The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

‘Well, do you blame me?’ cried Hugh, feverishly pouring himself another drink, histrionically clutching his thick black curly hair, ‘do you blame me? Here I am, a grandfather at the age of forty. It’s a joke, what kind of effect do you think it’s likely to have on me? No wonder the adrenalin starts to flow the minute I see anyone under the age of thirty.’

  Watching them, Frances thought how true it was that Hugh got so animated. She had rarely seen anyone with so much physical restlessness. He lived a sedentary life, an office life (how he managed to work so well she never knew), and in the evenings a violence of speech and gesture and emotion would take him over, like a spirit. His views were extreme, his language appalling, his behaviour erratic. Stephen, on the other hand, sat still and careful like his mother, expressing himself in small movements of face and speech. As though, it suddenly occurred to Frances, as though afraid to move?

  They moved on to a discussion of whether or not analysis were designed to make one fit into society, and if so, whether or not it destroyed rather than mended the individual psyche. Hugh argued that it destroyed, and that therefore people like Stephen, who were supposed to disapprove of society, ought also to disapprove of analysis. ‘Who ever said I disapproved of society?’ said Stephen, in answer to this. ‘I’ve got nothing against it. Why should I disapprove of it?’

  ‘Because of capitalism and all that crap. And policemen and drugs. And the Third World.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about the Third World or capitalism,’ said Stephen. ‘What on earth have they got to do with me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t you disapprove of capitalism?’

  ‘No. why should I? Do you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘Well then, why should I?’

  There seemed to be a deadlock, and Hugh turned to Frances, and appealed to her to support his view that Freudian philosophy was both pernicious and out of date. ‘As a woman, for God’s sake, Frances,’ he said, ‘surely you object?’

  ‘Well, sort of,’ said Frances. The problem with Hugh was that he really was quite well informed in a muddled kind of way, he was probably quite well aware of the feminist arguments against Freudian faith, but he was too drunk to express himself. And she herself was rather confused about Freud’s views of women. While not quite able to accept the theory of penis envy, she was more and more convinced that what every woman wanted was a man, and that what every man wanted was a woman, or that if they didn’t want that they ought to, and that the only possibility of happiness and harmlessness on earth were to be found where Freud would have us find them, and that there was no way out of this, and that there was no point in being reasonable, life wasn’t reasonable, motives weren’t very mixed, they were horribly pure, appallingly unmixed, life wasn’t at all complex, it was truly of an unfair, terrifying, rigid, irreducible, wicked, amoral simplicity. One just couldn’t accept the simplicity. It was almost improper to accept it. She could see Hugh’s point. She smiled, ate a nut, smiled again, and said, ‘It’s like religion. I object but I believe,’ she said. ‘Because that’s how it is.’

  ‘You’re a traitor to your kind,’ said Hugh.

  ‘I don’t see that,’ said Frances.

  ‘You’re supposed to be a free woman,’ he said. ‘You can’t believe in Freud. And anyway, you can’t deny that analysis is designed to stop people behaving in anti-social ways. And that therefore it’s just another prop to society.’

  ‘That’s just Laingian crap,’ said Stephen mildly. ‘And you’re thinking of psychiatrists, not psychoanalysts, aren’t you? Or perhaps you don’t really know the difference?’

  ‘Don’t you be so fucking rude to me, son,’ said Hugh, and relapsed briefly into silence, from which he emerged a minute or two later with loud and snorting laughter. ‘Laingian crap, eh?’ he said. ‘So Laing’s out, is he? Who’s in, then? Apart from Freud, of course?’

  ‘Out, in,’ said Stephen, wearily. ‘You ought to be working for the New Statesman or the Sunday Times, not a bank. You could write those bits that tell people in their weekend cottages what they ought to be reading and what they ought to view on the telly and who’s who in the roman a clef, and all that kind of thing. I’ve never known anyone so keen to keep up and so pleased to see other people on the way down.’

  ‘It’s my age,’ said Hugh, ‘It’s your fault. You’ve aged me prematurely. Fran, tell your daughter to take his daughter to bed, I can’t stand all these children in the room. It makes me nervous.’

  ‘I quite like them about,’ said Frances, and it was true. She liked being in a room full of her own family, she felt safe with Natasha sitting there reading, with Daisy with the baby on her knee, with Hugh drunk and talkative, with Stephen limp and pleasant and intelligent. The light flickered from the fire, and glinted from the mirror on the wall, from the glasses, the gold rims of the coffee cups. It was so beautifully furnished, the cottage—everything was brown and red and black, yet nothing was too new, too shiny. The loose covers of the large chairs and settee were worn, the rugs which Natasha had made herself over the years were a little shabby, the curtains were jumble-sale curtains, an old lady’s curtains, with a muted pattern of birds and acorns on a beige background. It was all just so, it had been put together with love and care and trouble and expense (but not too much expense). A large bunch of teazels and honesty stood in a jar on a little table: a brown jug of dried grasses stood on another. A bookcase held weekend books and games—cards, Scrabble, Monopoly. A heap of baby toys stood in a corner. Two sheep skulls and a badger skull stood on a wooden chest. A copper kettle stood in the hearth. A bunch of dried flowers dangled from the low ceiling. It felt safe, it felt like the country, undisturbed, with the black night and no lights in it outside the small window panes, timeless. It was an old cottage, it felt old and safe like a secure infancy. Why can’t I make my home like this, thought Frances, why is it that I am so restlessly always going away, what on earth is it that makes Natasha able to do this, and me not?

  She thought of the flight to Adra, of the hotel in the desert. She thought that perhaps nothing would ever seem exciting again. She wondered if she were growing old. Though it had seemed a good idea when she had said she would go. To get right away, to somewhere different, to do something absurd. But the spirit had gone out of her. Where had it gone to? Why had she never aimed for Natasha’s virtues, Natasha’s composure?

  Natasha must have been very unhappy, with Hugh as a husband. How could she be as tolerant as she looked?

  The younger children went to bed. Natasha made another pot of coffee. She ground the beans in a square wooden grinder on her knee, and boiled the kettle on a rod over the fire. She had a special attachment, for doing this, given by a Swedish friend. How could one have the patience to have a Swedish friend, to write letters, to stay in touch?

  Hugh stumbled out to get some logs for the fire, and Stephen quietly remarked to Frances that he had been reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, had she ever? and did she believe that the self longed more for life than for death? Frances replied that she had indeed read that work a long time ago, and had forgotten much of what it said, but was it not the work in which Freud admitted that there was a possibility that all instincts were struggling to restore an earlier state of things, and that an earlier state being inanimate, all living things strove for death? More than that, said Stephen, he says that it’s possible that the extraordinarily violent instincts of sex arose by accident and are not particularly ancient.

  ‘Compared with the other yearnings of matter?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Stephen.

  ‘So to seek life was some silly new idea, the chance result of a Darwinian accident?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And where does that leave us?’ asked Frances.

  ‘More or less here,’ said Stephen. He looked sad and intent.

  ‘Where does what leave us?’ said Hugh, coming in with the logs.

  ‘We were talkin
g of the death wish,’ said Stephen. ‘And of things wanting to return to an earlier state.’

  ‘Schopenhauer?’

  ‘No. Freud.’

  ‘Not Freud again.’ He poked a bit of log cautiously into the blazing middle of the fire. Frances watched him. She was thinking that any fancy that she could recall even a glimpse of her own childhood, of an ideal childhood, in this house, was an illusion, for it was not her past nor the cottage’s past that surrounded her. The cottages had belonged to labourers, had been cold and dark. Her own past too had been quite otherwise. No wonder she could not recreate it. But what hopes should one have of any future? Should one merely regress to a field full of stones, one’s own safe place? What about sex, what about salvation? The eels go back to the same beds, the swallows fly south in the summer. And she had gone back for a weekend to the flat Midlands. What had she found there? What held her like a stone round her neck, like a stone in her chest, heavy, solid, inert? A field of stones, a valley of bones.

  ‘Freud says,’ said Stephen, smiling, ‘that the reason why things struggle so hard to stay alive against all the odds is that they want to die in their own fashion.’

  ‘I wish my carp would struggle a little harder,’ said Natasha, pouring the smoky coffee. ‘More coffee, Frances? They keep floating up all bloated, poor darlings.’

  ‘Perhaps they like dying there,’ said Frances, joining with Natasha’s wish to lighten the mood, afraid that she and Hugh, if this talk of death went on much longer, would start to brood on the death of their sister Alice, who had gassed herself for an unidentified reason. ‘They obviously feel it’s their destiny, to die in your pond. They float up quite happily.’

  ‘And that little camellia that didn’t take? I suppose that liked turning all brown and withered? I’m supposed to think it looks better like that, am I?’

  ‘I thought it did look quite pretty,’ said Frances, who had been shown the withered shrub that morning.

  ‘It’s a new fashion, this admiration of death,’ said Hugh. Really, how he managed to talk at all, let alone talk reasonably well, with all that liquor inside him, was a mystery. ‘It’s post-romantic fashion. People used to be frightened of it. Shrouds, skeletons, memento mori, all that. Now we stick the stuff around as decorations. Look at it. Dead flowers’ (he waved dramatically at the teazels), ‘dead—dead skulls. Look at it.’

  ‘I remember finding that badger’s skull,’ said Natasha. ‘I’d just gone for a pee behind a tree, and there it was.’

  ‘I thought death was supposed to be the modern taboo,’ said Frances. The subject was, after all, irresistible.

  ‘Taboo? Taboo? Balls, it’s the fashion. Well, not quite, it’s more the fashion to say it’s a taboo. But people talk about it all the time. It’s all over the cinema, all over the telly. Haven’t you noticed? Books on the subject every five minutes. It’s morbid, that’s what it is.’

  He poked the fire again, and escorted a panic-stricken woodlouse onto the floor. It scuttled off under a table. They all stared into the red-hot crater. The wood sighed and sang.

  ‘I’d hate to be burned on a funeral pyre,’ said Natasha, ‘like those people in the Sudan you gave me a book about, Fran.’

  ‘Even for me?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘Oh, for you I’ve been burned alive a million times,’ said Natasha.

  ‘A brand from the burning. To Carthage then I came,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘T. S. Eliot. Or St Augustine, as you prefer.’

  ‘To Carthage then I came. And to Adra I go,’ said Frances.

  ‘Perhaps they liked being burned alive,’ said Frances. ‘But I can’t really believe it. Can you?’

  ‘No, not really. You ought to believe it, though. You’re supposed to understand the minds of ancient races.’

  ‘I’ll tell you a very sobering thing that somebody said to me the other day,’ said Frances. ‘You know that quotation, I forget who said it, about “In death we join the great majority”? Well, I’ve always thought that was very nice, and I said it to this fellow who was going on about how his mother was dying. And do you know what he said? He said it wasn’t true any longer. He said there were more people alive now than ever have been alive in the whole history of mankind before, all put together. Do you think it can possibly be true? And if so, what a dreadful notion.’

  ‘It would make one feel doubly left out,’ said Hugh. ‘Dead, with all those teeming millions still having an endless rave-up. Horrible.’

  ‘It can’t be true, can it, statistically?’ said Natasha. ‘I must ask your mother. She’s the population expert, she should know.’

  ‘She’d say it was true even if it wasn’t,’ said Hugh. ‘You’d better not put the idea in her head. She is an irresponsible woman.’

  ‘In this exhibition at the Hayward Gallery,’ said Stephen, ‘there was this painting by Salvator Rosa of Empedocles jumping into Etna. Did you see it, Frances? I think it was you that told me to go.’

  ‘Yes, I saw it. Did you like the exhibition?’

  ‘I liked that one best.’

  ‘Did you really? I liked the philosopher reading under a tree. He had bare feet.’

  ‘You have got a peaceful nature, Aunt Frances. I liked Empedocles.’

  ‘Whatever did he jump into Etna for?’ asked Natasha. ‘Was that the death wish getting too strong for him?’

  ‘He jumped in to prove he was a god,’ said Frances. ‘He’d been boasting.’

  ‘And was he a god?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Really, Natasha, what a question. You don’t believe in gods, do you?’ Natasha laughed, shifting her position in her chair, wriggling the toes of the foot she had been sitting on.

  ‘I may not,’ she said, ‘but maybe they did. Anyway, how do they know he wasn’t one?’

  ‘I can’t remember. How do they know, Stephen?’

  ‘They found his sandal,’ said Stephen. ‘Thrown up out of the crater. A bronze sandal.’

  ‘And what did that prove V

  ‘It proved he’d been burned to a cinder, I suppose,’ said Hugh.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Natasha. ‘Why ever does it prove that?’

  ‘I suppose the theory was that he’d leap up again out of the molten lava like a phoenix. And as he didn’t, he was assumed dead.’

  ‘Reasonably enough,’ said Hugh.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Natasha. ‘If he really was a god, he might have liked it in the depths of Etna, mightn’t he? He might have been tired of living amongst foolish mortals.’

  ‘He was some kind of philosopher, wasn’t he?’ said Frances. ‘Perhaps he was an early Schopenhauer.’

  ‘What was his philosophy?’ asked Natasha.

  Nobody knew. Stephen remembered that the other philosophers portrayed in the exhibition, or at least the ones that Rosa seemed to like, were Stoics. But jumping into Etna did not seem a Stoic act.

  ‘We could look him up,’ said Natasha. ‘Stephen, find something to look him up in.’

  Looking things up, grinding coffee beans, making rugs. Natasha had picked up her crochet: she was making a dress for her granddaughter. While Stephen looked through the shelf for information about Empedocles, Frances thought of the Rosa painting. Red and brown it had been, not unlike the colours of this comfortable interior, but not at all in any other ways comfortable: it had been on the contrary rocky and seething, an immense craterous romantic cavern, with Empedocles falling forwards perilously from one foot into the red depths. The rock had had a bubbling viscous volcanic look about it: the whole painting suggested violent motion, and the philosopher himself, clothed as she recalled in sandals and brown robes, seemed made of the same stuff, to be longing to be absorbed into the same stuff.

  Stephen had found a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. He read the extract about Empedocles. It didn’t say what kind of philosopher he was. Matthew Arnold had written
a play about him. There was a quotation from Milton: Stephen read it out:

  ‘He, who to be deemed

  A God, lept fondly into Etna’s flames,

  Empedocles.’

  ‘And thereby proved he wasn’t,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Or was,’ said Stephen. ‘Depending on one’s view of godliness.’

  ‘How can one think it was a godly act, to jump into a volcano? He was just deluded.’

  ‘He can’t have thought he was a god,’ said Natasha. ‘He can’t have been deluded.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Hugh. ‘People are always deluding themselves about that kind of thing. Part of the human spirit. There was a silly bugger on the television only last week, threw himself off a church tower somewhere in Lincolnshire, he thought he could fly. And look at all those stupid fools who keep boring holes in their heads and jumping out of top floor windows.’

  ‘You’re suggesting Empedocles was on a trip?’ said Frances, rather provocatively. The subject of drugs was a dangerous one: Hugh himself had had a patch of smoking, which had thrilled him while it lasted, but the stuff had been too mild for him really, his constitution craved its daily pint of spirits, and he had luckily had too much sense to move onto anything harder. But he was ill-placed to criticize his son, or any other of the rising hordes of the vast young majority, on the grounds of their possible addictions; this didn’t prevent him from doing so, but it made him remarkably angry in the process of doing so. Once he had thrown a teapot at Natasha, for suggesting that he mind his own business. She had to have stitches.

  ‘Delusions of immortality,’ said Hugh. ‘Sounds like a trip, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Frances. ‘I’ve never been on one. I only go on real trips, like to Adra. Anyway, I hate that kind of language. As bad as a “dig”, a “trip”.’

  ‘Why didn’t his sandals get burned as well?’ asked Natasha.

  They all paused, and thought about Empedocles’ sandals.

  ‘They were bronze, were they?’ suggested Stephen. ‘Perhaps they were real bronze? Do you think? I’d always pictured them as being this kind of bronze vinyl stuff, but perhaps they were real bronze?’