The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  He finished the John le Carré in a couple of hours, still not quite sure what had happened in the course of its plot. Then he embarked on the Theban plays of Sophocles, which he had also packed in his bag. It was a new translation: after a while it occurred to him to look for the name of the translator whose version struck him as excellent and saw that, by God, it was Linton Hancox. The discovery cheered him. He looked around the office with more curiosity and less terror: the walls were bare, except for some red and green notices in Wallacian, and a highly tinted portrait of President Tetov. The furniture was standard cheap office furniture: pale splintery wood. He pulled away a few splinters. Daring, he opened the drawer of the desk. Inside were some multilingual documents about visas, some descriptions of currency regulations, a few cheap ballpoints, some paper clips, a pair of spectacles, a postcard of a ski resort, and an apple. He wondered whether he might eat the apple, but refrained. There was no point in being wantonly provocative.

  The airport had gone very quiet. It was almost as though everybody had gone away. It was not a busy spot at the best of times: only two planes a day from the outside world, one going east, one west, and a few internal trips to the capital. These did not seem to be taking place.

  Anthony rehearsed his lines, should anyone come and discover him. It was a pity that he could not speak Wallacian: he was forced to fall back on various old-world possibilities, such as, “Ah, I see you have come to return me my passport.” He wondered why any course of action seemed to suggest behavior more suited to a Victorian gentleman than to a modern operator; it was as though the spirit of Humphrey Clegg and his bedroom had subtly filled Anthony Keating’s submissive body. Here he was, a hostage, prepared to represent Queen and Country with the polite and honorable codes of the English public school. He had not even eaten the Wallacian apple.

  I don’t suppose these codes will last long, if anyone starts shooting at me, thought Anthony.

  He reopened Antigone. Antigone had gone out and died for a completely meaningless code. She had buried her brother, although her brother was a no-good traitor. He noted that Linton, inevitably, made some interesting anthropological kinship commentary, in his introduction, on Antigone’s extraordinarily unconvincing explanation for her behavior: I would not have done this for husband and child, said Antigone, for I could get another husband or another child, but where will I find another brother? Linton explained this in terms of endogamy and exogamy; even Linton, old world as he was, had become a reluctant structuralist. Anthony was prepared to believe it, while reflecting that his own society was so different that he would willingly, could he have found the courage, have died for Babs or Alison, or for any of their various children, but that nothing on earth would persuade him that it was worth dying for either of his two disagreeable brothers.

  Although, in a way, it was the pointlessness of Antigone’s sacrifice that was so significant. Linton Hancox recognized this. “While accepting the force of the anthropological argument,” he wrote, “we nevertheless today continue to be moved by the abstract nature of the sacrifice . . . .Maybe our society, so lacking in rigid codes of behavior, so influenced by the rationalism of the eighteenth century, turns all the more strongly toward the apparently irrational. It is interesting that Anouilh, during the German Occupation, turned to the same myth . . . .”

  Yes, thought Anthony. That weekend at the Hancoxes’ flashed back into his memory with a horrible clarity: the cold, the sloping bed, the wet fields. He knew, in his bones, that he, Anthony Keating, was in for worse than discomfort, that shortly he would look back to Linton’s cottage as though it were the height of physical luxury.

  The airport had gone silent. There was not a sound. At about four, he could hear trucks moving away; he was thinking he might risk opening his door when he heard sounds, shuffling, banging, voices, then again silence. It would be wiser, after all, to wait for dark; though then, where should he go? Perhaps it would be worth trying the consulate: there was no reason to suppose that everyone was dead.

  It began to grow dark. Jane, by now, would be in England. A lemon moon hung low in the sky. The airport buildings were, as far as he could see, in darkness, which implied that there was nobody around at all. It was uncanny. If the Wallacians had an air force, why was it not doing something? Had it already been wiped out by the Russians, the Chinese? Or were there other, military airfields scattered all over the country? Yes, that was clearly the explanation. This was nothing but a small commercial provincial airport, which handled only a few flights a day. It had closed down for the night. Perhaps nothing much is happening at all, thought Anthony to himself: perhaps the whole thing was a mere skirmish, a false alarm.

  A false alarm, in which I unfortunately lost my passport and missed my plane.

  He decided to walk back into town.

  No news of Anthony Keating reached England for four months. He was presumed dead, by Babs and Alison, by his own children, by his mother and brothers, by Giles Peters and Rory Leggett, and his solicitor. Even Humphrey Clegg began to think he was dead. Humphrey Clegg had been responsible for a not inconsiderable number of deaths over the Wallacian crisis, but he could not really blame himself: he had done his best and his best was better than most people’s. It could have been much worse. It had been better than the Albanian fiasco, anyway. Moreover, Jane Murray was alive, well, and free, and Anthony Keating would surely have been pleased about that, as an English gentleman.

  Only Jane insisted that Anthony must still be alive. She had become a passionate admirer and advocate of Anthony. Alison, listening to her breathless emotional panegyrics, found herself wishing dumbly and bitterly from time to time that perverse Jane had realized what a wonderful man Anthony was a little earlier, and allowed him and Alison a little happy married life together, before this disaster.

  Anthony Keating certainly looked heroic, in the British press. His photograph adorned many editions. The Foreign Office did not suppress the publicity, for the image of Anthony as Scarlet Pimpernel, flying out to rescue stepdaughter in distress, was the least damaging image that the Wallacian factions could receive, assuming that Anthony might still be alive. And Alison let Jane talk to the papers and on the television as much as she wanted: poor child, she had deserved a brief hour of notoriety and glory. In her better moments, Alison had to admit that Jane was behaving, at last, rather well: she took entire responsibility for the car accident, no longer saying that it was not her fault; she took responsibility for her own shocking appearance, explaining that the hunger strike had been her own idea, and a silly one at that; she praised the Wallacian prison authorities, who had treated her quite fairly, in all, she said. The governor in particular, she said, had been kind, and had lent her books to read. She hoped, she said, she hoped and prayed that Anthony Keating would be treated as well as she had been.

  Alison always shut her ears and eyes at that bit, for she knew Anthony was dead. She tried hard to avoid the violent pictures that filled her mind—bombs, guns, snipers, grenades exploded endlessly in her dreams and her waking hours. There are worse fates than death, she tried to tell herself. But she knew that that was not true.

  The Wallacian crisis seemed to Alison to last a long time. News was uncertain. An alleged pro-Chinese conspiracy was alleged to have been suppressed, the elderly Tetov was accused of neo-Stalinism, and his Minister of the Interior was accused of Revisionism. Both were shot. There were many executions, some orderly, some disorderly. International opinion protested about the death of Tetov, but there was not much that international opinion could do. The Russian tanks did not roll; the Warsaw Pact countries had shuffled off Wallacia, as she had shuffled off them. At one time it looked as though neighboring states, despite Russia’s disapproval, might involve themselves, but they did not move; neither did the Americans, the Cubans, the distant Chinese. The Arab world shifted uneasily and made uneasy pronouncements, in the time it could spare from its own troubles, for ubiquitous Palestinian guerrillas were said to have been involved i
n training anti-Tetov insuriectionists. Various experts in international affairs wondered if some new shift of power in the Near and Middle East might be about to take place: was this the beginning of the flow of Eastern power across Europe? It appeared not. Law and order were restored. Wallacia remained what it had always been, a small, independent Communist republic, though it became less isolationist in its policies: it reopened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which had been severed in 1964. The new President, Clejani, declared himself in favor of detente and the Helsinki agreement. Despite fears on all sides, the struggle had been contained, and compared with the death toll in Lebanon or Angola, the fighting had been modest in scale.

  Nevertheless, Alison remained convinced that Anthony had been one of its innocent and accidental casualties, until news reached the new ambassador in Beravograd that a man who said he was called Keating was being held in the Plevesti camp. He had been sentenced to six years’ strict regime in a labor colony, for anti-Wallacian activities and espionage.

  The ambassador immediately requested to visit Anthony Keating. Permission was refused. Protests ensued. Finally, a letter from Anthony Keating, satisfactorily establishing his identity, arrived. It said that he was in good health, that he fully accepted the justice of his conviction, that he was in the process of subjecting his past life to an intense and thorough analysis, and was reviewing the ideological basis of his past attitude toward the Wallacian people and their heroic history. He was being treated well, receiving an adequate diet, and wished to send his affectionate respects to his family, to whom he hoped, in the course of time, and at the discretion of the governor, to be allowed to write.

  The ambassador stared at this communication with interest. He wondered how Keating had managed to survive without being shot. He had certainly learned the right vocabulary quickly. As far as the ambassador knew, Keating had no past attitude whatsoever to the heroic Wallacian people, and there was an ironic clumsiness in his wielding of the usual instruments of apology that suggested he was keeping his head well screwed on. He would apply for permission to visit in another month. They would surely let him see him in the end. He recalled a story, told him by a man in Hungary at the time of the Revolution, of a prisoner who had emerged after more than ten years in jail, a British citizen, released when the jails were opened by the revolutionaries; she had languished unknown, utterly lost from all records. Keating was comparatively lucky.

  He reread the letter. Clegg had made a balls-up of the whole thing in some ways, but perhaps he had been right about Anthony Keating. Perhaps Keating ought to have entered the Foreign Office, been a diplomat. Perhaps he had missed his vocation. He had, after all, managed to get that tiresome teenager to deliver some useful goods in London. Or goods that might have been useful, had things taken a different course. Poor old Keating.

  There was little hope, in the circumstances, of getting him released, but at least one could go and have a look at him.

  As Anthony Keating had politely and respectfully hoped, in the course of time he was allowed to write to Alison and to his children. Unfortunately, not much information could be gleaned from his monthly letters. There was, of course, no account of what had happened between the time that Jane had last seen him on Krusograd airfield and the time that he had emerged in the Plevesti camp. Nor were there many graphic details of conditions in the camp, beyond the information that, as Alison would be relieved to hear, the food was luckily remarkably low in cholesterol content; in fact, wrote Anthony, “ideal for a man in my state of health.” Alison, pondering this sentence, decided that either Anthony had gone mad, or that he was in a better frame of mind than she had dared to hope.

  He had at first had little contact with his fellow prisoners, he wrote in his third letter, but now was permitted to mingle freely and share their duties. He made it sound quite a treat.

  The mountainous scenery of Upper Wallacia was particularly splendid, as Jane would remember, he wrote, and the climate bracing.

  He hoped that they were all well. He wanted Alison to know that she should consider the house as her own. He had intended to make a will, leaving it to her, but had not got round to it. She should do what she wished with it. God would advise her.

  This last sentence perplexed Alison extremely. God would advise her? Who was God? Was it a code name for Giles Peters or Len Wincobank? She knew that God was illegal in Wallacia, and had never known Anthony to refer to him before, except when he called upon him and took his name in vain.

  She did not know what to do. She explained to the ambassador and to Humphrey Clegg and to Amnesty that Anthony had a weak heart, and ought not to be subjected to the rigors he was clearly undergoing. She got his doctor to write to the ambassador. The ambassador continued to protest about the refusal of the authorities to allow him to see Anthony Keating, though his private opinion remained that Anthony Keating was lucky to be alive, and that if he had survived so far, he would probably continue to do so. Plevesti camp was not famed for its humanitarian outlook, but it did not torture its inmates or starve them to death on purpose. On the other hand, some of its inmates died from time to time from natural causes. If it was true that Keating had a bad heart, then something ought to be done about him. The ambassador went on writing letters. He suspected the bad heart. All prisoners’ wives claimed them for their husbands.

  Anthony continued to write letters about the trees, and the camp cat, and the sunsets. He continued to assert that he was well. Alison wrote back, with innocent details of the same nature; it occurred to her once, as she tried to think of something else innocuous and interesting to say, that writing to Anthony in labor camp was not unlike writing to Molly at the Margaret Gaskill School.

  Toward the end of the first year of Anthony’s detention, the ambassador, now familiar with the new regime and a little more certain of the regime’s reluctance to offend the outside world, worked out that the Wallacians must know that Keating was innocent of espionage, in any serious sense of the word. If he had been guilty, they would have shot him. If they had even thought him guilty, they would have shot him. The fact that he was still alive meant that they knew he was of no importance. The ambassador decided to risk making more fuss, and as a reward, was granted an interview with Anthony Keating, in the presence of two camp officers.

  The interview took place in Mjesti, a small mountain town fifty kilometers from Plevesti. The Wallacians did not want the ambassador to see the camp. He did not make an issue of this point.

  As the ambassador had never seen Anthony Keating as a free man, he was in no position to compare the new one with the old one. But he thought that Anthony looked not too bad. He had grown a beard: the razor blades, he said, did not encourage shaving. He was thin, but by no means emaciated; he did not look as though he had been knocked about. His skin looked weathered, a condition due no doubt to open air life. When the ambassador inquired about his health, Anthony said that the worst he could complain of these days was dermatitis, and displayed his hands, which were swollen and indeed peeling rather badly. “It’s the so-called soap,” said Anthony. “But then, I always had a delicate skin.” The ambassador asked if the camp medical authorities were aware of the problem. Anthony smiled, a smile much in keeping with the tone of his correspondence. “Oh yes, I think so,” he said.

  They were allowed to talk for half an hour. The ambassador conveyed messages from Anthony’s family: his mother had moved to a bungalow in a village ten miles outside Newcastle, where his elder brother practiced; his children were doing well at their various places of education; Jane had decided to leave art college and train as a nurse. Alison had let High Rook House for the year to some Americans, and was living in London, as she had no doubt informed him in her letter. “You do get her letters, don’t you?” he asked. Anthony nodded.

  Anthony had not much information to impart in exchange, and every time he spoke, the two prison officers moved imperceptibly nearer. He managed to convey that he had spent the first two months of hi
s sentence in solitary confinement, and that he had found it an unnerving experience. “Then they decided I had nothing to say,” he said, “so they let me out.”

  He added, “It wasn’t very pleasant, waiting for them to decide that I had nothing to say.”

  The ambassador pricked up his ears. “You weren’t actually ill treated, were you?”

  Anthony shrugged. “Well, it was a state of emergency, you know. And when I was picked up, I was found associating with people of the wrong persuasion.”

  The prison officers moved in and said that the time was nearly up. The ambassador offered them and Anthony cigarettes. Anthony accepted one, inhaled, and started to cough and splutter. “Out of practice,” he wheezed. “I don’t buy them in the camp. I spend my money on paper and pens.”

  The ambassador was interested in the people of the wrong persuasion with whom Anthony had been found, but could not think of any clever way of phrasing his questions so that the observers would not understand; perhaps, after all, Anthony had been involved in Wallacian politics, other than as a carrier of Humphrey Clegg’s messages? Anthony, for his part, would have liked to explain that his association with these ideologically confused people had not been exactly a free one: he had simply exchanged one set of captors for another. He had had a run for his money, in Krusograd, but it had not been a very long one. He was surprised, like the ambassador, that he had not been shot, all the more so as he had committed several real offenses, as well as unreal ones: he had stolen a car, broken into a deserted farmhouse, and shot a barking Alsatian with a farmer’s shotgun, before being stopped. Somebody else had shot the farmer, but Anthony did not expect anyone to believe him, especially as he was not able to explain himself in Wallacian. The shooting of the Alsatian had been so horrifying that he had realized at once that he was not cut out to shoot human beings, and he had surrendered to the first comers. It did not seem worth going back over this old history, even if the officers had permitted him, which they clearly would not. He had had plenty of time to come to terms with his memories, in those two months of solitude.