The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  While she was working at the Town Hall in Leicester, she’d summoned up the courage to go to an evening class. The instructor didn’t seem to like her. He told her that her work was tight and neat and pernickety, and that she’d never get anywhere that way; she must learn to be free and express herself. He had yelled this at her several times, staring contemptuously at her small tidy creations, and she had tried, for a few weeks, to do as he advised: she had got her hands and her overall dirty, she had got paint under her nails. But she had made nothing, and the process had sickened her: she couldn’t stand the smell of oils, and the texture of clay disturbed her. Thinking it was her own fault, she withdrew from the class. The instructor was sorry: she had been the most promising of an unpromising year. But she was uptight and repressed, he said to himself. He never thought to reproach himself for her absence.

  She had more or less given up trying, these days. Anyway, there wasn’t much time, with Hugh. There sat Hugh, in his plastic chair, staring at her, and fretting while she warmed up his soup. He was sad and hungry. She gave him a rusk to chew on while he waited. His blue anorak, dirtily streaked with spittle, she hung up in the airing cupboard by the boiler to dry, and noted with something approaching anguish that the front of his jersey was matted and damp as well. The texture of the wool, sodden with dribbling, horrified her. She knew what it would be like when it dried out—it would be stiff and prickly and woolly, all the stitches somehow sogged into one another. He waved his octopus hands, his anemone hands. His gums were raw, his eyes were wide with passion. He looked at her and moaned. She could do nothing, nothing. It’s no use looking at me, she said, desperately, aloud. I will look up unto the hill. From whence cometh my help? From whence but from me, poor poor thing, thought poor Janet, and kissed the baby passionately on its red and angry cheek, its taut and cracked and red and flaming cheek.

  (A goodenoughmother.)

  The baby had bone broth for its meal. She had some Weetabix, a bit of cheese, some leftover salad from the night before, a rotting banana, and one raw mushroom, stolen from the evening’s mushroom soup. It must be admitted that despite the prevailing melancholy, she enjoyed this meal, and felt a little cheered by it (the human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom) and even when she realized that her son Hugh had no intention of having his afternoon sleep, unless she slept with him, she managed to face the prospect of a communal nap. On the other hand, she did rather want to read the paper, which she hadn’t had time to look at earlier in the day, and wasn’t quite sure if she’d be able to persuade him to sleep through the crackling of the pages.

  She managed it, in the end; she laid him by her side on the double bed, crooked in her arm, and joggled him, having previously spread the paper ready on the other side. When he turned up the whites of his eyes to the white ceiling and dozed, she turned over to the newspaper, quietly and breathlessly, and read the front page. It was concerned with incipient strikes and a royal wedding. It took some courage to turn the page and look within, as Hugh could be very cross if aroused prematurely—in fact he was one of those tiresome babies who always sink into sleep with a deep reluctance, forcibly lulled, and wake with howls of cheated rage, and Janet herself could not but sympathize with his attitude—he was surely right to suspect that oblivion was a danger, and that enemies would knife him in the back if he ever lost his guard. She recognized all too well his awakening wails—they expressed resentment against the tricks of nature and convention, which would cheat one out of existence, if they could. Poisoned while sleeping, like Hamlet’s father. Oh yes. Sleep, marriage, adultery: all, all knives in the back. Stay awake, baby. The inner pages of the paper contained news about Northern Ireland (which she skipped) about the dangers of the pill (which she read with interest) and about a baby that had been battered to death by its father, because it cried while Match of the Day was on. If she had been reading a paper with more news in it, she might have read in a very small, dull item that her cousin David Ollerenshaw, and her second cousin Frances Wingate were among the members about to attend an international conference in Adra. She would not have known where Adra was—somewhere in Africa, she would have rightly guessed—nor would she have known who Frances Wingate was, although they had passed one another on Tockley High Street that summer: but the name of David Ollerenshaw would certainly have caught her attention, for he was not some infinitely remote relative, but her own first cousin, the son of her father’s brother, and she had actually met him quite often in her childhood, and heard a lot about him until her father and his father had quarrelled about Great-Aunt Dorrie’s furniture. She had looked up to him: he had been the clever one, as had his father before him.

  But she didn’t read all this, because her husband didn’t take The Times. So we can skip her supposed reflections on David’s success and her own failure in life: we can skip her childhood memories of family parties, of the eventual family feud, and of her mother’s oft-voiced suspicions that David’s parents had pushed him too hard, he would break down if they weren’t careful.

  Instead, Janet, dozing, breathing heavily and chestily through the thin bones of her pigeon chest, through the small covering of her dry breasts, thought of the battered babies and fell asleep, rolling up the whites of her eyes to the ceiling like her son: a family trick.

  Frances Wingate, reading of the same battering in the same paper at more or less the same hour, as she sat over a cup of coffee at home in Putney, was rather surprised to feel tears rising in her eyes. She’d thought she was past that kind of thing. Not that it seemed very meaningful. She moved on to the article about the pill. At least she didn’t have to worry about thrombosis now. There was something to be said for celibacy.

  David Ollerenshaw, while his cousins were indulging in the female pastimes of cups of coffee and afternoon naps, was making elaborate preparations for his visit to Adra. His preparations were of necessity elaborate, as he had decided to drive there, through Europe, and across the Sahara. He was looking forward to the journey: he liked driving, and he particularly liked driving alone across difficult terrain.

  At the moment, he was sitting in his rarely occupied rooms, filling in an insurance form which he had to send off to the secretary of the conference. The secretary had not approved of David’s plans: he thought David would arrive late for the conference, and would much have preferred him to arrive on an aeroplane like everybody else. But David had persisted. In the old French colonial days, one hadn’t been allowed to drive alone across the Sahara: one had to go in convoy, which quite spoiled the whole point of the enterprise. Nowadays, one could get lost as one pleased. A great improvement. David had just been reading a review of a book by a man who had tried to cross the desert on a camel, and who had had a quite horrible time: he had been seeking Loneliness and Suffering, for personal domestic reasons, the reviewer suggested. David had no personal domestic reasons: nobody lived in his rooms but himself. Nor did he intend to suffer as spectacularly as Geoffrey Moorhouse. A little, mild suffering was all he wanted—that moment of intense expectation, when the map has clearly been misleading, when the wheels stick in the sand, when the engine fails, when the water is low. But even more than the disasters, he liked the complete isolation. Don’t you get bored, or lonely? people would ask him, as he set out on similar expeditions, and he could truly answer: No. To be completely free of all human contact was in itself a pleasure. People were all right: intermittently he enjoyed company. But solitude had its own quality.

  The insurance form wanted to know who was his next of kin. He had no wife, no brothers, no sisters, no children, and he did not wish to enter the names of his ageing parents, with whom his contact was almost non-existent: he did not like the thought of a police officer calling on them to tell them that his desiccated corpse had been found in the Hoggar Mountains. (He was looking forward particularly to the Hoggar.) So he put down the name of his friend and ex-colleague Banks, with whom he was to have dinner that night. Lying, he declared that Ba
nks was his cousin. He had got some real cousins, up in Tockley, but he didn’t want to embarrass them with his corpse either. Banks, a hardened earthquake inspector, wouldn’t care either way about David Ollerenshaw’s corpse. That was one of the reasons why David kept in fitful touch with him.

  Janet, half an hour later, woke to the angry wails of Hugh. Furious at being tricked into unawareness, tricked out of the masochistic satisfaction of the toothache, he yelled and bawled so loudly that she bundled him up in his dried-out anorak and shoved him in his pram in the back garden with a load of broken toys. He could sit out there, she said firmly, while she made the soup and peeled the vegetables. Then he could come in again. Her violent handling of him seemed to silence him: he sat there, pink cheeked and a little awestruck, plucking at his yellow harness and watching the leaves fall off the trees. What a boring life, being a baby, she thought to herself, as she went in to her neat and tidy kitchen and put on her apron, and waved to him through the window. He waved back, rather grudgingly.

  She started to peel the mushrooms, heaping up a little pile of thin papery silky skin, and slicing them neatly with her sharp knife. The shape of them, the white moonlike crescent and its stalk, with its darker pink brown fringe, satisfied her. If one sliced neatly and thinly, one could make a perfect section of each, like a specimen for a slide in biology. Mushrooms round here were still sometimes proper, perfect mushrooms—not those huge black gilled fraying things that one could sometimes get cheap, nor the other extreme, those so white and over-cultured underground that they were deformed, embryonic, with no proper distinction between stalk and cap. These were really lovely ones. She arranged them on the chopping board, and went to melt the butter in the pan. One could not go wrong with mushroom soup, Di Hutchins had told her, if one put enough sherry and cream in it. That was the kind of advice people were always giving her, and it was all very well, but sherry and cream were expensive, and Mark had been so difficult about money lately, and it was indeed true that the mortgage was crippling and going up as it seemed every day, and the baby had proved more expensive than she had dreamed possible. She would thicken the soup with a tin of Heinz, and perhaps put a spot of cream in later, leaving the rest for the coffee and the sweet. She must remember never to give mushroom soup to the Hutchins. And come to think of it, what had she given Cynthia and Ted for their main course last time? and Bill and Anthea? She honestly couldn’t remember. Too bad if it had been chicken. Too bad if any of them had yet tried on each other the chicken recipe in last month’s Femina. It looked all right, and not too complicated and expensive. After all, how the hell was one expected to know what other people in Tockley were eating every night? One couldn’t go and snoop through their windows of an evening, could one, spying on their supper, one couldn’t trail them to the butcher and the greengrocer. And anyway, that wouldn’t do much good these days, as everyone but herself seemed to have a deep freeze. She didn’t know how they afforded all the things they had. Cynthia David, she thought firmly, should have taken her lamb out of her deep freeze much much earlier. It had been tough and bloody.

  She got the mushroom soup simmering, looked out of the window and saw that Hugh had been joined by the cat and seemed quite happy for the moment, and started to joint the chicken, a job which always drove her into a frenzy. It was so messy, the meat was so translucent and slimy and slippery, the joints were never quite where they ought to be, but she had to do it, the recipe said so, and anyway the last time she had left a chicken whole Mark had made such a hash of carving it that he had sulked for the rest of the evening. How cruel he was to her. What pleasure did it give him, to be so unkind? She sawed at the knobbly thigh bone of the fowl, severing a tattered drumstick, and hoped that he would not provoke her so much that she would be obliged to stick a knife in him one day. It was unlikely, she was a very feeble timid person. He counted on that, she was sure. But people did stick knives into one another. When younger she had never been able to understand why, she had always thought of knife-stickers as another species, a breed apart. Now she knew that she was one of them in her spirit. Now she knew why people did it. It was a wonder to her that people did not do it more often. The self-restraint around in the world filled her with awestruck admiration. How wonderful people were, herself included, to control themselves so well. And how nasty, bloodless and underground chickens are: yellow skin, purple and white flesh. Reared in a battery. Not as good quality as the mushrooms, but doubtless nobody would notice, when she had sufficiently covered them with tinned peach sauce. She hacked away. Odd, how the flesh seemed to disappear as one hacked. There was never much left on a jointed chicken.

  The cat sat on the baby’s pram. She was glad that it liked it there, and that Hugh accepted it so nicely. She had been so fond of her little cat, before Hugh’s arrival, but everybody had tried to stop her from feeling fond—repressed maternal instincts, the clever ones had said. You’re a spinster at heart, Mark would say in company, and in private he would push the cat around, not quite cruelly, but as though he resented its very existence. He would shut the door too sharply on the cat’s tail, he would tip it too abruptly off chairs, he would push it away from its own dish with his foot if he wanted to go out by the back door, though he could perfectly well have walked round it. And when the baby was born, people tried to make her get rid of the poor creature, implying that it would be sure to suffocate the baby if she didn’t, that it was unhygienic, that she wouldn’t miss it if she had a baby instead. She had been really upset by these arguments, as she was terrified of germs, and had never thought of her little cat as being dirty before. She was even more upset by the vigour and venom with which her neighbours and relations pursued these arguments—it was almost as though they wanted to kill her cat, as though they enjoyed the idea of killing her cat. It was their zeal that finally persuaded her to keep it—she burst into tears one day, heavily pregnant, when a neighbour had called in one evening for a cup of coffee and started to tell her yet more horror stories of suffocated babies, and said, ‘You can kill her yourself, now, if you like, but if you don’t do it right now, here and now, in this room, I’m keeping her.’ And the neighbour had looked with shocked and narrow eyes at the little black and white cat sitting there so innocently and peacefully, and had changed the subject, and backed away without the cat’s blood on her hands. Poor Janet, she said later, vaguely, to both Janet and Mark, she’s upset, she’s overwrought, we all know how upset people get when the time gets near—and Janet, the palm of one hand flat on the swell of her lower ribs, had felt like saying who’s she, the cat’s mother, but her moment of rebellion was past, and she had to accept sympathy, excuses made on her behalf for her own bad behaviour, and meekly bow her head, as though she admitted her folly, her pregnancy-induced folly. Extraordinary, the way people had of explaining away in quite false but oddly plausible terms one’s own most violent emotions.

  She accepted reproof, but the cat lived. She had equipped herself with cat nets and DDT (but hadn’t dared to use the DDT because it said not to put it near babies), she had washed blankets and brushed cushions, she had sterilized teething rings and dummies ten times more frequently than she needed, and she had let the cat live. Somewhere, deep inside herself, she knew that the cat wasn’t going to kill the baby. She didn’t know where this knowledge came from, for she had no such instinctive feeling about slightly-old soup, or unboiled water, or extremes of temperature. The baby had responded perfectly. He liked the cat. He never hurt her or pulled her about or dropped things on her. And there she sat, on the end of his pram, while he chewed on a plastic beaker and mumbled (she couldn’t hear him, but she could see he was mumbling) and let spittle drip once more onto his anorak.

  She had nearly finished the chicken when she heard the door bell. Her heart sank, for it could not conceivably be anyone she wanted to see. Still, she had to answer it. Once she had hidden under the front room window sill, so horrified had she been by the approach of a neighbour down the front path, but people always g
ot one in the end. They just came back later. Wiping her hands on the door, hoping it would be a tradesman she could send away, she went to the front door. But it wasn’t a tradesman, it was her mother.

  ‘Getting dark early, isn’t it?’ said her mother, by way of greeting, as she stepped in. ‘Yes, it is,’ said Janet, though it wasn’t, it was only three o’clock, and not yet dark or even very cloudy.

  ‘I thought I’d better just pop in,’ said her mother, with no explanation.

  ‘Yes,’ said Janet.

  ‘You’re busy, I see,’ said her mother, following her into the kitchen.

  ‘Yes,’ said Janet.

  ‘People coming for the evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s nice for you then.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘A lot of work, though,’ said her mother, wandering around, peering at the simmering soup, and almost-jointed chicken, the bowl of peaches, the peeled carrots, the green beans, the salad. ‘Messy, too.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mummy?’ said Janet. ‘Would you mind putting the kettle on? My hands are all chickeny.’