The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble [Drabble, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780544289697
Google: PZXTAAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 105068
Publisher: Ivy Books
Published: 1975-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Frances Wingate spent the weekend before her departure for Adra with her brother’s family, in the country. Her brother had a large cottage in the Cotswolds: once he had filled it at weekends with his own children, but now they were dispersed at boarding schools, and Frances had brought her own four. Though Hugh’s children were dispersed only in theory—the night before, the Friday night, his eldest son Stephen and his grandchild had arrived from Sussex, unexpectedly (though Frances privately fancied that they had come to see her). She was still worried about Stephen: something was up, she felt sure. So they were a large gathering, a family party, and there they sat, on the Saturday night, by an open fire, drinking, talking, remembering old times. Her own three younger ones had gone upstairs, though not to bed: they were expected to sleep in sleeping bags on mattresses on the floor (all the beds had had to be divided), and therefore they were fighting and jumping about and quarrelling and reading damp spidery piles of their cousins’ old comics. Frances’s long-legged daughter, Daisy, was sitting below, with her niece on her knee, and keeping very quiet in case somebody noticed her and sent her to bed. Stephen, Frances and Hugh were talking about Freud: Hugh’s wife, Natasha, was leafing through a picture book of Ife and Nok sculptures that Frances had brought her. (It was an expensive book, but Frances had been sent a review copy, and anyway she doubted its thesis.) The fire crackled and popped: it smelt of wood and resin. There were yew boughs on it, lopped from the overhanging tree at the end of the church garden. It had seemed unlucky to lop them yet unlucky to leave them, so there they burned, with their pale poisonous gummy roasting berries. A pleasant scene, a rural scene, a family scene.

It was a pretty cottage, they were widely thought to have been lucky to find it. It was in a lovely part of the country—fertile, picturesque, with steep hills and valleys, verdant, unspoiled, expensive. Natasha, whose domestic touch Frances at times had time to envy, had made it exceptionally pretty. It was a large grey stone building—three cottages, in fact, knocked into one, with a large open room downstairs, a large kitchen for eating, and a small study, and upstairs a sequence of intercommunicating bedrooms. The garden outside sloped down to the churchyard: a gate led from the side onto a steep sloping field, with walks and sheep, and a small wood. The village contained a few shops, two pubs, a Country Crafts Centre. An idyllic position, everyone agreed. Natasha loved the country, she gardened with enthusiasm, she cooked and baked and painted, she chopped wood and tried to rear carp in the small pond. Frances admired her. She had just admired a large dinner cooked by her—farmhouse pâté, a casserole, salad, and home-made bread. The bread was brown and shining, with a woven plait on top of it, its crust a perfect brittle glaze, yellow brown like a harvest offering.

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