The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  Anthony knew perfectly well who had said that property was theft, and he was sure that some of the audience knew also, for they were not all stupid, but nobody replied. Mike Morgan continued to extemporize upon the theme. He quoted Locke, Hobbes, Marx. The man is mad, thought Anthony. Mike launched into Engels on the origin of the family and private property. The audience began to get restive. Feet shuffled, people coughed, one or two crept out. Anthony wondered if this was the way the show always ended, with some boring intellectual diatribe that finally drove the cattle, ashamed, from their stalls, full, one supposed, of a nasty self-recognition. Or was it a new departure, a new twist, leading up to a new punch line? After a few minutes it became clear that Mike Morgan was going to go on forever, unless stopped. One could not but admire such frenetic energy, coupled with such a good memory. Quotation after quotation poured forth, as in some final examination in political theory (had Mike read PPE at Oxford?—Anthony could not remember), and one by one the audience left, beginning to laugh again, comfortably, as they got the joke, as they received dismissal from their entertainer’s increasingly hostile, averted manner, manipulated willingly into release, docile, responding to his tone and gesture, ceasing to listen to his frenzied outpourings—chatting, milling, thronging, determined not to be embarrassed, determined to have enjoyed themselves, they made their way into the dark streets, to waiting cars, to taxis, for the last tubes and buses had long ago departed. Technically, it was a bravura performance. Such perfect control of the audience, such timing of hostilities, such embodiment of attitudes. Anthony was much impressed.

  Anthony sat it out. So did Giles and Mrs. Chalfont. Mrs. Chalfont had fallen asleep, fortunately, and was leaning on Giles’s solid shoulder, snoring slightly. Her poor neck, at an uncomfortable angle, was thin and stretched. The tendons stood up in it. Mike continued his harangue until there were but the three of them left, isled, marooned, amongst the empty red seats, the red toothless gums of the theater. Then he collapsed, in midsentence. Theatrically, gracefully, he went limp and flopped to the floor. Anthony and Giles clapped. The sound of their clapping echoed thinly in the empty auditorium, like the last plaudits at the end of the world. It had been a good show.

  “Well?” said Mike Morgan, sitting there, cross-legged, staring at his old friends. “Who was it that said that property is theft? I’m damned if I can remember. It went straight out of my head.”

  “Pierre Proudhon, of course,” said Anthony.

  “Of course,” Mike echoed, with irony. “Of course. Well, one can’t be expected to remember everything.”

  “Your brain seems pretty well stacked,” said Giles.

  “You nicked my tune,” said Anthony. “That’s theft, too. I’ll report you to the Performing Rights Society.”

  “Your tunes were never much good,” said Mike. “Which was the one I nicked? My tunes aren’t much good either, I admit. Pap, that’s what they are. But they serve, they serve.”

  Anthony climbed over the footlights, onto the stage, strummed the tune that Mike had played: Mike acknowledged the theft. They played a few more from the old days. Giles went off to put Mrs. Chalfont in a taxi. “Not that I care about theft,” said Anthony. “I always thought it was something of a miracle that anybody recognized the concept of property in artistic copyright. ‘The duration of labor is the just measure of value.’ Who said that?”

  “Pierre Proudhon?”

  “You’ve got it in one. So how can one assess the value of a work of art? By the time it took to make it? By the years of training?”

  “I work for my living,” said Mike Morgan.

  “You certainly do,” agreed Anthony.

  “I put in the hours,” said Mike.

  “Yes,” said Anthony, for it was true.

  “Whereas you and Giles, you sit around and exploit,” said Mike.

  Giles had by this time returned; he and Anthony looked at one another, and both laughed. Sitting around and exploiting did not seem to them an adequate explanation of the last few months, even of the last few years of intense sweat, anxiety, speculation, and terror. Now they could afford to laugh. Three months ago, thought Anthony, this encounter would have driven me mad. As it was, he proposed that they should go off and have a drink somewhere, as he could see a stage manager boy and a charwoman hanging around waiting to lock up and clean up, and Anthony Keating was ever considerate of the labor of others. The others agreed to move; Anthony wished the stage manager boy and the charwoman good night, but could not help noticing that Mike Morgan ignored the latter and dismissed the former with a reprimand and a prima donna flounce.

  They ended up in a drinking club off Old Compton Street. They continued to talk, of this and that, old friends, politics, the state of Britain. Mike Morgan sketched in a little of his missing years, but they had guessed at them already: disillusion in England, escape to America, involvement in radical politics of the late sixties, disillusion with the same, return. “And where are you living, now?” asked Anthony.

  “I live in a bed-sit in Kilburn,” said Mike, grinning, baring his sharp teeth. “I don’t approve of home ownership.”

  It was probably true. And if so, it showed at least consistency. But then, it was easy enough for a single man to live in a bed-sit, reflected Anthony. And Mike was very much the single man. He exuded solitude. It is the family unit, as Engels said, that inspires us with a need for a home of our own. Mike, Anthony guessed, was a sadist: his audience were all masochists. He had found a harmless enough way of exploiting for gain his own psychological bent. A solitary sadist with strong homosexual tendencies, probably unable to satisfy himself because of a mixture of narcissism and puritanism. He was better off employed amusing the idle theater-goers of London than seeking to fulfill himself more privately. Better to seek to destroy the willing indestructible public than the willing or unwilling private person. And he was a professional: one could not but admire the skill. But, thought Anthony, finally, I am not a masochist, and I do not like to be chastised by a bent entertainer who is no better than myself and who, moreover, forgets the name of Pierre Proudhon. What is it, in the English, that makes them take it so meekly?

  He asked the question of Mike. Mike replied at length, and with much feeling. The English are guilty, they are self-denigrating, they are masochistic, they love to be kicked, he said, because of their deeply engrained inalienable disgusting certainty of superiority. They are island xenophobes, shopkeepers, petty investors, tax evaders, proud of their sillinesses and their mistakes and their inconsistencies, and they love to be kicked because they know it does not hurt. It does not hurt, it tickles. They are rich bitches who like to be degraded.

  Why then connive with them, asked Anthony, unkindly. And it was indeed an unkind question, for Mike Morgan looked at him with his hard, sad, insincere eyes, and said, “Because I can’t resist it. I like to get the boot in. It amuses me. All right, I’m a victim too. A jester. What else could I be? They pay me to kick them. It’s better than working in a brothel.”

  “I think,” said Giles, rousing himself from his apparent stupor, “that the English are changing. I don’t think they’re going to go on finding life quite so funny. Because they’ve lost their superiority. I think you’re the end of a line, Mike.” He stubbed out a cigarette, to make his point. “Your act’s out of date, Mike,” he said. “They’ll turn on you in the end. Or if they don’t, they ought to.”

  Mike was offended, but too committed to the seriousness of the discussion to express personal pique, though it flooded like a dark stain into his eyes and face: how childish and vain we all are, thought Anthony, sadly.

  “All right,” said Mike, “so I’m out of date. So I’ve got an out-of-date audience. (I have got an audience, you noted?) So what next. What do you phophesy, Giles?”

  A silence fell around the small round table, over the overflowing ash tray, descending like a pall on the threadbare carpet, settling with a faint sigh in the stained and emptied glasses. Anthony knew, in the si
lence, that Mike had worked in a brothel, that he had not been employing a figure of speech. To what an end we have come. It seemed indeed the end of the act. To the question, what next, nobody answered. But it seemed to Anthony, as he sat there listening to the silence in the room, and the creaking sounds of London, that there would be an answer, for the nation if not for himself, and he saw, as he sat there, some apparition: of this great and puissant nation, a country lying there surrounded by the gray seas, the land green and gray, well worn, long inhabited, not in chains, not in thrall, but a land passing through some strange metamorphosis, through the intense creative lethargy of profound self-contemplation, not idle, not defeated, but waiting still, assembling defenses against the noxious oily tides of fatigue and contempt that washed insistently against her shores. An aerial view, a helicopter view of this precious isle came into his head, and he saw the seas washing forever, or more or less forever, around the white and yellow and pink and gray sands and pebbles of the beaches, this semiprecious stone set in a leaden sea, our heritage, the miles of coast, as yet unenclosed, not yet roped and staked and parceled. What next? The roping, the selling, the plundering? The view shimmered, fragmented, dissolved like a cloud. The silence lasted.

  It was broken by a gunshot in the street below. Because it was London and not New York or Detroit, they assumed it was the backfiring of a car rather than a gunshot, and did not much react. They agreed that the night was over, that it was time to go to bed. Mike Morgan’s question remained unanswered. He went home to Kilburn in a cab.

  In bed, at Giles’s flat, Anthony thought of the girl in labor, and wondered whether she had produced a baby or not, and what would happen to her and it. Babs’s new baby would be the same age, but with better prospects. Children of the midseventies. He was utterly unable to imagine their future. There was a future, but he could not force it to take shape in his mind. Shapes drifted, insubstantial, unconvincing. He knew that he had no reason, other than a congenital personal optimism, as arbitrary as Mike Morgan’s spleen, for his posture of faith. Maybe there was no future. He fell asleep.

  Linton Hancox, driving back from the theater to his wife and his cottage in Oxfordshire, after spending an hour in the bed of the wife of a colleague in Oxford en route, wondered what had happened to Mike Morgan in the intervening years since they had last met, and what was happening to his old friend Anthony Keating. He had glimpsed Anthony across the auditorium, and waved. Anthony looked gray and haggard and determined. His hair was graying. Mike had looked white and mad. And I am beginning to put on weight, thought Linton.

  Linton’s wife, Harriet, was having an affair with a local farmer. His own relationship with Harriet had become acrimonious beyond belief. Linton, in revenge, was having an affair with the wife of the bursar of the college: a double-edged revenge, for he did not like the bursar. The bursar was a nuclear physicist. Harriet’s farmer was a stupid, slow, philistine boor of a man whose favorite diversions according to Harriet were fucking Harriet, playing darts, and watching mindless endless television serials like Coronation Street, Crossroads, and Upstairs, Downstairs. He thought they were all very true to life, Harriet reported, giggling to herself mindlessly at her own memories. The bursar’s wife was a bad-tempered bitch in public, constantly lamenting her ruined career as a librarian, but in bed she was humble and amorous.

  Oh Jesus, thought Linton, as the white road unrolled before him, how have we come to this? What has happened to all of us? It should have been so different.

  He tried to summon up the good people that he knew, for he was desperate. But he could think of none. He no longer knew any good people. Mike Morgan was right: the people of Britain are selfish, mercenary, greedy, corrupt. It crossed his mind to drive his car hard into a tree. Harriet could have the insurance. The ancients considered suicide a noble act; or perhaps not noble: sensible, rather. One of his undergraduates had killed himself recently. Everybody had remarked piously that it was a tragic waste but Linton did not agree. He thought that the undergraduate, who had been suffering from what other dons described as “girl trouble,” had taken a wise short cut. Much better to die young than to struggle through the process of aging and disillusion. Better to die young and beautiful, than to die fat and depressed. He thought of Antigone, descending into her living tomb, her bridal bower. The three fates.

  On her the gray fates laid hard hands.

  Choose death, before it chooses you. They were all dead, all the young men and maidens, Antigone, Hector, Penelope, Cressida, Achilles, Orestes, Clytemnestra. The faithful and the faithless, all dead. And what difference did it make? The solitary goose of classical learning flapped its scraggy wings and squawked. The bursar’s wife slept soundly in a warm damp bed, gathering strength for the hectoring of the morrow. Harriet Hancox dreamed of owls and goats. Mike Morgan sat awake in a bed-sitter in Kilburn and tormented himself. Anthony Keating dreamed of balance sheets and bank statements.

  A thin flattened stoat ran across the road in the headlights, gaining the safety of the far hedgerow.

  Would it matter, at all, if the new dark ages rolled over the face of Europe? Linton Hancox was committed to believing that it was of importance to keep the tradition of scholarship alive. His own son, committed to admiring his father, could read Thucydides, Herodotus, Euripides, with apparent pleasure. But it might be true that he read Greek because he did not admire his father: it might be true that Linton tried to preserve the life of the classics because it was already fled. A scholastic stronghold, standing out against the barbarians, with the living flame within? Or an empty shrine, a pillaged tomb? How could one, any longer, tell? The ancient voice spoke to him no more. The muse was silent, though she had once teased him from every leaf and tried to catch his eye from every dusty textbook. Was she dead therefore, or dead to him alone? Would she ride back in triumph over the Eastern plains, clanking with armor, ferocious reborn matriarch, drinking blood?

  There is no blood left in me, thought Linton Hancox. I am a dry husk, dry as parchment. There is no blood in my veins, but some strange woody sap. Xylem or phloem. A protective spirit has mercifully turned me into a tree, to spare me the rape of the mind.

  The next day, Anthony Keating agreed to sell his old house for £35,000 and the Riverside scheme for half a million, did a few sums, and discovered to his surprise that, after all that excitement, he was going to break just about even. It seemed too neat to be true, but so it was. He was more or less back where he started, with a better house, in a less convenient place, no job, no income, and about four thousand pounds in the bank. And five years older. It seemed, somehow, conclusive proof that he, Anthony Keating, was not a serious person.

  He forgot to ring the hospital about the girl in labor. Had he rung, he might or might not have been told that the girl had died, and that the baby was suffering from heroin addiction. On the other hand, he did remember to keep his appointment with his own doctor, who expressed surprise at his healthy appearance. It must be because I gave up smoking and drinking, said Anthony, that I look so well.

  You don’t mean to say you really gave them up? said his doctor, with surprise.

  It was you that told me to, said Anthony.

  Yes, but I didn’t really think you’d manage it, said his doctor.

  You mean I needn’t have bothered? asked Anthony.

  No, I don’t mean that at all, said his doctor. Nor do I mean that you can take it up again now. Though I don’t suppose you’ll abstain forever.

  Oh, I don’t know, said Anthony. I’m a new man, now.

  And he walked out, a new man. And walked straight into the nearest pub, and ordered himself a double Scotch. He felt deeply aggrieved. He had taken every step in his nature toward selfdestruction: he had played with fire, he had gambled, he had tried to turn upside down his dearest principles, and by any law of justice, he, like Len Wincobank, should have ended up in prison, or, like Max Friedmann, dead. But fate had given him a second chance. Yet again, he was going to have to decide what
to do with his life. It was too exhausting. It was too much of an effort. He wished that somebody would throw a bomb through the pub window and put him out of his misery. He did not know what he thought about anything: why should he be expected to go on making up his mind? The problems were too complex. He had neither the intelligence nor the perseverance to solve them. On the other hand, he was quite well aware that he had too much intelligence and too much perseverance to give up the struggle. He had no choice but to go on making choices. No guardian angel would put him quietly away in a cell where he could go quietly mad. He wished profoundly that he was where Len Wincobank was, out of harm’s way. He felt deeply depressed. He was saved from ignominy and shame, from bankruptcy and self-reproach, and the prospect depressed him unimaginably. He ordered another double Scotch.

  As Anthony Keating sat drinking double Scotches in a pub in West London, Maureen Kirby lay in bed in a hotel in Aberdeen with Derek Ashby, her architect employer. She had given up resistance and had succumbed. It was a relief, really, to get it over with. And she liked Derek: he was a nice fellow, considerate in bed as well as out of it, he had come too soon, as men tend to do the first time, but had licked her and sucked her afterward, and now they lay there, comfortably in one another’s arms, watching Esther Rantzen on the television. Maureen approved of oral sex and thought it was a good invention. She was rather surprised that Derek was so good at it, because he must be at least forty-five.

  Derek was pleased with himself. He had a contract to build a new house for an American oil man, in a village on the East Coast. No expense spared. Derek enjoyed the opportunity, rare enough, to indulge his flights of fancy. He was also pleased with himself for laying Maureen. He had never slept with any of his secretaries before; indeed, the only extramarital sex he had ever indulged in had been an affair with another architect, initiated at a conference in Bonn, and she hadn’t been much fun, she had been far too serious and had threatened to tell his wife. Maureen was the kind of girl who would never tell anyone’s wife. Derek respected her for that. Indeed, he had a great deal of respect for Maureen, who seemed a thoroughly sensible person, and who listened to his complaints about his wife with exactly the right degree of sympathy. She didn’t imply that his wife must be an awful old bag—which, of course, she wasn’t—and indeed was quite capable of criticizing Derek’s version of events: “You must have done something worse than that,” she would say indignantly, when Derek tried to suggest that his wife had run away to her sister’s simply because Derek had forgotten to tell her he couldn’t be home for supper. She was also sympathetic to Derek’s wife’s desire to better herself through evening classes, and told Derek off quite sharply when he complained about her messing about making jewelry and silk-screen printing: why on earth shouldn’t she, she spent enough of her life looking after you and the kids, Maureen would retort, with a flounce of womanly solidarity. Derek approved of that, for the truth was that he was quite proud of his wife’s ambitions, but convention, deeply rooted, and a fear that she might make herself ridiculous, forbade him to show much sympathy either to the wife or to Maureen.