The Realms of Gold (11 page)

Joy, she noticed, had a black eye. Her face was thin and angry, and the lines from her nose to her mouth signified a permanent rage. Frances found herself worried for Karel, on more than one score. What had he done, to make another woman look like that? While she herself was sitting amidst her finery, brown and blooming? It was so long since she herself had been through the misery of marital violence that she had forgotten what it was like. This was one of the things that seemed to annoy Joy most: you get rid of your husband, she had yelled, then you sit here at his expense and just take what you fancy of mine. This, again, had been an inaccuracy, for it had been many years since Frances had needed any subsidy from her admittedly rather wealthy husband, but it did not seem worth correcting, in the mood of the moment. Frances felt more like asking why Joy considered her mother to be a murderer, but didn't dare to do that either: she tended to agree with her, and would have been prepared to discuss the subject in an amicable and joint manner, but it took her some time to learn (from Karel) that Joy, before he married her, had had an abortion, and considered Mrs Ollerenshaw (who happened to be a gynaecologist much in favour of abortion), as part of a conspiracy to sterilize the lower classes.

Meanwhile, they sat there and waited. After a while, Joy said, with intense bitterness, ‘Don't you think you have anything like a profound relationship with Karel, will you? He doesn't tell you a thing.'

‘Doesn't he?' said Frances.

She wondered if it was true, in the ensuing silence. Maybe he didn't; it hadn't seemed to matter much.

‘For instance,' said Joy, ‘he didn't tell you about me, did he?'

‘What about you?'

‘Anything about me,' said Joy.

‘He certainly didn't tell me how awful you were, if that's what you mean,' said Frances, mildly stung, then added, ‘Did he tell you about me?'

‘Of course,' said Joy, with a nasty snap of the lips. ‘I don't suppose you've even noticed,' said Joy, ‘how ill he's been looking of late?'

‘He's been looking tired,' said Frances.

‘He didn't tell you about Bob?' said Joy.

‘What about Bob?' said Frances, suddenly losing her nerve. Bob was the name of Karel's eldest child.

‘He's terribly ill. Seriously ill,' said Joy, with a malicious satisfaction so intense that Frances felt her head swim. ‘He didn't tell you that, did he? I bet he didn't tell you that. He wouldn't tell
you
a thing.'

Frances sat back and shut her eyes, feeling sick. Perhaps the woman was lying. She looked mad, acted mad; she might well lie. But it was true, Karel had been horribly ill and tired of late. He had said it was work and the mortgage.

‘I
don't
believe you,' said Frances after a while. ‘If it were true, you couldn't conceivably sound so bloody pleased about it.'

‘I'm past caring,' said Joy.

Frances reflected. ‘I'm going to ring Karel,' she said. ‘Perhaps he's at your place by now.'

This remark precipitated another flood of abuse, mostly about mysterious telephone calls, implausible wrong numbers, and the size of the Schmidt phone bill.

‘You're quite wrong,' said Frances, ‘I'd never ring your place. I was always too unwilling to speak to you. Now I see how wise I was.' And she got up and went over to the telephone, only to find herself once more assaulted on the way. Joy was screaming this time that she wasn't going to have a woman like Frances disturbing her children. ‘You don't seem to mind disturbing mine,' said Frances, between blows: blood was running down the side of her face from where the glass had hit it, and now Joy was beating her over the head with a copy of the
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse
which had been conveniently lying around. After a short skirmish, she managed to push Joy back into her corner of the settee, where she sat, breathing heavily, and looking crosser than ever.

It was upon this scene that Karel entered. He had a key and let himself in, but seemed to be expecting this sight before him, because he already looked harassed to death. He was greeted by another flying book, and half a bottle of wine, which went all over the place.

‘Oh Christ,' said Karel.

Frances felt like bursting into tears, but instead sat there. Karel stood in the doorway, dripping wine, and trying vaguely to wipe it off the paintwork with his hand.

‘Have a drink,' said Frances. ‘If there's anything left.'

‘Darling,' said Karel, in rather an uncertain and undirected way.

‘Darling
who
?' said Joy, pulling herself together again.

‘Please have a drink,' said Frances, and got up and poured him one.

‘Always the perfect hostess,' said Joy, with childish savagery.

Karel crossed over and took the drink. He held her hand. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘What a mess, what a mess.'

‘I don't mind,' said Frances, hopelessly. She was beginning to mind, rather badly, now that Karel was there, and couldn't see how he could possibly cope with the situation. It crossed her mind that the best thing to do would be, quietly, to leave the room and let them get on with it, whatever it was: she started to detach her fingers from Karel's, but he held on.

‘I'd better go,' she said.

‘Why should you go?' said Karel. ‘It's your house.'

This remark, perhaps understandably, aroused Joy again from her corner of the settee: she went for them both this time, flailing but effective, inflicting rather a lot of damage. After a while Karel hit her very hard, and she sank down on the floor, and shut her eyes, as though that was what she had been waiting for. She sat there, propped up against a table leg, and appeared to pass out.

Frances, weeping at last, took a disconsolate gulp of Scotch and sat down on the settee. She didn't dare to look at Karel. The violence of his blow had silenced her too.

‘What on earth was all this about?' said Karel, after a minute or two, coming to sit down by her.

Frances explained that she didn't know, that Joy had just turned up and gone for her, that she had no idea what it was all about. Talking about it, she began to feel better. Karel, on the other hand, seemed to get worse and worse, sunk into a more and more profound gloom. Frances ended up stroking his hair and his face. ‘You didn't tell me Bob was ill,' she said, after a while, whispering, as though Joy were asleep, which maybe she was. And he told her about Bob; he'd been very ill, he'd had some mysterious and permanent high fever, he'd been for a month in hospital waiting for the worst, they'd expected the worst, and then, in the end, somebody had diagnosed it as a curable but extremely obscure virus, and now he was all right and home again.

‘You didn't tell me a word,' said Frances, struck to the heart. ‘Not one word.'

‘I didn't want to worry you,' said Karel.

‘Why not?' said Frances. ‘I love you. I'm here to be worried. I
want
to be worried. I fell in love with you because you worried so much about me, why do you deny me the same privilege?'

And they went over it all: love, fear, commitment, fear of commitment, lack of mutual living. Joy slept through it all, worn out by emotion. I'll never leave you, Karel told Frances. She said that she believed him. As a pale green watery dawn broke, and the birds began to sing in the trees in her large garden, Karel and Frances started to pick up the pieces, throwing broken glass into one corner, assembling precious ancient fragments, trying to prop up the mangled ferns and pot plants. There was earth all over the carpet, as well as wine and blood and glass. Karel got the hoover, and began to hoover, but it was clearly a major task, and Frances persuaded him to abandon it.

Joy lay inert. ‘She
is
irresponsible,' said Karel, dishcloth in hand. ‘She's left those children alone all night. I wish she wouldn't do that kind of thing.'

‘And where were
you
? So late at night?'

‘Me?' said Karel. He looked slightly shifty and embarrassed. ‘Oh, I got stuck at college. Then I had to go home with Mrs Mayfield.'

‘Darling,' said Frances, with reproach. Mrs Mayfield was a tedious old lady, an ex-student, who had wasted many years of Karel's life.

‘I'm sorry,' said Karel, nervously.

‘You should have been either here or at home,' said Frances, ‘and then all this wouldn't have happened. You haven't any time to waste on Mrs Mayfield.'

‘Nor has anybody else any time to waste on Mrs Mayfield,' said Karel. ‘So I must.'

‘I love you,' said Frances, with conviction.

‘I make such a mess,' said Karel, irresolutely, ‘through trying to give people what they want. She' (pointing to Joy) ‘wants to be knocked about. I hate doing it, I really do.'

She had rarely heard him speak of himself in this way.

And you, he went on to her, all you seem to want is exactly what I want to give. How couldn't I like it better with you?

They stood there in the wrecked room, holding hands, contemplating the debris of their own confusions. They were both strong and healthy people, able to take a lot more of the same kind of thing. One blow, one row, was nothing. They would tidy up and begin again.

After a while Joy began to stir and mumble, and Karel picked her up and took her home, and Frances went to bed for what was left of the night.

The incident did not part them, as perhaps Joy had intended. If Joy had thought Frances a kind person or a nervous person, who would be disturbed by the sight of another's grief and rage, she had miscalculated. At times Frances wished she was a little nicer and kinder, but she wasn't, and that was that. Indeed, in a sense Joy had demonstrated how right Karel had been to seek an alternative, and Frances felt marginally less guilty than before. For his part, Karel seemed determined to take Frances more into his confidence: though naturally a secretive person, he made an effort to tell her about himself, his family, he introduced her to his past, his children. He even offered to show her where he lived, when Joy was out, and seemed surprised when she said she didn't want to see the flat off the Fulham Road. In other respects, their affair became like a second marriage. Frances's friends and children accepted Karel as her man: they went out together sometimes, though not often, for their chief problem was lack of time. Frances was an energetic and successful woman, with a life full of domestic, social and professional engagements, and Karel was also busy. He took on far too much, he spread himself far too thin. His life was full of past obligations, old Jewish refugees, impoverished college friends, old school friends, wealthy and boring fools, silly students, mad entrepreneurs, con men, thieves and liars of every kind. Frances accused him once of not knowing a single sane or interesting person, and he had agreed with her, but had defended his case: it was wicked, he said, to discriminate amongst people on the grounds of whether or not they were interesting. One should love all (Frances privately believed that he had married Joy because she was so awful: she hated to think that Karel had made her awful, and very little research had reassured her that she had been to pieces before Karel got to her, paranoid, miserable, mad. He might have liked her for her bad qualities, he might even have connived at and encouraged them, but at least he wasn't their sole origin).

And so you love me, said Frances, awful though I am?

You're different, of course he would say. You're my one indulgence in life. You're the one person I choose, who also chooses me. That's why you can't leave me. I can't survive without you.

She listened, anxious to believe.

And as he seemed to her to be incapable of organizing himself, she organized herself, over the years. She cut down on unnecessary work, she stopped travelling so much, she tried to stop going out to see people. She no longer needed other people: she got plenty of attention from Karel. It was all right, really. Sometimes she thought she had constructed a perfect situation for herself. And yet, she herself had destroyed it. After that holiday, their one holiday abroad, she had had enough. Something rebelled in her, something began to make trouble: she found herself saying to herself things like, ‘it simply isn't in me to spend the rest of my life ruining my career for a man who will never marry me.' Though that wasn't it, at all: for one thing, she wasn't ruining her career, and for another thing, she didn't much want to marry Karel. She was quite happy on her own. The words seemed to come into her head from nowhere, but once they started to come, that had been the end of it: she couldn't resist them. Karel wasn't as unresisting: he shouted at her, pleaded with her, wept at her, not minding that she should see how much he suffered. She was awestruck. If
he
had left
her
, how she would have dissimulated, how she would have pretended that she did not care, that it did not matter, that it had never mattered. How she would have pretended never to have loved him. His difference of approach stunned her. It had a grandeur, a generosity, a simplicity, of which she felt herself utterly incapable. He was far, far beyond her, in some different land. She would never be able to join him. She would return to her trivial round of excavations and lectures and television series and parties, suffering in the upper mountain reaches of her being, while his nature lay deep and opaque, levelled to base level, without the jagged cataracts of the self, deep, persistent, continuous, deep like the river meeting the sea.

 

And so it was something of a shock to her, to find that water dry. She'd sent him an unambiguous postcard, telling him she loved him and missed him, and he hadn't rushed in love or pity to her side. He would have taken pity on a dog, a cat, a hamster, but he'd lost pity for her. Whatever could have happened to him, what had she done? She had been so certain that he would take her back. At times she said to herself, he would have taken pity on a dog, but the fact that he takes no pity on me can only mean he loves me still, thus he distinguishes me. But she didn't think much of this explanation. She knew it was nonsense. She knew he would have come to her. (The true explanation never crossed her mind.)