The Realms of Gold (38 page)

Spirelli seemed to appreciate her efforts: she had known he would, or she wouldn't have made them. He in turn told his own traveller's tales, tales as strange as those of Othello, of tribes whose heads grew beneath their shoulders, and Frances and Patsy listened, like two docile Desdemonas. Frances could see that Patsy was annoyed by her own arrival on the scene: she had been getting on well with Spirelli. The sight of her annoyance encouraged Frances to greater efforts of courtesy. She couldn't help it. Half-amused, half-horror-struck, she watched herself perform, and watched Patsy begin to sulk. Though if it were to come to it, she would have put the odds on Patsy. After all, she was younger, and better looking. Perhaps she should form
an
alliance with her, not set up competition. It wasn't as though she wanted Spirelli, after all.

Virtuously, she returned her attention to David: they discussed the distribution of swimming pools amongst the undeveloped nations of the world. There were whole continents that Frances had never visited: she was beginning to feel ignorant. It was a good thing, to attend a conference every now and then, in order to be made to feel ignorant. Otherwise, as David agreed, one saw only one's own job. For months on end, said David, I hardly speak to anyone at all. That's why
I
like conferences, he said, pouring himself a large final drink. Suddenly, all this good company.

You adjust very well from one to the other, said Patsy.

Oh, I like extremes, said David. A lot of people or none at all.

 

In bed that night, staring through a dark window at a very large African moon, David wondered about these things. He was drunk, and as usual when drunk, had a conviction that with a little introspection, all things would be made plain. If he thought about it enough, he would know why he continued, at his age, to plod off into deserts and suffer in strange places. He had to admit that there was a very high degree of straight masochism in his choices. He liked to suffer, and he liked to overcome suffering. He positively enjoyed it when things went wrong, when lorries dropped to pieces, and wells ran dry, and provisions got lost. Too easy a ride bored him. The easy explanation, that he was constantly trying to prove himself, seemed a likely one, and he thought there was something in it. It had been the explanation offered by a psychiatrist when David, at University, had had what he refused to refer to as a nervous breakdown. Closely questioned, he had admitted that yes, his father had always made him work very hard, yes, his father had wanted him to study physics not geology, yes, he had always felt guilty and unhappy and inadequate as a child, yes, he had suffered terrible torments about masturbation and examinations and the guilt and sense of failure connected with both.

So, said the psychiatrist, you want to prove yourself a better man than your father, and you want to escape from him. What better way than by testing yourself in this way? (Two months excessively solitary field work, as a post-graduate, had precipitated David's illness, and the doctor had packed him off to bed for a month in a hospital.) David had agreed, and after a month had climbed out of bed, and had pursued his career as a geologist, continuing to test himself in extreme situations, although his father was now a feeble old shadow, a retired depressed teacher of General Science in a Manchester Comprehensive, and not worth proving anything to at all.

He thought of that first night in the Middle East, his first experience of extreme heat. Unbelievable, it had been. With his usual independence and faith in his own powers of endurance, he had refused to listen to advice about air conditioning, and had booked himself into a cheap small hotel. Why pay more? He could cope with bugs, he had no need for modern plumbing. But he had reckoned without the heat. He was in a daze from the moment when he stepped out of the aeroplane into the blinding light. He could hardly cross the tarmac to find a taxi. People talked at him and reeled away from him in a confused and meaningless way, dressed oddly, speaking odd languages, all inexplicably surviving and thriving in an atmosphere that ought not to have been able to support life, except possibly the life of large dry insects. He had somehow managed to get to his hotel, sign a register, allow himself to be pushed into a lift and out of it, and had finally achieved his only aim, of falling upon the bed. And all night he lay there, sleepless, feeling the sweat pour from his body, feeling his joints melt and rot, mouth open, eyes open, limp, lifeless, aching, immovable. Sweat welled up in the sockets of his eyes and dripped over like great tears down his cheeks until he felt that he would have wept, could he have found the fluid or the strength. He would have tried to read, to while away the long night, but he had not the strength to reach for his book. He would have rung the company, but there was of course no phone in the room. He saw himself condemned to an eternal hell of debilitation, immobile, lacking the energy even to cry for help, as in one of those nightmares where the sleeper struggles in vain to let out the faintest of shrieks, or to move by half an inch an arm or leg. He was trapped, like a fly in amber, in a new element, and the element, solid like water, more solid than water, was heat. Towards dawn, it had grown slightly cooler, and he had managed to look at his watch, take a drink of water, and doze off for an hour. But at sunrise the whole process began again, with renewed intensity. He lay on the bed, and wept tears, wasting precious liquor, not knowing how he would ever feel well enough to let anyone know how ill he felt, fearing he would lie there and die there and very quickly deliquesce there.

In the morning, of course, a man from the company rang, and then came round to collect him: with a superhuman effort David pulled himself to his feet, put on some clothes (he had lain there all night naked like a corpse, covered with a wet towel) and managed to stagger across the exposed glare of the pavement to a waiting car, from which he was delivered into the unimaginable relief of a cold air-conditioned building. It had been quite an experience, and Frances was right: it was the psychological shock that destroyed one so completely. He had been through, since then, far worse conditions, but none had ever so alarmed him. It had been so mysterious, the sense of total weakness, when all around seemed normal, active, busy. But it only happens to one once in a lifetime. One can train the body to accept all kinds of trials. In the end, there weren't many trials left.

And it wasn't as though he could quite bring himself to believe in the trial for the trial's sake. He believed in an end product: he prided himself on the solidarity of his end products. A valley of tin. Secretly, he thought archaeologists and anthropologists were a frivolous lot: interesting, but frivolous, after the wrong thing, as were missionaries and mountaineers. Oil, zinc, tin, bauxite: they were real, they were needed. I have harnessed my neuroses to a useful end, thought David, staring out at the dark night, and the rather theatrical stars. This was the way he had learned to consider his own behaviour. A psychiatrist might have agreed with him, but he had long since given up consulting psychiatrists. He was a man who believed in self-help.

At least, thought David Ollerenshaw, I don't get in anybody else's way. (This was a thought that would arise in his mind in the most remote places: I'm not in anyone's way
here
, he would think, with satisfaction, alone in the Sahara, alone on a rocky shore.)

 

The conference quickly settled into its own pattern, a curious pattern in a curious limbo, of papers, discussions, meals, drinks, swimming. They inspected every aspect of the Adran economy, its resources and its prospects: they listened to long-range weather predictions over the Sahel, and the possibility of future droughts. They did not, of course, see the real Adra: they stayed marooned in the hotel, and watched film of the outside world. An expedition had been planned for the end of the conference: they were to be flown in a light aircraft to look at the tin mine and the new excavations in the north. It appeared that there had indeed been some exciting new archaeological discoveries, in a tin mine, as in Nigeria: Frances's wild conjectures, at her lecture, in response to David's question, had not been so wide of the mark. It wasn't exactly as though they were going to sink an oil well through an ancient site: there was no real reason why tin and figurines should not be harmoniously and jointly extracted—no real reason, that is, apart from the ancient reasons of the Sahara, lack of water, and lack of funds. The tin miners were already up there, extracting tin: there wasn't enough water left over for a team of archaeologists. An appeal would be made for funds. Frances would be asked to sign it, to agitate for it. (Her paper, which she delivered with aplomb, would be quoted, she realized, in this case.) Indeed, she rather hoped she might be invited to play a more active role: one of the figurines that had been discovered was of a quite unexpected character, unlike anything that one might hope to find in Adra, and Frances, asked her opinion, and staring at its old enigmatic face, had felt such strong and sudden attraction, such a desire to stop messing about and return to some real work, that the thought of a hot and waterless tin plateau had begun to shimmer for her like an oasis.

Meanwhile, she swam in the pool, ate too much, and worried about her figure, and watched how other people behaved. The original group of late swimmers and late talkers had, as Frances had predicted, solidified and become yet more distinct, and, as she had also predicted without admitting it to herself, Spirelli was proving rather a problem. Randy, grey and wiry, he seemed determined to avenge the honour of his country, and the ghost of rejected Galletti. With no Hunter to protect her, Frances turned, not wholly in self-defence, to David, and forced upon them all many a late foursome: for Patsy was as determined to forestall Spirelli's advances to Frances as Frances was herself. Many strange little games they played, by the pool side, in the bar, over a game of cards: looks, smiles, nods, manoeuvres. Frances liked Spirelli: she couldn't help it. He was an interesting man, an intelligent and original man, with a reliable air of confidence: you'll be all right with me, he hourly implied, and she was sure that in his sense it would be true. Luckily, she also liked David, though in quite a different way.

She did not understand David. He talked a lot, which led one to tell him a lot, but at the end of the day he had given away nothing, the others all. She wondered about his solitary life, and why he had chosen it: was he a homosexual, perhaps? He told them once, in a way that told nothing, that he had had a complete nervous collapse when ten years younger: any of her friends she would have questioned more closely—was it sex? was it family? she would happily have asked—but it didn't seem quite right to interrogate him, for some reason. And yet he wasn't withdrawn, far from it. He had an amiable, sociable, communicative manner: he got excited when talking about quite abstract matters (to hear him on geology reminded her of her brother Hugh on the subject of money). She liked his face and his freckles and his bare English knees. She was pleased, childishly, to find a scientist who would talk to her, a scientist that she found interesting. ‘I'm not a very
pure
scientist,' David would say, when she expressed this view.

He was capable, at times, of the most extraordinary public behaviour: a little dancing took place, one evening, to the music of a juke box, and David had leapt around in a most uninhibited fashion, all by himself. She liked that, though she was faintly embarrassed by it. And on one occasion, when they were all sitting by the poo!, he had grabbed the Polish engineer (who was fully dressed) and slung her over his shoulder and wandered perilously with her to the end of the diving board, where he held her over the luminous water, threatening to drop her in. The Polish engineer, usually reserved and silent, had taken this in surprisingly good part, laughing and struggling as her black hair came loose from its bun, and finally tripping back along the diving board to dry land with a look of dishevelled gaiety. Frances noted that the next night she came down for the first time in a severe dark blue swimming suit, and swam powerfully and expertly around the pool with the rest of them.

Amusing though these diversions were, after ten days they began to pall slightly, and a feeling of claustrophobia set in. People began to talk of what they would do when they got home again, of jobs, of wives and children, of future conferences and expeditions. There was a feeling of not unpleasurable tedium, on the penultimate night of the conference, as Patsy, Frances, David and Spirelli met for their customary drink before dinner: a mood not unlike the end of term, at a boarding school, where the prospect of release mingles with a faint sense of imminent loss of familiar companions and a desire for some final, reckless action. Patsy, demonstrating her response to the mood was wearing a dress she had not produced before, a white dress which showed a great deal of brown and gleaming arm and bosom and thigh, and Spirelli rose to the occasion by ordering a large gin and French instead of his usual Scotch. Frances herself had put on a necklace, she could not think why, following the same instinct that had prompted Patsy: it wasn't a very special necklace, it was a string of yellow glass beads she had had since childhood. David, in his khaki shirt, looked much the same as ever, but even David had a restless glint in his eyes. They talked a little of the trip they were to make the next day to the tin mine, and of the dangers of light aircraft, and then Patsy yawned, and stretched, and said ‘Oh God, I
am
bored with this bar, I seem to have spent the last five
years
in this bar, if only there were somewhere else to go, just for a change.' She looked round her, histrionically, at the tiled table tops and white wire bird cages and plants and flowers, and then turned to David and said, ‘I'll tell you what, David, why don't you take us all for a drive? There's no reason why we should stay shut up in this hotel, is there? Why don't you take us out for a spin in your nice new car?'