The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  David Ollerenshaw and Karel Schmidt caught the plane home from Adra together. They were getting on not too badly, despite the inconvenience of the situation. Karel had shown remarkable self-control when informed that he had missed Frances by a day, and wasted several hundred pounds in the effort. ‘Well, bugger that,’ he had said bleakly, and had sat down to recover. He had been unable to tell them anything at all about the crisis that had recalled Frances. He didn’t read the Sunday Examiner, he only read the Sunday Times. ‘I don’t even read the Observer any more,’ he said from time to time, as though that would contribute to the sum total of information about Frances’s sudden disappearance.

  The as yet undispersed conference members were delighted by his romantic arrival, which gave an unexpected thrill to their last evening. They fed him and bought him drinks and asked him about Frances and tried to prod him into the swimming pool, wondering what grand passion could have brought him so far; for Karel certainly had a quixotic look about him, a look of harassed desperation. He had a tatty, dishevelled air, as of one whose clothes have been disintegrated by the constant fret of violent emotion, and they gazed at him with respect, a traveller from distant lands. Karel, conscious of his role, tried to live up to it, but he was feeling far too ill to leap dashingly into the swimming pool for their delight. He had had to have a cholera jab at the airport when leaving, and his arm was huge and swollen. He had been horribly sick on the flight, and the Adran food, delicious though it was, didn’t seem to go down too well, so Karel, with his usual aggressive policy towards his own health, had firmly washed it down with a large quantity of Real Scotch Flora MacDonald Whisky, and swallowed a good many pills which kind geologists and engineers offered him. By the time he boarded the plane home the next morning, he was feeling extremely ill.

  ‘It’s my fault for lying,’ he told David, groaning into the paper bag provided. ‘I told the Poly I couldn’t turn up because I was sick. And now I am.’

  David tried to cheer him up with the story of his first night in Tehran.

  They had to change planes in Paris, and owing to a strike of airport workers were unable to find seats on the normal scheduled flights: they were nearly fitted on to a plane from Bombay, and would have been if Karel hadn’t been feeling too ill to stand in a queue. This was just as well for them, as the plane blew up over the Channel, killing every one of the two hundred and seventeen passengers. Karel and David were lucky enough to spend the night in a hotel instead, and flew back to London the next morning, Friday morning, just as Frances Wingate was setting off to drive across the Midlands from Wolverton to Tockley, to bury her long-dead great-aunt.

  Harold Barnard sat in his office and stared at Constance Ollerenshaw’s will. He was wondering what his father could have been thinking of, to let her draw up such a tiresome document. It must have been quite obvious when she made it, twenty-five years earlier, that all its beneficiaries would be dead shortly, if they weren’t then dead already. And now, of course, they were. The list of beneficiaries was short. Her dog—presumably any current dog. Her cat. (There might still be a cat roaming around there somewhere, of course—cats are good at survival.) The matron of Star Valley Nursing Home. (He had checked that one, and she had died in 1959.) And the cottage she had left, mysteriously, to the owner of a lodging house in Morecambe, who had died without issue the year after the will was made.

  His father really ought to have kept her up to date on it, he thought. Though perhaps there wouldn’t have been much point—she was dotty, had been for years, she might have tried to draw up something yet more inconvenient. The fact was that the firm of Brooke and Barnard had completely forgotten the existence of Constance Ollerenshaw. She had still been vaguely in their minds when Ted Ollerenshaw, her brother, was still alive, and somebody had mentioned her when Eel Cottage was sold, but that was a good many years ago now. Mays Cottage would probably go to the next of kin. If they wanted it. The Armstrongs at the farm had had their eye on it for years, but Constance had hated them so much that she had actually added a clause that the cottage shouldn’t be sold to the Armstrongs. He wondered whether the clause would stand. The cottage, derelict though it was, might be quite valuable now. People were prepared to pay fancy prices for cottages, even in districts like this, and Mays Cottage was a period piece, completely unrestored, which in these days seemed to be an asset. Eel Cottage, which had changed hands several times since Ted died, had more than quadrupled in price, and would fetch an even better sum now.

  He was waiting, now for Ted’s granddaughter, Dr Frances Wingate. It did seem rather ironic that her father, who must have done very well for himself, seemed to be likely to inherit Connie’s money (and there might be a bit more than the cottage, his father hadn’t been very strict about cats and dogs in wills but he’d told her where to invest the odd hundred pounds or two, forty years earlier). There were plenty of other Ollerenshaws around on the spot, as it were, and several of them had been round to see him about the will: apart from the fact that they clearly weren’t as well off as a Vice-Chancellor they now claimed that they had looked after Connie well in her old age, and were therefore more deserving of her money. In view of the circumstances of her death, he permitted himself to find this comic. But people have short memories. There was one of them who’d tried to go and see her, but only one: he’d seen her on the local tv news. She’d made quite a good impression. She’d given the old lady a box of Black Magic chocolates. When starving to death, Constance had eaten the box in which the chocolates came: relics of it had been found in her stomach. He hoped the young woman wouldn’t get to hear that bit of information. It might upset her. And whoever’s fault it was, it wasn’t hers. (She, of course, hadn’t been around after the money.) Harold Barnard inclined to take the line that it was nobody’s fault. If people chose to live alone, they chose to die alone. Though they thereby sometimes created a good deal of work for their solicitors. She had expressed a request, in her will, that she should be buried in unconsecrated ground, and that the Vicar of St Oswald’s, Tockley, should attend. He wondered what Frances Wingate would make of that. It wasn’t all that easy to bury people in unconsecrated ground, and the vicar of St Oswald’s to whom she had referred had been lying long years in his highly respectable grave.

  Frances Wingate parked her car in a side street, by the Church of All Saints. How beautiful it was, the church. It wasn’t the famous church of Tockley; it was just another church. There it stood, densely surrounded by Building Societies and Wimpy Bars. How beautiful England was, how lovely a place is an English town.

  She was feeling a little light headed, easily affected. She hadn’t quite got over the air travel shock, and all this rushing around was making her feel rather emotional, and rather tired. Perhaps she should stop rushing around the world and settle down and live quietly in a nice place like Tockley.

  She gathered together her bag, her gloves, her cigarettes, and opened the car door. She sniffed. Her nostrils widened in horror. For she was met by the most amazing smell. Whatever could it be? Was it a spiritual smell, the smell of Great-Aunt Con’s decay, hanging like a miasma over Tockley? She had heard of such delusions, they were well recognized. Nobody else seemed to be stationary with horror, as she herself was.

  But it was too distinctive to be a delusion. She locked the car door, and walked along the pavement, sniffing experimentally. Was it cows, was it pigs, was it manure? It was too unpleasant to be any of these things, though it contained elements that reminded her of them. Could it be something burning? Perhaps what it reminded her of most was the smell of burning chocolate, which she had smelt once before, and most unpleasantly, on the flat green wastes of York race course, emanating from the local chocolate factory. But this was worse, worse even than that. Sweetish and piggy, it hung rotten in the air.

  She would ask Mr Barnard about it, and if he said there was no smell, she would go and see a psychiatrist as soon as she got home. Tockley hadn’t smelled at all like this in the early summer. Perhap
s it was the guilt of Con’s death, after all.

  Mr Barnard was delighted to talk about the smell. He sat her down in his office, and gave her a cup of coffee, and told her that Con’s death was in no way her fault whatever the local and national press might suggest, and that it was certainly not polluting the atmosphere of Tockley: Con, he said, was neatly frozen (or as neatly as possible) in the morgue, awaiting burial. The smell, he explained, was the smell of cooking sugar beet, and it was a great local scandal, and how right she was to notice it. His firm, he said, represented those factions which were trying to prevent the smell of burning beet from filling the streets of Tockley, but there were other powerful interests who argued that it was a good smell, that there was no smell, or that even if there were an unpleasant smell, it was a smell upon which the prosperity of Tockley was founded, and as such must be accepted and made welcome. ‘We get used to it,’ he said, ‘but it certainly does strike a stranger.’

  ‘Yes, it certainly does,’ said Frances. She liked the look of Mr Barnard, he was quite dashing in a quiet way, he wore side whiskers and a large wide striped collar and a colourful tie: she liked the way the hair receded from his high and intelligent brow. He was about her own age, she guessed: she had expected somebody much older, but as he shortly told her, he had taken over the position of his father, who had now retired.

  Pleasant though Mr Barnard was, however, he couldn’t disguise the fact that Connie’s will had left a few problems. He gave her some advice about undertakers, and the number of the police station, and she said she would have to think about whether or not she should disregard the will of the dead.

  ‘A cremation would be simplest,’ said Mr Barnard.

  ‘I’ll think about it over lunch,’ said Frances.

  She then asked him if it would be all right if she went to have a look at Mays Cottage. She was thinking of going that afternoon. The police wouldn’t mind, would they, she asked, and he said no, and looked in a little drawer of his desk and found her the keys. ‘Though I doubt if you’ll need them,’ he said. ‘I think the door’s off the hinges.

  ‘I would come with you,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got some clients to see this afternoon. You won’t be too shocked by what you find there, will you?’

  ‘I’ve seen some nasty things in my time,’ said Frances, ‘though it’s true that most of them have been a few thousand years old.’

  ‘You could bring me the keys back tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘And the dog, you said, was found dead? There’s no need to look for the dog?’

  ‘The dog was very very dead,’ said Harold Barnard gravely, and courteously escorted her out into the smell of beets.

  She booked herself into the same hotel in which she had stayed earlier that year, and had some lunch there, thinking while she ate it of whether or not one ought to respect the wishes of a dead person to be buried eccentrically in unhallowed ground. She couldn’t make her mind up. She of all people was aware that mankind had strong views about burials: burial rites were one of the oldest signs of culture, they were what distintuished man from beast. Impossible to dismiss such a significant passion, as mere superstition, for if one dismissed that, how much else had to go? Perhaps she would have a better sense of her duty to Constance when she had been to visit her cottage. She would postpone judgement.

  Harold Barnard had given her the vicar’s phone number, In case she wanted to discuss the matter with him. She rather fancied discussing burial rites with the vicar, perhaps she would give him a ring. (She was by now quite enjoying this disaster.) He had also given her the number of a distant relative of hers, called Janet Bird, who had been the last person to see Constance Ollerenshaw alive: she seems a reasonable person, he had said, you could get in touch with her. She’s been having a tough time with the press, he said.

  Frances had forgotten about the press: rightly, she suspected. The Constance story had been a non-story, and they must have realized it by now. The British public was tired of dead old ladies and the gaps in the social services: its indignation was exhausted. Still, the family had had a bad time, however excessive her mother’s reaction appeared. Perhaps she would ring Janet Bird, that evening. It would be interesting to meet yet another Ollerenshaw.

  She felt rather tired after lunch, and went to lie down on one of the neat twin beds in her bedroom. (It wasn’t the same room as the one she had stayed in earlier in the summer, it looked over a rubbish dump instead of over a parking lot, but it was in other respects identical.) When she woke up, it was after three, and the air was already turning slightly dark. Being a practical person, it occurred to her that it might well be quite dark by the time she had finished with the cottage, supposing that there was anything there of interest, and that the cottage would probably not be connected up with electricity now, even if it had once been. Luckily, this was an autumn of power cuts, and the hotel had thoughtfully provided candles and matches; she slipped them into her bag, and set off.

  Harold Barnard had drawn her a little map, but nevertheless at Barton she took the wrong turning, and got herself rather lost. The country, even though it was so near Eel Cottage, was quite different in character: slightly undulating, wooded, hedged. There was none of that sense of desolate rural openness and utility: it was secretive, alluring. The hedges were bright with red hips and berries: they glowed like little lanterns in the gathering dusk, and the dark clouds strained above them, white edged and flowing. These were the paths that Constance Ollerenshaw had walked with her old pram, gathering snails for supper.

  She couldn’t get the car up the path to the cottage, it was so overgrown. So she got out and walked. Unlike her cousin Janet, she was good at negotiating rough terrain, and careless of her shoes. (She could afford to be careless of her shoes.) She strode along, pushing her way through the bushes, which leant towards her, ready to obscure the path altogether: anxious to see the cottage before it was dusk. It was like Sleeping Beauty’s terrain, she said to herself, though it was no sleeping beauty that the Armstrongs had discovered there. An intense stillness, a trance, hung over everything. And there stood the cottage itself, ancient, decayed, dank, dark, beautiful. It stood alone, itself, gone wild, run wild.

  She had been expecting the worst: later she realized that it was partly in terms of her expectations that the place was so beautiful. But first impressions are all, and in the silent dusk she stood and stared. She had pictured decay, rusted corrugated iron, tin cans, broken bottles, rotten planks, dung heaps, the worst of the country, but instead there was a cottage, overgrown with thorns and brambles, crumbling and falling, but crumbling to nature only, not to man. Constance Ollerenshaw had lived simply and madly; there were no corrugated iron roofs covering her leaking rafters. A terrible purity marked the scene, and Frances approached it without fear. Even a corpse would not have alarmed her. She was used to corpses; human bones were her familiars. She walked up to the front door, through the long swathes of grass, her feet wet with mud and dew: Oh so different, so beautifully different from the parched red mud of Adra, from the glaring altitudes of rocky, weathered Tizouk. England. A bird sang in a tree. Frances paused at the door, feeling in her pocket for the key. She bowed her head in respect to Constance Ollerenshaw, who had lived here alone for so long, whose death had been so solitary, so unremarked, who had let the creepers and brambles and roses grow in through her windows.

  Harold Barnard was right: she did not need the key. The door did not exactly swing open at her touch, but it was easy enough to push open: the long-unpainted wood scraped over the stone floor, for it drooped on its hinges, with a kind of weary welcome. Though so densely overgrown and surrounded by trees, it was still light enough inside to see without the aid of candles, and Frances found herself in the main room of the cottage: the main, front room. A door led off the back to a kitchen: a staircase led up from one corner.

  It was not nearly as desolate as she had supposed. There was still furniture—a couch, chairs, a table with
a fringed velour cloth. There were even ornaments: a picture on the walls, a lamp on the table, a vase on the mantelpiece. Embers lay in the grate: knobby bits of wood. Perhaps Con had not been so mad after all: perhaps she had simply been a Natasha of the country, without a town house. The Real Thing. A desk stood in a comer, a solid wooden desk, ornate, carved, woody, black. Apart from these objects, the room had a dignified emptiness: she wondered if it had always been like this, or whether surface rubble had been swept up and removed by police or solicitors. The place was not exactly clean: the stone floor was covered in leaves, the maroon velour cloth was ragged and thick, (she touched it tentatively, with a nervous finger) thick and stiff with dust. There were mouse droppings, bird droppings: maybe also rats? Frances did not mind rats. She must remember to look out for a possible cat.

  A fraying plum-coloured curtain, heavy with age and dirt, hung between the main room and the kitchen: Frances pushed it aside and went through. The windows were small, and branches leant pressingly against them. They were small paned, made to let in the light with the smallest possible escape of heat. How cold it must have been in the past. She was glad she had borrowed her father’s jersey the night before. A row of pots stood on the window sill: the plants were dead and twiggy, dry and stiff, but they must once have grown profusely, making the cottage green within, green without. The floor, again, was stone, with a few peg rugs on it: Constance had cooked on a kitchen range, black and heavy, a Victorian range. It must once have been an expensive fitment. The sink was a deep stone sink, silted up now with leaves: Frances prodded at the leaves with a spoon, and beetles ran. There were spiders, too: an insects’ paradise. On the stone slab by the sink stood some pans: curious, Frances peered in them, finding snail shells (she had heard that Constance ate snails, and why not?), a little mould, and in one lid-covered pan a sheep’s head. Frances did not much care for the sheep’s head: it had been picked too clean, and yet remained disgusting, the huge stupid eye sockets staring, the rather too healthy teeth still fixed in the jaw, and some of the bone pitted and worn and frilled into a tiny, holey pattern, an intricate membranous delicate web. It was a curious colour too, green and red and blotchy, not white as bone should be. She did not care for it, she did not like to think of Constance eating the last scrap (or perhaps the cat had helped) and she put the lid on it again, and went upstairs, glad that Constance was not still lying there in wait, as she had been for the Armstrongs.