The Realms of Gold (33 page)

Mrs Mayfield lived alone, in a dark room.

He would give up the struggle. Why should he personally feel called upon to justify his survival by struggling single-handed to redress the appalling imbalances of the natural scheme of things? Let others die, let them rot. He would disassociate himself. He would end up in a bed sitter like Mrs Mayfield, with a milk bottle or two on the window sill, boiling eggs in a kettle, a malevolent recluse. Adding by one unit to the world's immeasurable woe. Joining the legions of the great majority. Supporting, rather than defying, the myrmidons of solitude and death.

He contemplated this vision with a morbid satisfaction. It pleased him. He looked round, at the purple walls, the oak sideboard, the moquette chairs, the tatty Indian carpet, the littered desk, the overflowing book shelves. Why set oneself up in this grand manner? It was unnatural. It was asking for trouble. He would sink into his proper place.

As he finished writing out the last cheque, the door bell rang. He crossed furtively to the window and peered out from behind the brown curtain. Standing on the doorstep was an ex-colleague, no doubt in hope of a cup of tea or a free drink.

I'll start a new life today, thought Karel, I won't answer. And with an immense effort of the will, he managed to stand there, without going down to open the door. He went down at the second ring, of course. And as a reward for his one-minute effort, for his heroic attempt to adjust his world-picture (or as a reward for his equally heroic failure to readjust, who can say?) the picture postcard which Frances Wingate had written to him at the beginning of the year was at that moment lifted from its resting place at the bottom of a mail bag a thousand miles away, and sent upon its way. Its journey from box to bag had taken nine months: the rest of its journey was to take a mere ten days. And to those who object to too much coincidence in fiction, perhaps one could point out there is very little real coincidence in the postcard motif, though there are many other coincidences in this book. These days, the post being what it is, it would have been more of a miracle if the postcard had arrived on time, as Frances (unlike Tess of the d'Urbervilles) should have been sensible enough to realize, though (in this sense like Tess of the d'Urbervilles) her judgement too was clouded by emotion. Frances, in fact, had built her expectations of Karel on a perfectly accurate premise: that, if he received her card, he would respond. As, in ten days, he will do.

 

David Ollerenshaw, well on his way to Adra, with his foot down on the accelerator, watched the desert pass, and sang to himself, loudly and contentedly.

 

‘Jesus shall reign where'er the sun

 Doth his successive journeys run;

 His kingdom stretch from shore to shore

 Till moons shall wax and wane no more,'

 

he sang, thinking little of the content, but liking the tune, which he remembered well from his school days. He had, however, probably been prompted to choose this tune by the sight of the surrounding empty wastes, where neither Jesus nor Mohammed reigned, for there was nobody there at all. The following year, the whole area was to be struck by a terrible drought, but David was not to know that. And even if he had, he might have reflected that his valley of tin would probably come in handy somehow, even in a drought situation.

Meanwhile, he was well stocked with water, and with other forms of drink. Although capable of considerable abstinence, he would go in for bouts of heavy drinking, like a sailor on shore leave, and he did not see why he should not indulge in one of these at the end of his journey: he was preparing for the indulgence each night, after pitching his tent, by a nightcap of whisky.

He changed tune, and started on Greenland's icy mountains. He'd met a few missionaries, on his travels, in desolate outposts. Converting the Heathen, the Turk and the Jew, the Eskimo, the Pacific Islander, the African. Their task had always seemed to him mad: he was more likely to find gold in a tin mine, than they were to strike faith in the heathen human heart. But they went on prospecting. Likely places, unlikely places.

On the boat over, he had met a French couple; he had been unable to avoid meeting them, as they were all three placed together at the same first-class dining table for meals. At first he had thought them husband and wife, but after a while it became clear that they were brother and sister: middle aged, olive skinned, soberly dressed, they were on their way to visit their mother, who was dying in a nursing home in Algiers. He was a business man: she an actress, it seemed. They were on poor terms, but united by their journey. In Paris, where both lived, they never met, they said. With the same features, the same gestures, the same ironic smile: we never meet, they said. Did David have brothers, sisters, a wife? No, none, nobody.

Black birds of passage. He had walked on the deck with them after their dinner in the blue night, in the middle of the black Mediterranean. The woman, immobile as a figurehead in the slightly salty air, held a silk scarf round her throat with one gloved hand, as she looked south. Her brother, a man of fifty, covered her other glove with his as it lay on the rail, ‘Death brings us together,' the woman had said, not very dramatically, factually rather, and down in the bar he had heard some of their differences. She had signed a petition claiming to have had an abortion, out of female solidarity, she said: he was a Catholic, with a public position, and six children. They told David these things freely, as pop music from a coin machine filled the bar. They sat, the three of them, round a plastic-topped steel-rimmed round table, lit from beneath with lurid pink and green and chequered lights, covered with brown melted smudges from lighted cigarettes, and the other two discussed why it was not possible, in these times, to live in the same city on friendly terms with one's brother, one's sister. David listened to these foreign conversations, volunteering nothing. He had never inhabited a region where friendship had been possible, of the sort these two had perhaps once enjoyed in infancy. An only child.

People often told David things. He had heard some amazing stories, both in the prolonged and enforced intimacy of communal effort (what else can one do, in the Falkland Islands, but tell stories?) and from passing strangers, such as these. There must, he sometimes thought, be some rift in his nature, unperceived by himself, down which people knew they could let their confidences tumble out of sight. Other people's garbage. He could understand the satisfaction. Once, on an uninhabited island off the north-west coast of Scotland, he had lost a gun metal cigarette lighter down a crevasse between two rocks. He liked to think that it was still there.

He rarely told people much in exchange. They didn't seem to demand it. But he would make his own offerings. On this occasion he showed them some of the objects that he carried around in his khaki pockets: a dull topaz or two from his valley, a little aspirin bottle of stream tin, a twig of straw tin, a sign of previous habitation. (There was no one there now: the water had dried up.) They looked at his relics with interest.

The coin box played a popular song called ‘Souvenir'. The woman recited, sombrely, more dramatically, ‘Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu?' It was a poem by Verlaine, she explained, that their father had recited frequently over the dining table. They had been born and brought up in Algeria, she explained, and had not been back since the troubles. They were returning to the land of their birth. ‘O temps, suspends ton vol,' she said, with feeling. She was an actress. Her solid cream neck rose from the throat of her dark green dress, a firm column. She looked so like her brother, the same nose, the same eyes, the same gestures, and yet they led in the same city lives so far removed, so mutually hostile, that they never met.

‘As pants the hart for cooling streams,' sang David, driving through the desert, prompted this time by the surrounding dryness. He thought of the French woman and her brother, and of Frances Wingate, who was attending the conference, and whose lecture he had heard earlier that year. He looked forward to meeting her. He was quite interested in archaeology.

 

Frances Wingate sat on the aeroplane and stared down at the desert. She was bored. Perhaps the stone in her chest was boredom. Nothing seemed very interesting any more—travelling was a drag, the conference was certain to be tedious, the desert below was extraordinarily tedious, and she didn't even feel like the drink she'd ordered. She was terrified of boredom, it was the worst threat, or so it seemed for the moment. The absolute futility of all human effort struck her in all its banal, heavyweight, unanswerable dullness. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair.

She tried, with an immense effort of the will, to make herself think about something interesting: namely, Joe Ayida, Minister of Culture of Adra. He was, as she had told her brother, quite an exceptional man. She had met him in London: he had come to talk to her about her trade route and her Trans-Saharan emporium. He had been extremely excited by them, and also extremely well informed about the possibility of similarly interesting discoveries on his own territory. She had told him that it was more than likely that such discoveries could and would be made. He had talked a great deal about the history of Africa, and had been not at all annoying on the subject: through him, she had glimpsed what it must be like to have lost one's past, and to stand on the verge of reclaiming it. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians he had said, they have blinded us for centuries. She agreed. She always agreed in theory, but Joe had made her feel that it mattered. They discussed the massive joke of Zimbabwe, the confusion created amongst Egyptologists by radio-carbon dating, the inability of the European mind to conceive that any good thing could come out of Africa. They have conceded us homo habilis, but it is not enough, said Joe Ayida. We will rewrite the labels in the museums. Quite right, said Frances, carried along by his enthusiasm.

Joe Ayida wasn't an archaeologist, or even an anthropologist. He was an art historian. Of course, as they had frequently remarked to one another, the disciplines overlapped more and more these days. He was also a sculptor. To hear him talk of tradition and the individual talent was to enter into a world where old labels had meanings. Frances found it deeply exciting, and also beyond her. There was something in Joe Ayida that she could never catch. She was too old and came from the wrong culture. But she could recognize it, she had a feel of its quality. Hearing him speak one heard words like ‘artist' and ‘nation' for the first time, with a kind of primal clarity.

Joe was ideally placed so to speak. His nation was a small one, his country large. It needed culture, it needed water, and minerals, and oil, it needed past, present and future. It seemed that some of these commodities had now been discovered: perhaps Adra was about to become as rich as a Gulf State. She wondered what they would do with the money, if it were really there. Television stations, airports, roads, railways, hotels, washing machines? At the moment, most of the people of Adra were semi-nomadic: she had met plenty of them herself in her travels. They pitched their tents by small ancient trees, they wandered with their Biblical cattle. The country would need a lot of money if it wanted to get any kind of modern living to its remoter inhabitants. And perhaps it didn't want to. Modernization wasn't so much taken for granted as a blessing, these days.

She wondered what Joe's intentions were. He was a dynamic man, and had certainly been a powerful force in organizing the conference, but he wasn't exactly Prime Minister yet, and there were other yet more powerful economic forces involved. It was going to cost Adra a lot of money to get at its newly discovered resources, and one of the many things Adra hadn't got was a lot of money. Loans, investments. The conference was doubtless intended to raise a few million pounds. It was a prestige project, to persuade the world of the seriousness of Adran intentions. A prestige project of the intellect, as the amazing hotel they were all going to stay in was a prestige project of a more earthy nature. She gazed at the brochure for it, which lay brightly-coloured on her table, provided by Air-Adra. It was really too amazing. The architect that designed it must have gone mad. It was an enormous building, the Hotel Sahara, and it was much wider at the top than it was at the bottom, like a kind of pyramid in reverse, each floor extending by one step out into the sky. A blue, dazzling, blistering Kodacolour sky. One wouldn't have thought such a construction possible. It looked quite illogical, as though it must surely fall over. It was as white as the sky was blue, and its base was surrounded with ornamental palm trees and fountains. A row of large Mercedes was drawn up in front of the vast entrance. Frances found herself hoping that she hadn't been given a room that hung out, as it were into space. If a child had built such a building out of Lego bricks, she would have understood it. It was quite an amusing shape. But it wasn't for real.

The drink that she had ordered arrived, brought by a rather forbidding very black Adran girl. It was a Campari soda. Frances stared at it in horror. Whatever had happened to her, that she had started to order drinks she didn't like in order to have a change? At least it was an exciting colour, as the hotel was an exciting shape. Such dull little pleasures would have to do her for the rest of her life, she thought glumly. For what did the future hold? Nothing much. She'd be able to keep her mind occupied while delivering her own paper, but that wouldn't last long, and she knew she'd get horribly bored listening to other people's. Interpreters were so dull anyway. She sipped the healthy pink drink. It wasn't too bad, but it certainly wouldn't amuse one for eternity. Oh God, she felt bored. She wanted Karel. That short conversation with Hugh about sex had upset her. She hadn't thought about sex for a long time till then, but after all she wasn't as middle aged as she pretended to be. Why hadn't she tried anyone else, after Karel? Was it the fear of annoying him, even in his everlasting absence? Surely not. Perhaps it was the fear of being bored by people, once one started having personal relationships with them. She hadn't liked to admit it to herself when she was younger but now she didn't really mind: the fact was that she found most other people frighteningly dull. Most other people
were
frighteningly dull, and that was the end of it. It wasn't really their fault, but one could guess what they were going to say, and was tired with it before they'd said it. And if one slept with a dull person, they would be sure to hang around asking for more. Frances found herself in the unfortunate position of knowing that people would hang around asking for more whether they wanted it or not. She seemed to have that kind of effect on people. And it was very hard to get rid of them without being rude.