The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  His friend Len Wincobank was much impressed and amused by Anthony’s conversion. He watched his progress with protective benevolence, for Anthony was his protégé. He himself dealt on a scale that made Anthony feel slightly faint: he doubted if he would ever want to be involved with such vast transactions. Len took him on a tour of the Northern town centers that he had developed, showed him shops, offices, described deals with councils and triumphs over competitors, showed him failed monstrosities developed by others, took him to look at Park Hill in Sheffield. “I really wanted to go into housing,” said Len, staring in admiration from the front seat of his Rolls at the massive block. “But there weren’t the openings.” Anthony continued to admire Len. He admired him because he was an articulate bloke, who knew all the arguments against what he was doing as well as those in favor of it: because he was self-made, had started from scratch, without a rich Oxbridge friend to back him; because he loved what he was doing, loved his buildings, believed in them, thought them beautiful, thought people ought to like them, was outraged when they didn’t (and, of course, they didn’t, as most people dislike anything new), and was determined, with a kind of blinkered faithful zeal, to make people like them. He was an enthusiast. Anthony liked Len’s girl, Maureen, too. Occasionally he had misgivings about the appearance of some of the actual developments: the center in Northam looked to him, from outside, sinister and blank, but when Len explained to him that this was the new kind of architecture, that there was no need to have any windows at all in that kind of building, that most new buildings were going to be windowless, and what about the height, the fine expanse, and of course perhaps architects hadn’t yet quite got the hang of building without windows, but they would, they would—well, Anthony began to see even the Northam center with new eyes.

  Len Wincobank was not the only interesting new person that he met in his interesting, integrated new life. As well as a new London of buildings, he discovered a new world of people: stockbrokers, merchant bankers, town clerks, local councillors, commercial architects, contractors, accountants—all sorts of people now swam into his social ken, people who had once at best been fodder for social programs, usually cast as villains. Some perhaps were villains, but they were all of them very interesting, and none of them paid any attention to all those things that had previously drifted idly round Anthony’s mind—they did not read novels, or go to good films, or read the arts pages of newspapers, or listen to music, or discuss the problems of the underprivileged. They “didn’t much go” for that kind of thing. They were far, far too busy. He found them entrancing. The Other England. Where had they been, all this time?

  Babs did not find them so entertaining. They had nothing to say to her, nor she to them: if they met her and thought of her at all, they thought her a Bohemian slut, which she was. She thought they were interested only in money, which they were. She accused Anthony of hypocrisy, of intellectual slumming, of folie de grandeur, of brain fever. They are all crooks, she wailed. They will do you, Anthony. Crap, said the new Anthony, his mind intent on some loophole in the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947.

  Finally, she cooked up a satisfactory social explanation for his extraordinary aberration. “It’s his Yorkshire blood coming out at last,” she said. Anthony found this quite funny. It was true that the Keatings were original Yorkshire stock, and that Anthony himself had a yearning for the landscapes of his childhood holidays with his grandmother, those days of paradise by the River Wharfe. But the Keatings had hardly been of the tough, mill-owning, slave-driving, where-there’s-muck-there’s-money class that Babs’s wild apology suggested. They had been quiet folk, farmers, schoolmasters, clergymen, doctors. It was they that, in this heroic stand, he rejected forever. Enough apology, enough politeness, enough self-seeking high-minded well-meaning well-respected idleness, enough of quite-well-paid middle-status gentlemen’s jobs, enough of the Oxbridge Arts graduate. They had killed the country, sapped initiative, destroyed the economy. This was the new line of the new Anthony, Oxbridge Arts graduate turned property dealer.

  In the early seventies, he no longer woke up in the small hours asking himself, What is it? What is what? He was usually too tired to wake, and when he did, he occasionally asked himself with horror, What on earth have I done? It seemed a better question. At least he had done something. He had made thousands of pounds, but had borrowed many thousands more. He had tackled the modern capitalist economy. He was a modern man, an operator, at one with the spirit of the age.

  Babs was not the only person to suspect that Anthony’s sense of empire was illusory. Alison Murray also suspected it, but unlike Babs she had a vested interest in believing it to be real. If Anthony became a rich man, Babs would lose him and Alison would get him. Babs, at this time, did not quite want to lose Anthony: she certainly did not want to risk the chilly winds of divorce, inadequate maintenance, quarreling over houses, looking singlehanded after four children, with a babyfaced man as her only support. (She had not yet met the civil servant.) Of course, if Anthony became rich, he would be able to support an ex-wife in style. But Babs regarded the whole thing as a bit of a gamble. And she liked Anthony.

  Alison, on the other hand, invested a good deal of hope in it. She loved Anthony, and wanted to marry him, so she aided and abetted and morally supported his efforts to make this financially possible. She, like Anthony, had an unsatisfactory and feckless spouse, an actor of pathologically jealous and pathologically unfaithful temperament; like Anthony, she had been through a process of slow disillusion with her past life. She was an actress, but had abandoned the stage on the birth of her second daughter, who suffered quite severely from cerebral palsy: she started to work for the Society for Disabled Children, and devoted herself to fundraising, appealing, visiting, talking on radio, television, to the press. She was sufficiently well-known to be able to do this with some impact. The career she had given up had been highly promising, established, even, rather than doubtful, and most of her theatrical friends thought she was mad, though they did not like to say so to her face, because of their diffidence in face of her very evident tragedy; also, Alison’s decision to stop acting removed a serious competitor from an overcrowded profession, and who could be unselfish enough to regret that? Nevertheless, behind her back, they speculated that it must have been some kind of guilt or self-punishment, rather than real goodness, that had made her relinquish so bright a future for one of such hard and, in their eyes, unsatisfying work. One or two of them guessed, shrewdly enough, that her husband, Donnell, might have had something to do with her decision, for Donnell’s career, when the sick child was born, was not going nearly as well as Alison’s, a fact which caused him a resentment which he was quite unable to conceal in public, and which, they felt, might well express itself somewhat violently in private. Like a good wife, perhaps Alison had chosen to retire rather than to compete.

  Alison was thirty when she met Anthony, and on the verge of turning from the good-natured friendly person she had once thought herself into a mean, embittered, angry, contemptuous woman. The transformation had surprised her, but she did not much blame herself for it. She blamed others. When she met Anthony Keating, at a party in the gay and prosperous party-giving sixties, she felt herself to be standing in the last ditch of pleasantness, smiling faintly and politely and hopelessly, resolving never to smile at another adult again, knee-deep in an intense dislike of almost everybody she had ever met, or might ever meet, including the good people of her professional life. Attracted by the nonsexual aroma of her unhappiness (for he thought he had had enough of sex, and making up to other people’s disaffected wives), and provoked by her undisguised boredom, Anthony set out to interest her, and he succeeded. For he was a good talker, a good listener, a man of tact and feeling.

  They had much in common, as well as feckless spouses. Both were tired of being good, or of pretending to be good. Both felt that they had encountered low standards of behavior in the outside world; both had tried, in their own ways, to behave better,
and both felt defeated. Both were interested in money. Anthony was interested in it for the reasons already stated, Alison was interested in it in a more abstract sense. Years of fund-raising had taught her to read balance sheets and inquire knowledgeably about interest rates and investments and tax relief: she was able to listen to Anthony’s financial problems and ambitions with some real understanding. She had also had to organize her domestic economy singlehanded, and had long been in charge of mortgage, bills, visits to the accountant, for her husband, Donnell, was a spendthrift and had, in the early years, often been out of work. By the time she met Anthony, Donnell was always working, for he was one of those whose natural stage or screen age is well over forty: he had been too young to play heavyweights in his twenties, but by his midthirties he was much in demand for businessmen, villains, chiefs of police, leaders of guerrilla groups. But Alison still had to watch the money; otherwise he spent it all on buying drinks and meals for friends, sending guests home on the minicab expense account, and staying in expensive hotels. So she was well aware of the shifting value of a pound note. She even knew what the Financial Times index was, from day to day. Anthony found this very companionable, for Babs had never been able to grasp the difference between debtors and creditors, and had to think very hard to work out the difference between net and gross, concepts she connected with cornflakes packets rather than incomes.

  The alliance of Alison and Anthony was not as joyless or as mercenary as this summary might indicate. It had its pleasures, too. For instance, Alison happened to be a beautiful woman, whose chief weakness was for her own appearance. She dressed well, looked after herself, kept herself in excellent condition, and devoted much energy to preventing herself, successfully, from growing fat, gray, and wrinkled. As Babs had long been fat and never very stylish, Anthony naturally found Alison’s appearance in itself good for morale. She was the kind of woman one could take anywhere. Merchant bankers treated her with respect. She was dark, with one of those pale, oval, sad, soft, expressive faces that are as typically English as the English rose: refined, delicate, slightly but not uneasily withdrawn. Her large, expressive dark eyes had once looked into the hearts of those sitting in the back rows of the stalls: when they turned their gaze upon Anthony, upon a merchant banker, upon a rich benefactor, their appeal could hardly be resisted. And she had remarkable legs. The clean, thin line of shin and ankle, the precision, the articulation, were a joy to behold, as she herself would have been the first to acknowledge. Her skin was also remarkable. It had a clear, pale, translucent smoothness, blue veins adorned her inner arm, her thighs, her breasts, her elegant neck. Even the touch of her hand had a dry, soft vitality: anybody who had ever so much as held your hand, Anthony said to her once, would surely never wish to touch another woman. She liked that kind of remark, naturally, and he was good at making them. He meant them, too.

  And all these gifts she gave to Anthony. She was not in any conventional sense a vain woman, and certainly not a flirtatious one: she had by her prime received so much trivial sexual admiration that she had come to find it genuinely boring, thus offering to men a sincere rather than an assumed resistance. Anthony felt very pleased with himself for having overcome it.

  Alison, for her part, found Anthony sweet. “Oh, Anthony, you are sweet,” she would say. It was not quite clear to Anthony precisely what she meant by this, but he found the remark acceptable. She was not quite sure what she meant by it either, using the epithet actress-style to cover a wide range of possibilities: that Anthony was a spontaneously affectionate person, that he was generous with his praise and his money, that he often opened doors for her, that he frequently had a worried expression that stirred her maternal spirit. That he recognized that she was the beautiful woman, rather than a beautiful woman. He was also extremely sweet to her defective daughter, Molly. Molly spent the term in a special school, but she would emerge for holidays, and then Anthony would be very sweet to her indeed, driving her out into the country, taking her to the zoo, not minding when she messed up his car, playing dull games with her for hours. He did not at all mind the embarrassment of dealing with her in public, would wipe her nose, pick up the cups she knocked over in cafes, patiently cut up her meals and fasten her shoelaces, and read to her from her favorite comics. Once she was sick all over the back of his best suede jacket in the car, on the way to Whipsnade: Anthony had taken his jacket off, tossed it in the trunk, wiped up the rest of the mess, without the faintest discernible hint of any form of irritation. He had been upset that Molly was feeling bad, had been worried that her day might be spoiled. One cannot expect that kind of behavior of a man, but it is irresistible when one meets it.

  Anthony was not quite so sweet to Jane. But nobody is perfect.

  Anthony Keating, the pheasant buried, the vegetable patch dug, started at seven o’clock to cook himself a solitary early supper. He had spent more time alone in the last weeks, since Alison’s departure, than he had done in the whole of the rest of his life. The doctor had told him to take things quietly, and so he was doing. He was also evading a fair assortment of problems, by removing himself from the London scene. He wondered how things were getting on without him. Giles spoke to him, daily, with a progress report on the Riverside scheme but there seemed to be little to report: the market could hardly be more inert. And Anthony had become a very inert partner. It was largely a question of hanging on. The night before, Giles had promised to visit: I might have business up North, he said, but he had said it in so uneasy a manner that Anthony, not much caring for his new role, almost took offense. He did not want Giles’s sympathy; he could do without it. He could do without any human sympathy.

  It was all very odd. Not only had the boom turned into a slump: his life, which had recently been far too full, had suddenly become extraordinarily empty. He would have to learn to cope with solitude. It had become the new problem. Occasionally he felt an urge to drive down to London, just to see what was happening, although he knew he could do nothing useful: part of him missed the anxiety, the tension, the racket. But he would train himself to stare at stones and trees. It was a longer-termed insurance. If he could afford to pay the premium. More frequently (for, in truth, the very thought of the London scene made him feel physically unwell), he felt an urge to drop in at the village pub, but this too he resisted. He would stick it out, alone. After a lifetime, or half a lifetime, of dissolute company, he would give solitude a fair trial. In a sense, he felt he owed it to Alison, who could not be finding much company in Wallacia.

  Boredom had proved to be a problem, as one might have guessed. Anthony was a restless Londoner, tuned to the rhythm of ten new problems a day, ten different appointments; and even between appointments, sitting in his car waiting for a meal, he had in the old days been at times overwhelmed with boredom, as though eternity had suddenly set in and would never shift. A craving for excitement, for stimulus, was what had kept him on the move. Nothingness would yawn suddenly at him, worse than the prospect of a violent death. One of his most uncanny moments of self-knowledge had taken place once years earlier when he had by mistake locked himself into the lavatory in a seaside hotel in Normandy: the lock seemed to have jammed, fiddle as he would he could not shift it, and he feared to fiddle too much lest he damage it even more irretrievably. It was a gilt lock, a pretty French gilt lock, ornate, ill-made, useless. And there Anthony was, shut up in a small square box, without a window (it being a French lavatory, where the regulations are different) and with no prospect of deliverance for two or three hours, for Babs and the children had all gone down to the beach, and Anthony had said he would stay in the hotel room for the morning, working. The chambermaid would not pass: she had already done the room. Luckily he had a Michelin guide with him, which was better than nothing, so he sat quietly on the lavatory and tried to read, and to think of what to do, but waves of heat began to flow through him, at the prospect of imprisonment, and panic rose—not the panic of claustrophobia, for the lavatory was quite spacious, but deep panic a
t the prospect of deep, inert boredom. One Michelin guide could not possibly keep boredom from the door for a quarter of an hour, let alone the possibility of three hours. Desperately he looked around the rectangular prison: there was nothing to distract him, nothing at all to do. And then, on the wall, he spotted a hook. And ah, thought Anthony, without thinking at all, quite unconsciously—ah, if it gets too dull in here, I can always hang myself by my belt. The thought was so bizarre and so comforting and so alarming that it impelled him to a new, frenzied, violent assault on the lock, which suddenly and mysteriously yielded, and he emerged, pricking with sweat, horribly aware that at least a part of him would have preferred the action of death to the passivity of boredom.

  And here he was, imprisoned in High Rook House, with nothing to do, no one to distract him. It seemed a challenge, which he would try to accept. He wondered why there was so little recognition in the world of the possibility of profound, disabling, terrifying boredom. One never heard people complain of it. It was not done, to complain of it. Like fear of death, it was supposed not to exist. Perhaps, because if one admitted it, one would never have the courage to live on at all. Perhaps people were ashamed of it. He was ashamed of it himself, ashamed of how often he looked at his watch, relieved if it was later than he had thought. Since moving to the country, he had found himself shifting his mealtimes earlier and earlier, going to bed earlier, and, by vicious consequence, being forced out of bed earlier, for he had not acquired the knack of sleeping more than seven hours a night. At his more optimistic moments, he thought that perhaps he was simply shifting his rhythm to a more natural time scheme: the rhythm of the night and the day. He hoped that that would prove to be so. There must be some way over the mountain of boredom that rose, ridge after ridge, before him.