The Realms of Gold (24 page)

Another thing that she failed to understand was their interest in local amenities. None of them ever used them, if they could possibly avoid it—they never went to the local swimming baths or the local cinema or the local amateur dramatic group, they never went to watch the football team or took their children to the park. But they fought tooth and nail to protect them from others. The gravel pit was a case in point. It had been used by children for generations as an unofficial playground, and now somebody was trying to buy it and keep the children out. Janet couldn't understand why Mark and Cynthia and Bill and Anthea and Ted were so committed to the issue. She was the only one of all of them who had been brought up in the district, who had played as a child in the gravel pit, and she certainly wouldn't have been prepared to go to great lengths to defend it. As far as she could remember, it was rather a nasty place, full of shit and litter even in her childhood, and doubtless much worse now: it was also dangerous, and several children had drowned there in her own memory. It was perhaps a pity that the children weren't going to be allowed to play there, but she could think of plenty of much nicer places, and it really wasn't as far as she could see anything to do with these five, discussing the matter now with such vigour, with so many scornful implications about the self-interest of certain parties, with such violent condemnation of local personalities who were more or less unknown to her, and she suspected not very intimately known to them. What did they know of Sir Harry Lonsdale? Nothing at all. It wasn't that she had much to say for him herself, she'd only ever once set eyes on him, and the Ollerenshaws had been no loyal supporters of the landed gentry, but she couldn't help but feel uneasy about the way he was being condemned out of hand. It wasn't as though Mark and the Davids and the Streets had any feeling at all for the local children. In fact, they hated them, and when they weren't talking about the gravel pit they would as likely as not be talking about what a dump Tockley was, and how backward, and how stupid its inhabitants, and how they wished they were in London.

Anthea was wearing a kaftan, a green and blue one with a large paisley print. She had some large blue transparent plastic jewellery on, the expensive sort of plastic, and she waved her arms around to show off the rings and bracelets. She did look rather handsome, one couldn't deny, and the way Cynthia's husband was gazing at her would have boded ill, had they all been five years older and five years more dissatisfied. Cynthia was wearing a long black skirt with a gold lurex top. What a funny business it was, dressing up in one's best clothes to go out to one another's houses to stare at one another's husbands. Mark wasn't behaving too badly, Janet was glad to note. His most annoying speciality was to become extremely pedantic about demolishing other people's arguments, and as they were all on the same side about the gravel pit, they hadn't yet given him an opportunity. But he would doubtless find one. Just as he could always find an opportunity for upsetting her, as he now did, when she tried to move them towards the table: rising to his feet, he looked at her and smiled in that ominous way, and said, ‘Are you going upstairs to throttle that baby, or shall I?'

‘He's a bit quieter now,' said Janet. ‘I think he'll go to sleep.' But she was raging inside, with a black fury. How could he use words like throttle, about her own baby?

‘
How
you expect us to conduct a civilized conversation, with so much competition from the uninvited guest, I cannot imagine,' he said, in that way which was meant to be a joke, but which made nobody smile. It was in that tone, in her childless years, that he had referred to her in company constantly as ‘my barren wife'. What did he want, what did he want, she screamed inside herself, and went out into the kitchen to pass the soup through the hatch.

When she got back again, they were talking about the power crisis, and the appalling way the Tory government was handling the matter. It never seemed to occur to them that a Labour government might have found some problems too. Surely she could remember power crises when Wilson was in charge? She kept quiet. It was quite the vogue, these days, for women to do most of the talking: Women's Lib, they called it, and the men, who were keen to be fashionable, didn't like to put a stop to it. There was something rather comic in the spectacle of the poor men being obliged to connive at their own destruction, out of loyalty to an idea. It served them right, thought Janet, as she listened to Cynthia airing some very outspoken opinions about Phase Three: she could somehow tell, although she had no idea of the facts herself, that Cynthia had got her facts wrong, and that the others suspected it, but hadn't got the facts right enough themselves to contradict her. She could tell it partly, perhaps, from the uneasy look on Ted's face, and the way he caught her eye almost apologetically, and the way he said with a diffident smile when Cynthia paused for breath, ‘It's awfully nice soup, Janet, delicious.' She found herself smiling back, gratefully, and thinking automatically, as though a button had been pushed—really, he's quite nice, Ted Street: and then thinking again, looking at him almost for the first time, at his neat straight brown hair and pleasant, capable face—thinking again, with genuine feeling, not push-button feeling, he
is
nice, after all. And she smiled at him again, and tried to think of something to say to him—no reason why they should
all
talk about the fuel crisis—and saw that he was trying to think of something to say to her, and he got there first, because he came out with, ‘And have you found yourself any new interests, then?', and then blushed slightly, as though it were an impertinent question, and followed it up with—‘Cynthia tells me you're thinking of going to an evening class, but you won't go to silk screen printing with her, she says.'

‘I haven't quite decided yet,' said Janet, scraping the last drop of soup, grey beige from her white bone china plate. ‘I've left it too late to enrol for the popular things, anyway.'

‘What are the popular things?'

‘Oh, Yoga's always full at the beginning of term, and the Cordon Bleu cookery class, and the Local History class too.'

‘You don't
need
a cookery class,' said Ted Street.

‘Thank you,' she said, and smiled quite warmly, in what she felt was quite an adult fashion.

He asked her why the Local History class was so popular, and she explained that it was because a local hero was taking them, a handsome man in his sixties, the curator of the Museum, a whitehaired gallant, admired by ladies old and young. ‘But not by you?' suggested Ted Street.

‘Oh no, I do admire him' said Janet. ‘I used to like it when he came to speak to us at school.'

‘So why don't you go to his class? Do you like to be different?'

‘Oh no, not really. Not at all, in fact.'

‘And you won't go to the silk screen printing, with Cynthia?'

‘I don't think so. I've gone off that kind of thing.'

‘So what will you do?'

Ted Street stared at her, in his unusually amiable new mood. She wished she could think of something interesting to say, something unexpected. ‘I must get the next course,' she said, and began to reach for the soup plates.

The others talked of radioactivity and nuclear reactors.

‘Perhaps you really don't want to go to an evening class at all,' said Ted.

‘No,' she said, considering the point seriously. ‘No, perhaps you're right.'

And she left the room with the soup plates, and came back with the chicken and rice and peaches, and found that they had stopped talking heavily about fuel and had begun to talk about it lightly instead, joking about previous power cuts, saying that they were grateful that at least Janet had managed to get their delicious dinner cooked (they were all wanning up a little with the wine), and that if all the lights went off now it wouldn't be too bad. Mark told quite a funny story about what somebody had said to him at the factory today about what would happen to the specimens if the electricity got switched off, and they discussed why it was that the telephone went on working when the electricity wasn't on, and Mark asked Janet where the candles were just in case (he asked this in quite a friendly fashion, but Janet could see he was going to punish her at some point for having enjoyed talking to his friend Ted), and they ate their chicken, and their salad, and their orange dessert, and just as Janet was going out to put the kettle on for coffee all the lights went out.

They all laughed, of course, and lit matches, and expressed thanks that dinner was over, and said that they could do without coffee. The house was all electric. It will get cold soon, said Janet anxiously. Oh, then we'll all have to snuggle up to one another, said Bill David, and laughed in an unpleasant manner that made her stiffen and shiver in the dark. She would rather they talked about the gravel pit, than that they got like
that
. But it was going to be hard to stop them, now the lights were out. And Mark would hate it and resent it as much as she would. Well, it was all his fault, he shouldn't have such friends. She borrowed a cigarette lighter from Cynthia, and went off into the kitchen to look for candles. With any luck she'd at least be able to illuminate the place brightly enough to stop any goings-on.

She found a whole packet of thick white candles in a cupboard, bought in the last emergency: she also had coloured ones, from the Christmas before. She put them in the pottery holder that Cynthia and Ted had given her, and told them what a useful gift it had been. They glowed, red and green and orange. They left the table and sat in the easy chairs at the other end of the room, in the soft light. Janet had always liked candlelight: in the old days, in Leicester, that year she'd lived on her own when she met Mark, she used to make her own, and Mark teased her about them, and made all kinds of knowing remarks about nuns and candles, and wasn't it time she got married, and she hadn't the faintest idea, but not the faintest idea, of what he'd been talking about, and when she'd found out she'd been so upset, so mortified, but by then it was too late, by then she had been officially engaged, and anyway part of her still hoped that if Mark were able to make such knowing remarks about nuns and candles, then he would know some other useful facts of life—but of course he hadn't known, all he had known had been empty second-hand sterile vulgar jokes, and her knowledge, her instincts, when it came to it, had been better than his, and God knows she had been hopeless enough. Looking at the flickering candles, she had to repress these thoughts, or they would have disturbed her too much. How dared Mark come and take her from her safe solitude, and give her so little in exchange for it? Whatever had he done it for? But, on the other hand, whatever had he got out of it? Nothing, nothing. He must have been mistaken as she had been, to have come to this pass. She bowed her head upon her knees, as she sat upon the floor (there were chairs for five people only), hoping to escape notice in the semi-darkness, but he had spotted her, he had heard her thoughts, he was on to her.

‘Can't you go next
door
and make us some
coffee
,' he said, in that curious whine that would come over him late at night or after a drink or two. ‘Haven't they got
gas
next
door
?'

‘I don't think so,' said Janet. ‘The whole estate's electric.'

‘Oh,
electric. Dynamic. Humming
with vitality. Never have you known'—he turned to his other guests—‘such a vital, exciting, thrilling, modern milieu. And is there nowhere we could get a cup of coffee? Surely your friend Mrs Cooper next door, surely she'd have a primus stove or something like that? Or a
hay box
? Could one make coffee in a
hay box
? The mind boggles. I'm sure your friend Mrs Cooper next door must have been a girl guide at some point in her dazzling career. Indeed, she may still be a girl guide now, she certainly dresses as though just about to present herself to
Brown Owl
, wouldn't you say, Janet? Wouldn't you say, my enchanting wife?'

‘I don't know whether Jean's got a primus stove or not,' said Janet, ‘but I can hardly go round and ask to borrow it without inviting her round for coffee. And in view of your views about her, you wouldn't be very likely to like that, would you?'

‘
In view of your views—likely to like
—oh, she's getting quite witty and articulate in her old age, isn't she?' said Mark.

He is unbelievable, said Janet to herself. What could I have done to him to deserve what I get?

‘We can manage without coffee,' said Anthea, thinking things had gone far enough. ‘It's so pretty in here, in the candle light. Let's just sit here quietly until we freeze to death. They'll find us in the morning, dressed in our best. We could be put in a museum as a diorama, they could call it “Dinner Party in the Provinces in the Nineteen Seventies”. They could transport your entire lounge to Tockley Museum and set it down as the next one on from all those Roman relics and bits of agricultural machinery, Janet. And I bet you people would look at it in a hundred years or two, and say, oh look, isn't that nice. Oh, I do wish I'd lived
then
.'

‘Isn't it funny, they'd say, that they still hadn't invented electricity?' suggested Ted; ‘And that the women were still wearing long skirts, they'd say,' said Cynthia: and they went on for a while like that, imagining how others would see them, what mistakes they made in seeing other ages. Janet listened, thinking that perhaps she was inarticulate and a fool, as Mark proclaimed, because after all the others were quite entertaining at times: Anthea was being exceptionally pleasant, softened by the lights, and started to tell them about a visit she had made to Norwich Museum that summer with a nephew of hers (and Janet was surprised she had taken such trouble with a nephew, which proved how little she knew her), and how much he had liked dioramas, and how gruesome life must have been in a really primitive society, in the Stone or the Bronze Age, because there they were in all these reconstructed bits of history, poor buggers (it
must
be late thought Janet, or Women's Lib was further advanced than she suspected), digging and hoeing and shivering and never resting. And Bill said that he'd seen an article recently proving that Stone Age Britons were cannibals, or something like that, and that wasn't very nice, was it, and they discussed morality and survival, and luxury and subsistence, and agreed that one of the causes of the present power crisis was that people had come to expect far too high a standard of living, far too much comfort, both at home and at work, but that it didn't do any good to know that, because there was no way of stopping the process.