The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  “But you don’t regret it.”

  “No, I don’t suppose I regret it.” Anthony paused. “No, I don’t regret anything.”

  “My wife,” said Humphrey Clegg, “is a very good-looking woman. She’d have no problems, in finding another husband.”

  “She must have cared for you in the first place,” said Anthony.

  “I don’t know. She was impressed by me. I bullied her. She was very young.”

  And Clegg proceeded to tell Anthony about his search for a wife, his troubles with predatory and unsuitable and unreliable women, his fear of attractive and eligible women, his fastidiousness, his inability to involve himself or commit himself, his preference for divorced women with past histories unacceptable to the Foreign Office; he did not speak of his preference for men, though Anthony, himself from a minor public school, did not need to hear him describe his predicament. It was too common to need description. We are, thought Anthony, moving into a time when homosexuality will be so acceptable that it will no longer constitute a security risk, but it is too late for Humphrey Clegg. Though, as Clegg implied, he was not a natural homosexual anyway, for when he had met his wife, Sylvia, at a reception for the Belgian ambassador, he had in his own view fallen in love with her, and had wooed and courted her until she succumbed, and agreed to marry him.

  To begin with, Sylvia had been the ideal wife. She enjoyed company, enjoyed entertaining, obliged by producing a son and a daughter. She was intelligent, vivacious, tactful, discreet. But the life of discretion had begun to overburden her. She complained that she could never let her hair down, could never talk freely.

  “And it’s true,” said Clegg, “being married to a man in my position is a strain.”

  On the way to his flat, in the taxi, Anthony wondered if Clegg was so indiscreet about his marriage because of the necessity for discretion in all other directions. Or was it merely the immediacy of her desertion that had impelled him to these confidences? Or the sense that in Anthony, a woman’s man and an adventurer, he would find a sympathetic, an uncritical audience? A confessor who was, anyway, about to depart the country, perhaps forever, with his secrets?

  But even Anthony could not guess at the secret that Humphrey Clegg kept locked in his heart, the secret guilt over which, endlessly, he brooded. Anthony’s guesses were near enough, reasonable enough, but Clegg had never been, in fact, a homosexual: he had been, both better and worse, a solitary transvestite. More eccentric, but, in security terms, could he have made anyone understand, less of a risk. He had never confessed to anyone, until, after marrying Sylvia, he had confessed to her. She had taken it badly. She had tried, gallantly, to rescue him, had pretended not to mind, had employed all her energy to divert and please him, and had succeeded, from his point of view, for he had loved her and admired her; but the secret of his locked suitcase of women’s clothes, hidden in a secret locked cupboard, had weighed upon her mind, had corroded her spirits and sapped her optimism. Bluebeard’s cupboard, she had called it, laughingly, patting his arm, smiling at him bravely; and he had given her the key. I have locked it up, now I have you I will never open the cupboard again, he said. And she had taken the key from him, turning quiet and subdued with the sinister gift. But the knowledge that she alone knew this thing had tormented Sylvia Clegg, as his temptations had tormented her husband. He knew that he should never have told her. There are some things one cannot tell. But once told, they cannot be untold.

  So she had left him, the light-hearted Sylvia, carrying off the two little ones, to her father’s house in Sussex. She had written to him: I do not trust myself with you any more. I feel these wild impulses to talk, to tell people things I should not tell. I am afraid of hurting you, dear Humphrey, and I must go before I do you any harm. We should never have married, though I suppose I am glad we did, because of the babies. She enclosed, in the letter, the key to the suitcase.

  In terms of Humphrey Clegg’s career, her desertion might not prove too serious. It is better to have had a wife and lost her, than never to have had a wife at all. But he wanted her back. He missed her.

  Her ghost haunted the flat in South Kensington. She smiled brightly from silver frames.

  Anthony and Humphrey Clegg sat up for half an hour, over a pot of tea. They talked of marriage, and children, and public schools, and state education, and whether or not Anthony had ever contemplated the Foreign Office or the Civil Service. Anthony described the way in which he had drifted into his own various activities. Clegg said that he envied his flexibility.

  “And now I’m about to drift off to Wallacia,” said Anthony. “I do hope I manage to drift back again alive.”

  Clegg smiled. “There is no danger,” he said.

  Humphrey Clegg’s life had been ruined not by Eton but by a maid who had dressed him up in her frilly blouses and silk underwear, and painted his little boy’s face with lipstick and rouge, and dabbed his throat with Californian Poppy. He had been imprisoned by this misfortune in a jail from which there would be no release.

  Jane Murray, hoped Humphrey Clegg, would be home within the week. “Don’t be surprised if she doesn’t look too well,” Clegg reminded him in a more somber tone, as he found Anthony a hot water bottle, a John le Carré to read in bed. “She’s been starving herself, you know. I wouldn’t comment on it to anyone, if I were you. She’ll recover quickly enough, at her age.”

  In bed, with his book and his bottle, Anthony stared around and wondered what on earth he had stumbled into. The guest room in Humphrey Clegg’s flat was profoundly comfortable, in an old-fashioned, solid, reliable style. The bed was high, wide, and soft, the carpet a patterned Victorian Indian, the wardrobe solid mahogany, the adjoining bathroom modern and well-fitted. Most of the furniture looked as though it had been inherited from parents or grandparents: it was heavy and dark, but perfectly good. It would last forever. Framed prints of the nineteenth century hung on the walls: there was one of Chelsea before the Embankment had been built, one of the Great Exhibition, one of Windsor Castle, a prospect of Eton College, a prospect from Westminster Bridge. A framed embroidered Oriental bird struck a more recent exotic imperial note, as did a Javanese shadow puppet in a glass box on the mantelpiece: relics, no doubt, of past postings. Anthony, lying and gazing around him, thought: this is some kind of trap. Life is not like this at all. It is another mirage, for all that its accouterments are so substantial.

  He was not looking forward to ringing Alison in the morning, to tell her of his imminent departure. She would be sure to protest. But what can I do? thought Anthony. I have to go.

  The room was a room of the past. Nothing in it spoke of a future. Victorian England surrounded him, as it had hung on Clegg’s office wall, in the shape of camels and an oasis, and dangled from his office ceiling, in the shape of a crystal chandelier. So that was it, that had been England. Anthony stirred, restlessly. Surely, even as a boy, he and his clever friends had mocked the notion of empire? Surely they had all known the past was dead, that it was time for a new age? But nothing had arisen to fill the gap. He and his clever friends had been reared as surely, conditioned as firmly, as those like Humphrey Clegg, who had entered the old progression, learned the old rules, played the old games. Oh yes, they had dabbled and trifled and cracked irreverent jokes; they had thrown out the mahogany and bought cheap stripped pine, they had slept with one another’s wives, and divorced their own, they had sent their children to state schools, they had acquired indeterminate accents, they had made friends from unthinkable quarters, they had encouraged upstarts like Mike Morgan, they had worn themselves out and contorted themselves trying to understand a new system, a new egalitarian culture, the new illiterate visual television age. They had tried: they had made efforts. They had learned to help their working wives to cook and care for the children; they had learned to live without servants, to give elaborate dinner parties without the white cloths and cut glass and silver cutlery of their grandparents, they had learned to survive broken nights with screaming babi
es, broken nights with weeping, angry, emancipated, emaciated wives. They had learned—academics, teachers, and parents alike—to condemn the examination system that had elevated them and brought them security: they had tried to learn new tricks. But where were the new tricks? They had produced no new images, no new style, merely a cheap strained exhausted imitation of the old one. Nothing had changed. Where was the new bright classless enterprising future of Great Britain? In jail with Len Wincobank, mortgaged to the hilt with North Sea Oil.

  Well, I give in, thought Anthony. There is no point in struggling against the tide of one’s time. I will go where Humphrey Clegg pushes me. I might as well accept that I belong to the world that has gone, reared in the shelter of a cathedral built to a faith that I have sometimes wished I could share, educated in ideals of public service which I have sometimes wished I could fulfill, a child of a lost empire, disinherited, gambler, drinker, hypocrite: and who am I to resist an appeal to a chivalric spirit that was condemned as archaic by Cervantes? I will let myself be pushed. I am nothing but weed on the tide of history.

  He found the notion of being weed on the tide of history oddly reassuring, rather than depressing: amusing, even. He smiled to himself. I always feel all right, he thought, in a moment of acute self-knowledge, when I have found some grandiose way of explaining and justifying to myself what I am too weak to resist doing anyway. There had been no possibility of resisting Clegg. He had to go, for Jane, for Alison, for himself.

  He wondered how Jane Murray would look, after more than half a year in a foreign prison, after weeks on hunger strike. Over dinner, Clegg had showed him the report from dead Clyde Barstow: she had abandoned the hunger strike after she had started to bleed from the esophagus each time the prison officer introduced the pipe for forced feeding. But, Barstow insisted, she had not been ill treated. As far as he could tell, all she needed was attention. She had been seeking attention, like any lonely teenage girl.

  They would have to try to make it up to Jane, if they got her safely home.

  He was three days in Krusograd before he was able to see Jane, but there seemed no cause for anxiety over the delay. Everything worked smoothly: the visa was fixed, the flight was on time, Kammell met the plane and received the documents. Anthony found messages waiting for him at his hotel, which he duly conveyed to appropriate quarters, in exchange for other packages. The Ministry of Social and Public Order was polite and helpful, and arranged an appointment for Anthony to see Jane and the governor of the prison; Mr. Barstow’s successor, a man called Hopkins, took Anthony out to a dinner of goose and dumplings covered in what seemed remarkably like Heinz tomato ketchup. Everything seemed very normal, too good to be true, except for the unnerving way in which Hopkins kept lowering his voice and looking around him whenever any new person entered the restaurant. Nor were the piles of sandbags around the restaurant windows, and across the foyer of the hotel, entirely reassuring; but then, sandbags had become a commonplace of the London scene also recently. If the restaurant where Max and Kitty Friedmann had celebrated their Ruby wedding anniversary had been barricaded with this new fashionable decor—which looked, in fact, not unlike the kind of modern sculpture on which the Tate had recently been spending vast sums—perhaps Max might not have been dead, nor Kitty without a foot.

  At night, however, one could hear shooting. At least, Anthony thought it might be shooting. He had never heard shooting before. And the horizon had a faint red glow.

  There were a few English-speaking people in the hotel: they were foreign correspondents, waiting for something to happen. They greeted Anthony warmly, a welcome addition to their small circle. Clegg had warned Anthony not to talk to them much, but he had not said he could not drink with them and play poker with them. The journalists were bored: there was less action at the capital, a hundred miles farther east, but more diversion. They were full of unreliable-sounding gossip about the political state of the country. It did not seem worth listening too closely to their contradictory accounts, but he was glad of their company to pass the time, for he found, as Alison had found before him, that there was not much to do in Wallacia. The mixture of boredom and anxiety was not pleasant, and Anthony could not help worrying lest the papers that Kammell had given him, in exchange for those he had delivered, might be stolen from his hotel room. They could not be particularly secret, Anthony decided, for surely Clegg would not have trusted him with anything secret; and if he had done, he would have issued much more strict instructions about what to do with them while waiting for Jane’s release. But he did not want to lose them. Nor did he want to lose his passport, or his money, or his return ticket, or Jane’s return ticket, so he took to carrying rather a lot of papers around on his person, and thumbing nervously through them from time to time to check that nothing was missing.

  On the third day, he was summoned to the Department of the Ministry. It was a modern building, on the banks of the river: the town had been more or less flattened during the Second World War, and most of the buildings were new. Anthony had to wait an hour before being summoned into the presence of the Minister’s deputy, but when he reached the presence, the deputy, through a fair-haired girl interpreter, was very civil. He was a large, stocky man, with short hair and a red complexion; he looked not unlike a Slavonic version of Giles Peters, thought Anthony. He conveyed, through the interpreter, the Minister’s thanks to Anthony for coming to collect Jane, and the Minister’s regret that Jane had so unwisely endangered her own health. Anthony politely apologized on Jane’s behalf, and thought to himself that it would be hard to imagine any scene less reminiscent of the savage and brutal bureaucracy invoked by the Daily Express. The decor of the office was bright and bourgeois, of the midfifties, with shining clinical surfaces and orange and black geometric curtains. The deputy gave Anthony some papers relating to Jane’s release and asked if he would sign them. Anthony said he could hardly sign papers he could not understand, so could he have an English version, please; the interpreter was sent off to produce a translation, and the deputy minister offered Anthony a small glass of vodka while waiting. As they could no longer converse, without the fair-haired girl as intermediary, they sipped and smiled at one another, and tried out a few experimental words of each other’s language: Anthony managed, Please, Good morning, Good evening, and counted up to ten, and the deputy did rather better with various phrases such as, To be or not to be, or Down by the Riverside, and finally, triumphantly, if not wholly comprehensibly, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Stones and Beatles had clearly been passing through diplomatic bags, and international relations seemed momentarily simple. Though there was a moment of panic when the girl returned with the English documents, and Anthony realized that he had no means of knowing whether or not they were faithful renderings of the originals. They looked innocuous enough, but he felt obliged to explain that he felt he could sign only the English version. The deputy and the interpreter looked hurt, and said the English versions were not official, for see, they had no seals on them; and, sweating slightly, for he did not want to initiate any further delays, Anthony signed for he knew not what. It will all be over soon, he said to himself.

  They told him he could go and see Jane that afternoon, if he wished: she would be released, provided that the minister in Beravograd ratified the papers, the next day. “So you can arrange your flight home,” said the deputy. “Mrs. Murray will be pleased to have her daughter home.”

  Then they explained to him how to get to the prison, gave him yet more papers to present to obtain admission, shook his hand warmly, and dismissed him.

  He walked out into the bright sunlight. It was late morning. There was a strange air of expectancy in the dull little town: of stasis, of pause before movement. There were more people than usual on the streets, standing in knots, talking; for the first time Anthony looked at them, had time to look at them. Had the Reuters men looked at them at all? Some, perhaps. There were all ages, both sexes: hard-faced brown old peasants, fat women with baskets, students in t
he local approximation to jeans. They were standing and talking, with an air of interest, hope, lively concern, slight menace. The Wallacian people. Blond Slavic broad faces, nutcracker brown ones, and student faces such as one can see in any city in the world: only in middle and old age do the more extreme characteristics take their final form. What were they up to, what were they hoping for? I am an ignorant fool, thought Anthony; here is history, and I can’t understand a word anyone is saying, and my only aim is to get out of it as quickly as possible.

  The sun shone down on the square modern blocks, and on the odd little Oriental remnants of fluted and tiled roofs of little turrets and domes and dovecotes. The sun redeemed it into a moment of beauty, and the red stone hills glittered on the horizon. Anthony gazed: it was not for him. It was utterly foreign. In no way could he ever understand such a place, such a life. He walked back to the hotel: he would ring the consul, to report.

  But the line to the consulate was dead. The hotel operator apologized: he could not get through. He went down to the bar, to see if there were any journalists hanging around who could tell him what was going on. There was one Reuters man, who informed Anthony of the blowing up, by landmine, of a busload of thirty-five workers from the eastern province. Who was responsible? Nobody knew, but it meant trouble. All the other journalists were on their telephones, blocking the lines. Anthony decided to walk around to the consulate, as it was only a quarter of an hour’s walk away; he could not really believe that there was shooting in the streets. But the main road leading toward the consulate was cordoned off. Guards in blue uniform stood with guns. Beyond, he could see a crater in the road and a wrecked car. He turned back.

  The prison lay out in the other direction, luckily. He ate an abrasive sandwich in the bar with the Reuters man, then set off, again on foot. For some reason he did not wish to risk taking a taxi: he felt safer on foot, more independent. He fingered the papers in his pocket as he walked along. The road to the prison wound upward, out of the town center, through a shabby fringe district, of badly made roads, past high abattoir walls and haphazard factories. For the first time since his plane had landed, Anthony felt and smelled that he was abroad, noticed the vegetation, the twisted gnarled evergreen oaks, the dusty olives, the patches full of tomatoes, the little corners of vines. This had been a country of peasants, subdued peasants, now freed by the protective powers of Eastern Europe. The land had been distributed and redistributed, in many a conflict. Anthony remembered holidays in Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia. Nobody ever came for a holiday to Wallacia. But one could see that the town had once been attractive: the road rose, toward the outskirts, toward a strange red sandstone outcrop, and if one looked back downward, the roofs nestled together, in a harmony much broken by new square blocks. He could see the roof of a building that looked like a mosque. But religion was not permitted in this modern state. Perhaps the mosque was preserved as a museum? A museum, a memorial to the past credulity of mankind.