The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  Karel crossed over and took the drink. He held her hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘What a mess, what a mess.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Frances, hopelessly. She was beginning to mind, rather badly, now that Karel was there, and couldn’t see how he could possibly cope with the situation. It crossed her mind that the best thing to do would be, quietly, to leave the room and let them get on with it, whatever it was: she started to detach her fingers from Karel’s, but he held on.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

  ‘Why should you go?’ said Karel. ‘It’s your house.’

  This remark, perhaps understandably, aroused Joy again from her corner of the settee: she went for them both this time, flailing but effective, inflicting rather a lot of damage. After a while Karel hit her very hard, and she sank down on the floor, and shut her eyes, as though that was what she had been waiting for. She sat there, propped up against a table leg, and appeared to pass out.

  Frances, weeping at last, took a disconsolate gulp of Scotch and sat down on the settee. She didn’t dare to look at Karel. The violence of his blow had silenced her too.

  ‘What on earth was all this about?’ said Karel, after a minute or two, coming to sit down by her.

  Frances explained that she didn’t know, that Joy had just turned up and gone for her, that she had no idea what it was all about. Talking about it, she began to feel better. Karel, on the other hand, seemed to get worse and worse, sunk into a more and more profound gloom. Frances ended up stroking his hair and his face. ‘You didn’t tell me Bob was ill,’ she said, after a while, whispering, as though Joy were asleep, which maybe she was. And he told her about Bob; he’d been very ill, he’d had some mysterious and permanent high fever, he’d been for a month in hospital waiting for the worst, they’d expected the worst, and then, in the end, somebody had diagnosed it as a curable but extremely obscure virus, and now he was all right and home again.

  ‘You didn’t tell me a word,’ said Frances, struck to the heart. ‘Not one word.’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ said Karel.

  ‘Why not?’ said Frances. ‘I love you. I’m here to be worried. I want to be worried. I fell in love with you because you worried so much about me, why do you deny me the same privilege?’

  And they went over it all: love, fear, commitment, fear of commitment, lack of mutual living. Joy slept through it all, worn out by emotion. I’ll never leave you, Karel told Frances. She said that she believed him. As a pale green watery dawn broke, and the birds began to sing in the trees in her large garden, Karel and Frances started to pick up the pieces, throwing broken glass into one corner, assembling precious ancient fragments, trying to prop up the mangled ferns and pot plants. There was earth all over the carpet, as well as wine and blood and glass. Karel got the hoover, and began to hoover, but it was clearly a major task, and Frances persuaded him to abandon it.

  Joy lay inert. ‘She is irresponsible,’ said Karel, dishcloth in hand. ‘She’s left those children alone all night. I wish she wouldn’t do that kind of thing.’

  ‘And where were you? So late at night?’

  ‘Me?’ said Karel. He looked slightly shifty and embarrassed. ‘Oh, I got stuck at college. Then I had to go home with Mrs Mayfield.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Frances, with reproach. Mrs Mayfield was a tedious old lady, an ex-student, who had wasted many years of Karel’s life.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Karel, nervously.

  ‘You should have been either here or at home,’ said Frances, ‘and then all this wouldn’t have happened. You haven’t any time to waste on Mrs Mayfield.’

  ‘Nor has anybody else any time to waste on Mrs Mayfield,’ said Karel. ‘So I must.’

  ‘I love you,’ said Frances, with conviction.

  ‘I make such a mess,’ said Karel, irresolutely, ‘through trying to give people what they want. She’ (pointing to Joy) ‘wants to be knocked about. I hate doing it, I really do.’

  She had rarely heard him speak of himself in this way.

  And you, he went on to her, all you seem to want is exactly what I want to give. How couldn’t I like it better with you?

  They stood there in the wrecked room, holding hands, contemplating the debris of their own confusions. They were both strong and healthy people, able to take a lot more of the same kind of thing. One blow, one row, was nothing. They would tidy up and begin again.

  After a while Joy began to stir and mumble, and Karel picked her up and took her home, and Frances went to bed for what was left of the night.

  The incident did not part them, as perhaps Joy had intended. If Joy had thought Frances a kind person or a nervous person, who would be disturbed by the sight of another’s grief and rage, she had miscalculated. At times Frances wished she was a little nicer and kinder, but she wasn’t, and that was that. Indeed, in a sense Joy had demonstrated how right Karel had been to seek an alternative, and Frances felt marginally less guilty than before. For his part, Karel seemed determined to take Frances more into his confidence: though naturally a secretive person, he made an effort to tell her about himself, his family, he introduced her to his past, his children. He even offered to show her where he lived, when Joy was out, and seemed surprised when she said she didn’t want to see the flat off the Fulham Road. In other respects, their affair became like a second marriage. Frances’s friends and children accepted Karel as her man: they went out together sometimes, though not often, for their chief problem was lack of time. Frances was an energetic and successful woman, with a life full of domestic, social and professional engagements, and Karel was also busy. He took on far too much, he spread himself far too thin. His life was full of past obligations, old Jewish refugees, impoverished college friends, old school friends, wealthy and boring fools, silly students, mad entrepreneurs, con men, thieves and liars of every kind. Frances accused him once of not knowing a single sane or interesting person, and he had agreed with her, but had defended his case: it was wicked, he said, to discriminate amongst people on the grounds of whether or not they were interesting. One should love all (Frances privately believed that he had married Joy because she was so awful: she hated to think that Karel had made her awful, and very little research had reassured her that she had been to pieces before Karel got to her, paranoid, miserable, mad. He might have liked her for her bad qualities, he might even have connived at and encouraged them, but at least he wasn’t their sole origin).

  And so you love me, said Frances, awful though I am?

  You’re different, of course he would say. You’re my one indulgence in life. You’re the one person I choose, who also chooses me. That’s why you can’t leave me. I can’t survive without you.

  She listened, anxious to believe.

  And as he seemed to her to be incapable of organizing himself, she organized herself, over the years. She cut down on unnecessary work, she stopped travelling so much, she tried to stop going out to see people. She no longer needed other people: she got plenty of attention from Karel. It was all right, really. Sometimes she thought she had constructed a perfect situation for herself. And yet, she herself had destroyed it. After that holiday, their one holiday abroad, she had had enough. Something rebelled in her, something began to make trouble: she found herself saying to herself things like, ‘it simply isn’t in me to spend the rest of my life ruining my career for a man who will never marry me.’ Though that wasn’t it, at all: for one thing, she wasn’t ruining her career, and for another thing, she didn’t much want to marry Karel. She was quite happy on her own. The words seemed to come into her head from nowhere, but once they started to come, that had been the end of it: she couldn’t resist them. Karel wasn’t as unresisting: he shouted at her, pleaded with her, wept at her, not minding that she should see how much he suffered. She was awestruck. If he had left her, how she would have dissimulated, how she would have pretended that she did not care, that it did not matter, that it had never mattered. How she would have pretended never to h
ave loved him. His difference of approach stunned her. It had a grandeur, a generosity, a simplicity, of which she felt herself utterly incapable. He was far, far beyond her, in some different land. She would never be able to join him. She would return to her trivial round of excavations and lectures and television series and parties, suffering in the upper mountain reaches of her being, while his nature lay deep and opaque, levelled to base level, without the jagged cataracts of the self, deep, persistent, continuous, deep like the river meeting the sea.

  And so it was something of a shock to her, to find that water dry. She’d sent him an unambiguous postcard, telling him she loved him and missed him, and he hadn’t rushed in love or pity to her side. He would have taken pity on a dog, a cat, a hamster, but he’d lost pity for her. Whatever could have happened to him, what had she done? She had been so certain that he would take her back. At times she said to herself, he would have taken pity on a dog, but the fact that he takes no pity on me can only mean he loves me still, thus he distinguishes me. But she didn’t think much of this explanation. She knew it was nonsense. She knew he would have come to her. (The true explanation never crossed her mind.)

  In the end, she began to wonder whether he had loved her. She was obliged to. Perhaps he had another woman by now? He was an attractive man, he had had plenty of offers. His students solicited him constantly.

  She began to doubt his nature. In astonishment, she said to herself, he deceived me. This is how it must be, she said, for a woman when her husband suddenly tells her, out of the blue, that he’s got another woman. And she can’t believe it, because she had always trusted him, had never had any suspicions.

  It was the one experience she had tried to avoid. Rejection. Betrayal. Surprise.

  Doubting him, she grew ill, as I have said. As she lay in bed in the hospital, she looked at the worst things in herself, and did not like them much. She had behaved badly. She had left him frivolously, she saw that now. She had left because she was a woman used to having the initiative, and she must have been afraid of losing it. Had she been offended, over the years, by the fact that he had not even spoken of leaving Joy for her? Her pride, her self-esteem, the most trivial parts of herself, had been wounded, and in revenge for them, she had lost all. She had lost him because she had believed that if she relented, he would come back.

  She did not like herself much for this.

  But even more, she disliked the way that Karel now, finally, had accepted her departure. Oh yes, he’d made a fuss at the time, she’d been taken in by his wails of anguish at her desertion. She’d been vain enough, even at that point, to be taken in. But Karel hadn’t even meant it. It hadn’t been love or generosity in him, to make that kind of fuss, it was simply the way he expressed himself. Middle European. It didn’t mean anything. It had simply been a conventional row from a man who had chosen to cast himself in a certain role. All right, she had behaved badly, pettily. But he should have seen through her pettiness and redeemed her. That was what he was there for. But instead, he had clearly vowed to take upon her the revenge that she had taken upon him. He would ignore her appeals, as she had his. And this was the man she had thought so good.

  It wasn’t his fault, maybe, that he was no better than herself. It was the situation’s. But if he couldn’t rise above it, she wasn’t interested. She determined, half-heartedly, not to be interested. She would cast him off. A future without him stretched like the desert, dry and hot. She had always hated the heat, and wished often that she had specialized in some more Nordic branch of her field.

  She would think of him no more, she told herself. Or if she thought of him, she would try to think the worst. (She did not succeed. She had too strong a sense of reality.)

  In her illness she found herself turning rather weakly to her family. There was nowhere else to turn. She had no real friends, only colleagues and acquaintances, and she’d lost a lot of those during her years with Karel. Karel had been bad for her, she told herself. He had cut her off from her kind, had made her into a recluse. When she got better, she would have to apply herself seriously to the business of living in the world again. She hadn’t really faced that problem yet, she’d always been expecting to get Karel back, since their parting she had lived in a kind of nothingness, a kind of limbo. She would have to come to terms with the future. She would have to make new connections.

  Her family were quite kind to her. They visited her in hospital, sent her flowers, entertained her children in her absence, asked her to stay in their houses while she recuperated. Joy had been wrong about the country houses which she believed the Ollerenshaws to possess in such abundance; Frances’s brother Hugh had a cottage in the country, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. And her parents lived on a campus, which could hardly have been described as the country: her father was Vice-Chancellor of a fairly new University, and one of the perks or penalties of this post was that one had to live in the building designed for the job. Frances, who went to stay with them for the weekend after she emerged from hospital, thought that she wouldn’t have liked it at all, but they didn’t seem to mind. The campus was composed of plate glass and grassy lawns and duck ponds and covered alley ways, quite a change from the Oxford where she had been brought up. She suspected that they both liked its anonymity and the fact that they need take no personal responsibility for its shortcomings. Neither of them cared much for style: her father, brought up in the flat East Midlands, the only child of a nursery gardener, was quite exceptionally unaware of his surroundings, while her mother, who came from a notable family of Oxford intellectuals (mostly scientific ones) had always believed in functional living conditions. She had certainly got them now, thought Frances, slumped into a corner of the modern very comfortable undyed tweed settee, gazing out of the huge picture window at the vast artificially hummocky garden, trying to avoid her mother’s eye, trying not to be drawn into discussion about the lump now removed from her breast. Her mother was a gynaecologist, and had the most extraordinary views on sex. One really had to try to keep off the subject, but it was more or less impossible, for Lady Ollerenshaw was an enthusiast, ardently caught up in population control and abortion law reform—she wanted more abortion not less. She spent much of her time now telling others from the lecture platform that they ought not to have more than two children per family. This was reasonable enough, Frances supposed, but her tone when delivering her views was particularly unfortunate—upper class, patronizing, shrill and dogmatic. Perhaps Joy had had the misfortune to hear her speak. At least, thought Frances, if nothing else, I’m a better speaker than my mother.

  Frances had always suspected that her mother didn’t care much for sex. (That would be one explanation for the domestic moodiness of her father: in public life, he was pleasant, amiable, a good chap, a reliable administrator, efficient and calm, but at home he tended towards the morose and abstracted. In fact, it was reported to Frances that he was forgetting to be pleasant in public, these days, as though he were brooding all the time over some important problem as he grew older.) Her mother had never disparaged sex: on the contrary, she had talked about it too much, too sensibly, too medically. How could anyone who talked like that ever have enjoyed the least sensible, the messiest and most amazing of mysteries? On the other hand, she was an attractive woman—she was still an attractive woman—and enjoyed the company of men. Although in theory a feminist, speaking frequently of the need to emancipate woman from the chores of domesticity and childrearing, she seemed not to like other women, and had few friends. She liked sexual attention, and demanded it from the men around her (in University circles, there were always plenty of men) in a way that was both coy and calculating: she manipulated the most unwilling and reluctant old dons and young undergraduates into attitudes of gallantry that Frances certainly found embarrassing, even if they didn’t. There was no resisting her: she would not be ignored in a gathering, she had to be noticed, as a woman. And yet she hadn’t got quite the style to manipulate gracefully: perhaps she lacked confi
dence, somewhere along the line, for her conquests always eyed her with a faint air of uneasiness, as though they knew something was demanded of them, knew they had to give, and were unsure whether they had given enough. She had the power to demand, without the charm to make tributes easy. She made people uncomfortable, she made them feel guilty, as though they were somehow at fault.

  She had been very difficult to deal with, during Frances’s adolescence and years at University. Frances had since discovered that it is more commonly a daughter’s father who makes problems over his daughter’s friends, but Frank Ollerenshaw had ignored her social life completely, never even bothering to inquire where she was going, with whom she had just been to stay. Her mother, on the contrary, took an excessive, a proprietorial interest. Young men, brought home for tea or dinner, would be interrogated, charmed, bullied, provoked. Many was the time that Frances found herself sulking silently and ungraciously in a corner of the sitting room, or weeping upstairs on her bed, while her mother talked to her boyfriend on the settee. Some of them succumbed easily: she was after all an intelligent, highly educated woman, from a family of famous names, with some interesting anecdotes to tell, and a good deal of social power in the University. Others resisted, hoping to please Frances. Frances found herself disliking both those who gave in and those who didn’t. She couldn’t bear her mother to get away with it, but she couldn’t bear to know she was being criticized either. Thus, successfully, were many of her early attempts at friendship brought to an end. It was only fairly recently that she’d begun to wonder whether her mother might not have done it deliberately, through jealousy. But she didn’t think that was it. It was more likely that her mother simply needed attention, whatever the source.

  In the end, she had learned to keep her real friends away from her mother. She would feed to her mother harmless friends, meaningless people, as one might feed dead rabbits to a snake, twitching them a little every now and then by a string so that they simulated signs of life. She was careful not to introduce complete duds—her mother was no fool, after all, she would not be taken in by anything too mangy, too bedraggled. But there was always an intermediate category of friends, would-be suitors most of them (for Frances was not a particularly kind person herself), who would do for her mother—to this day, Lady Ollerenshaw would still inquire in a possessive and self-congratulatory way about Miles who became a doctor, Stephen who became an art historian, Malcolm who went off to Iowa, and that very nice boy Rickie who always brought her flowers. Miles, Stephen, Malcolm and Rickie had played their parts well, and graced the dinner table many times. Rickie had been truly charmed. Frances, perversely, had been grateful to him for that.