She admired people who could do the thing well. Civil servants, who (unlike Patsy Cornford) could quietly get their minds round anything and produce order out of chaos and boredom. Chairmen who managed to be efficient and yet witty. Lawyers who could see inconsistencies in what seemed to her like logical statements. Mediators who could bridge impassable gulfs of opinion by the right formula of acceptable words, who could string a bridge of language between two craggy summits, avoiding the horrible plunge into the deadly chasm of a Minority Report.
Sometimes, however, people went berserk in public. There had been that conference at Uppsala, when old Hammerkind had started to read a quite dotty paper about the moral turpitude of radio-carbon dating and the great technological conspiracy. He had supported his theory, which otherwise might have got by, with quotations from the scriptures and a plea for a return to a more reverent approach to pre-history, and had embellished it with some grotesque insults about careless Italian archaeologists and incompetent French ones, backing up his insults with some unfortunately not too grotesque illustrations. It had been quite a scene. She had herself, in deep excesses of boredom, wondered what would happen if she suddenly shouted out some rude words, or got up and danced on the table, or started to strip off all her clothes. Once a professor, whose gravity and calm she had always admired, confessed that he found it almost impossible to sit still for more than half an hour, and had to resort to the strangest devices to induce self-control. What was the average concentration span, she wondered?—then woke up with a jerk, as her neighbour handed to her a pleasant little nodule of Adran manganese ore. The geologist was explaining how uneconomic it was to mine the stuff. She stared at it with respect and handed it on. Looking up, she caught David Ollerenshaw’s eye. He was sitting almost directly opposite. He winked at her, in an encouraging manner. He looked as lively and attentive as anything, after his ordeal in the desert. She envied his stamina, she liked his face. She would have a drink with him later, she had promised. Geology was his own subject, of course, that was why he was looking so wide awake.
She listened hard for the rest of the afternoon.
There was nothing much planned for the evening: they had two hours off until dinner, then dinner, then a film show about no-mads. (How pleasant it was to have things organized. How agreeable her life was, really.) So she went upstairs to have a rest: belated air fatigue was telling on her, she was terribly tired. In the lift she was joined by Patsy Cornford, who was very excited because she had just had a telegram from her lover and another from a prospective lover. She showed them to Frances, proudly: they were bright green, an unusual colour in telegrams, a kind of bright leaf green. One said I LOVE YOU DARLING PATSY, the other said HARLING COME HOME SOON. They speculated, in the lift, as to why Darling should have been spelt once correctly, once incorrectly. Then Frances said she was going to have a short sleep, and marched into her room and shut the door firmly: she wrote a letter to her children, allowing her gaze to wander over their four photographed faces, thinking of the mother octopus. The four faces stared back: Daisy, two years ago, blonde and disdainful, a stern school photograph: Joshua, sitting on a bicycle grinning aimlessly in his good natured fashion: Spike, savage and bored, leaning histrionically and waiflike, hands in his pockets, against the front door jamb: Pru, another smiling child, a very professional photo this one, a Sunday Times one, Pru sitting as a baby of six (she was now eight) in the garden, with a lot of leaves and flowers stuck in her hair. She wrote to them as well as she could, describing her flight, the hotel, the meals, the swimming pool. I’ll be back soon, my darlings, she said at the end of the letter.
Then she lay down and fell asleep.
She woke in an hour, with her usual well-regulated internal timing: got up, had a bath, got dressed. The same black dress would have to do. She sorted out her conference papers: they had already got mixed up. She brushed her hair, polished her shoes with a Kleenex, read a few pages of The Charterhouse of Parma (she’d been meaning to read it for years, and God could she see why), then read an article in the Sunday Examiner about old people dying alone and starving in the midst of plenty: she’d brought the Sunday Examiner all the way with her from Hugh’s and Natasha’s, it was reassuring to have an English paper around, even if it was out of date. The Sunday Examiner said that too many old ladies were dying alone and starving: the most recent had died in a pricey council block in a resort on the south coast, and somebody was in for trouble—the council, the social workers, the relatives. A witch hunt, she smelled a witch hunt. Probably somebody deserved it, but maybe not those who would get it. In the nomad film, they would doubtless be shown pictures of old folk left to die by the wayside when too old to plod on, and would be told by the commentary that this was a humane socially integrated way of dealing with old age. Sociologists and anthropologists were a strange lot. She looked forward to further discussions with Spirelli on the subject. Thinking of Spirelli, she drew her belly in sharply, and looked at herself in the mirror. Was the black dress too tight? She leafed through the Sunday Examiner again, and found a frivolous article about how one shouldn’t be able to keep a pencil under one’s breast. The idea to her, small-breasted, was laughable. A pencil under one’s breast? She could as soon have hooked one under her lower eyelid. But maybe some people could. Maybe Patsy Cornford would be able to, in years to come.
She looked at her watch. It was time for a drink.
In the bar, she avoided a predatory-looking Spirelli who tried to intercept her, and made straight for David Ollerenshaw, who was talking to the Adran who had delivered the paper about minerals. They greeted her affably and bought her a drink. They were talking about geology. She tried too hard to prove that she had been paying attention all afternoon, by the occasionally intelligent question, and thought she didn’t do too badly. Indeed, she got quite interested, and accompanied them in to dinner where they continued to talk of the world copper market. She didn’t mind that: it was what she was here for after all. She would have a chat with Ollerenshaw after the nomads.
The nomads were quaint but brief. They stood around aimlessly under a tree, tramped across the screen, fed their cattle and camels, made a few pots and baskets, and that was that. Maps followed showing their distribution. It was not a very glossy film, with a dull plot.
Afterwards, some went to bed. Others decided to swim. Frances felt like a drink, and hesitated, wondering if it might not be thought too decadent to combine drinking and swimming. She was quite prepared to opt for the former, if there was going to be anyone to drink with. This, however, looked unlikely, so she went upstairs and put on her bikini, and found when she came down again that David Ollerenshaw was sitting by the edge of the pool with some glasses and a bottle of Scotch. ‘Ah,’ he said, when he saw her. ‘Just the person I was waiting for.’
‘A man after my own heart,’ said Frances, somewhat to her own surprise, as David poured her a drink. She was not usually so forward with strangers.
‘Now you must tell me,’ she said, as she sat down by him, ‘what you were doing, at my lecture.’
So he explained what he had been doing: that he had been in the same city, visiting his own Institute, the Geological Institute, and that he was rather bored, because his rocks hadn’t turned up. ‘I only saw that it was on by accident,’ he said. ‘There was a notice up, in the library. And I thought, why not?’
‘Are you glad you went?’
‘Of course I’m glad I went. You were on good form, I thought. Not that I know what your form is usually. But you seemed in good spirits.’
‘Yes, I was, as far as I can remember. Or was I? No, come to think of it, I was feeling rather low, at the time. I had terrible toothache. I had to have the tooth out, in Paris. Funny, how one forgets.’
‘Well, you didn’t look as though you were suffering from toothache, you’ll be pleased to hear. Terrible, having toothache away from an English dentist, isn’t it? I remember once, in Nigeria . . . ’—and he poured himself another drink, and t
hey embarked on a session of traveller’s tales. Tooth extractions in wooden huts, typhoid in the back of landrovers, suspected appendicitis halfway up a mountain: defective maps, petrol problems, the lack of acceleration of landrovers, snakes, sunsets. Field work in archaeology and geology seemed to be fraught with remarkably similar problems. ‘Horrible terrain, always,’ said David, enthusiastically, ‘and then one can’t be quite sure if the stuff’s there, or if it is, whether there’s going to be enough of it, and if there is enough of it, whether it’s going to be possible to get at it.’
‘Without spending a fortune.’
‘Yes, without spending a fortune.’
‘Your resources must be so much greater than ours, that kind of problem ought to be irrelevant.’
‘It never is, though.’
And they discussed the excitement of the first indications—the aerial photographs, tracer plants that indicate the presence of a certain mineral, a piece of broken pot, a bone, a shape in the sand. The disappointments, the sense of rage at having wasted months of one’s life in a hell hole, for nothing. ‘Though why I should care, I don’t know,’ said David. ‘There’s nothing in it for me, whether I find anything or not. I’m just doing a job. It’s different for you, I suppose. What you find is all your own.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ said Frances, and explained briefly about the way in which even some of the most nonchalant countries had finally woken up to the fact that their treasures were being picked up idly from celebrated sites and carried home in tourists’ pockets: they had introduced new regulations about exportation, and about time too, she had to agree. It had taken months to clear some of her larger trunks from Tizouk.
Then they reverted, with one accord, to the subject of discomfort, and why it was that they were prepared to endure it—why, indeed, they could be suspected of actually enjoying it. Both agreed that heat was their worst thing, which was doubtless why both had ended up in Africa. ‘I tried the Falkland Islands,’ said David, ‘but it wasn’t bad enough.’ They discussed the effects of heat on the British metabolism, and the horrible psychological shock of one’s first experience of it: each seemed to have responded in the same way, which was not surprising, they said (comparing arms in the fairylight), as they had the same complexions, fair skin, freckles. Frances described a night she had spent with her four children in Tunis, all of them melting and panting and furious and sleepless and desperate with that peculiar hot despair that seems so endless: ‘But what could I do?’ said Frances, ‘a night in the Africa for the five of us would have cost something like sixty pounds, they told me. Sixty pounds, for air conditioning! I’m not mad yet. I will be, but I’m not yet.’ David described his first night in Tehran. Why do we do it, they asked one another? Are we simply masochists?
‘Do you swim,’ she asked him, ‘in Arctic seas? That is a true test of a masochist.’
‘If you mean literally Arctic,’ he said, ‘it’s more likely a death wish you’re describing, than masochism. But I’ve tried some pretty chilly places, in my time.’ He thought of the Antarctic, and the happy penguins.
‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever have to go and dig in the snow,’ said Frances. ‘There can’t be much in the way of archaeology, under the North Pole.
He agreed. The swimming pool, however, he said, looked warm and inviting: why not try it?
They rolled in, lazily. They swam around.
‘Hello,’ he said to her, in the middle of the pool, as her head rose from the dive, sleek like an otter’s.
‘Hello,’ she said, enchanted by the illusion of proximity, the illusion of belonging to the same species.
David was an energetic swimmer, and set a high standard: by the time they emerged, they were both a little breathless. Spirelli was waiting for them, as they pulled themselves out, with Patsy Cornford. He was about to offer his arm again, but she managed to evade the gesture. She was a little frightened of Spirelli. She did not want to touch him again. And yet, at the same time, a slight competitive spirit stirred in her, a spirit that had been quiet and subdued for a long time. She didn’t like the look of Patsy getting on so well with Spirelli. Irresistibly, she set herself to charm. She felt David (a safer-seeming ally) watching her, with some amusement. But still, she couldn’t stop. A bit of old mechanism had been put back into action, by a chance flick of a finger, and off it whirred, off it clicked, as efficiently as ever. Oh dear, she thought to herself, oh dear, oh dear.
Spirelli seemed to appreciate her efforts: she had known he would, or she wouldn’t have made them. He in turn told his own traveller’s tales, tales as strange as those of Othello, of tribes whose heads grew beneath their shoulders, and Frances and Patsy listened, like two docile Desdemonas. Frances could see that Patsy was annoyed by her own arrival on the scene: she had been getting on well with Spirelli. The sight of her annoyance encouraged Frances to greater efforts of courtesy. She couldn’t help it. Half-amused, half-horror-struck, she watched herself perform, and watched Patsy begin to sulk. Though if it were to come to it, she would have put the odds on Patsy. After all, she was younger, and better looking. Perhaps she should form an alliance with her, not set up competition. It wasn’t as though she wanted Spirelli, after all.
Virtuously, she returned her attention to David: they discussed the distribution of swimming pools amongst the undeveloped nations of the world. There were whole continents that Frances had never visited: she was beginning to feel ignorant. It was a good thing, to attend a conference every now and then, in order to be made to feel ignorant. Otherwise, as David agreed, one saw only one’s own job. For months on end, said David, I hardly speak to anyone at all. That’s why I like conferences, he said, pouring himself a large final drink. Suddenly, all this good company.
You adjust very well from one to the other, said Patsy.
Oh, I like extremes, said David. A lot of people or none at all.
In bed that night, staring through a dark window at a very large African moon, David wondered about these things. He was drunk, and as usual when drunk, had a conviction that with a little introspection, all things would be made plain. If he thought about it enough, he would know why he continued, at his age, to plod off into deserts and suffer in strange places. He had to admit that there was a very high degree of straight masochism in his choices. He liked to suffer, and he liked to overcome suffering. He positively enjoyed it when things went wrong, when lorries dropped to pieces, and wells ran dry, and provisions got lost. Too easy a ride bored him. The easy explanation, that he was constantly trying to prove himself, seemed a likely one, and he thought there was something in it. It had been the explanation offered by a psychiatrist when David, at University, had had what he refused to refer to as a nervous breakdown. Closely questioned, he had admitted that yes, his father had always made him work very hard, yes, his father had wanted him to study physics not geology, yes, he had always felt guilty and unhappy and inadequate as a child, yes, he had suffered terrible torments about masturbation and examinations and the guilt and sense of failure connected with both.
So, said the psychiatrist, you want to prove yourself a better man than your father, and you want to escape from him. What better way than by testing yourself in this way? (Two months excessively solitary field work, as a post-graduate, had precipitated David’s illness, and the doctor had packed him off to bed for a month in a hospital.) David had agreed, and after a month had climbed out of bed, and had pursued his career as a geologist, continuing to test himself in extreme situations, although his father was now a feeble old shadow, a retired depressed teacher of General Science in a Manchester Comprehensive, and not worth proving anything to at all.
He thought of that first night in the Middle East, his first experience of extreme heat. Unbelievable, it had been. With his usual independence and faith in his own powers of endurance, he had refused to listen to advice about air conditioning, and had booked himself into a cheap small hotel. Why pay more? He could cope with bugs, he had no need for modern plu
mbing. But he had reckoned without the heat. He was in a daze from the moment when he stepped out of the aeroplane into the blinding light. He could hardly cross the tarmac to find a taxi. People talked at him and reeled away from him in a confused and meaningless way, dressed oddly, speaking odd languages, all inexplicably surviving and thriving in an atmosphere that ought not to have been able to support life, except possibly the life of large dry insects. He had somehow managed to get to his hotel, sign a register, allow himself to be pushed into a lift and out of it, and had finally achieved his only aim, of falling upon the bed. And all night he lay there, sleepless, feeling the sweat pour from his body, feeling his joints melt and rot, mouth open, eyes open, limp, lifeless, aching, immovable. Sweat welled up in the sockets of his eyes and dripped over like great tears down his cheeks until he felt that he would have wept, could he have found the fluid or the strength. He would have tried to read, to while away the long night, but he had not the strength to reach for his book. He would have rung the company, but there was of course no phone in the room. He saw himself condemned to an eternal hell of debilitation, immobile, lacking the energy even to cry for help, as in one of those nightmares where the sleeper struggles in vain to let out the faintest of shrieks, or to move by half an inch an arm or leg. He was trapped, like a fly in amber, in a new element, and the element, solid like water, more solid than water, was heat. Towards dawn, it had grown slightly cooler, and he had managed to look at his watch, take a drink of water, and doze off for an hour. But at sunrise the whole process began again, with renewed intensity. He lay on the bed, and wept tears, wasting precious liquor, not knowing how he would ever feel well enough to let anyone know how ill he felt, fearing he would lie there and die there and very quickly deliquesce there.
The Realms of Gold Page 29