The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  A pond, out of which the water had slowly drained, leaving Linton stranded, beached, useless. Unable to adapt, unable to learn new skills, obstinately committed to justifying the old ones—and, alas, as so often happens, ruining quite unnecessary and disconnected parts of himself in his willed, forced, unnatural, retrogressive justifications. For there was no reason in nature why Linton should not teach classics to a lot of second-rate students, and yet continue to write first-rate poetry. Why should the whole man grow sour, because one part of him was no longer vital? But it was so. It was as though Linton, in his rejection of the modern world in education, had resolved to reject the modern world altogether, and his poetry too had become sour, petty, carping, reactionary, lightened only by the odd flash of fairly useless and despicable nostalgia, which was more distressing to a reader than the carping itself. Linton had had a real gift, but he had ruined it by ignobly blaming the wrong people for the wrong things. He had started to complain almost as a joke—Anthony could remember those first, tentative complaints about Nuffield physics and concrete poetry—and the joke had obscured reality, had detached him from it, had become the reality. And now Linton sat there in his cottage, depressed on his low salary, with few prospects of promotion, writing cross letters to the papers about the falling standard of literacy, and sneering, if anyone cared to listen, about the inflated reputations of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney—for it was not simply the popular who now attracted his fire, it was enough that a poet was successful for Linton to resent his work. He had lost, in bitterness, the power to distinguish.

  Success may corrupt, but failure also corrupts.

  So thought Anthony Keating, who had tasted something of both. And as he sat reflecting that the fate of classical studies might, like the fate of the property market, indicate something of a watershed in British history—for who, in a recession, can afford the luxury of Greek, who can afford the luxury of a civil service staffed by those who have first class degrees in classics?—the telephone rang.

  He was quite pleased. He had had enough thinking, for one day. A chat would be a diversion. But it was not merely a chat that was offered: it was Giles in person. He was ringing from a call box in a service station on the motorway, going North, ten miles away, wanting to visit, wondering if he could stay the night. Anthony said, yes, of course, but he hadn’t got much to eat. We’ll pick something up on the way, said Giles.

  Giles had never visited Anthony’s new house, although he had heard a great deal about it. Anthony looked around himself, slightly flustered, wondering what he could do to make it look more homey, uncomfortably aware that it had a touch of Linton Hancox discomfort about it. Not very handy with a dustpan and brush or vacuum cleaner, he had let dust and rubbish accumulate; he had not even bothered to unpack some of the articles that had arrived from London, and boxes of books and clothes and crockery stood around the large drawing room and the long stone corridor. But at least it was not freezing: the central heating worked, and he had boosted it with an electric fire, albeit a temperamental electric fire, which needed the occasional kick. And the structure was good. In fact, fine. Beautiful. It was a fine house, he was proud of it. It was a house to be proud of; even Giles would see that it was a house to be proud of.

  Anthony was slightly afraid of Giles. Although Giles had many weaknesses, and some characteristics which could even be called ridiculous, Anthony could not recover from his primal impression: that Giles knew what he was about, that he was a man of the real world, a man of substance. And I, thought Anthony, am I a man of straw? In the intense silence, an owl hooted, a dry leaf rustled in the drafty corridor. I want to impress Giles, thought Anthony. As though he were my superior, my employer. Perhaps I bought this house not for myself and Alison, but to impress Giles? Though there was little point in trying to impress Giles on such a level. He had visited the Peters family home, an enormous Victorian pile in Dorset; he had made passing acquaintance with Giles’s many passing residences—Mews cottages in Belgravia, little houses in Chelsea, a large house in Canonbury, a flat behind Marble Arch, a cottage in Sussex, a house in Sussex, a whole island with a house on it in an Essex estuary . . . no, there was little point in competing with Giles. But perhaps his own house did manage to make the point that Anthony was not completely frivolous, that he had at least to be taken seriously?

  The car approached, up the long steep uneven drive. Giles had brought a girl and a chauffeur, and the girl had brought a small dog. The chauffeur Anthony had met before: he was a taciturn and eccentric Scot, who seemed content to sit for long hours in a corner, and who, when he spoke, was often very rude, like his employer. He had convinced Anthony long ago that it was a bad idea to have a chauffeur, no matter how wealthy one became: one might get on with one’s own chauffeur, but one could not expect everybody else to do the same. Giles, however, had to have a chauffeur, for he had been banned from driving.

  The girl was called Pamela. She was carrying a bottle of whisky and some cartons full of chicken and chips, and a small miserable old dog trailed from her wrist on a lead. She stood in the doorway, clutching her parcels, in a full-length fur coat, and said to Anthony in a voice so thin and upper-class that it at once set his teeth on edge, “It is too kind of you to invite us, really.”

  “I didn’t invite you, you invited yourselves,” said Anthony, determined not to allow himself to be cast in the role of host, a role in which he would inevitably prove inadequate; but, being polite, added, “I do hope you won’t be too uncomfortable.”

  Pamela looked around, sniffed the air expertly. “Oh, I’m sure we shan’t,” she said, with evident reservations.

  Giles, meanwhile, was already inspecting the property: turning the key in the huge Jacobean lock, testing the thickness of the walls and window embrasures, padding into the enormous kitchen, peering at the central heating thermostat, opening the door to the butler’s pantry, testing knobs, tapping wood, ending up, with Pamela and Anthony and the chauffeur, in the packing-case-filled drawing room.

  “Oil-fired central heating, I see,” was more or less his first audible remark, after a few preliminary grunts. “That was a mistake.”

  “Not my mistake,” said Anthony. “It was here already.”

  “Oh well,” said Giles, placing himself firmly in front of the bar of the electric fire, his hands in his pockets, standing stockily, occupying space. The electric fire did not like him, and went out. Anthony crossed to it and kicked it, with some satisfaction: odd, how much pleasure kicking that fire had given him, in the last few weeks. The fading bar blushed and brightened. The two men stood there. It was always slow, socially, with Giles, for all that they had known each other for so long. Slow, but for the time unworried: for Anthony had been able to tell, from the nature of his inspection, that Giles was impressed by the house.

  Pamela stood, pulling off her gloves, looking at the paintings. “Are these yours?” she said, nodding at them. She pulled off her coat, and Anthony took it from her and laid it on a chair. She was wearing a long Oriental embroidered dress, and had black hair, done up in a bun, and a white, pinched, little girl’s face, uneasily gracing a woman of thirty.

  “Guess,” said Anthony.

  “I don’t like guessing games,” she said. “In fact, I don’t like games at all, before supper. Shall we eat, before that chicken gets cold?”

  “It’s cold already,” said Giles. “We bought it in Leeds. Go and put it in the oven for half an hour, Pam. We’ll have a drink. Where are your glasses, Anthony?”

  Pamela went into the kitchen with the boxes of chicken, in a curious bidden way, quite in keeping with her hard and sprightly self-possession. Anthony nearly called after her, to say that he had already had his supper, but he didn’t for he was hungry again. He did not care either for her smartness, nor for her submission. She was exactly the kind of girl that one could expect from Giles. He thought with longing of messy Babs, with more longing of unhappy unlucky lovely Alison.

  The
glasses were in one of the unpacked crates. Anthony removed a layer of newspaper, unwrapped one from its newspaper twist. It was his favorite: a glass with a twisted stem, and a rose engraved on it. He had been wondering where it was, but had not bothered to look. He gave it to Giles, unwrapped two more.

  “You’ll have to drink your own drink,” he said to Giles. “I haven’t got any.”

  “That’s not like you,” said Giles.

  Anthony, playing host, unscrewed the top of the bottle of Teacher’s, feeling with a pang the thread unlock under the tough plastic integument. The familiar smell assailed him, through senses no longer dulled by smoke.

  “I’m not allowed to drink,” said Anthony. “I must have told you that.”

  He poured a glass each for the two guests, put the bottle down by the third glass on the card table.

  “However long for?” said Giles.

  “I don’t know,” said Anthony. “Forever, who knows?”

  “Who says you can’t drink?”

  “My doctor.”

  “Then why don’t you find a doctor who says you can drink?”

  Anthony laughed. The possibility had occurred to him.

  “I decided to see how long I could stick it out,” he said.

  Pamela had come back into the room. She asked him what it had felt like, having a heart attack so unexpectedly; he told her. Then she had a drink, and guessed, not very accurately, which pictures were his and which had been left in the house. Listening to her, Anthony felt his craving for a drink increase almost beyond bearing: his eyes kept straying back to the bottle, to the crate of unpacked glasses, he imagined in detail the taste, the sensation, the concept of the liquid running along his arteries and veins, coursing through his body. His blood felt strange even at the thought, and his head swam. He longed for it. And yet, at the end of the drinking, what had one got? Just drink, in one’s bloodstream. Worth dying for? Surely not. He did not know. Surely not?

  They ate the chicken and chips. Giles, unlocking, became talkative, told Anthony the latest property gossip, the latest rumors and scandals, who was up, who was down, who, like themselves, was still hanging on. Nothing was happening at all, in their own affairs, said Giles: not a flicker from anywhere. But there were signs that the situation might ease, in the end: there were straws in the wind. These two statements seemed to Anthony to be contradictory, but he did not bother to query them. He felt out of touch, slightly guilty that he had escaped and left Rory and Giles to do all the work and all the worrying, reluctant to be drawn back into the feverish atmosphere of doom and speculation, the big talk about money, money that did not exist except on paper. It seemed so long ago, though in reality it was only a matter of weeks, since he had spent every night discussing the situation, mesmerized by the bleeding and draining and seeping away of profits in bank charges and interest, paralyzed by prospects of disaster. It had been so gripping, so absorbing, and clearly Giles still found it so, but to Anthony it seemed like news from another planet. He listened, asked questions from time to time, tried to revive the passionate paternal interest he had felt in the Imperial Property Company, the pride he had felt in Imperial House, the hopes he had had for the Riverside, but he felt remote, geographically remote, detached, unwilling to get caught up in their powers of reasoning, their sense of self-preservation. They had known they were making mistakes at the end, but that had not stopped them. Why not?

  And why, he wondered after a while, had Giles come to see him? He said that he was on his way to Newcastle to have a look at a new office development, which might or might not have been true: Giles was a notorious liar, who it sometimes seemed would induce mystification for its own sake. Maybe Pamela was the real reason for the excursion, Anthony and Newcastle merely pretexts. Giles made one or two remarks about Anthony’s geographical distance from the flagging pulse of the Imperial Property Company, and inquired when he planned to return; but without, Anthony felt, much enthusiasm. On the contrary, he seemed pleased to find Anthony so well installed, in such peaceful and beautiful surroundings. He approved of the house, and said so several times. You were very wise to snap it up, he said. Anthony did not point out that the price he had paid for High Rook House hardly suggested a snapping up: that he had to strain open the jaws of his bank account somewhat brutally in order to introduce this large new expense, and was naturally now extremely doubtful as to whether in the new depressing financial situation the bank account would ever digest and absorb it. Giles Peters might well have been able to open his pikelike jaw and suck in a country house or two, without gulping, but Anthony, as Giles knew perfectly well, was hardly in the same league. As Giles Peters knew perfectly well, Anthony Keating’s fortunes were entirely dependent on the fortunes of the I.D. Property Company.

  It grew late, and Giles and Pamela and the chauffeur finished the bottle: Anthony, sober, watched the level drop, and began to hope that it would drop so far that his guests would not notice the deficiencies of their accommodation. For, he now realized, he did not think he had any extra sheets; or, if he had, did not know where they were, and did not feel up to a search. There was one pair on his bed, one at the laundry in Blickley, and where the others had got to, God alone knew, or possibly God and Alison, but Alison was a thousand miles away. He himself had not made his bed for weeks. He would crawl into it at night, like a hamster into its ball of straw, and pull everything around him. Alison would have hated that. She liked the sheets clean and smooth and well tucked in, at least to begin with.

  Pamela looked as though she would like clean smooth sheets too. Was she drunk enough to bed down happily in the rough, in the woollen? There were plenty of blankets, plenty of bedrooms. Princess Pamela, with her white face and white fingers, looked as though she might well be the type to complain about a pea under the twentieth mattress. Her voice was intolerable. She was the kind of person who makes greengrocers wince behind their stock, who attracts the sneers of taxi drivers and the covert insults of all but the most servile and cowardly of those engaged in the services. He wondered what she was like in bed. The thought of her and Giles in bed together was peculiarly unattractive. Perhaps they weren’t sleeping together after all; perhaps she was merely there for the ride.

  It was two o’clock before they staggered upstairs. Pamela wanted a room to herself. He had an uncomfortable feeling, as he showed her into it, showed her the heap of blankets in the large mahogany wardrobe, apologized for the lack of sheets, that she was expecting him to make some kind of pass at her—possibly only for the pleasure of rejecting it, but expecting it, nevertheless. He could not bring himself to push chivalry so far. But, when she commented on the lack of a bedside light, was weak enough to offer her his own. “And you wouldn’t have such a thing as a hot-water bottle?” she asked, when he returned with the lamp, standing there, expectant, in her long embroidered dress, dangling her fur coat. “I’m afraid not,” he said.

  She shivered, ostentatiously. “I’m afraid I’m very coldblooded,” she said; an unfortunate remark, for indeed she did look cold, and slightly reptilian—a cold, ancient little creature, determined, bloodless. Surprising, in a way, that her species had not become extinct long ago.

  “I’ll get you the electric fire from downstairs,” he said, and went down and fetched it. The bar did not wish to illumine itself at all for Pamela’s benefit, and he kicked it till the sparks flew before the connection magically connected. He stared at the reluctant angry glow.

  “It might go off, I’m afraid, in the middle of the night,” he said. “It’s very temperamental. I don’t know why it behaves like this. Sometimes, when I’m sitting quite quietly, not moving at all, it will go off. For no reason.”

  “If it goes off in the middle of the night,” said Pamela, “and if I’m freezing to death, I’ll come and get you to kick it for me, shall I?” She stared at him, rather rudely. He found her most unattractive. And yet there was something in him that felt as though he had been issued an order, to which he ought to respond: as she
had responded, with docility, to Giles’s order to warm up the chicken and chips.

  He had no intention of responding. He smiled, with more charm perhaps than he intended—or perhaps he intended to demonstrate that it was he, after all, that had the charm—and said, “Oh, do please try not to do that. I’d much rather you didn’t do that,” and walked off, leaving her standing there.

  The chauffeur had disappeared into his room as into a burrow, not to re-emerge, and Giles, by the time Anthony had got around to seeing what had happened to him, was asleep, in most of his clothes, under an eiderdown.

  Anthony went to his own room. He looked out the window at the brilliant sky. There is so much sky in the country, and there rode the pale moon, high over the valley, shedding so much light that the trees with their few leaves glimmered and shone: the moon, the pale bride of death, the still, the chosen one. She shook and stirred him. Her shadowy silver face leaned toward him. Radiant, luminous, enigmatic, attendant. Three quarters full and on the wane. Soon, the bright and savage sickle. The soft, unshapely shape, the unfinished circle swam in the clear sky. What has she to do with profit and loss? Something, perhaps. She too waxes and wanes.

  Len Wincobank, in Scratby Open Prison, lay awake and stared through a flimsy bit of curtain at the same moon. In a closed prison, one of the things that men suffer from is their inability to see the sky. In his weeks in Northam jail, before his transfer to this relatively lenient spot, he had heard stories from other inmates of the famous strike, when the men had refused to return to their cells from exercise: all night they had stood in the grim nineteenth-century yard, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, on strike, for a better parole system, or at least to be given reasons for the refusal of parole; and the night had begun in anger and fear of violence and had ended with two hundred men standing, squatting, staring with awe at the night sky that some of them had not seen for years, would not see again for more years. “It was uncanny,” one of them said to novice Len. “Uncanny, that’s what it was. It was a clear night, see, and there was this bloody great full moon, and stars so thick it was like daytime. I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never looked at the sky before.”