The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘You’re a child of your time,’ said Frances, recognizing familiar arguments. ‘We, we’re too old to renounce Israel.’

  ‘You’re too addicted to living,’ said Stephen, with what seemed to her an uncharacteristic unkindness: for there she lay, as he well knew, awaiting the final results of her biopsy. And then he had looked at his child, wriggling there against him, and he had looked with such desperate unconcealed yearning, and had begun to talk strangely about his fears of having her immunized and vaccinated, for he had read in the paper that even such routine measures could kill, could cause irreversible brain damage, ‘and if a hair of her head,’ he said, with a miserable ferocity, ‘were harmed, I would—I would—I don’t know what I wouldn’t do.’

  The baby, almost hairless, smiled happily.

  ‘You mustn’t worry so much,’ said Frances, gently, reaching for his hand, squeezing it in an avuncular fashion. ‘Babies aren’t so fragile, you know. They survive an awful lot. Don’t worry yourself, Stephen. I know it’s hell, worrying about them, you just have to accept that that’s how it is and it doesn’t matter, and that they’ll survive. You read too many papers. You shouldn’t read the papers, you should read Dr Spock, you know.’

  ‘Dr Spock is so hideously reassuring,’ Stephen had said, ‘and so obviously a liar . . . ’

  And they had both laughed, and Stephen had gone on to ask her, in a different tone, what Karel thought of Israel: for him this was a conversational matter, he was perhaps curious about where Karel had gone to, why he had disappeared from the scene, she sometimes thought he was too young and self-absorbed ever to have noticed what Karel had meant to her, and so she was not prepared to speak of Karel’s views on Israel, of his anxiety, his loyalty, his distress. Why should she deliver these things up to a teenager who believed blindly in the Third World?

  She kept the memory of Karel to herself, and fobbed Stephen off with some of her own views on the Arabs. She knew a lot about the Arabs, he could not answer her back.

  While Frances Wingate sat in her parents’ sitting room gazing over the darkening wastes, fobbing off her parents with some account of their grandson and great-granddaughter which quite denied her true anxiety (why should they be given her true feelings?) Karel Schmidt sat in his room at the Polytechnic, staring at a pile of essays, and thought of Frances Wingate. He hadn’t really yet got round to believing she had left him. Surely she would summon him back. They had loved each other, it had all been so simple, it had been so silly to part.

  Love was such a rare commodity, too rare to waste. He didn’t love anyone else much, except his children, and they were growing up in a most tiresome way and no longer required his devotion. Joy required devotion, but she would honourably admit from time to time that she hardly expected to get it, and that only a saint would love her after the things she had said and done to him: and you, she would point out, are no saint. He didn’t love Joy: neither did he love Mrs Mayfield, or Dick Wilkie, or Slater, or Ken Stuart, or Gloria Hussein, or Eli Kalunka, or all the other people who counted themselves his intimate friends. He ought to be a saint, and love Joy and Mrs Mayfield, but he wasn’t, though he had tried hard. From time to time, through the years, through a lifetime of endeavour, he had felt welling up in him a kind of compelled and induced love, and had felt as though he were on the brink of a discovery so wonderful that all the doubts and hours of boredom and inadequate responses would be justified: Mrs Mayfield or Dick Wilkie would suddenly bask in his unforced, real, shining love, and would at last be made whole. Nobody else could do it, they were too unlovable: he alone, with his years of practice, could achieve the transformation. But the vision would fade, and he would be forced to see himself in the light of common day: weak, over-identifying with the unlovely, unable to say no, with a peculiar capacity for enduring hours and hours of unremitting boredom. At least he put the capacity to good use. Every now and then one of his more energetic friends (and he still had a few left, by some miracle) would try to encourage him to see himself in more worldly terms: you ought to try to enjoy yourself, you ought to get out, you ought to get rid of all these dreary people, they would say. In other words, they would say, you ought to come with us.

  Karel wondered why they bothered with him, and was too modest to see clearly that his conversion would have been a considerable triumph. He did suspect that there was some hypnotic quality in his own drab but passionate life: it drew people, and the only reason why it didn’t draw more of the exciting ones was that they got tired of finding his flat full of the interminable others. Karel is all right, they would say, but I can’t stand another evening of Eli/Ken/Gloria. And yet they would return to Karel, for Karel was a man of weird and crazy principle, and in part they wanted to destroy it, in part to have it. Karel, never knowing how others saw him, would mildly respond to all claims, from the most trivial to the most demanding: he would sit up all night talking and drinking and smoking, he would lend his money, he would drive people to railway stations, he would fix them up with psychiatrists or degree courses in the Open University or drug contacts, each according to his need. It was one of his favourite principles (again closely resembling inertia) that one should never question what the other person wanted, or try to impose a view of one’s own upon another: he believed, against all the evidence, that people knew what they were doing and ought to be allowed to do it. Occasionally, behind their backs, being human, he would explode into a terrible rage, and condemn and disapprove as violently as anyone: but always, when he had got over his rage, he would again accept even the most hardened, most disagreeable cases. Joy, who had been driven into excessive intolerance by his excessive tolerance, amused herself by inventing all kinds of degrading explanations for his social habits—that he felt himself to be so unacceptable that even the acceptance of a Mrs Mayfield was welcome, that he was himself so boring that the concept of boredom had never darkened his mind, that he wanted to play at being Jesus Christ. This last explanation often managed to enrage him, and as he was not particularly Christlike in his domestic life, he would usually beat her up whenever she expanded upon it: a result which gave her a peculiar satisfaction, and which left him feeling worse than ever, and even less able to discriminate morally amongst his acquaintances.

  There were evenings when Karel did not dare move out of his office, for dread of the inevitable encounter with Ken: he would sit on for hours longer than he need, and then Ken would get him, late, and keep him even later. Ken was one of the few students who never knocked on the door: he always lurked around waiting, and his timing of his confrontations was brilliant. He was mad, Ken, and like many mad men he was a brilliant manipulator. He was one of the most exhausting people even Karel had ever met: a session with Ken would leave him limp and drained, bloodless and sweating, depressed and savage, hopeless and bitter, as though Ken had managed to transfer all his own psychic and chemical content into Karel’s own body. Karel tried not to think of Ken: he thought of Frances instead.

  He had reduced Frances, for such times, into a series of images. First of all, he would think of the colour of her. She was brown and yellow. Her skin was golden, and it was an interesting mixture of coarseness and sensitivity: it had been weathered, as she was fond of pointing out, by sun and sand, like an ancient monument. She was covered in blemishes: scars, rough patches, corns, permanently damaged nails, moles, and a large brown birth mark on her bottom. He would think of these details, one after the other. Then he would think of making love to her, and how much she seemed to like it. Ow, help, lovely, ow, Karel, she would yell. She certainly hadn’t weathered right through: inside, there was plenty going on. He had known there would be, from the beginning. All that had astonished him had been her assertion (love, or truth?) that nobody had got there before.

  After he had thought about this kind of thing (and it was getting hard to remember details, all the separate years of occasions had begun to blur into a single archetypal event), he would go on to remember other kinds of incidents with her: con
versations, meals, journeys, the odd social outing. Sometimes, he would nostalgically start again at the beginning, remembering the first time they had met, the rather dauntingly bland lecture she had given, the odd purple dress she’d been wearing, the pleasant way in which she hadn’t seemed to mind the lack of tonic in the gin. He would think of the drive home, and the slight uneasiness that had overcome both of them towards the end of the journey: over her, because she wanted to get rid of him, over him, because he was aware of this, and concurred with her, for he too was tired and wanted to get to bed. Then he would remember the shock of seeing, as in one’s worst nightmare, an ambulance at one’s own front door (he was an over-anxious person himself, a constant foreseer of disaster, and was not at this point to know that she herself was much less given to nightmare speculations): and then he would recall what was for him the decisive moment, which was the moment when he saw, under the street lamp, all the colour drain out of her face. It was an astonishing, a beautiful effect. That brown yellow, freckled face of hers had turned grey: the blood had poured away, leaving the brown freckles standing there on her skin, strained, pallid, deadly, in the yellow grey waste of her cheek, on the prow of her large nose. Even her lips had turned grey, parted, dry with shock. How lovely, how responsive, how beautifully knit, how in the body she had been. The texture and the colour remained with him forever. Later, as tragedy turned to farce, as the blood came back into her face, he hung around and watched her, to see what would happen next: and her swoop of recovery, her instant relief, her instant command, had been irresistible. He forgot that he was tired, that he ought to get home early. Love had got hold of him, yet again.

  As he got to know her better, Karel found that there were many things about Frances that he did not exactly approve. He didn’t like the way she kept leaving her children to go off to foreign parts. He slightly disapproved of her excessive interest in her work. He didn’t like the way she threw her money and her husband’s money around. He didn’t like what he took to be her predatory instincts about people—her liking to be liked, her need to collect admirers, her need for flattery. He slightly distrusted the imbalance of her nature, and the way it would swing from meaningless but infectious gloom to meaningless but infectious euphoria. And yet for all that, he loved her, he admired her. What did it matter whether he approved or disapproved? There she was—or there, at least, she had been. He couldn’t really believe that she wouldn’t come back to him again. Surely she would write to him, one of these days.

  (Her postcard, months old, lay in the bottom of an enormous heap of mail in a strike-bound letter box on a railway station, somewhere in Europe.)

  He couldn’t think why her loss hadn’t finished him off. Because he hadn’t believed it, maybe? He gave one more thought to her body, and, groaning slightly in his spirit, turned his attention to Ken, whose peaky schizoid face would be lying in wait for him in the shadowy gauntlet of the foyer. He was no use to anyone, why go through with it? But there wasn’t really any choice.

  Frances Wingate, sitting at High Table in Leofric College, talked about heredity and environment to a psychologist who worked with rats and hamsters. The depressing session over poor Stephen had stimulated her, and she was drinking more than the doctor had said she should, and propounding to this rather opinionated young man her view that there were factors in the environment—the human environment—that had never yet been taken into consideration when assessing the human personality. She could tell that he did not know how to take her: he did not know whether she was trying to be serious or amusing, and she was not sure herself. ‘The point is,’ she was saying, ‘that the Romantics took all this seriously, even if we don’t. They understood the effects of landscape on the soul. What about all that stuff about frost at midnight, and moon shine sweetly, and the formative influences of the Lake District? Hartley, and all that? I’ve never yet met a psychiatrist or a psychologist who went into all that kind of thing when trying to diagnose an illness, have you? They never ask one if one was brought up in the mountains or the suburbs. And yet anyone could tell you it must have some effect. It’s obvious that it does. Look at America, you must have been to America. Well, it’s on too large a scale. It drives people mad. Everything there is too big, the rivers are too wide, the mountains are too high, the canyons are too deep, the geology is too dramatic, the deserts are too large, it just isn’t possible to live in spaces like that. They’ve taken centuries trying to adapt to it and they can’t. It’s driving them insane. In Europe one gets proper-scale landscapes, but there it’s just all out of proportion. The whole nation is suffering from collective agoraphobia.’

  ‘And what about us? What do we suffer from?’

  ‘Oh, it depends what part of the country one comes from. There are small distinctions you know. I only really know about the parts I come from. Oxford and the East Midlands. A fine mixture. And of course, like your rats, we are all products of mixed environmental heredity.’

  ‘Do you mean that one can inherit a landscape?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Though it’s not quite as simple as that. After all one does still have family links, kinship links, with the landscapes one’s parents and grandparents were born in. One goes back to visit relatives. One hears about them from one’s parents. One might even take sentimental journeys to see them.’

  ‘What do you still see of the East Midlands? You weren’t even born there, were you?’

  ‘No, I was born in Oxford. But I used to go and stay with my grandmother. My father’s mother. She’s dead now, of course. But I used to know it quite well. There are still members of the family there, I think, though we don’t see them. I haven’t been back for years.’ She paused, prodding at the tablecloth with her knife, thoughtfully. ‘You know,’ she said, slowly, ‘I’ve often thought that there must be something in the soil there, in the very earth and water, that sours the nature. I often think that in our family—we’ve got some hereditary deficiency. Or excess. I wouldn’t know which. Like fluoride. And that, combined with the flatness of the landscape, was what did it.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Created the family temperament, I suppose I mean. If there is such a thing. Though, quite obviously, there is. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘In general, do you mean, or in your family? I couldn’t say about your family. I’ve only met you and your father. Oh, and once, I think, your brother. In general, I think I agree. Of course certain families have very pronounced characteristics—take your mother’s for example, or the Huxleys, or the Darwins, or the Mitchisons . . . ’

  ‘I wasn’t so much meaning families like that,’ said Frances, flatly. ‘I meant just ordinary families. Rat families. Without genius or too much inbreeding. I’m certain,’ she said, rousing herself slightly, ‘that there must be something positively poisoning the whole of South Yorkshire and the Midlands, or they wouldn’t all be so bloody miserable up there, and live in such appalling conditions. One day they’ll work out what it is, and give everyone a pill to counteract it. Meanwhile, we’ve all got to accommodate ourselves to it as best we can.’

  ‘To the Midlands sickness?’ He laughed, politely.

  ‘That’s it. One could call it that.’ She too laughed, to prove that she wasn’t serious. ‘I manage to accommodate myself quite well. I’m never there. I’m always abroad.’

  ‘But you carry it with you in your bones.’

  ‘Oh yes. Even in the middle of the Sahara, it flattens me out if I’m not careful.’

  ‘You’re lucky to be able to move.’

  ‘Oh yes, I believe in keeping on the move. I get quite upset when I think about all the people that can’t.’

  ‘They probably like it there.’

  ‘Do you think so? How could they?’

  ‘Lucky for you that your father got out, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She looked down the table at her father, who was staring blankly into the far distance. ‘But he’s a bad case,’ she confided, conspirator
ially. ‘A bad case of the Midlands.’ And, disloyally, they both laughed.

  She thought about this conversation in bed, at length. She had been joking, or so she thought: the psychologist’s description of his rats and his discoveries about social and anti-social behaviour had both depressed and excited her, as did all suggestions of mechanism in behaviour, and she had tried to change the subject. But she had not succeeded. The more she thought about it, the more she feared that Stephen was suffering from some incurable and ratlike family disease, yet another manifestation of the same illness that had killed her sister, driven Hugh manic to the bottle, and driven her father into a world of silent brooding. She herself suffered from the same thing: it would come over her, periodically, meaninglessly. She had learned to deal with it by ignoring it, by denying its significance: she had refused to take it too seriously, but had let it sweat itself out like a dose of malaria. She had clung to activity and movement as an escape, and on the whole her remedy had worked: she had been able to evade the effects of the sickness, if not the sickness itself. At times she thought Hugh in his own way had been as successful: though often in a hopeless condition, he could still operate, he still by some freak which she failed to understand managed to do well in the City, and when drunk he was sometimes quite amusing. Not always, but sometimes. But was this all she was doing, feverishly seeking health by trying to avoid illness? And what of her convictions, when in the illness, that the illness had some deep spiritual significance? She suspected that her father thought it had: any talk of chemical imbalance or hereditary disorder upset him wildly. He thought God was after him alone. Frances could not give herself such dignity, but, lying awake at night, feeling the stitches in her once perfect breast, she felt that she would like to know where she began and the family ended. God was certainly not hounding her down the nights and down the days, but on the other hand it was possible that she had set up her individual will too firmly against him, had tried too much to cheat him, had ignored his portents too coldly. Where would it take her? She had often thought it would take her to a spectacular collapse in her forties, at the approach of the change of life, maybe. That was now not too far ahead. Would there be some stunning reckoning, would she crawl round the walls and stick forever in one of those black phases, eating her own excrement?