The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  It would have done Giles good to have a heart attack, reflected Anthony. It had certainly taken the edge off most of Anthony’s other anxieties. For a while at least, the fear of death had made his financial anxieties seem insignificant. There is no point, as many have observed, in being rich and dead. The desperate struggle to avoid smoking and drinking had proved an absorbing diversion: one’s capacity for anxiety is not endless. There were times when Anthony would willingly have exchanged his entire prospects for a cigarette or a whisky. (At times he regretted that his debts were so enormous that these enforced economies would not make the slightest impression.)

  But even the heart attack had not been the final blow aimed by fate at Anthony Keating. The heart attack had proved to have compensations, the chief of which was Alison, who stood by him, slept by him, diverted him, and paid him more attention than she usually thought his due, making him, for once, her first priority. Anthony enjoyed this, and began to imagine that there might be some agreeable future ahead for both of them, even without any money. Alison was very good at looking after him, when she chose to be. (His ex-wife, Barbara, had offered to return to him to look after him, but he had told her that she was more likely to kill him than cure him: humbly she had agreed, and relapsed into the prolific mess she created around her wherever she went. At thirty-eight, Babs was pregnant yet again, expecting her fifth baby. Anthony was glad it was not his. He felt sorry for Babs’s new husband, a civil servant, previously unmarried, used to a quiet life. But at least he had a good, stable, decent government salary. Short of revolution, nothing too terrible can happen to a civil servant, unless, of course, he becomes greedy and accepts bribes. But Babs’s new man didn’t sound as though he was that kind of person at all.)

  So, with Alison, the illness had been endurable, acceptable, and there had still been the hope that finances would improve, there had still been the house in the country. They planned to move after the summer, when Alison’s younger daughter, Molly, went back to school. It was to be their first home together. Folly though it was, there it was. They had already sent up some furniture, when the coup de grâce was delivered. Like the bomb that killed Max Friedmann, it had no connection with Anthony’s finances, so he did not feel responsible for it. But that was cold comfort.

  The final blow was the arrest of Alison’s elder daughter, Jane. Jane, aged nineteen, was arrested and incarcerated on her way back from her summer holiday, in a Balkan country well behind the Iron Curtain and one not known for its tolerance of Western teenagers. Details of the charge were at first vague: dangerous driving, possession of drugs, both? Telegrams full of alarm and confusion arrived from the embassy, finally establishing that Jane had been involved in a fatal traffic accident, and that she was now in the prison hospital, lucky to have suffered no worse injury than a broken leg. Alison would have packed her bags and flown out at once, but it was difficult to obtain a visa: Wallacia had only recently started to issue traveling visas for tourists and was very cautious about visitors. But the Foreign Office had agitated, and the press, possibly counterproductively, had agitated, and after weeks of waiting she had received one and had gone out to see what was happening. She was still there. Anthony had offered to go with her, but he could tell that she did not want him there. It would be bad for his health, she said. Nor did he much want to be there. Secretly, he had never much liked Jane.

  The British press had made much of Jane’s imprisonment, portraying her as an innocent schoolgirl in the hands of vindictive Communists who had never heard of the concept of bail. They had pestered Alison before her departure for photographs and interviews: Alison was photogenic, and she could easily be made into a good news story. TRAGEDY STRIKES AGAIN, they declared. THE TRIALS OF A BRITISH MOTHER, they announced, and went into details about Alison’s previous self-sacrifices. Others dwelled lovingly on the barbaric sentences passed on dangerous driving in Eastern Europe. None of this went down very well with Alison, who did not like the idea of her daughter being turned into a martyr for driving badly, whatever the consequences: journalists tried to persuade her that international support and protest would be the best hope for Jane’s acquittal and return, but both Alison and the Foreign Office doubted this. Though, as Humphrey Clegg at the F.O. said, one can never be sure. Wallacia had not hitherto shown much sensitivity to world opinion on these matters, but it was changing, slightly. There was some hope.

  Anthony did not like to imagine what it must be like for Alison in Wallacia. She had written to him, saying that Jane looked very bruised, and that she was refusing to speak to anyone, including her mother, that two people had been killed in the crash, that the boyfriend with whom she had been traveling had simply disappeared. She said the best that could happen would be a speedy trial, but there were innumerable little delays and obstacles placed in their way, it seemed deliberately. She said the consul, Clyde Barstow, was very kind, but not optimistic. She said she was allowed, somewhat to his surprise, to see Jane twice a week, in the presence of witnesses. She said it was depressing, seeing Jane, because Jane would not speak.

  So, there it was. A terrible year, a terrible world. Two of his acquaintance in prison, one dead by assassination, himself in debt by many thousands. It had all looked so different, four years ago, three years ago. So hopeful, so prosperous, so safe, so expansive. In those days, the worst injuries he had ever known had been a broken ankle, children’s measles, Babs’s cervical ulcer, a bout of flu that might have been pneumonia; the worst accidents had been a broken windshield, a flooded basement. The frequency and the intensity had changed. He had never thought of himself, when younger, as an optimist; now he realized that this was what he had been. It could not surely be the natural onset of middle age? It was too severe, too sudden, too dramatic. It was as though he had strayed into some charged field, where death and disaster became commonplace. Once, such things had happened to others. Now he was the person to whom they happened. They were attracted to him, they leaped toward him like iron filings to a magnet, they clustered eagerly around him.

  There was no point in thinking these thoughts. They led nowhere, to no illumination. He stood up, and stretched. It was too cold to sit long, despite the bright sun. He would dig over the vegetable patch: the pheasant’s grave had reminded him of his resolve. By digging, we stake our claim to the earth, and Anthony Keating felt that his claim needed some reinforcement. He doubted whether he would be able to hang on to the house for long enough to see the potatoes and leeks and carrots of next spring: unless there was a turn of fortune, a reversal, a remission, he would have to sell, when the creditors finally closed in—and for much less than he had paid, no doubt. Nobody could afford a house like his any more. He could not afford it himself: it was doubly mortgaged, offered as a security, tied up with a personal guarantee. When the final crunch came, if it came, High Rook House would be swallowed up as though it had never been, a mere crumb in the vast empty maw of debt. So it seemed an act of faith, a warding off of ill fortune, to dig the vegetable patch, to plan ahead. Also, there were no vegetables to be had in the village shop. One of the laws of country life is that one cannot buy fruit or vegetables in the country. So Anthony would grow his own. But first, he would walk along the footpath, along the edge of the scar, down by the nameless brook, into the valley, and back by the road. The water in the brook ran brown and clear and busy, sharp with its own newborn purity, uncontaminated, without a history. It collected on the high fell and rushed and bubbled downward, over moss and stones. The water from London taps has been through six pairs of kidneys. This had fallen straight from the sky. He liked it. He liked walking. It was a consoling pastime, monotonous, safe, unproductive. And the countryside, though riddled and mined with its own limestone secrets, with potholes and swallow holes, caves and underground rivers, was stability itself compared with the explosive terrain of the London property market.

  It was, of course, his own fault that he had strayed into such a minefield. Whatever else had been accidental, this had be
en his own choice. He had rarely done the sensible thing in his life: his whole career had consisted of careless gambles and apostasies, most of them springing, no doubt, from the first—from the denial of his father and all his father had expected of him. The usual story. His father had been a churchman and a schoolmaster, teaching in the cathedral school in an ancient cathedral city: he had sent his three sons, on a special scholarship for clergymen’s sons, to a more distinguished public school, and had expected them to do well for themselves. He was a worldly man, who despised the more obvious ways of making money: throughout his childhood Anthony had listened to his father and mother speaking slightingly of the lack of culture of businessmen, of the philistinism and ignorance of their sons, of commercial greed, expense accounts, business lunches. Under the massive yellow sandy shadow of the cathedral wall, the Keatings sat safely in their extremely attractive, well-maintained eighteenth-century house (it went with the job) and listened to good music, and laughed over funny mistakes in Latin proses, and bitched about the clergyman’s wife who had a pronounced Lancashire accent and economized in small ways, for they were not well off, and had to appear better off than they were.

  Mr. Keating had accepted Anthony’s rejection of the church without a murmur, conceding that Christian faith was a rare blessing these days. He murmured slightly more at Anthony’s premature marriage, while still an undergraduate, to Barbara Cockburn: muttered that it would be better if Anthony had waited to take his degree, made one or two nasty remarks about shotgun weddings and repenting at leisure, asked him whether Barbara knew about family planning (she didn’t and wouldn’t) and lent Anthony two hundred pounds. “At least she isn’t a Catholic,” he said, having met her, and having seen she was not as bad as he feared.

  Two hundred pounds was not enough. Owing partly to Barbara’s fecklessness, partly to the normal expenses of marriage and babies, and partly to Anthony’s determination not to be completely subdued by that fecklessness, he was, from the earliest years, either in debt or just about to run into debt. He never had time to work out what he wanted to do for his living, in any serious sense: necessity obliged him to live on his wits to pay the bills. Luckily, he had plenty of wits, and soon discovered that there was not much future in being a hospital porter or a launderette attendant or a mortuary assistant: such jobs broadened one’s vision, and were a short cut to paying the rent and the milk bill, but they had no prospects. So he tried to think of other possibilities, through his degree in history, and moodily stared at his own and other people’s laundry, and listened to his baby crying in the small hours.

  His parents had always assumed that he would become a professional man, of one sort or another: his two elder brothers were barristers. But to Anthony, with a baby and a large wife and another baby on the way, there did not seem to be enough time to train for a profession. He did not think he would get a good enough degree to enter the Civil Service; anyway, he did not much want to be a civil servant. So what was left? It must be said that it never once crossed Anthony Keating’s mind that he might get a job in industry. Rebel he was, but not to such a degree: so deeply conditioned are some sections of the British nation that some thoughts are deeply inaccessible to them. Despite the fact that major companies were at that time appealing urgently for graduates in any field, despite the fact that the national press was full of seductive offers, the college notice boards plastered with them, Anthony Keating, child of the professional middle classes, reared in an anachronism as an anachronism, did not even see the offers: he walked past them daily, turned over pages daily, with as much indifference as if they had been written in Turkish or Hungarian. He thought himself superior to that kind of thing: that kind of advertisement was aimed at bores and sloggers, not at men of vision like Anthony Keating. His nearest approach to contemplating a proper job, at this stage, was to visit the Civil Service on an organized tour, an offer he accepted largely because it included two free nights in London, which he spent in a hotel on the Cromwell Road with a pregnant Babs. But he was so turned off, on his trip round the Home Office, by the queries about pensions and wives’ pensions made by unmarried youths of nineteen that he decided that that kind of security was certainly not for him.

  For despite the pregnant Babs, and then the crying babies, Anthony himself at this stage thought that there was something not very nice about money. One had to have some to live on, of course, but one ought not to concentrate too much upon the matter. His politics were left-wing, like those of most arts undergraduates: he disapproved of the Establishment (then a vague but fashionable catch phrase), deplored the fact that so much was owned by so few, would have liked to see public schools abolished, denounced the property-owning role of the church, and could not see why everybody did not agree that a radical redistribution of wealth was logical, desirable, and necessary. He thought that miners and garbage collectors and sewage workers and railway drivers should earn more, and that company directors should earn less. He would never have dreamed of voting Tory, although both his parents did. He worried about his fellow men, but, like many of his fellow worriers, could find no means of expressing his care. He was too busy caring for his own: for Babs and baby Mary, and then for baby Peter, and Stephen, and Ruth.

  So, like so many, he stumbled into a career, rather than chose one. He had, in his first year at university, as yet unencumbered by Babs, shown a certain frivolous talent for writing revue sketches and lyrics and songs: he had always been fond of playing the piano, and had a small but useful gift, one in demand in undergraduate circles, for writing quickly and composing quickly—he could knock out a song in an hour or so, for any given occasion. He could sing quite pleasantly, too, and even after Babs and the baby enjoyed escaping to the college piano. Tired and penniless as he was, his friends found him rather dashing; to have a wife and baby so early in life seemed a form of one-upmanship. So he kept singing: in his second year, a show for which he had written the lyrics (they were vaguely satirical—this was just after his Salad Days, just before the satire boom) transferred to London, with some success. He didn’t make any money, for he had signed no proper contracts, but for the first time it occurred to him that there might be money in the arts as well as in launderettes.

  In his third year, his friend Giles Peters came to him with a proposition. Write a musical, said Giles Peters, and I will put up the money, and we will take it to the Student International Drama Festival in Chicago and win first prize.

  Giles Peters, unlike most undergraduates, had a lot of money. At this stage, he had little else: indeed, Anthony tended to look down on him, from his tenuous but prominent position as fashionable witty young man. Giles was neither handsome nor witty: one of the hard lessons of the sixties was the spectacle of his frequent sexual successes (successes followed by disasters, it is true, but when has the maintenance of sexual happiness been rated as highly as the acquiring of it?). Giles was small and ungainly and already slightly overweight: he had reddish hair and a red complexion, whereas Anthony was tall and dark and pale of skin. As an undergraduate, Giles was interested in the arts, and hung around stage doors and exhibitions and got himself invited to the theater parties and literary parties: he gave lavish parties himself, which made him a welcome if not wholly popular guest. The clever set thought Giles was a bit odd but quite sweet: a bit of a bore, but not quite a bore. He had a kind of self-confidence and rudeness that made his social inadequacies appear deliberate and therefore acceptable. And he had one or two marked successes—for example, with the lovely Chloe Vickers, one of the most pursued girls in Oxford, who could have taken her pick of all the wealthy young men around. Anthony and his friends, bewildered by the incongruous liaison, tried to persuade themselves that Giles had simply bored and bought her into acquiescence, but they were guiltily aware that this hope sprang from a very deep desire to underrate Giles. And Anthony himself did not in fact find Giles at all boring, though he did not know why. He was not witty, he had no verbal elegance, indeed was rather slow of speech, and
quickness was in others one of the qualities that Anthony most prized. But Giles had some other, indefinable, at this stage incomprehensible virtues that made him interesting company.

  He also had a great deal of money.

  His father had made a great deal of money, and his grandfather before him, out of bridges: they built bridges all over the world, over all kinds of chasms, and had diversified into roads and dams; work which those less snobbish and unrealistic and obtuse than Anthony and his friends might have found exciting. However, Anthony and his friends thought bridges dull, and Giles, at this stage a third generation dilettante, tended to let them think what they chose about bridges, for he wanted to make his mark in other fields. And he wanted Anthony to write him a musical, to win a prize of five thousand dollars in Chicago. They discussed it, in Anthony’s dank basement flat: it seemed like a fantasy, and, as Anthony poured Giles another glass of wine (then six shillings a bottle) he even said to Giles, “So you fancy yourself as an impresario, do you?” “No more than you fancy yourself as a composer,” Giles had sagely replied.

  Anthony had agreed to have a go: why not? He had abandoned, through sex, all hope of the good degree that might have been his. Why not write a musical instead? Giles had then spoken of money: better draw up a proper contract, he said, just in case. Anthony tried to conceal his surprise. A contract? He did not conceal his surprise effectively: Giles caught it, and, briefly, smiled. Anthony caught Giles’s smile, and said—truly, for they were not beyond truth—“You know, Giles, I’m a lousy songwriter.”

  “Even lousy songwriters have a right to a contract,” said Giles.

  So Anthony wrote his musical, and Giles backed it and took it to Chicago. It did not win five thousand dollars, but it was favorably mentioned, and launched the career of Bill Wade, well-known star of cabaret. Bill Wade had a weakness for one of Anthony’s not very good songs, and thanks to the contract and the Performing Rights Society the song is still sung, and even to this day Anthony Keating makes some money every year from it. In its best year, and his worst, it made three hundred pounds, which was very welcome.