The Realms of Gold (7 page)

He was impressed by her bedroom. He sat on the bed and accepted gracefully when she opened the refrigerator and offered him a little bottle of champagne. She herself swallowed a couple more codeine, and told him about her bad tooth, and started to pack her things.

‘You don't exactly travel light, do you?' said Hunter, staring at her hair brushes and photographs and books and scent bottles.

‘No need, in Europe,' she said.

‘I'd pictured you keeping all your possessions in a carrier bag,' he said.

‘Oh, I get quite enough of that,' she said, checking in her bag for the fiftieth time to make sure she'd got her passport, her money, and her escape ticket. ‘I quite like a little luxury, every now and then.'

There in her bag was the postcard to Karel. She looked at it and read it, and then, very quickly, before she had time to think, she put a stamp on it. She would post it on the station, and it would all be fixed. He would be waiting for her, not exactly when she got back, because the card would take a day or two to get there, but almost as soon as she got back. She had perfect faith in him. He had always promised that, if asked, he would return, and she had believed him. In a way, that had made it easy to be good. He had persuaded her that he would never abandon her. An impressive achievement. She admired him for it.

Hunter was lying back, now, on her bed.

‘Aren't you feeling tired,' he said, ‘after all that lecturing?'

‘Not particularly,' said Frances, who was, in fact, but who didn't want to get onto the bed with Hunter: so she busied herself by washing her feet and cleaning her shoes. When she looked round, Hunter's eyes were shut. He was breathing heavily. He was asleep. How very nice he looked, she thought maternally, with his wavy hair and his round white neck. His wife had gone off with their doctor and nearly got him struck off the medical register: a
wicked
woman, Hunter had called her, but had had to admit that it was all his own fault because he was never at home if he could help it and was not very good about the house.

Quietly, Frances edged herself onto the other side of the bed, kicked off her shoes, and fell asleep.

They both woke at five: she had a perfect timing mechanism, and could wake at will at any predicted moment. A life of babies and travel had taught her this excellent skill. She felt quite well, apart from her tooth, but Hunter looked worn out.

‘Sorry,' he said, pulling himself together.

‘That's
quite
all right,' said Frances.

‘I'll drive you to the station,' he said.

‘I didn't know you'd got a car,' she said.

‘I have got one,
somewhere
, but I've forgotten where.' He looked vaguely puzzled.

‘Oh well, we'll ring for a taxi.'

So they did, and departed. There wasn't even a hotel bill to pay: the Institute had paid it. Learning this, Frances wished she had taken more advantage, drunk more and eaten more, but realized that that would have been impossible. Once, in an Eastern European country, she had been taken round by a fat little student interpreter, who had eaten colossally and drunk immensely on Frances's expense account, and had, at the end of the week, without the slightest note of embarrassment or apology, declared that it was necessary to eat as much as one could these days because it was the only thing they couldn't take off you. Frances had never thought to hear such a peasant declaration from a teenage student of languages in the late twentieth century. It had pleased her very much.

At the station, she posted her card to Karel in a highly official looking and carefully chosen box. It fell into the welcome depths. Her fate was sealed, or rather unsealed. She felt extraordinarily happy, standing there, in all the rightness of her decision. She would make no more cities, she would make love. The departure announcements clicked and whizzed. She liked train journeys, she slept well on trains.

‘Is there anything you need for the journey?' said Hunter. ‘What about a drink?'

‘That wouldn't be a bad idea,' she said, thinking she would make use of him for his own sake, so he went off and bought her half a bottle of brandy.

‘I'll see you onto the train,' he said, and he carried her bags to her wagon lit. They had twenty minutes in hand.

‘Have a drink,' said Frances, reaching for her tooth glass.

He accepted a drop of brandy with some mineral water.

‘You must come and see me in England,' she said, in a friendly manner. ‘When did you say you finished here?'

‘At the end of the year,' he said.

He was washing the brandy round the glass in a quiet, reflective way. He was about to say something else. She decided to let him.

‘I admire you immensely,' he said, looking at her with what was almost insolence. Appraising her, he was.

‘Do you?' she said. ‘What for?'

She expected the question to throw him slightly: she didn't care for so much cool in one so young. But he continued to stare at her, with his rather short-sighted brown eyes. He reflected.

‘I enjoyed your lecture,' he said.

She laughed, but despite herself she couldn't help feeling pleased, even by so absurd a response.

‘Well,' she said, ‘I'm glad somebody appreciated it.'

‘Oh, everybody enjoyed it,' he said, with that curiously insincere tone of his. She wondered why he employed it. Was it simply to prevent himself from sounding foolish? Or was it meant to intrigue? Or had he got a lot to hide? She couldn't imagine why he had said he enjoyed her lecture if he hadn't, and had to admit that on one not very important level she needed reassurance so much that even reassurance of this dubious nature was welcome. There was nothing she disliked more than the blunt open-hearted frankness of those who sought to ingratiate themselves with her by telling her that they didn't know anything about her subject, hadn't read any of her work or seen any of her programmes, and didn't intend to. It was extraordinary how often people seemed to think that such an approach would delight her. Perhaps Hunter's line was simply a more sophisticated version of the same thing. If so, she preferred it to the other.

‘Do you like lecturing?' she said.

‘Not much,' he said, limply, ‘I don't do it if 1 can avoid it. And I usually can. You,' he said, this time with a positive note of accusation, ‘you actually seem to
like
doing it.'

‘I don't mind it,' she said. ‘Why shouldn't I like it?'

‘No reason at all,' he said, implying reasons. ‘I envy you, that's all. I envy your energy. I admire you. I've just said so. I'm the laziest person I've ever met. I admire you for doing so much. I just wonder why you do it, that's all. You needn't bother, need you?'

‘Well, I have a family to support,' she said, but as she said it she knew that he knew quite well that that wasn't the whole or real reason. What did he suspect of her? Histrionics? Showmanship? Unprofessionalism? A slight panic began to flutter in her chest.

‘I do it because I've got to keep moving,' she said. ‘I get so depressed if I don't.'

The truth, badly stated, sounded and was ridiculous. But he looked at her with curiosity and concern.

‘Depressed?' he said, gently, delicately, as though unwilling to probe. Her tooth had become very noticeable again.

‘Well, yes, depressed,' she said. ‘But I find it quite easy to cure depression by work. One just has to keep moving, that's all. Otherwise one sinks. I'm just an unnaturally energetic person, that's all. I even think sometimes that I'm not really depressive at all, it's just that for years I was underemployed. But I doubt if that's quite true, because my family are all depressives too.'

‘And what do your family do about it?'

‘Oh, various things.'

‘What things?'

She thought. ‘Oh, the usual things. Suicide, drugs, drink, the mad house.'

‘You make it sound quite serious.'

‘Oh, I don't know. Most families are like that, aren't they?'

He thought. He smiled.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I suppose they are. Certainly I can think of examples of all those lines of attack in my fairly immediate family. I just never worry about them though. In fact, I hardly ever think about them.'

‘You have a lucky nature,' she said.

‘So have you.'

‘One could say that.'

Her whole jaw was aching by now. She clutched at it.

‘My tooth is killing me,' she said. ‘I should have stayed and had it out.'

The look of spurious concern returned to his face.

‘Can I get you anything for it?'

‘No, not really. I've got drink and pills, there's nothing else one can do about it, is there?'

‘Not really,' he said.

And they sat there for a few more minutes, until the brown-suited attendant came round, and said the train would be leaving shortly, and that dinner would be at seven. To her surprise, at the sound of dinner, she felt quite hungry. Eating would take her mind off her tooth, maybe.

Hunter left, politely saying goodbye, wishing her a pleasant journey. She shook his hand, and then inclined her cheek, so that he could kiss it. He kissed the bone over her aching tooth. She felt very friendly towards him, for he had after all been the means of renewing her life with Karel. He had seen Karel, in the flesh, quite recently. She almost wanted to tell him of the role he had played, but having decided on discretion, thought she would stick to it. Anyway, he probably sensed it, as he was no fool. Cleopatra had hauled her messengers up and down by the hair when they brought bad tidings. Antony had been reduced to sending his schoolmaster to sue for peace. She looked at Hunter as he stood there on the platform below the open window, expecting wings or a halo, almost, or some other archaic sign of distinction to sprout from him or encircle him. He was a nice boy, a worthy messenger, a pleasant and probably talented (if lazy) archaeologist.

‘Don't wait for the train to go,' she said.

‘I want to,' he said, standing there below her on the platform.

‘Give my regards to Karel,' he said, ‘when you see him.'

‘I will,' she said, ‘I will.'

He looked like a piece of plot, standing there. An extra character, about to return to his mislaid car and his own life.

‘I hope your tooth isn't too bad,' he said. ‘You must get it seen to, in Paris.'

The train lurched forward. She put her hand through the window and he squeezed it. They were so high, continental trains. He was still staring at her intently as the train drew out. He admired her.

She returned to her compartment and sat on the bed and poured herself a drink. She was pleased with the Hunter episode. She thought she had handled it well. She looked out of the window, and watched the station and the city. It was dusk, and beautiful. She thought of Karel, and the day she had met him here: the train had pulled into the station in the early morning, through an amazing pink and lilac dawn, and her heart had been so full of love and anxiety, and she had taken a taxi to the hotel where they had arranged to meet, and there he was in bed asleep. It would be like that again, she would have all that again. What a fool she had been to lose him.

‘Husband, I come,' she thought to herself, thinking again of Cleopatra and grand passion. ‘Now to that name my courage prove my title.'

 

David Ollerenshaw, by this time, was back in his own Institute. It stood next door to the octopus research laboratory, on the sea front beneath the date palms. He too, like Frances, had paid a courtesy visit to see the octopus, and several to the public aquarium, where he had stared at the fish and the coral, and pondered on the possibilities of marine geology. He was bored. He was held up, waiting for some rocks in a bag, and some information about the rocks, which he was hoping to feed into a new kind of computer. The rocks should have arrived three days earlier. He had spent the three days idly, strolling along the front, gazing at ships, going to films in foreign languages, reading periodicals in the Institute library, drifting into zoo and aquarium and museums and churches, and wondering whether he needed a new pair of glasses. There was something wrong with his eyes, but he was damned if he was going to have them tested abroad.

He was quite used to being abroad, and quite used to being alone. He didn't mind either. He was just a little bored, by the lack of action. And he was rather keen to have a closer look at his rocks.

Meanwhile, he leafed aimlessly through an old copy of the
Guardian
, and thought about the Tassili rock paintings. They had been impressive, and he liked the thought that the Sahara had been thoroughly inhabited so long ago. Though he was himself, in the course of work, constantly setting off for uninhabited places, he was no conservationist: his aim was after all the exploitation and not the preservation of the world's resources. The stuff was there to be got, and man was merely another agent of change, like wind, or water, or earthquakes. Ridiculous, to look at it in any other way.

Here, in the
Guardian
, as usual, was another crappy conservationist article about the way of life in the Shetlands, and its threat from North Sea oil. There was a quaint ill-printed picture of an old lady clutching a shawl round her head, and a lot of nonsense by a female journalist about dying customs and mainland mentality. The female journalist had of course travelled up from London and no doubt had sampled the local customs for all of three or four days. It amazed him, the way in which people these days seemed to admire the primitive. If they admired it so much, why didn't they go off like himself and try it? There were still plenty of extraordinarily uncomfortable places left in the world, and he had been to many of them. He was a useful geologist: the company he worked for made good use of his liking for unpleasant places.

He read on, of the possibility of striking oil near Rockall, near the Hebrides: it was by no means as unlikely a discovery as it would once have seemed. Gold in the Sahara, oil at Rockall. David Ollerenshaw, perhaps understandably, held the minority view, that the earth's resources are more or less illimitable, and also self-renewing: as yet man, in the shape of men very much like himself, had simply wandered around picking up lumps as they lay scattered on, or very near, the earth's crust, lumps of coal, lumps of iron, of tin, of copper, gathered as unscientifically as Elgin (he was thinking of Frances Wingate) had gathered the marble of Athens. It was only recently that the intellect had been engaged at all in such searches.