The Realms of Gold (31 page)

He himself did not wish for love. There was enough love. Hugh loved him, Natasha loved him, Frances loved him, both sets of grandparents (a complete four) loved him, Beata loved him, and his poor baby loved him far, far too much, far more than he deserved. His problems were not personal, his fears were not personal. Or did not seem to him to be so.

The baby whimpered in its sleep, and he reached out a hand and shook its cradle. The little creature inspired him with such pity and such terror, he could not bear it. What did it dream of? Birds dream in the egg, he had read recently in the paper. In her egg head, in her thin boned beating skull, his baby dreamed. The membrane of her head still beat, softly, under her soft brown curls. He prayed, passionately, for the bones to close. Small things had always frightened him, small birds, bats, butterflies, mice—not for any dislike of them, but for pity and terror, terror and pity. Birds were always getting into the cottage, Natasha was frightened of them, and so was Hugh, it had always been his task to remove them, he had been so afraid of killing them, in his clumsiness, and once a fledgeling had died of fright in his hands.

There was no escape from this fragility, this soft and bloody beating, these small bones, this perishable flesh. Since diagnosing Beata's illness (he had worked it out himself, from a book) he had read medical text books, constantly, with horror, shocked by the catalogue of all the illnesses that flesh is heir to. And the medical text books didn't mention road accidents, fires, lightning flashes, falling meteors, and all the other likely and unlikely causes of accidental death. Survival was a miracle.

He had had a brief period of respite, between the anxieties of puberty and the responsibilities of fatherhood. True to his age, he had found escape from the human condition not in drink or travel, but in drugs. While high, he had been for long periods of time unaware of mortality and its pressing implications. He had been able to forget about death, while concentrating hard on the pattern in the carpet. Lying in bed, now, rocking the cradle with a tired arm (the baby was restless, she was teething, and her cousins had over-excited her), he looked back to those happy days of grassy innocence, when the future had seemed so irrelevant. One would never get back there again. The Garden of Eden. He had hardly smoked at all since he had, one evening, caught his father at it: Hugh, giggling helplessly, talking inconsequentially, falling off his chair, had seemed such a parody of Hugh drunk, fierce, disputative, logical, irritable, that Stephen (although he excused his father's behaviour on the grounds of inexperience) had decided to set a good example by abstaining. Drugs are out of fashion, he told his father. His father was very fashion conscious.

Various friends of his had met bad ends through drugs—not through grass, but through acid. They had thought themselves immortal, some of them: one had jumped out of a high window, another had tried to cross a motorway while hitchhiking to Leeds, apparently under the impression that he had the power to stop the traffic. Others had simply gone rather mad. Stephen's problem was that most of his delusions (he supposed they were delusions) came to him when he was quite sober and in his right mind. He had from an early age suffered from the more common suicidal impulses, and was surprised that more people did not fall out of high windows or off church steeples or cliff tops, or throw themselves under trains, or drive themselves into head-on collisions. Freud had said that we are all balanced between conflicting needs: the need to live, and the need to die. It was a miracle that the balance was so well struck in favour of living. In Beata, something had gone wrong, and in himself also, he sometimes thought. He was genuinely surprised that the average person was so well aware that a high jump would be fatal. Perhaps he himself had a sense missing, a protective sense of danger, like those rare unfortunates who feel no bodily pain, and who have to learn, by intellectual processes, that they must not put their hands in the hot flame. (Or was the reverse true? Was he perhaps too much aware, as for this child of his? He did not know.)

He had never dared to take acid. For already, when looking out of a fourth-floor window, or gazing down a stairwell, he would think to himself:
the quickest way down is to jump
. And each time, it seemed like a truth, as well as a temptation.

The baby whimpered. He was worried about the baby. Something was wrong with her back, she didn't seem to sit up as well as she should at her age, and her head wobbled rather. The doctor said it was nothing, but he thought that even so he would get a second opinion. How appallingly badly constructed is the human body. Why aren't people made of plastic or wood, or some other more or less indestructible material, thought Stephen to himself, as he lay awake, and listened to an owl hoot in the well-stocked churchyard. God had organized man very badly. How sorry he must have felt, when he saw the sorrows and torments that Christ, his only son, had suffered. Why had he not in his great pity blotted out, on Good Friday, in the darkness, the entire creation? For the same reason, perhaps, that Stephen himself could not kill a dying rabbit, and was frightened of a frightened bird. God was weak and sorry, just like man, he turned his face from pain.

Sometimes Stephen thought he might become a doctor. It would at least be a positive way of confronting his obsessions. It might even cure him of them. But he doubted if he had the intellectual energy. He hadn't got the right qualifications behind him, he'd have to start too many subjects all over again, and he'd lost too many brain cells already. And what use was one doctor, in view of the size of the problem?

He fell asleep, his white arm hooked into the cradle, so that when he woke up an hour later it was numb and rigid, and for some time he thought that he must have a terrible new creeping paralysis (multiple sclerosis, maybe?).

 

Karel Schmidt sat at his desk in the flat off the Fulham Road, and stared at a heap of bills. He had decided to sit down and pay some of them, but was not making much progress. Gas. Electricity. Telephone. Newsagent. They were all final notices. Karel always waited for final notices, assuming that everybody else did
too. It
never occurred to him to pay earlier, occasionally he discovered that others were more prompt, but he wrote them off as neurotics or eccentrics. He knew no better. He had been brought up in a household of final notices and unpaid bills. He even considered himself rather efficient. He had, for various reasons, little grasp of a norm.

He opened his cheque book, filled in the date, lit a cigarette, stared round the room, and listened to the roar of the traffic in the severe, straight, grim one-way road below. It was a first-floor flat, large and gloomy. He had never cared for it much, and didn't now. It was overfull of heavy old dark brown furniture, most of which his aunt and uncle had picked up cheap just before and during the war: it reflected their tastes and mood, for it had a continental, derelict, refugee look about it, and stood around the walls as though waiting to be rearranged. Joy hadn't much interest in furniture, though she had once in an unusual outburst of energy painted the walls of the living room a dark purple, which she had thought would conceal their irregularities. It had concealed the marks but not the bumps. Even Joy had agreed it wasn't a very cheerful colour. It looked all right in other people's houses, but in theirs, it looked morbid.

The one good thing about the house was the view out the back. The living room filled the whole width of the building, and the front window looked out over the traffic, pouring relentlessly on its way North. Why this particular road had been selected as a throughway, nobody could remember. Perhaps because it was wide, dull, and inhabited by powerless people, many of them old ladies who watched the lorries from lofty bedsitters. But the back window looked out over a garden, over trees and bushes, as far as the eye could see. The garden was inaccessible, for it was in fact a cemetery. But it was a garden, after all.

Karel finished writing out his cheque to the LEB, and stopped for a few minutes to think of Frances Wingate, off to her conference in Africa. The thought of her carrying on with normal life always upset him, indeed it annoyed him, and at times he felt like getting on an aeroplane and flying out there and getting hold of her and forcing her to come back. But he didn't suppose that would do much good, and anyway it would be terribly expensive, and he wasn't all that well off, though things had been looking up financially, he had been given a rise and a new appointment. It was just as well they were looking up in some direction, for in others they were appalling.

He missed Frances. He loved her, and that was that, and he had thought she loved him. No reason why she should, of course, but still, he had thought she did. They had had a good time together. What more had she wanted? What more could anyone possibly have wanted? Perhaps she really was a shallow person, as she had claimed from time to time, and had wanted a little more fun. They certainly hadn't managed to have much fun together. He thought of her in a hotel in Adra, alone in a hotel bedroom, accompanied in a hotel bedroom. They had only ever managed four days away together in the whole of their seven years. Had she been aggrieved, like a neglected wife? He had always thought her above such things, but maybe she wasn't. He had always suspected that she preferred to be on her own, autonomous, her own keeper. But maybe not, maybe he had disappointed her in some way. He didn't understand her, he didn't understand anyone.

Gas, fourteen pounds. Telephone, twenty-five. He must tell the children to lay off the telephone.

Since Frances had left, he had gone from bad to worse. At first he had been actively unhappy, and had spent his time contemplating strange forms of pursuit and revenge, but then he had settled down into a more passive misery. He had tried to be practical about it, he had taken on extra evening classes to fill in the time, he had struggled even less when boring people arrived to bore him. Let them have him if that was what they wanted. In a sense, Frances had shielded him from his own weaknesses, for in order to be with her, he had been obliged to organize himself a little, and at her house in Putney, in her bed in Putney, he was out of reach. In her bed, between her legs, was the only place where he felt safe and guiltless. Now, she had taken away that place, and left him. He was being pulled to pieces, as though by wild beasts. One could not of course compare Mrs Mayfield or Ken Stuart or any of the other people who pursued him to wild beasts without sounding ridiculous, for they were all pathetic, sad, depressed and hopeless cases, without (one would have thought) a fang between them. But wild beasts they were, and they made Karel bleed. He dreaded them now, he dreaded all of them. Between them, they had made mincemeat of him. He couldn't face them any more. He didn't know what to do.

He had made the mistake, simply, of taking on too many. Whether he had done this through goodness, as Frances had come to believe, or through inertia, as he himself believed, or through masochism, as Joy believed, who can say. Certainly he had managed to defend himself at times by his theory that the human condition was so appalling that one should not even struggle to escape from it. He had seen his own behaviour as chosen rather than helpless. In his heart, he knew he couldn't help but be how he was. He was a born victim, and, saved by a miracle from the holocaust of Europe, it was not in him to devise another fate. How could he say no, when the telephone rang, how could he hurry away from the mad and the lonely?

Once, he had undertaken his role with some good will. But now he found that everything was too much for him: he could not go on, and did not know how to stop. He had deceived himself into thinking himself of use, but now he knew that he was not. It had become physically impossible for him to respond to all the demands on his time and his patience. There were simply too many people wanting a piece of him. He tried to combine his claimants, letting them come round together, but then they would quarrel and drink and smoke and fall over one another in the most appalling way, and then come back for yet another evening to complain about each other, making everything take twice as long. Each wanted him and him alone. However could he have been fool enough to let them think that they all could have him? He tried leaving the phone off the hook, to prevent people from ringing, but then they called round, and when they called, as some did, all the way from Croydon or Kentish Town, they had to stay even longer when they got there.

No doubt about it, he had got himself into a terrible mess, and it was all his own fault, or rather Frances's fault, for it was that last evening class, that extra evening class, that Frances-substitute, that had finally tipped the balance. He had himself imposed the last straw. There were two people in that class who seemed more tiresome and more demanding than any he had ever had before. One was, to make things worse, an extremely attractive girl: the other an elderly bachelor. The girl was Swedish: wide eyed, beautiful, divorced. The bachelor was passionately interested in local history, and had joined Karel's class by mistake, but having joined it, would not let go. Between them, they pulled him apart. They would corner him at coffee breaks, lie in wait for him in the doorway, walk along the street with him, cadge lifts from him. In the end, of course, both of them ended up regularly in his flat. Both were very lonely people. They perturbed Karel, as such people always did, but what perturbed him most of all was his own growing hardness of heart. There was no mistaking it, he regarded them with rancour. He did not want to see them, never wanted to see them, was relieved when they fell ill and did not turn up. He found himself watching their manoeuvres to gain his attention with malice rather than with compassion. (There was one occasion when, in an effort to get near him, one of them pushed the other right off the pavement into the gutter, as they walked to the pub for a drink.) Indeed, he found himself wondering whether or not they weren't actually encouraged to pursue him by the element of competition with the other.