The Realms of Gold Read Online Free PDF

underneath that, she wrote,
I love you
.
    There didn’t seem to be much point in signing it. She had no intention of posting it, and anyway, he would know who she was.
    Silly, really, the things she had found herself doing since she fell in love with Karel. Love was certainly a madness as the poets said, and it made even quite adult people behave in a most peculiar way—hoarding, hoping, promising, sending messages. It was the last resort, the last deliverance, for those who could not aspire to the holy love of God. She was not well balanced enough for the holy love of God, she had not the spiritual capacity for it, though she had spiritual concepts from time to time. No, passion had been the only hope for her. It had worked in a way, but the circumstances had been so inconvenient. For instance, Karel’s wife hadn’t liked it at all. And she had so much to put up with from Karel anyway that Frances had sympathized with her unpleasantness.
    I love you, I miss you. It was true, she did miss him, but she’d missed him even while she was in theory with him, because of all the times when in practice she wasn’t. Incredible subterfuges she had been driven to—you tell me what programme you’ll be watching on the telly and I’ll watch it too, you give me a ring at nine exactly but I won’t answer, I’ll know it’s you, you think of me when you’re at college and I’ll think of you in the library. When he got some new false teeth (he had two on a bridge) she made him give her the old set. She carried them around for ages, then put them in a drawer by her bed with his letters. Later, when she had left him, she got them out again, and when she returned from Africa and started again upon social life, she had taken to putting the teeth down the front of her brassiere. She liked the feel of them, Karel’s teeth resting gently and delicately and wirily against her soft evening breast, they kept her company. She had one low-cut dress that she was rather fond of, a soft black one, soft black wool, and one night at a party she caught a man in the act of staring down her cleavage and meeting, entranced and horrified, the sight of Karel’s glaring teeth, the guardians of her virtue. She had taken a man back home with her from that party, an old colleague and friend, and as they got undressed for bed, she got out the teeth and put them on the bedside table, and John had stared at them in alarm, and she had told him what and whose they were, and they had lain in each other’s arms all night, quietly, watched over by those almost luminous dentures, gleaming pale like ivory, more vigilant than a nun’s candle. John had been good and solicitous to her after that, ringing her up sometimes, asking her out to dinner once in a while. He must have thought she was mad, and in need of care and attention. A little of Karel’s virtue had breathed its way through even so poor a relic.
    She and Karel had planned, once, to visit Pilsen, but they hadn’t made it. He had not been there since he was a small child. Most of his family had perished in concentration camps. He alone of his generation had escaped. Teeth and bones. Profanely she cherished his fragments.
    Suddenly she wanted the teeth very badly. She hadn’t had them out for ages. She didn’t even know where they were. It was just possible that she might have them with her, in one of the rarely opened zip pockets of her luggage: she had taken them to Turin, hadn’t she, on that last trip. Or had she? She couldn’t remember.
    Perhaps he has forgotten me, she thought, as she waved to the girl, to bring her her bill.
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    She woke up in the morning in a most frightful panic. She had been dreaming—she dreamed every night, all night, exhaustingly—that she was standing in a bathroom, with blue tiled walls and chrome fittings, and that every detail was as clear to her as if she were really there, though she