The Realms of Gold (34 page)

So there one was, alone. Here I am, she said to herself, moving her lips over the words.

Karel had never bored her, not for an instant. She had loved him so much that even when she couldn't understand what he was saying she had been happy to watch him say it. How could he not reply to her postcard? How could she love him so much, and other people not at all? Ah, she had asked this question often, in their happy years. And had always found her own answer. It is because you are so lovely, so amazing, she had cried, each time. For so he was.

The endless sand flowed under them. Work was all that was left, with Karel gone and the children growing. But somehow, when one knew one was good at it, it lost its charm. Why bother? What did it matter, one archaeologist more or less? One Minister more or less?

Though that, of course, wasn't quite true. For Joe Ayida was in a position to influence his country's future.

Still, what was a country? My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Oh God, she did feel low. She knocked back the Campari and rang for another. The Adran girl came back and said they would be landing shortly and was Frances sure she wanted another drink. Yes, quite sure, said Frances, who was not at all sure. The drink never arrived.

But there were plenty of drinks at the hotel. So many, in fact, that Frances began to wonder whether it might not be more dignified to move on to heroin or cocaine and make an end of it.

She was met at the airport by a civil servant. It appeared that various other conference members had been travelling on the same flight: she had suspected that this might be so, and had deliberately avoided the eyes of people who might be trying to look at her. She was used to being looked at, and used to avoidance. They all shook hands politely on the tarmac. Frances began to feel slightly, but very slightly, better, as she stepped into the old routine. All one has to do, she told herself with a part of herself, is to
keep moving, keep talking
, and don't spend too much time alone. And you'll survive. What for? Don't ask, don't be naive. While actually smiling, while actually speaking to a stranger (she said to herself, in the back of a diplomatic car, talking to a Unesco man and a Polish woman engineer at the same time) one cannot possibly feel too terribly miserable.

The hotel was as surprising as its photograph, if not more so. They all exclaimed. The civil servant explained why it was like it was. He assured them it was very comfortable. And so it was. They stepped into a dense jungle of a foyer, beautifully air-conditioned (for it was, even at this time of the year, unpleasantly hot outside), with mosaic paving, rippling fountains, heavenly Musak. The manager met them, smiling happily, but without servility. What an honour, what a pleasure. The President of Zambia had visited him the week before. Before that, the English prince. And now so many distinguished guests. Their baggage would follow from the airport, would they like to see their rooms, would they like drinks in the lounge? Dinner would be served at eight. Tomorrow for work, this evening for society.

Frances liked this kind of thing, and she found herself responding like a Pavlovian dog. Thank Christ, she said to herself, for the large amount of silliness and vanity in one's makeup. Without it, one would indeed drop dead with boredom.

The conference members were eyeing one another uneasily. Should they have a drink, should they see their rooms? Frances said that she would see her room, and others followed suit.

She was, in fact, in an overhanging bit, just as she had predicted. It was clearly thought to be a particularly pleasant room, with views of nothing much in all directions. It was large and comfortable. She wandered round it for a while, opening cupboards, trying taps. They all worked, for which she awarded full marks. Out of the last window she looked through, she saw a large glinting swimming pool, lurid green blue in the evening light. It was enormous, shaped like a kidney, with diving boards and chutes and floodlighting. Her spirits rose. She had brought her bathing suit. An after-dinner swim would be quite reviving.

Then she sat down on the bed, and burst into tears.

After a few minutes, her luggage arrived. It seemed to be an extremely efficient country. The man who brought it up didn't seem to expect a tip, either, for he dumped it and disappeared very abruptly.

She unpacked her clothes, her books, her papers, Karel's teeth. Then she had a bath. While she was in the bath, the phone rang: it was Joe Ayida, asking if she had arrived safely, asking how she felt. I'm fine, she said, what a glorious hotel. Do you think so, he said, ambiguously, and laughed. I'll see you at dinner, he said. Unless you come down first, for a drink.

I'll be down in half an hour, she said. And in half an hour, she went down to the bar, dressed rather smartly in a long black dress. The bar was large and opulent, marble floored, full of plants climbing up pillars and birds in white wire cages. Conference members stood about, drinking, and the television was on. The Prime Minister was speaking, as it seemed at some length. So there was television in Adra. She looked around for Joe, and wondered if the drinks were free, and if she ought to purchase some Adran currency. She spotted him, luckily, before she had to confront the problem. ‘Ah, my dear Frances,' he cried with heart-warming certainty, disengaging himself from an ageing Russian, ‘my dear, here you are. How delightful, how delightful.'

He shook her hand, heartily. In Adra, emancipated women were honorary men, as he had explained to her, and could not be kissed.

‘Joe,' she said, ‘how nice to see you.'

‘How nice of you to come all this way,' he said. And so they went on for some time. He provided her with a large drink, and introduced her to some of her prospective colleagues: she was well aware that she was very far from being the most important person there, and was pleased that he stayed with her. He stayed with her until they went in to dinner, and then abandoned her between a French economist and an Adran engineer. She tried hard with both, ate a vast amount of food, washed it down with as much wine as she could get into her glass, but was nevertheless glad, actually glad, when their chairman rose to his feet and made a welcoming speech. He spoke of the need for international cooperation, and to prove its need, his speech was duly translated into several languages. Luckily it was brief. It was followed by other speeches, also brief, one from a Unesco man, one from Joe Ayida himself, one from some unexplained American. Then the chairman stood up again and announced the schedule, and explained how papers would be distributed and in which languages, and told them that an expedition had been arranged for the following week and he hoped they would all go, and that the rest of the evening was their own.

They drifted away from the table: Frances drifted rather rapidly, making for an Englishwoman who looked like a potential ally. The brief biography they had been given said she was from the Department of the Environment, and so indeed she proved to be. She was quick to tell Frances that she was only there as an observer and wasn't supposed to have any views: however, she clearly had plenty. While she was expounding them, Joe Ayida came up and joined them. Frances asked if everybody had arrived. ‘There seem to be a lot of people,' she said.

‘Everybody is here,' he said, ‘except a Russian who arrives late—she has problems with her visa, I think—and an Englishman, who drives himself.'

‘Wherever is he driving from?'

‘Across the Sahara.'

‘Perhaps he got lost on the way. When was he supposed to get here?'

‘Today, like yourselves. It is much safer on an aeroplane.'

‘What's his name?'

‘His name is Ollerenshaw. A geologist, I believe.'

‘That's funny,' said Frances. ‘My maiden name was Ollerenshaw.'

‘Isn't your father Vice-Chancellor of Wolverton University?' asked the woman from the Department of the Environment, and initiated a long conversation about new British Universities, which excluded Joe Ayida completely and rather rudely. Frances struggled, and then gave in. It was going to be boring, after all.

Three hours later, at midnight, however, things had livened up a little. Some had retired to bed: others were sitting around drinking and playing cards. Frances had managed to bully the Department of the Environment woman (who was extremely pretty for one so neurotic) and one or two other stray possibilities into a game of poker, though they hadn't got much beyond the stage of arguing about the rules they were playing by. Still, it was better than nothing. She was just thinking of proposing that they began playing for real money instead of matchsticks when another member of the party, more daring (or, she suspected, a better and more dissatisfied card player) suggested that they drop the cards for a time and go for a swim. ‘Look,' he said, waving, dramatically, at the kidney-shaped floodlit pool outside, ‘regarde, on ne peut pas résister.'

Frances certainly couldn't resist. She rushed off to the lift for her bathing things at once, persuading the Department woman to join her. Their rooms, they had discovered, were adjacent. The woman complained that she hadn't got her bathing things, Frances offered to lend her a spare set. Frances knew, from endless travel, that there is nothing more useful abroad than a bathing suit or two. Her own were extremely old: the bikini she had bought just after Daisy was born, and the one-piece garment which she offered to Patsy she had had since school. They changed, grabbed a heap of luxurious towels, and ran down to the pool, where a fat geologist and a bald engineer were already splashing and diving. The water was a perfect temperature: warm, soft, quivering blue, very mildly refreshing. She wondered if it was heated: it was probably cold in this part of the world at night, but the whole atmosphere was so artificial that one couldn't possibly tell. She lay on her back, her hair drifting like weed, her ears full of water, gazing upwards at the white monument of the hotel, and the fairylights, orange and white and green, and a new crescent of a new moon, and stars competing ineffectively with the lights, and thought of other bathes in other seas: the children on a beach in the South of France, howling with fear at the sight of the water (it had annoyed Anthony), an obscene swim at Venice on the dull and ugly Lido with a randy Italian, a desperate plunge into a hotel pool after hours of driving in Tunisia. As a child herself, on the vast intimidating sands of East Anglia. A bathe in a river near her brother's cottage, in the icy Windrush, where one swam silently like an otter or a rat between the weedy flowering banks, on a level with secret holes and burrows. With Karel, there had never been much time for swimming. They had never had a holiday together, except that one with the frogs. She thought about the frogs, and smiled to herself as always. If one could smile about the frogs, one must be capable of recovery. She gazed up at the moon and wished on it, like a child, as she always did when the moon was new, and on every first evening star: she wished for Karel to come back to her. Oh God, she said, combining piety and superstition, let him come back, let me be his, let him be mine.

She wondered if Karel would have liked this hotel, this swimming pool. She paddled herself around a little, and watched the fat geologist dive in. She admired men for the way they didn't mind people seeing their bodies. Karel did mind. His body was private and beautiful: he was a modest man. The Department woman was sitting elegantly on a yellow bathmat, talking to an anthropologist. She looked very nice in Frances's maroon school swimsuit: Frances suspected she wouldn't have worn it if she hadn't. What a weird scene. Joe Ayida wouldn't have liked it. Tolerant though he was, Western though he was, he wouldn't have liked it. He had gone home to his mysterious wife. She wouldn't know what kind of house they lived in. One would certainly never be invited to it. She had asked Joe's wife to dinner once, when she had been visiting London, and she had accepted, and turned up, and smiled politely, and eaten everything put in front of her (except the turnips, for which Frances could hardly blame her, for turnips were rather an acquired taste, though at that time one of her own favourite vegetables) and had said not a word. What did she think of London? She had smiled and nodded. What of Paris, what of Milan? She smiled happily. In the end, she said, Very nice. Yet she spoke good English, Joe asserted. Joe sculpted her, large and naked, but in company it was improper for her to speak, and it would certainly have been improper for her to disport herself in this lurid modern swimming pool.

Frances noted rather enviously that the Department woman, who must be considerably younger than herself, hadn't got even a suggestion of fat. When Frances sat in certain positions, she noticed that there was a spare roll round her waist, and even an incipient double chin. On the other hand, she hadn't, she hoped, got the other woman's mad and manic laugh. How was it that one could tell so quickly that another person was slightly off course? The laugh floated over the pool. Frances swam over to the group—the fat geologist had joined them, and so had a nice looking Bulgarian. The anthropologist who was talking to the Department woman (her name, she remembered, was Comford, Patsy Comford) was an Italian, a distinguished man, in his fifties, grey, but hardened and fit, grizzled as though by years of field work. His chest was covered with wiry dark grey hair. His name was Emilio Spirelli, she had read a book of his once about kinship and family structures in nomadic peoples. He was watching her approach through the Technicolor water, though maintaining a conversation at the same time, and when she arrived at the side he leaned over the pool edge, and offered her his arm to pull her up. His arm was amazingly strong, the hand had little hairs like wires all over it, he seemed to pull her out of the water without effort. The casual stylish gesture alarmed her slightly, as did her response to the touch of Spirelli's hand. He was like that, then, was he. She would have to be careful. The fact that she hadn't been touched by so nearly naked a man for a long time, together with Hugh's admonishments about celibacy, swam into her mind simultaneously, fish of the same colour. She shook the water out of her hair and ears, to frighten them away. Oh dear. Dripping, she sat there on the towel, squeezing out her hair.