A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  Tony Kettle returns from an evening at the Bowens to find his mother lying snoring on the living-room settee. Her head is thrown back, and she snores, deeply, evenly, rhythmically. The television is still on, but it is soundless. The remote-control gadget has dropped from Fanny’s fingers and lies on the Persian rug by an empty bottle of Bulgarian Mountain Cabernet, an empty wineglass, an empty packet of cigarettes, an orange plastic cigarette lighter, and a stub-filled triangular Craven-A mock-antique ashtray. It is twenty to ten. Tony gazes at his mother with an indeterminate expression which accurately reflects his indeterminate feelings, then watches for a while the muted but loquacious participants in an incestuous BBC Answerback free-for-all about the alleged obscenity of a recent drama series. Tony does not know whether to creep quietly upstairs, like a prudent coward, or whether to attempt to wake his mother and persuade her to go to bed too. His father is away at a conference, so it doesn’t really matter if she lies there all night, or until (which is more probable) she rouses herself in the small hours, makes herself a cup of tea, and then puts herself to bed.

  He wanders into the kitchen to think things over. He has had a pleasant evening with his friend Sam and Sam’s parents. Tony had not met Alix and Brian Bowen before. Alix did not seem the kind of mother that one would find lying asleep on a settee with an empty bottle of wine, but she was by no means unalarming: her wild grey hair, her piercing blue eyes, her intent concentration on everything one said, her large gestures, her sudden exclamations over forgotten parsley sauce, all these things had been slightly disconcerting. She seemed of a different generation from Tony’s mother, but Tony was used to that: most mothers belonged to an older generation than his own freakish darling. Most mothers, in Northam as in Ogham, seemed more reliable, more capable, more regular, more dull than Fanny Kettle. But Alix had not been dull: she had been full of talk, full of questions, full of enthusiasms. She had been particularly interested and indeed well informed about Tony’s father’s recent dig. She knew about chariot burials and Romans.

  Sam Bowen claimed that she was obsessed by a murderer in Porston Prison, and Tony Kettle had waited eagerly for evidence of this, but none had emerged.

  Instead, Alix over the fish pie had talked of the finds at Wetwang, the burials at Eastwold. She was fascinated to learn that the Kettles had actually lived at Eastwold, practically on the site, as it were. She wanted to know what it was like living at Eastwold Grange, how he had found the social life of Ogham, whether she ought to go and visit the ruins of Ogham Abbey. She expressed a polite desire to meet the Kettle parents.

  Tony had drunk a glass of white wine with his supper. There wasn’t any pudding.

  ‘I’m afraid I never make puddings,’ said Alix, as though this deficiency had newly occurred to her. ‘I don’t know why, but I never do.’

  Brian Bowen, Sam’s father, had showed less interest in ar chaeology, but equal interest in Tony’s impressions of social life in East and South Yorkshire. Brian worked, Tony gathered, for fhe Education Department of Northam City Council. He wanted to know what Tony thought about sixth form colleges, how many kids had gone on to do A-Levels at Ogham, that kind of thing.

  ‘Your parents didn’t think of boarding-school?’ he asked, at one point.

  ‘I wouldn’t go,’ said Tony. ‘They suggested it, but I would stay at home.’ He laughed, a little uncomfortable at being the centre of so much attention. ‘Really boring it was, but I would stay.’ He paused, took another sip of wine, continued boldly, ‘But they took me around, you know. I didn’t spend all my youth in the sticks, as Sam likes to think. I went around with my mother. To London. And Paris. And Venice. Places like that.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Alix; thinking, what an odd boy, what can his parents have been up to?

  Tony Kettle, standing irresolute an hour later in the vast high-ceilinged kitchen of the new Kettle residence, wonders the same thing. And wonders if Brian and Alix are normal parents, or whether there are no such creatures as normal parents? And if there were, would he want them for his own? He shrugs. He doubts it. He will take life as it is. What choice is there, after all?

  He returns to the living-room, quietly removes the glass, the bottle and the ashtray, and slowly, sneakily, from the far end of the room, increases the volume of sound on the television. His mother stirs, mumbles, suddenly sits bolt upright, as Tony backs out of the door and makes his escape up the stairs.

  Attractive danger. Natural curiosity. Unnatural curiosity. Charles Headleand cannot resist pursuing a visa for Baldai, Alix Bowen cannot resist travelling to see her murderer across the lonely moor, Susie Enderby cannot resist returning to take tea with Fanny Kettle, Janice Enderby cannot resist inviting people to dinner and Liz Headleand will not be able to resist an invitation to appear in a contentious debate on television. Their friend Stephen Cox has been unable to resist one of the challenges of the century, the secretive Pol Pot, hiding in his lair, at the end of the Shining Path.

  Cliff Harper’s approach to the cliff edge of danger is less voluntary. He does not have an illusion of freedom. He has been struggling for years to prevent himself from reaching this precipice. He lies awake at night, adding up columns of figures, counting his creditors. He lacks the gift of self-deception, the Micawber touch which might have got him out of this mess. His partner Jim Bakewell blames him for lack of confidence. ‘You’ve got to think positive,’ Jim is—or was—fond of saying.

  Cliff thinks that is all beside the point. Figures are what count, not faith.

  His relationship with Jim deteriorates, almost as dramatically as the non-contractual relationship between Jim’s wife Yvonne and Cliff’s wife Shirley has done. These two women cannot stand one another. The origins of their mutual dislike are lost in history, though there is some remembered legend about a rejected piece of lemon meringue pie. It is known that Yvonne thinks Shirley gets ‘above herself’, ‘thinks a lot of herself’, ‘thinks she’s too good for this world’. ‘Who does she think she is?’ is the phrase that springs most frequently to Yvonne’s lips, when speaking of Shirley. Shirley, for her part, cannot forget or forgive a remark Yvonne once made about Shirley’s mother and the virtual seclusion in which Shirley’s mother chose to live. Cliff and Jim, for years, attempted to mediate, and then to keep the women apart, but rancour persisted, and has now flooded into their own friendship. ‘What did I tell you?’ is now Yvonne’s refrain.

  Jim resigns as fellow-director, tries to get his money out. There is no money. There is talk of liquidation of assets, of consulting an insolvency practitioner. Jim argues (rightly) that insolvency practitioners come very expensive and that the company’s accounts will not rise to one. Cliff muddles on. He cannot sleep, he cannot eat, he loses weight. He worries, secretly, about his health, and furtively consults medical dictionaries in the Information Centre at the public library. They terrify him, as leaflets on insolvency in that same library terrify Shirley. Things drag on, good money is borrowed and thrown after bad, money leaks and oozes away, staff are laid off, the Customs and Excise query Cliff’s VAT returns, he cannot work out how to deregister.

  He does not discuss these matters with Shirley. He has become morose and surly, impossible to live with. He punishes her for his sense of impending failure. He torments her. She wonders if she can stand it much longer. He is a changed man, he is not the man she thought she married. She can see no way out. A kind of dull despair settles in her: this is it, this is the end. But there is no end.

  Meanwhile, she cooks Cliff’s breakfast, and cooks his supper: she cleans his house, pays his household bills, washes his clothes, cleans his bath, buys his soap and lavatory paper. The house ticks over, Shirley ticks over, Shirley-and-Cliff tick over. They watch television together, they sleep in the same bed, occasionally they even go out for a meal together.

  It all seems a little unreal, but then, the country at large seems a little unreal too. It is hard to tell if it is ticking over or not. Are we bankrupt or are we prosperous? Have we s
quandered our resources and drained the North Sea gold, or is the economy booming and the balance of payments healthier than it has been for decades? Are our hospitals crumbling and our streets full of litter, or have we triumphantly reduced the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement? Are there nearly four million unemployed with unemployment rising daily, especially in the north, or are the unemployment figures sinking daily, especially in the north? Has spending on the National Health Service since 1979 gone down by 5 per cent, as the Opposition claims, or up by 24 per cent, as the government claims? Each day brings new figures, new analysis, new comment, new interpretations, newly false oppositions of factors that cannot properly be compared: for the nation has fallen in love with statistics, although it cannot decide what they mean. A few eyewitnesses continue to describe what they see, as they travel by tube, walk the streets, wait in bus shelters, queue in doctors’ waiting-rooms, serve on juries, and clutch their wire baskets at the supermarket check-out, but others accuse them of telling atrocity stories, of indulging in a pornography of squalor.

  Brian Bowen has learned nothing from the last few years. He stands where he did. He is an unreconstructed socialist. He has not learned doubt. Alix has learned doubt, but not Brian. Brian is less reconstructed than his friend Blinkhorn of Northam City Council, a man of the New Hard Pragmatic Middle Left. He is far less reconstructed than his older and closer friend, Otto Werner, economist, who has left for Washington, as part of the Brain Drain. Brian is way, way out of date. He is so far out of date that sometimes he thinks the revolution may, in its revolving, turn again to his own aged and honourable position. Meanwhile, he organizes evening classes and worries over balance sheets and interviews teachers and sets up courses and seminars, and even finds time to do a little teaching himself. And out there, amongst the people, he fancies he finds some unreconstructed socialists like himself. One of them, a middle-aged catering manageress, is so unreconstructed that she thinks the correct term is ‘unreconstituted’, and firmly declares herself on any suitable occasion to be just that—unreconstituted—proudly, as though she were a wholesome piece of prime beef or fresh fish, not a knitted turkey roll or a soya hamburger.

  The truth is that Brian, since coming up to Northam, his home town, has felt happier, less isolated, in his unreconstructed state. He is not, here, driven to extremes of position, as he had been in London. The political atmosphere here seems more decent, more realistic, less febrile and opinionated than the atmosphere in London. This is partly because the left here has more roots, more confidence, more sense of tradition. Northam has a left-wing council and a vast majority of Labour Members of Parliament, so Brian here does not have to feel like a pariah or a crazed dreamer. He does not have to fight every inch of the way, every day, as he did in the Adult Education College in south London that jumped at the chance of making him redundant. True, Northam has a reputation for being extremist, for being of the ‘loony left’, but anybody who lives there knows that this reputation is greatly exaggerated. Northam is a solid provincial town, staggering now from the recession, but not yet on its knees. Perry Blinkhorn and Clive Enderby may not yet be on speaking terms, and may feel culturally condemned to despise one another, but they come from the same stock, they speak with the same accent, they share some of the same hopes, and they have more in common with one another than either have with the yuppies and city slickers and get-rich-quick boys of a south which they distrust. Brian fits in here. He settles back into the familiar city that bore him, and which he struggled so hard to leave.

  And Alix, far more uprooted than he, far less a northerner, far less in tune with Northam’s brand of socialism—she does not seem too out of place, too unhappy, either. She has made new friends, she has found herself a job, she keeps up her criminal connections, and she too loves the landscape. She does not miss London as she had feared she might.

  Sometimes Brian finds himself remembering (or reconstructing, perhaps?) some remarks made by Alix when there had seemed to be a probability that Brian’s new job might take him not from London to Northam but from London to Gloseley, an unattractive Midlands town famed chiefly for its nuclear missile station and its attendant Peace Women. Alix had said that if they went to Gloseley, she could join the women over their camp-fires. But, Brian had protested, you don’t even think you believe in unilateral disarmament. No, said Alix, I don’t suppose I do, now, but I could become an outcast, and if I became an outcast by joining those women, then I would begin to believe what they believe. That’s how it would go. I would sit by the fire, and that would bring belief.

  Fitting in, believing, consensus, outcasts. Yes, he could see clearly an Alix who would crouch by a fire warming her hands on a mug of soup, her fingers dirty, her grey hair wild, her eyes glittering, her mind slowly filling with belief, as her body took on the posture of a witch. She would knit little Peace Emblems and tie them fluttering to the barbed wire: she would murmur incantations in ghostly gay company. It was perfectly plausible, this version of Alix, in a way it was what she had been bred to be, by her school, by her parents, by generations of radical intellectual nonconformists. She had been bred to be a protestor, a marcher, a martyr, a woman of faith. She had met her first husband, who had died long before Brian met her, on a protest march. In the face of such destiny, the details of conviction, of opinion, did not matter: it was the posture of protest that gave one shape, belief, faith. If one is born and bred to a role of outcast protestor, then one must adopt it, in order to conform.

  But Alix had not adopted it. Reason had been too strong for her; reason followed, fatally, by doubt. She had become deviant. And she had detached herself from politics, in disillusion; she had taken up psychotics and long country walks instead.

  Well, she had not quite detached herself from politics. She cannot wean herself away altogether. She cannot help looking for a way forward, for a new consensus that will unite her and Brian and Perry Blinkhorn and Otto Werner and their absent friend Stephen Cox, Stephen, the most extreme of all. She has been reading a book called How Britain Votes, which describes the emergence of a new semi-professional class of Perry Blinkhorns and catering manageresses and nursery schoolteachers and social workers, which suggests that higher education in practice as well as in theory leads to a liberalization of attitude on such matters as capital punishment. Clutching at straws, at men of straw. For does not everything else she reads suggest that we are moving towards a new intolerance, a new negation of ‘progress’, a culture where education is openly used not to liberalize and unite, but to segregate and divide?

  Alix and Brian agree to differ, for their hearts are united. They may differ about means, but their vision of a just society is the same. Their marriage has been through some rough times lately, but they seem to have survived them. Unlike some of the couples in this narrative, they do not seem at the moment to be heading for marital disaster.

  Shirley Harper has no interest in politics at all. At the last election, she did not even vote. Cliff Harper, small businessman, small employer and member of the petty bourgeoisie, is, as How Britain Votes would predict, of the die-hard right-wing. He is slightly acquainted, through Shirley’s sister Liz, through his sister-in-law Dora, with Brian and Alix, but they do not, cannot like one another or trust one another. Alix, who extends sympathy and interest to criminals and murderers, finds it very hard to listen with patience to the views of a Cliff Harper. This is one of her more serious limitations, a limitation of which she is, seriously, unaware.

  Alix enjoys danger, but Brian, like Cliff, does not. Brian does not need it, does not see the point of it, wishes that people could get along without it. He gets impatient when rescue teams are called out in appalling conditions by parties of stranded walkers in the Lake District. He secretly sympathizes with judges who are held up to derision for saying that young girls in mini-skirts shouldn’t ask for trouble by hitching lifts from strangers at midnight. Brian cannot see why people have to climb Everest or cross the Atlantic single-handed in coracles. He ca
nnot see why his friend Stephen Cox has gone off to Democratic Kampuchea when he could have stayed at home writing novels in his bachelor flat in Primrose Hill. And as for Charles Headleand’s plans—well, Brian thinks they are ridiculous, embarrassingly ridiculous. But then, he had somewhat harsh views of the generally admired conduct of the long-vanished kidnapped envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite. Why can’t people accept the limitations of the human condition, instead of trying to show off all the time? Brian is not a risk-taker. Or so he thinks. He does not admire heroism, would never himself aspire to act heroically. Or so he thinks.

  Ancient crimes, ancient victims. Over supper, in St John’s Wood, Alix and Liz Headleand laugh heartily, with abandon, as they recall the scene in the British Museum archaeology exhibition, by the glass coffin where the upper half of Lindow Man sleeps everlastingly. ‘So nice,’ says Alix, almost choking over her lentil soup, ‘so absolutely sweet, such a—such a little boy!’

  ‘And oh dear, that marvellous old lady, though I don’t know why I call her old, she wasn’t all that much older than us,’ agrees Liz, dabbing her eyes with her rose-sprigged napkin: happy to see Alix, happy to remember the day’s adventures, still amused by the little seven-year-old, grey-uniformed, pink-braided boy who had piped up so sweetly, so piercingly, so unselfconsciously in his treble, gazing at the miraculously preserved, multiply wounded, overslaughtered sacrificial corpse, the corpse of a victim who had been bashed on the head, stabbed in the chest and garrotted, whose throat had been cut, and who had been left to lie for two millennia in a boggy pool. ‘Gosh,’ the little boy had announced, to his schoolmates, to his teacher, to Alix and Liz and two Japanese tourists and the old lady in a felt hat. ‘Gosh, isn’t he lucky, to have ended up here!’