The wreath must surely have been a queen’s possession. How on earth had it survived burial?
She had been to see the Crown Jewels once, as a child, on a school outing. She remembered them as heavy things, lumpish, solid. Not the kind of jewels to wear lightly. Crowns, scepters, miters. And modern jewelry was not much better. Bond Street was full of gold and silver and precious stones, but how lumpishly assembled, on the whole: thousands of pounds’ worth of diamonds assembled into the shape of a Scottie dog, a pheasant, a poodle.
Kitty Friedmann had a diamond peacock. Diamonds and emeralds.
Gold. The gold standard. It was not perhaps surprising that the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Indians, the Americans, the British had chosen gold. It seemed to speak of something. Of the sun under the earth, so long concealed.
Gold. Money. Ambition. Alison walked up and down the empty marble corridors, her hands in her pockets, thinking. The gold rush. Property speculation had become a kind of gold rush: easy money, but not only easy money—enormous money. Until she had met Anthony, she had never thought much about making money. She and Donnell had never been desperately hard up; there had always been work, always enough, and latterly, as Donnell began to have more and more film work, there had been more than enough. And always the possibility of a lucky break, a windfall, a repeat fee. There had been nothing much that she had wanted; she ate well, she dressed well, what more could one want? She had never understood what it was that drove people on to want more: had not understood, that is, until she had met Anthony, and his new friends. And then, suddenly, the glamour of the whole business had enraptured her, as it had enraptured Anthony. She too had been thrilled, corrupted, by the prospect of large risks, large profits. The victor’s crown of gold. How on earth had she and Anthony, two perfectly unambitious, ordinary, middle-of-the-road people, got themselves caught up in such a ludicrous world?
It was easy enough to see how someone like Len Wincobank had got into it. Len’s mother, as he had described to her one evening over a large steak, had worked in a laundry. He had shared a bed with his brother. From rags to riches. Max Friedmann was another sort: he had been born into the world of commerce, was expected to make his mark, had a textile business anyway, had started on property as a sideline. Making money was natural to him, he had been brought up to it, as Anthony had been brought up to expect to go to Oxbridge. Giles was one of the same, and as for Rory Leggett—Rory lived, ate, drank, breathed property, he cared for nothing else, he loved it so much that he even found the dangers and potential collapse of his own company quite, quite fascinating.
One of the problems was that she didn’t see how they were going to get out of it: not only practically speaking, but also emotionally. It was like an addiction, a fever. After so much excitement, how could Anthony go quietly back and become anybody’s employee? How dull her own old life seemed to her now: how dull, and how unnecessary.
She went back and stood in front of the wreath, and stared at it once more. A fine piece of costume jewelry. She had worn some fine fake gear herself, in her early days on the stage: princesses she had played, in those old days. But she had turned from gold, and chosen the leaden casket. How had she allowed herself to be tempted back to the gold again?
The safe choice. The bad choice. The good choice. The dangerous choice.
Poor Anthony. The heart attack had warned him that he was not of the mettle to make dangerous choices. Failure of some kind was written into him.
What will we do? she wondered. There was the house. She had liked the idea of living in the country, with Anthony: watching the seasons change, walking, reading, drinking less, smoking less. Growing old gracefully. It seemed this would not be. What if they had to sell the house, before she had even taken possession of it? She had so loved the idea of the house. How could they sell it? And how much would they lose on it if they were forced to sell?
Perhaps Anthony would actually be declared bankrupt. She did not know what bankruptcy was. It seemed that when Len Wincobank came out of prison, he might still be a rich man. On the other hand, if Anthony lost everything, he would not go to prison. But what would he do, where at his age begin again? She did not think she wanted to live with a failed man. She wanted to turn back the clock, to six months ago, when all had been well: to wipe out the last six months, bombs, heart attacks, traffic accidents, property slump, the lot. She wanted it so badly, standing there staring at a golden laurel wreath in a remote Iron Curtain museum, that a small tic started up in her right temple: Oh Christ, she thought, perhaps I’m about to have a cerebral hemorrhage, from too much of the wrong kind of thinking.
But she didn’t. Instead, she went out into the cold refreshing air, pulled herself together, and set off for the consulate. She was getting to know this small town as well as if it had been her birthplace.
Jane Murray could not understand why the Wallacian authorities were not more friendly toward her. She could not understand a word they said, but she could see that they were not friendly. They must surely see that she was a victim of Western Europe, that she like them despised possession, that she was a real person, an individual person, politically on their side if anything, and that she had an absolutely gruesome mother. How could anyone not forgive anything to a person who has a mother like mine, thought Jane Murray, sick with resentment, as she sat and waited for Alison to turn up, in her capitalist furs, with her anticonservationist handbag. How does she think she’s going to get anywhere, if she comes along looking like that? And how can they not see, thought Jane Murray, that it’s all her fault?
The weather changed during the night before Anthony’s visit to Len Wincobank. He woke feeling cold, wondering if the central heating had failed, if he had lost his blankets in the night, but when he opened the bedroom curtain he saw the cause, indeed saw it as he approached the window, in the strange gray pallid glare that beat against the fabric. Outside, everything was different. The sky was hard and iron-gray, and a thick frost, the thickest Anthony had ever seen, had appeared; the yard and drive and lawn were white as with snow, and the trees were encased in a thick crystalline fur, a jeweled coating, as though they had been dipped into some strange chemical, as though some mysterious transformation had changed their very substance. It was beautiful, but sinister. Just outside the window, a few leaves still clung to the creeper: he looked at them curiously, noting the iced veins, the spiked frost, the odd heightened pattern of the leaves that looked now more like carvings of leaves than leaves themselves. And, looking up to the distance, he could see that the hills had disappeared into a blue white blur. Another kingdom. He wondered if the winters were truly so much harder here than in the South. He had been warned, but had disbelieved, dismissing stories of snowdrifts and blizzards as instances of idle Northern folklore. He had been a Londoner so long, a Southerner so long, he had lost touch with the extremes of the weather.
Shivering, he went downstairs, and turned up the thermostat to 70, and switched on a few extra radiators. Pamela’s miserable dog was standing bleakly in the kitchen, its teeth bared with suffering, shaking with cold, more offensively frail than ever. It looked up at Anthony with such pain and helpless indignation that he bent down and patted it. It was not a bad dog. It was not its fault that it was so ugly and so old.
He had to drive carefully down the valley to Leeds to meet Maureen; the roads were icy to begin with and, as he reached more traveled regions, muddy. The hedgerows had never looked so unattractive: bare stalks and withered plants, mud-spattered, hung desolately on to a dirty life, tattered, bent, spent, spattered. The trees retained their beauty and their icy, mineral excrescence, but they looked unnatural, watchful. Like the beginning of a science fiction film, thought Anthony. Oh God, thought Anthony, I hope it isn’t a bad omen, about the rendezvous with Maureen and Len.
He hadn’t seen Maureen since Len was put away. The last time he had seen the two of them together had been while Len was on bail. They’d had supper together, in London, in Anthony’s empty Lon
don ghost house. Take-away curry, some bottles of wine. Maureen had been subdued and anxious, but Len had been in good form, in high spirits, aggressively optimistic, eating the hottest curry and talking as the sweat leaped up in beads on his forehead about lawyers and loans and bank managers. He had asked Anthony about his own affairs, listened with interest, advised him over his comparatively puny dangers, as curious as ever. After dinner, discussing the trial, due to begin next week, Maureen had said, “You know, Len, you really ought to get your hair cut, make yourself look respectable.” Len, whose hair was thick and black and curly and indeed overlong for a respectable businessman, had said, “Why don’t you cut it for me then, love?” And Maureen had found a pair of kitchen scissors, and wrapped a towel round Len’s shoulders, and snipped away: and as she snipped, she and Anthony looked at one another in growing alarm, for it was clear that the haircut (and she did it very neatly, an ex-professional), far from making Len look meek and proper and law-abiding as had been intended, revealed instead the man beneath, dangerous, aggressive, threatening, the kind of man that a timid jury would surely put away. Safer behind bars. Poor Maureen, standing there with the large scissors and the black curls of Len’s hair in her little hand, perplexed. Delilah revealing her man as one of the enemy. Len had leaped up from the chair, the barbering over, to look at himself, and had noted at once the change for the worse in his plausibility as an honest mistaken man. She had shorn away his disguise: he had been pretending successfully, for years, to be a charming new man of the seventies, pleasant, informal, easygoing, but underneath all the time there had been this man of iron purpose, with a head like a rock and a lowering brow.
All he had said was, “It’s a prison haircut you’ve given me in advance, duck.” And had poured himself another drink, and returned to the subject of the wickedness and folly of those bloody small-time fools who think they can make money out of shares without running risks, without imagination, without suffering for it, without sweating for it. As he spoke, the sweat leaped back to his brow. Len’s contempt for the squealing of small investors had inspired much impassioned rhetoric of late.
Anthony, driving through the icy landscape, wondered what Len was making of the investment scene, from his retired position in prison. Were prisoners allowed to play the stock exchange?
He was nervous about the encounter. It seemed sordid, to visit a prison, as though one were a morbid voyeur. It seemed mean to be free, when Len was put away. But it would be even more mean not to visit. Think of others, not yourself, said Anthony to himself, as his mother had said to him when he complained about visiting senile elderly relatives, the sick in hospital. Think of the pleasure you bring. Anthony, as a boy, had been sure that he had taken no pleasure to old Auntie Grace or to Mrs. Nicholson, the dean’s mother, but now realized he had probably been wrong. And anyway, it was ridiculous to compare Len Wincobank to old Auntie Grace or Mrs. Nicholson. Len would surely have survived prison with some aplomb. And Anthony was looking forward to asking Len’s advice about Giles’s offer. It is very easy to stall over two hundred miles. It is very easy not to answer the telephone, to pretend to be cut off, to pretend to have a bad line. He had promised Giles a decision, but had deliberately waited until this visit to Len. His distrust of Giles had been growing, over the past days, and it was not entirely related to the abandoning of the wretched little dog. He had not told Giles that he would visit Len. He too could be devious.
He met Maureen at the barrier off the train from Sheffield: she came bouncing along toward him, trailing scarves and packages; little, overburdened, smiling.
“Anthony, this is nice,” she said, dropping her parcels to throw her arms around his neck. “You are a duck,” she said, kissing him firmly on the cheek. Her lips felt warm: he had not touched a person for weeks, he remembered. “What a day,” she said, picking up her parcels, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “Incredible weather, isn’t it? Do you think we’ll make it? It might be all snowy up on the moors. Poor old Len, in that hut. I bet the poor love is frozen to death. They can’t be planting trees in this weather, can they? The ground must be like stone.”
They had lunch, before they set off, in the Queen’s Hotel. Maureen looked around the old place with affection. She did not mind that it was growing more American, with its sauna and its coffee shop: to her it was still the height of luxury, the height of style. She was too young to remember the old days, when English hotels were English hotels. They had a gin and tonic in the Linton Bar, then entrecôte steak and French fries in the dining room. She ate with gusto, though sighing guiltily every now and then as she thought of Len. She looked around at the groups of businessmen in their well-polished shoes, and wondered what dirty secrets some of them might be concealing; she stared at the few prosperous trouser-suited Northern women drinking pink wine. “It doesn’t seem right,” she said to Anthony, on her return from a visit to the powder room. “All that space, even in the ladies’, and to think of those poor buggers locked up over there, and shivering to death, I bet you.” The powder room impressed Maureen. It had velvet curtains, of deep red and pale apple-green: it had a pink flowered wallpaper, and a pink geometric-patterned carpet. She liked it, connoisseur of conferences and hotels and business lunches. Over lunch, she expressed to Anthony her disapproval of the London Hilton, which she had had cause to visit recently in the company of her new boss: It’s a real dump, she said warmly to Anthony, you’ve never seen such a mess. I mean, I know they’ve had a bomb in it, but that’s no excuse for letting it get quite so shabby, is it? The whole place was full of sawdust. And with that bomb damage, you can see it’s all made of plywood anyway.
On the way over the moors, she continued to talk: about Anthony’s health, about Alison’s absence, about Maureen’s new job, about her last visit to Len, about how difficult all the men’s wives found it to visit. Maureen, not naturally a public-spirited person, although a kindly one, had been shocked by some of the stories she’d heard from the other women, last time: long journeys, no money, no public transport, nowhere to leave the kids while one talked. “What do they want to put a prison in a place like this for?” she said, shivering ostentatiously as she looked out at the countryside, which grew higher and bleaker with every mile, then laughed in response to her own question. “I brought Len a few Mars bars,” she said. “And half a bottle of Scotch. But I don’t suppose I’ll get a chance to slip it to him. Do you think they’d stop me coming, if they caught me at it? Perhaps we’ll have it ourselves, shall we? We’ll need it, after this lot.”
She seemed cheerful: overdoing it a bit perhaps, but still, genuinely cheerful. She told him about her new job, and Derek Ashby, her architect employer; she liked him, he didn’t at all mind her taking a long weekend off to see Len. She told him about the kind of houses he designed. Expensive, modern, private houses for business executives: expensive conversions of old barns, mills, Methodist chapels. Once he had even done a water tower. He was successful, and, because successful, amiable—a friendly, easygoing, kindly person, doing work he enjoyed, in his own good time, only occasionally frustrated by the lack of taste and vision of his clients. Maureen sighed. “I envy him, really,” she said. “He’s got no worries. He earns a good living, and he likes doing it. You wouldn’t think a man could make such a good living, just designing private houses, would you? I’d got so used to thinking big, with Len. Thinking in millions. But who needs millions?” Anthony knew what she meant.
“Still,” he said, “he’s lucky, your architect, to have found a job that satisfies him. A creative job. A self-employed job.”
She told him about the house they were working on at the moment: an old stone farmhouse for a steel man, off the Glossop Road. They were building a cottage in the grounds, for the elderly parents. She rattled on, describing features, describing her employer’s theories of the blending of old and new. Anthony listened. He liked her, she was no trouble, she liked to please.
“I’m looking forward to seeing your house, Anthony,�
� she said. “It sounds great. Derek knows it, he went to have a look at it once. He says it’s very unusual, but I can’t remember why, now. You mustn’t sell it, you know. You’d never find another one like it. Think how you’d kick yourself, in ten years’ time, when you’re rolling in money, looking for somewhere to buy. You’d never forgive yourself. You hang on to it.”
The prison lay open to the cold sky, covering acres: an open prison, highly exposed. High walls surrounded it, but the public road ran through it. One could imagine that in summer the position might be pleasant; to Anthony, the whole thing looked at first sight like something in Siberia. But as they approached, showed their permits, parked, he noticed that perhaps it was, after all, more as Len had remarked, like public school. There was a lodge, there were playing fields where men were even, despite the weather, playing: men in uniform, gray trousers, striped shirts, gray jackets, were sweeping paths, like overgrown sixth formers. Seagulls from the North Sea sat on the rooftops. At any moment, one felt the bell might toll for Maths, for History, for Greek. A physical pang, of mixed horror and nostalgia, shot through Anthony’s chest, as memories of cold, humiliation, close bored companionship swept back through him. Did any of them like it here? As some had liked even the miseries of public school, where one had to break the ice in the washbowl, where one could not sleep without three pairs of wool socks and three jerseys? Did some of them feel safe in here? And how am I coping? thought Anthony: how am I coping with my freedom, now I am freed from every institution, from school, from Oxford, from the BBC, from ITV, from all those restricting reassuring wombs?
The Ice Age Page 13
