The Realms of Gold Read online

  It continued, rhythmically: it came from the end of the canal they were stuck in. They went to see what it was, curious, like children, and located its source: it was coming from a round erect drainage pipe, about four feet across, standing at an arbitrary cross roads. Shall we look down? said Frances, standing at a safe distance, her feet squelching. I think we must, said Karel.

  So they went up to the yellow pot pipe, and stared down it. And there they saw a most amazing sight. Hundreds and hundreds of frogs were sitting down that pipe, and they were all honking, all of them, not in unison but constantly, their little throats going, their mouths open, their eyes staring up with curiosity at Karel and Frances and their large human shadows. Honk, honk, koax, koax, they cried. They were all different shapes and sizes—the same species, probably, all a yellowy grey in colour, but madly, but crazily varied in size, as though some law of nature had gone wrong. Huge big ones, tiny little ones, fat ones, skinny ones, they all sat and honked. Down the pipe they sat, as happy as can be, croaking for joy. Karel and Frances stared, awestruck, amused: the sight was repulsive and at the same time profoundly comic, they loved the little frogs and the big ones. Oh, I love them, said Frances. They looked as though they had been bred from the clay, as in some medieval natural history. A natural product of the landscape, they were. And every time she thought of them, in later years, she felt such pleasure and amusement deep within her, a deep source of it, much deeper than that pipe.

  It had taken them some time to get the car out, she remembered, as she finished up her omelette and chewed a lettuce leaf. In fact, they had given up the attempt for a while, and had made their way finally down to the sea—a strange sea, derelict and morbid, not at all the same sea that filled the bay a few miles down the coast. There had been no beach to speak of, but a clay shore where the tideless Mediterranean dully curved its idle dirty little waves. Long reeds and rushes grew. But it had at least been secluded, so they lay down on the mud and made love, which was, after all, the purpose of their expedition. Frances kept her filthy sandals on, because she knew that although they felt quite nice, almost part of her foot at that moment, she would never be able to face putting them back on again once they had caked and dried. She could remember the sight of that dirty sandal, somewhere up behind Karel’s shoulder. She thought of Karel’s shoulder, forever lost, renounced forever.

  Then they had gone back to the car, and pulled it out. She, expert in dislodging jeeps and landrovers, had finally taken off her dress, and used it to give the wheels some grip: she’d arrived back at the hotel in a quite amazing condition.

  The next day, when Karel drove back to his wife, it crossed her mind that she would leave him. She was tired of being treated so badly—abandoned in inconvenient places, pushed into muddy ditches. She had had enough of it. Something in her finally rebelled—pride, conscience, something like that—and when she got back to England she found herself behaving, somewhat to her own surprise, quite oddly. She told Karel that they should part, and stuck to it. He didn’t believe her at first: he refused to let her go, suggesting ludicrous compromises (but not, she noted, marriage). She became equally persistent. They were ruining one another’s lives, she said, and off she went, firmly, after a fortnight of recrimination, to North Africa, on a perfectly legitimate piece of work. He could not pursue her there: she had always had the upper hand, as far as mobility went. She stayed there for a month, half-expecting each day to see him appear on a camel, sun struck, across the sands to rescue her, as he had threatened to do: but he didn’t. And when she got back to England, she didn’t see him, didn’t hear from him. She was rather surprised. They had left it that if she ever changed her mind, she had only to let him know, but she hadn’t exactly changed her mind. It was as though he had ceased to exist. She was not likely to come across him by accident. They did not move in the same circles. And now she had not seen him or heard of him for months.

  Going over this old ground, she poked through the pile of papers she had brought with her to chaperone her during her dinner. There was the card for the children, there were the lecture notes, there was the note she had written to Karel. She tore it up, and pushed the pieces into the folder. The folder was full of such scraps. Then, wavering, she lit upon another new postcard—well, it wasn’t exactly new, she’d picked it up a year or two ago on another lecture tour in Florence, round the Uffizi she’d been, and there she must have bought this rather attractive card. (Her folder was full of such things also—a sediment of past journeys, tickets, old cards, street plans, hotel bills, letters, addresses.) The card was a detail from a painting by Hugo van der Goes, of the adoration of the shepherds: it showed a bunch of straw, a glass with some canterbury bells, a painted pot with two red lilies, two white irises, and one blue iris. It was extraordinarily beautiful. She looked at it and her eyes filled with easy tears. Beautiful, beautiful. She turned it over, and she wrote

  Karel Schmidt Esq.

  11 Huntingdon Rd,

  London SW6

  She stared at that for some time, and then she filled in the message space. First of all she put the date. Carefully then she wrote: I miss you. Then, underneath that, she wrote, I love you.

  There didn’t seem to be much point in signing it. She had no intention of posting it, and anyway, he would know who she was.

  Silly, really, the things she had found herself doing since she fell in love with Karel. Love was certainly a madness as the poets said, and it made even quite adult people behave in a most peculiar way—hoarding, hoping, promising, sending messages. It was the last resort, the last deliverance, for those who could not aspire to the holy love of God. She was not well balanced enough for the holy love of God, she had not the spiritual capacity for it, though she had spiritual concepts from time to time. No, passion had been the only hope for her. It had worked in a way, but the circumstances had been so inconvenient. For instance, Karel’s wife hadn’t liked it at all. And she had so much to put up with from Karel anyway that Frances had sympathized with her unpleasantness.

  I love you, I miss you. It was true, she did miss him, but she’d missed him even while she was in theory with him, because of all the times when in practice she wasn’t. Incredible subterfuges she had been driven to—you tell me what programme you’ll be watching on the telly and I’ll watch it too, you give me a ring at nine exactly but I won’t answer, I’ll know it’s you, you think of me when you’re at college and I’ll think of you in the library. When he got some new false teeth (he had two on a bridge) she made him give her the old set. She carried them around for ages, then put them in a drawer by her bed with his letters. Later, when she had left him, she got them out again, and when she returned from Africa and started again upon social life, she had taken to putting the teeth down the front of her brassiere. She liked the feel of them, Karel’s teeth resting gently and delicately and wirily against her soft evening breast, they kept her company. She had one low-cut dress that she was rather fond of, a soft black one, soft black wool, and one night at a party she caught a man in the act of staring down her cleavage and meeting, entranced and horrified, the sight of Karel’s glaring teeth, the guardians of her virtue. She had taken a man back home with her from that party, an old colleague and friend, and as they got undressed for bed, she got out the teeth and put them on the bedside table, and John had stared at them in alarm, and she had told him what and whose they were, and they had lain in each other’s arms all night, quietly, watched over by those almost luminous dentures, gleaming pale like ivory, more vigilant than a nun’s candle. John had been good and solicitous to her after that, ringing her up sometimes, asking her out to dinner once in a while. He must have thought she was mad, and in need of care and attention. A little of Karel’s virtue had breathed its way through even so poor a relic.

  She and Karel had planned, once, to visit Pilsen, but they hadn’t made it. He had not been there since he was a small child. Most of his family had perished in concentration camps. He alone of his generation had e
scaped. Teeth and bones. Profanely she cherished his fragments.

  Suddenly she wanted the teeth very badly. She hadn’t had them out for ages. She didn’t even know where they were. It was just possible that she might have them with her, in one of the rarely opened zip pockets of her luggage: she had taken them to Turin, hadn’t she, on that last trip. Or had she? She couldn’t remember.

  Perhaps he has forgotten me, she thought, as she waved to the girl, to bring her her bill.

  She woke up in the morning in a most frightful panic. She had been dreaming—she dreamed every night, all night, exhaustingly—that she was standing in a bathroom, with blue tiled walls and chrome fittings, and that every detail was as clear to her as if she were really there, though she had never been there and knew it was a dream. This is impossible, she was saying to herself, as she stood there in her dream gazing at every tiny detail of the unexistent wall’s surface, at every thread of the dark blue towel, at every little silver screw in the frame of the mirror. Impossible, impossible, I could never create so powerfully in such detail, she said to herself, quite consciously panic stricken even in her dream. And then she woke up. It was pitch black, and her heart was pounding high up in her bosom—too much black coffee, as people on the Continent always say. Also, her tooth was aching shockingly. Help, help, please God it is morning, she said to herself, and switched on her bedside light and looked at her watch.

  It was. It was seven o’clock.

  Thank God for that, she said, and got out of bed, and went over to the window, nervously exploring the hole in her tooth as she walked. The curtains were so thick they let in no light. She opened them, and there was the autumn sunshine, there was the harbour, there were the boats and their forests of masts, and there was all the dazzling bay, with the islands far out, strung along the horizon. Her thudding heart lifted. Lovely, said her waking heart.

  While she was having breakfast, she had a good idea for her lecture—nothing much, just an interesting new connection about Phoenician trade which would interest, from what Galletti had said, this particular lay and local audience. She got out her notes again, scribbled a few more, crossed out one quotation and decided to use another. The breakfast was delicious—nice doughy rolls, thank God, instead of those hard crusty things one sometimes got, and the coffee was hot. I must get my tooth fixed, she thought (plugging up the cavity with dough, swallowing down a couple of codeine) as soon as I get back to England. I must get my tooth fixed, she thought, and have a bath.

  The water was hot, and there was a bath as well as a shower. She didn’t like showers. She liked to lie in a hot bath. And like lying in a hot bath it was, two hours later, to hear Professor Andersson introduce her to her audience. She sat there, neatly, happily, listening to the long list of her achievements: she let them flow over her, reassuring, relaxing, comforting, like water full of compliments. I did all that, she thought to herself, as she heard the catalogue of her accomplishments: I, me, I stole all that from nature and got it for myself. I am a vain, self-satisfied woman, she said to herself, with satisfaction.

  Professor Andersson was an amiable fellow: tall, stooping, urbane, Scandinavian, and chivalrous in a thoroughly acceptable way, like most Scandinavians. (She didn’t trust Galletti: in her pre-Karel days, when she found it almost impossible to stop herself sleeping with people whenever she was away from home, she’d have been in trouble with Galletti.) But Andersson was delightful. He was even rather handsome, thought Frances idly, watching his beaky profile and his cold grey Nordic eye. She liked people with big noses, having one herself. What about making a pass at Andersson. Would he respond? He was in a promising age group for response. She looked down, modestly, to avoid her own improper speculations, and the image of a less tidy Professor in her splendid hotel bed, and noticed that she should have cleaned her shoes, perhaps. But nobody would look at her shoes, they’d be behind the lectern. How filthy she had been that day with Karel in the mud. She had got into the shower fully clothed, sandals and all, and it had run off her in great streaks and lumps, clogging up the drainage: she’d had to pick lumps of mud out and mush them up with a hairpin before they would go down.

  She shouldn’t really think about Karel. It was unsuitable, memories of him threw her sometimes, they would flash across her mind in the middle of dinner parties and press conferences. His thinning yellow hair, his hollow creaky chest, his pedantic speaking, his mouth open in sleep, his long in-turning feet, his bony hands, his nose so sharp in the early morning, so handsome in the evening. His mouth against her, sucking strength into her. An interesting physical exchange. Was there a term for it in physics, maybe, a formal term, or in biology? The replacement of one energy by the removal of another? Sometimes she thought, thinking of Karel, that he had filled her and given to her and charged her for years, so that she could run on for years without him, but still full of him. Opaque with goodness he had been, though he looked as brittle as glass, as transparent as a classifiable neurotic. Like thick old glass he was, like the sky or the sea, opaque, indestructible. She had thought to see through him with her quickness and clever knowingness. I mustn’t think about all this, thought Frances Wingate, I must stop it, there’ll be more coming if I don’t watch it. Oh, how awful it is to be able to think of several things at once, thought Frances Wingate insincerely, as she listened to her own praises and decided to fix her attention upon the decor.

  A large and ancient room it was, a dignified spot, though unlike most English halls of the same distinction it was peeling a bit, and the dark red Attic borders on the high ceiling could do with a bit of touching up. Funny how careless they are about some things abroad, and how fussy about others. A much-travelled woman, she never ceased to marvel. False marbling filled the false and unnecessary arches in the walls. The chairs were gilt, and the floor was polished wood. On the chairs sat a curiously mixed audience, of students, dignitaries, Anglophiles, exiles, even one or two academics. There sat, though she did not know it, her distant cousin David Ollerenshaw, geologist. David Ollerenshaw did not know that he was her cousin, nor did he know much about her. He had come to her lecture largely through boredom, having nothing better to do. Though he had always been interested in archaeology, fossils, and that kind of thing. He had come across several archaeologists on his travels, and had been interested in their pursuits.

  Professor Andersson was drawing his eloquent introduction to a close. He had recounted her early academic career, dwelling lovingly on her thesis, Carthage and the Saharan Hinterland, on her later seminal paper on Carthage and the Garamantes, and moving on to her later travels in Chad, Adra and the Sudan. Finally, he described the well-known story of her discovery of Tizouk, which had established her theory of Punic-Meroitic contacts, as well as introducing some interesting new speculations about trade routes from the south. ‘Inspired,’ said Professor Andersson, ‘by a fine mixture of faith and scholarly expectation, Dr Wingate had the perseverance to communicate to others the belief that she had located and could usefully excavate her Saharan highland emporium—a missing link in so many scholars’ speculations. And, with an exceptional perseverance, she was able to overcome all the practical and financial obstacles that lay between her and the city of her imagination . . . ’ (Yes, thought Frances, Andersson would do. But he wouldn’t be very cheerful about it. Too serious. Galletti looked a more cheerful prospect.) ‘As we all know,’ said the Professor, ‘in 1968 she discovered . . . ’ (and he proceeded, politely, to recap what they all ought to have known but undoubtedly didn’t; Frances, who was realistic if not modest about her own achievements and their notoriety, was always grateful for such summaries. There was nothing more embarrassing of embarrassed than an audience who did not know what it was there for, or who its speaker was. Why such people went to lectures remained a mystery, but as they did, it was sensible of people like Andersson to take them into account.)

  Professor Andersson concluded. ‘It is a great personal pleasure,’ he said, ‘for me to be able to introduce to you D
r Frances Wingate, whose work I have followed with the greatest enthusiasm, and who has proved to be as interesting as a person as she is’ (here he fumbled slightly for words, ‘as she is as a . . . as . . . ’ (triumphantly but not wholly happily)) ‘as an archaeologist.’ And he sat down, leaving her the floor. He won’t do, thought Frances. Too unhappy, too worn, too guilty. Too deep lines from the nose to the mouth, too elaborate a manner. She warmed pointlessly to his courtesy. She wished she’d had dinner with him and his wife the night before.

  Frances Wingate cleared her throat, rose neatly to her feet, and lectured. She felt on form. Something in what Andersson had said had lifted her—she wasn’t quite sure what, but it had been there. Perhaps it had been that phrase, the city of the imagination. An ordinary phrase, but so precisely what Tizouk had been. She gave more or less her usual lay lecture—a description of her early interest in the Carthaginians, her studies in Tunis and the Sahara, her visit to Meroe, her visit to Nigeria, filled out for this local audience by a few polite references to the trade between this famous seaport and ancient Carthage: then she moved on to Tizouk itself. People often told her that she must get tired of talking about Tizouk, which always annoyed her, because the truth was that she never got tired of it, she always enjoyed it, it was just that they got tired of hearing about it and assumed in their incorrect sophisticated way that she must be as bored as they. Not so, not so: she loved Tizouk. She could no more get tired of it than she could tire of living. If she relinquished Tizouk, she would relinquish all things. It never bored her. But at times it frightened her, and now, talking as evocatively as she could about her discovery and excavation of it, she remembered with awesome clarity the emotions of triumph and terror that had accompanied that discovery. Those, she could not relate.