The Realms of Gold (37 page)

The afternoon was devoted to papers on mineral resources. Frances listened dutifully to statistics about copper and wolfram, and stared at little coloured maps that were presented to her from time to time. (Coyly, they were saving their tin discoveries for the next day.) It was all most interesting and very good for her, she was sure, and she had sensibly had nothing but chalky water to drink at lunch, and only a small meal: nevertheless, after about an hour and a half, her mind began to drift. She thought of all the other conferences she had attended, all the other committees. She had sat on some committees for years without even knowing what they were for. Once, when she had woken up to the subject matter, and the role she was supposed to be playing, she realized she was constitutionally ineligible to sit on it and had to resign. There was one which had infuriated her for six months or so with its ridiculous jargon: all the other members seemed to have been there for years, and they talked in initials and short cuts; and she had noted with growing alarm that as she gradually acquired the jargon, so she gradually changed her views, and by the time she was thoroughly au fait with the committee's terms of reference and accounts, she had lost all desire to reform it, and had become as reactionary as all its other members.

She admired people who could do the thing well. Civil servants, who (unlike Patsy Cornford) could quietly get their minds round anything and produce order out of chaos and boredom. Chairmen who managed to be efficient and yet witty. Lawyers who could see inconsistencies in what seemed to her like logical statements. Mediators who could bridge impassable gulfs of opinion by the right formula of acceptable words, who could string a bridge of language between two craggy summits, avoiding the horrible plunge into the deadly chasm of a Minority Report.

Sometimes, however, people went berserk in public. There had been that conference at Uppsala, when old Hammerkind had started to read a quite dotty paper about the moral turpitude of radio-carbon dating and the great technological conspiracy. He had supported his theory, which otherwise might have got by, with quotations from the scriptures and a plea for a return to a more reverent approach to pre-history, and had embellished it with some grotesque insults about careless Italian archaeologists and incompetent French ones, backing up his insults with some unfortunately not too grotesque illustrations. It had been quite a scene. She had herself, in deep excesses of boredom, wondered what would happen if she suddenly shouted out some rude words, or got up and danced on the table, or started to strip off all her clothes. Once a professor, whose gravity and calm she had always admired, confessed that he found it almost impossible to sit still for more than half an hour, and had to resort to the strangest devices to induce self-control. What was the average concentration span, she wondered?—then woke up with a jerk, as her neighbour handed to her a pleasant little nodule of Adran manganese ore. The geologist was explaining how uneconomic it was to mine the stuff. She stared at it with respect and handed it on. Looking up, she caught David Ollerenshaw's eye. He was sitting almost directly opposite. He winked at her, in an encouraging manner. He looked as lively and attentive as anything, after his ordeal in the desert. She envied his stamina, she liked his face. She would have a drink with him later, she had promised. Geology was his own subject, of course, that was why he was looking so wide awake.

She listened hard for the rest of the afternoon.

There was nothing much planned for the evening: they had two hours off until dinner, then dinner, then a film show about no-mads. (How pleasant it was to have things organized. How agreeable her life was, really.) So she went upstairs to have a rest: belated air fatigue was telling on her, she was terribly tired. In the lift she was joined by Patsy Cornford, who was very excited because she had just had a telegram from her lover and another from a prospective lover. She showed them to Frances, proudly: they were bright green, an unusual colour in telegrams, a kind of bright leaf green. One said
I LOVE YOU DARLING PATSY
, the other said
HARLING COME HOME SOON
. They speculated, in the lift, as to why Darling should have been spelt once correctly, once incorrectly. Then Frances said she was going to have a short sleep, and marched into her room and shut the door firmly: she wrote a letter to her children, allowing her gaze to wander over their four photographed faces, thinking of the mother octopus. The four faces stared back: Daisy, two years ago, blonde and disdainful, a stern school photograph: Joshua, sitting on a bicycle grinning aimlessly in his good natured fashion: Spike, savage and bored, leaning histrionically and waiflike, hands in his pockets, against the front door jamb: Pru, another smiling child, a very professional photo this one, a
Sunday Times
one, Pru sitting as a baby of six (she was now eight) in the garden, with a lot of leaves and flowers stuck in her hair. She wrote to them as well as she could, describing her flight, the hotel, the meals, the swimming pool. I'll be back soon, my darlings, she said at the end of the letter.

Then she lay down and fell asleep.

She woke in an hour, with her usual well-regulated internal timing: got up, had a bath, got dressed. The same black dress would have to do. She sorted out her conference papers: they had already got mixed up. She brushed her hair, polished her shoes with a Kleenex, read a few pages of
The Charterhouse of Parma
(she'd been meaning to read it for years, and God could she see why), then read an article in the
Sunday Examiner
about old people dying alone and starving in the midst of plenty: she'd brought the
Sunday Examiner
all the way with her from Hugh's and Natasha's, it was reassuring to have an English paper around, even if it was out of date. The
Sunday Examiner
said that too many old ladies were dying alone and starving: the most recent had died in a pricey council block in a resort on the south coast, and somebody was in for trouble—the council, the social workers, the relatives. A witch hunt, she smelled a witch hunt. Probably somebody deserved it, but maybe not those who would get it. In the nomad film, they would doubtless be shown pictures of old folk left to die by the wayside when too old to plod on, and would be told by the commentary that this was a humane socially integrated way of dealing with old age. Sociologists and anthropologists were a strange lot. She looked forward to further discussions with Spirelli on the subject. Thinking of Spirelli, she drew her belly in sharply, and looked at herself in the mirror. Was the black dress too tight? She leafed through the
Sunday Examiner
again, and found a frivolous article about how one shouldn't be able to keep a pencil under one's breast. The idea to her, small-breasted, was laughable. A
pencil
under one's
breast
? She could as soon have hooked one under her lower eyelid. But maybe some people could. Maybe Patsy Cornford would be able to, in years to come.

She looked at her watch. It was time for a drink.

In the bar, she avoided a predatory-looking Spirelli who tried to intercept her, and made straight for David Ollerenshaw, who was talking to the Adran who had delivered the paper about minerals. They greeted her affably and bought her a drink. They were talking about geology. She tried too hard to prove that she had been paying attention all afternoon, by the occasionally intelligent question, and thought she didn't do too badly. Indeed, she got quite interested, and accompanied them in to dinner where they continued to talk of the world copper market. She didn't mind that: it was what she was here for after all. She would have a chat with Ollerenshaw after the nomads.

The nomads were quaint but brief. They stood around aimlessly under a tree, tramped across the screen, fed their cattle and camels, made a few pots and baskets, and that was that. Maps followed showing their distribution. It was not a very glossy film, with a dull plot.

Afterwards, some went to bed. Others decided to swim. Frances felt like a drink, and hesitated, wondering if it might not be thought too decadent to combine drinking and swimming. She was quite prepared to opt for the former, if there was going to be anyone to drink with. This, however, looked unlikely, so she went upstairs and put on her bikini, and found when she came down again that David Ollerenshaw was sitting by the edge of the pool with some glasses and a bottle of Scotch. ‘Ah,' he said, when he saw her. ‘Just the person I was waiting for.'

‘A man after my own heart,' said Frances, somewhat to her own surprise, as David poured her a drink. She was not usually so forward with strangers.

‘Now you must tell me,' she said, as she sat down by him, ‘what you were doing, at my lecture.'

So he explained what he had been doing: that he had been in the same city, visiting his own Institute, the Geological Institute, and that he was rather bored, because his rocks hadn't turned up. ‘I only saw that it was on by accident,' he said. ‘There was a notice up, in the library. And I thought, why not?'

‘Are you glad you went?'

‘Of course I'm glad I went. You were on good form, I thought. Not that I know what your form is usually. But you seemed in good spirits.'

‘Yes, I was, as far as I can remember. Or was I? No, come to think of it, I was feeling rather low, at the time. I had terrible toothache. I had to have the tooth out, in Paris. Funny, how one forgets.'

‘Well, you didn't look as though you were suffering from toothache, you'll be pleased to hear. Terrible, having toothache away from an English dentist, isn't it? I remember once, in Nigeria . . . '—and he poured himself another drink, and they embarked on a session of traveller's tales. Tooth extractions in wooden huts, typhoid in the back of landrovers, suspected appendicitis halfway up a mountain: defective maps, petrol problems, the lack of acceleration of landrovers, snakes, sunsets. Field work in archaeology and geology seemed to be fraught with remarkably similar problems. ‘Horrible terrain, always,' said David, enthusiastically, ‘and then one can't be quite sure if the stuff's there, or if it is, whether there's going to be enough of it, and if there is enough of it, whether it's going to be possible to get at it.'

‘Without spending a fortune.'

‘Yes, without spending a fortune.'

‘Your resources must be so much greater than ours, that kind of problem ought to be irrelevant.'

‘It never is, though.'

And they discussed the excitement of the first indications—the aerial photographs, tracer plants that indicate the presence of a certain mineral, a piece of broken pot, a bone, a shape in the sand. The disappointments, the sense of rage at having wasted months of one's life in a hell hole, for nothing. ‘Though why I should care, I don't know,' said David. ‘There's nothing in it for me, whether I find anything or not. I'm just doing a job. It's different for you, I suppose. What you find is all your own.'

‘Well, not exactly,' said Frances, and explained briefly about the way in which even some of the most nonchalant countries had finally woken up to the fact that their treasures were being picked up idly from celebrated sites and carried home in tourists' pockets: they had introduced new regulations about exportation, and about time too, she had to agree. It had taken months to clear some of her larger trunks from Tizouk.

Then they reverted, with one accord, to the subject of discomfort, and why it was that they were prepared to endure it—why, indeed, they could be suspected of actually enjoying it. Both agreed that heat was their worst thing, which was doubtless why both had ended up in Africa. ‘I tried the Falkland Islands,' said David, ‘but it wasn't bad enough.' They discussed the effects of heat on the British metabolism, and the horrible psychological shock of one's first experience of it: each seemed to have responded in the same way, which was not surprising, they said (comparing arms in the fairylight), as they had the same complexions, fair skin, freckles. Frances described a night she had spent with her four children in Tunis, all of them melting and panting and furious and sleepless and desperate with that peculiar hot despair that seems so endless: ‘But what could I do?' said Frances, ‘a night in the Africa for the five of us would have cost something like
sixty pounds
, they told me. Sixty pounds, for air conditioning! I'm not mad yet. I will be, but I'm not yet.' David described his first night in Tehran. Why do we do it, they asked one another? Are we simply masochists?

‘Do you swim,' she asked him, ‘in Arctic seas? That is a true test of a masochist.'

‘If you mean literally Arctic,' he said, ‘it's more likely a death wish you're describing, than masochism. But I've tried some pretty chilly places, in my time.' He thought of the Antarctic, and the happy penguins.

‘I don't suppose I'll ever have to go and dig in the snow,' said Frances. ‘There can't be much in the way of archaeology, under the North Pole.

He agreed. The swimming pool, however, he said, looked warm and inviting: why not try it?

They rolled in, lazily. They swam around.

‘Hello,' he said to her, in the middle of the pool, as her head rose from the dive, sleek like an otter's.

‘Hello,' she said, enchanted by the illusion of proximity, the illusion of belonging to the same species.

David was an energetic swimmer, and set a high standard: by the time they emerged, they were both a little breathless. Spirelli was waiting for them, as they pulled themselves out, with Patsy Cornford. He was about to offer his arm again, but she managed to evade the gesture. She was a little frightened of Spirelli. She did not want to touch him again. And yet, at the same time, a slight competitive spirit stirred in her, a spirit that had been quiet and subdued for a long time. She didn't like the look of Patsy getting on so well with Spirelli. Irresistibly, she set herself to charm. She felt David (a safer-seeming ally) watching her, with some amusement. But still, she couldn't stop. A bit of old mechanism had been put back into action, by a chance flick of a finger, and off it whirred, off it clicked, as efficiently as ever. Oh dear, she thought to herself, oh dear, oh dear.