The Realms of Gold (35 page)

‘Dr Wingate, I think,' he said. She nodded, water falling from the tip of her nose. They all smiled. She remembered now, he was to present a paper on the effects of development on a nomadic tribe in neighbouring Chad, and the projected consequences for a great many of the very few Adrans who wandered around the Northern territories of Adra. It would be interesting; he was a very interesting man. She also remembered that she had liked his book, because it had argued a case for returning to Malinowski's simplistic theories about family ties: he was opposed to the trend for interpreting them in terms of property, arguing that property was an extraordinarily recent development of civilization. He was one of these avant-garde reactionaries that every profession throws up now and then—confusing, acute, unclassifiable.

‘How nice to meet you,' said Frances. ‘I do so look forward to hearing your paper.'

‘And I you,' said Spirelli. His English was not perfect: nevertheless it was very much better than Frances's rather unused Italian, and they managed to have quite an interesting chat about families and kinship, a subject which naturally attracted everyone. The geologist contributed the view that in his experience the small modern family created strain and neurosis and drove people into clinics, and did not Spirelli, as an Italian, agree that large families were much better? Spirelli did not necessarily agree, though he saw the point. He himself, he said, came from a family completely dissipated (by which he meant dispersed, reasonably enough), and that that was why he was so interested in kinship ties. At this irony, he laughed, and asked them if they did not think that it was common for people to choose a profession that provided what they did not get in life? As compensation? Like academics who grow old and grey writing pedantic books about Blake and Lawrence, suggested Miss Cornford. Or quiet novelists who write novels full of blood. That kind of thing, he agreed, though Frances doubted whether he picked up the literary allusions: he picked up the sense, though, quickly enough. She liked him, but wished his name didn't remind her of corsets, because that in turn kept reminding her of how fat she was or might be getting, and how thin Miss Cornford was. They discussed the size of the modern family: Patsy Cornford had one sister, the geologist had one brother, Spirelli claimed two of each, all lost and dissipated, as it appeared, in all senses of the word. When Frances said she had four children, they all made clicking noises just as her mother would have done, which rather annoyed her. Still, she couldn't help feeling she had scored a point. ‘And your husband, what does he say? You leave him with the babies?' asked the geologist.

‘I haven't got a husband,' said Frances, perhaps rashly, then tried to give a brief and forbidding account of her marital status, whereupon Spirelli asked her whether it were true that more and more women in England were bringing up their children alone, and whether or not the trend was pronounced enough to be counted a social phenomenon.

Frances tried to think about this, and said that it was hard to produce statistics. But she and Patsy Cornford between them could produce hardly any examples of first marriages with offspring lasting any length of time. ‘Perhaps getting married again is becoming a trend,' said Frances. ‘Do you think, Patsy?' (First name terms were inevitable: she was in for the woman's entire life story at some point during the conference.) Patsy did think so. But also it was quite common for mothers to bring the children up single-handed. More of the people Frances knew were doing this than weren't. She pondered the fact, it had never struck her so forcibly before. It wasn't that her acquaintance was a very large cross-section, but it was surely representative of something. And if so, of what? She asked Spirelli if it were so in Italy, and as he replied, half in Italian (it was not so, it seemed, but this was for economic reasons, educational reasons), she thought back to an incident the weekend before, which had, as it were, taken her by surprise. She'd been driving the children up to Hugh's and Natasha's, sitting in the kind of daze she always sat in while driving, and had stopped at a crossroads in one of the last villages they passed through: waiting for the lights, she had seen a family on bicycles approach, two small children, and then their father. They were laughing and shouting at one another, she smiled to herself at the sight of them, it always touched her to see passing strangers in momentary glimpses of amity. They weren't a very special family—a little boy in a red woolly hat, a girl in an anorak, the father a small working man in a cap. And then, their mother had followed, and quick as a flash, as she saw the fourth member of the completed family, Frances had felt her smile fade, her approval vanish, her own vicarious pleasure die, the image shattered, the transient harmony destroyed. It had frightened her, the way her spirits dropped so instantly at the sight of the mother, bicycling behind. Why not a mother? Why should she not join in too?

And she had driven on, thoughtfully, pondering this. The truth was, she concluded, that she could no longer admit the concept of a two-parent family. Such symmetry, such ideal union utterly excluded her. She could not even smile at a nuclear family's pleasure as it cycled along a road. She wanted them split, broken, fragmented. She couldn't believe they were really happy as a foursome: one of the parents must be a drag, and if it wasn't the man, then it must be the woman. Any other balance was impossible, unthinkable.

She had just been congratulating herself, as she drove along, on the adaptability, the good nature, the charm of her own children. She had been listening to their chat, idly, answering them from time to time, all the way from Putney. She could manage. She could cope. No need for a man, must have been her underlying thought. Or why be so shocked at her own shock? She despised people who sacrificed themselves for their children and dragged their way through desolate, bitter marriages. Karel and Joy. For the sake of the children. Her own children were fine, they had escaped her fell hand. They were set free.

She could not conceive of family love. She was too selfish, too unco-operative, too fond of her own way. That was it. It was obvious. And she loved a man who was not the father of her children, and he loved his family more than he loved her. Moreover, she could not conceive of any life in which all the things she loved could come together, and therefore did not want to believe that anyone else could have such a perfect life. Ideological sour grapes. They dangled, blue and bitter. It was all bitter, whichever way one looked. However did it get to be like that? When were the anthropologists and sociologists going to explain that? Certainly, she said to herself, if those four people, that perfect family, at the village crossroads, had resembled for an instant a perfect family, they would not be able to keep up the illusion for long. Oh no. They would be quarrelling by the next corner.

She thought of Hugh and Natasha, who had tried so hard. Hugh had tried to drown his nature in floods of alcohol, Natasha slaved till exhaustion to produce the illusion of a home. And now she was attending group therapy sessions. They were the only couple Frances knew who were still married, even. Whatever had gone wrong? She did not often think in these simple terms. She looked down at her wet arm. The veins were prominent now, and knotty. Those on the inside on Karel's arm were huge and delicate, his skin was white and smoother than her own. She was ageing, when she bent her arm there were wrinkles at her elbow. She should have had another baby, years ago, with Karel. Another family.

Spirelli had stopped talking about the education of women in Italy, and started on the difficulties of abortion in Portugal. She asked him about primitive cultures in which it was permitted for women to have children by different men. He described one or two. They didn't sound very nice. The geologist told them that he was too selfish ever to get married, that he liked to do things his own way and was very fussy about what he ate, liked to talk to himself, and was mean about money, too mean to support a wife. He found all this very amusing, and so did they. Then he asked Patsy Cornford if she were thinking of getting married. Frances obscurely feared an outburst at this question, especially as the girl had been rather quiet during the last ten minutes, but the outburst was clearly biding its time, for all that she said was that she was very selfish too and (darkly) it was time that certain people recognized the fact. Spirelli admitted to having had a wife at one point, but said that it hadn't worked out. ‘I have two adult sons,' he said. It seemed they would not speak to him, they took their mother's part. ‘But an anthropologist like myself can have no family life,' he said. The geologist agreed that those who went in for field work and conferences could have not family life. Then they turned on Frances, and asked her how or why she managed it, and she said she didn't know, it must be to prove that it could be done, and that she'd been lucky to have a rich if not a cooperative husband, and she went on to explain that naturally her work had suffered as a result of her family arrangements, how could it not have done? They told her she was making excuses, and the geologist said he must be going to bed, he was just going to plunge in again for a last swim, who would join him? In he went like a porpoise, puffing and blowing and cheerful, in his large flowered trunks. And Patsy Cornford, rather to their surprise, suddenly rose neatly and quietly to her feet, and walked over to the diving board, and dived in, perfectly, professionally, neatly. Spirelli and Frances sat and watched them, silently. It was late, everyone else had gone to bed, though there were still lavish lights glittering all over the ground floor of the hotel, and the upper storeys were lit irregularly with small coloured oblongs of brightness. They sat quietly, and listened to the slapping of the water, the breathing of the swimmers, the hum of the lights, the clattering of insects round the lights. It was a scene from nowhere, a modern Arabian Night.

And suddenly, they heard a noise. In the silence, it sounded important, ominous. It was only the sound of a car engine, as they realized after a while, but they found themselves listening to it with some attention. It seemed to be heading so directly for them, through the empty space. The hotel was built on the outskirts of the small town, near the very small and infrequently used airport. They wondered who could be arriving at this time of night. Frances had a sudden crazy inspiration that it was Karel, come at last to get her, as she had always known he would: how often had she not dreamed of him. stumbling over the hot sand, screeching to a halt outside her own front door, pulling her from her seat in the Institute, arriving (Oh God how she longed for him) at the side of her hospital bed. Oh, the reunions she had arranged in her mind. Why ever should he not, on an impulse, arrive in Adra? She summoned him, she willed him, she conjured him.

The apparition that finally materialized was not Karel, but it was almost as strange. Patsy and the geologist had climbed out of the pool to join their expectation: the car grew closer, grinding up the long drive. And here it was, in sight at last, a new green Peugeot. It pulled up smartly, by the side of the pool, an obvious place to approach for it was brightly lit (the manager had, finally, extinguished the splendid avenue that approached, the splendid fountain-filled forecourt). The four of them sat there, waiting to see who would emerge. And from the car descended a man, an Englishman, a parody of an Englishman. There he stood, bespectacled, bare kneed, desert booted. He shaded his eyes like an explorer as he stared at them, presumably protecting his vision from the vulgar multi-coloured gaiety of the pool. (Closer inspection had revealed that the clusters of floodlights, in Adran colours, green, orange and white, were arranged to throw patterns of hearts and diamonds on the coloured tiles of the surround of the bath. Frances meant to have words with Joe about those.) And then he staggered forward, rather dazed, uncertain, looking not at all well.

Spirelli, man of action, at once leapt to his feet and rushed forward. Frances, stumbling to hers, remembered how pleasantly strong his arm had felt, pulling her from the pool. Spirelli advanced with outstretched hand: the other man shook it hard. They exchanged some words. Frances joined them: ‘Ah,' said Spirelli, ‘Dr Wingate, you are just what is necessary, this is a countryman of yours, Dr David Ollerenshaw, he has had a hard drive.' More hands were shaken. The man looked on the verge of collapse. ‘Come and sit down,' said Frances, helpfully, leading him to the wet bath mat.

They sat down. David Ollerenshaw said that he was perfectly all right, simply tired and hungry.

‘Wherever have you come from?' they asked him.

‘Oh, I drove down,' he said.

‘Wherever
from
?' they cried admiringly, picturing the map, the enormous Sahara, the empty space. ‘Oh, from the north,' he said, revived by their admiration, and proceeded to describe the final stages of his rather tiresome journey. (Spirelli disappeared discreetly, for some food.) It had been fine, but he had run into trouble nearly all the way. Something in the end had gone wrong with the car: he defended the car's honour warmly, insisting that it had been buggered about by children before he had embarked. He'd had to wait to fix that, then he'd decided to take a short cut of a few hundred miles by a route that was marked on the map, or at least on one of his maps, but which, like all such routes, hadn't really existed. Luckily he'd had a compass and was used to that sort of terrain (Frances and the geologist, listening to him, had yearnings of envy, nostalgia and horror mixed), but it had taken him a long time to get out, and he hadn't wanted to be late for the conference which he thought from his watch (which told him the date) was due to begin the next morning, so he'd just driven straight on, once he'd got back on to the right route. Anyway, there hadn't been anywhere to stop.

‘When did you last eat?' said the fat geologist, wide eyed.

‘Yesterday morning,' said David Ollerenshaw.