The Realms of Gold (13 page)

‘It makes me look
ridiculous
,' she said, leaning back in her chair, brushing back her blue white hair from her unwrinkled brow.

‘I don't suppose it was you they were thinking of when they did it,' said Frances, knowing that even so obvious a truth could not fail to disturb her mother's picture of how things ought to be. Luckily, she was not listening. ‘It's too disgraceful,' she continued, moaning slightly, for the fiftieth time, and for the fiftieth time a large duck flew into the plate glass window and dropped, stunned and ornamental, upon the Basil Spence greensward.

‘I wish to God they wouldn't do that,' said her father, and looked down again at the crossword. They were waiting for dinner, they were to dine in Hall. They had asked Frances if she would mind, and she had said she wouldn't mind, she felt (reproachfully) quite well enough, of course. Oh, you poor thing, how awful, I'd quite
forgotten
you were ill, you look so
well
, cried her mother—I don't mind at all, insisted Frances—oh well, if you really don't
mind
, Dr Billing would so like to meet you. Ha ha, thought Frances nastily, forced to admit I'm worth showing off, even with a severed breast, she thought, but the truth was she quite liked dining in Hall, it was a change after all, she didn't do that kind of thing often these days.

‘I mean to say,' pursued her mother, relentlessly, ‘do I
look
like a great-grandmother?'

Frances regarded her with amusement and affection. She certainly didn't, one had to admit. She looked younger than her years, despite the fact that she tended to dress in a rather old-world manner, preferring well-cut suits and cashmere twinsets to the more casual shirts and skirts and long dresses that most of the other women on the campus now wore, and despite the fact that her luxurious white hair was rinsed blue, and carefully waved, and despite the fact that she wore very large diamond and sapphire earrings in her ears, and red lipstick on her lips. Frances had never understood her mother's attitude to clothes. Well off, well brought up, she had always groomed herself with a slightly excessive care, rather like a member of the royal family, while other stylish dons and dons' wives, equally well born, tended to despise make-up as vulgar, and earrings as a waste of time. Some interesting social distinctions lurked in the upper middle classes. Frances had never come to terms with them. Herself, she was of mixed blood. But it was certainly true that Lady Ollerenshaw looked as though she could not possibly be a great-grandmother. Her face was unlined, her back straight, her skin clear, her hands with their large emerald fine and white and smooth and dimpled, mysteriously more youthful, in fact, than Frances's own large veined freckled buckled hands. She had an almost unused look, as though there was something in her that was still waiting. Her legs were like a girl's, straight shinned, neat ankled, well shod. What was she waiting for, at the age of sixty-three? So clean, so well groomed, so neat, so womanly? How dare she sit there, so unsatisfied? Perhaps she had been waiting in a trance for all the forty-one years of her marriage. Would it ever come to her now? Watching her, Frances struggled with onslaughts of fear, of pity and of love. Her mother, disappointed in eternity, forever protected from knowing she would be so by the quicker wits of others. Frances sought for the only tone in which she could speak to her—a tone positive, jocular, teasing, bracing. (A patronizing tone?) She was frightened by her mother, but more frightened for her. She was too vulnerable. One shouldn't be like that, at her age, thought Frances.

‘No,' she said, ‘you don't look at all like a great-grandmother. But then, do you think I look like a great-aunt? Think what a shock it was for me, suddenly finding myself a great-aunt. At my age.'

‘In my day,' said her father, suddenly, exceptionally conversational, ‘great-aunts were about ninety. Weren't they, Stella? Do you remember Great-Aunt Dorrie?'

‘Something has happened to the nation,' said Frances. ‘People get married so young these days. It must be your fault, Mother. You set the trend.'

‘Don't be silly,' said her mother. ‘Seriously, Frances, I am surprised at Hugh. Letting that boy get married. He's only nineteen.'

‘The girl was pregnant,' said Frances.

‘Yes, I know, that's what I'm
complaining
about. Haven't they ever heard of contraception? Haven't they ever heard of abortion?'

‘It wasn't Hugh's fault,' said Frances. ‘I don't suppose he much likes being a grandfather, either.'

‘Of course it was his fault. The man's an alcoholic.'

‘That's another matter,' said Frances, thinking of her brother, who had escaped his mother and his heritage at some cost to his liver. It doubtless caused Stella pain, to find her golden boy a drunken grandfather. Hugh had been so literally a golden boy, more golden than even Frances had ever been, flaxen-curled, beautiful, smiling, ingratiating. And then, as occasionally happens with blond children, the sun had gone in and darkness had overtaken him; his hair had turned not brown, but pitch black, his skin had darkened to gipsy changeling darkness, and as a youth he had grown thick hair like a bear culling all over his brown chest. He had to shave twice a day if he wanted to look respectable. It was a freak transformation, inexplicable in terms of immediate heredity. One night, after a heavy drinking session, Frances and Hugh and Hugh's wife Natasha had constructed the theory that Hugh had produced this transformation by sheer will, in order to escape the seductive powers of his mother, who had certainly been slightly unnerved by her son's increasingly masculine and swarthy appearance. Having constructed the theory in a moment of idle fancy, all of them had been struck with its solemn truth, and had been unable to forget it.

Lady Ollerenshaw decided to drop the subject of her son's condition.

‘Anyway, darling,' she went on, ‘you should know what happened, if anyone does. You're on good terms with Stephen, aren't you? I thought you were the person he talks to? Have you seen him, lately?'

‘He came to see me in hospital,' said Frances, not quite wanting to deliver him up: he was so delicate, Stephen, so insubstantial, she would have to talk about him in a deceitful jolly family tone, if she talked about him at all, in order not to hurt him. She would protect him from their curiosity, for it was true that he confided in her. He had attached himself to her, while he was still a schoolboy, and she had taken him in, at first as a duty (remembering Karel's amazing patience with tedious young and old dependents, modelling herself as so often on Karel's virtues), and then through affection. He wasn't much trouble to her, once she had got over the surprise of finding him a young man rather than a child. He was good practice, she told him, she could learn through him to adjust to the eventual ageing of her own children. He would arrive unannounced on her doorstep in Putney, with his thin white face and his clouds of frizzy dark hair, he would sit at her kitchen table while she chopped vegetables, he would tell her his anxieties, some of which seemed to her (her hands reeking with onions, her chopping block ornamented with slices of liver) curiously metaphysical. She would smile and soothe and listen. She went to hear him sing, once, in his school choir—he had a fine voice, a tenor, they were singing the Matthew Passion, and tears of nostalgia had flowed down her cheeks as she heard the tall long-haired boys singing the familiar tragic music, and Stephen there in the back row in his vague dark halo, remote and useless, beautiful and gone. Give. Oh give me back my lord. He loved music, but he wouldn't work, he was lazy, sometimes she would reproach him for this, as perhaps he wanted her to do. He lived in a cloud of grass, the full dry wrinkled sheaves of his hair symbolizing too aptly the clouds in which he drifted, with the white star of his anxious face like an indestructible centre of human knowledge, undrifting, unchanging, fixed, intent, unappeased—and he would return for more reproaches. He admired her, he said so. ‘Aunt Frances,' he would say, earnestly, mockingly, with devotion, ‘where do you get it all from?'

‘All what?' she would say.

‘The energy, the movement,' he would say, as she briskly sliced a tomato or two.

‘It's a phenomenon of our generation. Your father's got it too.'

‘My father's an alcoholic. It's all artificial,' said Stephen.

‘Nonsense,' Frances would say, proving how dynamic she was by the manner in which she mixed the salad dressing.

‘How can you possibly imagine,' he would say, again, returning to the same theme, ‘that the things you do are worth doing?'

‘I don't know,' she would say, helplessly, attacked, not knowing. ‘I like them, that's all.'

‘You mean you enjoy them.'

‘Yes, yes, I enjoy them.'

And he would gaze at her in wonder, as though she belonged to another species, as though she were an angel floating in the upper reaches of meaningless heavenly activity, as though she were a bird or a fish.

‘Aren't you bored?' he would say.

‘No,' she would say, truthfully. ‘Though I
was
bored, often, at your age.'

‘Why, why, tell me why?' he would ask, and she would speculate, trying to tell him, and he would listen, genuinely eager. He was never impertinent, he was the soul of tact. He was a delightful child, she had great hopes of him. She could understand why he distrusted Hugh, why he confided in her rather than in his remarkable mother. (His mother was fully occupied trying to amuse Hugh, an impossible task at which she seemed to have been, over the years, remarkably successful.) So she had been anxious, conventionally anxious, she had to admit, like a mother or a grandmother, when he arrived on her doorstep in Putney one day with his prospective bride, and had asked her to intercede with his father to allow them to get married.

The bride was a shabby, neurotic little creature, as skinny as a rabbit, with bitten nails and stringy hair, hair the very opposite of Stephen's fine abundance. (Though Stephen, too, was skinny. One could see that they had a similarity.) She hardly spoke. She was called Beata, though Frances doubted the name's authenticity, and her voice, when one was lucky enough to hear it, had a horrible nasal whine. She wore limp old clothes, in the fashion of the day, and painted her nails green. Frances, like a jealous mother, found herself deeply resenting the fact that such a miserable creature had found the life-force to buy nail varnish, and had wasted it on nail varnish. The human race, looking at her, appeared threatened with extinction.

Then Stephen had told her that Beata was pregnant.

‘Do you
want
the baby?' said Frances, to both of them, wondering if she were being employed as devil's advocate, and resenting the role, indeed thinking that she would not forgive Stephen if such was his conception of her quasi-maternal relationship. But they had insisted that they both wanted the baby, that it had to be born. They talked about it as though it already existed, which she found disquieting—but no more logically disquieting, she had to remind herself, than her mother's less imaginative attitude.

So she had encouraged them, and had talked to Hugh at length on the telephone, and Stephen and Beata had married. She did not go to the wedding. The baby was born at the end of Stephen's second year at University. It was a girl. She was only faintly surprised, if at all, to learn that Beata was the daughter of an oil millionaire, that she expected to inherit a fortune, and that she was suffering from anorexia nervosa. She managed to eat enough to survive during pregnancy, spoon fed by Stephen (this she did see, in her own home, before her own eyes: she saw Stephen, talking of the baby's survival, spoon leek soup down her retching bony throat): but after the baby was born, she relapsed, and was taken into hospital, where she lay inert for weeks. For all Frances knew she was still there. And Stephen had refused to allow his daughter to be taken from him. He had turned quite savage and rejected all suggestions that she should be removed, though he would soon be in his final year and was working hard. He had, independently, devised a rota of girl friends and tutors wives' au pair girls to cope when he was absolutely obliged to be elsewhere, and the rest of the time he carried the baby on his hip in a canvas bag. Hugh thought he had gone mad: Beata lay uncaring: Lady Ollerenshaw did not seem to think that it might be partly the fault of her own policies. Frances thought he was mad, but was also moved. He had shown perseverance, at last. He had simply been waiting for some occasion worthy of his effort. He was even working better, now. There wasn't so much to worry about.

Though he had upset her slightly, when he had called to see her in hospital. He had brought the baby, of course: she sat on his hip and smiled, and waved her squashy fingers. But he had talked oddly, sadly. He had said that the conditions of survival were so dreadful that it was undignified to survive. This is what Beata feels, he had said: that living is a crime. What do you mean, Frances said, look at your lovely baby, she is innocent, she smiles, innocent of any crime. Yes, he had said, but keeping a baby alive is such a labour, such a labour, can God have intended survival? Not knowing whether he seriously believed in God or not, she did not know how to answer, though she knew she was on thin ground. Perhaps, her rational self had said to herself, he is simply worn out, with trying to deal with the baby and the work and the ill wife, and she had offered to look after the baby for a few days when well enough herself: he declined the offer, as she had expected he would. But anyway, she knew that there was more at stake than simple fatigue. He had asked her about her own illness in a strange, probing, intent way: he had looked at the other women in the ward with an air of assessment. He talked at some length about the Jews (his mother was Jewish) and why they had submitted to their own fate, and what he felt about Israel and its struggling for survival, and its racism, and its militarism. ‘I used to despise the Jews,' he said at one point, ‘for their cowardice. Whoever, looking at the Jews, could call Christianity a slave religion? But now I like them even less.'