The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

‘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.

  And yet. He
stared at the photograph of the old lady. Perhaps, after all, he would be rather put out if the North West Highlands were to be transformed by oil rigs and property speculators. He remembered the first time that he had been there, alone, as a young man, for a holiday, in a summer so splendid that it had become legendary. He had taken his motor bike, had slept in bed-and-breakfast places, eating too much bacon and eggs, chipping bits of rock and measuring angles of strike, discovering outcrops, tracing faults, examining crystals, awestruck by the predominance of water, by the sudden lowering loaves of Torridonian sandstone, by the pink sands of Mull and the white sands of Sutherland; and finally, ending up late one night in the dark middle of nowhere, he had taken a winding path down to the sea between lochs and mountains, hoping to find a small village or a hamlet with a bed to let (the Ordnance Survey map marked a cluster of cottages), and had nearly turned back, but in the end reached the sea, in a deep sudden inlet, and there at the land’s end stood four cottages, and one of them had a sign out. Bed and Breakfast. In the morning, when he looked out of the bedroom window, there was the sea, right beneath him: he could see into the depths of clear and rocky water, he could see each limpet, each barnacle, each anemone, pink stone, blue stone, grey stone, and silvery crystalline crevasses. And looking up, there was the sea, an enormously high horizon, welling up above him.

  Hurried, he struggled into his clothes, and out through the garden where his motor bike stood amongst chickens and lobster pots: he struggled through a profusion of flowers, purple, yellow, blue, green, growing in a dense and lush long stemmed abundance, monkey flowers with yellow throats deep-spotted with red, forget-me-nots straggling in the hedge bottom, their pale blue faces small and perfect, so much perfection in so small a space, as lovely and as oft-repeated as crystals, as sure, as infallible, yet as different as snowflakes. He walked through the flowers as though it were the first morning, and through a little gate and up a hill, where the ground changed suddenly from the gulf-stream haven to a shorter turf starred with saxifrage and thyme and milkweed and speedwell, and there, the most beautiful flower of all, grew the Grass of Parnassus, so aptly named, its white carved petals streaked with its own faint green blood. But he climbed on, upwards, to see the sea, as yet obscured by the brow of the hill: he climbed, breathing heavily, for the hill was steep though small, and there at the top lay a view more splendid, more wild, more various than anything he could have imagined in the darkness of the night, for there before him lay a sea full of small islands, rising like grey seals, raising their backs like dolphins from the water, heaving and burgeoning, as far as the eye could see, an panse of rocky islands lying in the blue green sea. The landscape seemed alive, as though seething in the act of its own creation, for round every island the waves broke white and fell and glittered, in a perpetual swell and heave. The Isles of the Blest, he said to himself. Uninhabited, ancient. Out they stretched forever, to the North and West, to the ultimate reaches of man’s desiring, where man was lost and nothing, at the edges of the world. For what did man desire, but those edges? David Ollerenshaw stood there and gazed, his heart beating strangely. Those islands were granite: Lewisian gneiss, the most ancient rock in Britain.

  He had known they were ancient, he said to himself, as he scrambled back down the hill to his hard scrambled eggs. He had a geiger counter in his blood, a mechanism that responded to rock, as swallows to the magnetism of the earth. He did not really need a computer: all that the computer would do would be to confirm his own innate response. This was what was called a feeling for the subject, he supposed.

  And now they were going to dig it all up. He had to admit that he would himself rather dig up the Sahara. The Grass of Parnassus did not blossom there, nor the pale blue water lobelia and the marsh orchid. If the company sent him off to the Hebrides, should he on grounds of conscience refuse? Not that they were likely to: he was a hard rock man, not an oil man. He wished that his hard rocks would arrive from Africa: he knew what they were made of, but equally knew that the company would prefer confirmation from this convenient new computer. He gazed out of the Institute window, at the famous view. The blue lobelia had pallid flowers, blue white, and it broke the still mirror surface of the lochs, of the all-covering water, of the cold brown peaty water. It was more water than land, that part of Scotland. That, too, could not be said of the Sahara.

  If the rocks turned out to be what he expected (and they would) then he would have been as lucky, in his way, as Frances Wingate. Though he would never get the credit. She, he thought (though without ill-will) seemed to have had more than her fair share of credit. Her performance had amused him.

  He rubbed his glasses on his handkerchief. Remember him, for it will be some months before he and Frances Wingate meet again.

  By the time Frances got to the dinner on the train, she was in intense pain. The whole of the side of her head was aching and drumming, not quite in time with the train’s rhythm. She thought she probably had an abscess. From time to time she hit at it with her knuckles, horribly aware of bone and mortality, thinking of the poor Pharaohs with their tooth rot, and the insufferable dental decay of the ancient world. She had two more codeine, and got the waiter to open a whole bottle of wine. The meal was quite pleasant, and she had a table to herself: it was a quiet time of year. She read The Years, and ate her eggs in aspic, and her veal, and forgot about her tooth for a second or two while doing it, being an exceptionally greedy person, and then returned seriously, over the fruit and cheese to the subject of pain.

  It was too much. She wanted to cry. The codeines had no effect at all. She took another. It was as bad as typhoid and slightly worse than childbirth, up till then her high-water marks of pain. She tried to remember how awful it had been in the back of the landrover, with the vomiting and the diarrhoea and the appalling cramping and clutching in her guts, and above all that the sickening anxiety about actual death. Nobody ever died of a toothache, though somebody—was it Dr Johnson?—had said that if toothache were mortal, it would be the most dreaded of all illnesses. That was a reassuring thought, and she quoted it to herself several times while waiting for her bill, then went through a speech from Shakespeare and a sonnet or two from Keats and Milton, an Ode from Horace, and a piece of Virgil.

  The train was thumping unnaturally. She wanted to lie down and cry. When the waiter brought her her bill, she went back to her compartment and lay down on the bed and cried, but it didn’t do much good. Desperately, she rang for the attendant and told him she had toothache. He clucked and shook his head and said he was desolated and offered her an aspirin. She declined it. It had been good to speak to somebody, however.

  After another half hour, she took a couple of sleeping pills and got into bed and had another drink. She had ceased to care whether or not she made herself ill, and wished only to knock herself out. She repeated ‘On His Blindness’ and ‘Westminster Bridge’ several times to herself; they had always been a good charm against pain, and she had gone through them many a time while trying to comply with her husband’s desire for sexual intercourse, for instance, and had shouted them aloud very wildly in childbirth, till the nurses told her to shut up.

  Her head felt like a skull. There was no flesh feeling about it at all, the flesh seemed such irrelevance, a silly perishable covering of the serious matter, which was diseased bone. One might as well be dead, she found herself thinking. She had seen a statue once, which had weathered so badly that the head had looked like a skull. The rest of it had been all right, it was only the head that had gone. She felt a bit like that herself. She pinched her leg. It was all right, it was still there, it didn’t hurt. She would try and concentrate on how well her legs felt.

  She must have dozed off at some point, because she was woken up by the feeling of the train grinding to a halt. She opened her blind, and found that they were in the middle of high dark mountains, at a tiny station. The pain of returning consciousness was so bad that she felt like leaping off and demanding extraction from a local dentist. She
couldn’t see a place name: perhaps it was some kind of frontier. A lot of people were getting down from the train and heading for the buffet, which curiously enough (it was one o’clock in the morning) seemed to be open and doing good business. Just as she was wondering whether or not to join them, the attendant knocked on her door and told her the train had stopped for three-quarters of an hour, and how was she, and would she like to get out and have a drink with him in the bar. Why not, she thought to herself, and pulled her coat on over her nightdress, and pushed her feet into her shoes, and staggered out onto the icy platform.

  Her coat was fur lined. It felt rather good momentarily on her bare arms. The whole of the rest of her body felt numb and weightless: she couldn’t feel her legs move. She followed the attendant to the buffet, where he bought her a brandy. The buffet was full of people, positively humming with some curious mountain life of its own: not all of the customers were passengers, some were clearly locals, playing cards, drinking beer, eating omelettes. She stood there in her nightdress drinking. Was it France, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy? She had no idea. Her head wasn’t exactly turning, it wasn’t there. She was disembodied. The attendant, a smooth-faced young man of about forty, was trying to chat her up in French, but she couldn’t hear a word he was saying. She held on to the rail of the bar. Everything had dissolved away, except, amazingly enough, her toothache. That was still at its job, plunging and beating and knocking at her persistently, demanding attention but not getting it: it felt removed, her resistance to it had gone but so had her anxiety, and it raged and throbbed furiously, getting no reply.

  The woman behind the bar was sallow and stringy, her hair tied up in a black bun. She wore a black dress and a small white apron. There were men wearing braces. The tariff was multilingual. The attendant went on talking. She bought him a drink, not listening. Then she wandered back onto the platform.

  The sky was full of stars, the air bitterly cold. There was a smell of pine, and snow on the hill side. They must be high up: the air felt clear and thin. She ground her knuckles into her cheekbone. My life is amazing, she thought to herself dimly. Did anyone ever die to escape the toothache? The rails gleamed. Suicide ran in the family: her younger sister had killed herself, while at University. It had been called an accident. By accident I was spared. To whom should I feel gratitude?