The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble Page B

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.
    Writing Karel off as missing, was a process she had never thought to undergo. It was slower and more painful than she had thought possible. Lying feverish in bed at home, lying awake in hospital listening to the heavy breathing of women in pain, she tried to reconcile herself to this loss. She could not really believe that he would not return. He was a kind man: he had shown perplexing kindness to people much less pleasant than herself. His desertion obliged her to reconsider the whole affair.
    He had always sworn loyalty, and she had believed him. Only now, nearly a year later, could she measure by the depth of her shock how much she had trusted and believed him. She had thought that at the slightest hint from her, he would return. She had always been so lucky, and now her luck had run out.
    Of course, she’d never quite trusted her luck. She’d rarely put it to the test, in case it failed her. She’d taken no chances; her guesses had been certainties. She applied for jobs she could not fail to get, she avoided too keen competition, she gave herself a wide margin, she covered her bets. She left Karel before he had a chance of leaving her. And yet, even so, he had managed, posthumously as it were, to reject her. And she had trusted him. He hadn’t seemed a gamble; he had seemed, for various reasons, a certainty.
    She had known Karel Schmidt for years and had had good cause to trust him. She had trusted him surely as much as any wife who is not an entire fool can trust any husband—possibly even more so, for not being married, their relationship had had a whole extra scaffold of uncertainty and inconvenience and shortage of time to prevent the usual cracks of boredom and familiarity from creeping into the structure. Their relationship, she had thought, had been perfect. He had been perfect.
    It was, in reality (she had to count the years) only seven years that she had known him. It seemed much longer. She often looked back on their first meeting. It had taken place at a propitious time in her life, just as she was on the verge of her major excavations on the Chad-Libyan border. She’d already done her preliminary survey, and had got enough grants and backing for a larger expedition. She was full of certainty: she knew the stuff was there, all she had to do was to go and find it. And, almost on the eve of her departure, she’d gone to give a lecture to Karel’s students at the South Eastern Polytechnic. She was going to talk about her discoveries on the last trip, her hopes of the next. She was pleased with herself, cheerful, expectant.
    Karel met her at the station, took her to the Poly, gave her a cup of tea, and