hadn't wanted to kill her, he had wanted to make love to her. Making love to her would have kept him happy for ever, but she must have had more complicated views of life, or she wouldn't have left him. He had always hoped she would come back, but was now beginning to doubt it. He couldn't contemplate a replacement. She, for no good reason, had been exactly what he desired. He could never hope to find such a woman again, for he did not know what it was in her that he so desired. It was the whole thing, her whole self, the way she was. And it wasn't only loving her that was so satisfactory, it was as though loving her made everything else much better. He found it easier to be pleasant to Mrs Mayfield when Frances was being pleasant to him. Maybe he shouldn't have found this surprising, but he did. And now that she was gone, he was becoming impatient with everybody, even with Mrs Mayfield. He simply couldn't keep up with the whole thing any more. He had failed. He had failed to be an egalitarian of love, so he would become an egalitarian of hate, and hate the lot of them. Why draw distinctions?

Karel hated distinctions. There was no justice in life, why seek for it or try to create it? What justice could ever have given to him and Frances such years of loving, and to others, no loving at all?

Karel's parents and brothers and sister had perished in the gas chambers. His mother had made distinctions: she had chosen Karel for salvation. Her favourite son, her baby. As the darkness closed in on them (they had been living in Cracow, his father a doctor, his mother a journalist), she had chosen Karel, aged three, and sent him off to England with her sister and her sister's husband. She had always meant to follow, but like so many, she left it too late. What consolation had it been, at the point of death, to know her baby was alive in Palmers Green? Karel could not bear to think of these matters. How could he not have felt himself rejected, denied the honour and the intimacy of death? The chosen, the elect, the rejected. His brothers and sister, dead. He thought at times he could remember them, but perhaps it was his aunt's memories he remembered—his aunt, weeping night after night by the hearth, her apron thrown over her head like a peasant, rockin herself backwards and forwards like a peasant, though she was a graduate from the University of Prague, while Karel, the favourite, cried for his cruel mother who had forgotten him and sent him to live in a dark single room.