The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘The sins of our fathers separated us,’ said David, as he pressed the button.

  ‘One could say so,’ said Frances.

  ‘I met this woman and her brother on the boat, coming over. They were going to see their mother, in a hospital in Algeria.’ He paused. ‘I wondered why they bothered.’

  ‘Families are incomprehensible,’ she said.

  ‘I was an only child,’ he said.

  They got into the lift together, and ascended to the eighth floor. On the landing, they parted.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said. ‘And thank you for the drive.’

  An undemonstrative lot, the Ollerenshaws.

  When she got into her bedroom, Frances sat down on her bed and burst into tears. She was thinking that when the organizers of the conference had asked her to fill in her next of kin on her travel and insurance form, she hadn’t known whose name to put.

  She cried for quite a while, comfortably, tired. The stone in her chest was dissolving, after all: fate was on her side, after all. The tears poured down. In the morning, or the morning after, when she got back from the tin mine, she would write to Karel, she would write him a long letter, explaining how much she needed him, asking him to take her back. There was no point, no point at all, in being alone. How arrogant she had been, to think she could get him back with a postcard. It would take a letter, at least. If not two or three letters.

  Resolved, comforted, she went into the bathroom and washed her face and cleaned her teeth. She was growing older, but Karel would not mind. Her skin was over-exposed and veiny, she had wrinkles round her eyes, her hair was coarse and growing coarser, but Karel would not mind. Her teeth—no, she drew the line at looking at her teeth and wondering what Karel would think of them when he saw them again. His own weren’t all that marvellous anyway, and she loved them, every one, even the false ones.

  She got into bed. Next day, the tin mines. Piously, she picked up and kissed each one of her children’s photographs, and Karel’s teeth. The tin mines, next day, and some rickety little light aircraft. She hoped it would not crash into a mountain, leaving her either dead (to be eaten by Spirelli) or alive (to eat Spirelli) as seemed to be the vogue these days. Before falling asleep, she looked at some photographs of the amazing figurine. Quite unlike anything, it was, with its naturalistic features (negroid? Arab?—neither, really, in any recognizable way) and its stringy ropes of hair, all carved in terracotta in a style no one had ever seen before. It had a witchy, androgynous, yet friendly look, almost a comic look, as of one who appreciates the twists of fate. If she played her cards right, perhaps she could get Karel back, and get herself on the dig as well. She would have to see what she made of the site, the next day.

  Part Four

  But the next day brought quite different prospects. It brought her, at seven o’clock in the morning, a pile of leaf green telegrams, all demanding immediate action of one sort or another, and all, at first sight, equally incomprehensible.

  She sat up in bed, gaping in horror at the pile on her breakfast tray, ripping open one after another, dreading to find news of the death or illness of children. Reading blindly, she could find no such news: none of them were from her ex-husband. So she had to calm down and begin again, under the agitated eye of the Adran girl, who did not dare to leave the room, so frightened was she by the ashy terror on Frances’s countenance, and by the excess of telegrams.

  After a while, Frances calmed down, and managed to read them and make some kind of sense from them. There were, in fact, only six: though there had seemed at first to be far more, and the envelopes, when open, added to the impression of multiplicity. The most innocuous of them was from the Sunday Examiner, and said PLEASE RING AT ONCE BILL MERRITON. She was used to that kind of thing, but it seemed more sinister in conjunction with the others. One of these said: SUNDAY EXAMINER CANDAL EXERT SELF COME HOME MOTHER. Another read: MOTHER ILL COME HOME FATHER. Another read: HAVE YOU SEEN SUNDAY EXAMINER MOTHER IN A STATE MAYBE BETTER HOME HOME H. Another read: PLEASE COME HOME STEPHEN MISSING EVERYTHING TERRIBLE WE NEED YOU YOUR CHILDREN ALL WELL NATASHA. Finally, another one from the Sunday Examiner said PLEASE PHONE YOUR STORY EARLIEST EDITOR.

  Frances stared at them. What on earth had happened? What was this mysterious candal (candal for scandal, she assumed) that had hit her family in her absence? Was it her mother’s illness, had it caused her mother’s illness? Her mother had clearly been well enough to struggle to the telephone to send at least one of these telegrams. And what on earth was the sub-plot about Stephen? (Briefly, she thanked Natasha in her heart for those reassuring words about her own children.) Better home home, said H, meaning better come home from Hugh, she guessed. And what on earth was the Sunday Examiner so very excited about, so suddenly? Her relations with this paper had always been amiable, they had published several articles by her, an adulatory interview with her and had covered her Tizouk expedition in glorious colour and for a large fee in their colour magazine, but they also had a reputation for hard-hitting exposés (not that an exposé hits, it exposes) and ruthless investigations. Had they been investigating her mother or her father and making them ill? Were there scandals as yet undreamed of by her in the Ollerenshaw family, skeletons stacked up in its cupboard, and now about to rattle out and spill all their dusty bones over the front pages of the Sunday papers? Surely not, surely she would have heard about them, or sensed them. Was her mother running an illegal abortion clinic, was her father a spy or a bigamist? The possibilities, once probability was discarded, were endless. She gaped at the sea of deadly crispy green leaves, unsure what to do next.

  The Adran girl hovered, quivered, approached, and poured Frances a cup of coffee from the pot on her tray. What a sensible, nice girl, thought Frances, and accepted the cup, and drank. She was thinking hard. What should she do? How long would it take her to ring England? And whom should she ring, the possibly hostile Sunday Examiner, or her probably hysterical family? And should she do what they all suggested, and catch the next flight home? The best thing would be to try to speak to Natasha. Her telegram, although containing as much menace as the others, had an air of reason about it, and anyway Natasha was always reasonable. She would try to ring Natasha, if only she could remember their number. And she would enquire, at once, about flights home.

  ‘Please,’ she said to the Adran girl, who was still waiting, ‘I want to ring London. And to find out about aeroplanes to London.’

  The girl nodded helpfully, and smiled, and disappeared. A few minutes later, Frances had a call from Reception telling her that it would take at least two hours to put a call through to London, and that the only flight of the day left at ten that morning.

  Clearly she needed official help. She began to pack, while wondering who could best help her, and finally rang the secretary of the conference, who seemed to get things going at a tremendous speed, booking her a seat on the plane, arranging transport, promising to get her call to London through in no time, and offering sympathy and calm efficiency all at the same time. ‘I’m sorry I shall miss the tin mine,’ she said, with some sincerity. ‘Another time, another time,’ was all he replied.

  But he didn’t manage to get her call through to Natasha, all the same. She waited around restlessly in the foyer, her luggage packed and waiting, only to be told that when the call got to London, Natasha’s line was permanently engaged. This, if there had truly been a domestic crisis of the proportions indicated, was not surprising: she would have to wait till she got to London to find out what had happened. The tin mine expedition was due to set off before her flight for London, so she was able to bid farewell, one by one, to the other members of the conference, as they made their way through the foyer to the bus: she was touched when David Ollerenshaw offered to fly back to London with her. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘it’s my family as well as yours, as we established yesterday. Why don’t you let me come and help you sort it all out.’

  ‘Oh, it’s probably nothi
ng,’ said Frances. ‘Just some hysteria of my mother’s. No, you stay and see your tin mine.’

  ‘I’ve seen if before,’ said David.

  ‘All the more reason to see it again,’ said Frances.

  ‘You could give me a ring, and tell me what has happened,’ said David.

  ‘It’s easier said than done, ringing Adra,’ she said: but they promised to communicate, and David went off on the bus, and Frances went off in her hire car to the airport, and caught the plane for London.

  On the plane, the reason for at least some of the emergency became apparent to her, as she leafed through the sheaf of newspapers that had been thrust into her arms by the civil servant who saw her off. She wondered how she could have remained in happy ignorance for so long—though it wasn’t really so long, today was only Wednesday, and the paper that had done the damage had been released to the world the preceding Sunday. In fact, as she considered it, it was more astonishing, far more astonishing, that the Sunday Examiner should have reached Adra so early, than that it should have reached her so late. It was rather a tatty copy, perhaps some incoming passenger had left it lying around, and the airport newspaper man had sensibly reassembled and resold it.

  The news, when she read it, combined the tragic and the grotesque and the crazily coincidental to such a degree that she did not know how to take it. The Sunday Examiner, as she recalled from her flight out, had been conducting an enquiry into the deaths of various old ladies from various causes in the preceding months, accompanied by a mildly political campaign against social workers, striking electricians and various other offending bodies whom the paper chose to find neglectful of their duties. As luck would have it, there had been quite a few such deaths that autumn, and the preceding Sunday an old lady named Connie Ollerenshaw had been found dead in her cottage near Tockley. She had been dead for some months, which ruled out the striking electricians as the cause of death, and left neglectful relatives and social workers. The old lady had died, it appeared, of starvation: the paper implied that gruesome details could be given, were the paper not too delicate to print them. The paper also said that the old lady had several relatives living close by, and that she was the aunt of Sir Frank Ollerenshaw, Vice-Chancellor of Wolverton University.

  Well, bugger me, thought Frances, gazing at a photograph of her parents, looking cruel and neglectful and affluent, on some public occasion.

  The paper promised more details next week. Frances checked the dates: Connie Ollerenshaw’s body had been found on Saturday, which meant the Sunday Examiner had had to do a rush job to get anything in the paper by Sunday, and that there would be more dirt next week. Including Frances’s own story, as told to Bill Merriton or as not told. Bill was a nice fellow, perhaps he had tried to contact her in a spirit of friendship rather than hostility, though one couldn’t trust a journalist, ever. Obviously the paper hadn’t, by Sunday, woken up to the fact that Connie Ollerenshaw, if she was Frank Ollerenshaw’s aunt, must be Frances Wingate’s great-aunt, or there would doubtless have been a picture of Frances as murderess adorning the inner page as well.

  What bloody awful luck, she thought, that the Sunday Examiner should have been into the subject of old ladies dying of hypothermia and starvation and bad housing conditions. If they hadn’t been, Connie Ollerenshaw might have been buried in peace, without creating a scandal. She could hardly blame her mother for feeling hysterical, if hysterical was all that she was feeling. She was beginning to feel rather hysterical herself, as the plane covered the endless spaces of the desert. Connie Ollerenshaw, her grandfather’s sister, dying like that in a cottage with her stomach full of undigested cardboard and pages of newspaper. (The Sunday Examiner had not spared all details.) It was not nice to think of such a thing happening to anyone, let alone to a blood relation. She half-wished she had let David fly with her, so that he could share this bizarre development in their family history. What on earth had happened to Connie? How had the welfare so completely overlooked her? She had heard of loops in the network, but surely not loops large enough to allow one whole old lady to starve to death, in the second half of the twentieth century, while relations sat in nearby Flaxam and Tockley eating bacon and eggs, and her parents dined on elaborately decorated large meals in Hall. She began, as the journey lengthened, and as she tried to eat a weird meal of chicken and mayonnaise, to sympathize with the investigatory zeal of the Sunday Examiner. Good luck to them, they were doing a good job, and how disgraceful, how wicked and shocking of her father, to let his very own aunt starve to death. What was the world coming to? One could carry disassociation to extremes, and he had done it. Had he felt no responsibility for her? Had he completely forgotten her existence, as he sometimes appeared to have forgotten the existence of the whole material world?

  She couldn’t remember that she had ever heard him make more than the vaguest allusions to Aunt Con. Her grandfather had never spoken of her either, but then he never spoke of anyone. And yet, from the sound of it, she had been living there all the time, only a few miles from Eel Cottage: she had been there, mad and alone, throughout Frances’s childhood visits. Racking her memory, she thought she could dimly remember muttered remarks, overheard, not for the ears of children. What a sour and tiresome and quarrelsome lot the Ollerenshaws were, they had sucked in some poison with the very water of Tockley, it had poisoned their brains, that unnatural ditch water, she had always known it. Mentally unbalanced all of them, melancholics and suicides and witches, and now, in this newer generation, nomads, alcoholics and archaeologists, with death running in their veins. David Ollerenshaw had been born in Tockley, and those first few months of Tockley water, diluting the Cow and Gate powdered milk, had been enough to send him too, unlikely though it was, into the desert. She wondered how she would find them all, when she returned. Whom should she ring first? Her home? Natasha? And where in God’s name had she left her car, she simply couldn’t remember.

  Families. Incomprehensible. What was it David had said to her the night before, about a couple who were going to visit their dying mother in Algeria? And here was she, bound on a similar errand. Ancient migrations. Perhaps David should have come with her; Constance was almost as much his great-aunt as hers, though neither had known of her existence, though David doubtless was still, even now, ignorant of her existence, or rather of her leaving of it. She thought about David, and of how surprised she had been to discover their relationship: the truth was (she might as well admit it) that she’d been astonished to learn that any member of the Ollerenshaw family apart from her father had ever made it to Grammar School, let alone to University. Her mother had always taken the line that no good thing could come out of Tockley: the Ollerenshaws had been written off as peasants and shoemakers and shopkeepers, and Frances would never have thought of looking for a cousin amongst them, would never have dreamed of finding as acceptable a cousin as David. She had cousins on her mother’s side, of course: there had always been plenty of Chadwicks to play with, discuss and dislike and compete with and boast about. A surplus of them, in fact: a gifted-tiresome surplus. But her mother had always implied that her father’s intellectual distinction had been a sheer fluke, a spontaneous generation, born out of the mud of East Anglia unparented, like the ancient crocodile, and no more likely to have been repeated or paralleled than the virgin birth.

  Frances, herself, had never been very keen on the Chadwicks. There were too many of them, and they were good at things that Frances could not do. Therefore she had not much cared for the notion of family resemblances, of inherited characteristics. She did not like people to say that she resembled her mother or her mother’s sister (which she did not, much, anyway). Nor did she like discussions about families, which take up so much time in English social life. John Sinclair-Davies had had one of the largest extended families she had ever encountered, and although he managed to forget about it while sitting in a tent in the desert, it seemed to rule his life when back in England. She had always found it hard to believe that John, so amusi
ng, so charming, so delicate and polite and attentive, so adaptable, so surprisingly adept with spade and spanner and tow rope, was the same man as the effete bore who would spend hours dropping names and tracing dull net-work connections and being utterly uninteresting and ungracious whenever he happened to run into anyone of his own extensive (but Frances-excluding) circle. How extraordinarily rude the well-bred can be, once they get onto the subject of kinship. How bored she had been, on how many occasions, listening to runic references to Sinclairs and Davieses, to Chadwicks and Huxleys, to Haldanes and Stracheys. She had allied herself with the ill-connected Ollerenshaws, and the dull ditches of her father and his newts.

  But now it seemed that even the insignificant Ollerenshaws were going to prove a trouble. If one could discover a dead Constance and a living David within the space of twenty-four hours, what might not the future hold of contact and of complication? England might be full of unknown second cousins, running drug rings, murdering their mistresses, designing nuclear reactors, entering monasteries, painting masterpieces. Perhaps they would all gather together, in some terrible Midlands twilight. She had heard, from a friend, of a gathering at Claridges, organized by an American millionaire, at which several hundred members of one family had assembled, from all parts of the world: how had he felt, she had asked him, to see so many of his kin, and did he recognize them as his kin? Oh yes, he said, you could tell us easily. By the noses. She had found the idea alarming.

  The plane continued, over the desert, on its way to Europe. She ate another mouthful of wilting lettuce. It tasted hygienic, as though it had been washed in disinfectant. Probably it had. Then she stared at the peculiar litter of plastic cutlery, cellophane, and polystyrene platters that occupied the table in front of her. What could it feel like, to be so hungry that one filled one’s stomach with cardboard?