The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  The house was quite silent when Janet and Mark went back into it, uncannily silent, without even the hum of electricity. The baby had worn himself out with crying and was fast asleep. Janet felt guilty about him: she should have gone up to him, but had not dared, for fear the meal would be ruined or Mark annoyed or Cynthia (who believed in letting them yell) critical of her maternal behaviour. She had sacrificed the poor baby on the altar of their opinions, and now he slept, exhausted. She felt bad. She also felt worried that she could not clear up properly: it seemed silly to clear up in the dark, one could do it so much more efficiently in the daylight, and yet she really didn’t like the thought of all those plates and dishes and chicken bones and dirty glasses and ashtrays lying around all evening. Of course it didn’t matter, but it mattered to her. She wondered what Mark would say if she started to tidy up. Would he shout at her and tell her she was a fool? She would start on it anyway.

  Furtively, almost guiltily, she began to stack the dessert plates that had been abandoned on the white table.

  ‘Why don’t you leave that till morning?’ said Mark, watching her from somewhere over in the shadows, standing by the functionless never-used fireplace.

  ‘I’d rather get a bit of it done now,’ said Janet.

  ‘Why? It’ll wait till tomorrow. You’ve nothing else to do tomorrow, have you? Nothing pressing, nothing particularly urgent?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Janet. ‘It’s just that I don’t like the thought of all this mess lying around all night. I’ll just put a few of the things away now. I’ll just stack the dishes. It won’t take me a minute.’

  ‘You are neurotic. Everyone says you’re neurotic, you know. You know what it means, don’t you, not being able to leave the plates on the table all night?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, wearily, wondering what he was going to come out with now—some dreary bit of half-baked psychology out of a paper-back, some pseudo-intellectual joke from one of those silly games he and his friends sometimes played. She often wondered how he and his friends dared to play these games and say such things to one another, when it was quite obvious that there must be something very wrong with all of them. Skating on thin ice, they were. What if one day one of them broke the convention and came up with some real, some shocking truth: what if she were to say to Mark, now, that the reason she wanted to stack the plates was that she didn’t want to go to bed with him, and that she’d do anything to put off the evil moment of getting into bed with her own husband. It was all very well making jokes about barrenness, and frigidity, and neurosis. How dare he? Why didn’t she speak up? But she couldn’t. She couldn’t attack him. She was terrified of destroying him. And Mark destroyed was worse than Mark potting shots at her as though she were a duck at a fair.

  Mark was still trying to think of something clever to say about not putting the plates away, and failing: she got in quickly, suddenly, with an obvious point. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I must at least put the chicken bones in the bin, or the cat’ll get them, and they can choke on chicken bones, cats can.’

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ said Mark. He was annoyed with himself for not being able to think of a joke about plates. Perhaps he’d have worked one out for her by the time she got upstairs.

  ‘All right,’ said Janet. ‘I won’t be long.’

  And she heard Mark go up, and clean his teeth in the dark, while she continued to pile up plates, and empty ashtrays, and put the bones, wrapped in newspaper, in the bin. She thought about doing the washing up, but of course there wasn’t any hot water, it was tepid, and anyway she really couldn’t see well enough to do it properly. It would be annoying to have to do it all again in the morning.

  (Frances Wingate, a hundred and one miles away in Putney, was stacking her dishwasher, and thinking, not particularly coincidentally, about the Museum in Tockley, and the eel stang, and her father watching before her the newts in the ditch, and becoming a professor of zoology. Had he ever been disappointed that she hadn’t pursued her childish interest in nature? He’d never said anything about it, one way or the other. Daisy was getting on rather well with the Physics, better than Frances had ever done: her tears had been caused by a fairly high level of frustration. Were there any women physicists?

  She scraped a few neglected baked beans off a plate into the bin, and ate a cold piece of bacon rind. Though greedy, she was not fussy.

  She shut the dishwasher door, and switched it on. She was wondering what her life would have been like, if her father hadn’t become a zoologist. How would she have got on, if she’d had to live in Tockley? Though of course in those circumstances she could hardly have been born, because if her father hadn’t gone to Oxford on a scholarship and met her mother, she wouldn’t have existed, would she?

  She looked at her watch. It was nearly bed time. Perhaps she would go to bed and finish the novel that an old college friend of hers had written. It wasn’t very good, but it was quite amusing, recognizing the characters, from so long ago.

  The children were to go to her husband Anthony, while she was in Adra. How useful it was, to be divorced, she reflected, as she mounted the stairs with her pile of little distractions—the novel, a couple of learned journals, the New Statesman, a small whisky, and some nail scissors that she’d used earlier, faute de mieux, to trim Spike’s hair—how useful to be divorced, and how pleasant, if one cannot sleep with the man one loves, to sleep alone.)

  When she had emptied the coffee pot, Janet Bird went back into the lounge, and sat down for a moment on the white sheepskin rug in front of the empty grate. It hadn’t been too bad an evening, after all. Mark hadn’t been too difficult, and Ted and Anthea had been rather nicer than usual. She sat back on her heels, and listened, to hear if Mark was making a noise. He couldn’t be reading, he’d only got one candle. She heard a cupboard door shut, and wondered how much he’d had to drink. Not very much, she thought. Two glasses of sherry, and they’d only had three bottles of wine between them, and Bill always drank a lot more than his share. She wished that Mark had had some more. If he had had some more, he would be more likely to fall asleep. As it was, she knew that he was lying in wait.

  Oh God, oh God, give me patience, give me strength, she said to herself, not to God particularly. Every night of her life, the same problem. What was she to do, what could she ever do, to escape the torment? There lay Mark waiting to grab her. She hated it, she hated him. She had thought of so many ways out—feeling ill, headaches, period pains, backaches. The baby had been a good excuse and had kept him off her for three months at a time. Perhaps she should have another baby, that would give her a bit of peace, but at what a price to herself, and it didn’t seem quite fair to the baby either, one shouldn’t use the poor little creatures as a kind of anti-sex device, it seemed all wrong somehow, but she bet it was quite common, however wrong, the queen had babies they said to get out of having to appear in public all the time, and so it perhaps wasn’t all that rare to use babies as a way of avoiding making love, she knew plenty of women used them as an excuse, one could see that from the back pages of the women’s magazines, and the advice always was, don’t worry, be patient, and your husband must be patient too, and you will find that in good time all your natural feelings will come back to you and you will enjoy your married life as much as you did before, it is quite natural to find yourself less interested in sexual relations for a little while after baby is born—ah yes, but what if one had never been interested, what if one had no natural feelings, what then, Witch Doctor, what then? Oh, she knew all the tricks of avoidance—pretending to be asleep, messing around downstairs for so long when Mark was tired that he fell asleep first, little aches and pains all exploited to the full—it makes one into a hypochondriac as well as inflicting other real wounds, does marriage—pretending to be terribly worried about altruistic things like her father’s stroke or the mortgage going up, or the reason why Mark hadn’t got promotion yet, so that Mark would feel a brute if he touched her, an insensitive brute. Oh y
es, she had been through all that, and would go through it still, as far as she could see, for every night of her life, forever and ever, in sickness and in health. No wonder she wished for a volcano or an earthquake, neither of them very likely in this flat terrain. A flood would be more likely; what if the great river Done were to overflow and wash them all away out to the cold North Sea? Sometimes she wished that she could really catch some disabling disease—not a fatal disease, for after all if it were truly death she desired, she had the means to hand. No, what she wanted was some universal disaster that would involve her in its fate, or else some personal release, through paralysis or a stroke, or the threat of heart attacks.

  She rocked backwards and forwards on the white rug in the candle-light, and thought about all this.

  Sometimes she had even woken the baby on purpose, as a shield, as a protector. One can’t make love (if that is what one could call it) in front of a baby, or not in Tockley, anyway. One may in the Isles of the Pacific, or in Italy, or in the East End, or in Hampstead or Kensington, but not in Tockley.

  Something had gone very wrong somewhere. She recognized that. She did tend to think of herself as a norm and to see the world in her own image, finding enough evidence in Tockley at least to support her view, but she could tell that the rest of the world wasn’t really like herself. The whole thing had been designed for some different end. Sex and babies had certainly not been intended by nature to be conflicting trials of interest, had they? Wasn’t one meant to enjoy sex rather than grit one’s teeth and bear it? She didn’t even really like thinking about these things, but she had to; one of the most painful things about her present way of life (as a married woman) was that she had to think about it constantly, indeed she could never forget it, except on those rare and blessed occasions when Mark was away on business. Some people certainly enjoyed sex; literature and films on television and such like were full of their enjoyment. And if there was something real, why was she forever shut out from it, and forced to live in this horrible horrible mockery? What had she done wrong? What had been her mistake?

  Somewhere in the back of her mind she had an image of what things ought to be like. It wasn’t a very sexy image—sex she genuinely couldn’t imagine as being anything other than humiliating—but it involved a mother, a father and a baby, all in some way happy together and united, though they didn’t bear much inspection, this happy trio, because the more she tried to visualize them the stronger a resemblance they took on to a Christmas crib with proud parents and babe in the manger, which wasn’t the point at all, because Jesus had been produced by a virgin birth; it was yet another proof that she couldn’t either want or imagine sex. Perhaps it was simply the Christmas candles that had suggested the image. She tried to remember an article she had read in Nova, by a man describing his emotion as he watched his baby daughter being born. It had made her cry. It had moved her so much that she had torn it out and thrown it away because she didn’t want Mark to read it.

  Things could be better, but not for her. It was a hard truth she held, hard like a nut. It would crack her teeth sooner than reveal its soft kernel for her.

  It was time to go upstairs. She couldn’t really pretend to be doing anything much for much longer down here. There was one more ashtray she could empty, over there by the corner of the settee. It was the one Ted had been using. She wondered why Ted had been so pleasant to her—was he just feeling sorry for her because she was so stupid and so unable to talk about the gravel pit? She wondered how his marriage with Cynthia was. She could never make Cynthia out—she was brisk, busy, self-assured, outspoken, rather aggressive, she had two children already at school, one at nursery, one at primary, she worked part time in the local hospital in the physiotherapy department and was very good at getting to know important people, she was into everything, she managed and manipulated and gossiped, she made Janet feel feeble and wilting, and she was getting fat. She wasn’t, Janet had thought, the kind of person one could ever get to know really well: the nearest they had ever got to an intimate conversation (Janet was good at avoiding these too) had been when Cynthia had told her not to bother with natural childbirth classes, they were a waste of time, and had given her some gruesome hospital statistics about easy births by un-natural mothers and hard births by those who’d been breathing and doing exercises from the first week on. Don’t you bother with all that, my girl, Cynthia had said, and Janet, relieved to be spared the embarrassment of doing exercises with a lot of other pregnant women, had followed her advice without noticeable ill-effect; Cynthia came to see her in hospital and had actually been rather cheery and helpful, knowing all the doctors as she did, laughing loudly and making jokes about the nurses, admiring the baby. She was a nononsense person, and had been good for morale, in those circumstances.

  But to be married to, well, that was another matter. Ted must know her intimately, if anyone did. It was hard to imagine what they talked about. Ted was a rather quiet person, and Cynthia so noisy.

  (Frances, brushing her teeth, was thinking of Karel and Joy. She hoped Joy didn’t think she had given Karel up for Joy’s sake. She didn’t like to be underestimated.

  Karel Schmidt, for his part, was thinking about Frances. So she was off to Adra, was she? Unlike Janet, he had read his morning papers thoroughly. Unlike Frances and Janet, he was nowhere near bed. He kept late hours. At the moment, while thinking of Frances, he was ostensibly listening to the drunken ramblings of a colleague whose wife had left him for the third time, and who was threatening suicide if he ever made her go back. They would go on for some time.

  David Ollerenshaw was nowhere near bed either. Like Karel, he found himself in the listening role. His friend Banks, rather surprisingly, claimed to have fallen in love with a red-haired seismologist from Canada, who, like Banks, was already married. David listened with interest, over a rapidly emptying bottle of Glenfiddich, to Banks’s story: it had had to wait till Mrs Banks went to bed, so the whole of dinner time had been devoted to earthquakes. How extraordinarily unexpected people are, thought David. He had always assumed that the heart of Banks was made of stone. How glad he was that he himself was not involved either with Mrs Banks or with the red-haired seismologist. He opened his second pack of cigarettes, and listened on.)

  Janet picked up the ashtray, and stared at the cigarette ends. White crushed cellulose, grey insubstantial ash. She picked up the large green scented Swedish candle at her elbow, idly, to look at it more closely, and some molten wax tipped into the pottery ashtray with its pottery sign of the zodiac. The combination of liquid wax and fag ends and burnt matches was singularly disgusting, but she tipped some more, trying to swamp the fag ends completely, leaving a burning hollow green crater in the wide candle. A friend of Mark’s had spent years working for a tobacco company to invent the perfect synthetic cigarette. It seemed a strange way to spend one’s life, but a useful one, it could be argued. Mark and Ted rarely spoke of the utility of their projects, they spoke instead of salaries and colleagues and the canteen food. They could not speak to her about such matters, she did not understand plastics, she tried to but she couldn’t, and anyway part of her didn’t want to. She melted more wax and tipped it into her molten green lake. The translucent deep core of the candle glowed more brightly. Mark, upstairs, slammed a drawer in a threatening manner. Thus did he summon her. There would be no point tonight in trying to read in bed about the Jewish orphan in Poland. She must go up to her appointed, her chosen fate. Why could not Mark be more pleasant to her, if he wanted her to sleep with him?

  She would go up when she had completely swamped Ted’s cigarette ends and little heap of matches. She melted more wax, she tipped, she melted. She thought about what Anthea had said about the Iron Age. If anyone were to see her now, what would they think she was doing? Would they think she was a witch, would they think her mad, would they think the twentieth century mad? Here she sat, pouring wax on to an ancient symbol, pointlessly. If disinterred as from the ruins of Pompeii, what little rite wo
uld it be assumed she had been enacting, what gods would she have been seen to propitiate?

  Her cat appeared from nowhere, as she melted the last drops. She sat by her side, fresh from the dry leaves outside, and watched the small flame with narrowed eyes and wide streaked golden irises. All the matches were sunk by now in the slowly hardening dead sea of wax, sunk like spars from some small shipwreck. Janet stared at her work with some satisfaction. And then she heard her husband call ‘Janet’ from upstairs, and she shut the little cat into the kitchen, and blew out the green candle, and carried an ordinary white wax candle from the grocer’s with her up to bed.

  Part Three

  And that is enough, for the moment, of Janet Bird. More than enough, you might reasonably think, for her life is slow, even slower than its description, and her dinner party seemed to go on too long to her, as it did to you. Frances Wingate’s life moves much faster. (Though it began rather slowly, in these pages—a tactical error, perhaps, and the idea of starting her off in a more manic moment has frequently suggested itself, but the reasons against such an opening are stronger, finally, than the reasons for it.) Because Frances Wingate’s life moves faster, it is therefore more entertaining. We will return to it shortly, and will dwell no longer on its depressing aspects. It is depressing to read about depression. Frances Wingate, as you will have noticed, rarely feels depressed for long, anyway, and her opportunities for distraction are varied.