The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  The ambulance took twenty minutes. It seemed a long time. Anthony could not disentangle his fingers from those of the girl, so he decided he had better go with her. Anyway, he wanted to have a proper look at her, in proper light. So he left his neighbor to lock up, and climbed into the ambulance with the girl, astonished, glancing at his watch, to see that it was only half past seven: it felt like midnight. The girl seemed to be getting calmer, rather than more agitated; perhaps it was partly fear that had been distressing her so much. She seemed resigned to ambulance, hospital, doctors. She was not, he guessed, even at the best of times a pretty girl: her skin was a terrible color, her features plain, and she was dressed, under the old army surplus coat, in a horrible collection of tat—a long shiny maroon skirt, a baggy flowered blouse, a gray cardigan, and a green cardigan on top of that. She had no shoes, and was wearing brown knitted socks. No flower child this, though possibly a junkie. She smelt of drink, but her clothes were so stained that maybe Bill had spilled it on her. Under the grave eye of the ambulance man, Anthony tried to ask her if there was anyone she wanted him to get in touch with: mother, family, friends. She groaned at the thought. “Don’t tell nobody,” she said. “What’s your name?” he asked her. “What’s that to do with you,” she said, automatically, still holding on to his hand convulsively. “I’ll call and see how you are tomorrow,” he said, as the ambulance drew up outside the hospital. “You know what hospitals are like, they’ll never let me in now.” Before they carried her off, he gave her a five-pound note and some silver, though he doubted that she would be able to hang on to it. He wondered where it would end up. “Good luck,” he said, as she was carried off. She did not reply. Good luck was the best she could ever hope for, he thought, and she wasn’t likely to get much of that. Though perhaps it had been luck that he had found her, that Bill hadn’t been left as solitary stoned midwife. The sooner his well-heeled architect buyer signed up and moved in the better. He would hardly appreciate a house littered with afterbirths or dead babies. Or not at £35,000.

  Anthony took a taxi from the hospital to Babs’s. He had never been to Babs’s new place, or exchanged more than a civil nod with her new husband: all divorce and maintenance exchanges had been conducted on neutral territory. Babs lived in a large flat in Little Venice. It looked peculiarly inviting, from the outside, after his last grim visit: the lights glowed warm through striped curtains, and flowers grew in a windowbox, but he felt put in his place by the fact that he had to ring the doorbell—to ring at the door, for his own wife and children? But of course the enormous aproned Babs who opened the door with her hands full of cutlery was not his wife any more, she was the wife of this plump young man in a roll-necked pullover who was advancing after Babs along the corridor, and who was, yes, there he was, extending a hand. Anthony took it, shook it. “Hello,” he said nervously. The young man smiled, also nervously, and Babs dropped a clump of spoons and forks: both Anthony and Stuart bent down to pick them up at once, and their heads knocked, and both apologized, each letting the other retrieve an object or two, straightening up, smiling again. “You’ll have some supper, won’t you?” said Babs, patting Anthony on the shoulder, then pottering off, calling behind her that she wanted to hear the story of the woman in labor immediately, but not until she’d put the rice on. Her place in the corridor was taken by Peter with his leg in plaster (not still, said Anthony, and was told with scorn that the cast would be on for another three weeks); by Stephen, on a skateboard, who looked as though determined to emulate his brother’s misfortune; and finally, as they disentangled themselves, and battled their way past bicycles and cardboard boxes into the living room, they were joined by the youngest, Ruth, who threw herself hard at her father and spilled most of the tonic that Stuart had politely poured for him. Family life. They seemed very thick on the ground, his offspring, and the eldest was missing, already back at college. Gone off early to get some peace and quiet, Babs shouted through the kitchen door, as she held the door open with one foot, stirred a panful of sauce with one hand, and fed the cat with the other.

  There was no time to protest about eating with the family, or to feel uncomfortable about breaking bread and eating salt with Stuart on Stuart’s own territory. As ever in Babs’s company, time flew past, in a welter of gossip, some hard, some soft, and a spatter of food and drink. Babs was feeling wonderful, she said, she was due in three weeks, she was overweight and had high blood pressure but who cared, Anthony was looking wonderful, she said, had never looked better—and Anthony, sneaking a glance at his reflection in the glass face of the kitchen clock while moving plates, decided it was true. He did look exceptionally well. The drama of Bill and the pregnant girl went down big, without too many interruptions from his audience, except a cry from Babs, who suddenly remembered, out of the blue, that Giles had called, had left a number, had said to ring after eight, had said he was expecting him for the night—but you needn’t go to Giles’s, you can stay here, said Babs, can’t he, Stuart? Where, said Stuart, looking around rather unhappily. Anthony assured Stuart that he would have to go to Giles as arranged, and Babs said that was perhaps just as well, they hadn’t really got a spare room, and God knew where the baby would sleep when it arrived. I’ll leave home and go and live with Anthony and Alison, shall I, said Ruth, sidling obsequiously and treacherously over to Anthony and leaning heavily on him. He put his arm around her. She was a tall girl, fourteen, grown up, with feet sized 7 and long legs, and she was the only one of the four that looked like him: his baby. And the only one whose paternity, before birth, he had secretly doubted. Nature has random kindnesses: she was unmistakably his.

  They talked of his father’s funeral, of the sale of the old house, of the problems of squatters, of property rights and the property market, of inheritance, and wills, and money, and North Sea Oil, of leaseholds and freeholds, of solicitors and stamp duty. Anthony thought of his mother in a new bungalow, and the dirty girl giving birth on a borrowed floor, and Babs and Stuart and all cramped into this overflowing flat, and of the new half-built council flats on the Riverside, and of Len in a Nissen hut, and of Alison and Molly alone in his spacious stately home. Babs inquired only once, in disparaging terms, about his new house: she was cross and dismissive, envious (reasonably so), so he placated her by describing his problems with the cesspool and the blocked drains and the tree roots, painting a black picture. And then, rising from a litter of cheese rinds, biscuits, crumbs, apple cores, orange peel, and nut shells, he went off to ring Giles.

  Giles was high. It’s all going to be all right, said Giles. Would you believe it? It’s all right. Get a cab and come round here and then we’ve got to go to the theater. Whatever for, Anthony protested, it’s too late, but Giles was insistent: they had to go and see a late-night one-man show presented by an old friend from the old days, Mike Morgan. You remember Mike, said Giles. We’ve got to go, I promised him we’d be there. Ring a cab and come round here. Where are you? asked Anthony, just in time, before Giles rang off: Giles was at his ex-mother-in-law’s, in Regent’s Park.

  In the cab, Anthony remembered Mike Morgan. He had not thought of him for years, until recently, over the last eighteen months, his name had begun to appear more and more frequently in the papers. Mike Morgan, like Anthony, had had a peculiar career. He had, at university, been clown, wit, and intellectual, a working-class intellectual, son of a Welsh miner, grammar school boy from the green valley, clever, outrageous, camp, severe. He had also been extremely left-wing, even by university standards, but that, in view of his origins, had surprised nobody. A brilliant future was prophesied for him: talent spotters from London were on to him in his first year, agents were making offers and dangling contracts. “The funniest young man in Britain,” the Daily Express had called him, after one revue that transferred for a short run to the Lyric, Hammersmith. But Mike Morgan, for reasons which he did not explain, decided that he did not want to be a funny man, but a straight actor, and had accepted a job with what is now the Royal Shakespe
are Company. He was not a good straight actor, and not a good Shakespearean clown. He played bit parts, not well. Anthony, in the year or two before he forgot Mike Morgan’s existence, saw him as a murderer in Macbeth, as Second Citizen in Coriolanus, and as a eunuch in Antony and Cleopatra; they were not roles that gave his talents scope, though he managed to impart an uneasy edge to the scenes in which he appeared. Perhaps for this reason, he did not flourish at Stratford, dragged on for another season or two, then disappeared. Looking back, with hindsight, Anthony wondered whether the problem with Mike’s Shakespearean performances was that he exuded an ineradicable air of disapproval. Second Citizens are not supposed to disapprove of their betters.

  After Stratford, Mike had disappeared from the scene. Anthony had assumed, without paying the matter much attention, that he had left the stage, discouraged, and turned his hand to something more obscure and more profitable. It seemed a waste of real talent, but Anthony was too busy to think about it much. They had been friends, but not close friends: Mike had no close friends. So no news of him filtered through into the general gossip. Until recently. At first Anthony, idly reading of the brilliant new American comic, assumed that it was some other Mike Morgan, until a photograph and an interview assured him that it was his very own, not American at all, but returned from several years in the States, with a one-man show that quickly became fashionable. So here was Anthony, in a cab on the way to see Giles and Giles’s ex-mother-in-law, on their way to see Mike Morgan. It was all somewhat unexpected. It was rather sneaky of Mike, Anthony felt, to have returned so abruptly, after so long a silence. He did not much want to go and laugh at his jokes.

  Giles’s ex-mother-in-law was a shriveled, elegant woman, quite glazed with drink. She managed to join up with Anthony’s hand, to shake it, but her pale china blue eyes rolled and wandered as crazily and with as little focus as the eyes of the girl in labor. She was wearing a pale blue silk jersey dress. Before he could say no, she had poured Anthony an enormous tumblerful of vodka martini: her manual control seemed restricted entirely to the area of the bottles and ice bucket, for she then started to grope quite helplessly for a cigarette in her bag, and Giles had to abstract one for her, and light it, and return it to her tremulous fingers. In comparison, Giles seemed quite sober. Anthony held his glass of icy gray venomous spirit, and wondered what to do with it. The sight of Mrs. Chalfont made him feel that he might as well down it and drop dead on the spot, as continue to strive, against the odds, to make some sense of life. But he resisted. Instead, he admired the floral decorations, which were, indeed, superb. Mrs. Chalfont agreed. “Yes,” she said, “they are so pretty, aren’t they?” She waved her cigarette at the great vases of lilies and narcissi and fluttery pink orchidlike butterfly blooms, so strikingly out of season. “I get them from . . . from . . . ” and her voice trailed away, as though she had forgotten not merely the name of the florist, but also that she was speaking at all.

  Giles’s line with her was to ignore her. He made no conversational moves toward her during the entire evening—she was to accompany them to the theater—but contented himself with lighting her cigarettes, guiding her toward doors, dressing her in her coat, unwrapping her from her coat, and helping her into cabs. Meanwhile, over the drink, which grew warm in Anthony’s hand, and in the cab on the way to the theater, Giles described the deal, elaborated on it. He was very pleased with himself. But it had been a near thing, Anthony could tell. Anthony could not quite believe the good news. Could it be true, that the anxiety was over, that he had been given a reprieve, and time to think again? He had become so accustomed to living with self-reproach that he did not think he would adjust very easily to self-congratulation. The denouement seemed so uncanny, so undeserved. Such a bad plot. In the cab, listening to Giles, Anthony realized how near he had come to accepting a scenario which had ended in defeat. Defeat would have been more artistic. With astonishment, watching the London streets pass, the traffic, the lurid posters of Charing Cross Road, he thought: I should feel relieved, but in some way I feel obscurely cheated.

  He had no time to dwell on this odd response for long, as they arrived at the theater and were ushered into the small, intimate, modern auditorium. It was a very long time since Anthony had been to the theater, or indeed to any public entertainment, and he found himself gazing like a stranger at the once familiar scene. For here were all the people he had gone into property to avoid: all the smart alecs, all the bitter trendies, all the snipers and laughers and jokers, all the people who spent their time laughing at what they had no hope of understanding, all the desperate comfortable lazy liberal folk. They were his friends. He was one of them. He recognized many faces: people waved at him, waved their programs at him, grinned and mouthed across rows at him. Some were dressed smartly, some were shabby, some had new wives and some had new lovers, but there they all were. Why did they fill him with such distaste? Was it simply that he had been out of touch for so long, alone for so long, with no companions but Molly, and Mrs. Bunney and Ned Buckton in the pub, and the renunciatory Alison? A countryman, shocked by town manners. Mrs. Chalfont sat upright, in a glazed silence, staring from right to left blindly. What did she see, with those blank eyes? He hoped she had found the oblivion she sought. It would be frightening, if she came around from the anesthesia, in the middle of the show, before she was safely home in her bed. He tried to look at the program, to concentrate on the summary of Mike’s career, but could not help looking around at the menagerie of people: there was Chloe Vickers, waving at Giles, there was Hattie Baines, his first girlfriend, there was Gino Vignoli, there was his old director of programs, there was Austin Jones, there was Tim, and there, all the way from Oxfordshire, was Linton Hancox, classicist and purist and scholar and poet, Linton Hancox of all people. How strange they all looked. The theater-going élite of Britain. The scene seemed set for a Restoration comedy or a Weimar Republic drag show. He wondered what Mike Morgan would pull out of the magician’s hat. And yet one could not say that each of these people, each individual, was in any way shocking, distasteful, unpleasant. They were not even overprivileged. There were the rich, it is true, like Chloe and Giles and Mrs. Chalfont; but there were also upstarts like Austin Jones, and those who were nothing at all, like poor Tim. Britain in the midseventies. Looking around him, Anthony felt in his heart a small confidence. I think, thought Anthony, I think I can really do without all this. I think I can manage on my own.

  People should not get together. They are more attractive in smaller groups. Collectivity corrupts. Man is a social animal, but only at a great risk.

  Mike Morgan, when he appeared upon the stage to enthusiastic applause, was very much alone. He had changed, aged, of course, but there was still that same white rat-clown face, impassive, cold, disdainful. The audience liked it. They liked it when he began to berate them for being what they were: drunk, idle, affluent, capitalist, elitist. They liked it when he told black jokes about blacks, queer jokes about queers, Irish jokes about the Irish, Arab jokes about the Arabs, then mocked them for laughing. He sang some songs, accompanying himself on the piano: the melodies were not very good, indeed Anthony thought one of them bore a sinister resemblance to an early work of his own, which was not much to its credit, but the lyrics were, he had to admit, brilliant, and the delivery electric. All in all, Anthony thought it a brilliant show. But it was not funny. So why was everybody laughing? Even Mrs. Chalfont was laughing. Anthony could not see the joke.

  Mike Morgan spotted the fact that Anthony Keating could not see the joke, for at the end of the second part of the show, after he had used up his formal material, he came down to the footlights, squatted down, and said to Anthony, who was in the third row, “Well, Keating, aren’t you enjoying yourself?” Anthony did not much like participatory theater, but he was not particularly afraid of it either, so he replied politely that he was enjoying himself, in his own manner, but was not much amused. This amused Mike Morgan no end. “Ha ha,” he shrieked, leaping from his haunches to
his feet in one athletic well-trained actorly movement, “Anthony Keating, like Queen Victoria, is not amused.” Then he went into a strange little dance, with which from time to time he would punctuate his patter, then rounded on Anthony, and shrieked again, “Who said that property is theft? Any answers?” He threw out his arms, embracing the audience, his mad white face gleaming. “Who said it? Come on, dumbbells. Who? What’s the matter with you all? Left your dictionaries of quotations on top of the pile of French grammars in the loo, have you?”