The Realms of Gold (27 page)

(We have already seen him, waiting to confirm the details of his discovery on a computer.)

The Adran government had been delighted: the company for which he worked had been delighted. For a country extremely low in mineral resources, David's valley represented wealth, and his company would have a large stake in the difficult job of extracting it. David too was delighted, for through the valley he had satisfied one of his childhood ambitions: he had contributed to changing the world charts of mineral distribution. This had always been his secret desire, though he had toyed at times with the thought of an academic career in volcanoes or earthquakes, a lucrative career in oil. Minerals had been his first love: minerals had made him a geologist. His favourite bedtime book, as a boy, had been an old blue Penguin about minerals in industry, in which he would read nightly, with inexplicable interest, of phosphates and bauxite and platinum, of the properties of molybdenum, nickel, and the solitary monazite, which appeared on the beach sands of Travancore, in occasional large crystals weighing up to thirty pounds. Most of all he liked the charts. Why should there be so much tungsten in China, so much tin in Malaya, so much mercury in Spain, so much platinum in Russia, such enormous quantities of cobalt in the Belgian Congo, when other countries seemed to have no minerals at all?

He had always suspected that the charts must be wrong, even as a boy: and so they had been proved. As a boy, he had dreamed of unlikely discoveries—opals in Sweden, asbestos in the Sudan, zirconium in the Cameroons: and now they had found oil under the North Sea, and valleys of tin in Adra. When you've tried all the obvious places, start to look in the silly ones: on this principle had the Adran government worked, with surprising success. David had in his car his papers on the likely distribution of tin, all written up neatly for the Unesco Conference on Saharan Resources that he was about to attend.

He stared down abstractly into the reddish lava, thinking of the world chart in the limp blue Penguin, and as he stared, the volcano rumbled, made a noise like a gravel pit emptying, and spat up, suddenly, a few fair-sized bombs. One of them landed at David's feet, and he stepped back sharply. Perhaps the thing wasn't so quiescent after all. It would be a very second-rate fate, to be knocked out by an almost-spent volcano, and it would serve him right for wanting to see a bit of action. He stooped and picked up one of the bombs. It was hot and light and bubbled, newly congealed. He thought, not for the first time, that it would be his idea of heaven to sit on an observation platform somewhere and watch the earth change—watch mountains heave and fold, seas shrink, rivers wear down their valleys, continents drift and collide, forests dry into deserts and deserts burgeon into forests. The processes, the constant flux, enthralled him. Man's life span was too short to be interesting: he wanted to see all the slow great events, right to the final cinder, the black hole.

Weighing the light lump of lava in his hand, he stood there, and thought about order, and process. He thought a great deal about order and about whether it went down to the very middle of things. In another age, these speculations might have been called religious. They were certainly concerned with the nature of the infinite. In many ways, David was a typical post-Darwinian scientist, who had adapted himself without effort to the faith of scientific determinism: he saw order in the universe, he traced it along faults and folds, knowing that it was only ignorance that concealed the pattern, that the next outcrop existed surely, if only one could find it, and he had abandoned happily, indeed had never had, being born too late, the slightest sense of man as a necessary part of creation, as in any way a significant part. Man's life, as the Bible says, is grass, a mere breath: so was the whole history of mankind. This did not perturb him at all: on the contrary, he found the idea reassuring, for what he knew of man did not justify his taking of any very dignified part in the scale of creation.

He was, however, perturbed by nuclear physics. Like a Victorian agonizing over the death of God and the inaccuracy of the Bible, David found himself worrying about the place of man in the universe, and fearing that, through the splitting of the atom, man had gained a power quite inappropriate, quite unsanctioned, a Godhead which he disliked in every way. It was all very well to maintain (as he frequently did, to justify his own activities) that man was merely another agent of natural weathering and change, like wind and water, and that his mining and quarrying were at best superficial insults, insignificant contributions to a much more mightily organized whole: the fact was that it now seemed possible that man would take into his own hands the destruction of matter itself. And if that were possible, one would have to rethink the question of man's proper place, and of the order that had seemed to pre-exist. Nuclear fission had created a spiritual imbalance in the world which he did not like at all. It had elevated spirit against matter, the organic agent against the inorganic, and he did find this as alarming as his ancestors had found the correct dating of fossils, and the evolutionary chain. (If questioned, he would also have agreed that he deplored the destruction of innocent human beings, at Nagasaki, at Hiroshima, and that he did not care for the thought of future destruction on such a scale, but he did not think of such things while alone. As a geologist, he took a long view of time: even longer than Frances Wingate, archaeologist, and very much longer than Karel Schmidt, historian.)

He tossed the lump of lava back into the volcano's gullet, and lit himself a cigarette. He thought oí the voyage across the well-charted Mediterranean. The ancients, so Banks had told him, had held a variety of interesting superstitious beliefs about volcanoes and earthquakes; well, of course they had. Man has to find an explanation or two. Perhaps nuclear fission was not such a disaster after all: for even if man blew up the whole surface of the globe, the whole human race, and everything else with it, and filled the entire atmosphere to its known limits with fall-out (as he was now filling it with fall-out from aerosols), there would still follow natural cooling processes. Man could, it was true, upset the lovely weathering processes, but he could surely never ruin the world to the very centre? And if he could, what of the other worlds? Man was, after all, surely, thank God, in all his wickedness, insignificant and weak, even now.

David Ollerenshaw threw his cigarette end into the crater. The volcano received it, spewing gently from its blackened lungs, like a tired old prophet. It would not overwhelm him with its wrath.

Imagine him, David Ollerenshaw, standing there, the only unbearded geologist in the business, fair haired, long necked, short sighted, indefinably English, indefinably odd, with the oddness of one who spends much time alone, thinking about inhuman things. Watch him, as he begins to stumble, a small figure against a small volcano, down the mounds of pyroclastic rubble, back to his new car. Tomorrow he sets sail for Africa.

And we can leave him there, on the eve of departure, and return home to Frances Wingate; she is a more familiar figure, a more manageable figure, in every way.

 

Frances Wingate spent the weekend before her departure for Adra with her brother's family, in the country. Her brother had a large cottage in the Cotswolds: once he had filled it at weekends with his own children, but now they were dispersed at boarding schools, and Frances had brought her own four. Though Hugh's children were dispersed only in theory—the night before, the Friday night, his eldest son Stephen and his grandchild had arrived from Sussex, unexpectedly (though Frances privately fancied that they had come to see her). She was still worried about Stephen: something was up, she felt sure. So they were a large gathering, a family party, and there they sat, on the Saturday night, by an open fire, drinking, talking, remembering old times. Her own three younger ones had gone upstairs, though not to bed: they were expected to sleep in sleeping bags on mattresses on the floor (all the beds had had to be divided), and therefore they were fighting and jumping about and quarrelling and reading damp spidery piles of their cousins' old comics. Frances's long-legged daughter, Daisy, was sitting below, with her niece on her knee, and keeping very quiet in case somebody noticed her and sent her to bed. Stephen, Frances and Hugh were talking about Freud: Hugh's wife, Natasha, was leafing through a picture book of Ife and Nok sculptures that Frances had brought her. (It was an expensive book, but Frances had been sent a review copy, and anyway she doubted its thesis.) The fire crackled and popped: it smelt of wood and resin. There were yew boughs on it, lopped from the overhanging tree at the end of the church garden. It had seemed unlucky to lop them yet unlucky to leave them, so there they burned, with their pale poisonous gummy roasting berries. A pleasant scene, a rural scene, a family scene.

It was a pretty cottage, they were widely thought to have been lucky to find it. It was in a lovely part of the country—fertile, picturesque, with steep hills and valleys, verdant, unspoiled, expensive. Natasha, whose domestic touch Frances at times had time to envy, had made it exceptionally pretty. It was a large grey stone building—three cottages, in fact, knocked into one, with a large open room downstairs, a large kitchen for eating, and a small study, and upstairs a sequence of intercommunicating bedrooms. The garden outside sloped down to the churchyard: a gate led from the side onto a steep sloping field, with walks and sheep, and a small wood. The village contained a few shops, two pubs, a Country Crafts Centre. An idyllic position, everyone agreed. Natasha loved the country, she gardened with enthusiasm, she cooked and baked and painted, she chopped wood and tried to rear carp in the small pond. Frances admired her. She had just admired a large dinner cooked by her—farmhouse pâté, a casserole, salad, and home-made bread. The bread was brown and shining, with a woven plait on top of it, its crust a perfect brittle glaze, yellow brown like a harvest offering. Everything that Natasha did was real and perfect. She took no short cuts, she chopped with a hand chopper, she ground with a hand grinder, she made real stock, real bread, real marmalade, she preserved fruit. Her stone larder was full of jars of fruit, gleaming like jewels in bright rows.

Now she sat there, tired and comfortable, in a deep armchair, with her feet curled up under her, looking at the pictures. She wore a long wool skirt, and expensive shoes. She was tall, slight and bony, her face was lined and hard and sweet. She had the gallant air of a woman fighting a losing battle, but nobody could guess the terms of her defeat, for she was discreet and silent about herself. She had a well-shaped mouth, curiously curved, with thin and conscious delicate lips, a careful and precise and gentle way of speech. Her hair was dyed. It had turned, in the course of nature, from brown to a miserable, mustardy yellowy fuzzy grey, and so she dyed it, back to its original brown. It was her one weak gesture, and it was a realistic one, for she did, and she had said to Frances one day some years ago, look like the Witch of Endor with it undyed. And who wants to look like
that!
she had said. It isn't fair to other people, she had said. Who could tell what vanity lay concealed in her? Certainly she always wore extremely expensive shoes. Now they were tucked under her, out of sight. She sat there and looked at photographs of wide-browed terra-cotta women, and read of additive and subtractive techniques of sculpture, in terracotta and in wood.

Her husband was drunk, as he was every night of his life. He drank at least half a bottle of Scotch regularly, and if there was anything to celebrate he drank more. He was arguing with his son about Freud. He had not read Freud; Stephen had. Frances was appealed to from time to time by either side. She had read more than the former and less than the latter—or perhaps more less recently than the latter. They were discussing the uses of Freudian analysis, Hugh perhaps predictably taking the view that it was useless, Stephen more surprisingly claiming that it could be beneficial in certain cases. It emerged that his wife (how strange to think such a child has a wife, thought Frances) was thinking of struggling out of the clutches of a drug-mad psychiatrist in hospital into the embrace of a Freudian analyst at home—though what home, whose home, where, was not at all clear. She's quite right, Stephen was saying, it's no use her just lying there swallowing pills and then being bullied into eating jam sandwiches. There must be a cause, it's the cause that needs curing. He said this earnestly, and seemed to mean it.

Hugh, emphatic, vehement, as he always was later in the evening, after a few drinks, took the line that if the pills made her eat the sandwiches, then what was wrong with the pills? Anyway, you lot, he said, you live on drugs anyway, why object just because a doctor gives them to you in hospital? What's the difference? And anyway, he went on, getting carried away, as arguments crowded into his head, I thought young people disapproved of Freud, I thought he was supposed to have a mechanical unspiritual view of human nature, and you're all spiritual, aren't you?

‘I'm
not particularly spiritual,' said Stephen, shaking his head gently, looking spiritual and aggrieved. ‘And I do wish you wouldn't talk about young people, Hugh. I'm not young people. I'm a young person. Be reasonable.'

‘Well, you share a good many characteristics of your generation.'

‘Of course I do. That doesn't mean I share them all. You do get so
animated
by the very
word
“young”, Dad.'

‘Well, do you blame me?' cried Hugh, feverishly pouring himself another drink, histrionically clutching his thick black curly hair, ‘do you blame me? Here I am, a grandfather at the age of forty. It's a joke, what kind of effect do you think it's likely to have on me? No wonder the adrenalin starts to flow the minute I
see
anyone under the age of thirty.'

Watching them, Frances thought how true it was that Hugh got so animated. She had rarely seen anyone with so much physical restlessness. He lived a sedentary life, an office life (how he managed to work so well she never knew), and in the evenings a violence of speech and gesture and emotion would take him over, like a spirit. His views were extreme, his language appalling, his behaviour erratic. Stephen, on the other hand, sat still and careful like his mother, expressing himself in small movements of face and speech. As though, it suddenly occurred to Frances, as though afraid to move?