The Realms of Gold Read Online Free Page A

made. It was partly that he was so insistent. He thought he loved her; he could not be dissuaded from this fixed and neurotic idea, and in the end she had decided that he could find out for himself that he didn’t. But oh, how long and horrible the process of discovery had been. He hadn’t been a man to give in easily. Anthony Wingate. She rarely thought of him now, though she bore his name. On that evening, when she was twenty-one, she had escaped from him for half an hour, and had sat watching the sea and thinking of what it would be like, married to Anthony.
    Her third visit had been with Anthony and some of their children, on their way south, on holiday. (How many children? She could hardly remember. Two? Three? Or maybe even four??) How odd these family holidays had been, how painful, and yet at times how poignant, how lovely the moments salvaged. They had been bitter with one another most of the time, she and her husband: he was a cold man with a violent temper, and she was frightened of him, but she was not easily intimidated, she refused to submit. Obstinate to the last degree, she had pursued her career, her interests, her own self, in his despite. She had hardened herself on him. On holidays, she had tried to soften, for the children’s sake, but it was impossible—they would quarrel in the car, fight bitter disputes over meal times, shout and throw things at one another at night, quarrel over trivia—where to stop, where to stay, what to eat, what to buy, how to treat the children. (The children, tough, resilient, good-natured, ignored their parents’ folly, and amused themselves.) Holidays, from the adult point of view, had been largely an occasion for intensive, undistracted warfare. But even then, there had been strange lakes of time when a view of a mountain, a tree in flower, a courtyard, had seemed to retain its own self despite their destructive passions, when, they would have, the two of them, even a moment of peace in the face of some more powerful natural phenomenon. They had been overcome, from time to time, in their littleness. It had not happened here: it was one of the most famous views in the world, but it had not done its famous trick, for they had spent their two hours here (they were passing through, they had stopped for lunch) arguing about where to have lunch. Anthony had wanted an expensive meal, she could tell, but hadn’t been able to stand the thought of the children larking around in a good restaurant. Frances didn’t give a damn what the children did, they never embarrassed her. They had compromised, and both had sulked, looking over the famous bay. But later that day, a little further south, they had had a moment of remission: they had driven through a small forest, high over the sea, and the roots of the trees had been crazily exposed and twisted, and strange undergrowth flourished, and they had stopped the car, and looked at the improbable vegetation in some awe. Fungi, odd fleshy plants, brown leaves, spotted leaves, thin needle leaves, mould and heaped curving interweaving branches, like nothing in nature, showing what?—that there was hope, that there were more manifestations than man’s miserable limited mind could dream of, that not even she, all-thoughtful, never-resting, never-rested, could either create or destroy by her own misery the variety of the earth’s creation, for such a sight she had never dreamed of.
    She thought of the octopus again and smiled. Why did she love it so? She had loved its grey fleshy body, its lovely tinted iridescent grey muscles, its faint blushes and changes, its round suckers, its responsiveness, its sensibility, its grace. And, smiling, she thought of that last, that most significant visit to this city. She had been here with Karel. They had had two days here together, a lifetime. On one of the days they had gone out for a walk, and with their usual lack of success they had found the most terrible place in