The Realms of Gold (20 page)

Janet was nearly home. She wondered if anything nice could possibly have happened there while she was out. What could she imagine that might cheer her up? This was a game she had played since adolescence—on the way back from school, she would try to imagine something, anything, that would make life seem better, and at times would admit to herself that she would have welcomed a cataclysm, a volcano, a fire, an outbreak of war, anything to break the unremitting nothingness of her existence. What would she feel like now, if she got back and found that the whole new estate they lived in had been burned to the ground? She had to admit that she would have felt nothing but delight to see the black ruins and the smouldering ash. It was even possible. A gas main might have leaked and blown up, that old bore Mr Blaney next door might at last have fallen asleep over his pipe and newspaper and set the place on fire. If such a thing happened, at least something would have happened, and she and Hugh would have been safely out of it, and free—but free for what? She could not imagine. But perhaps for something. If the shell were burned, she dimly sensed, she might work her way into a new life. AJone, she was not strong enough to do it. It would take a cataclysm to release her, and a cataclysm, even via the gas main, was not likely to come her way.

She had been of late more and more drawn towards disasters. She hadn't quite taken stock of this yet, hadn't quite even noticed it, but the fact was that her heart quickened with excitement when she read of factories going up in flames, of explosions in Northern Ireland and central London, of floods in Italy and car crashes on motorways. She longed to see an aeroplane drop burning from the sky. She had even started to read books about holocausts. She had always been an idle reader, picking things up in the library, able to involve herself easily in the adventures of Nurse Brown or the life of Anne Boleyn or the voyage of the Kon-Tiki. But recently, since the child was born, she had found herself reading of horrors. She did not know why. She started mildly, with
A Town Like Alice
, and other such war stories, then moved on to heavier stuff—the literature of the concentration camps, war memoirs, even Solzhenitsyn. She could not have said what drew her to it. Was it fear or pleasure? She did not know. As she walked home, picturing Aragon Place in ruins, she thought of the book the was reading at the moment—a heart-rending account, it was, a fictional account, of a mother in Poland, a Jewish woman, who had been taken off to the concentration camps on a train, and who had thrown her baby out of the train window as the train moved through a flat field. She had thrown the baby into the arms of a Polish peasant woman, who was hoeing the turnip field, and as the train moved on inexorably to extinction, the Polish woman and the Jewish woman had exchanged looks of profound significance, and the Polish woman had picked up the baby and had embraced and kissed it with a promise of devotion as the train moved out of sight. That was as far as Janet had got with the story: there were at least five-sixths of the book still to come, including no doubt a description of the mother's death, in the labour camp or the gas chambers.

What was it that attracted her to these subjects? The death and the destruction? Or the baby salvaged and harvested like a turnip from the field?

Janet Bird, who was after all a post-war baby, knew quite well that the Poles were not distinguished for their love of the Jews, and that she was reading a romantic fiction. She took it seriously, nevertheless.

(Karel Schmidt, who had been born in Pilsen, took such fantasies seriously too, for other reasons.)

She looked at her small baby, who was dribbling miserably on to the stained front of his tiny anorak. She would never have to throw him for his salvation from a train window as she went on to her death, or at least she imagined that she would not have to.
But perhaps, with her, a doom as dreadful he was inheriting. Not the gas chamber, not the labour camp, but some lengthy disaster. Perhaps it was for this reason that her soul yearned for the holocaust. Perhaps, now, she should fling him from her, for his own sake. I won't do, as a mother, she thought sadly. The sight of his wet jacket filled her with despair. She could not endure it, she could not endure it. But she had to endure it. There was no way of getting off this train.

(Stephen Ollerenshaw, on this theme, was to have other views, alas.)

The estate, of course, had not been burned down. It was not even smoking slightly. It looked perfectly normal, established forever, in the late October air. There it stood, so conveniently near the centre of town, only a twenty-minute pram-push from the centre of town. It was supposed to be a good address, a cut above the council and factory housing that lay further out on the long ribbon roads that wandered in their desultory manner through the surrounding countryside. Its inhabitants were nice people, as Janet's mother was fond of pointing out: even Janet was not above reflecting that her neighbours were at least, most of them, ‘nice'. There was a school teacher or two, a journalist on the local paper, a retired military man, and a few executives from local firms, as well as a wealthy bookie and a greengrocer. Nevertheless, Janet thought to herself frequently, if this is a good address, what can a bad one be like? Her parents' home (they had lived on top of their little shop, in an outlying village, in increasing comfort as the village and trade expanded) had been a hundred times more pleasant, more homely.

The estate had been built in the late fifties, and had the characteristics of the period. The little houses—maisonettes, they were described as, but Mark and his friends thought the word silly, and laughed when her mother used it—were two storey, with an entrance hall, a kitchen, and a large lounge with windows back and front downstairs, and three small bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. They were semi-detached, though the detachment was extremely narrow, and consisted of a small alleyway along which one could wheel a bicycle, so one's neighbours were rather close.

Janet hated her home. She hated more or less everything about it—the colour of the brick, the colour of the linoleum tiles, the colour of the bathroom fittings, the shape of the banisters. She hated her own efforts to make it look pleasanter, to give it individuality (as she had put it to herself) and she approached it now with a sinking in her spirits as she saw yet again the gleaming windowpane, framed by its orange curtains, and within the glow of the red sofa, and the red painted piano. Once, Janet had cared about such things. She had even been quite good at them: she had had ‘taste', as her mother called it. She had opinions about shapes and colours, and as a child she had been good at making things: she hadn't received much encouragement at school, where the art mistress, a tearful woman, never got past the stage of teaching them perspective, but she had watched the handicrafts programmes on television, and had worked with glue and paper and paint, carefully, fastidiously. Everyone recognized that Janet had quite a flair for that kind of thing. It wasn't a gift that ran in the family at all. As she grew older, unaided, she began to make collages of felt and paper and pebbles and leaves. Her own designs.

While she was working at the Town Hall in Leicester, she'd summoned up the courage to go to an evening class. The instructor didn't seem to like her. He told her that her work was tight and neat and pernickety, and that she'd never get anywhere that way; she must learn to be free and express herself. He had yelled this at her several times, staring contemptuously at her small tidy creations, and she had tried, for a few weeks, to do as he advised: she had got her hands and her overall dirty, she had got paint under her nails. But she had made nothing, and the process had sickened her: she couldn't stand the smell of oils, and the texture of clay disturbed her. Thinking it was her own fault, she withdrew from the class. The instructor was sorry: she had been the most promising of an unpromising year. But she was uptight and repressed, he said to himself. He never thought to reproach himself for her absence.

She had more or less given up trying, these days. Anyway, there wasn't much time, with Hugh. There sat Hugh, in his plastic chair, staring at her, and fretting while she warmed up his soup. He was sad and hungry. She gave him a rusk to chew on while he waited. His blue anorak, dirtily streaked with spittle, she hung up in the airing cupboard by the boiler to dry, and noted with something approaching anguish that the front of his jersey was matted and damp as well. The texture of the wool, sodden with dribbling, horrified her. She knew what it would be like when it dried out—it would be stiff and prickly and woolly, all the stitches somehow sogged into one another. He waved his octopus hands, his anemone hands. His gums were raw, his eyes were wide with passion. He looked at her and moaned. She could do nothing, nothing. It's no use looking at
me
, she said, desperately, aloud. I will look up unto the hill. From whence cometh my help? From whence but from me, poor poor thing, thought poor Janet, and kissed the baby passionately on its red and angry cheek, its taut and cracked and red and flaming cheek.

(A goodenoughmother.)

The baby had bone broth for its meal. She had some Weetabix, a bit of cheese, some leftover salad from the night before, a rotting banana, and one raw mushroom, stolen from the evening's mushroom soup. It must be admitted that despite the prevailing melancholy, she enjoyed this meal, and felt a little cheered by it (the human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom) and even when she realized that her son Hugh had no intention of having his afternoon sleep, unless she slept with him, she managed to face the prospect of a communal nap. On the other hand, she did rather want to read the paper, which she hadn't had time to look at earlier in the day, and wasn't quite sure if she'd be able to persuade him to sleep through the crackling of the pages.

She managed it, in the end; she laid him by her side on the double bed, crooked in her arm, and joggled him, having previously spread the paper ready on the other side. When he turned up the whites of his eyes to the white ceiling and dozed, she turned over to the newspaper, quietly and breathlessly, and read the front page. It was concerned with incipient strikes and a royal wedding. It took some courage to turn the page and look within, as Hugh could be very cross if aroused prematurely—in fact he was one of those tiresome babies who always sink into sleep with a deep reluctance, forcibly lulled, and wake with howls of cheated rage, and Janet herself could not but sympathize with his attitude—he was surely right to suspect that oblivion was a danger, and that enemies would knife him in the back if he ever lost his guard. She recognized all too well his awakening wails—they expressed resentment against the tricks of nature and convention, which would cheat one out of existence, if they could. Poisoned while sleeping, like Hamlet's father. Oh yes. Sleep, marriage, adultery: all, all knives in the back. Stay awake, baby. The inner pages of the paper contained news about Northern Ireland (which she skipped) about the dangers of the pill (which she read with interest) and about a baby that had been battered to death by its father, because it cried while Match of the Day was on. If she had been reading a paper with more news in it, she might have read in a very small, dull item that her cousin David Ollerenshaw, and her second cousin Frances Wingate were among the members about to attend an international conference in Adra. She would not have known where Adra was—somewhere in Africa, she would have rightly guessed—nor would she have known who Frances Wingate was, although they had passed one another on Tockley High Street that summer: but the name of David Ollerenshaw would certainly have caught her attention, for he was not some infinitely remote relative, but her own first cousin, the son of her father's brother, and she had actually met him quite often in her childhood, and heard a lot about him until her father and his father had quarrelled about Great-Aunt Dorrie's furniture. She had looked up to him: he had been the clever one, as had his father before him.

But she didn't read all this, because her husband didn't take
The Times
. So we can skip her supposed reflections on David's success and her own failure in life: we can skip her childhood memories of family parties, of the eventual family feud, and of her mother's oft-voiced suspicions that David's parents had pushed him too hard, he would break down if they weren't careful.

Instead, Janet, dozing, breathing heavily and chestily through the thin bones of her pigeon chest, through the small covering of her dry breasts, thought of the battered babies and fell asleep, rolling up the whites of her eyes to the ceiling like her son: a family trick.

 

Frances Wingate, reading of the same battering in the same paper at more or less the same hour, as she sat over a cup of coffee at home in Putney, was rather surprised to feel tears rising in her eyes. She'd thought she was past that kind of thing. Not that it seemed very meaningful. She moved on to the article about the pill. At least she didn't have to worry about thrombosis now. There was something to be said for celibacy.

 

David Ollerenshaw, while his cousins were indulging in the female pastimes of cups of coffee and afternoon naps, was making elaborate preparations for his visit to Adra. His preparations were of necessity elaborate, as he had decided to drive there, through Europe, and across the Sahara. He was looking forward to the journey: he liked driving, and he particularly liked driving alone across difficult terrain.

At the moment, he was sitting in his rarely occupied rooms, filling in an insurance form which he had to send off to the secretary of the conference. The secretary had not approved of David's plans: he thought David would arrive late for the conference, and would much have preferred him to arrive on an aeroplane like everybody else. But David had persisted. In the old French colonial days, one hadn't been allowed to drive alone across the Sahara: one had to go in convoy, which quite spoiled the whole point of the enterprise. Nowadays, one could get lost as one pleased. A great improvement. David had just been reading a review of a book by a man who had tried to cross the desert on a camel, and who had had a quite horrible time: he had been seeking Loneliness and Suffering, for personal domestic reasons, the reviewer suggested. David had no personal domestic reasons: nobody lived in his rooms but himself. Nor did he intend to suffer as spectacularly as Geoffrey Moorhouse. A little, mild suffering was all he wanted—that moment of intense expectation, when the map has clearly been misleading, when the wheels stick in the sand, when the engine fails, when the water is low. But even more than the disasters, he liked the complete isolation. Don't you get bored, or lonely? people would ask him, as he set out on similar expeditions, and he could truly answer: No. To be completely free of all human contact was in itself a pleasure. People were all right: intermittently he enjoyed company. But solitude had its own quality.