The Realms of Gold (25 page)

As they talked, so cleverly, Janet remembered that after all she had got a little cooking stove somewhere, she and Mark had used it on their first holiday together in Wales, and it might well have enough gas in it still for a cup of coffee each. She went off to look for it, and there it was, in the bottom of the broom cupboard. While she was fiddling with it in the kitchen, trying to get it to light, Mark called to ask what she was doing, and she told him, and Anthea said (how nice Anthea was being, and why?) that she should bring it into the lounge, and not stay out there in the dark, the even darker kitchen—so she came through, and crouched on the carpet, and finally managed, in the flickering shadows, to ignite a pale blue flame. It flickered up, blue and spiritual, sad and cold in colour, although warming the small copper pan. They all watched, spell-bound, for the water to bubble, as though watching the process of boiling for the first time. Each small bubble seemed to swell from some deep spring. It was not the coffee they wanted, it was the magic of the process, it was not the triumph of the process but the magic of it, not the will and the domination but the secret invocation, and as they watched Anthea told them how she had taken her nephew to a reconstruction of an Iceni village in Norfolk, one of the most beautiful historical reconstructions she had ever seen (he was a history-struck little boy, her nephew), and that she had read there that the process of making iron had seemed to the Iron Age men so accidental, so arbitrary, that they had been obliged to invoke success from the deities, rather than from science. Let us now invoke the God of boiling water, said Ted, as reluctant bubbles gathered round the pan's rim. They didn't know
how
it happened, it was so hit and miss, cried Anthea, but when it did, that was a good day, a fine creation. They
made iron
! Imagine! But magic, it was to them. They didn't know how it happened. Imagine!

The water bubbled, and Janet made tiny cups of coffee, more an offering than a drink. They drank them solemnly, facetiously invoking various gods. It was growing colder in the room, but nobody knew what action to take, it seemed better not to admit that it was cold at all. Gradually the conversation cooled, as well as the temperature, and Ted suggested that it would be as well to go home. It won't be any warmer at home, said Cynthia, and then came the moment that Janet had been dreading—oh yes it will, one can get into
bed
and warm oneself up at home, cried Anthea, and there followed inevitably a discussion of how the birth rate rose in power cuts, and how contraceptives would never do as much for world population in the East as the introduction of electric light in the evening, and how the Eskimoes, although they had little to do but copulate, could never expand and overtake the world because their environment was
too
hostile, though at the same time, as Bill remarked, one had to wonder what kind of birth control they did use to keep the family size down. Abstinence, infanticide, the contraceptive pill?

Janet hated this kind of conversation. It kept the others warm for a while, and she watched them trying to be clever, giggling, making predictable jokes: all the temporary gleam had gone out of them, and they looked like they had looked at the beginning to her, mean, derivative, jaundiced, not golden but jaundiced in the yellow candle light. It was amazing how none of them had a good word, ever, to say about anyone. They enjoyed sniping, about people they knew, people they didn't know, about whole cultures and countries they had never seen. They were a real opposition group, united in their suspicion of the outside world. Even Ted, whom she had been beginning to think that she might like, was being as silly as the others, in his speculation about the effect of central heating on sexual practices. She hated talk about sex. She didn't know what to make of the attitude of the others—perhaps they could talk about it in this way because they really enjoyed it and got on with it at home, perhaps Ted and Cynthia and Bill and Anthea had perfectly satisfactory private lives. If so, she admitted, they were free to make these jokes and to speculate. But in her heart she couldn't really believe that they were happy, she couldn't really believe that they enjoyed themselves in bed. It was just a convention, they were talking conventionally about something that did not exist. The emperor's new clothes. She had support for this view in the fact that Mark talked as well as anyone about sex, made the same jokes, seemed knowing and worldly—and yet she knew that he knew very little about it at all, when it came down to it. She remembered with a kind of disgust the way he used to go on about mini skirts, in the days of the mini skirt, about proportion, and the beauty of women's legs—he had a whole set speech about Art, the Human Body, Michelangelo (or was it Leonardo) and the Mini-Skirt, with which he used to entertain guests for months, till they too obviously tired of it. And yet he had no feeling for legs at all. He had never noticed any beauty in her own legs, he had never addressed them with any tenderness. All in the head, was his appreciation. She was glad that now she could cover her legs up in long skirts and keep them to herself, she had hated it when Mark would point at them in demonstration.

So they sat, and talked about sex—not rudely, not crudely, not tenderly. It was just talk. Perhaps, had they been five years older, there would have been a bit of action, a little more suggestiveness. As it was, there was nothing much. Janet sat and waited for them to go away, and hoped that the lights would not come back on again.

They did not. Somebody vaguely suggested that they should get coats, or rugs, and sit a little longer, but the conversation did not seem brilliant enough to warrant it, the little flare of intimacy had died down, they were all possessed with a kind of uneasiness. The time had come to go home, to confront one's own ghost privately, one's own skeleton. Anthea made rather a handsome skeleton, a well-covered one, rising dramatically to her feet, stretching, her bangles shaking and glinting, her huge heavy plastic beads catching the candle light. Thank you, thank you for a
lovely
evening, she said, and kissed Janet on the cheek. She was a Southerner and had imported Southern manners, she kept herself going by frightening other women with her embraces; she rather enjoyed the way poor timid Janet stiffly shrank away. Cynthia, a Sheffield girl, did not kiss, of course. Nor did the men. They shuffled, and muttered thanks, not very good at such things. Ted said several times over how much he had enjoyed himself, and they must come to them soon. They moved towards the door. The Streets, of course, had to give the Davids a lift home. As soon as they were actually out on the path, a new lease of life seemed to fill them: they stopped muttering, spoke up, laughed loudly, commented on the size of the moon and the large stars, told the Birds that they would have to bring their gas stove with them next time they called for dinner, waved cheerily, laughed some more, pledged themselves to defend the gravel pit at a meeting on Thursday night—all as though they had to prove to the neighbours that they had had a good evening, thought Janet. The neighbours, the Blaneys and the Coopers, sat silently in their dark houses, and who could tell if they were watching or not?

The house was quite silent when Janet and Mark went back into it, uncannily silent, without even the hum of electricity. The baby had worn himself out with crying and was fast asleep. Janet felt guilty about him: she should have gone up to him, but had not dared, for fear the meal would be ruined or Mark annoyed or Cynthia (who believed in letting them yell) critical of her maternal behaviour. She had sacrificed the poor baby on the altar of their opinions, and now he slept, exhausted. She felt bad. She also felt worried that she could not clear up properly: it seemed silly to clear up in the dark, one could do it so much more efficiently in the daylight, and yet she really didn't like the thought of all those plates and dishes and chicken bones and dirty glasses and ashtrays lying around all evening. Of course it didn't matter, but it mattered to her. She wondered what Mark would say if she started to tidy up. Would he shout at her and tell her she was a fool? She would start on it anyway.

Furtively, almost guiltily, she began to stack the dessert plates that had been abandoned on the white table.

‘Why don't you leave that till morning?' said Mark, watching her from somewhere over in the shadows, standing by the functionless never-used fireplace.

‘I'd rather get a bit of it done now,' said Janet.

‘Why? It'll wait till tomorrow. You've nothing else to do tomorrow, have you? Nothing
pressing
, nothing particularly urgent?'

‘Of course not,' said Janet. ‘It's just that I don't like the thought of all this mess lying around all night. I'll just put a few of the things away now. I'll just stack the dishes. It won't take me a minute.'

‘You
are
neurotic. Everyone says you're neurotic, you know. You know what it means, don't you, not being able to leave the plates on the table all night?'

‘No, I don't,' she said, wearily, wondering what he was going to come out with now—some dreary bit of half-baked psychology out of a paper-back, some pseudo-intellectual joke from one of those silly games he and his friends sometimes played. She often wondered how he and his friends dared to play these games and say such things to one another, when it was quite obvious that there must be something very wrong with all of them. Skating on thin ice, they were. What if one day one of them broke the convention and came up with some real, some shocking truth: what if she were to say to Mark, now, that the reason she wanted to stack the plates was that she didn't want to go to bed with him, and that she'd do anything to put off the evil moment of getting into bed with her own husband. It was all very well making jokes about barrenness, and frigidity, and neurosis. How dare he? Why didn't she speak up? But she couldn't. She couldn't attack him. She was terrified of destroying him. And Mark destroyed was worse than Mark potting shots at her as though she were a duck at a fair.

Mark was still trying to think of something clever to say about not putting the plates away, and failing: she got in quickly, suddenly, with an obvious point. ‘Anyway,' she said, ‘I must at least put the chicken bones in the bin, or the cat'll get them, and they can choke on chicken bones, cats can.'

‘I'm going to bed,' said Mark. He was annoyed with himself for not being able to think of a joke about plates. Perhaps he'd have worked one out for her by the time she got upstairs.

‘All right,' said Janet. ‘I won't be long.'

And she heard Mark go up, and clean his teeth in the dark, while she continued to pile up plates, and empty ashtrays, and put the bones, wrapped in newspaper, in the bin. She thought about doing the washing up, but of course there wasn't any hot water, it was tepid, and anyway she really couldn't see well enough to do it properly. It would be annoying to have to do it all again in the morning.

(Frances Wingate, a hundred and one miles away in Putney, was stacking her dishwasher, and thinking, not particularly coincidentally, about the Museum in Tockley, and the eel stang, and her father watching before her the newts in the ditch, and becoming a professor of zoology. Had he ever been disappointed that she hadn't pursued her childish interest in nature? He'd never said anything about it, one way or the other. Daisy was getting on rather well with the Physics, better than Frances had ever done: her tears had been caused by a fairly high level of frustration. Were there any women physicists?

She scraped a few neglected baked beans off a plate into the bin, and ate a cold piece of bacon rind. Though greedy, she was not fussy.

She shut the dishwasher door, and switched it on. She was wondering what her life would have been like, if her father hadn't become a zoologist. How would she have got on, if she'd had to live in Tockley? Though of course in those circumstances she could hardly have been born, because if her father hadn't gone to Oxford on a scholarship and met her mother, she wouldn't have existed, would she?

She looked at her watch. It was nearly bed time. Perhaps she would go to bed and finish the novel that an old college friend of hers had written. It wasn't very good, but it was quite amusing, recognizing the characters, from so long ago.

The children were to go to her husband Anthony, while she was in Adra. How useful it was, to be divorced, she reflected, as she mounted the stairs with her pile of little distractions—the novel, a couple of learned journals, the
New Statesman
, a small whisky, and some nail scissors that she'd used earlier,
faute de mieux
, to trim Spike's hair—how useful to be divorced, and how pleasant, if one cannot sleep with the man one loves, to sleep alone.)

 

When she had emptied the coffee pot, Janet Bird went back into the lounge, and sat down for a moment on the white sheepskin rug in front of the empty grate. It hadn't been too bad an evening, after all. Mark hadn't been too difficult, and Ted and Anthea had been rather nicer than usual. She sat back on her heels, and listened, to hear if Mark was making a noise. He couldn't be reading, he'd only got one candle. She heard a cupboard door shut, and wondered how much he'd had to drink. Not very much, she thought. Two glasses of sherry, and they'd only had three bottles of wine between them, and Bill always drank a lot more than his share. She wished that Mark had had some more. If he had had some more, he would be more likely to fall asleep. As it was, she knew that he was lying in wait.

Oh God, oh God, give me patience, give me strength, she said to herself, not to God particularly. Every night of her life, the same problem. What was she to do, what could she ever do, to escape the torment? There lay Mark waiting to grab her. She hated it, she hated him. She had thought of so many ways out—feeling ill, headaches, period pains, backaches. The baby had been a good excuse and had kept him off her for three months at a time. Perhaps she should have another baby, that would give her a bit of peace, but at what a price to herself, and it didn't seem quite fair to the baby either, one shouldn't use the poor little creatures as a kind of anti-sex device, it seemed all wrong somehow, but she bet it was quite common, however wrong, the queen had babies they said to get out of having to appear in public all the time, and so it perhaps wasn't all that rare to use babies as a way of avoiding making love, she knew plenty of women used them as an excuse, one could see that from the back pages of the women's magazines, and the advice always was,
don't worry, be patient, and your husband must be patient too, and you will find that in good time all your natural feelings will come back to you and you will enjoy your married life as much as you did before, it is quite natural to find yourself less interested in sexual relations for a little while after baby is born
—ah yes, but what if one had never been interested, what if one had no natural feelings, what then, Witch Doctor, what then? Oh, she knew all the tricks of avoidance—pretending to be asleep, messing around downstairs for so long when Mark was tired that he fell asleep first, little aches and pains all exploited to the full—it makes one into a hypochondriac as well as inflicting other real wounds, does marriage—pretending to be terribly worried about altruistic things like her father's stroke or the mortgage going up, or the reason why Mark hadn't got promotion yet, so that Mark would feel a brute if he touched her, an insensitive brute. Oh yes, she had been through all that, and would go through it still, as far as she could see, for every night of her life, forever and ever, in sickness and in health. No wonder she wished for a volcano or an earthquake, neither of them very likely in this flat terrain. A flood would be more likely; what if the great river Done were to overflow and wash them all away out to the cold North Sea? Sometimes she wished that she could really catch some disabling disease—not a fatal disease, for after all if it were truly death she desired, she had the means to hand. No, what she wanted was some universal disaster that would involve her in its fate, or else some personal release, through paralysis or a stroke, or the threat of heart attacks.