The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  She put on her coat, picked up her bag, walked smartly down the stairs, and handed in her key, with a familiar deceptive briskness, as though she were very busy and slightly late for an important assignation.

  Over a plate of soup, a little later, she thought about the only man in Europe, that man from Palmers Green. (He lived in Fulham now.) She thought about him a great deal of the time. She wondered again why it was that she had left him, and why she was sitting here alone, and whether it had been her fault or his. Had he driven her away, or had she departed? The latter, surely. The issue had become confused, by her insistence that it wasn’t in any way his fault that she was leaving, that it had been entirely her own, and that it was her wicked nature that was to blame. As she recalled, she had blamed her bad nature, and her work. He was ruining both, she had said. He was making her better natured, and he was preventing her from wanting to work. This had been true, but she doubted if it could really have been her reason for leaving him—more like a reason for staying, it sounded now, after the event. Why on earth had she left him? She added pepper to her soup. Pride? Fear?

  She had been rather afraid of him. He had been something of a Salvationist, he had wished to save her, with evangelical passion, and she was afraid of disappointing him, and simultaneously rather afraid of being saved. So she had told him firmly that she was mad and beyond redemption and that he’d better leave her alone or he’d be in for some nasty disappointments. Out she had gone into the wilderness, and now she stayed in expensive hotel bedrooms, in beds large enough at least for two. (Perhaps it was the third that had really driven her away, though she and he had never talked about it much, and she never thought about it if she could possibly prevent herself.)

  She certainly wasn’t going to start thinking about his wife now. It was neither the time nor the place. She stirred her soup vigorously, It was full of fish bones. Amazing, how keen one was to eat even when thoroughly depressed. Or was one simply keen to pass the time? The man at the other end of the restaurant was staring at her rather nastily, a large moustached huge-chested person. He was the only other customer in the place. It was a horrid little eating house, as cheap as she could find, tucked away down a dark back street strewn with cabbage stalks and fish heads, slapping with washing. One could say this for Frances Wingate, she really didn’t care where she went or what she did or what she ate, she didn’t care what risks she ran. (She was careful about foreign water these days, but with good cause.) And yet, of course, she didn’t really run any risks, she had an excellent sense of judgement, she was well used to eating alone, and she had recognized at once, from the outside, that this place, though a dump, was in no way a sinister dump, and the man who was staring at her was doing it idly, and the fat proprietor and his fat wife and skinny daughter who were sitting in a sulky group round a table at the other end of the room would protect her interests, though with some contempt. Safe, safe as houses. She took out a little embossed hotel notepaper and started to write a long drunken unpostable letter to her long-lost lover (six-months-lost, he was in fact, but it seemed like an age). Darling, darling, beautiful darling, I love you forever, I miss you forever, she wrote idly. There wasn’t really much to say in a love letter. He had been good at the genre, inventive and devious. He had also been good at telegrams. I love you, she wrote again, underlining the words for emphasis.

  The she wrote a real postcard to her children: that one, she would post. And another to her parents, and one to her alcoholic brother Hugh and his wife Natasha. And another to her brother Hugh’s son Stephen, who had (rather early in life) a new baby, which he took as seriously as a mother octopus would its many offspring. There were various other friends to whom she would have liked to send cards, but she did not know their addresses. Her family was hardly a close-knit one, but at least she knew where most of its immediate members lived. She made a note or two, for her lecture in the morning, thinking of ex-colleagues who would have been pleased and surprised to hear from her, if only she knew where they were. The past had been so full: over-full. What of the future? What on earth could it still hold for her? Her mind hovered over her soup plate, contemplating its skeletal omens. There must surely still be something in store. Hope springs eternal, she said to herself. Such cliches amused her. But it was not hope that seemed to be springing and flourishing in her spiritual breast, it was a malignant and meaningless growth of grief. She felt as though she had swallowed a stone, or a whole hard-boiled egg. A dull sad ache. Perhaps the soup would cure it, but she doubted it.

  The soup was really quite good, though bony. She had told the children about the octopus on the postcard—they would be pleased, they had watched the television programme with her about the programmed octopus, indeed they had summoned her with cries from the kitchen to watch it, one of them with tears in her eyes about the poor mother dying in her nest, and it was because of them really, that she’d told Professor Andersson that she’d like to see the research laboratory. They’d be interested in that. Though she might well get home before the postcard, the post was dreadfully slow. Somebody told her there’d been a postal strike in this country, but that wasn’t so bad, in fact, because they were delivering all the most recently posted things, it was the very old ones that had to wait, lingering in the boxes for months till all the backlog was cleared, and if it wasn’t cleared before the next inevitable strike, well, too bad, there they would stay for another few months. Not that it mattered, she’d be home soon.

  A piece of bone had lodged itself between her wisdom tooth and her back molar. Annoying. She prodded at it with her tongue, but failed to dislodge it. She had another glass of wine, swilling it around hopefully—weren’t fish bones supposed to melt? And this wine was acid enough to melt anything, even Cleopatra’s pearl. Wine of the house, in a smeared carafe. Sometimes she did wish she didn’t drink so much. Though she’d only just finished that bottle of brandy, hadn’t she? But then she’d been dined out every night. An eighth of a bottle a day, on top of what she’d been given and the experimental little bottles she’d taken out of the convenient little refrigerators. Modest, really, quite a reassuring calculation. Though not quite so reassuring, because there’d also been that open half bottle of scotch, that she’d finished off on the first night with Peter Borg, and she’d noticed he’d hardly had any. Oh dear. It would be too awful to become a real alcoholic, and to have to make these little self-deceiving calculations all the time—but I only had three doubles, and wine doesn’t count, and I’m sure John drank some of that bottle, and anyway I’m going to give it up tomorrow—all that kind of thing. This wine really was sour. She quite liked sour wine. She had another half glass, and then began to prod at the bone with a toothpick—funny how they were so lavish with toothpicks abroad, even in places like this. (She’d come here really because it would have been too embarrassing to meet Andersson or Galletti or any of her other contacts in any other restaurant when she’d promised them she was going to eat in the hotel and go to bed early. Which she might even have done, but eating in the hotel wouldn’t have filled in enough of the evening. It was still only nine o’clock.) She was prodding at her teeth more energetically than she would have done if she had been entirely sober, as she thought these dull thoughts, and so she was not particularly surprised, though rather alarmed, when she dislodged not only the fish bone, but also a fair sized piece of filling from her wisdom tooth. As the tooth consisted of little but filling (the dentist had wanted to pull it out last time, and she hadn’t let him, because it seemed such a bad omen, to lose a wisdom tooth), she couldn’t believe she had lost anything very important—he’d warned her that he was filling it for the last time. But the lump of silvery metal which she extracted, delicately, with her finger, and laid upon the side of her soup plate, did look rather large. Nervously, she explored what was left. There seemed to be very little left, but at least it didn’t hurt. She washed a little more wine around it, and was grateful that she had ordered an omelette for her next course. Stringy foreign bif
tek would have been the end.

  She was beginning to feel quite cheerful. The man at the other table, right across the other side of the room, was staring at her. She stared back and he dropped his eyes. That done, she decided to have a little read of her book. She was reading a novel by Virginia Woolf, The Years. One had to be so careful what one read on journeys, because the book would forever bear the mark of the journey, so she always tried to read something not too important but not too trivial either. She remembered reading a volume of short stories by Wells—why, she couldn’t remember—while waiting for Karel to arrive at some incredibly elaborate and doubtful assignation, and the book had been ruined forever: she had to turn its spine to the wall nowadays so she couldn’t read its lettering. And while one of the children had been having his appendix out, she had read Iris Murdoch. On a train, when she had just left her husband forever, she had read Mr Norris Changes Trains. Crying, turning the pages, gazing out of the window, crying again, reading a few more pages. Just like now, in fact. The soup plate and the filling were removed by the proprietor’s sulky daughter, the omelette arrived.

  She read a few pages of The Years, but she couldn’t concentrate for long. Such gallant old people lived in those pages, but the writer died young by her own hand. Shall I become a lonely gallant old lady, thought Frances Wingate? All in all, it seemed quite likely. She did seem to have amazing powers of survival and adaptation. And it wasn’t surprising, at all, that she had felt bad, here in this city. It had been quite a significant place, in her life. A strange place, with its bleached salty buildings, its fortifications, its serious naval power, its fish bones and conferences, and a few luxury yachts moored amongst the fishing boats, well away from the tankers and the destroyers. She had been here quite often. The first time, many years ago, she had been eighteen years old, and she had sat on that bench on the sea front, and cried and cried—the disaster had been so petty that she had often laughed about it, when recalling or recounting it, but it had seemed the end of the world at the time. She’d been on her way home from a fortnight’s hitch-hiking in Calabria, and here, in this city, where she and her friend were to part, and her friend to catch her train home, she found that she had lost her passport. It must have been stolen from her bag, on their last lift, for nothing else was gone. Bravely she had waved her friend goodbye (she was off back to England, the lucky girl; Frances still had a week more abroad to endure), and then she had wandered down from the station, back down the long steps from the height of the town to its depth, down to the sea front, and there she had sat on the bench, and watched the oily sea. Hopeless, she felt, hopeless and stateless. She hadn’t even got anywhere to spend the night, and two days to wait before her next companion reached her. She wept, tired and dirty. In the end, she pulled herself together and found herself a bed in a convent: it had been a frightening place, with rows of girls sleeping in uncurtained beds, and a curtained nun shuffling behind a screen in a corner, where a candle burned, as though it were a hospital, not a youth centre.

  The candle had upset her. Was it for religion, or for surveillance, she had wondered then, and wondered now? She had had a bad night. But in the morning, she had got up and gone off to the Consulate and bought herself a new passport, it had been as simple as that, as easy as that to reinstate oneself, in those days. And now she did not sleep with rows of girls and a nun, but in the best room in the best hotel. Alone.

  Her second visit had been three years later, with the man she was just about to marry. She had known at the time that it was a mistake to marry him, that on no account ought she to marry him, that she would be no use to him nor he to her. She also knew it was inevitable that the mistake would be made. It was partly that he was so insistent. He thought he loved her; he could not be dissuaded from this fixed and neurotic idea, and in the end she had decided that he could find out for himself that he didn’t. But oh, how long and horrible the process of discovery had been. He hadn’t been a man to give in easily. Anthony Wingate. She rarely thought of him now, though she bore his name. On that evening, when she was twenty-one, she had escaped from him for half an hour, and had sat watching the sea and thinking of what it would be like, married to Anthony.

  Her third visit had been with Anthony and some of their children, on their way south, on holiday. (How many children? She could hardly remember. Two? Three? Or maybe even four??) How odd these family holidays had been, how painful, and yet at times how poignant, how lovely the moments salvaged. They had been bitter with one another most of the time, she and her husband: he was a cold man with a violent temper, and she was frightened of him, but she was not easily intimidated, she refused to submit. Obstinate to the last degree, she had pursued her career, her interests, her own self, in his despite. She had hardened herself on him. On holidays, she had tried to soften, for the children’s sake, but it was impossible—they would quarrel in the car, fight bitter disputes over meal times, shout and throw things at one another at night, quarrel over trivia—where to stop, where to stay, what to eat, what to buy, how to treat the children. (The children, tough, resilient, good-natured, ignored their parents’ folly, and amused themselves.) Holidays, from the adult point of view, had been largely an occasion for intensive, undistracted warfare. But even then, there had been strange lakes of time when a view of a mountain, a tree in flower, a courtyard, had seemed to retain its own self despite their destructive passions, when, they would have, the two of them, even a moment of peace in the face of some more powerful natural phenomenon. They had been overcome, from time to time, in their littleness. It had not happened here: it was one of the most famous views in the world, but it had not done its famous trick, for they had spent their two hours here (they were passing through, they had stopped for lunch) arguing about where to have lunch. Anthony had wanted an expensive meal, she could tell, but hadn’t been able to stand the thought of the children larking around in a good restaurant. Frances didn’t give a damn what the children did, they never embarrassed her. They had compromised, and both had sulked, looking over the famous bay. But later that day, a little further south, they had had a moment of remission: they had driven through a small forest, high over the sea, and the roots of the trees had been crazily exposed and twisted, and strange undergrowth flourished, and they had stopped the car, and looked at the improbable vegetation in some awe. Fungi, odd fleshy plants, brown leaves, spotted leaves, thin needle leaves, mould and heaped curving interweaving branches, like nothing in nature, showing what?—that there was hope, that there were more manifestations than man’s miserable limited mind could dream of, that not even she, all-thoughtful, never-resting, never-rested, could either create or destroy by her own misery the variety of the earth’s creation, for such a sight she had never dreamed of.

  She thought of the octopus again and smiled. Why did she love it so? She had loved its grey fleshy body, its lovely tinted iridescent grey muscles, its faint blushes and changes, its round suckers, its responsiveness, its sensibility, its grace. And, smiling, she thought of that last, that most significant visit to this city. She had been here with Karel. They had had two days here together, a lifetime. On one of the days they had gone out for a walk, and with their usual lack of success they had found the most terrible place in the world for walking—Karel, a city man, had no sense of maps or countryside, and would always deliver them, thus, in some impossible place. This time he had looked at the map, at the empty spaces on either side of the port—it must be good there, he said, pointing at a large flat patch without towns or villages, and they had set off, along the coast road, hoping for seclusion, and indeed seclusion they had found, for they ended up in a fiat yellow swamp, crossed by long straight muddy tracks. They left the road and turned down a track through what seemed to be fields, though what they were growing who could have said, for the soil was both yellow and salty, an unpromising combination. There were ditches by either side of the track: the tracks intersected, regularly, at right angles. They aimed for the sea, but the terrain grew more a
nd more difficult, the mud clinging to the tyres of Karel’s car, and the ditches turning in a sinister fashion into banks, until finally they were driving along a kind of yellow muddy tunnel, and then the car went into a deep rut, and stopped. They hadn’t much cared: they had sat and kissed and talked for a while of other matters, and then they’d got out to investigate. The car was deeply embedded: they would clearly have to push it out and reverse back the way they had come. They stood there in the mud, holding hands, his shoes sinking, her sandals full of wet clay. It was one of the most unattractive spots one could have imagined. Frances, being a practical woman and used to excavations, hadn’t worried much: she was more worried about losing Karel the next day than about standing there forever in a muddy estuary. She said this to him. I’ll never leave you, he said, with his usual air of slight panic. You’re leaving me tomorrow, she said, unable to keep a plaintive tremor from her voice. I’ll see you next week, he said. And they stood there, in the immense wet flat silence, where nothing grew.

  Only it wasn’t silence. As they stood and listened, they became aware of a most peculiar noise—a kind of honking and squawking and bubbling, a comic and sinister sound.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ said Karel.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said.