The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  Anthony, meanwhile, back in West Gonnersall, was feeling amazingly much better. For several reasons. One was that he could tell, from Giles’s response to his telephone call, that Giles, as Len had predicted, had got something up his sleeve, and for the first time in his life he felt, however irrationally, one up on Giles. This so pleased him that he even forgot to mention Pamela’s dog. It was not much trouble, after all. He was also pleased by the notion that maybe the Riverside scheme might after all be salvaged: it even began to cross his mind at optimistic moments that it might even pay off? Supposing it paid off, supposing, instead of being in terrible trouble, he and Giles and Rory remade their lost fortune after all? It no longer seemed impossible. What a laugh that would be. If it all worked out all right. If it works out all right, Anthony promised himself, touching wood superstitiously, crossing and uncrossing his fingers childishly—if it works out, I will quit. I will dabble no more. I will retire, I will get a proper job, I will go and travel with contraceptives in India, with sanitary tampons in China, I will find a useful social role.

  But what a laugh it would be, he thought to himself, if it paid off. There was something about the end-of-the-year light, the dark evenings, the iron frosts, that had turned from despair to hope, and his body had revived too: he could feel his body thinking of the spring. The tiredness of doing nothing had left him; he was sure that his heart tissue had mended itself. He could feel that it had. It had been a warning, a portent, not a final blow. I will listen, he promised. Let me just pull this one off, and I will listen.

  One of the reasons for his renewed cheerfulness was, of course, Molly. Ill-fitted as she was to play the part of Pollyanna or Anne of Green Gables, Molly undoubtedly brought with her to him a new sense of purpose, and her pleasure at seeing him was very flattering. It reassured him that Alison would surely come back soon, and that at least some of their dreams might be made real. Private happiness might, after all, exist, despite the public woes of Britain.

  Donnell had arrived with a very thick large spade-shaped black beard. A gun-running beard. He seemed in good spirits and did not talk much about Jane, though he hoped for everybody’s sake that Alison would be home by the time he himself got back from the Caribbean. Anthony found that he did not envy the Caribbean trip at all. “No,” he said to Donnell, as he forced him to stroll around the grounds. “No, I don’t envy you at all. I’m really into the English winter, myself. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?” And he waved, vaguely, expressively, at the bare shaking trees, the colony of rooks down the lane, the yellowing roses, the frosted lawns, the gray-green stone of the house, the leafless gnarled trunk of wisteria. But Donnell, unlike Giles, was not remotely interested in property; the extreme beauty of Anthony’s only stake seemed to leave him quite cold. Literally cold. He shivered, constantly, during the two hours he was there; a big hairy man, he shivered and blew on his hands and said, “It’s a big place you’ve got to keep warm here, isn’t it? Whatever will your heating bills be?” Donnell was interested in people, and, only by association, money. He was not interested in things. Or places. He had always been unacquisi-tive, haphazard, vagrant. Anthony liked him, and could never quite sympathize with Alison’s occasional outbursts against him.

  Donnell had not brought an au pair girl, he had brought an au pair boy. “I forgot it was the weekend, when I rang; the agency was shut. So I brought Tim instead. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Anthony stared at Tim. Tim stared nervously back. He was a pale, tall, thin youth, with large dangling hands, lank black hair, and several layers of jersey. And a strange accent, which Anthony could not place, though he discovered later that it was a heavily overlaid and distorted Lancashire. He was obviously queer. You could tell he was queer from the look of the top of his pullover. It had stripes, and was too narrow in the shoulder. He looked like a boy who had outgrown his garments in the last year at school.

  Out of earshot, Donnell explained that Tim was an out of work actor, who worked most of the time as a dresser at the Regent: Donnell had met him around in pubs for years (“He’s older than he looks”), had bought him meals, got him bit parts in films. But Tim still drifted. “Doesn’t really seem to want to make a go of it,” said Donnell, rather surprised by the subtlety of his own analysis. “Self-destructive type, you know? Can’t come to terms. But he’s very capable. Oh yes, he’s very capable. He works for the Morrices sometimes, babysits, cooks dinners, cleans, that kind of thing. That’s why I thought of him. They’ve got a baby with muscular dystrophy and Tim’s marvelous with him. He’s a good cook, too. You’ll be surprised. And he won’t get in your way, I don’t think.” Donnell’s confidence wavered slightly. “Well, I don’t expect he will. If he talks too much, tell him you’ve got work to do. That’s what I do. Anyway”—brightening, the lure of the Caribbean glowing in Technicolor, the memory of dull chats with Tim about hopeless aspirations fading—“anyway, it’s not for long, is it? And now”—looking at his watch—“now, I’ll just explain to you about Molly’s pills and things, and then I’d better be off.”

  The first evening with Molly went all right. Maureen stayed on, and supper with Tim, Molly, and Maureen was not bad at all. Maureen cooked it, and Molly enjoyed it, and Anthony and Maureen and Molly listened with some interest while Tim told them about how he’d walked on with Richardson, and how he’d understudied Alec McCowen and had nearly had to go on one night for him because his car had been held up in a bomb scare, and how he’d run away from home when he was fifteen. As he talked, Anthony realized that he wasn’t so obviously queer after all: he certainly didn’t assume that Maureen and Anthony would assume that he was, and any references he made to sex were conventional heterosexual ones, and very polite, at that. A mixed-up boy, Anthony decided; or that was what he would have been called twenty years ago. There was doubtless some new offensive bit of slang for such a predicament these days.

  After supper, Molly wanted to watch the telly. But there wasn’t any telly. Never mind, I’ll get one tomorrow, promised Anthony, wondering if she understood. Then he remembered that tomorrow was Sunday, but it wasn’t worth explaining that to Molly.

  Luckily, Molly took to Pamela’s dog. Although not as good as a telly, it proved a diversion, and sat on her lap. He wished she would not kiss it, it seemed unhygienic, but did not like to stop her.

  In bed that night, he wondered if perhaps Donnell, despite the plausibility of his excuses, had not brought an au pair boy instead of an au pair girl out of some misdirected sense of jealousy about Alison. He had lost Alison himself, and had been exceedingly unfaithful to her, but nevertheless did not want her new man to sleep with an au pair girl. And as Donnell was clearly the kind of person who would judge another’s morals by his own, he would find it inconceivable that a man of Anthony’s age could share a house with an eligible girl without attempting sexual intercourse. Indeed, on being introduced to Maureen, he had given Maureen some funny looks, but Maureen, a bright girl, had made her status in Anthony’s life exceedingly clear: she was very good at making blunt points. And had gone off to a bed on her own tonight, aware that it would be unwise to provide Tim with gossip. A large house did have advantages.

  Anthony thought about girls. Perhaps he was relieved, after all, that Tim was not one, although he threatened to have some nuisance value. But girls were always a nuisance. His mind ranged back over the strange selection of au pair girls, mother’s helpers, student lodgers, and sheer parasites that he and Babs had looked after in the old days: Babs, a real sucker if ever there was one, had let the lazy slobs lie in bed all day if they wanted, would even make them breakfast and run errands for them in town, and entertain their boyfriends, and their mothers, and their sisters and cousins. One or two had responded with kindness to kindness: a six-foot blond Austrian girl, who had proved ten times more efficient than her employers and had made the children enchanting Christmas decorations, and who had visited evening classes and learned impeccable English and French, as well as photography and anc
ient history. She was a very good photographer: she sent them, still, samples of her work from Graz. And there had been Eloise, not as clever or as ambitious as the heroic Margrit, but just as enthusiastic about the Keating household, and no trouble at all, because she had a permanent fiance, who shared her room and occupied all her free time in a very harmless way. She married him too, when he finished his degree at the London School of Economics.

  But most of the rest of them had been pains in the neck. Tearful, self-absorbed, inept, promiscuous, morose, garrulous—and nearly all of them bone idle. “It’s your fault they’re so lazy,” Anthony would say to Babs. “You encourage them to be lazy. You’re always offering to do things for them. You make them feel they’re doing you a favor by breathing. You corrupt them.” “You’re just as bad,” Babs would say. “You never ask them to do anything either. And as for telling them—I’d like to hear you tell anyone to do anything.”

  She was right, of course. It was so nice when they all went away. Poor old Babs, would she have to start on all that again, when she got the new baby?

  Meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how Tim shaped up. I have learned nothing in life, thought Anthony. Nothing. I have had four children and several jobs, I have made and lost half a million pounds, I have loved two women properly and several more not too badly, I have a friend I visit in prison, I have found and bought one of the finest houses I’ve ever seen, I have even had a mild heart attack, and yet I know that I am completely at the mercy of that boy. I am just going to wait, to see how he behaves. I know it. And what if he is one of those that takes advantage? I have learned nothing.

  But it was not so bad. It was cheering, distracting. On Sunday Maureen left, on Monday Anthony replaced her with a color television, hired from the electrical store in Blickley. Then he and Tim and Molly settled down together in their ménage à trois. Molly could play simple games, like Snap with picture cards (she could not count), and could follow if Tim and Anthony played Ludo, though she could not work out how to move her own pieces. Her I.Q., Anthony thought, was somewhere in the sixties, though it was difficult to tell, because she had such physical difficulties with manipulating objects, and in speaking: he found he could understand most of what she said, except when she became very excited or agitated. He had on occasion suspected that Alison underestimated Molly’s abilities, for at times she expressed herself very clearly, and with great feeling: “It’s annoying,” she would say, when she dropped her spoon for the fifth time over a meal, “it’s very annoying, not to be able to put it where I want, when I know where it ought to go—” and such remarks seemed to indicate an area of awareness, frustration, inexpressible understandings that could find no normal outlet. One did not need a psychiatrist to explain that Molly’s fits of rage were fits of intense frustration at her own inability to do the things she felt she ought to be able to do. And if she felt this about physical problems, might she not also suffer the same rages about other skills, like reading and counting? It was a delicate area, and Anthony respected the fact that Alison had been for many years familiar with the problem in a way he could never be; nevertheless, he felt quite strongly that she had the misfortune to be intelligent enough to experience, acutely, her own disabilities. Snap and Ludo did not satisfy her, as they would have satisfied a very small child: they amused her for a while, but there was an element of rage in the way she tipped over the board at the end of a game, or scattered the cards on the table, as though she knew that there were more interesting games, from which she was excluded.

  In other ways, she was like a small child: she enjoyed talking to the dog, she enjoyed being taken for walks, although it was bitterly cold, and she liked being driven in the car, to look at things. She even liked looking at the scenery: he wondered what she saw in it. Being with her reminded him of the old days, when his own children were still small: he and Babs, driven to exert themselves by the boredom and irritation of staying in, had undertaken many dull weekend expeditions to distant parks, to fairs and playgrounds. There was more to see in the country, or more that Anthony himself enjoyed seeing. They went to look at the pig farm, at the river, at the horse in the field, at the strange mountain of horseshoes that some eccentric villager had erected in his front garden, at the ship in a bottle in Mrs. Appleyard’s front window, at the cows in the barn, with numbers stamped on their rumps. She liked to stand on the little bridge over the river that flowed through the village, dropping in sticks and leaves, watching them appear on the other side. She liked, too, the village shop, with its archaic bacon sheer, its dotty and confused array of packaged foods, its postcards and plimsolls and paper handkerchiefs. The woman who ran the shop, a middle-aged and confused person called Mrs. Lightfoot, was patient and unperturbed, as Molly made her mind up between Dolly Mixtures and Smarties: she was the worst saleswoman in the world, much given to pointing out what was wrong with her own wares (I wouldn’t have the oranges, Mr. Keating, they’re squashy in the middle, going off a bit, you know), apologizing for her produce (I don’t know what’s the matter with these eggs, Mr. Keating, they look like bantams to me, I’ll charge you a penny less, shall I?). She never hurried: nobody in the shop ever hurried. It suited Molly well. She could stare and poke about without fear of reprimand. Mrs. Lightfoot had herself a fat simpleminded youngest son of much the same age, who would run in from the back to steal sweeties when his mother was not looking. After a few visits, Anthony began to think that Mrs. Lightfoot had probably not even noticed that Molly was in any way odd. Or, if odd, no odder than Anthony himself.

  In the evenings, there was always the television. She enjoyed the television greatly. Undoubtedly, thought Anthony, as he sat through hitherto unheard-of programs, undoubtedly the television is a great invention. It took care of the evenings entirely.

  Tim, as Donnell had promised, was a good cook—almost too good a cook, for he liked composing rich and complicated dishes that made Anthony worry about his diet, and which Molly reasonably enough rejected from time to time, preferring, in a normal childish way, hamburgers and fish fingers and fried eggs. But Tim would not let her eat them all the time. He bullied Anthony into driving him in to the delicatessen in Blickley, where he stocked up with herbs and spices, rice and cheeses, olive oil and pasta, salami and Polish chorizos, dried beans and frozen prawns.

  But Tim was, also, a bore. As Donnell had ineffectively tried to conceal. At first Anthony could not work out quite why he found him boring: it was not so much that he talked too much, although he did, it was more that one could not quite believe anything he said. His stories were too interesting to be interesting. At first Anthony did not think of suspecting his veracity, for the stories seemed plausible enough—theatrical anecdotes of a familiar variety, tales of an impoverished childhood, adventures experienced on running away from home. Strange encounters, strokes of good or ill luck. Perhaps, thought Anthony at first, this is what life is really like in that particular kind of underworld: mad landladies, beneficent old Etonians, narrow escapes from the fuzz, wild weekends in country houses, propositions from famous film stars, betrayals and little acts of violence. But if it really was like that, why did such strange narratives arouse in him so little curiosity? Why did he have to work so hard to bring himself to say, every now and then, over the yellow paella or the Greek salad, “How astonishing,” “Goodness me,” “He didn’t really, did he?” It was oddly hard work, responding to Tim. The explanation did not occur to him for some days. One evening, Tim embarked on a story for which he unfortunately chose as protagonist an actress whom Anthony, through Alison, knew quite well. Anthony listened politely to an account of her career and marital adventures which culminated in a scene, alleged to have taken place at a party given by Lord Kinarth in Eaton Square. The party had indeed taken place, for Anthony had been to it, but it did not at all resemble Tim’s description; nor was it possible that Laura’s antics could have taken place after Anthony and Alison’s departure, in some strange surreal postscript to the real party, for h
e had on that occasion driven Laura home, and she and Alison had complained all the way back to Laura’s house in Kensington about the dullness of the occasion, the drunkenness of Kinarth’s butler, and the inadequacy of the food. “Call that a buffet supper,” he distinctly remembered Laura remarking, in her high camp tone of exaggerated horror. “More like a nursery tea.” And she had invited them in for eggs and bacon, and several slices of toast and Marmite.

  So it simply was not possible that at the same time she was taking off her blouse and bra and dancing on Kinarth’s four-poster bed, watched by Tim and others, was it? No, it was not.

  Nevertheless, it was hard to interrupt or to contradict a storyteller in full flight. So Anthony listened politely, and at the end said mildly, “Well, that is surprising. I’ve met Laura Blakely several times, and that’s not the kind of impression she made on me at all.” At which Tim looked at him, sharply, but without real suspicion.

  After that, Anthony found Tim’s stories increasingly dull and increasingly unreal. He had never gone much for the theory that good storytellers never have any respect for the truth; on the contrary he tended to think that only the truth could possibly be interesting. However dull the truth, it was more interesting than a fantasy. Anthony began to evolve for himself, while listening to Tim, a new theory: that bores are not necessarily people who talk too much, or who talk too much about themselves, they are people who do not tell the truth, either about others or about themselves. Perhaps because they do not know it? Tim was such a strange boy, it would be hard to convict him of a genuine desire to deceive: it seemed more likely that he was a fantasist, who found it hard to unravel his own stories, once he had invented them. Why don’t I just sit back and listen and enjoy it, Anthony said to himself. But he found it difficult, it was not in his nature. Tim disturbed him too much. A strange desire to protect him from his own lies came over him: he had entered into connivance. He began to agree more easily, nod more eagerly, to steer him off dangerous ground. Tim was quick: he picked up quickly the areas of social life of which Anthony had first-class knowledge and avoided them, confining himself to unexplored fringes where Anthony and Alison had never strayed.