The Realms of Gold (39 page)

It seemed like a good idea, it was just what they wanted, they wondered why they hadn't thought of it before. There's nothing much to see, David told them, it's a very dull town, there's nothing to do and nothing to see: but they were not deterred. It will make a change, at least, said Patsy.

So after dinner, they met together again, and got into the car. To her annoyance Frances, who had determined to get in the front with David, found herself, through some strange last-minute manoeuvre that she was not quick enough to prevent, sitting in the back with Spirelli. Off they went, into the night, into the boring capital city of Adra. As David had predicted, there was not much to see: wide, well-lit streets (no shortage of space here), some large modern buildings, a mosque or two, a church, some Coca Cola signs, some brightly-coloured fountains in the main square, ostentatiously wasting gallons of precious water. It was a flat and arbitrary place. Not a bit like one's idea of Timbuctoo, said Patsy, disappointed. Or does Timbuctoo look like this, now?

There was one street that showed signs of animation: there were stalls, cafes, people sitting at little tables on the pavement, men selling nuts and ice cream. ‘This is the Champs Elysées of Adra, said David, slowing down, as they drove past. ‘Or we could try the Old Quarter. But one can't take the car in. And one can't get a drink there. Or rather -' glancing sideways at Patsy, in her white dress—‘you wouldn't be able to get a drink there.'

‘Is it picturesque?' asked Patsy.

‘No, not really,' said David, who had himself quite liked it, with its narrow poky streets and odd little comers and seedy hot shabby cafes, its sackfuls of beans and flour and inedible sweetmeats. There was no point in going there with two women. Frances one might have risked, possibly, but not Patsy Comford.

So they settled for the Champs Elysées. As they walked from the parked car to the least dull of the cafes, Spirelli put his arm round Frances's shoulders. So here we go, she thought. There was hardly enough spirit left in her to resist: his hand lay there, heavy and possessive and rather comfortable. The very slightest inclination on her own part would do the trick, she knew, and she knew that he would not miss it. She was annoyed with herself; she walked on, looking straight ahead. It was her own fault, it served her right. She thought of Karel, crossly. She had renounced him, but he wouldn't go, he hung around her, with all his treacheries like teeth on a string round his neck, bewitching her, preventing her from living. She would sleep with Spirelli, and be rid of Karel. What else was she supposed to do?

They sat at a little table, and ordered some soft drinks and some hard drinks, and ate some little dry nutty objects of a curious texture and an evidently local nature: the kind of thing one did not get in the Hotel Sahara. ‘This is the
real
Adra,' said David, grinning at them over the plastic tablecloth. They watched the local life go by: Frances and Patsy were the only women in sight. And Frances allowed Spirelli to follow up the advantage he thought he had gained. Perhaps he had gained it after all. How strange it must be, she thought, to be a man, and to be so persistent. She watched Spirelli watching her, carefully, as they talked of this and that: he was waiting for a sign, like an auctioneer. She must be very careful not to nod or wink by accident, or she would find herself in possession. She must be very careful not to drink too much. (A horrible flash flicked through her mind, of a bad scene in a hotel at Luxor: drink, chat, quarrels, academic disputes of ridiculous ferocity, broken glasses and finally a ghastly hot night in bed with a red-haired Canadian cameraman and broken air conditioning.) Spirelli filled her glass.

When they had sat there for as long as seemed tolerable, Patsy, still restless, suggested a drive in the country. ‘There
isn't
any country,' said David. ‘And anyway, it's dark.'

‘I want to see,' said Patsy.

‘Oh, all right,' said David. ‘But it's not like the Cotswolds out there, Pm warning you.'

‘I don't care,' said Patsy. ‘I want to see Africa.'

When they got back to the car, Frances got into the back with Spirelli without protest. It was accepted that she would sit there with him.

The country was flat: the road ran through it straight as a ruler. Stunted trees grew on either side of it, for this was the fertile part of Adra. The road went on forever.

‘You see,' said David.

Frances sighed, heavily. Around them stretched the terrible space, and they looked out on it, as it passed. The earth was a kind of sandy red, stony and sandy at the same time. A little scrub grew near the road, fitfully cultivated, and beyond that, nothing. Frances felt that Spirelli was about to reach for her hand: oh well, so what, she thought, resigned, oh well, never mind. Idly, she tried one last spin of the wheel, one last conversational gambit, before the silence. What right had Karel to thrust her thus into the arms of strangers? One last desultory spin, and she would forget him.

‘How flat it is here,' she said. ‘It was so rocky, up at Tizouk. Flat places are rather frightening, don't you think?'

‘I was born in a flat place,' said David, from the front, responding gallantly, and it seemed, consciously, to her tired appeal. ‘I was born in Tockley, Lines. Have you ever been to Tockley, Lines? It's the flattest place in England.'

‘Tockley?' said Frances, sitting suddenly forward in her seat. ‘Really, Tockley? I thought you came from Sheffield.'

‘I do, but I was born in Tockley, my family come from there.'

‘But how extraordinary, so do mine.'

‘What a coincidence.'

Spirelli sat back, Frances leant forward. The game was over; indeed, Frances, engrossed in this new subject, had forgotten that it had existed. In the next five minutes, instead of finding herself involved in a contract with Spirelli, she found instead that she was related to David Ollerenshaw through a communal great-great-grandfather: her grandfather Ted had been his grandfather Enoch's first cousin. Astonished, delighted, amused, they traced connections: ‘But why had we never
heard
of each other?' said Frances, from time to time, and both agreed that it was typical of the Ollerenshaw family that they should not have heard of each other. Enoch the bad, Enoch the wicked had been David's own grandfather, and had dandled him on his knee and played ‘This is the way the fanner rides' with him. What had they quarrelled about, Enoch and Ted? Nobody could remember, nobody knew.

‘My gran hated Enoch,' said Frances.

‘Enoch hated your grandma,' said David.

‘Perhaps that was what they quarrelled over,' said Frances, and they agreed that this might have been so, and agreed that both of them had vaguely heard of a sister of Ted, an Auntie Con, who had hated everybody, and had been as mad as a hatter.

‘I don't know if one ought to be pleased to belong to such a family at all,' said Frances. ‘A terrible lot, they are, really. Bad blood, I'd say.'

‘You look all right to me,' said David.

‘I look rather
like
you, in fact,' said Frances, and as they drove back to the hotel the others agreed that this was so: that there was a distinct family resemblance between the two of them, and how amazing it was that nobody had spotted it so far. And when they got back, they ordered a bottle of Adran champagne to celebrate, and sat up late over it, the four of them, discussing endogamy, and exogamy, and the nuclear family, and genes and heredity, and incest. Spirelli, expert in family structures, drew them some diagrams of marriage patterns in Western Europe, and constructed for them a family tree, and proved to them that everybody was related to just about everybody, at remarkably few removes: but even he had to acknowledge that there was a certain degree of coincidence in the fact that David and Frances should have met so far from home in the middle of Africa.

‘Tell me,' said Frances, finishing off her last glass, ‘did you have any sense of recognition when you first saw me? Did you think, I recognize her?'

David shook his head. ‘No, I can't say I did. Did you?'

‘I could easily persuade myself I did,' she said. ‘But whether it would have been true or not, I don't know.'

Spirelli, meanwhile, responding quickly to the change of play, was getting on with Patsy. Frances would have thought it beneath her dignity and his, but evidently this was not so. Frances felt reprieved, by sheer chance. How wise she had been to make a last conversational effort at that crucial moment, how kind of fate so elaborately to intervene. It was clearly much, much better for Patsy to sleep with Spirelli: both would enjoy it more. How astonishing people are, in the way they transfer their allegiances, she thought. And as she was thinking this, she caught Spirelli's eye, and he winked, he actually winked at her. She thought she was slightly offended. Carefully, she rose to her feet, to take her leave.

‘I must go to bed,' she said carefully, ‘if we have all those miles to fly tomorrow.'

‘I'll walk up with you,' said David.

And they left Patsy and Spirelli sitting there, as thick as thieves, as they walked off towards the lift.

‘The sins of our fathers separated us,' said David, as he pressed the button.

‘One could say so,' said Frances.

‘I met this woman and her brother on the boat, coming over. They were going to see their mother, in a hospital in Algeria.' He paused. ‘I wondered why they bothered.'

‘Families are incomprehensible,' she said.

‘I was an only child,' he said.

They got into the lift together, and ascended to the eighth floor. On the landing, they parted.

‘Goodnight,' he said.

‘Goodnight,' she said. ‘And thank you for the drive.'

An undemonstrative lot, the Ollerenshaws.

 

When she got into her bedroom, Frances sat down on her bed and burst into tears. She was thinking that when the organizers of the conference had asked her to fill in her next of kin on her travel and insurance form, she hadn't known whose name to put.

She cried for quite a while, comfortably, tired. The stone in her chest was dissolving, after all: fate was on her side, after all. The tears poured down. In the morning, or the morning after, when she got back from the tin mine, she would write to Karel, she would write him a long letter, explaining how much she needed him, asking him to take her back. There was no point, no point at all, in being alone. How arrogant she had been, to think she could get him back with a postcard. It would take a letter, at least. If not two or three letters.

Resolved, comforted, she went into the bathroom and washed her face and cleaned her teeth. She was growing older, but Karel would not mind. Her skin was over-exposed and veiny, she had wrinkles round her eyes, her hair was coarse and growing coarser, but Karel would not mind. Her teeth—no, she drew the line at looking at her teeth and wondering what Karel would think of them when he saw them again. His own weren't all that marvellous anyway, and she loved them, every one, even the false ones.

She got into bed. Next day, the tin mines. Piously, she picked up and kissed each one of her children's photographs, and Karel's teeth. The tin mines, next day, and some rickety little light aircraft. She hoped it would not crash into a mountain, leaving her either dead (to be eaten by Spirelli) or alive (to eat Spirelli) as seemed to be the vogue these days. Before falling asleep, she looked at some photographs of the amazing figurine. Quite unlike anything, it was, with its naturalistic features (negroid? Arab?—neither, really, in any recognizable way) and its stringy ropes of hair, all carved in terracotta in a style no one had ever seen before. It had a witchy, androgynous, yet friendly look, almost a comic look, as of one who appreciates the twists of fate. If she played her cards right, perhaps she could get Karel back, and get herself on the dig as well. She would have to see what she made of the site, the next day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the next day brought quite different prospects. It brought her, at seven o'clock in the morning, a pile of leaf green telegrams, all demanding immediate action of one sort or another, and all, at first sight, equally incomprehensible.

She sat up in bed, gaping in horror at the pile on her breakfast tray, ripping open one after another, dreading to find news of the death or illness of children. Reading blindly, she could find no such news: none of them were from her ex-husband. So she had to calm down and begin again, under the agitated eye of the Adran girl, who did not dare to leave the room, so frightened was she by the ashy terror on Frances's countenance, and by the excess of telegrams.

After a while, Frances calmed down, and managed to read them and make some kind of sense from them. There were, in fact, only six: though there had seemed at first to be far more, and the envelopes, when open, added to the impression of multiplicity. The most innocuous of them was from the
Sunday Examiner
, and said
PLEASE RING AT ONCE BILL MERRITON
. She was used to that kind of thing, but it seemed more sinister in conjunction with the others. One of these said:
SUNDAY EXAMINER CANDAL EXERT SELF COME HOME MOTHER
. Another read:
MOTHER ILL COME HOME FATHER.
Another read:
HAVE YOU SEEN SUNDAY EXAMINER MOTHER IN A STATE MAYBE BETTER HOME HOME H
. Another read:
PLEASE COME HOME STEPHEN MISSING EVERYTHING TERRIBLE WE NEED YOU YOUR CHILDREN ALL WELL NATASHA
. Finally, another one from the
Sunday Examiner
said
PLEASE PHONE YOUR STORY EARLIEST EDITOR
.