The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble Page A

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.
    Â 
    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