The Realms of Gold Read Online Free

the other side of the room, was staring at her. She stared back and he dropped his eyes. That done, she decided to have a little read of her book. She was reading a novel by Virginia Woolf,
The Years
. One had to be so careful what one read on journeys, because the book would forever bear the mark of the journey, so she always tried to read something not too important but not too trivial either. She remembered reading a volume of short stories by Wells—why, she couldn’t remember—while waiting for Karel to arrive at some incredibly elaborate and doubtful assignation, and the book had been ruined forever: she had to turn its spine to the wall nowadays so she couldn’t read its lettering. And while one of the children had been having his appendix out, she had read Iris Murdoch. On a train, when she had just left her husband forever, she had read
Mr Norris Changes Trains
. Crying, turning the pages, gazing out of the window, crying again, reading a few more pages. Just like now, in fact. The soup plate and the filling were removed by the proprietor’s sulky daughter, the omelette arrived.
    She read a few pages of
The Years
, but she couldn’t concentrate for long. Such gallant old people lived in those pages, but the writer died young by her own hand. Shall I become a lonely gallant old lady, thought Frances Wingate? All in all, it seemed quite likely. She did seem to have amazing powers of survival and adaptation. And it wasn’t surprising, at all, that she had felt bad, here in this city. It had been quite a significant place, in her life. A strange place, with its bleached salty buildings, its fortifications, its serious naval power, its fish bones and conferences, and a few luxury yachts moored amongst the fishing boats, well away from the tankers and the destroyers. She had been here quite often. The first time, many years ago, she had been eighteen years old, and she had sat on that bench on the sea front, and cried and cried—the disaster had been so petty that she had often laughed about it, when recalling or recounting it, but it had seemed the end of the world at the time. She’d been on her way home from a fortnight’s hitch-hiking in Calabria, and here, in this city, where she and her friend were to part, and her friend to catch her train home, she found that she had lost her passport. It must have been stolen from her bag, on their last lift, for nothing else was gone. Bravely she had waved her friend goodbye (she was off back to England, the lucky girl; Frances still had a week more abroad to endure), and then she had wandered down from the station, back down the long steps from the height of the town to its depth, down to the sea front, and there she had sat on the bench, and watched the oily sea. Hopeless, she felt, hopeless and stateless. She hadn’t even got anywhere to spend the night, and two days to wait before her next companion reached her. She wept, tired and dirty. In the end, she pulled herself together and found herself a bed in a convent: it had been a frightening place, with rows of girls sleeping in uncurtained beds, and a curtained nun shuffling behind a screen in a corner, where a candle burned, as though it were a hospital, not a youth centre.
    The candle had upset her. Was it for religion, or for surveillance, she had wondered then, and wondered now? She had had a bad night. But in the morning, she had got up and gone off to the Consulate and bought herself a new passport, it had been as simple as that, as easy as that to reinstate oneself, in those days. And now she did not sleep with rows of girls and a nun, but in the best room in the best hotel. Alone.
    Her second visit had been three years later, with the man she was just about to marry. She had known at the time that it was a mistake to marry him, that on no account ought she to marry him, that she would be no use to him nor he to her. She also knew it was inevitable that the mistake would be