The Realms of Gold (8 page)

And yet. He stared at the photograph of the old lady. Perhaps, after all, he would be rather put out if the North West Highlands were to be transformed by oil rigs and property speculators. He remembered the first time that he had been there, alone, as a young man, for a holiday, in a summer so splendid that it had become legendary. He had taken his motor bike, had slept in bed-and-breakfast places, eating too much bacon and eggs, chipping bits of rock and measuring angles of strike, discovering outcrops, tracing faults, examining crystals, awestruck by the predominance of water, by the sudden lowering loaves of Torridonian sandstone, by the pink sands of Mull and the white sands of Sutherland; and finally, ending up late one night in the dark middle of nowhere, he had taken a winding path down to the sea between lochs and mountains, hoping to find a small village or a hamlet with a bed to let (the Ordnance Survey map marked a cluster of cottages), and had nearly turned back, but in the end reached the sea, in a deep sudden inlet, and there at the land's end stood four cottages, and one of them had a sign out. Bed and Breakfast. In the morning, when he looked out of the bedroom window, there was the sea, right beneath him: he could see into the depths of clear and rocky water, he could see each limpet, each barnacle, each anemone, pink stone, blue stone, grey stone, and silvery crystalline crevasses. And looking up, there was the sea, an enormously high horizon, welling up above him.

Hurried, he struggled into his clothes, and out through the garden where his motor bike stood amongst chickens and lobster pots: he struggled through a profusion of flowers, purple, yellow, blue, green, growing in a dense and lush long stemmed abundance, monkey flowers with yellow throats deep-spotted with red, forget-me-nots straggling in the hedge bottom, their pale blue faces small and perfect, so much perfection in so small a space, as lovely and as oft-repeated as crystals, as sure, as infallible, yet as different as snowflakes. He walked through the flowers as though it were the first morning, and through a little gate and up a hill, where the ground changed suddenly from the gulf-stream haven to a shorter turf starred with saxifrage and thyme and milkweed and speedwell, and there, the most beautiful flower of all, grew the Grass of Parnassus, so aptly named, its white carved petals streaked with its own faint green blood. But he climbed on, upwards, to see the sea, as yet obscured by the brow of the hill: he climbed, breathing heavily, for the hill was steep though small, and there at the top lay a view more splendid, more wild, more various than anything he could have imagined in the darkness of the night, for there before him lay a sea full of small islands, rising like grey seals, raising their backs like dolphins from the water, heaving and burgeoning, as far as the eye could see, an panse of rocky islands lying in the blue green sea. The landscape seemed alive, as though seething in the act of its own creation, for round every island the waves broke white and fell and glittered, in a perpetual swell and heave. The Isles of the Blest, he said to himself. Uninhabited, ancient. Out they stretched forever, to the North and West, to the ultimate reaches of man's desiring, where man was lost and nothing, at the edges of the world. For what did man desire, but those edges? David Ollerenshaw stood there and gazed, his heart beating strangely. Those islands were granite: Lewisian gneiss, the most ancient rock in Britain.

He had known they were ancient, he said to himself, as he scrambled back down the hill to his hard scrambled eggs. He had a geiger counter in his blood, a mechanism that responded to rock, as swallows to the magnetism of the earth. He did not really need a computer: all that the computer would do would be to confirm his own innate response. This was what was called a feeling for the subject, he supposed.

And now they were going to dig it all up. He had to admit that he would himself rather dig up the Sahara. The Grass of Parnassus did not blossom there, nor the pale blue water lobelia and the marsh orchid. If the company sent him off to the Hebrides, should he on grounds of conscience refuse? Not that they were likely to: he was a hard rock man, not an oil man. He wished that his hard rocks would arrive from Africa: he knew what they were made of, but equally knew that the company would prefer confirmation from this convenient new computer. He gazed out of the Institute window, at the famous view. The blue lobelia had pallid flowers, blue white, and it broke the still mirror surface of the lochs, of the all-covering water, of the cold brown peaty water. It was more water than land, that part of Scotland. That, too, could not be said of the Sahara.

If the rocks turned out to be what he expected (and they would) then he would have been as lucky, in his way, as Frances Wingate. Though he would never get the credit. She, he thought (though without ill-will) seemed to have had more than her fair share of credit. Her performance had amused him.

He rubbed his glasses on his handkerchief. Remember him, for it will be some months before he and Frances Wingate meet again.

 

By the time Frances got to the dinner on the train, she was in intense pain. The whole of the side of her head was aching and drumming, not quite in time with the train's rhythm. She thought she probably had an abscess. From time to time she hit at it with her knuckles, horribly aware of bone and mortality, thinking of the poor Pharaohs with their tooth rot, and the insufferable dental decay of the ancient world. She had two more codeine, and got the waiter to open a whole bottle of wine. The meal was quite pleasant, and she had a table to herself: it was a quiet time of year. She read
The Years
, and ate her eggs in aspic, and her veal, and forgot about her tooth for a second or two while doing it, being an exceptionally greedy person, and then returned seriously, over the fruit and cheese to the subject of pain.

It was too much. She wanted to cry. The codeines had no effect at all. She took another. It was as bad as typhoid and slightly worse than childbirth, up till then her high-water marks of pain. She tried to remember how awful it had been in the back of the landrover, with the vomiting and the diarrhoea and the appalling cramping and clutching in her guts, and above all that the sickening anxiety about actual death. Nobody ever died of a toothache, though somebody—was it Dr Johnson?—had said that if toothache were mortal, it would be the most dreaded of all illnesses. That was a reassuring thought, and she quoted it to herself several times while waiting for her bill, then went through a speech from Shakespeare and a sonnet or two from Keats and Milton, an Ode from Horace, and a piece of Virgil.

The train was thumping unnaturally. She wanted to lie down and cry. When the waiter brought her her bill, she went back to her compartment and lay down on the bed and cried, but it didn't do much good. Desperately, she rang for the attendant and told him she had toothache. He clucked and shook his head and said he was desolated and offered her an aspirin. She declined it. It had been good to speak to somebody, however.

After another half hour, she took a couple of sleeping pills and got into bed and had another drink. She had ceased to care whether or not she made herself ill, and wished only to knock herself out. She repeated ‘On His Blindness' and ‘Westminster Bridge' several times to herself; they had always been a good charm against pain, and she had gone through them many a time while trying to comply with her husband's desire for sexual intercourse, for instance, and had shouted them aloud very wildly in childbirth, till the nurses told her to shut up.

Her head felt like a skull. There was no flesh feeling about it at all, the flesh seemed such irrelevance, a silly perishable covering of the serious matter, which was diseased bone. One might as well
be
dead, she found herself thinking. She had seen a statue once, which had weathered so badly that the head had looked like a skull. The rest of it had been all right, it was only the head that had gone. She felt a bit like that herself. She pinched her leg. It was all right, it was still there, it didn't hurt. She would try and concentrate on how well her legs felt.

She must have dozed off at some point, because she was woken up by the feeling of the train grinding to a halt. She opened her blind, and found that they were in the middle of high dark mountains, at a tiny station. The pain of returning consciousness was so bad that she felt like leaping off and demanding extraction from a local dentist. She couldn't see a place name: perhaps it was some kind of frontier. A lot of people were getting down from the train and heading for the buffet, which curiously enough (it was one o'clock in the morning) seemed to be open and doing good business. Just as she was wondering whether or not to join them, the attendant knocked on her door and told her the train had stopped for three-quarters of an hour, and how was she, and would she like to get out and have a drink with him in the bar. Why not, she thought to herself, and pulled her coat on over her nightdress, and pushed her feet into her shoes, and staggered out onto the icy platform.

Her coat was fur lined. It felt rather good momentarily on her bare arms. The whole of the rest of her body felt numb and weightless: she couldn't feel her legs move. She followed the attendant to the buffet, where he bought her a brandy. The buffet was full of people, positively humming with some curious mountain life of its own: not all of the customers were passengers, some were clearly locals, playing cards, drinking beer, eating omelettes. She stood there in her nightdress drinking. Was it France, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy? She had no idea. Her head wasn't exactly turning, it wasn't there. She was disembodied. The attendant, a smooth-faced young man of about forty, was trying to chat her up in French, but she couldn't hear a word he was saying. She held on to the rail of the bar. Everything had dissolved away, except, amazingly enough, her toothache. That was still at its job, plunging and beating and knocking at her persistently, demanding attention but not getting it: it felt removed, her resistance to it had gone but so had her anxiety, and it raged and throbbed furiously, getting no reply.

The woman behind the bar was sallow and stringy, her hair tied up in a black bun. She wore a black dress and a small white apron. There were men wearing braces. The tariff was multilingual. The attendant went on talking. She bought him a drink, not listening. Then she wandered back onto the platform.

The sky was full of stars, the air bitterly cold. There was a smell of pine, and snow on the hill side. They must be high up: the air felt clear and thin. She ground her knuckles into her cheekbone. My life is amazing, she thought to herself dimly. Did anyone ever die to escape the toothache? The rails gleamed. Suicide ran in the family: her younger sister had killed herself, while at University. It had been called an accident. By accident I was spared. To whom should I feel gratitude?

She had elected Karel. She stood there in the steep and cruel mountains, hitting herself, moaning slightly. The jagged edges soared above her. She looked up and felt faint. Sometimes she had thought she would like to live her life under an anaesthetic. She wasn't up to it; she would fail, yet again. The mountains were, in fact, too high, the desert was, in fact, too hot, the stones were, in fact, too dry. Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable. Why prove that it had ever once been green? And yet, here, on these steep slopes, people lived, played cards, drank beer in the small hours, perched on a gradient too perilous to contemplate, in the path of avalanches. The octopus lived on in its perspex box. The effort of comprehension was beyond her, she felt like despairing; love and understanding were beyond her. In the middle of nowhere, high up, a solitary lunatic, in her dry crater. The world was drying out, and everything she touched would die. Manic. Down on her gleamed the ancient and romantic moon, through the clear sky. It lit the snow. Frantically she hit the other cheekbone, to distribute the pain. Inside the buffet, people ate sausages and talked in an unknown tongue. She did not even know which species was her own.

 

When she reached Paris, she was too ill to lecture. She was whisked off to a dental hospital, and had her tooth extracted. There was no abscess, but the tooth was fanged and green. She kept it as a souvenir.

The next morning, she was put on the aeroplane home. Her gum where the tooth had been was soft and bloody, and she probed it constantly, anxiously, with a surprised relief. Her jaw ached, but pleasantly.

When she got home, she gave the children their presents, and listened to their stories, and kissed them, and was pulled around by them: they were an excitable, assertive, healthy, resolute, daring bunch, her children, constantly milling and seething with an excess of energy, conditioned by herself, perhaps, into an irregular way of life, all stops and starts, departures and homecomings, presents and dramas and disasters. It was not a peaceful home, and after half an hour of Daisy, Josh, Spike and Pru she felt quite shattered and whole again at the same time, and had to shut them up (they got very loud, with any encouragement at all) by showing them her extracted tooth. They admired it as it lay wicked in its gauze wrapping, and then her daughter Daisy embalmed it for her, in her Plasticraft Kit. It was a kit for making plastic jewelry—one could embed in it small shells, seaweed, beads, pebbles. Frances's tooth gleamed from a clear white bed, against a blue ground, preserved forever, a smooth oval. Frances put it in the drawer of her bedside table, along with the false ones Karel had given her. Then she began to wait for Karel.

The postcard she had sent the children arrived a couple of days after her: the post was slow, but not so slow. She calculated when Karel would receive his. She waited for him to write or ring.

He neither wrote nor rang. There was silence from Karel.

For a fortnight or two, she hoped. Then she began to abandon hope. After a month, she despaired, and fell ill.

First of all she caught flu. Though she was never ill, had never had flu in her life. Then she had to have another tooth out. Then, just after Whitsun, she developed a lump on her breast, and had to go into hospital to have it off: she had to sign a paper saying they could take the breast off if they wanted. They didn't: the lump had proved benign. But she was depressed: unreasonably depressed.