The Realms of Gold (12 page)

In the end, she began to wonder whether he
had
loved her. She was obliged to. Perhaps he had another woman by now? He was an attractive man, he had had plenty of offers. His students solicited him constantly.

She began to doubt his nature. In astonishment, she said to herself, he
deceived
me. This is how it must be, she said, for a woman when her husband suddenly tells her, out of the blue, that he's got another woman. And she can't believe it, because she had always trusted him, had never had any suspicions.

It was the one experience she had tried to avoid. Rejection. Betrayal. Surprise.

Doubting him, she grew ill, as I have said. As she lay in bed in the hospital, she looked at the worst things in herself, and did not like them much. She had behaved badly. She had left him frivolously, she saw that now. She had left because she was a woman used to having the initiative, and she must have been afraid of losing it. Had she been offended, over the years, by the fact that he had not even spoken of leaving Joy for her? Her pride, her self-esteem, the most trivial parts of herself, had been wounded, and in revenge for them, she had lost all. She had lost him because she had believed that if she relented, he would come back.

She did not like herself much for this.

But even more, she disliked the way that Karel now, finally, had accepted her departure. Oh yes, he'd made a fuss at the time, she'd been taken in by his wails of anguish at her desertion. She'd been vain enough, even at that point, to be taken in. But Karel hadn't even meant it. It hadn't been love or generosity in him, to make that kind of fuss, it was simply the way he expressed himself. Middle European. It didn't mean anything. It had simply been a conventional row from a man who had chosen to cast himself in a certain role. All right, she had behaved badly, pettily. But he should have seen through her pettiness and redeemed her. That was what he was there for. But instead, he had clearly vowed to take upon her the revenge that she had taken upon him. He would ignore her appeals, as she had his. And this was the man she had thought so good.

It wasn't his fault, maybe, that he was no better than herself. It was the situation's. But if he couldn't rise above it, she wasn't interested. She determined, half-heartedly, not to be interested. She would cast him off. A future without him stretched like the desert, dry and hot. She had always hated the heat, and wished often that she had specialized in some more Nordic branch of her field.

She would think of him no more, she told herself. Or if she thought of him, she would try to think the worst. (She did not succeed. She had too strong a sense of reality.)

 

In her illness she found herself turning rather weakly to her family. There was nowhere else to turn. She had no real friends, only colleagues and acquaintances, and she'd lost a lot of those during her years with Karel. Karel had been bad for her, she told herself. He had cut her off from her kind, had made her into a recluse. When she got better, she would have to apply herself seriously to the business of living in the world again. She hadn't really faced that problem yet, she'd always been expecting to get Karel back, since their parting she had lived in a kind of nothingness, a kind of limbo. She would have to come to terms with the future. She would have to make new connections.

Her family were quite kind to her. They visited her in hospital, sent her flowers, entertained her children in her absence, asked her to stay in their houses while she recuperated. Joy had been wrong about the country houses which she believed the Ollerenshaws to possess in such abundance; Frances's brother Hugh had a cottage in the country, but that wasn't quite the same thing. And her parents lived on a campus, which could hardly have been described as the country: her father was Vice-Chancellor of a fairly new University, and one of the perks or penalties of this post was that one had to live in the building designed for the job. Frances, who went to stay with them for the weekend after she emerged from hospital, thought that she wouldn't have liked it at all, but they didn't seem to mind. The campus was composed of plate glass and grassy lawns and duck ponds and covered alley ways, quite a change from the Oxford where she had been brought up. She suspected that they both liked its anonymity and the fact that they need take no personal responsibility for its shortcomings. Neither of them cared much for style: her father, brought up in the flat East Midlands, the only child of a nursery gardener, was quite exceptionally unaware of his surroundings, while her mother, who came from a notable family of Oxford intellectuals (mostly scientific ones) had always believed in functional living conditions. She had certainly got them now, thought Frances, slumped into a corner of the modern very comfortable undyed tweed settee, gazing out of the huge picture window at the vast artificially hummocky garden, trying to avoid her mother's eye, trying not to be drawn into discussion about the lump now removed from her breast. Her mother was a gynaecologist, and had the most extraordinary views on sex. One really had to try to keep off the subject, but it was more or less impossible, for Lady Ollerenshaw was an enthusiast, ardently caught up in population control and abortion law reform—she wanted more abortion not less. She spent much of her time now telling others from the lecture platform that they ought not to have more than two children per family. This was reasonable enough, Frances supposed, but her tone when delivering her views was particularly unfortunate—upper class, patronizing, shrill and dogmatic. Perhaps Joy had had the misfortune to hear her speak. At least, thought Frances, if nothing else, I'm a better speaker than my mother.

Frances had always suspected that her mother didn't care much for sex. (That would be one explanation for the domestic moodiness of her father: in public life, he was pleasant, amiable, a good chap, a reliable administrator, efficient and calm, but at home he tended towards the morose and abstracted. In fact, it was reported to Frances that he was forgetting to be pleasant in public, these days, as though he were brooding all the time over some important problem as he grew older.) Her mother had never disparaged sex: on the contrary, she had talked about it too much, too sensibly, too medically. How could anyone who talked like that ever have enjoyed the least sensible, the messiest and most amazing of mysteries? On the other hand, she was an attractive woman—she was still an attractive woman—and enjoyed the company of men. Although in theory a feminist, speaking frequently of the need to emancipate woman from the chores of domesticity and childrearing, she seemed not to like other women, and had few friends. She liked sexual attention, and demanded it from the men around her (in University circles, there were always plenty of men) in a way that was both coy and calculating: she manipulated the most unwilling and reluctant old dons and young undergraduates into attitudes of gallantry that Frances certainly found embarrassing, even if they didn't. There was no resisting her: she would not be ignored in a gathering, she had to be noticed, as a woman. And yet she hadn't got quite the style to manipulate gracefully: perhaps she lacked confidence, somewhere along the line, for her conquests always eyed her with a faint air of uneasiness, as though they knew something was demanded of them, knew they had to give, and were unsure whether they had given enough. She had the power to demand, without the charm to make tributes easy. She made people uncomfortable, she made them feel guilty, as though they were somehow at fault.

She had been very difficult to deal with, during Frances's adolescence and years at University. Frances had since discovered that it is more commonly a daughter's father who makes problems over his daughter's friends, but Frank Ollerenshaw had ignored her social life completely, never even bothering to inquire where she was going, with whom she had just been to stay. Her mother, on the contrary, took an excessive, a proprietorial interest. Young men, brought home for tea or dinner, would be interrogated, charmed, bullied, provoked. Many was the time that Frances found herself sulking silently and ungraciously in a corner of the sitting room, or weeping upstairs on her bed, while her mother talked to her boyfriend on the settee. Some of them succumbed easily: she was after all an intelligent, highly educated woman, from a family of famous names, with some interesting anecdotes to tell, and a good deal of social power in the University. Others resisted, hoping to please Frances. Frances found herself disliking both those who gave in and those who didn't. She couldn't bear her mother to get away with it, but she couldn't bear to know she was being criticized either. Thus, successfully, were many of her early attempts at friendship brought to an end. It was only fairly recently that she'd begun to wonder whether her mother might not have done it deliberately, through jealousy. But she didn't think that was it. It was more likely that her mother simply needed attention, whatever the source.

In the end, she had learned to keep her real friends away from her mother. She would feed to her mother harmless friends, meaningless people, as one might feed dead rabbits to a snake, twitching them a little every now and then by a string so that they simulated signs of life. She was careful not to introduce complete duds—her mother was no fool, after all, she would not be taken in by anything too mangy, too bedraggled. But there was always an intermediate category of friends, would-be suitors most of them (for Frances was not a particularly kind person herself), who would do for her mother—to this day, Lady Ollerenshaw would still inquire in a possessive and self-congratulatory way about Miles who became a doctor, Stephen who became an art historian, Malcolm who went off to Iowa, and that very nice boy Rickie who always brought her flowers. Miles, Stephen, Malcolm and Rickie had played their parts well, and graced the dinner table many times. Rickie had been truly charmed. Frances, perversely, had been grateful to him for that.

But her real friends, her formidable friends, she kept to herself. Until Anthony, her husband. And as she had to marry him, so she had to introduce him to her mother. Cold-blooded and dominating himself, Anthony had set out to charm her mother as she set out to charm him, and they had eyed one another with a mutually hypnotic stare, both of them conniving at what seemed to be a rather sordid agreement. Anthony allowed himself to be bullied into flattery: her mother allowed him to marry Frances, as long as he continued to flatter and pay court. The relationship seemed to give them both satisfaction, for which she, again perversely, gave them both black marks.

A friend of hers told her in bed late one night that he sometimes slept with his wife's mother, and didn't mind which he had, mother or daughter. Frances had been temporarily shocked by this near-incest, but had since decided that if Anthony had been capable of sleeping with her mother, or her mother capable of sleeping with Anthony, they would both of them have been rather happier and nicer people. Frigidity and gynaecology seemed to her a deadly combination, and possibly a common one.

Common or not, they had overshadowed her adolescence, and in an effort to escape them she had pursued sex with determination rather than pleasure, resolving that whatever she turned out like, at least she wouldn't be like her mother. Before Anthony, she slept with anyone she fancied, while taking home the men with whom she did not sleep. It had done her no good, she had ended up with Anthony, who could never forgive her for his inability to control her. One cannot escape one's destiny. And one day, in a moment of comic horror, it had occurred to her that in seeking to avoid her mother's ghost, she had in fact behaved exactly like her mother—she too had turned into a promiscuous and dominating flirt, the only difference being a technical one, in that she slept with the men instead of satisfying herself with verbal homage. But for Karel, she would have ended up like her mother.

She'd never been able to understand her father's attitude to her mother. As a child, she had taken his side, blaming her mother for his moodiness, imagining that she herself knew what went on in his head during the long domestic silences. He obviously didn't like the spectacle of her social behaviour any more than Frances did, and had been on occasions remarkably rude about her public crusades. Whatever their differences, they had stayed together, as couples of their generation tended so submissively to do. He sat now, silent, doing
The Times
crossword, in a corner of the large room. Impossible to know what he was thinking. Perhaps he had had a bad effect on her, as perhaps Karel had had on Joy. Perhaps she would have been all right, with another man.

Lady Ollerenshaw, sipping her sherry, had now moved from the subject of the lump in Frances's breast to the subject of the extreme productivity of her own children, which had naturally shocked her greatly. Frances's elder brother Hugh had produced three, Frances herself had produced four, partly at least, she supposed, through the same defiant impulse that had driven her into so many strange beds, partly through a deep dislike of the birth control of which she had heard so much too much, partly out of a need to compensate for her lack of affection for her husband, partly to prove she could, partly because she liked being pregnant and partly (no not partly, all, of course all), because she loved children, and would have wanted more and more, loving each one as it arrived. So much for the population problem. Still, four was excessive, yes, she knew it, it was extravagant and disgraceful, as her behaviour had always been. (Her mother had had three: listening to her now, Frances felt like remarking that her younger sister Alice, now dead and beyond reproduction, had doubtless killed herself to reduce the family average. She might have made the remark had she not feared that her mother would not mind it. She is a woman without real affections, said Frances to herself.)

To make matters worse, Hugh's eldest son Stephen had got himself married while still at University, and had produced a baby, which made Lady Ollerenshaw, the pioneer of planning, a great-grandmother at the modest age of sixty-two. She did not like it at all.