The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  She would, she thought, climb over the railings. She was fortified in this resolve by the sight of a middle-aged workman calmly doing the same thing: he swung his leg over, waited for a pause in the traffic, lifted his hand confidently to stop the oncoming flow, and marched across. There was still some initiative, some free enterprise left in the land. She picked up her case, swung it over, balanced it on the perilously narrow verge, and was just about to follow it, when she saw a sight that made her pause.

  It was a dog, an Alsatian dog, plodding down the middle of the four-lane road. Its nose was down, it ignored the cars, it walked resolutely on, nose low, tail low, with a plodding, determined, dedicated gait. And she could see that the whole of one side of the dog had been ripped away. She could see its red flesh. Its fur had been scooped and flayed backward: a wad of it hung rumpled. It must, she thought, be dying, but on it walked, without a glance to either side, contemptuous, indifferent. It was a wolf walking to its lair to die. Its red flank was the red flank of death. But where would it go? It had collided with a car, evidently: the cars now parted for it, too late. Where would it go? There was nothing but concrete, as far as the eye could see. There was no cave, no hole, no retreat, no lair. But it walked as though it had some purpose. It was going somewhere, if only to death. Maybe, thought Alison, it has a sense of some place to which it is walking, and it will walk until it drops and dies. The steppes, the forests, the mountains. On it went, out of her vision, padding on the hard surface of the hard road. No forest awaited it, no pond, no stream. Its fur had been scooped back like an old jumble sale coat. Rucked and rumpled, from the living side.

  If the traffic will part for a dog, it will part for me, thought Alison, illogically, and climbed over the railings, as strange a sight in her own way and as displaced as the dog: a well-dressed woman, in a well-cut coat and Italian shoes, forced like the dog to pursue her own ends in a hostile environment, swinging her shapely legs smartly over the rail, elegantly collecting herself.

  The shops, fortunately, had what she wanted, and the return journey to the station seemed easier, as return journeys do. Nevertheless, her knees were trembling, as she collapsed into her seat in the small Pay Train. She could have well done without the concrete tunnel and the dying dog. Anxiety about Anthony and Molly gripped her: perhaps the storm had killed them, perhaps the roof had come off, perhaps they were dead. She would not know until she got there. Rigid, trembling, she sat there, willing the train to move, yet afraid of what might await her at the other end of the journey.

  Anthony, meanwhile, was feeling good. He was helping two men from the village to clear the shattered elm from the road. They were all enjoying the emergency. The entire village had lost its electricity the night before, as Anthony learned when he walked down in the morning to buy paraffin for the lamp: most of the village was gathered on the same errand, thrilled by the disaster, comparing notes, discussing what they had been doing, precisely, when the lights went out over West Gonnersall. He learned at the post office that the council would send an electrician to cut him off, as his cable, drooped and festooned like a liana over the crashed elm and the courtyard, was alive, sparking, and dangerous: “We can cut you off all right,” the man from the council promised, “but we can’t promise when we’ll put you back on again. You’re the end of the line, at High Rook.”

  Anthony hacked and sawed. The men had a tractor; when they had severed the crown they would hitch it up and drag it to one side, and he would be able to get the car out again. The wood was living: it was a shame the tree was gone. In it were the skeletal remains of the nests of the rowdy stiff-legged rooks, which they patched up from year to year. Next year, they would have to find a new property. After centuries. “It was quite a landmark, that tree,” said one of the men. But Anthony, looking around, could not but reflect on how well everything else had stood up to the violence of the elements. Elms are notoriously dangerous, and it had been an old tree. It was an interesting job, a good initiative test, moving the tree. He was feeling exceptionally well: country life was suiting him. And it reassured him, that all this landscape had stood up so well to the onslaughts. England. It would never shake to the roots, surely. An old tree might crash, but the rest endured. It was a fine morning: the clouds had blown away, the air was clear and blue and damp, fresh, unending. A glittering calm lay over the valley.

  He wondered where Alison would be, if she were on her way, if she had tried to ring, and, if so, if she had guessed why there was no reply. He felt confident that all would be well. He was pleased with himself, pleased with his own total lack of anxiety about the absence of electricity and the prawns that must perish in the refrigerator or be eaten in a final feast, pleased with how well he felt—perhaps all the abstinence had really been worthwhile. And he was pleased with his little ménage. Molly was happy, even Tim was happy, Anthony had learned to deal with them both. Tim, with a captive audience, had become more confiding, less garish, and therefore more interesting in his stories; Molly seemed content: she said from time to time that she was glad it was the holidays, glad not to be at school. The place suited her. The pace of life suited her. And it was beginning to suit Anthony, too. For the first time, he began to imagine that he could perhaps lead a real life away from London, a peaceful life with a peaceful rhythm. As he hacked, his mind turned vaguely toward projects—if there was any money left after the Riverside scheme’s final stand, he would stay in Yorkshire, he would dig and grow his own vegetables, he would let people like Molly and Tim hang around year in, year out, he would struggle no more to do, he would learn to be—and if there wasn’t any money left, if he had to sell High Rook, he would get a job, in a school. He would teach. Why not? A country school. A school for the handicapped. Vague idealistic notions drifted very pleasantly around his mind: fantasies of peace and virtue. He would opt out. Surely, after the unpleasant experiences he had suffered during his attempts to opt in, he would have a right to make such a decision? And anyway, what was there wrong in a quiet life, digging one’s own garden, being pleasant to those that need pleasantness. It would not have suited him when he was younger, but whyever should one’s life show any consistency?

  The thought pleased him. The last dry splinter gave; the broken piece was loose. It took them some time to attach it to the tractor: Anthony had hoped that Jim Eaves and Michael Eyam would know how to do it, but of course they didn’t, for the tree presented a unique problem. They had to apply their minds. Tim brought Molly out to watch, as they worked out which angle, where to drag it. “Where will the rooks go, next year?” said Tim. The tractor and chains creaked, the great branches heaved. Molly laughed. It was better than the television. It was a fascinating spectacle. A real event. They all enjoyed it.

  Alison, in Blickley, found that there was only one bus a week to West Gonnersall, and that it went in three days’ time. It would be possible, the man at the station told her, to get within two miles, by changing buses twice, but it would take over two hours. She asked if there was a taxi. Not strictly speaking, he said, but he had a number she could ring, if she wanted. He said this with the kind of Northern ill will that makes a sensitive stranger wilt. Alison, feeling rather ill, rang the number. An equally reluctant man answered, and said that he supposed he could drive her out to West Gonnersall. The prospect did not seem to arouse much enthusiasm in him.

  Alison arrived just as the elm was being dragged into the courtyard: they had decided that the courtyard was the safest place to put it. Anthony rather enjoyed the idea of chopping it up, slowly, day by day, for firewood. His own small contribution to the energy crisis.

  They were all so absorbed, in the gathering winter afternoon, with the job of freeing the tractor from the tree, that they did not at first notice Alison’s arrival: she was unloading her case, and listening to her driver grumbling about having to reverse down the lane, when they spotted her. Anthony, covered in tractor grease and sawdust, rushed to embrace her, in a moment so long awaited. He put his arms around her,
kissed her, held her. But she stood there, hardly returning his attentions. She was watching Molly. Molly was still watching the tractor: she turned around, saw Alison, smiled vaguely, then went on watching the tractor. Alison stood very stiff, inside Anthony’s arm. She was pale, and icy cold. She said nothing.

  “What is it, darling?” said Anthony, picking up her case, making toward the door, imagining disasters—as the memory of Jane, for whom he had not spared a thought for days, suddenly returned to him. Alison sighed, shook her head, dumbly followed him. She was struck dumb.

  Over a cup of tea she revived slightly, gave her present to Molly, chatted to Molly, listened to the story of the storm and the tree. But she looked remote, unattached. Anthony, watching her, was anxious for her; she did not seem to hear what they said to her, gazed at Molly with a kind of suspicion, though as far as Anthony could see the child looked perfectly clean and well, rather better than usual in fact. “You must be tired,” he said to her gently, every now and then, to excuse her silences and her heavy sighs.

  “Oh yes, I’m tired,” she said, and sighed again.

  “Go and have a lie-down, till supper,” said Anthony. “We’ll look after everything. We’ll cook you a nice supper on the paraffin stove. We’re good at looking after ourselves. I bet you haven’t had a proper meal all day. You go and lie down, we’ll look after ourselves.”

  “I can see you will,” said Alison, and rose to her feet, and went upstairs.

  “I’ll call you when supper’s ready,” said Anthony. She did not reply.

  She must be tired out, said Anthony to himself, again, as he lit the lamps, inspected the central heating (which, despite electric thermostat and time switch, was still working), and tried to tidy up downstairs for her descent. It was not the homecoming he had expected, but perhaps homecomings are never what one hopes. But had he not noticed on her face a look of something like hostility? He could not be mistaken, he was never mistaken about these things. But he willed himself to be so. It had not been hostility, it had been fatigue.

  She made an effort to be pleasant, over supper: to take an interest in their affairs. But she seemed still like a stranger from another world, and Molly appealed more often to Anthony or Tim for help or response over the meal than to her mother, sensing her mother’s abstraction, Anthony guessed. She told them little about her stay in Krusograd, or about Jane, so Anthony, a polite man, felt compelled to make conversation, though he would have liked to stroke her and kiss her tired face. She had never looked so old, so taut: it frightened him. And he had never felt better. The irony was surely apparent to both. To be polite, he told her about life at the house, about the outings he had been on with Molly, and, more remotely, about Giles and the I.D. Company’s affairs, about Len and Maureen, about the storm, but she did not seem to listen very closely. She said, Yes, No, Really, as politely as if she had been himself listening to Tim on that first evening. She’s out of touch, he told himself, it’s hard to get back into touch when one’s been away, alone, for so long.

  Lacking the television, Molly went to bed early: Alison let Tim take her. Anthony hoped that Tim would tactfully retire, but there was nowhere for him to retire to except a darkened bedroom, so the three of them sat together and listened to the radio news. As usual, it was all bad. The pound was sinking, more deaths in Northern Ireland, a new strike at Leyland, the storm damage throughout the country had destroyed millions of pounds’ worth of property, the doctors were threatening to strike again over private beds, there would be a potato shortage, the Americans were still complaining about Concorde. It was so awful that Anthony began to find it quite funny, and when the final announcement was made, with equal solemnity, announcing the death of an eighty-eight-year-old former music hall star, he began to laugh, hoping to cheer Alison up with a few wisecracks about Britain’s state. But she was in no mood for laughing; indeed, she actually said, “It’s all very well for you to sit here laughing, Anthony, but what about the rest of the country?”

  Anthony tried to defend himself, by saying that he was in no position to laugh either: he, like the nation, was living beyond his means, on borrowed time and borrowed money, and he, as the nation ought to be, was perfectly prepared to accept a lower standard of living, to live quietly, and work harder.

  “You’ve got a completely artificial way of life,” said Alison; and Tim, sensing trouble, withdrew, leaving Alison to speak. And she spoke. About the folly of Anthony’s brand of escapism, about the dirt of St. Pancras Station, about the monstrous mess that the developers had made of Northam, about the wickedness of Len Wincobank and his like, and the naive folly of Anthony’s getting mixed up in such a money-grabbing immoral corrupt line of business. In part, it was like hearing Babs all over again, but more worrying, for before, Alison had always been so much on his side. She spoke of the state of the nation. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “When I was in Krusograd, I wanted so much to come home. But now I’m back, I don’t like it. It’s changed. It’s not the same.”

  “You haven’t been converted to Communism, have you?” he asked, perhaps too lightly. She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It was worse over there. They don’t have bail, or proper trials, or Tampax, or anything civilized. But then it probably never was very nice there. And it used to be nice here.”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” said Anthony. “I know there are things wrong, but I like it here.”

  “Where?” said Alison. “Up the side of this hillside, in this nice seventeenth-century house? Oh yes, I grant you, it is quite nice up here. It wasn’t here that I was talking about. I was talking about the news, and St. Pancras station. And what people like you have done to the face, to the very face of the country.”

  “It’s not true,” said Anthony. He did not want to argue, could not make himself do it. “There have been some good buildings built. You know there have. And clean air, and landscaping. It wasn’t all so good in the past. You mustn’t think that. You don’t think that.”

  “I don’t know what to think any more,” said Alison forlornly. “I’m thoroughly confused.”

  “I’m sure we all are. There’s nothing so wrong with that.”

  “And I’m so tired, too. I think I must go to bed, Anthony. I’ve not been feeling well.” She rose to her feet. “But I do think it’s a bit awful of you, Anthony, to knock other places down, and that nice Mr. Boot from the sweets factory, and drive them out, and put up all those great blocks, and then come and sit up here in this—this Ancient Monument, and say you like it. Of course you like it. But it just isn’t consistent of you, is it?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sure a lot of developers are also escapists.”

  “Well, that just makes them all the worse.” She picked up the coffee tray: he opened the door to the kitchen for her. “At least Len Wincobank was consistent, I suppose,” she said, walking along the corridor. “He liked horrid places, built horrid places, and lived in one himself. And has ended up in one. That’s consistency.”

  In the kitchen, she put down the tray on the table, and in the semidarkness stumbled over the little dog.

  The little dog did not move. It was dead.

  Anthony shone a light on it, but it was certainly dead. It had stiffened at last into the rusty corpse it had so long resembled.

  Alison stood and stared at it. He told her where it had come from. “I’ll bury it tomorrow,” he said, covering it with a piece of old blanket, carrying it to the back door. “Molly will miss it, but I can’t say I will. Much.”

  “Do you think I killed it, by kicking it like that?”

  “No, of course not. It was on its last legs already when it got here, it’s never been anything but half dead.”

  Alison did not tell Anthony about the dog she had seen on the road at Northam. She wondered if it too was by now dead.

  In bed, where she had hoped she might thaw out a little and turn to him, she lay tense and rigid and trembling. He stroked her back, her face, her hair. “I’m not well
,” she kept repeating, and he could tell that she was not, but it was unlike her to say so, so often.

  The next week was bad. Alison was so strange that he did not know how to deal with her; Molly grieved over the death of the dog, and refused to be comforted; it took six days to get the electricity and the television back; and Tim, offended by Alison’s indifference to him, departed sourly, with many double-edged expressions of gratitude.

  But it was Alison that worried him most. Indeed, he wondered if she were not perhaps suffering from a nervous breakdown, whatever that might be. As on her first evening she had sounded like Babs, so, over the days, she seemed to confuse him with her exhusband, Donnell: she accused him of spoiling her career, of making her send Molly away to school when she would have been happier at home, of being careless with money. When he tried to defend himself, she would seem to listen, seem to agree, and then, a little later, begin again. Most of her accusations being so irrelevant, they did not worry him much, but there were two points on which she reached him. He did not like it when she called him an escapist, attacked him for his liking for the house, the garden, the view. She tried to spoil it for him, and he felt that it was all he had; the more she attacked it, the more he loved it, the more he wished to justify his need for it as a profound need rather than a passing one. She told him he was playing house in the country. He had thought this so often himself that he did not like to hear it from her.

  The second direct hit was about Molly. She told him that he had deliberately stolen Molly’s affections from her. And indeed, it did seem that Molly now turned to Anthony more than to her mother. “But I did it for you,” he would say, to a drearily perplexed Alison. “No, you alienated her from me, after all those years, I gave myself to that child for all those years, and you walk in, you charm her, you take her from me . . . .”