The Realms of Gold (16 page)

Alice was dead now, and Hugh a grandfather.

There had been other pleasures. The very ditches, which seemed so unnatural and threatening elsewhere, were a source of delight when close enough to the safety of the cottage. There was one at the end of the potato field (new potatoes clinging like little white marbles to their delicate network of hairy roots, even Gran, normally lazy and cross, would sometimes take the trouble to wash them and scrape them, boil them and butter them and exclaim on their flavour)—it was a deep one, steep sided, and utterly private. Frances remembered the sides of it as being ten feet tall, a dangerous descent, but she had herself been small at the time. She would slip off there alone, when bored with helping, or when Gran shouted at her once too often: Clear off, bugger off, Gran would yell every now and then at her gently nurtured grandchildren, an instruction which both shocked and thrilled them. And Hugh would disappear with a book, Alice would wheedle around till she was in favour, and Frances would make for the ditch.

It was full of creatures. Its flora varied from section to section: some bits were choked with duck weed, bright green and thick and scummy, others were clear, with forget-me-nots, and pale yellow comfrey, and even bits of watercress. Canadian pond weed grew in the water: purple spikes and poppies and ragwort and teazles grew on the banks. In the spring there were celandines and cowslips. It was untouched, undisturbed, and the water, over the yellow mud, was clear and cold. Frances often drank from it, and found it delicious. The animals that lived in the ditch were as varied as the flora, though more evenly distributed: there were water boatmen, large beetles, tadpoles, frogs, minnows, stickleback, grubs, caddis larvae, water rats, newts, a whole unnecessary and teeming world of creation. Frances, a speculative child, would lie there on her stomach with her face against the frontier of the water and peer for hours and hours, wondering what God had bothered to make it all for, and pondering on the origin of species; coming near at times to an apprehension of a real answer: God had done it all for fun, for joy, for excitement in creation, for variety, for delight. Why seek to justify? There it all was. One year there was a plague of frogs, there were millions of them everywhere, something had gone wrong with nature's regulations, they got into the fields and all over the back yard and into the house, and Gran nearly went mad beating them to death with the broom, poor little hopping tadpoles. Gran hated nature, and no wonder, she had to keep it at bay, or it would be in under the doors and through the cracks in the bricks, oozing like flood water, irresistible, spoiling her little dry haven.

Frances liked the newts best. They were elusive, and therefore something of a sign of favour. One day she had gone down there, in tears over some trivial row with Hugh, and had found several of the small ancient special creatures, floating on the surface, their little arms outstretched, taking the sun. Breathless, quiet, she sat there and watched them. They were surely a sign to her, a blessing. They floated there, green grey, pink bellied, frill backed, survivors from a world of pre-history, born before the Romans arrived, before the bits of bronze-age pot sank in the swamp, remembering in their tiny bones the great bones of the stenosaurus, a symbol of God's undying contract with the earth. They floated with an intense pleasure: she felt it herself, in the warm sun. And then, suddenly, silently, with one accord, they sank, swimming downwards with their small graceful limbs, leaving bubbles to rise behind them from the depths. She had been left on the bank. But did not forget them.

She had always wanted to see an eel. There were eels, she knew, but she never saw one. It was her one failure.

In the end, things had changed: inevitably, she supposed. It wasn't exactly an angel with a flaming sword that had expelled her: nor was it, as she had at one Freudian stage assumed, simply the sins of sex, though she had in fact reached puberty at Eel Cottage one hot summer, to her terror and alarm, miles from sanitary belts and sanitary towels, nearly a year earlier than most of her contemporaries, and unable to confide in crosspatch Gran, who, she was sure, had never heard of such a thing. In the end, weeping bitterly, appalled by the rust coloured guilty stain, she had told Hugh, and he, noble boy that he was, had borrowed Grandad's bike and cycled into Tockley for her and bought the things. She had always loved Hugh for that, and had also been forced to recognize that she couldn't have been all that neurotic about sex if she had managed to confide in him about such a matter. He had often thanked her for the opportunity to prove himself a hero: always rather dashing in his own sexual exploits, he had been delighted by this early chance to show his courage. (He had been fifteen at the time: she, twelve.) In fact, one of the amusing aspects of life at the Eel had been the fact that she and Hugh had been allowed, indeed compelled, to share a bedroom, and there late at night they would discuss such subjects as atom bombs, homosexuality, procreation, contraception, masturbation and love, while Alice slept or pretended to sleep: Hugh would quote to Frances Shakespeare's sonnets (there really was rather a dearth of reading matter at the cottage, and by the age of fifteen Hugh had been through it all several times, though he always refused to import much, for to him the Eel reading matter was as special as, for Frances, were the Eel newts)—and they would discuss Shakespeare, and whether he was or wasn't a homosexual. Hugh took the line that he was clearly bisexual: Frances tended, even at that early age, to defend her sex by claiming that the sonnets to the young man (W.H., or H.W., or whoever he was) were clearly not written from the heart, whereas those to the dark lady were hot with unwilling passion. She could get quite cross about it at times.

So it can't have been wholly the fact of sexual development that spoiled her stays at the cottage. Perhaps it was somehow connected with growing large, for the rooms began to seem cramped and pokey, instead of deep and comfortable: she too, a tall girl, would occasionally hit her head going through a door. Or maybe her grandmother's temper really had deteriorated. Her grandfather fell ill, two years before he died, and became slower and slower and quieter and quieter, delegating most of his work to two lads from the next village who came in to help him: one of them was simple, and would stand for hours leaning on a spade gazing vacantly and dribbling, and the other could not really manage on his own, though he tried. The garden went to seed: first one patch was left, then another. Nobody bothered to dig up the new potatoes or to plant carrots. Even the fruit trees seemed to be growing old, for each year they produced fewer plums, fewer pears, fewer apples, and what they did produce was left to the wasps and the birds. Grandfather kept the flowers going, and the tomatoes, because they were his favourites, and they were nearer to the house, but bit by bit the garden frayed round its outer edges: the ditches grew over, the fields were overgrown, the spinach leapt into trees then withered into yellow decay. Nobody talked about what would happen when Grandfather died: at home, once, Frances heard her father say that they were all right, his parents, they'd got quite a bit put away, but it seemed depressing to her, just the same. The one good thing about those last years was that, towards the end, Gran let her husband have a dog. She had always hated dogs, and swore she would never have one in the house: she was a cat lover herself, and sometimes filled the house with as many as eight cats. Then, suddenly, eighteen months before the end, she got rid of the cats. Just like that. Her favourite cat, the matriarch, died, and she sent the boy off with the others to shoot them or drown them. Frances never dared to ask which he had done, for she had liked the cats, and was horrified by this brutal act of treachery. And then she let her husband have a dog.

It was a little yellow puppy: Frances saw it when it was very small. Her grandfather would hobble along, immensely fat by now, leaning on his stick, and the silly little dog would trail after him: every now and then he would gently garner it with his stick, when it strayed away. He talked to it with pride. In the evenings, it sat on his knee, and it would lap hot tea out of his saucer. Gran watched all this sourly, and said nothing. Frances, of an age now to be sentimental, was deeply moved by the thought that this man had all his life wanted a dog—when she was little, he had told her about the dogs of his childhood—and had had to wait like this, till the end. The big man and the little pup made her want to cry, but no tears came. She had wept over the dead cats.

When her grandfather died, visits to the cottage became a duty rather than a pleasure. Her grandmother refused to move, and lived on there alone. Frances, deep in school life, emotional entanglements, the classics, adolescence, nearly died of boredom while she was there. Her grandmother had developed so great a grudge against life that
there
was nothing left to discuss with her. The world was made up of villains and liars, the shopkeepers were out to ruin her, the income tax plagued her, the post office persecuted her, her own son neglected her, the radio and the television annoyed her. She lived out of tins, and on sliced bread from the travelling baker: she never ate a vegetable or a leaf of salad. Sometimes Frances would slip out furtively into the fields and dig, but all she found were huge old potatoes full of worms and eyes, or carrots like wood. Gran refused to do anything about the place: refused to sell up, refused to have it taken over. Here I live and here I die, she would say morosely, when propositioned. She kept the tomatoes going, after a fashion, though panes of glass would fall in and lie unreplaced for months. To her horror, Frances now found herself hating to serve passing customers: she felt it was beneath her dignity to sell tomatoes, she blushed deeply when inoffensive passers-by asked if she was the little girl they'd seen years ago, when they asked her where her grandad was, when they looked with surprise round the derelict gardens. She had grown used, at home, to seeing herself as a customer, not as a supplier: the charm of playing shop had faded, to be replaced by a deadly threat. One of the most humiliating memories of this period was a day when a car drew up: a middle-aged couple got out, with their two teenage children, all smiles and friendliness, he in shorts, she in a flowery dress, the children shy and hanging back. They were on their way home from holiday on the coast, could they have some tomatoes and some vegetables, and what was there in the way of fruit? Embarrassed, Frances weighed out tomatoes, and explained that there was nothing else. The pleasant red-faced man looked round (Dutch, he looked, like many people in this region) and said oh dear, what a pity, what had happened. Where's your Grandad, he said, I knew him well, I always stop for a chat.

‘He's dead,' said Frances, knowing she should have put it more politely.

‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,' said the man. ‘And what about your Gran, then? She still here?'

‘Yes,' said Frances.

‘You've come to look after her then?' he said, and Frances nodded, and then, realizing that he might mean permanently, forever, shook her head violently, thinking with longing of Horace and Ovid, of Sappho and Sophocles, of lipstick and cinemas, of pavements and Marks and Spencer's.

‘Is your Gran there?' said the man. ‘I'd better have a word.'

Frances didn't know how to say that he'd better not have a word, and she stood there immobile, unable to prevent him from striding over to the door and banging on it and swinging it open.

‘You there, Mrs Ollerenshaw?' he yelled, making the cottage and all its bits and pieces jangle.

Gran emerged, sullenly, from the back regions, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘What's that then?' she said. ‘What's all this noise, then?'

‘It's me, Mrs Ollerenshaw. You'll remember me, I used to call by every year, we missed last year . . . '

‘Don't remember yer,' she said, and turned away.

He called after her, offering sympathy, but she had gone into the kitchen: she stood there muttering and cursing, for all the world, thought Frances, like an old witch.

The man had been as upset as Frances.

‘She's taken it bad,' he said, and to her horror he pressed into her hand a ten bob note. She tried desperately to thrust it back, but failed. ‘You buy yourself something pretty, cheer yourself up,' he said. And off he went, red from shame and from the East Coast sun, ashamed of his kindness.

Frances nearly tore the note up, but in the end she kept it and bought herself some nylon stockings.

In those later days, the poor yellow dog led a dog's life. Gran kept it and hated it. It wasn't pretty any more, it was just an ordinary dog. It didn't go out into the fields to escape, as it could have done: it hung around the kitchen, tripping Gran up and waiting to be kicked. When Frances visited, she would try to take it for walks, but it was hard to shift. It preferred to stick around at home, in the memory of its glorious infancy. She didn't suppose it could really remember. She hoped it couldn't. She hoped it liked being kicked. It seemed to, after all.

 

The cottage, of course, might have been pulled down, thought Frances, as the train drew in to Tockley station. I might have come all this way for nothing. She couldn't even remember who had bought it: it and the land had been sold up separately, she thought.

There was the gas works, the river, the church spire, the factory chimneys. Her heart beat rather noisily, and her stomach churned.

The hotel was just across the yard from the station entrance; square, yellow brick, three star, Victorian, reassuring. She carried her bag and her typewriter over, registered herself, went up to her twin-bedded room, sat on the bed. It was lunch time. She would have some lunch, then, in the afternoon she would brace herself to go for a walk.

Lunch was something called Eggs Joinville, which turned out to be half a hard boiled egg in pink sauce with three shrimps on it, then salmon mayonnaise (quite nice, fresh salmon at least) and then a piece of Stilton so old and green and salty and crystalline that it was quite a pleasure in itself, though hardly a Stilton-type pleasure. It was dark green and brown, a rich bruised ripe dead colour. They were quite near Stilton, here, they could surely have found her a better piece. The dining room was hushed like a church, and only one other couple was lunching: an elderly couple who did not speak. Frances read her notes on her own footnotes to her own book on Trans-Saharan Trade, Edition Two: she was supposed to be bringing them up to date. After lunch, feeling rather tired, she went back to her bedroom and took her shoes off and fell asleep. When she woke up, it was half past three. She sat up quickly, put her shoes back on, and set off.