The Realms of Gold (52 page)

Drearily, they all trudged off back through the rain to culture, process and effort. They were wedded to them, after all.

Through the following days and weeks, Frances read Stephen's letter again and again, searching for clues. What could have been done, what could have helped? They should have known, that last weekend in the Cotswolds, that there was something wrong with Stephen: she had known it, but she had done nothing. She had flown off frivolously to Adra, to sit around a swimming pool drinking and gossiping. She reproached herself. What had any of them said, in that evening, when they had talked of Freud and the death wish and Empedocles, that had tipped the balance?

Karel reassured her. It was not their fault; it was nobody's fault. Nothing could have been done to prevent it. He had made up his mind, and he had done it, and that was that.

Gradually, she calmed down. It was true that it was not her fault: she had always been good to Stephen, and had always had plenty of time for him. Indeed, as Karel pointed out to her, she had clearly represented for him one of the only possible patterns of living. He had loved and admired her: he said so in his last letter to her. If anybody cheered him up, it was you, said Karel: look, he more or less says so. But poor thing, poor thing, Frances would weep, what can it have been like, to feel so desperate? She could not imagine his state of mind: she did not know how he could have brought himself to it.

Her own parents were quite subdued by the event. Lady Ollerenshaw pulled herself together and emerged from hospital and started living again, with a rather impressive humility. Sir Frank stared a little more blankly still, as though fate had confirmed his worst suspicions about life, and said nothing. Hugh drank and wept: Natasha took to her bed tranquilized for days and in the nd rose like a ghost, and picked up the threads of living. She stopped dyeing her hair, and withdrew her other younger children from boarding school: both courses of action seemed like mistakes, but nobody felt like arguing with her.

In the end, Frances got over it. One gets used to anything. She even began to see it in a better light, once the shock was over. After all, Stephen had been in some curious way true to himself: one could see that his act had a kind of integrity and finality that exonerated all bystanders from guilt. He had blamed no one. He had not even, as far as one could gather, endured any very striking suffering before his death. One could regard it perhaps as a tragic accident.

Or perhaps it was not even as bad as a tragic accident. An accident cuts people off, unwilling, surprised: illness rips people panting and reluctant from life. Stephen had chosen to leave. Reperusing his last words, in a tearless calm, months later, it occurred to Frances that perhaps it was not so bad. Perhaps, in some way, it was all right. With a certain admirable determination, he had faced his own nature, and the terms of life and death, and seen what to do. He had had the revelation she had always been denied, which she had glimpsed so often in the distance. It was a revelation that she did not want at all. She would continue to live, herself. He had spared her, and taken it all upon himself.

She taught herself, over the years, to see his death as a healing of some kind, the end of a long illness, a sacrifice. Taken from them for their better health. Her own children, certainly mercifully, showed no inheritance of the more unwelcome Ollerenshaw traits. Stephen had taken it all away with him. She thought of Stephen, years later, in Prague—she and Karel never got to Pilsen, but they got to Prague, where Karel's mother's family had lived, and while she was there it was as much Stephen as Karel that came into her thoughts: walking round the Jewish cemetery with the slanting apocalyptic tomb stones, staring at dangerous scaffolding and great blackened stone eagles on doorways, she thought that perhaps it was the reinforcement, the double heritage that had killed Stephen. For here was Karel, still alive, despite all still alive, a man with no hatred in him, the only man in Europe. Karel wept, in bed that night in Prague, because they had been to visit his aunt, and she was now an old woman, living not too well—the light had gone out in the middle of the meal she had cooked them, and she had been distressed by the forced failure of her hospitality, but for all that she refused to return to London, for she felt more at home in Prague—and Karel in bed had turned to Frances and wept, as she had wept for Stephen, and it all seemed a part of the same fate. A fate which had spared them, and left them with so much, with each other. What could one do, what sense could one make of it? One could only give thanks.

Karel lost a tooth, in Prague, as she had lost one in Paris: it's the anxiety of travel that makes one's teeth go bad abroad, they concluded, as they stared at the incisor that Karel could ill afford to lose, extracted by a Czech dentist who was a friend of the aunt, and who had once, when a young man in another world, met Karel's mother. Europe and death. Karel wept into the broad shoulder of Frances, and she stared at the hotel ceiling (the aunt could not accommodate them, for she lived, as she had lived in Palmers Green, in a single room) and she thanked God for her survival, for there was no one else to thank. Karel, she said, don't cry, Karel, don't, please don't—though she did not mind, for to have him there was more than she, ambitious as she was, had ever hoped, and his tears, and the sight of his teeth hanging on the doorknob of the wardrobe, and the thought of his lonely aunt, and his dead mother and brother and sister and father and dead Stephen dust and ashes rising from a crematorium chimney, were all part of a salvation so unexpected, that she lay there with him, perishing and fading it was true, but who cared, who cared, if one can salvage one moment from the sentence of death let us do so, let us catch at it, for we owe it to the dead, to the others, and it is all the living and the lucky can do for the dead, all they can do, given the chance, is to rejoice: overcome with joy she lay there, as he wept himself to sleep on her shoulder, overcome with joy she lay awake and thought of the gold baroque of Prague, and Kafka the mad Jew, and of those perilous grave stones, grave stones, her profession, her trade, her living, on account of which (account, account) she lay here with Karel in this double bed.

More years later, she stood with Karel in another graveyard, in the Precinct of Tanit in Carthage, and talked to an archaeologist of child sacrifice. She had never really understood her Phoenicians: nor had she been able to understand how Stephen could take the child's life as well as his own. His own, yes; that she had accepted. She stood there, grey haired now in the bright North African light. There stood the little urns. Bones of children, bones of mice, bones of saints, relicts. Lucky Mr Fox, to believe in the resurrection. Whatever had the Phoenicians believed? She did not want to know, she did not want to understand, she turned away. She could not believe in the resurrection, or in the revelation, and anything more sinister she did not wish to comprehend. She was a modern woman. Her children were grown up now. (Daisy had become a physicist: her mother's pride in this was immense. She had also married Bob Schmidt, after a highly incestuous courtship, and was about to produce the child that Karel and Frances, in belated deference to the population problem, had refrained from producing. But further forward one cannot look. Or not yet.)

 

From these projections, it may be concluded that Frances's reunion with Karel, though achieved in ill-health, and cemented by death and tears, proved permanent. Their separation had been an aberration: both remembered it with amusement, as a happily married couple might remember a harmless affair; both agreed that, postcard or no postcard, they would have got together in the end. Karel's wife went off to the country, as she had often threatened to do, to live in a Lesbian commune: she left the children with Karel and Frances. Frances ran her large household with great satisfaction, feeling that her energies, which she had feared were going to waste, were properly taxed at last. The children bickered and quarrelled a little at first, but after a few months settled down well.

Joy, contrary to Karel's expectations, and contrary to those of Frances (who had not dared to hope for so unlikely and so happy a resolution) turned out to have been truly Lesbian after all. It was no wonder that she had been so cross with Karel for so much of the time. As the months passed, she became almost pleasant. Frances, through the inevitable social contacts brought about by the children, found herself becoming interested, against her will, in the homosexual movements of the seventies: she even went to a meeting or two, and was much impressed by them. Despite these liberal gestures, Joy continued to dislike and distrust Frances, and could never bring herself to be very civil to her. Frances didn't much mind: she had done little to deserve Joy's civility. She had ruthlessly and fairly persistently pursued her husband, and had got him, after all. She was quite content with the resolution, and could well afford to be pleased to see that Joy herself was less discontented. In fact, she was rather pleased that Joy did not wish to become too friendly, as in fact she didn't like Joy much, either. So there you are. Invent a more suitable ending if you can.

Frances bought Mays Cottage from her father. He certainly didn't want it and Frances did. To her astonishment, he allowed her to pay very nearly the market price for it (a sum rather more than a hundred times what her predecessor had paid for it in 1880). This interesting fact was to intrigue and perplex her for the rest of her life, and she invented various explanations for his surprising conduct, none of them wholly satisfactory. However one looked at the transaction, it involved blood money, of one sort or another, and it was money that she would well afford. Perhaps her father guessed the pride she felt in her own power of purchase, and wished to allow her to enjoy it? But she felt there was more to it than that.

She tidied the cottage up, gradually: on the first few visits, she managed to get there alone with Karel, and they slept together amongst the cobwebs, making good lost months and years, in a terrifying, a safe, a giddy, a precarious, a secure and all-excluding secluded conclusion, as final in its own way as Stephen's had been: as final, as ruthless, and, it seemed, as natural. A happy ending, you may say. Resent it, if you like. She will not care: she is not listening. After a few months, the cottage was fit for their large family, and they would all (or most, for the children had reached the drifting stage) go up for weekends and holidays. When asked where her country cottage was, Frances would say, ‘Near Tockley', and people would look at her as though she was mad, and she would laugh, and say, it may not be Paradise, but it suits me. It never looked as nice as Hugh's and Natasha's cottage, but she liked it. It combined elements. It was not quite as spectacular a rediscovery and reclamation as Tizouk, but it offered many private satisfactions. It even proved, in its own way, to be of historical, if not of archaeological interest, for one day when Karel was doing some repairs he found walled up in a cupboard three shoes—a man's, a woman's, and a child's—with a small porridge bowl. Ollerenshaw shoes, dating from the mid-nineteenth century. He took them to the Museum, and found that the practice of shoe burial, if not exactly of shoe sacrifice, was not uncommon, and that such discoveries were occasionally found associated with other offerings—knives, coins, on one occasion a couple of slaughtered chickens. An interesting footnote to the history of the agricultural labourer, he said. Frances, staring at the strange little family of shoes, said, well, they were always an odd lot, Aunt Con clearly wasn't the first, was she?

Having the cottage meant that she could keep in touch with Janet, which pleased them both. She would pick Janet and little Hugh up from Tockley in the car, and drive them out for a meal, and her children and Karel's would play with the baby, while the adults talked. Mark usually refused to come, to Frances's relief. She tried a little subversion on Janet, but wasn't very successful. Janet remained self-contained, dry, only intermittently communicative: she wasn't prepared to discuss her marraige with anybody, after that initial disoriented evening. But she liked to see Frances. It made a change, to see Frances. Gradually, Janet came to believe that instead of confronting a life of boredom, she was merely biding her time. There was Frances at forty, as lively as anything, digging her garden, painting walls, writing articles, riding (she had taken up riding, to stop getting fat), so how could her own life be over, when she wasn't even thirty? Even if the gas mains didn't blow up under Aragon Place, something else might happen, after all.

Frances and Karel tried to keep in touch with David Ollerenshaw as well, but it wasn't very easy. He was rarely in England. He sent them postcards from foreign parts: he spent another six months in Africa, then moved on to the Middle East. (Frances had missed the dig in Adra, through her domestic complications: it proved to be an enigmatic but fascinating affair and she was annoyed she hadn't been there. But one can't have everything.) David sent them, for a wedding present, a lump of pale yellow silica glass, that he had picked up himself in the desert: scooped, pitted, smoothly irregular, carved and weathered by the desert wind, apparently translucent but finally opaque, it had seemed an appropriate gift.

They did manage to meet, occasionally, when he was in London: he came to dinner in Putney several times, and talked of the old days. He and Karel got on well. Frances found herself slightly piqued by their friendship, for she regarded each as he own discovery: she would grow quietly sulky while listening to them discuss world resources and recessions and the new science of cliometrics. A luxury, in these good years.

Once, David invited them round to his London pied-à-terre for a drink, and took them out for a meal. It was one of the biggest surprises of Frances's life. She had been certain that David would live in some shabby neglected hovel or bedsitter, like Mrs Mayfield, and his address (in Earls Court) promised no other. But his tiny flat, in size alone resembling a bed sitter, was quite unexpected. It was carefully furnished, spotless, even elegant, A stereo record player, a large collection of records, shelves of books, a series of orchid prints, and (most inexplicable of all) some interesting pieces of porcelain bore witness to interests of which she would never have dreamed. On the mantelpiece stood some geological objects: satin spar from the Midlands, a polished block of puddingstone, some green olivine from the Red Sea, desert roses, a lump of pink crystalline corundum, and a very large block of smoky quartz. She gazed into the block of quartz: it was dense and translucent within, streaked by refraction, like a petrified forest. Human nature is truly impenetrable, she said to herself.