The Realms of Gold Read Free

more closely about her pill-taking habits, and remained puzzled by her resistance. But then, he had never been convinced that there was anything much wrong with her.)
    When she left her husband, the thing stopped altogether, for a while. Aha, she had said to herself.
    It started up again some time later, and had continued, though very intermittently, through the happiest years of her life. It was back again now, but not surprisingly. She poured herself another drink, and wandered over to the gilt-edged mirror and looked at herself, while thinking of the happiest years of her life, and wondered if they could really be over, as it now seemed. She looked at herself, red and blotchy, her skin with broken veins (drink, of course, as much as age), and thought that she certainly didn’t look as though she had much future. The notion amused her, because she was after all only in her mid-thirties, and doing very well for herself in other ways. She blew her nose, and decided to feel better, if she possibly could.
    It was partly her own fault that she was feeling so bad. She must, in some way, have wanted it. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have come back to this very town, where she had parted from the only man she had ever loved, the only man in Europe. (She liked that phrase and said it to herself from time to time, and in a sense it was appropriate as well as melodramatic, for the man in question had been a middle European, born in Pilsen though reared in Palmers Green.) She deserved to feel bad, after all. One had to relive one’s own worst moments. (Part of her said, if one must be miserable, one might as well have something to be miserable
about
.)
    Though she was feeling, distinctly, better. Blowing her nose, powdering her nose, wiping her eyes. It’s all your own fault, she said to herself, you shouldn’t spend so much time alone. You should have gone to dinner with Andersson, as you were supposed to.
    But I didn’t
want
to, she answered herself. I’d seen enough people, I’d met too many people.
    Oh heavens, she said to herself, and looked at her watch. It was, amazingly, mercifully, ten to eight. One good thing about one’s bad moments, they did speed up once they got going. It was only the approach that was so laboriously, so boringly, so painfully slow. It was rather like work. Settling down to work was agonizingly tedious, and yet once one got into it the time flew away. Ten to eight. If she went out now for dinner, and had a little walk on the way there, and a little walk on the way back, it would be time to go to bed when she got back to the hotel, and the whole evening would be over, polished off, finished forever. She looked at herself. Did she look ill, did she look drunk? She must not shame the Institute, whose honoured guest she was. She didn’t look too bad, surely, she would pass.
    She put on her coat, picked up her bag, walked smartly down the stairs, and handed in her key, with a familiar deceptive briskness, as though she were very busy and slightly late for an important assignation.
    Over a plate of soup, a little later, she thought about the only man in Europe, that man from Palmers Green. (He lived in Fulham now.) She thought about him a great deal of the time. She wondered again why it was that she had left him, and why she was sitting here alone, and whether it had been her fault or his. Had he driven her away, or had she departed? The latter, surely. The issue had become confused, by her insistence that it wasn’t in any way his fault that she was leaving, that it had been entirely her own, and that it was her wicked nature that was to blame. As she recalled, she had blamed her bad nature, and her work. He was ruining both, she had said. He was making her better natured, and he was preventing her from wanting to work. This had been true, but she doubted if it could really have been her reason for leaving him—more like a reason for staying, it sounded now, after the