The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  Hunter was very interested in her, no doubt about it. Or perhaps he was more interested in second-hand stories about Derek. She really must be very careful what she said, as it would clearly get around in no time, and she had lived to regret many an indiscretion: on the other hand, she couldn’t resist telling him about Derek and the camel and the syphilis. (She could see Andersson looking at her more in sorrow than in anger. Galletti, on the other hand, was much entertained, though distracted slightly by the attentions he was having to pay to some unexplained and indeed inexplicable young lady on his other side. Who the hell could she be? She was far too young to be anyone’s wife, and too well dressed to be a student. Someone’s daughter, maybe? Anyway, she was old enough to hear echoes of the camel story.) Hunter enjoyed the story, she could see, though it was impossible to evoke all it had meant to them, huddled together in their small oasis, playing poker, playing Scrabble, drinking, recounting the whole of their past histories to one another night after night, laughing hysterically whenever the camel was mentioned, childishly referring to it, making Derek expose, night after night, the infinitesimally small bump which he had mistaken for serious affliction, and which he in the end admitted had probably been there all his life. Even the words of the Scrabble board had veered remarkably towards the camel, and when one night they had been reduced to playing Consequences, they had produced some highly entertaining variations on the theme. None of those good jokes would stand the chill of retelling, but they had been good at the time, mingled as they had been with the extraordinary sensations of relief and triumph, with the knowledge that there, just out in the sandhills, lay their own city, rising slowly from the ground: a reputation made, it meant, for Frances Wingate, and a good step in the right direction, career-wise, for Derek and Bruce, both of them acting as her assistants, both of them on handsome grants from their respective Universities, grants which would now be seen to have been amply justified. No wonder they had laughed weakly with euphoria, lying there in the cool evening, thinking of the long caravans from Meroé, the bazaar, the palms, the chickens and dogs, the bargaining, the donkeys and camels, probably not so different then from now, for the whole place had been miraculously preserved by the fine dry sand, and it looked, as it emerged, habitable, homely, like any other small Saharan village today, not crushed out of recognition, like so many sites, by earth and rain and trampling feet. It had been busy then, but they had all gone away (she had had to think of reasons for their departure, but that came later). Negroes, Arabs, Phoenicians. John Sinclair-Davies, who had accompanied them at his own expense, was the artist of the expedition; he was there to draw pots and stones, but would also dash off beautiful reconstructions—life in Tizouk and Meroë in 500 BC, with giraffes and monkeys and ivory, with palm trees and lions, interspersed with sketches of Frances in her bikini, Frances in the pose of Alexandrine Tinne, the first European woman to venture into the Sahara (she was hacked to death for her trouble), Frances in the full regalia of a Meroitic queen, Palmer grotesquely raddled in the last stages of tertiary syphilis, Bruce Wyatt as a sheik playing poker with Frances dressed as the ancient queen of the Tuareg. They had all been very silly, no doubt. They had played Scrabble, in the evenings, when poker palled, allowing themselves to use the place names of the Sahara, which were full of z and k and x, and other useful consonants—after all, said Frances one night, regally adjudicating, bending the rules, allowing Tizouk to Derek, it is our place name, and we can allow ourselves to use it, can we not?

  The Sahara had once been very different: fertile, grass-covered, and in places the hippopotamus had wallowed where there is now no water for hundreds of miles. Her people had left Tizouk when the water dried up: they had wandered off, from their little trading post, leaving it to the wind and the sand and Frances Wingate.

  When she had finished her camel story, she and Hunter and Galletti discussed camels and their habits in general, contrasting their bad character with the nobility and fidelity of the horse and the dog, and then, suddenly out of the blue, Hunter said, ‘I met an old friend of yours a month ago. Karel Schmidt, his name was.’

  ‘Really?’ said Frances, a little stunned, unable to change gear very quickly. She couldn’t think of anything to say, her mind still ran on camels, but she longed to know more.

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ she said, after a pause, playing for time, afraid the topic would be changed, wondering desperately how much Hunter could know about her and Karel, what Karel had said about her and whether she dared ask, whether Karel still saw Derek Palmer ever, wishing she hadn’t drunk so much.

  ‘I met him at his Poly,’ said Hunter. ‘I went to give a talk there. He said that’s where you first met him.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Frances. ‘A good few years ago, now.’

  ‘A nice fellow,’ said Hunter, idly, probingly. She panicked, unsure what to do. Should she tell all and get the real news of Karel? Should she keep calm and disown him? Should she suggest ownership? Hunter, she thought, would like her to tell all, so that he could sympathize, but perhaps he would sympathize too much. If she disowned him, she wouldn’t get the news. The only thing to do was to suggest a vague association, implying all and telling nothing: that would keep Hunter quiet and get her what she wanted. If only I still had Karel, she said to herself, I wouldn’t get into these confusions, drinking too much at lunch time and all this kind of thing.

  Her tooth was beginning to ache: she had hit it, in her panic, on her pudding spoon.

  ‘He’s a very nice fellow,’ she said, warmly. ‘Very nice. In fact quite one of my closest friends.’ She’d said that in a special enough way, she hoped, without too much of a leer. ‘And how was he?’

  ‘Oh, he seemed very well,’ said Hunter. ‘Working hard. He does two evenings a week WE A as well, he says. We had quite a chat about it, because I was thinking of doing a class myself next year, if I can afford it. The pay’s appalling. I don’t know what he does it for.’

  ‘Two a week is too much’ said Frances, faintly, emptying her glass quickly as Galletti reached for the replenishing decanter, and replenished. Waves of loneliness poured through her. Two a week. Last time she had spoken to him, he’d only been doing one. He had taken on a whole new class and she hadn’t known. She felt insulted and bereft.

  ‘One would be all right, though, I thought it might be fun,’ said Hunter. ‘Does he do it for fun?’

  ‘I don’t really know’ said Frances, cautiously. ‘I think he enjoyed it, yes. He’s a very good teacher,’ she said, primly and loyally.

  ‘And he’s got a large family,’ said Hunter. ‘Perhaps, with all those children, even a fiver helps . . . ’

  ‘It’s not as large a family as mine,’ said Frances.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Hunter, with a touch of malice, ‘but then we all know you’re the golden girl, don’t we?’

  ‘Tell me some more about Karel,’ said Frances, rather pleased by the malice: flattery was all very well, but it wasn’t as good as real acknowledgement. ‘What else did you talk about?’

  Hunter stared at her calmly. He had a peculiar baby face, soft and freckled and pale, and long wavy hair, straggling a little round his neck, as though it had passed the point where he usually cut it. He was very relaxed. He was years younger than she was.

  ‘We talked about you, of course,’ said Hunter.

  ‘But you don’t know me,’ she said.

  ‘I knew you through Derek. And I knew your work.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what he said about you?’

  ‘I don’t know if I dare,’ said Frances, as the air turned very still: her heart was beating rather loudly, and her tooth seemed to be beating in time with it, with an incessant throb, like a generating machine. Suddenly Hunter’s self, which she had taken so lightly, assumed a terrible significance: there he was, this bland young man, smiling at her, a fatal messenger. How much would he dare to say? If the news were bad, would he utter it, and would she
blame him for delivering it? Or was he the kind of polite person who would never tell an unwelcome truth? It was important to know, but too late to discover. He smiled at her, knowingly. He was a quiet trouble-maker, maybe. It was too late to escape. If Karel had disowned her, she would die.

  ‘Oh, I think you dare ask,’ said Hunter.

  ‘All right, then,’ said Frances. ‘Tell me. What did he say about me?’

  ‘He said he loved you,’ said Hunter, with satisfaction, expecting applause.

  She thought she was going to faint, for a moment, at the sound of this lovely news.

  ‘How nice of him,’ she said, unable to stop herself from smiling. And then she handed over her reward. ‘And I love him, of course,’ she said, primly.

  ‘He didn’t say much about that,’ said Hunter.

  ‘No. Well, he wouldn’t,’ said Frances. She was so moved by Karel’s loyalty, and by this boy’s completely self-interested nerve, that she wanted to embrace Hunter as a substitute, but could see that that would not do. On the other hand, she could see that there was no point in pursuing the Karel theme: to pursue it would have ruined it, for she would have had to admit her failures, and at the moment it stood between them perfect, undiminished, neatly summarized, as though in a poem or a play. She decided that it would be better, after all, to devote her attention to Hunter himself.

  ‘How kind of you to tell me,’ she said. ‘Why did you tell me, may I ask?’

  ‘I thought you might like to know,’ said Hunter.

  ‘It was rather a risk,’ she said. ‘You clearly don’t mind taking a risk or two.’

  And in no time at all, she had Hunter discussing himself, with her knowledge of Karel filling her heart with such delight and joy that she could hardly breathe. She would rush straight back to him, she would ring him as soon as she reached England, no perhaps not ring because of his wife, she would write to him, they would meet again, how mad to have wasted all this time, she drunkenly reflected, as she listened to Hunter and the story of his divorce (he can’t be divorced, she said to herself, he’s only about twenty-eight, he can hardly be married yet, she thought, though she herself had married a rich man at the age of twenty).

  Hunter walked her back to her hotel. She had a train to catch at six: it was now half past three, and she hadn’t packed. Hunter could help her pack. She had got him completely under her thumb. He had nothing better to do, anyway, and would enjoy telling the story of how he helped Frances Wingate to pack her bags. She hadn’t behaved badly to him, after all. She’d listened to his stories about his wife with sympathy and had given him some excellent advice. She felt slightly bad about Galletti, but then one can’t please everyone, and there hadn’t after all been a contract between them, and even if there had been Galletti wouldn’t have liked its terms. Whereas Hunter liked exactly what he was getting, she could tell. She was too old for him, but he liked watching.

  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?’