The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  There was a story in the valley of a heavy snowstorm one night many years ago. The snow had drifted against the windows of an old woman’s cottage, a remote cottage, and she had been buried there alone for two days and two nights before neighbors dug their way to her. When they found her, she was still in bed and had not moved for forty-eight hours: she had been waiting patiently for the sun to rise. She said, That was the longest night I’ve ever known. Anthony smiled, remembering the story. How had she not died of boredom, trying to sleep, against nature, for so long? He tipped the pan, the fat sizzled ominously. What would one do in prison, like those poor buggers shut up for years alone by the Chinese? Would fear provide a sharp enough antidote to dullness? The fear of one’s own death? We have come to need gross and violent stimulants. He wondered if it were possible to retrain the expectations of the spirit, to re-educate the palate.

  He was cooking sausages for his supper, bought two days ago at the village shop. They were stuffed with cholesterol, but what was not? Very little, it appeared, and while he was prepared to believe in the anticholesterol lobby over a breakfast of Ryvita and honey, he had lost all interest in it by the evening. He didn’t care if the sausages killed him. On the other hand, he did wish he could remember how to cook them properly. They were going to burst, he could tell, from the pinky brown way they were swelling up inside their skins, and oozing at the ends. He pricked them again, viciously, and turned down the gas, but one of them burst just the same: a nasty weal appeared along its side, its flesh gaped, lumpy, crumby.

  They had bought the house thinking it would be big enough for all of them: for Anthony and any of his four children who wanted to visit, for Alison and her two daughters, for friends, for children’s friends. Anthony had planned to commute to London, had talked in the good old days (albeit with a touch of astonished bravado) of getting a season ticket on the Executive Special from Leeds, for a mere £595 a year. And now, here he was, moodily turning four pork sausages, objects which seemed to recognize no state between the raw and the burned. So much for country house life.

  He thought of Len Wincobank, whose company had gone so spectacularly bust. He wondered how he was getting on in prison. It was hard to imagine so energetic a man deprived of any possibility of private enterprise. He must surely have found some way of expressing himself, even in there. He had written to Anthony, twice, in reply to Anthony’s letters, but he did not say very much. “It’s just what I imagine public school is like, in here,” Len had written. Anthony could dimly picture it: uniform, dormitories, playing fields, cold showers. A far cry from the bar at the Queen’s Hotel, Leeds, with its dark brown bars and plum-jacketed bartenders, where they had shared so many gins and tonic, eaten so many small, pale, translucent onions. Though, geographically, not so far: Scratby Open Prison was in the North Riding, not forty miles away from Anthony’s country house. He was due to visit Len, next week. He was going to drive Len’s girlfriend, Maureen, over. The prospect made him rather nervous. He had been shocked by Len’s sentence. It had seemed unreal, impossible. He had seen him several times while he was out on bail, had heard his stories of panic and collapse, had failed (like the jury) to follow some of the financial complexities, but had managed to persuade himself that Len would get off. But the tide had swung against such as Len. There had been too many scandals, too much corruption, and Len had served as an easy symbol. Down he had gone. How would he look, how would he behave, when they saw him?

  The sausages were now burning on the outside. He cut one in half to see what it looked like on the inside. Rawish, still. God, he thought, I need a drink. But he had vowed, had promised himself not to.

  Len would not be getting a drink in Scratby, either. Unless all those television series which showed prisoners secretly brewing liquor in the kitchen from yeast and old apple peelings were accurate documentaries rather than fantasies.

  The jail in which Jane Murray had found herself did not sound as lenient as Scratby. Nor was the concept of bail much appreciated in Wallacia, according to Alison. Four weeks she had been there, without even a formal charge. Whereas Len, after the warrant had been issued, had had some months to rearrange his affairs, to sell this and buy that and transfer the other, before standing trial.

  Anthony had never been very fond of Jane. Sultry, sulky, she had resented his existence, his relationship with her mother, and had been rude and offhand whenever he spoke to her. It was largely on her account that he had never tried to live with Alison: they had been going to wait, till Jane left school, left home, before setting up house together. Perhaps she had had the accident on purpose, to keep them both apart? He recalled with distaste meals in Alison’s house, with Jane picking petulantly at her plate with a fork, making hostile comments on the cooking if ever she spoke at all, and often walking off, leaving the room without a word, as though Alison and Anthony’s joint presence was too much for her to be expected to deal with. A petty, childish creature. Nothing ever satisfied her. She criticized everything; Alison never retaliated. She was a pretty girl, heavier in build than her mother, with a heavy, sulking, pre-Raphaelite mouth: when she was older, he guessed she would look rather like Janey Morris, and just as destructively dissatisfied. He wondered what kind of treatment she was getting in Krusograd jail. It would do her good to eat some disgusting meals, he unkindly reflected.

  The sausages did not taste too bad. He had them with a tin of baked beans. Take it easy, the doctor had said. But it wasn’t very easy to take it easy. Mustard helped. He covered everything in mustard, including a slice of Ryvita, then propped up a copy of the Property Investment Review against the radio, and read and ate. The Property Investment Review made interesting reading, these days. Its language had become curiously lurid. Every page was scattered with such mortal words as death pangs, moratoria, fatal bleeding: journalists spoke ominously of rocking foundations, and catalogued horrors, collapses, crashes, catastrophes—and chatted, more cheerily and colloquially, of skinned knees and burned fingers. The picture they ought to have evoked was of the end of the world, but it was strangely unconvincing, as though all the crashes were of cardboard skyscrapers or purpose-built film sets, as in a 1930s movie of the destruction of Nineveh. And, of course, most of the crashes were indeed metaphorical rather than physical. Only a few real buildings had really fallen. Ronan Point, Camden Girls’ School ceiling, the roof of a swimming pool. Nothing much.

  He finished the mustard meal, and sat there, gasping, eyes smarting, faintly cheered. Things were not as bad as the Property Investment Review might indicate, and mustard still really did the trick. The evening stretched ahead, long, dark and empty, but he was not wholly unhappy. This was so bad, some good was sure to come out of it. The darkest hour. He was not allowed to smoke or drink, but he could still think: the doctor had not told him not to think. And there were consolations, even in this long night. At least he did not have to worry too much about his own children, to feel guilty about them. They were a cheerful lot, not yet suffering from VD or schizophrenia or drug addiction or anorexia, as most people’s children seemed to. Babs had done a good job with them. He missed them at times, but not, he had to admit, much. It was more fitting that he should brood by himself. He had been lucky with his children. Unlike poor Alison. He would not think about Alison.

  He would think, instead, about Giles, and why he was slightly afraid of him, as though Giles had some undefined hold over him: and of Len, whom he did not fear at all, and whom, though a declared crook, he trusted: he would think of the problems of a mixed economy, state capitalism, the profit motive, corporate ownership, personal incentives. It would all make some sense in the end, if he worked on it. One cannot live alone for weeks in the country, untempted by any diversions, without coming to some useful conclusions. As yet, he had not the faintest sense of even the vaguest approach of understanding, but something would surely swim up out of the dark pool.

  While Anthony cooked his sausages, Alison Murray was waiting in Krusograd, second largest city
in Wallacia, to see a psychiatrist who might, the consul had suggested, be persuaded to visit her daughter in the prison hospital. Mr. Barstow was worried about Jane’s behavior, and so was Alison, though—knowing Jane—she found it less surprising than he did. She sat on a hard chair in the waiting room and reflected that it was a good thing she was accustomed to doctors, hospitals, institutions, and the inevitable waiting they impose. It was a good thing, also, that she spoke enough German to make herself understood. She did not trust interpreters.

  Dr. Gobian, the psychiatrist, spoke German. There were not many psychiatrists in Wallacia. It was not a country that much respected the revelations of Sigmund Freud. It regarded psychic problems as bourgeois luxuries, the idle tics of the underemployed. In her heart, Alison rather agreed with this view, but nevertheless considered it her maternal duty to do what she could for her own daughter. So there she sat, on a hard chair, hoping that the doctor might at least agree to look at Jane, and perhaps recommend that she should be released on bail, or be transferred from the prison hospital to a civilian one. Though maybe a hospital for the mentally ill would be as bad as prison, and even harder to get out of: she had read disturbing newspaper reports, about Jews and dissidents in Russia, that suggested that the Russians regarded psychiatric treatment as an alternative to punishment rather than as a cure. How could one, in such a situation, know what to do for the best? Clyde Barstow had himself been uncertain, and he knew the country well. But he had thought it at least worth visiting Dr. Gobian; it can do no harm, he said.

  I suppose, he had cautiously added.

  Jane could hardly have picked a worse country in which to commit an offense. Wallacia was the most obscure and mysterious of the Communist states, with the exception of Albania: it had only recently allowed tourists to travel through its territory on their way to the Black Sea, to Istanbul, to Greece, and then only with severe and complex restrictions of visas and currency. Its internal politics were highly secretive and little reported; its relations with its neighbors, and with the U.S.S.R., were shrouded in ominous ill will. Like Albania, it flirted with China, though who could guess with what intent. Its activities reached the English headlines only when, as now, unfortunate foreigners found themselves incarcerated there on charges of espionage or dangerous driving or drug smuggling. Alison had known nothing about it before her arrival; now, she knew little more. The consul had said there were signs of easing of tension and that hostility to the West was diminishing: there was even talk of trade agreements. Alison suspected, however, that he was trying, when he made these comments, to cheer her up.

  She had been sitting there for an hour, waiting. It was nearly eight in the evening. It seemed that people liked to make her wait, these days. Instead of leaping to open doors for her, instead of showering her with profuse if insincere flattery, the Wallacians made it perfectly clear that she could not expect any kind of preferential treatment. Although she recognized the justice and propriety of this and had often complained of the obsequious way she was treated back in England, she nevertheless found the contrast rather a shock, and would have been amused, had she been cheerful enough to feel amusement, by her efforts to maintain her own status in her own eyes.

  After a while, she resorted to one of the most familiar of these efforts. She took her powder compact out of her bag, opened it, and looked at herself in the small oval mirror. There she still was. But Alison found, unlike Anthony with the mustard, that there was very little kick left in her own face. It was still there, but it didn’t do much for her. She put the compact back in her bag, and went on waiting.

  It would have been wrong to be bored, with one’s daughter in such miserable danger. And Alison like Anthony was not, exactly, bored. She was too anxious. And she was also aware that some revelation was gradually shaping itself in her mind. But she did not much like the shape that it was slowly assuming: indeed, she wondered whether it was perhaps assuming a face of such unnatural monstrosity that it was no wonder that the pale small image of her own beauty had been unable to charm it. Alison Murray was beginning to have very bad thoughts about her daughter Jane.

  It seemed an inappropriate time to be having them, but they would not go away. They waved, like Medusa’s snakes, just beyond the edge of her vision, and she dared not confront them directly, though she knew they were there. She knew they were there because of the effort she was putting into not looking at them.

  When the news of the accident had come through, Alison had been shocked, anxious, first for Jane’s life, then for her safety: she had battled for the visa, waiting long hours in offices like this, and had set off to save, to rescue, to comfort, filled with savage maternal indignation. But somehow when she arrived and saw Jane’s tight, hard face, her sullen impassivity, the sulking curve of her eighteen-year-old lip, her simple partisan sympathy had perished. For there was Jane, just Jane, as cross and perverse as she had ever been, the same girl with whom Alison had remonstrated, three years or so ago, for staying out all night without ringing home, for smoking pot in full view of the neighbors in the back garden, for leaving the bath taps running so that the water overflowed and brought down the dining room ceiling. Instead of feeling sorrow for her daughter, she had found many old irritations and resentments stirred and brought back to life. And, as the days dragged on, she dwelled more and more on these things, for which she had tried not to judge Jane; for after all the child had had a difficult childhood, poor girl, with Molly spoiling everything—embarrassing, pampered, messy, expensive, time-consuming Molly, eating up maternal attention and affection. She had tried not to judge Jane. But how could one not?

  Sitting there, she remembered the scene last year at her parents’ home when her father had been dying. The family had assembled, dutifully, for his last days: he was in the hospital dying rapidly of cirrhosis of the liver, and Alison, her mother, and her sister, Rosemary, reunited for the first time for some years, had found themselves, to their surprise, shame, and horror, spending most of their evenings complaining about what a dreadful nuisance he had been in his later years, how cantankerous, how selfish, how foul-tempered, how demanding. And with him dying painfully, not two miles up the road. They had been ashamed of themselves, but they had not been able to stop.

  When he had died, then they had stopped. They had spoken of him no more to one another, though occasionally, now, Alison found herself able to remember the good things.

  Maybe, she thought, my bad thoughts of Jane will disappear after the trial? It is the not knowing, the suspense.

  She crossed her legs, neatly, looked for comfort at her neat ankle, her Milanese shoe. She tried not to think of Jane’s stubborn, rejecting face. She thought instead of Molly and her jerking, ungainly, relieved surprise whenever one went to collect her from school.

  On this same evening, while Anthony was brooding over the Investment Review and Alison over her daughter, Len Wincobank was lying on his dormitory bed in Block D and listening to the radio. On the walls around him, naked girls in various rude attitudes winked at him and offered themselves to him, thrusting out handsome bums and eccentrically large tits; they mingled oddly with a few sober snapshots of quiet-looking wives and ordinary children in jerseys and track suits. There were some children’s drawings on the walls too, fresh from primary school: My Mum, A Space Ship, A Jumbo Jet. One man had a picture of Loch Lomond painted by himself in art class. Len Wincobank, over his bed, had a photograph of the Chicago skyline in a lurid sunset, a picture of the Chay Bank development in Northam, and a picture of the undeveloped town center of Porcaster: Porcaster, pig town, which had been his undoing.

  He had been surprised that he was allowed to stick these subversive mementos on the walls, but nobody had commented, and there they stayed, along with a nude portrait from a Pirelli calendar, put up largely as a sop to his companions, for Len was a diplomatic fellow unless provoked and did not like to provoke hostility unnecessarily: if nudes were the scene, he would have nudes. He had not stuck his girlfriend, ex-secreta
ry, and fellow conspirator, Maureen, on the wall, next to the Pirelli, because he did not want the other men to peer at her. Also, he didn’t have a good picture of her, one that did her justice. And unlike many of his fellow inmates, Len was a man who liked to turn his fantasies into realities; he did not accept the gap between the nude pin-up and the homely wife. When he got out, if she had waited for him and was still willing to co-operate with him, he would have a nice nude portrait done of Maureen. On a white fur rug. With her socks on. For private viewing only. She wouldn’t mind: she was an easygoing girl, Maureen.

  Meanwhile, the radio was informing him that there was to be a twenty-five percent increase in the price of gas, that another prestige car manufacturing firm was going into liquidation, that a local councillor in Dexted had been charged with corruption, and that three more soldiers had been killed in Ulster. He could understand the view, sometimes expressed in his present residence, that one was better off inside than out. He didn’t share? it, but he could see its point. Particularly, he could understand the fear in the eyes of the ineffectual bumbling lazy dishonest old men who formed a recognizable section of the community: what would the world be like, by the time they were let out into it again? There was one old boy in particular, for whom Len felt sorry: he was due for release in a few months, and the prospect terrified him. He was an ex-primary-school headmaster, from a village in County Durham: he had been put away for nicking, quite pointlessly, five hundred toilet rolls, two gross of pencils, seven hundred reams of paper, and a hundred electric light bulbs, all school property. He was not the kind of person to cope buoyantly with a twenty-five percent rate of inflation and a lost pension.