The Realms of Gold Read online

  She had elected Karel. She stood there in the steep and cruel mountains, hitting herself, moaning slightly. The jagged edges soared above her. She looked up and felt faint. Sometimes she had thought she would like to live her life under an anaesthetic. She wasn’t up to it; she would fail, yet again. The mountains were, in fact, too high, the desert was, in fact, too hot, the stones were, in fact, too dry. Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable. Why prove that it had ever once been green? And yet, here, on these steep slopes, people lived, played cards, drank beer in the small hours, perched on a gradient too perilous to contemplate, in the path of avalanches. The octopus lived on in its perspex box. The effort of comprehension was beyond her, she felt like despairing; love and understanding were beyond her. In the middle of nowhere, high up, a solitary lunatic, in her dry crater. The world was drying out, and everything she touched would die. Manic. Down on her gleamed the ancient and romantic moon, through the clear sky. It lit the snow. Frantically she hit the other cheekbone, to distribute the pain. Inside the buffet, people ate sausages and talked in an unknown tongue. She did not even know which species was her own.

  When she reached Paris, she was too ill to lecture. She was whisked off to a dental hospital, and had her tooth extracted. There was no abscess, but the tooth was fanged and green. She kept it as a souvenir.

  The next morning, she was put on the aeroplane home. Her gum where the tooth had been was soft and bloody, and she probed it constantly, anxiously, with a surprised relief. Her jaw ached, but pleasantly.

  When she got home, she gave the children their presents, and listened to their stories, and kissed them, and was pulled around by them: they were an excitable, assertive, healthy, resolute, daring bunch, her children, constantly milling and seething with an excess of energy, conditioned by herself, perhaps, into an irregular way of life, all stops and starts, departures and homecomings, presents and dramas and disasters. It was not a peaceful home, and after half an hour of Daisy, Josh, Spike and Pru she felt quite shattered and whole again at the same time, and had to shut them up (they got very loud, with any encouragement at all) by showing them her extracted tooth. They admired it as it lay wicked in its gauze wrapping, and then her daughter Daisy embalmed it for her, in her Plasticraft Kit. It was a kit for making plastic jewelry—one could embed in it small shells, seaweed, beads, pebbles. Frances’s tooth gleamed from a clear white bed, against a blue ground, preserved forever, a smooth oval. Frances put it in the drawer of her bedside table, along with the false ones Karel had given her. Then she began to wait for Karel.

  The postcard she had sent the children arrived a couple of days after her: the post was slow, but not so slow. She calculated when Karel would receive his. She waited for him to write or ring.

  He neither wrote nor rang. There was silence from Karel.

  For a fortnight or two, she hoped. Then she began to abandon hope. After a month, she despaired, and fell ill.

  First of all she caught flu. Though she was never ill, had never had flu in her life. Then she had to have another tooth out. Then, just after Whitsun, she developed a lump on her breast, and had to go into hospital to have it off: she had to sign a paper saying they could take the breast off if they wanted. They didn’t: the lump had proved benign. But she was depressed: unreasonably depressed.

  Writing Karel off as missing, was a process she had never thought to undergo. It was slower and more painful than she had thought possible. Lying feverish in bed at home, lying awake in hospital listening to the heavy breathing of women in pain, she tried to reconcile herself to this loss. She could not really believe that he would not return. He was a kind man: he had shown perplexing kindness to people much less pleasant than herself. His desertion obliged her to reconsider the whole affair.

  He had always sworn loyalty, and she had believed him. Only now, nearly a year later, could she measure by the depth of her shock how much she had trusted and believed him. She had thought that at the slightest hint from her, he would return. She had always been so lucky, and now her luck had run out.

  Of course, she’d never quite trusted her luck. She’d rarely put it to the test, in case it failed her. She’d taken no chances; her guesses had been certainties. She applied for jobs she could not fail to get, she avoided too keen competition, she gave herself a wide margin, she covered her bets. She left Karel before he had a chance of leaving her. And yet, even so, he had managed, posthumously as it were, to reject her. And she had trusted him. He hadn’t seemed a gamble; he had seemed, for various reasons, a certainty.

  She had known Karel Schmidt for years and had had good cause to trust him. She had trusted him surely as much as any wife who is not an entire fool can trust any husband—possibly even more so, for not being married, their relationship had had a whole extra scaffold of uncertainty and inconvenience and shortage of time to prevent the usual cracks of boredom and familiarity from creeping into the structure. Their relationship, she had thought, had been perfect. He had been perfect.

  It was, in reality (she had to count the years) only seven years that she had known him. It seemed much longer. She often looked back on their first meeting. It had taken place at a propitious time in her life, just as she was on the verge of her major excavations on the Chad-Libyan border. She’d already done her preliminary survey, and had got enough grants and backing for a larger expedition. She was full of certainty: she knew the stuff was there, all she had to do was to go and find it. And, almost on the eve of her departure, she’d gone to give a lecture to Karel’s students at the South Eastern Polytechnic. She was going to talk about her discoveries on the last trip, her hopes of the next. She was pleased with herself, cheerful, expectant.

  Karel met her at the station, took her to the Poly, gave her a cup of tea, and told her about the students. The students everywhere were in their angriest phase, for it was a troubled time in the Universities and Polytechnics: but they were quite eager to listen to Frances, because after all one of her themes was the fashionable one that black culture had been consistently neglected and underestimated by scholars, who preferred the Greeks and the Romans, and who couldn’t believe that any good thing could come out of Africa. Do they expect me to sing a hymn of negritude, she had asked Karel, over that first of many thousand cups of tea, and he had sighed heavily, and said that after all the students weren’t really very well informed, and it didn’t matter much what she said. A few anti-rationalist, anti-Western culture remarks would no doubt go down well, he said. If that’s the way they look at it, I won’t make any, she said primly, and Karel smiled at her, a peculiar exhausted intimate smile, as of one who acknowledged her reluctance.

  She thought, looking at him in these first minutes: a familiar type. She had been met by so many strange men on strange stations, she had drunk so many cups of tea with so many heads of departments, headmasters, students. Karel she classified as an ageing beauty: he had long fair stringy ringlet thinning hair, a long stringy moustache, a huge beak of a nose, a tired and oddly foreign look, the look of one much battered by overwork and a refusal to admit the advance of the years. She guessed he had domestic problems, or amorous problems: all men of his age in his kind of job had that kind of problem. She guessed, rightly, that he was in his mid-thirties, if not already in his late thirties. He must once have been good looking, she thought to herself; as so many of them had once been. A certain gallantry still lingered, in the prow of the nose, the shabbiness of the clothes. After a certain age, men get tidier or shabbier: Karel had chosen the latter course. Again, like so many. (She herself on this occasion was wearing a rather strange purple dress, which she had put on that morning by mistake, having found a large hole in the seam of the skirt she had meant to wear: she’d intended to change all day, but hadn’t got round to it. What will it matter what I look like, in the South Western Poly, she had thought. Who cares?)

  The lecture went as well as could be expected: she talked about trade routes and showed them some slides of Carthage, declaimed
some Herodotus in Greek, and handed round a piece of mid-first-millennia pottery. I’m going to find more of that stuff, and better, she told them. She kept off politics, and when asked by a rather astute grinning student with corkscrew ringlets about the attitudes of the Nigerian and Libyan governments, she managed to restrain herself from telling her favourite horror story about the episode on the Libyan frontier, and told them instead about delightful, rationalist, responsible, scholarly, Quaker, black Mr Manowe, who had been in charge of the first dig she had visited in Africa: an expert on Nok terracottas, he had been deeply comforting. Manowe believed in her trade routes, he believed in the history of Africa, he was a friend of Leakey, his views were impeccable: she recited them, and the students didn’t seem to notice that they had been diverted, if not exactly deceived. Except, perhaps, for the corkscrew ringlets, who continued to grin. (He had modelled his hair style on what Karel’s might once have been, she decided.)

  Afterwards, Karel said she had done it very nicely, and thanked her, and took her up to his room for a drink: He was a historian; he said apologetically that he didn’t know much about her period, but he had enjoyed her talk, and admired her tact. She asked him about student revolt, and he sighed again, and said it was tiring.

  She liked him, more than most of his kind. He was without vanity, she thought, and he looked tired, and did not conceal the fact that he was tired. Gently he rolled himself a cigarette, with yellow fingers. His hair was thinning, his nose was sharp, and his eyes were a hard blue, an unnaturally deep blue. He did not look at her directly. His shirt was dirty, his room was untidy, deep in papers and books and periodicals and old cups of tea. It was a poky little room, with a window that looked onto a brick wall. While she was there, the phone went five times, and two students knocked on the door: he dealt with all these interruptions at excessive length, keeping her sitting there, drinking gin and water. (There had been no tonic in the cupboard, not much to his surprise.) A weak man, she had said to herself. Nice, but weak.

  After a while, she said that she had to be going, and he said he’d drive her to the station. Outside the station, he said where was she going ultimately, and she said home, to Putney.

  I’ll take you, he said, I’m going that way myself.

  It was half past nine. He drove her across South London, and told her that he lived in Fulham, so it wasn’t really out of his way.

  She could see that it wasn’t, much, but nevertheless thought he was the nice harmless kind of person who would quite like to do another person a kindness even if it inconvenienced himself. As they got within a mile or two of home, she began to worry about whether or not she ought to ask him in, when they got there: what a bore it would be, she was thinking to herself, if I asked him in and he stayed for hours and hours, being dull and boring. She was quite tired and wanted an early night. She was trying to think of ways of handling him, which made her rather silent, and inattentive, as they neared her house. As they turned the corner of her street, he said, ‘I’ll have to get straight off, I’m afraid,’ as though to forestall any polite invitation, when they both at once saw the ambulance standing outside her front door.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Frances, and scrambled for the door, and jumped out before he had had much time to park. He must have dumped the car and run after her, because he was there when she reached the open door of her house. There were two men standing in the drive, and her housekeeper Polly.

  Reassurance began to pour from them as soon as they saw her. ‘It’s nothing,’ said Polly, nearly in tears. And it was nothing: the baby had shoved a bead down its ear, Polly had panicked, been unable to get a taxi, had dialled an ambulance, couldn’t leave the other children, and was being told off by the ambulance men for being an alarmist and a waster of public funds. The bead had been extracted, but the baby was wailing in its not very big sister’s arms.

  Frances felt her knees shaking, as the ambulance men explained what had happened: when they saw how frightened she looked, they stopped being angry and became quite civil. Karel was hanging about, nervously and aimlessly, clearly not sure how or whether to participate. The ambulance went away, and Frances went in with the baby, and tried to pacify the other three bigger children, who were all standing about in their pyjamas and nightdresses, waiting for more action. Polly’s baby was howling too, from its cot upstairs, so Frances sent Polly off to deal with it, and when she had gathered herself together, Karel was still there, standing in the wide hallway, leaning on a bookcase, and she looked at him, in the shadowy hall, and caught on his face such an expression of concern, such profoundly harassed embarrassed anxious protective participation, that she fell in love with him at once.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, meeting her eyes. ‘I haven’t been very useful. I didn’t know what to do.’

  She stared at him. As an ageing beauty, she had classed him. She must have been mad. She had never seen anyone so beautiful. As a type, she had typed him, whereas the truth was that she had never seen anything like him in her life before.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ she said. ‘Please, I need a drink.’ She was far more terrified now that he would refuse, than she had earlier been anxious that he might accept such an offer. ‘Please,’ she said, as he hesitated, ‘I know it’s late and you look tired. But please.’

  He followed her into her large sitting room, full of plants and archaeological objects in and out of glass cases and maps and cats and parrots and children, and he poured her a drink because she was still holding the baby, and they sat down, and drank, and after a few minutes she chased the other children off to bed, having listened to seven different versions of where Baby had got the bead from, why Polly had panicked (no more unmarried-mother housekeepers, said Frances to herself), what the ambulance man had said, what the doctor in the Outpatients had said. Her eldest, Daisy, had accompanied Baby to hospital, and was proud of her initiative. ‘He said Baby might have been deafened if we hadn’t taken her in at once,’ said this child with satisfaction. ‘And he gave me some Smarties too,’ she added, with equal satisfaction.

  When they had gone, Frances looked at Karel again. He still looked the same: astonishing, that she had missed it for so long.

  ‘Cheer up,’ she said, ‘it’s all right now, it’s all over.’

  ‘It gave me such a fright,’ he said. ‘One’s worst nightmare, the ambulance at the door.’

  ‘You must have children of your own,’ she said, dumping the baby in the corner of the settee, refilling her glass. ‘How many have you got?’

  ‘Three,’ he said.

  And they talked of the children, and the time he had got home to find one covered in burns from a birthday cake candle, the time another of his had fallen from a first floor window, the time she had lost one on a hovercraft and had been convinced it was overboard, and had made them stop the boat, only to find the child in question (a girl) locked in the First Class Gents.

  She drank a lot, from nervousness and relief. He drank a lot too, she noticed, for reasons as yet unknown to her. After a while the baby fell asleep, but she didn’t have the strength to move it. Lectures and ambulances take it out of one, she said.

  He wandered round and looked at her objects. She was proud of her room; she hoped he liked it. He was tall and bony and slightly stooping. Whatever was she to do about him? It wouldn’t be fair to do anything about him. If she seduced him, he would be tortured, and he looked tortured enough already. One couldn’t seduce, in cold blood, a man who was so fond of his children.

  He hadn’t mentioned his wife. A signal, of some sort? Frances found herself thinking that his wife must be a feckless woman, to let her children fall out of windows so often. (Thereby finding an attitude of censure from the outset which was to make life a great deal simpler than it might otherwise have been.)

  They looked at some of her photographs of the excavations at Carthage, and talked about child sacrifice, and whether perhaps the children had been already dead when sacrificed. They talked about primitive be
liefs, about fertility and magic and barbarism and cruelty and progress and angry students. Trendy though he looked, in some ways, his views were of a deep-hued universal pessimism: a hopeless rationalist, he called himself. She was desperate not to let him go: she wanted to go on watching him. But just after midnight, he said he’d better be getting home. She managed to keep him for another half hour, doing her best to retain him (though already she could see that it would be better not to let him drink too much, she didn’t want him to kill himself, perhaps sensing already that Karel’s survival was essential for her own). She wondered whether to embark on the subject of marriage, her own lack of marriage, but thought better of it: it was too powerful a card to play. She was a woman used to getting her own way, but she did not want to cheat, particularly at the outset. They talked, instead, of the origins of agriculture.

  In the end, he left. She had to let him go; he was determined to go. She did not say that she would like to see him again: pride, honour, a desire not to cheat, restrained her. Instead, they shook hands, at the door, and parted. She went to bed, with the baby. She had been asleep for half an hour when he rang. They talked, for another hour. They agreed to meet, for lunch the next day.

  They met the next day, and the next, and the next. They met every day, in the three weeks before she went off to Africa, though she was busy with preparations for her journey, and he was working full time. But they made time. While she was in Africa, they corresponded, in so far as the postal service and the remoteness of her position admitted. In his letters, he said that he loved her. She replied, saying that she loved him, and suggesting that he should fly out to see her to check up on it. He said he was too busy and couldn’t afford it. I’ll wait till you come back, he said. It will keep till then.