The Realms of Gold Read Free Page B

postcard—they would be pleased, they had watched the television programme with her about the programmed octopus, indeed they had summoned her with cries from the kitchen to watch it, one of them with tears in her eyes about the poor mother dying in her nest, and it was because of them really, that she’d told Professor Andersson that she’d like to see the research laboratory. They’d be interested in that. Though she might well get home before the postcard, the post was dreadfully slow. Somebody told her there’d been a postal strike in this country, but that wasn’t so bad, in fact, because they were delivering all the most recently posted things, it was the very old ones that had to wait, lingering in the boxes for months till all the backlog was cleared, and if it wasn’t cleared before the next inevitable strike, well, too bad, there they would stay for another few months. Not that it mattered, she’d be home soon.
    A piece of bone had lodged itself between her wisdom tooth and her back molar. Annoying. She prodded at it with her tongue, but failed to dislodge it. She had another glass of wine, swilling it around hopefully—weren’t fish bones supposed to melt? And this wine was acid enough to melt anything, even Cleopatra’s pearl. Wine of the house, in a smeared carafe. Sometimes she did wish she didn’t drink so much. Though she’d only just finished that bottle of brandy, hadn’t she? But then she’d been dined out every night. An eighth of a bottle a day, on top of what she’d been given and the experimental little bottles she’d taken out of the convenient little refrigerators. Modest, really, quite a reassuring calculation. Though not quite so reassuring, because there’d also been that open half bottle of scotch, that she’d finished off on the first night with Peter Borg, and she’d noticed he’d hardly had any. Oh dear. It would be too awful to become a real alcoholic, and to have to make these little self-deceiving calculations all the time—but I only had three doubles, and wine doesn’t count, and I’m sure John drank
some
of that bottle, and anyway I’m going to give it up tomorrow—all that kind of thing. This wine really was sour. She quite liked sour wine. She had another half glass, and then began to prod at the bone with a toothpick—funny how they were so lavish with toothpicks abroad, even in places like this. (She’d come here really because it would have been too embarrassing to meet Andersson or Galletti or any of her other contacts in any other restaurant when she’d promised them she was going to eat in the hotel and go to bed early. Which she might even have done, but eating in the hotel wouldn’t have filled in enough of the evening. It was still only nine o’clock.) She was prodding at her teeth more energetically than she would have done if she had been entirely sober, as she thought these dull thoughts, and so she was not particularly surprised, though rather alarmed, when she dislodged not only the fish bone, but also a fair sized piece of filling from her wisdom tooth. As the tooth consisted of little but filling (the dentist had wanted to pull it out last time, and she hadn’t let him, because it seemed such a bad omen, to lose a wisdom tooth), she couldn’t believe she had lost anything very important—he’d warned her that he was filling it for the last time. But the lump of silvery metal which she extracted, delicately, with her finger, and laid upon the side of her soup plate, did look rather large. Nervously, she explored what was left. There seemed to be very little left, but at least it didn’t hurt. She washed a little more wine around it, and was grateful that she had ordered an omelette for her next course. Stringy foreign biftek would have been the end.
    She was beginning to feel quite cheerful. The man at the other table, right across