The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  Anthea was wearing a kaftan, a green and blue one with a large paisley print. She had some large blue transparent plastic jewellery on, the expensive sort of plastic, and she waved her arms around to show off the rings and bracelets. She did look rather handsome, one couldn’t deny, and the way Cynthia’s husband was gazing at her would have boded ill, had they all been five years older and five years more dissatisfied. Cynthia was wearing a long black skirt with a gold lurex top. What a funny business it was, dressing up in one’s best clothes to go out to one another’s houses to stare at one another’s husbands. Mark wasn’t behaving too badly, Janet was glad to note. His most annoying speciality was to become extremely pedantic about demolishing other people’s arguments, and as they were all on the same side about the gravel pit, they hadn’t yet given him an opportunity. But he would doubtless find one. Just as he could always find an opportunity for upsetting her, as he now did, when she tried to move them towards the table: rising to his feet, he looked at her and smiled in that ominous way, and said, ‘Are you going upstairs to throttle that baby, or shall I?’

  ‘He’s a bit quieter now,’ said Janet. ‘I think he’ll go to sleep.’ But she was raging inside, with a black fury. How could he use words like throttle, about her own baby?

  ‘How you expect us to conduct a civilized conversation, with so much competition from the uninvited guest, I cannot imagine,’ he said, in that way which was meant to be a joke, but which made nobody smile. It was in that tone, in her childless years, that he had referred to her in company constantly as ‘my barren wife’. What did he want, what did he want, she screamed inside herself, and went out into the kitchen to pass the soup through the hatch.

  When she got back again, they were talking about the power crisis, and the appalling way the Tory government was handling the matter. It never seemed to occur to them that a Labour government might have found some problems too. Surely she could remember power crises when Wilson was in charge? She kept quiet. It was quite the vogue, these days, for women to do most of the talking: Women’s Lib, they called it, and the men, who were keen to be fashionable, didn’t like to put a stop to it. There was something rather comic in the spectacle of the poor men being obliged to connive at their own destruction, out of loyalty to an idea. It served them right, thought Janet, as she listened to Cynthia airing some very outspoken opinions about Phase Three: she could somehow tell, although she had no idea of the facts herself, that Cynthia had got her facts wrong, and that the others suspected it, but hadn’t got the facts right enough themselves to contradict her. She could tell it partly, perhaps, from the uneasy look on Ted’s face, and the way he caught her eye almost apologetically, and the way he said with a diffident smile when Cynthia paused for breath, ‘It’s awfully nice soup, Janet, delicious.’ She found herself smiling back, gratefully, and thinking automatically, as though a button had been pushed—really, he’s quite nice, Ted Street: and then thinking again, looking at him almost for the first time, at his neat straight brown hair and pleasant, capable face—thinking again, with genuine feeling, not push-button feeling, he is nice, after all. And she smiled at him again, and tried to think of something to say to him—no reason why they should all talk about the fuel crisis—and saw that he was trying to think of something to say to her, and he got there first, because he came out with, ‘And have you found yourself any new interests, then?’, and then blushed slightly, as though it were an impertinent question, and followed it up with—‘Cynthia tells me you’re thinking of going to an evening class, but you won’t go to silk screen printing with her, she says.’

  ‘I haven’t quite decided yet,’ said Janet, scraping the last drop of soup, grey beige from her white bone china plate. ‘I’ve left it too late to enrol for the popular things, anyway.’

  ‘What are the popular things?’

  ‘Oh, Yoga’s always full at the beginning of term, and the Cordon Bleu cookery class, and the Local History class too.’

  ‘You don’t need a cookery class,’ said Ted Street.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and smiled quite warmly, in what she felt was quite an adult fashion.

  He asked her why the Local History class was so popular, and she explained that it was because a local hero was taking them, a handsome man in his sixties, the curator of the Museum, a whitehaired gallant, admired by ladies old and young. ‘But not by you?’ suggested Ted Street.

  ‘Oh no, I do admire him’ said Janet. ‘I used to like it when he came to speak to us at school.’

  ‘So why don’t you go to his class? Do you like to be different?’

  ‘Oh no, not really. Not at all, in fact.’

  ‘And you won’t go to the silk screen printing, with Cynthia?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ve gone off that kind of thing.’

  ‘So what will you do?’

  Ted Street stared at her, in his unusually amiable new mood. She wished she could think of something interesting to say, something unexpected. ‘I must get the next course,’ she said, and began to reach for the soup plates.

  The others talked of radioactivity and nuclear reactors.

  ‘Perhaps you really don’t want to go to an evening class at all,’ said Ted.

  ‘No,’ she said, considering the point seriously. ‘No, perhaps you’re right.’

  And she left the room with the soup plates, and came back with the chicken and rice and peaches, and found that they had stopped talking heavily about fuel and had begun to talk about it lightly instead, joking about previous power cuts, saying that they were grateful that at least Janet had managed to get their delicious dinner cooked (they were all wanning up a little with the wine), and that if all the lights went off now it wouldn’t be too bad. Mark told quite a funny story about what somebody had said to him at the factory today about what would happen to the specimens if the electricity got switched off, and they discussed why it was that the telephone went on working when the electricity wasn’t on, and Mark asked Janet where the candles were just in case (he asked this in quite a friendly fashion, but Janet could see he was going to punish her at some point for having enjoyed talking to his friend Ted), and they ate their chicken, and their salad, and their orange dessert, and just as Janet was going out to put the kettle on for coffee all the lights went out.

  They all laughed, of course, and lit matches, and expressed thanks that dinner was over, and said that they could do without coffee. The house was all electric. It will get cold soon, said Janet anxiously. Oh, then we’ll all have to snuggle up to one another, said Bill David, and laughed in an unpleasant manner that made her stiffen and shiver in the dark. She would rather they talked about the gravel pit, than that they got like that. But it was going to be hard to stop them, now the lights were out. And Mark would hate it and resent it as much as she would. Well, it was all his fault, he shouldn’t have such friends. She borrowed a cigarette lighter from Cynthia, and went off into the kitchen to look for candles. With any luck she’d at least be able to illuminate the place brightly enough to stop any goings-on.

  She found a whole packet of thick white candles in a cupboard, bought in the last emergency: she also had coloured ones, from the Christmas before. She put them in the pottery holder that Cynthia and Ted had given her, and told them what a useful gift it had been. They glowed, red and green and orange. They left the table and sat in the easy chairs at the other end of the room, in the soft light. Janet had always liked candlelight: in the old days, in Leicester, that year she’d lived on her own when she met Mark, she used to make her own, and Mark teased her about them, and made all kinds of knowing remarks about nuns and candles, and wasn’t it time she got married, and she hadn’t the faintest idea, but not the faintest idea, of what he’d been talking about, and when she’d found out she’d been so upset, so mortified, but by then it was too late, by then she had been officially engaged, and anyway part of her still hoped that if Mark were able to make such knowing remarks about nuns and candles, then he would know some other u
seful facts of life—but of course he hadn’t known, all he had known had been empty second-hand sterile vulgar jokes, and her knowledge, her instincts, when it came to it, had been better than his, and God knows she had been hopeless enough. Looking at the flickering candles, she had to repress these thoughts, or they would have disturbed her too much. How dared Mark come and take her from her safe solitude, and give her so little in exchange for it? Whatever had he done it for? But, on the other hand, whatever had he got out of it? Nothing, nothing. He must have been mistaken as she had been, to have come to this pass. She bowed her head upon her knees, as she sat upon the floor (there were chairs for five people only), hoping to escape notice in the semi-darkness, but he had spotted her, he had heard her thoughts, he was on to her.

  ‘Can’t you go next door and make us some coffee,’ he said, in that curious whine that would come over him late at night or after a drink or two. ‘Haven’t they got gas next door?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Janet. ‘The whole estate’s electric.’

  ‘Oh, electric. Dynamic. Humming with vitality. Never have you known’—he turned to his other guests—‘such a vital, exciting, thrilling, modern milieu. And is there nowhere we could get a cup of coffee? Surely your friend Mrs Cooper next door, surely she’d have a primus stove or something like that? Or a hay box? Could one make coffee in a hay box? The mind boggles. I’m sure your friend Mrs Cooper next door must have been a girl guide at some point in her dazzling career. Indeed, she may still be a girl guide now, she certainly dresses as though just about to present herself to Brown Owl, wouldn’t you say, Janet? Wouldn’t you say, my enchanting wife?’

  ‘I don’t know whether Jean’s got a primus stove or not,’ said Janet, ‘but I can hardly go round and ask to borrow it without inviting her round for coffee. And in view of your views about her, you wouldn’t be very likely to like that, would you?’

  ‘In view of your views—likely to like—oh, she’s getting quite witty and articulate in her old age, isn’t she?’ said Mark.

  He is unbelievable, said Janet to herself. What could I have done to him to deserve what I get?

  ‘We can manage without coffee,’ said Anthea, thinking things had gone far enough. ‘It’s so pretty in here, in the candle light. Let’s just sit here quietly until we freeze to death. They’ll find us in the morning, dressed in our best. We could be put in a museum as a diorama, they could call it “Dinner Party in the Provinces in the Nineteen Seventies”. They could transport your entire lounge to Tockley Museum and set it down as the next one on from all those Roman relics and bits of agricultural machinery, Janet. And I bet you people would look at it in a hundred years or two, and say, oh look, isn’t that nice. Oh, I do wish I’d lived then.’

  ‘Isn’t it funny, they’d say, that they still hadn’t invented electricity?’ suggested Ted; ‘And that the women were still wearing long skirts, they’d say,’ said Cynthia: and they went on for a while like that, imagining how others would see them, what mistakes they made in seeing other ages. Janet listened, thinking that perhaps she was inarticulate and a fool, as Mark proclaimed, because after all the others were quite entertaining at times: Anthea was being exceptionally pleasant, softened by the lights, and started to tell them about a visit she had made to Norwich Museum that summer with a nephew of hers (and Janet was surprised she had taken such trouble with a nephew, which proved how little she knew her), and how much he had liked dioramas, and how gruesome life must have been in a really primitive society, in the Stone or the Bronze Age, because there they were in all these reconstructed bits of history, poor buggers (it must be late thought Janet, or Women’s Lib was further advanced than she suspected), digging and hoeing and shivering and never resting. And Bill said that he’d seen an article recently proving that Stone Age Britons were cannibals, or something like that, and that wasn’t very nice, was it, and they discussed morality and survival, and luxury and subsistence, and agreed that one of the causes of the present power crisis was that people had come to expect far too high a standard of living, far too much comfort, both at home and at work, but that it didn’t do any good to know that, because there was no way of stopping the process.

  As they talked, so cleverly, Janet remembered that after all she had got a little cooking stove somewhere, she and Mark had used it on their first holiday together in Wales, and it might well have enough gas in it still for a cup of coffee each. She went off to look for it, and there it was, in the bottom of the broom cupboard. While she was fiddling with it in the kitchen, trying to get it to light, Mark called to ask what she was doing, and she told him, and Anthea said (how nice Anthea was being, and why?) that she should bring it into the lounge, and not stay out there in the dark, the even darker kitchen—so she came through, and crouched on the carpet, and finally managed, in the flickering shadows, to ignite a pale blue flame. It flickered up, blue and spiritual, sad and cold in colour, although warming the small copper pan. They all watched, spell-bound, for the water to bubble, as though watching the process of boiling for the first time. Each small bubble seemed to swell from some deep spring. It was not the coffee they wanted, it was the magic of the process, it was not the triumph of the process but the magic of it, not the will and the domination but the secret invocation, and as they watched Anthea told them how she had taken her nephew to a reconstruction of an Iceni village in Norfolk, one of the most beautiful historical reconstructions she had ever seen (he was a history-struck little boy, her nephew), and that she had read there that the process of making iron had seemed to the Iron Age men so accidental, so arbitrary, that they had been obliged to invoke success from the deities, rather than from science. Let us now invoke the God of boiling water, said Ted, as reluctant bubbles gathered round the pan’s rim. They didn’t know how it happened, it was so hit and miss, cried Anthea, but when it did, that was a good day, a fine creation. They made iron! Imagine! But magic, it was to them. They didn’t know how it happened. Imagine!

  The water bubbled, and Janet made tiny cups of coffee, more an offering than a drink. They drank them solemnly, facetiously invoking various gods. It was growing colder in the room, but nobody knew what action to take, it seemed better not to admit that it was cold at all. Gradually the conversation cooled, as well as the temperature, and Ted suggested that it would be as well to go home. It won’t be any warmer at home, said Cynthia, and then came the moment that Janet had been dreading—oh yes it will, one can get into bed and warm oneself up at home, cried Anthea, and there followed inevitably a discussion of how the birth rate rose in power cuts, and how contraceptives would never do as much for world population in the East as the introduction of electric light in the evening, and how the Eskimoes, although they had little to do but copulate, could never expand and overtake the world because their environment was too hostile, though at the same time, as Bill remarked, one had to wonder what kind of birth control they did use to keep the family size down. Abstinence, infanticide, the contraceptive pill?

  Janet hated this kind of conversation. It kept the others warm for a while, and she watched them trying to be clever, giggling, making predictable jokes: all the temporary gleam had gone out of them, and they looked like they had looked at the beginning to her, mean, derivative, jaundiced, not golden but jaundiced in the yellow candle light. It was amazing how none of them had a good word, ever, to say about anyone. They enjoyed sniping, about people they knew, people they didn’t know, about whole cultures and countries they had never seen. They were a real opposition group, united in their suspicion of the outside world. Even Ted, whom she had been beginning to think that she might like, was being as silly as the others, in his speculation about the effect of central heating on sexual practices. She hated talk about sex. She didn’t know what to make of the attitude of the others—perhaps they could talk about it in this way because they really enjoyed it and got on with it at home, perhaps Ted and Cynthia and Bill and Anthea had perfectly satisfactory private lives. If so, she admitted, they were
free to make these jokes and to speculate. But in her heart she couldn’t really believe that they were happy, she couldn’t really believe that they enjoyed themselves in bed. It was just a convention, they were talking conventionally about something that did not exist. The emperor’s new clothes. She had support for this view in the fact that Mark talked as well as anyone about sex, made the same jokes, seemed knowing and worldly—and yet she knew that he knew very little about it at all, when it came down to it. She remembered with a kind of disgust the way he used to go on about mini skirts, in the days of the mini skirt, about proportion, and the beauty of women’s legs—he had a whole set speech about Art, the Human Body, Michelangelo (or was it Leonardo) and the Mini-Skirt, with which he used to entertain guests for months, till they too obviously tired of it. And yet he had no feeling for legs at all. He had never noticed any beauty in her own legs, he had never addressed them with any tenderness. All in the head, was his appreciation. She was glad that now she could cover her legs up in long skirts and keep them to herself, she had hated it when Mark would point at them in demonstration.

  So they sat, and talked about sex—not rudely, not crudely, not tenderly. It was just talk. Perhaps, had they been five years older, there would have been a bit of action, a little more suggestiveness. As it was, there was nothing much. Janet sat and waited for them to go away, and hoped that the lights would not come back on again.

  They did not. Somebody vaguely suggested that they should get coats, or rugs, and sit a little longer, but the conversation did not seem brilliant enough to warrant it, the little flare of intimacy had died down, they were all possessed with a kind of uneasiness. The time had come to go home, to confront one’s own ghost privately, one’s own skeleton. Anthea made rather a handsome skeleton, a well-covered one, rising dramatically to her feet, stretching, her bangles shaking and glinting, her huge heavy plastic beads catching the candle light. Thank you, thank you for a lovely evening, she said, and kissed Janet on the cheek. She was a Southerner and had imported Southern manners, she kept herself going by frightening other women with her embraces; she rather enjoyed the way poor timid Janet stiffly shrank away. Cynthia, a Sheffield girl, did not kiss, of course. Nor did the men. They shuffled, and muttered thanks, not very good at such things. Ted said several times over how much he had enjoyed himself, and they must come to them soon. They moved towards the door. The Streets, of course, had to give the Davids a lift home. As soon as they were actually out on the path, a new lease of life seemed to fill them: they stopped muttering, spoke up, laughed loudly, commented on the size of the moon and the large stars, told the Birds that they would have to bring their gas stove with them next time they called for dinner, waved cheerily, laughed some more, pledged themselves to defend the gravel pit at a meeting on Thursday night—all as though they had to prove to the neighbours that they had had a good evening, thought Janet. The neighbours, the Blaneys and the Coopers, sat silently in their dark houses, and who could tell if they were watching or not?