The Realms of Gold

by Margaret Drabble

  From these projections, it may be concluded that Frances’s reunion with Karel, though achieved in ill-health, and cemented by death and tears, proved permanent. Their separation had been an aberration: both remembered it with amusement, as a happily married couple might remember a harmless affair; both agreed that, postcard or no postcard, they would have got together in the end. Karel’s wife went off to the country, as she had often threatened to do, to live in a Lesbian commune: she left the children with Karel and Frances. Frances ran her large household with great satisfaction, feeling that her energies, which she had feared were going to waste, were properly taxed at last. The children bickered and quarrelled a little at first, but after a few months settled down well.

  Joy, contrary to Karel’s expectations, and contrary to those of Frances (who had not dared to hope for so unlikely and so happy a resolution) turned out to have been truly Lesbian after all. It was no wonder that she had been so cross with Karel for so much of the time. As the months passed, she became almost pleasant. Frances, through the inevitable social contacts brought about by the children, found herself becoming interested, against her will, in the homosexual movements of the seventies: she even went to a meeting or two, and was much impressed by them. Despite these liberal gestures, Joy continued to dislike and distrust Frances, and could never bring herself to be very civil to her. Frances didn’t much mind: she had done little to deserve Joy’s civility. She had ruthlessly and fairly persistently pursued her husband, and had got him, after all. She was quite content with the resolution, and could well afford to be pleased to see that Joy herself was less discontented. In fact, she was rather pleased that Joy did not wish to become too friendly, as in fact she didn’t like Joy much, either. So there you are. Invent a more suitable ending if you can.

  Frances bought Mays Cottage from her father. He certainly didn’t want it and Frances did. To her astonishment, he allowed her to pay very nearly the market price for it (a sum rather more than a hundred times what her predecessor had paid for it in 1880). This interesting fact was to intrigue and perplex her for the rest of her life, and she invented various explanations for his surprising conduct, none of them wholly satisfactory. However one looked at the transaction, it involved blood money, of one sort or another, and it was money that she would well afford. Perhaps her father guessed the pride she felt in her own power of purchase, and wished to allow her to enjoy it? But she felt there was more to it than that.

  She tidied the cottage up, gradually: on the first few visits, she managed to get there alone with Karel, and they slept together amongst the cobwebs, making good lost months and years, in a terrifying, a safe, a giddy, a precarious, a secure and all-excluding secluded conclusion, as final in its own way as Stephen’s had been: as final, as ruthless, and, it seemed, as natural. A happy ending, you may say. Resent it, if you like. She will not care: she is not listening. After a few months, the cottage was fit for their large family, and they would all (or most, for the children had reached the drifting stage) go up for weekends and holidays. When asked where her country cottage was, Frances would say, ‘Near Tockley’, and people would look at her as though she was mad, and she would laugh, and say, it may not be Paradise, but it suits me. It never looked as nice as Hugh’s and Natasha’s cottage, but she liked it. It combined elements. It was not quite as spectacular a rediscovery and reclamation as Tizouk, but it offered many private satisfactions. It even proved, in its own way, to be of historical, if not of archaeological interest, for one day when Karel was doing some repairs he found walled up in a cupboard three shoes—a man’s, a woman’s, and a child’s—with a small porridge bowl. Ollerenshaw shoes, dating from the mid-nineteenth century. He took them to the Museum, and found that the practice of shoe burial, if not exactly of shoe sacrifice, was not uncommon, and that such discoveries were occasionally found associated with other offerings—knives, coins, on one occasion a couple of slaughtered chickens. An interesting footnote to the history of the agricultural labourer, he said. Frances, staring at the strange little family of shoes, said, well, they were always an odd lot, Aunt Con clearly wasn’t the first, was she?

  Having the cottage meant that she could keep in touch with Janet, which pleased them both. She would pick Janet and little Hugh up from Tockley in the car, and drive them out for a meal, and her children and Karel’s would play with the baby, while the adults talked. Mark usually refused to come, to Frances’s relief. She tried a little subversion on Janet, but wasn’t very successful. Janet remained self-contained, dry, only intermittently communicative: she wasn’t prepared to discuss her marraige with anybody, after that initial disoriented evening. But she liked to see Frances. It made a change, to see Frances. Gradually, Janet came to believe that instead of confronting a life of boredom, she was merely biding her time. There was Frances at forty, as lively as anything, digging her garden, painting walls, writing articles, riding (she had taken up riding, to stop getting fat), so how could her own life be over, when she wasn’t even thirty? Even if the gas mains didn’t blow up under Aragon Place, something else might happen, after all.

  Frances and Karel tried to keep in touch with David Ollerenshaw as well, but it wasn’t very easy. He was rarely in England. He sent them postcards from foreign parts: he spent another six months in Africa, then moved on to the Middle East. (Frances had missed the dig in Adra, through her domestic complications: it proved to be an enigmatic but fascinating affair and she was annoyed she hadn’t been there. But one can’t have everything.) David sent them, for a wedding present, a lump of pale yellow silica glass, that he had picked up himself in the desert: scooped, pitted, smoothly irregular, carved and weathered by the desert wind, apparently translucent but finally opaque, it had seemed an appropriate gift.

  They did manage to meet, occasionally, when he was in London: he came to dinner in Putney several times, and talked of the old days. He and Karel got on well. Frances found herself slightly piqued by their friendship, for she regarded each as he own discovery: she would grow quietly sulky while listening to them discuss world resources and recessions and the new science of cliometrics. A luxury, in these good years.

  Once, David invited them round to his London pied-à-terre for a drink, and took them out for a meal. It was one of the biggest surprises of Frances’s life. She had been certain that David would live in some shabby neglected hovel or bedsitter, like Mrs Mayfield, and his address (in Earls Court) promised no other. But his tiny flat, in size alone resembling a bed sitter, was quite unexpected. It was carefully furnished, spotless, even elegant, A stereo record player, a large collection of records, shelves of books, a series of orchid prints, and (most inexplicable of all) some interesting pieces of porcelain bore witness to interests of which she would never have dreamed. On the mantelpiece stood some geological objects: satin spar from the Midlands, a polished block of puddingstone, some green olivine from the Red Sea, desert roses, a lump of pink crystalline corundum, and a very large block of smoky quartz. She gazed into the block of quartz: it was dense and translucent within, streaked by refraction, like a petrified forest. Human nature is truly impenetrable, she said to herself.

  On the way home she said to Karel, what a surprising place. But Karel didn’t know what she was talking about. David’s place hadn’t surprised him at all.

  About the Author

  MARGARET DRABBLE is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle’s Eye, among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

 

 

 
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