The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  The ditch was still there, but she could tell before she was close enough to peer into it that its prime days were over. There was a building site just on the other side of it, with concrete mixers and signs and heaps of bricks, where once there had been another pure and endless field of cabbages. Knowing the worst already, but unable to see, owing to the lie of the land, until the last moment, she climbed over the small ridge before the descent into the ditch, and saw what she had feared. A thick oily scum covered the water: bits of paper, fag ends, Coca Cola bottles, an old tyre, a chunk of polystyrene and a car seat floated in it. Bubbles, not from fish or newts, but from some invisible putrescence rose to the surface. There was still, surprisingly, a little greenery: a patch of slimy duck weed, a slippery moss. And that was that. Ah well, never mind, she said to herself, one could hope for no better. And she climbed out of the ditch, and went on to Hussey, to see what was going on in the new metropolis.

  Nothing much was going on there, it appeared. There were some new houses, some new shops, a garage. Back Lane had been widened into a road. There were babies in prams in gardens, old men taking dogs for walks. It was much the same as it had been in her own day, but bigger: the people had the same faces, the same voices. It wasn’t even Hussey translated into a commuter’s suburb. It was simply Hussey up to date. Frances began to feel ashamed of her conservationist notions, as she watched two young mothers, babies on the hips, talking over their hedge on their brand new lawns in front of their brand new picture-window houses (one could see right through the houses, into the flat fields behind), by their brand new gold fish ponds. In her day, only Colonel Blake at Hinkley had had a gold fish pond, and it had been the wonder of the district.

  Still, it was a pity about the scum on the ditch.

  She walked through the village, thinking of her grandparents and of their circumscribed lives. Had her grandmother wanted more, was that why she had been so sour? And what had they made of her father’s success? They never spoke of it much, and had dealt with her mother’s superiority by ignoring it, in a manner that Frances at the time had found natural, and now found wholly admirable. Unruffled, they had fed her on strong tea and kippers: they had turned a deaf ear to her requests for coffee. They had listened blankly at her mannered praise of fresh vegetables and duck eggs (they had had a duck-keeping phase) and plied her with biscuits and cake. Thinking back, Frances remembered how she had loved the diet, and how incredibly greedy she had been all her life, a most undignified failing in a woman. What a fool she had made of herself over meals, at times. She wondered what the Station Hotel would provide for dinner. The salmon had really been very nice. What a miracle that she wasn’t monstrously fat. Though of course she could survive on nothing, as she had proved, and had a capacity like a camel for doing without drink, except in the most appalling heat.

  She recognized somebody in Hussey, but was not recognized in turn. It was the village postmistress, now no doubt long retired: a little bent woman of infinite gentility, with a voice so faint that one had had to stand on tiptoe to catch it. She was wearing the same long black suit that she had always worn in Frances’s childhood, but she had a new hat. Her black buttoned shoes looked the same, and not unlike the pair that Frances herself was wearing. The wheel comes full circle. A little further on, on the far outskirts of now monstrously inflated Hussey (grown from forty souls to four hundred) she saw another familiar face: it was Mr Bazeley, who had worked at the big seed merchants’ in Tockley, and who had called at her grandparents’ for tea regularly, every Sunday afternoon. She remembered those teas. They had said little, the three of them: they had sat in companionable silence, the two men smoking. Gran sewing, drinking cups of strong tea and eating pieces of home-made custard tart and rock cakes and fairy cakes and fruit cake. (After, Gran had taken to buying everything from the travelling baker.) When she was small, Frances had thought this silence quite acceptable. Why should they talk, and what about? Later, she had thought it horrible, and had writhed with misery during the event, sweating with fear lest one of the odd remarks should be addressed to her. (Literally sweating, for she had sweated much during adolescence, to add to its other inconveniences.) Yet later, on her last visit before Gran’s death, when she had found loyal ageing fifty-year-old bachelor Mr Bazeley, still loyal, still there, still sitting it out with his cups of poisonous tea, she had taken another line. She had studied her anthropology by then, she knew about primitive societies, kinship, social networks, non-verbal communication.

  And therefore, now, she greeted him with a smile. ‘Hello,’ she said, extending her hand, ‘you won’t remember me, I’m Frances Ollerenshaw, you used to come to tea with my grandparents.’

  And his weathered red-veined face lit with certain recollection, and they stood there painfully for a few moments, exchanging platitudes. Yes, she said, she was married now: yes, she had four children. And how was he? Retired now? Was he enjoying it? Not much to do? But surely he had always had plenty to do in the district. What was she doing here? Just looking around a little. Yes, that’s right, for old times’ sake. Yes, it was changed. A lot of new buildings. Nice for the young people.

  ‘I miss your Gran,’ said Mr Bazeley, digging his stick into the turf: but he said it flatly, dully. How could she know whether he spoke with passion, with loss, with respect, with duty? He spoke a foreign language, the signs of which she could read less well than the signs of a Punic inscription or a Latin text.

  ‘She reached a good age, though,’ said Frances.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, brightening slightly. ‘Eighty-two. A fair age.’

  ‘And the new people at Eel Cottage,’ she dared to ask. ‘How long have they been there? Do you know them?’

  His face darkened. A rum couple, was all that he would say. She had known it, somehow. Triumphant at her own reading of signs and portents (here thwarted with Mr Bazeley) she knew that she had known it.

  He asked after her parents, she was able to tell him that she had seen them alive and well the night before, which made her feel ultra-respectable, as though in fact there might have been something not quite respectable involved in wandering around alone in a Lincolnshire lane, like a tramp, as though she needed the stamp of respectability: and so they parted, cordially. She was glad she had spoken.

  She had to move on, though she had been intending to turn back, because she was afraid of overtaking him. He was ageing and walked slowly, with his stick. She had to walk on briskly, as though that was what she had intended, though she was feeling tired and the road led to nowhere. Past the last two buildings she went—a chapel, closed forever, and a school once closed but now, apparently, with the new growth of population, re-opened. Beyond lay nothing but fields. How far would she have to walk, before she dared return without fear of encountering once more Mr Bazeley? She thought of the King’s Head and its solid comforts. She would have a bath, when she got back, and write up those notes, or some of them at least.

  She was about to turn back, judging that she had let enough time pass, when she saw ahead of her a sight that drew her forward. It was a field full of people, and the vision of it flashed across her unprepared eye, shaking her in a way that she could not comprehend. A field full of people, only—women and children, in a bare ploughed field. Stooping and bending under the large sky. They had baskets, they were filling the baskets. What were they doing, in that bare field? There were no crops, there was nothing. Small children stooped, women in head scarves stooped, like an ancestral memory. She shivered as she drew nearer, and her first impression dispelled itself—for of course, they were ordinary women and children gathering stones, and when she leaned on the gate and asked the nearest what they were doing, they said they were clearing the new school playing field, and she could see that that was what they were doing, and that they were enjoying it—it was a voluntary effort, a communal effort, and the children were nicely dressed and the women were exchanging jokes as they worked. Why then had she seen something quite different? For what she had see
n had been an image of forced labour, of barrenness, of futility, of toil, of women and children stooping for survival, harvesting nothing but stones. The big field stretched aimlessly, the people at the far reaches looked small and aimless. Shivering, she went back and caught the bus to Tockley.

  On the way back to the hotel, she called in at the Museum. Forlornly it represented culture amidst the Building Society windows: she needed it, after the stones and the cabbages. It had been done up since her day. There was still the same collection of Roman coins and pots, the same old bones, but they had been put in new cases with new charts, and re-labelled. And there was a whole new section, a sign of the cultural times, devoted to agricultural implements and archaeology, with photographs and reconstructions and exhibits. The most interesting exhibit, to Frances, was a thing called an eel stang. It was a black pronged fork, and staring at it, she felt the same shiver as she had felt watching the bare field. Something is the matter with me, she thought, her teeth chattering. Flu again, or salmonella. The label attached to the eel stang said, or so she thought, that it was an implement used for turning eels in ditches. At the description, she shivered again, and looked again, and saw that it said not turning, but trapping: it was a useful implement, for trapping eels. She felt an unaccountable relief. She had had a vision, she had to admit it to herself, of old men pointlessly turning over eels in ditches in meaningless labour, just as those women and children in the field had appeared to her at first sight as an allegory of pointless rural toil. We dig, we plant, we reap, we dig again, and barely we survive. The thought made her feel ill. A man with an eel stang, like Wordsworth’s leech gatherer, stood around portentously in her mind, aimlessly searching the ditches for eels to turn. He meant something to her, she had not conjured him from nothing, she had not misread that notice for nothing. What did he personify, that ancient labourer? She looked in horror at his black pronged fork, and turned away. She turned back to modernity and her bedroom’s efficient plumbing.

  She had a bath, and washed her jersey, and washed her hair, and then sat in front of her typewriter drying off. She squeezed the water out of her jersey very tightly, and piled it in a neat little heap on top of the bulb of the reading lamp, where it steamed gently, like a little household god. Then she looked at her notes and thought about primitive societies and why she had become an archaeologist and what on earth it was that she was trying to prove about the past. She felt as though she had been visited by ghosts. Karel’s special subject was the history of agriculture in the eighteenth century, and she had often talked about the matter with him—the whole story of enclosures, of labourers’ wages, of rural poverty, of Captain Swing and peasants’ revolts, she knew only through him. She had often teased him about his interest in these things, for he was the most urban of men, and could not tell a turnip from a swede, or wheat from barley, and it had seemed strange to find him so attached to the history of the countryside. I am reclaiming the lost land of the Jew, he would say. You should go to Israel, she would say, but he would shake his head and say that he belonged to the cabbage plots and mustard fields of Europe, for all that his father had been a Jewish doctor and his mother a Polish journalist.

  The primitive life appalled her. Why had she chosen to struggle with it? Why had she chosen to divert her attention from the Greeks and the Romans? Classical archaeology, the praise of Western thought, would have been quite good enough for her. She could have spent her time digging the ditches of Norfolk and Lincolnshire for relics of Roman occupation, instead of confronting the problems of the Sahara.

  The incense steamed upward from her jersey. She had to turn it from time to time so it would not scorch, as the man in her mind turned his eels. John Clare, she remembered, had lived not too far from here. Karel had much admired the poetry of John Clare. John Clare had gone mad, another case of the Midlands sickness, but before his madness he had deplored the loss of the commons and the death of moles, in his great tenderness for the creation.

  The pursuit of archaeology, she said to herself, like the pursuit of history, is for such as myself and Karel a fruitless attempt to prove the possibility of the future through the past. We seek a Utopia in the past, a possible if not an ideal society. We seek golden worlds from which we are banished, they recede infinitely, for there never was a golden world, there was never anything but toil and subsistence, cruelty and dullness.

  Ah, if I believed that, she said to herself. But we unearth horrors, and justify them. Child sacrifice we label benevolent birth control, a dull and endless struggle against nature we label communion with the earth. We see an Eskimo child drag a dead sea-gull along a bleak beach by a piece of seal gut, and we praise its diverse customary joys.

  A friend of hers, another archaeologist, had recently discovered unmistakable evidence that the civilization he had been investigating had, contrary to all previous suggestions, practised cannibalism. He was still close enough to the discovery to admit that it had shocked him: the practices of a people centuries dead had shocked him, because he had invested them with his own values, he had learned to like them. In time, he said, I know I shall justify them. I will see why they did it, and why I am wrong to judge them. It is simply a question of investing five more years of thought.

  What for, what for, said Frances to herself. What is it for, the past, one’s own or the world’s. To what end question it so closely.

  Generations of her ancestors had gathered stones in those fields. Her grandfather had grown tomatoes and potatoes. Her father had studied newts and become a professor of zoology. And for herself, as a result of their labours, the world lay open. That was why she sat here, so comfortably, with a tumbler of brandy at her elbow, a portable typewriter in front of her, a choice of two single beds (odd, how they never seemed to have single rooms with baths in hotels these days), and a handy nylon jersey smoking by her side. Even her lumps were benign. Her spirits soared with the steam. The choice of two beds, both with clean sheets, was after all quite something.

  Part Two

  Janet Bird née Ollerenshaw was pushing her pram along Tockley High Street. The fact that she was doing this, as she was some 24 pages ago, does not indicate that no time has passed since that last brief encounter. Nor does it indicate a desire on the part of the narrator to impose an arbitrary order or significance upon events. It is simply a fact that Janet Bird spent a great deal of time pushing her pram up and down Tockley High Street. She had not much choice. She had little else to do. One could, arguably, have picked her up at one or another of the various monotonous and repetitive tasks that filled her day, but she might as well be allowed some exercise. For she gets little.

  It was now autumn. Nothing much had changed in Tockley in the last three months, since Frances Wingate paid her pilgrimage. The coats and hats in Elfrida Maple’s window were still autumnal in tint, the butchers still flourished plastic parsley, the Holland Shopping Precinct was not yet finished. The notices for Evening Classes, which had been up already when Frances Wingate née Ollerenshaw walked the same street in July, were still exactly where they had been, with the difference that they now applied to current, not future events. It was at one of these notices, in the Sportshop window, that Janet Bird was now staring. Her baby, three months older than on his last appearance, was sitting in his pram with two red fingers stuck in his mouth, rubbing his gum. He was teething, and from time to time seemed to be in great pain. Two white isolated pointed icebergs of teeth rose from the raw red bottom gum, and he sucked his fingers perpetually, making them wet and red and consequently, in the cold wind, chapped. She had tried to make him wear gloves, but gloves made him scream. He sucked miserably, while Janet read the notice for the twentieth time.

  She was wondering whether to join a class on classical music, or a class on upholstery, or a class on bird watching. It was strange that Tockley offered these things, but it offered them with some persistence. She did not really want to join an evening class at all. She was feeling too low to profit from an evening class,
but she felt that if she did not join, her husband would be angry with her, and she was so tired of his being angry with her that she would do quite a lot to avoid it. But maybe not upholstery. Cookery she could have faced, but he would have thought that was stupid. And so it would have been, but she had almost ceased to mind how stupid she appeared.

  The main reason why she did not want to go to an evening class was that she did not want either her husband or her mother to gain the moral advantage of baby-sitting for her. If she were to let either of them make any inroads on her misery, they would destroy her. Her only hope lay in total resistance. They must not be allowed to pity her or help her. She had dedicated her life to resistance, but her resistance must be both total and secret. On the other hand, it was possible to deceive them both, as she had already discovered—she could allow one or the other of them to baby-sit, while she went off to a course on Sociology or the Russian Novel, as long as she didn’t actually enjoy herself while she was out. Perhaps, after all, that would be the best line. It would give Mark less opportunity to complain that she was turning into a cabbage, or whatever it was that he was complaining she was doing. As long as she didn’t find herself actually enjoying herself, or taking an interest, she would be safe enough. And there was, after all, little likelihood of that.

  She took the brake off the pram, and jerked it forward. The baby’s fingers jerked out of his mouth, and he let out a despairing wail, then crammed them back in again, glaring at her reproachfully, with incommunicable distress. She stared back, not knowing what to do. Her regret was immense, but what was there to do about it? She could not even smile at him in his angry captive state. ‘There, there,’ she said, weakly. Her voice sounded very odd. Often she didn’t speak to anyone all day except the baby and the people in the shops. I’ll forget how to talk one of these days, she said to herself, as she set off home. She would give the baby a bit of biscuit when she got back, perhaps he would feel better with something to chew on. She didn’t want him to be miserable. But what on earth could she do about his teeth?