The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  The family history was in fact far from cheerful. Without exaggeration (and often she and Hugh exaggerated, carelessly, for effect, to dispel the gloom), the record was not too good. It was not on her mother’s brilliant side that things were black: there, eccentricity and talent had mingled and expressed themselves happily, collecting Nobel prizes on the way, and condemning only an odd maiden aunt or two to a quiet Retreat. It was her father’s family, that so-called ordinary family, that gave rise to alarm.

  Thinking of them, she thought with a sudden panic of her own children. As an adolescent, she had sworn that she would have no children: she seriously feared that she and they would go mad. And then, through some quirk of nature, she had quite forgotten her doubts, she had married, had given birth cheerfully, and produced as it seemed cheerful children. Maybe she shouldn’t have done it? Maybe she had had a brief period of light between two darknesses, long enough to condemn four others to perpetual gloom, before returning there herself? Why hadn’t she listened to her fifteen-year-old self? Those violent forebodings hadn’t been adolescent extravagances, they had been true warnings, as she had known at the time.

  Nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, turning in some discomfort. This is post-operative depression I am suffering from, and worry about poor Stephen.

  She resolved to ring Stephen in the morning.

  But still she couldn’t get to sleep. Thoughts of her childhood, of the flat Midlands, obtruded. She thought of her visits to her grandmother, visits both dreaded and desired. She remembered stories of the great-uncle who had hanged the cat and then himself, of the distant cousin who had thrown himself under a train, of aunts in lunatic asylums and another ancient cousin who had tramped the country preaching the word until he was found dead in a ditch. Some said murdered, though it was never known. With such stories her grandmother would lighten dark evenings, though she would never tell all: she always implied there was worse to tell, if she only could, if Hugh and Frances and Alice were only old enough to hear it. It had been such a fascinating mixture of morbidity and cosiness, her grandmother’s house. She wondered whether it was still standing.

  After she had rung Stephen, she would leave her parents, and spend a few days in Tockley. Her children were all with their father for the week, while she convalesced. She would take herself off to the Fens, and stay in a hotel, and visit all the old places, and find out what it was that was worrying her. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe the old black bird would flap off on its dirty old wings if she went to catch it.

  Morbid, morbid, said Frances to herself, as she curled up more comfortably, her hand tucked between her legs, ceasing to finger the irritating stitches. She felt better already. The prospect of action always cheered her up.

  As Frances Wingate sat in a first class carriage (her car was in for service) on the way to Tockley, her second cousin Janet Bird (née Ollerenshaw) pushed her baby and her pram along Tockley High Street.

  They had never met, and were not yet to meet.

  Frances Wingate had not been to Tockley for many years—she could not remember how many. Her grandfather had died when she was fourteen, and her grandmother ten years later, but she had been out of the country at the time and had not gone to the funeral. In fact, after her grandfather’s death she had hardly visited Tockley at all, she now remembered guiltily: the place had begun to weigh on her adolescent spirits, she could no longer stand the slow pace, the solitude, the emptiness, the very things which had charmed her as a small child, and her grandmother had turned odd and crabby, even more short-tempered than she had been when younger, even more given to disconcerting attacks and long silences.

  She thought of it, then as now, as ‘going to Tockley,’ but the house wasn’t really in Tockley: it was about six miles out, a distance that had then seemed enormous, as it had to be negotiated by a bus. The town was a medium-sized ordinary provincial town, with much light industry: it was easy enough to get to, but it was the kind of place one goes through, rather than stops at. Frances had booked herself into the British Rail hotel, because it was next to the station, and because her guide book said it was well run and that the food was acceptable. She looked out of the window and wondered what she remembered of the town. Little, she thought. It hadn’t meant much to her grandparents: they went there once a fortnight, to shop, depending otherwise on the shop in the nearest village, and on their own produce. There was a famous church, rising out of the flat plain, a landmark for miles: her guide book gave it a star and a glowing description, but she didn’t remember that she had ever been in it. She remembered, vaguely, the wool shop, the shoe shop, Woolworth’s. It had probably all changed by now.

  The cottage, too, had probably changed. She remembered it with a peculiar intensity. It had been the one fixed point in her childhood, for her parents had been itinerant, constantly moving as they climbed the academic ladder of promotion—five years here, three years there, had been the pattern. Granny Ollerenshaw, in the cottage, had been immovable, unchanged and unchanging. They called it Eel Cottage: over the doorway there was a square which announced EEL, 1779. For years Frances had thought that the eel was the eel of the fens and ditches: only later, looking more closely, did she consider that the mysterious and evocative word must have represented the builder’s or owner’s initials. The cottage was a basic cottage, the kind that children draw: low, a door in the middle, two windows with small panes downstairs, two windows with small panes upstairs. It was in red brick, the brick of the district, with a red tiled fluted roof. There were no rose bushes on either side of the door; though there were plenty in the fields behind, for it was a good district for roses, as for other things. On either side was a long low red-roofed barn: behind and around stretched fields and glass houses. It stood a little back from the road, in the middle of nowhere in particular, alone, with a strange look of basic survival as well as basic shape about it. It looked old, part of the landscape, and yet in some way uncertain and pathetic, as though the landscape would never really accept it. In the front garden was a large notice, which said ‘Nursery Garden. Please call at house for—’ and then would follow a list of seasonal treats: stick beans, peas, cut flowers (tulips, gladioli, daffodils), apples, pears, lettuce, marrows. It was a paradise for children.

  Perhaps the uneasiness of the landscape sprang from the fact that it was all reclaimed land. Its very fertility was unnatural. The country needed drainage, and it was crossed and crossed again by dykes and ditches, sometimes many feet deeper than the land surface, sometimes, frighteningly, banked higher than the fields. If man did not cherish it the earth would sink beneath the sea, as the Romans had sunk beneath the Midlands marshes: bits of Roman pot sunk into the marsh were forever being unearthed by local ploughmen. Not for nothing was a neighbouring district called after Holland. Frances remembered being enthralled and terrified, as a child, by stories of Dutch courage: the boy with his finger in the hole in the dyke, Hans Brinker and the silver skates, and just beyond, the raging water. A small tilt of the earth’s surface and everything would be swamped and disappear forever. She and Alice had been frightened, on the car journey from Oxford, or Leeds, or Bristol: the car (a small Austin) had seemed so low, the country so flat, the ditches so deep, the banks so high, the cabbages so huge. And then, at Eel Cottage, one reached safety: one went into the small low rooms where the paraffin lamps glowed and the small panes shut out the darkness, one went into a small-scale human world, with pot plants instead of shrub-sized cauliflowers, with knick-knacks and sewing boxes and souvenirs and proximity. It was a tiny cottage: her father, not a tall man, banged his head on the door frames, and her mother would fill the living room with her presence when she sat on the immensely decayed, patched and cat-filled couch. She never sat there for long: she would never stay the night. There wasn’t room for her.

  The children would stay there alone. For Frances, at first, it was like paradise, like the original garden. She was fascinated by tne garden itself, and would hang around helping while her gr
andfather, a fat round man with check trousers and boots and muddy finger nails and a moustache, would dig, or hoe, or sow, or mutter to himself. She sprayed insects, dug up weeds, picked tomatoes. It was a little business, just enough to live on nicely. It supplied various local greengrocers and florists, and did a little passing trade at the door. Frances adored the passing trade, and would wait passionately for the moment when her grandfather would be out in the field, and her gran in the orchard hanging out the washing, so that she could rush importantly to answer the bell, to weigh out a pound of tomatoes or sell a bunch of tulips. She would often be given a sixpence for her trouble, which she pocketed with pleasure, though there was nothing in the neighbourhood to spend it on except more tomatoes or more dahlias. Hugh, for some reason which she could never discover, didn’t like answering the bell: he would hide in the shed if anyone called. He spent most of his time there, in fact, reading books: Dickens, Walter Scott, Shakespeare, the Reader’s Digest, whatever the cottage had to offer. Alice didn’t like serving either: she would slink off, then slink back enviously as Frances collected her sixpence. Sometimes she crept back just in time to get a penny herself, which always annoyed Frances: a sign of weakness of character, she thought, to want to get something for nothing.

  Alice was dead now, and Hugh a grandfather.

  There had been other pleasures. The very ditches, which seemed so unnatural and threatening elsewhere, were a source of delight when close enough to the safety of the cottage. There was one at the end of the potato field (new potatoes clinging like little white marbles to their delicate network of hairy roots, even Gran, normally lazy and cross, would sometimes take the trouble to wash them and scrape them, boil them and butter them and exclaim on their flavour)—it was a deep one, steep sided, and utterly private. Frances remembered the sides of it as being ten feet tall, a dangerous descent, but she had herself been small at the time. She would slip off there alone, when bored with helping, or when Gran shouted at her once too often: Clear off, bugger off, Gran would yell every now and then at her gently nurtured grandchildren, an instruction which both shocked and thrilled them. And Hugh would disappear with a book, Alice would wheedle around till she was in favour, and Frances would make for the ditch.

  It was full of creatures. Its flora varied from section to section: some bits were choked with duck weed, bright green and thick and scummy, others were clear, with forget-me-nots, and pale yellow comfrey, and even bits of watercress. Canadian pond weed grew in the water: purple spikes and poppies and ragwort and teazles grew on the banks. In the spring there were celandines and cowslips. It was untouched, undisturbed, and the water, over the yellow mud, was clear and cold. Frances often drank from it, and found it delicious. The animals that lived in the ditch were as varied as the flora, though more evenly distributed: there were water boatmen, large beetles, tadpoles, frogs, minnows, stickleback, grubs, caddis larvae, water rats, newts, a whole unnecessary and teeming world of creation. Frances, a speculative child, would lie there on her stomach with her face against the frontier of the water and peer for hours and hours, wondering what God had bothered to make it all for, and pondering on the origin of species; coming near at times to an apprehension of a real answer: God had done it all for fun, for joy, for excitement in creation, for variety, for delight. Why seek to justify? There it all was. One year there was a plague of frogs, there were millions of them everywhere, something had gone wrong with nature’s regulations, they got into the fields and all over the back yard and into the house, and Gran nearly went mad beating them to death with the broom, poor little hopping tadpoles. Gran hated nature, and no wonder, she had to keep it at bay, or it would be in under the doors and through the cracks in the bricks, oozing like flood water, irresistible, spoiling her little dry haven.

  Frances liked the newts best. They were elusive, and therefore something of a sign of favour. One day she had gone down there, in tears over some trivial row with Hugh, and had found several of the small ancient special creatures, floating on the surface, their little arms outstretched, taking the sun. Breathless, quiet, she sat there and watched them. They were surely a sign to her, a blessing. They floated there, green grey, pink bellied, frill backed, survivors from a world of pre-history, born before the Romans arrived, before the bits of bronze-age pot sank in the swamp, remembering in their tiny bones the great bones of the stenosaurus, a symbol of God’s undying contract with the earth. They floated with an intense pleasure: she felt it herself, in the warm sun. And then, suddenly, silently, with one accord, they sank, swimming downwards with their small graceful limbs, leaving bubbles to rise behind them from the depths. She had been left on the bank. But did not forget them.

  She had always wanted to see an eel. There were eels, she knew, but she never saw one. It was her one failure.

  In the end, things had changed: inevitably, she supposed. It wasn’t exactly an angel with a flaming sword that had expelled her: nor was it, as she had at one Freudian stage assumed, simply the sins of sex, though she had in fact reached puberty at Eel Cottage one hot summer, to her terror and alarm, miles from sanitary belts and sanitary towels, nearly a year earlier than most of her contemporaries, and unable to confide in crosspatch Gran, who, she was sure, had never heard of such a thing. In the end, weeping bitterly, appalled by the rust coloured guilty stain, she had told Hugh, and he, noble boy that he was, had borrowed Grandad’s bike and cycled into Tockley for her and bought the things. She had always loved Hugh for that, and had also been forced to recognize that she couldn’t have been all that neurotic about sex if she had managed to confide in him about such a matter. He had often thanked her for the opportunity to prove himself a hero: always rather dashing in his own sexual exploits, he had been delighted by this early chance to show his courage. (He had been fifteen at the time: she, twelve.) In fact, one of the amusing aspects of life at the Eel had been the fact that she and Hugh had been allowed, indeed compelled, to share a bedroom, and there late at night they would discuss such subjects as atom bombs, homosexuality, procreation, contraception, masturbation and love, while Alice slept or pretended to sleep: Hugh would quote to Frances Shakespeare’s sonnets (there really was rather a dearth of reading matter at the cottage, and by the age of fifteen Hugh had been through it all several times, though he always refused to import much, for to him the Eel reading matter was as special as, for Frances, were the Eel newts)—and they would discuss Shakespeare, and whether he was or wasn’t a homosexual. Hugh took the line that he was clearly bisexual: Frances tended, even at that early age, to defend her sex by claiming that the sonnets to the young man (W.H., or H.W., or whoever he was) were clearly not written from the heart, whereas those to the dark lady were hot with unwilling passion. She could get quite cross about it at times.

  So it can’t have been wholly the fact of sexual development that spoiled her stays at the cottage. Perhaps it was somehow connected with growing large, for the rooms began to seem cramped and pokey, instead of deep and comfortable: she too, a tall girl, would occasionally hit her head going through a door. Or maybe her grandmother’s temper really had deteriorated. Her grandfather fell ill, two years before he died, and became slower and slower and quieter and quieter, delegating most of his work to two lads from the next village who came in to help him: one of them was simple, and would stand for hours leaning on a spade gazing vacantly and dribbling, and the other could not really manage on his own, though he tried. The garden went to seed: first one patch was left, then another. Nobody bothered to dig up the new potatoes or to plant carrots. Even the fruit trees seemed to be growing old, for each year they produced fewer plums, fewer pears, fewer apples, and what they did produce was left to the wasps and the birds. Grandfather kept the flowers going, and the tomatoes, because they were his favourites, and they were nearer to the house, but bit by bit the garden frayed round its outer edges: the ditches grew over, the fields were overgrown, the spinach leapt into trees then withered into yellow decay. Nobody talked about what would happe
n when Grandfather died: at home, once, Frances heard her father say that they were all right, his parents, they’d got quite a bit put away, but it seemed depressing to her, just the same. The one good thing about those last years was that, towards the end, Gran let her husband have a dog. She had always hated dogs, and swore she would never have one in the house: she was a cat lover herself, and sometimes filled the house with as many as eight cats. Then, suddenly, eighteen months before the end, she got rid of the cats. Just like that. Her favourite cat, the matriarch, died, and she sent the boy off with the others to shoot them or drown them. Frances never dared to ask which he had done, for she had liked the cats, and was horrified by this brutal act of treachery. And then she let her husband have a dog.

  It was a little yellow puppy: Frances saw it when it was very small. Her grandfather would hobble along, immensely fat by now, leaning on his stick, and the silly little dog would trail after him: every now and then he would gently garner it with his stick, when it strayed away. He talked to it with pride. In the evenings, it sat on his knee, and it would lap hot tea out of his saucer. Gran watched all this sourly, and said nothing. Frances, of an age now to be sentimental, was deeply moved by the thought that this man had all his life wanted a dog—when she was little, he had told her about the dogs of his childhood—and had had to wait like this, till the end. The big man and the little pup made her want to cry, but no tears came. She had wept over the dead cats.