The Realms of Gold (51 page)

Hugh had intended to drive back to London that night, but drink overtook him. He rang Natasha, and said he would stay. Nobody was feeling very hungry, after the sandwiches at tea-time, so they ordered some more sandwiches, and ate them in the lounge (which was quiet, on a Monday), washed down with a bottle or two of wine. It took a long time to persuade Hugh that it was time to go to bed: a yawning waiter and the emptiness of the last bottle finally dislodged him. Karel and Frances went upstairs to bed. In bed, Frances turned on her elbow to Karel, and said, forestalling, ‘You know that postcard I sent you? It was partly the frogs, but it was partly a boy called Hunter Wisbech. Whatever did you say to Hunter Wisbech, about me?'

Karel looked puzzled. ‘Whoever was Hunter Wisbech?' he asked.

‘Oh, you must remember,' said Frances. ‘He came to give a talk at your Poly. Just like me. Surely you remember him? I met him in February. On my lecture tour.'

‘Was he that young chap with the long curly hair who kept going on about how his wife had run off with the doctor?'

‘Yes, that was him.'

‘He wasn't at all like you, love. He was a quite different kind of person. And I don't remember saying anything much to him. He did all the talking. I think. Why, what did he say I said about you? I can't have said anything awful about you, I never have done, in my life. I always defend you, you know.'

Frances didn't quite care for the notion that she was so constantly attacked, in her absence: nevertheless, she pursued the subject.

‘You must have got on very intimate terms with Hunter Wisbech, whose name you have so completely forgotten,' she said, accusingly. ‘Because he said to me that you said to him that you loved me. He said it over lunch, too?'

‘Did he? Well, perhaps I did. What's so surprising about that? I did love you, I still do. Why shouldn't I?'

‘But it's not the kind of thing that one says to a total stranger.'

‘No, perhaps not.' Karel thought hard, trying to remember: he was feeling much better, and was looking forward to getting this conversation over with, though at the same time it was a luxury, to delay the only possible conclusion by talk. ‘No,' he said, ‘now I think about it, we did talk about you. It was he that brought the subject up, I think. We went off to the pub, after the lecture, and had a few drinks, and he said he knew Derek Palmer, who also knew you, and that's how we got onto it. I didn't say anything bad about you, you know. I never would. You mustn't be paranoid, my darling.'

‘I'm not. I was just interested. You must have been drunk, both of you,' she said, speculatively, imagining the scene.

‘Yes, I suppose we were.' He reflected. ‘And anyway,' he said, ‘how did you and Hunter get onto intimate terms about the subject of me, come to that? That's not the kind of thing one discusses with a total stranger, either, is it?'

As he spoke, an image of Hunter lying asleep on her bed in the hotel flashed across her mind: it seemed to have flashed simultaneously across Karel's mind, too, because before she had time to answer his questions, he followed them up with, ‘And I hope to God you didn't get
too
intimate with him, did you?'

‘Of course not,' she said, indignantly, as other images, of Galletti and Spirelli, of the Canadian camera man in Luxor, flashed rapidly across the screen of her brain: she hoped that Karel wasn't receiving them too, but she knew he was: on the other hand, if he was receiving them at all he must surely be receiving everything else as well?

‘Oh God, Karel,' she said, sinking down off her elbow into the narrow bed, ‘I missed you, I really missed you so much.'

‘Yes,' he said. He was feeling quite himself again. He told her so. Yes, she said, burying herself against him under the white sheets, she could see that this was so.

 

All in all, it had been quite an enjoyable day.

 

The same could not be said for Stephen's funeral. Stephen's funeral was a nightmare. Heroically, Frances organized that one too, for Natasha was too ill, and Hugh too distraught. It was something to do, at least, and by chance she now knew how to do it.

Stephen had died early one morning, in a wood, in Sussex. He had killed himself and the baby. Stephen's doctor believed that he had done it because of a misapprehension about the baby's health. He gave evidence at the inquest, saying that Stephen had visited him frequently with small complaints, and had perhaps remained unconvinced that his daughter was a perfectly healthy slow developer. He also testified that Stephen had been overburdened with his studies and the care of the child, and had become depressed. Are you suggesting, asked the coroner, that he took the child's life because he feared for her future? The doctor agreed that this might have been the case. It was a merciful explanation, and the coroner accepted it.

Stephen's flat had been found littered with medical textbooks: a Paediatric Encyclopedia had been found, with the passages on metabolic and degenerative diseases of the muscle heavily marked. Perhaps he had thought the child was suffering from Oppenheim's disease, from Thomson's disease, from the first stages of muscular dystrophy.

The coroner concluded that the balance of his mind had been disturbed. He expressed the deepest sympathy with the bereaved family.

Stephen's wife was still in hospital, and paid no attention to this tragedy. Frances, in irrational moments, found herself bitterly resenting the wife. One has to blame somebody, sometimes.

 

Stephen himself had been well aware that they would conclude that the balance of his mind had been disturbed, and he conceded that in worldly terms, perhaps it was: nevertheless, he had wished to set the record straight, to explain his own logic, and to this end he had written a long letter, describing his state of mind.

He had not, as the doctor had helpfully suggested, believed his daughter to be fatally ill. The text books, alarming though they were, had offered little support for such a belief. He had accepted the doctor's diagnosis, that she was a slow (and not even a very slow) developer.
All
babies' heads wobble, the doctor had said, and Stephen had believed him. Nevertheless, he had continued to read the text books, and had discovered that although his child might so far have been lucky, there were plenty of problems lying in store. And even if she escaped them all, what of those that didn't? Horrified by the photographic illustrations, he stared at the limp bodies of small doomed long dead babies, at the distorted bodies of children: their faces, like the faces of convicts in newspapers, had been blacked out, through some respect of their privacy, for their dreadful isolation. As Janet Bird, an AngloSaxon post-war woman, brooded over the fate of the Jews, he, a healthy father of a healthy child, brooded over illness and death.

Thinking about these things, Stephen made himself ill. Depression and inertia overcame him. It was as much as he could do to get himself out of bed in the mornings to get the child her breakfast, and he found himself forgetting to feed himself. Beata's way.

He would relapse into bed again, feebly, while the baby crawled around the room, pleased with little. Occasionally, he would get himself up, and go to visit a friend of his who was suffering from the after-effects of LSD: useless duty visits, for the friend, who lived with an aunt, had become more or less speechless, and did not seem to recognize Stephen, or anyone else either. The aunt feared permanent brain damage. The doctors were marginally more optimistic. Stephen did not know what he thought about the case. He would sit there, drink a cup of tea, chat to the aunt, and every now and then make an attempt to speak to Sebastian. Sebastian would answer, occasionally, extremely politely, dully, briefly. Sebastian had once been witty, energetic, eccentric, and a great talker.

Stephen did not know what he thought about Sebastian, or why he kept going to see him; to please the aunt maybe. He liked aunts. This aunt claimed that Sebastian had lost all sense of time, and would get up for breakfast in the middle of the night: also, that he would sometimes become extremely vocal, and talk a great deal, but that she could never understand a word of what he was saying in such spasms. Stephen wondered if there was anything interesting going on in his head, or whether whatever was in there had simply been ruined. How could one tell? His experiences with Beata had long since put him off the belief that madness is sanity, and sanity madness. But what, after all, was sanity?

It was while he was in this frame of mind that the news of Constance Ollerenshaw's bizarre end hit the Sunday papers. He spent all Sunday thinking about it. In the evening, he rang Hugh and Natasha, to find out if they had anything to say about it, but they hadn't, much: they were annoyed, indignant, but by no means overwhelmed. Indeed, Hugh had even been quite witty about the subject. A well-balanced man, Hugh. So Stephen had given the baby its supper, put it to bed, and sat down by his gas fire to brood. Like a medieval contemplative, he dedicated himself to mortality, decay, the corruption of flesh, disease. The end of all things.

Frances, in her worst moments, wept, like a woman. Karel also had a gift for weeping. Stephen lacked this gift, so he sat there and thought, instead. He felt himself on the verge of some revelation. It was sure to come: it needed no artificial invocation.

The revelation was one of extreme simplicity. It came to him like a light from heaven. It was better to be dead than alive: this was the knowledge that came to him. It seemed to descend upon him personally. Being alive was sordid, degrading, sickly, unimaginable: to struggle on through another fifty years, tormented by fear and guilt and sorrow, was a fate nobody should ever embrace. That others did, was not his affair. Man had been created sick and dying: for seventy years he feebly struggled to avoid his proper end. There was something overwhelmingly disgusting about man's efforts, against all the odds, to stay alive. One spent one's life in inoculating oneself, swallowing medicaments, trying to destroy disease, and all to no end, for the end was death. How sickly, how pitiable, how contemptible. Eating corpses in extremis, like those cannibals in the Andes. Condemned to a life of soul-destroying fear, one died in the end anyway, the soul destroyed and rotted by terror. Whereas if one left now, if one leapt now, unsubdued, into the flames, one would be freed, one would have conquered flesh and death, one would have departed whole, intact, undestroyed.

The certainty played around him like fire. This was it, then. He must leave himself no time to forget, no time to lose his knowledge, no time to die and rot like Sebastian and Constance, no time to wither, lingeringly, like Beata, whose feeble balance between life and death was the worst defeat, the most miserable compromise of all. If it was to be done, let it be done properly. The flames were light and bright, painless, without heat. The refining fire.

He started to pack up his things. It was midnight. It crossed his mind to leave the baby behind, but of course, it was out of the question to leave her, whom he so loved, to a life that he had rejected. He thought of his parents, his family: they would suffer, of course, but then they had so many other things to suffer for that one more, in his view, wouldn't make much difference. Should he write them a note? He hesitated. He ought to write something to somebody, to explain what had lead to his resolution: otherwise, they might think he was doing it out of some kind of misery, which was not quite the case. He couldn't quite face writing to his parents, direct. So he wrote them a brief note of farewell, then a longer letter, to Frances, in which he enclosed the note for Hugh and Natasha. His letter to Frances was, he thought, quite clear: he explained that living was disagreeable, and worse than disagreeable, humiliating and destructive, and that he had decided that it would be much better to depart while the way was open before him. ‘Don't think I haven't loved you, Aunt Frances,' he concluded (he enjoyed calling her ‘Aunt': it had a pleasant element of the ridiculous)—‘don't think I haven't been impressed by your approach. I have. But it's not for me. Good luck to you, Frances, and goodbye.'

He addressed this to her home in Putney: she was, he thought, still in Africa, but she would be home soon, and there was no hurry. He left a note on his mantelpiece, saying ‘Have gone, and won't be back', for his landlady. Then he picked up his baby, wrapped her up, put her in a knapsack with the sleeping bag and the sleeping pills, and set off through the dark town (it was after midnight), posting the letter on his way to his destination.

He walked till nearly morning. He knew the right place. They wouldn't find him till next weekend, probably: it was a very secret place, but people sometimes walked there at weekends. He made himself and the baby comfortable, gave both an overdose, and fell asleep as the dawn broke.

They weren't found the next weekend: they were found ten days later, two days after Constance's funeral. The police had been out to look, prompted by Frances, who found Stephen's letter only on her return to Putney from Tockley.

They were lying in a hollow in a wood, under tree roots, wrapped up in the sleeping bag together.

 

Frances wept herself into a stupor. Sodden with tears, she stumbled from police to undertaker, yet again. For days she wept almost without ceasing. If only he had left the baby, she would moan, rocking herself backwards and forwards, swollen and blotched. I would have had her, I would have had her, what's a baby more or less to me?

He didn't want to leave her behind, said Karel, who understood such things.

If Karel hadn't been there, she didn't know what she would have done. He moved in with her, of course, and they took up life together as though there had been no break. He looked after her, held her while she cried, comforted her, distracted the children, and coped with the incessant flow of telephone calls from family and sympathizers.

Stephen was cremated, in a London crematorium: it was pouring with rain as Karel drove slowly past the gravestones, up the interminable drive, to the chapel. Frances did not notice the chapel or the gravestones. Natasha did not attend, but her parents and Hugh got themselves there. Standing in the chapel listening to the piped music, Frances remembered the country churchyard, and Mr Fox in his beret, and the rose bushes and the cows and the yellow stone, and she thought to herself truly and bitterly that they had been an utter, utter irrelevance. This was the place: this was death. How can one make a friend of death, how can one accept graciously the wicked deal? It was better not to pretend. All ritual is a hollow mockery. The tears poured down her face, and Hugh squeezed her elbow. ‘Men do not weep for the dead because they fear them; they fear them because they weep for them,' Durkheim had said, in an attempt to explain mourning. But there was no explanation. An affirmation of life, of culture: a demonstration of the poverty of life and culture: what did it matter what that churchyard, or this bleak conveyor belt represented? Nobody had felt the slightest desire to make matters better by burying Stephen in the Cotswolds churchard, or even by alleviating this grim ceremony with some well-chosen words. Nobody cared, because they cared. Stephen was dead, and that was that. It was the thing, these days, to speak of making death less frightful, more dignified, more familiar. Perhaps there was something to be said for it. But for her part, she had drawn too far away from any human continuity to wish to know. Death and love. How dreadfully they contradict all culture, all process, all human effort. Stephen had been right. The silly curtains swished together, and Stephen and his child disappeared together into the red crater, made one with nature, transformed to black ash.