The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  They drifted away from the table: Frances drifted rather rapidly, making for an Englishwoman who looked like a potential ally. The brief biography they had been given said she was from the Department of the Environment, and so indeed she proved to be. She was quick to tell Frances that she was only there as an observer and wasn’t supposed to have any views: however, she clearly had plenty. While she was expounding them, Joe Ayida came up and joined them. Frances asked if everybody had arrived. ‘There seem to be a lot of people,’ she said.

  ‘Everybody is here,’ he said, ‘except a Russian who arrives late—she has problems with her visa, I think—and an Englishman, who drives himself.’

  ‘Wherever is he driving from?’

  ‘Across the Sahara.’

  ‘Perhaps he got lost on the way. When was he supposed to get here?’

  ‘Today, like yourselves. It is much safer on an aeroplane.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘His name is Ollerenshaw. A geologist, I believe.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Frances. ‘My maiden name was Ollerenshaw.’

  ‘Isn’t your father Vice-Chancellor of Wolverton University?’ asked the woman from the Department of the Environment, and initiated a long conversation about new British Universities, which excluded Joe Ayida completely and rather rudely. Frances struggled, and then gave in. It was going to be boring, after all.

  Three hours later, at midnight, however, things had livened up a little. Some had retired to bed: others were sitting around drinking and playing cards. Frances had managed to bully the Department of the Environment woman (who was extremely pretty for one so neurotic) and one or two other stray possibilities into a game of poker, though they hadn’t got much beyond the stage of arguing about the rules they were playing by. Still, it was better than nothing. She was just thinking of proposing that they began playing for real money instead of matchsticks when another member of the party, more daring (or, she suspected, a better and more dissatisfied card player) suggested that they drop the cards for a time and go for a swim. ‘Look,’ he said, waving, dramatically, at the kidney-shaped floodlit pool outside, ‘regarde, on ne peut pas résister.’

  Frances certainly couldn’t resist. She rushed off to the lift for her bathing things at once, persuading the Department woman to join her. Their rooms, they had discovered, were adjacent. The woman complained that she hadn’t got her bathing things, Frances offered to lend her a spare set. Frances knew, from endless travel, that there is nothing more useful abroad than a bathing suit or two. Her own were extremely old: the bikini she had bought just after Daisy was born, and the one-piece garment which she offered to Patsy she had had since school. They changed, grabbed a heap of luxurious towels, and ran down to the pool, where a fat geologist and a bald engineer were already splashing and diving. The water was a perfect temperature: warm, soft, quivering blue, very mildly refreshing. She wondered if it was heated: it was probably cold in this part of the world at night, but the whole atmosphere was so artificial that one couldn’t possibly tell. She lay on her back, her hair drifting like weed, her ears full of water, gazing upwards at the white monument of the hotel, and the fairylights, orange and white and green, and a new crescent of a new moon, and stars competing ineffectively with the lights, and thought of other bathes in other seas: the children on a beach in the South of France, howling with fear at the sight of the water (it had annoyed Anthony), an obscene swim at Venice on the dull and ugly Lido with a randy Italian, a desperate plunge into a hotel pool after hours of driving in Tunisia. As a child herself, on the vast intimidating sands of East Anglia. A bathe in a river near her brother’s cottage, in the icy Windrush, where one swam silently like an otter or a rat between the weedy flowering banks, on a level with secret holes and burrows. With Karel, there had never been much time for swimming. They had never had a holiday together, except that one with the frogs. She thought about the frogs, and smiled to herself as always. If one could smile about the frogs, one must be capable of recovery. She gazed up at the moon and wished on it, like a child, as she always did when the moon was new, and on every first evening star: she wished for Karel to come back to her. Oh God, she said, combining piety and superstition, let him come back, let me be his, let him be mine.

  She wondered if Karel would have liked this hotel, this swimming pool. She paddled herself around a little, and watched the fat geologist dive in. She admired men for the way they didn’t mind people seeing their bodies. Karel did mind. His body was private and beautiful: he was a modest man. The Department woman was sitting elegantly on a yellow bathmat, talking to an anthropologist. She looked very nice in Frances’s maroon school swimsuit: Frances suspected she wouldn’t have worn it if she hadn’t. What a weird scene. Joe Ayida wouldn’t have liked it. Tolerant though he was, Western though he was, he wouldn’t have liked it. He had gone home to his mysterious wife. She wouldn’t know what kind of house they lived in. One would certainly never be invited to it. She had asked Joe’s wife to dinner once, when she had been visiting London, and she had accepted, and turned up, and smiled politely, and eaten everything put in front of her (except the turnips, for which Frances could hardly blame her, for turnips were rather an acquired taste, though at that time one of her own favourite vegetables) and had said not a word. What did she think of London? She had smiled and nodded. What of Paris, what of Milan? She smiled happily. In the end, she said, Very nice. Yet she spoke good English, Joe asserted. Joe sculpted her, large and naked, but in company it was improper for her to speak, and it would certainly have been improper for her to disport herself in this lurid modern swimming pool.

  Frances noted rather enviously that the Department woman, who must be considerably younger than herself, hadn’t got even a suggestion of fat. When Frances sat in certain positions, she noticed that there was a spare roll round her waist, and even an incipient double chin. On the other hand, she hadn’t, she hoped, got the other woman’s mad and manic laugh. How was it that one could tell so quickly that another person was slightly off course? The laugh floated over the pool. Frances swam over to the group—the fat geologist had joined them, and so had a nice looking Bulgarian. The anthropologist who was talking to the Department woman (her name, she remembered, was Comford, Patsy Comford) was an Italian, a distinguished man, in his fifties, grey, but hardened and fit, grizzled as though by years of field work. His chest was covered with wiry dark grey hair. His name was Emilio Spirelli, she had read a book of his once about kinship and family structures in nomadic peoples. He was watching her approach through the Technicolor water, though maintaining a conversation at the same time, and when she arrived at the side he leaned over the pool edge, and offered her his arm to pull her up. His arm was amazingly strong, the hand had little hairs like wires all over it, he seemed to pull her out of the water without effort. The casual stylish gesture alarmed her slightly, as did her response to the touch of Spirelli’s hand. He was like that, then, was he. She would have to be careful. The fact that she hadn’t been touched by so nearly naked a man for a long time, together with Hugh’s admonishments about celibacy, swam into her mind simultaneously, fish of the same colour. She shook the water out of her hair and ears, to frighten them away. Oh dear. Dripping, she sat there on the towel, squeezing out her hair.

  ‘Dr Wingate, I think,’ he said. She nodded, water falling from the tip of her nose. They all smiled. She remembered now, he was to present a paper on the effects of development on a nomadic tribe in neighbouring Chad, and the projected consequences for a great many of the very few Adrans who wandered around the Northern territories of Adra. It would be interesting; he was a very interesting man. She also remembered that she had liked his book, because it had argued a case for returning to Malinowski’s simplistic theories about family ties: he was opposed to the trend for interpreting them in terms of property, arguing that property was an extraordinarily recent development of civilization. He was one of these avant-garde reactionaries that every profession throws up
now and then—confusing, acute, unclassifiable.

  ‘How nice to meet you,’ said Frances. ‘I do so look forward to hearing your paper.’

  ‘And I you,’ said Spirelli. His English was not perfect: nevertheless it was very much better than Frances’s rather unused Italian, and they managed to have quite an interesting chat about families and kinship, a subject which naturally attracted everyone. The geologist contributed the view that in his experience the small modern family created strain and neurosis and drove people into clinics, and did not Spirelli, as an Italian, agree that large families were much better? Spirelli did not necessarily agree, though he saw the point. He himself, he said, came from a family completely dissipated (by which he meant dispersed, reasonably enough), and that that was why he was so interested in kinship ties. At this irony, he laughed, and asked them if they did not think that it was common for people to choose a profession that provided what they did not get in life? As compensation? Like academics who grow old and grey writing pedantic books about Blake and Lawrence, suggested Miss Cornford. Or quiet novelists who write novels full of blood. That kind of thing, he agreed, though Frances doubted whether he picked up the literary allusions: he picked up the sense, though, quickly enough. She liked him, but wished his name didn’t remind her of corsets, because that in turn kept reminding her of how fat she was or might be getting, and how thin Miss Cornford was. They discussed the size of the modern family: Patsy Cornford had one sister, the geologist had one brother, Spirelli claimed two of each, all lost and dissipated, as it appeared, in all senses of the word. When Frances said she had four children, they all made clicking noises just as her mother would have done, which rather annoyed her. Still, she couldn’t help feeling she had scored a point. ‘And your husband, what does he say? You leave him with the babies?’ asked the geologist.

  ‘I haven’t got a husband,’ said Frances, perhaps rashly, then tried to give a brief and forbidding account of her marital status, whereupon Spirelli asked her whether it were true that more and more women in England were bringing up their children alone, and whether or not the trend was pronounced enough to be counted a social phenomenon.

  Frances tried to think about this, and said that it was hard to produce statistics. But she and Patsy Cornford between them could produce hardly any examples of first marriages with offspring lasting any length of time. ‘Perhaps getting married again is becoming a trend,’ said Frances. ‘Do you think, Patsy?’ (First name terms were inevitable: she was in for the woman’s entire life story at some point during the conference.) Patsy did think so. But also it was quite common for mothers to bring the children up single-handed. More of the people Frances knew were doing this than weren’t. She pondered the fact, it had never struck her so forcibly before. It wasn’t that her acquaintance was a very large cross-section, but it was surely representative of something. And if so, of what? She asked Spirelli if it were so in Italy, and as he replied, half in Italian (it was not so, it seemed, but this was for economic reasons, educational reasons), she thought back to an incident the weekend before, which had, as it were, taken her by surprise. She’d been driving the children up to Hugh’s and Natasha’s, sitting in the kind of daze she always sat in while driving, and had stopped at a crossroads in one of the last villages they passed through: waiting for the lights, she had seen a family on bicycles approach, two small children, and then their father. They were laughing and shouting at one another, she smiled to herself at the sight of them, it always touched her to see passing strangers in momentary glimpses of amity. They weren’t a very special family—a little boy in a red woolly hat, a girl in an anorak, the father a small working man in a cap. And then, their mother had followed, and quick as a flash, as she saw the fourth member of the completed family, Frances had felt her smile fade, her approval vanish, her own vicarious pleasure die, the image shattered, the transient harmony destroyed. It had frightened her, the way her spirits dropped so instantly at the sight of the mother, bicycling behind. Why not a mother? Why should she not join in too?

  And she had driven on, thoughtfully, pondering this. The truth was, she concluded, that she could no longer admit the concept of a two-parent family. Such symmetry, such ideal union utterly excluded her. She could not even smile at a nuclear family’s pleasure as it cycled along a road. She wanted them split, broken, fragmented. She couldn’t believe they were really happy as a foursome: one of the parents must be a drag, and if it wasn’t the man, then it must be the woman. Any other balance was impossible, unthinkable.

  She had just been congratulating herself, as she drove along, on the adaptability, the good nature, the charm of her own children. She had been listening to their chat, idly, answering them from time to time, all the way from Putney. She could manage. She could cope. No need for a man, must have been her underlying thought. Or why be so shocked at her own shock? She despised people who sacrificed themselves for their children and dragged their way through desolate, bitter marriages. Karel and Joy. For the sake of the children. Her own children were fine, they had escaped her fell hand. They were set free.

  She could not conceive of family love. She was too selfish, too unco-operative, too fond of her own way. That was it. It was obvious. And she loved a man who was not the father of her children, and he loved his family more than he loved her. Moreover, she could not conceive of any life in which all the things she loved could come together, and therefore did not want to believe that anyone else could have such a perfect life. Ideological sour grapes. They dangled, blue and bitter. It was all bitter, whichever way one looked. However did it get to be like that? When were the anthropologists and sociologists going to explain that? Certainly, she said to herself, if those four people, that perfect family, at the village crossroads, had resembled for an instant a perfect family, they would not be able to keep up the illusion for long. Oh no. They would be quarrelling by the next corner.

  She thought of Hugh and Natasha, who had tried so hard. Hugh had tried to drown his nature in floods of alcohol, Natasha slaved till exhaustion to produce the illusion of a home. And now she was attending group therapy sessions. They were the only couple Frances knew who were still married, even. Whatever had gone wrong? She did not often think in these simple terms. She looked down at her wet arm. The veins were prominent now, and knotty. Those on the inside on Karel’s arm were huge and delicate, his skin was white and smoother than her own. She was ageing, when she bent her arm there were wrinkles at her elbow. She should have had another baby, years ago, with Karel. Another family.

  Spirelli had stopped talking about the education of women in Italy, and started on the difficulties of abortion in Portugal. She asked him about primitive cultures in which it was permitted for women to have children by different men. He described one or two. They didn’t sound very nice. The geologist told them that he was too selfish ever to get married, that he liked to do things his own way and was very fussy about what he ate, liked to talk to himself, and was mean about money, too mean to support a wife. He found all this very amusing, and so did they. Then he asked Patsy Cornford if she were thinking of getting married. Frances obscurely feared an outburst at this question, especially as the girl had been rather quiet during the last ten minutes, but the outburst was clearly biding its time, for all that she said was that she was very selfish too and (darkly) it was time that certain people recognized the fact. Spirelli admitted to having had a wife at one point, but said that it hadn’t worked out. ‘I have two adult sons,’ he said. It seemed they would not speak to him, they took their mother’s part. ‘But an anthropologist like myself can have no family life,’ he said. The geologist agreed that those who went in for field work and conferences could have not family life. Then they turned on Frances, and asked her how or why she managed it, and she said she didn’t know, it must be to prove that it could be done, and that she’d been lucky to have a rich if not a cooperative husband, and she went on to explain that naturally her work had suffered as a result of her family arrangemen
ts, how could it not have done? They told her she was making excuses, and the geologist said he must be going to bed, he was just going to plunge in again for a last swim, who would join him? In he went like a porpoise, puffing and blowing and cheerful, in his large flowered trunks. And Patsy Cornford, rather to their surprise, suddenly rose neatly and quietly to her feet, and walked over to the diving board, and dived in, perfectly, professionally, neatly. Spirelli and Frances sat and watched them, silently. It was late, everyone else had gone to bed, though there were still lavish lights glittering all over the ground floor of the hotel, and the upper storeys were lit irregularly with small coloured oblongs of brightness. They sat quietly, and listened to the slapping of the water, the breathing of the swimmers, the hum of the lights, the clattering of insects round the lights. It was a scene from nowhere, a modern Arabian Night.

  And suddenly, they heard a noise. In the silence, it sounded important, ominous. It was only the sound of a car engine, as they realized after a while, but they found themselves listening to it with some attention. It seemed to be heading so directly for them, through the empty space. The hotel was built on the outskirts of the small town, near the very small and infrequently used airport. They wondered who could be arriving at this time of night. Frances had a sudden crazy inspiration that it was Karel, come at last to get her, as she had always known he would: how often had she not dreamed of him. stumbling over the hot sand, screeching to a halt outside her own front door, pulling her from her seat in the Institute, arriving (Oh God how she longed for him) at the side of her hospital bed. Oh, the reunions she had arranged in her mind. Why ever should he not, on an impulse, arrive in Adra? She summoned him, she willed him, she conjured him.