The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  On the way home, she wondered why she had ever got married. She spent a good deal of each day wondering about this question, and as yet had come up with very little in the way of an answer. The answers that did from time to time float towards her, before floating off again, were too trivial as well as too unpleasant to grasp. Could she possibly have done it because her younger sister had just done it before her, and she was jealous? Such things did happen, she knew. Was it because her mother had put a bit of pressure on her? Was it because she couldn’t think of any other way of getting away from her mother? Was it because she couldn’t think of anything else in the world to do? She would scan the back pages of women’s magazines for hints about her own behaviour, but found little: there was some conspiracy afoot, to make people believe that marriage was necessary and desirable, and nobody seemed at all concerned to justify it, as though it needed no justification. Occasionally one of the more expensive and avant garde of the women’s magazines would suggest that there were other ways of doing things, but she could tell at once that the other ways would not have suited her, and that the kind of women who did the other things did not live in Tockley.

  She never wasted time on wondering whether or not she had married Mark because she loved him. That would at least have simplified the issue. One could feel sorry for people who married in love and then fell out of love. It must happen quite frequently. Janet had seen it happen to her own acquaintances. No, her own case had been very different. She had certainly not loved Mark when she had agreed to marry him. She had been quite interested in him at one point, she admitted that much to herself—otherwise she wouldn’t have gone out with him, would she? But as for love—she had always known that she hadn’t loved him. Why on earth had she agreed to marry him?

  Walking past Mason’s, seeing the new displays of crockery and household goods in the windows, she had a twinge of shame, as she remembered how hard she had worked on making herself take an interest in wedding presents. What a crazy binge of objects a wedding produces. Insane. Tea sets, coffee sets, pyrex dishes with different designs, fish knives, ironing boards, toasters, electric kettles, what kind of refrigerator, what colour bedroom curtains. They had been quite distracting, the objects, they had taken her mind off Mark for days on end. (Frances Wingate, her oh so much cleverer cousin, had been a little taken up with the whole thing herself too, though she would never in a million years have admitted it. She had been particularly taken, when young, twenty-one and foolish, by a writing desk that her mother-in-law to be (now her ex-mother-in-law) had given her. She hadn’t minded the Gallé vase, either. There is some tribal insanity that comes over women, as they approach marriage: society offers pyrex dishes and silver tea spoons as bribes, as bargains, as anaesthesia against self-sacrifice. Stuck about with silver forks and new carving knives, as in a form of acupuncture, the woman lays herself upon the altar, upon the couch, half-numb. Even sensible women, like Frances Wingate: sensible women, who later struggle, as their senses return, and throw their Gallé vases and fish knives violently around their dwellings, as a protest.)

  Mason’s window was like an altar, a shrine to matrimony. So thought Janet Bird, as she walked past it, and thought of all the poor fools who would make their offerings, their purchases, who would receive coffee percolators and ice buckets and hotplates and pressure cookers, and then live forever disconsolate amidst their useless indestructible relics. Janet’s cupboards (and she was a tidy woman, who had been married only four years) were already filled with irreparable toasters and handleless non-stick frying pans.

  Why did one let it all happen? She would have liked some kind of an explanation. But there was very little in the way of an explanation, in the streets of Tockley. Aided by a psychoanalyst, or even by a reading of Freud in his new Pelican edition, she might have been able to construct some kind of an answer. But there were no psychoanalysts in Tockley. There was not even a bookshop that stocked Pelicans. And she wouldn’t have understood Freud, had she got hold of it. She was on her own, in a solitude that was so bleak that it was a thing on its own, almost a possession, almost company. She and the baby were in it together: at first she’d been afraid that he would have been on his own too, somewhere out there, but they shared the same envelope of darkness. It was a relief, to find that they constituted a unit, instead of two separate solitudes. She was not a natural mother: mothering did not come easily to her, for she was over-anxious, over-fastidious, she sterilized bottles too carefully, she read the Baby Book too often, she had no instinct for easy margins or leeways. The sight of the baby crawling on a less-than-spotless floor, or raising an unsterilized object to his mouth, would fill her with panic. But despite her apprehensions, she cared for him: he was her small powerless ally, and it was not him that she resented, from him there was no need to close herself away. He was an innocent victim of larger forces. And at the moment, the poor mite was miserable. His teeth hurt him, and she could do nothing to help. He would wail all evening, while she tried to entertain Mark’s colleagues, and felt inadequate, in all directions. She foresaw it all.

  Perhaps she would buy some jelly for the baby’s gums. It did no good, but it did no harm either. Even the book said it did no harm. She paused, in front of the chemist’s, and then pushed on, to a larger, more anonymous self-service store further down the road, which had a chemist’s department. She didn’t like small shops, where one recognized the staff, and was recognized by them. She preferred larger places, like this one, with its long counters and cash desks and cut prices, with its rapid turnover of assistants. Queueing at the cash desk, she watched peaky, undernourished little girls, in high platform shoes and ludicrously short skirts pushing trolleys around, re-stocking shelves: girls of sixteen, with tough, scrappy, vacant faces and pink and blue plastic shoes. And boys of sixteen, in overalls, with long drooping hair, and thin lips. She ached, with either sympathy or envy for them: she was not sure which.

  (Frances Wingate, watching these same girls and boys three months earlier, had reflected on the extraordinary style of the provinces: so avant garde in some respects, so out of date in others. The short skirts had long vanished from the London scene, but the platform shoes had reached heights of exaggeration in colour and form, that none but the boldest would yet have dared to wear.)

  Outside the church, Janet paused, and stared at the notice board, waiting idly for the church bells to strike. It was almost mid-day. There had been moments, when things had been bad, when she had thought of turning to the church for help. She could have joined a mothers’ group, now that she had a baby. She could speak to the vicar. The vicar must be used to problems such as hers. But what could he do about them? Nothing. He could not change Mark’s nature, or her own nature, or Tockley or their life in it, and without some change on that kind of scale she didn’t see much hope. It was better, really, not to give in: to keep one’s self to one’s self. A vicar would wheedle one’s misery away, minimize it, stroke it and soothe it, and leave her nothing in its stead, leave her ashamed and betrayed. Vicars and doctors were all the same, they told one it was natural to suffer from headaches and misery at puberty, to dread marriage, to feel ill and get cystitis when newly married, to dread pregnancy and feel ill and cry a lot when pregnant, to cry a lot with post-natal depression. It was all so natural.

  She was tired of hearing that kind of thing. It hadn’t done her much good. It had brought her here, to this full stop.

  She read the church notice boards, as she had read the Evening Class notice boards. One leaflet invited her to a jumble sale, another to an evening with slides about a Mission in India. A larger, more garish poster, with black print on a yellow ground, declared, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help.’ There were of course no hills round here, and therefore no help: though she remembered being told in a modern Bible Class at school that the lines didn’t mean that help came from the hills at all, they should have punctuated differently, thus: ‘I will lift mine eyes unto the hills: fro
m whence cometh my help?’ As though it were the enemies that were to descend from the hills, and the Lord to save one from them. Either way, there was no Lord, and there were no hills. It was all of an even flatness. She would quite have liked to see the warriors descending from the mountains, rattling their sabres, aiming for her heart.

  The church bells tolled. She looked up at the tall spire. It was an exceptionally beautiful church, or so she had been informed since she was a small child, by local schoolteachers and local papers. Once she had climbed to the top of it. From the top of the spire one could see many flat miles, and the flat wide river, and the town’s outskirts, and the chemical factory where her husband was to work. (She hadn’t met him then.) And she had clung to the old worn stone, alarmed by her vertigo, alarmed by the almost overpowering impulse to jump off and crash into the churchyard below. That again was something that puzzled her. A lot of people suffered from vertigo, she knew, it was considered quite natural, and the top of the tower was often crowded with giggling, gasping, squeaking schoolchildren, or with parents blenching with fear as their children tried to stand on tiptoe to see over the parapet. But why, why was it natural? And if it was natural, why did people continue to build and climb towers? Why didn’t they stay safely on the ground? They did not climb merely for the view.

  The church had been no help. She was too young for the Women’s Institute. The baby clinic was, she supposed, intended to be some kind of support, and it had been reassuring to discover that Hugh was gaining, not losing weight. But that was about it. Against her one-time friends she had hardened her heart, for fear lest they should discover her secret, and anyway the nicest of them had left the district. As who would not?

  The church bells fell silent. She would walk through the church yard home, she decided. There were yellow leaves on the graves, and the berries of the holly were already red. She found herself thinking, despite herself, of the mushroom soup and the chicken that she was going to cook for the evening. She was not a confident cook, as she was not a confident mother, and always deeply dreaded that she would do something wrong. Every meal that she prepared seemed to contain in it the charred or bleeding ghosts of her first disasters: they could never be properly concealed or exorcized. However unexceptionable the meal, she felt that her guests could discern in it her past mistakes. It was in vain that she told herself that it didn’t matter, that she didn’t even like the guests, that she didn’t care whether they liked their dinner or not, that anyway Cynthia’s roast lamb hadn’t been much to boast about, New Zealand it must have been and not properly unfrozen at that—it was in vain to repeat these arguments to herself, for she knew that she cared deeply though she despised herself for caring. Sliced peaches and sliced mushrooms floated in her head: she must be careful with the sauce, the last sauce she had made had been a little lumpy, and Mark had made an elaborate pantomime of dissecting one of the lumps.

  (For Frances Wingate, tolled the Christian bells of the church. Happily neglectful, confident mother, no agonizer she over bits of bread salvaged from the carpet, over mud and diseases: haphazard, confident, efficient cook. To them that have, it shall be given. There was no need for Frances Wingate to bury her talents. Stony ground, stony ground, tolled the bells, for Janet Bird.)

  Janet was nearly home. She wondered if anything nice could possibly have happened there while she was out. What could she imagine that might cheer her up? This was a game she had played since adolescence—on the way back from school, she would try to imagine something, anything, that would make life seem better, and at times would admit to herself that she would have welcomed a cataclysm, a volcano, a fire, an outbreak of war, anything to break the unremitting nothingness of her existence. What would she feel like now, if she got back and found that the whole new estate they lived in had been burned to the ground? She had to admit that she would have felt nothing but delight to see the black ruins and the smouldering ash. It was even possible. A gas main might have leaked and blown up, that old bore Mr Blaney next door might at last have fallen asleep over his pipe and newspaper and set the place on fire. If such a thing happened, at least something would have happened, and she and Hugh would have been safely out of it, and free—but free for what? She could not imagine. But perhaps for something. If the shell were burned, she dimly sensed, she might work her way into a new life. AJone, she was not strong enough to do it. It would take a cataclysm to release her, and a cataclysm, even via the gas main, was not likely to come her way.

  She had been of late more and more drawn towards disasters. She hadn’t quite taken stock of this yet, hadn’t quite even noticed it, but the fact was that her heart quickened with excitement when she read of factories going up in flames, of explosions in Northern Ireland and central London, of floods in Italy and car crashes on motorways. She longed to see an aeroplane drop burning from the sky. She had even started to read books about holocausts. She had always been an idle reader, picking things up in the library, able to involve herself easily in the adventures of Nurse Brown or the life of Anne Boleyn or the voyage of the Kon-Tiki. But recently, since the child was born, she had found herself reading of horrors. She did not know why. She started mildly, with A Town Like Alice, and other such war stories, then moved on to heavier stuff—the literature of the concentration camps, war memoirs, even Solzhenitsyn. She could not have said what drew her to it. Was it fear or pleasure? She did not know. As she walked home, picturing Aragon Place in ruins, she thought of the book the was reading at the moment—a heart-rending account, it was, a fictional account, of a mother in Poland, a Jewish woman, who had been taken off to the concentration camps on a train, and who had thrown her baby out of the train window as the train moved through a flat field. She had thrown the baby into the arms of a Polish peasant woman, who was hoeing the turnip field, and as the train moved on inexorably to extinction, the Polish woman and the Jewish woman had exchanged looks of profound significance, and the Polish woman had picked up the baby and had embraced and kissed it with a promise of devotion as the train moved out of sight. That was as far as Janet had got with the story: there were at least five-sixths of the book still to come, including no doubt a description of the mother’s death, in the labour camp or the gas chambers.

  What was it that attracted her to these subjects? The death and the destruction? Or the baby salvaged and harvested like a turnip from the field?

  Janet Bird, who was after all a post-war baby, knew quite well that the Poles were not distinguished for their love of the Jews, and that she was reading a romantic fiction. She took it seriously, nevertheless.

  (Karel Schmidt, who had been born in Pilsen, took such fantasies seriously too, for other reasons.)

  She looked at her small baby, who was dribbling miserably on to the stained front of his tiny anorak. She would never have to throw him for his salvation from a train window as she went on to her death, or at least she imagined that she would not have to. But perhaps, with her, a doom as dreadful he was inheriting. Not the gas chamber, not the labour camp, but some lengthy disaster. Perhaps it was for this reason that her soul yearned for the holocaust. Perhaps, now, she should fling him from her, for his own sake. I won’t do, as a mother, she thought sadly. The sight of his wet jacket filled her with despair. She could not endure it, she could not endure it. But she had to endure it. There was no way of getting off this train.

  (Stephen Ollerenshaw, on this theme, was to have other views, alas.)

  The estate, of course, had not been burned down. It was not even smoking slightly. It looked perfectly normal, established forever, in the late October air. There it stood, so conveniently near the centre of town, only a twenty-minute pram-push from the centre of town. It was supposed to be a good address, a cut above the council and factory housing that lay further out on the long ribbon roads that wandered in their desultory manner through the surrounding countryside. Its inhabitants were nice people, as Janet’s mother was fond of pointing out: even Janet was not above reflecting that her neighbours
were at least, most of them, ‘nice’. There was a school teacher or two, a journalist on the local paper, a retired military man, and a few executives from local firms, as well as a wealthy bookie and a greengrocer. Nevertheless, Janet thought to herself frequently, if this is a good address, what can a bad one be like? Her parents’ home (they had lived on top of their little shop, in an outlying village, in increasing comfort as the village and trade expanded) had been a hundred times more pleasant, more homely.

  The estate had been built in the late fifties, and had the characteristics of the period. The little houses—maisonettes, they were described as, but Mark and his friends thought the word silly, and laughed when her mother used it—were two storey, with an entrance hall, a kitchen, and a large lounge with windows back and front downstairs, and three small bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. They were semi-detached, though the detachment was extremely narrow, and consisted of a small alleyway along which one could wheel a bicycle, so one’s neighbours were rather close.

  Janet hated her home. She hated more or less everything about it—the colour of the brick, the colour of the linoleum tiles, the colour of the bathroom fittings, the shape of the banisters. She hated her own efforts to make it look pleasanter, to give it individuality (as she had put it to herself) and she approached it now with a sinking in her spirits as she saw yet again the gleaming windowpane, framed by its orange curtains, and within the glow of the red sofa, and the red painted piano. Once, Janet had cared about such things. She had even been quite good at them: she had had ‘taste’, as her mother called it. She had opinions about shapes and colours, and as a child she had been good at making things: she hadn’t received much encouragement at school, where the art mistress, a tearful woman, never got past the stage of teaching them perspective, but she had watched the handicrafts programmes on television, and had worked with glue and paper and paint, carefully, fastidiously. Everyone recognized that Janet had quite a flair for that kind of thing. It wasn’t a gift that ran in the family at all. As she grew older, unaided, she began to make collages of felt and paper and pebbles and leaves. Her own designs.