20.23. In a few minutes she would go down. She could have borrowed some mascara from her daughter Sally, but it was too late. She should have rung her mother in Northam, but it was too late. Seven minutes of solitude she had, and then she would descend. As she sat there, she experienced a sense of what seemed to be preternatural power. She had summoned these people up, these ghosts would materialize, even now they were converging upon her in their finery at her bidding, each of them willing to surrender a separate self for an evening, to eat, to drink, to talk, to exchange embraces, to wait for the witching hour. Soon their possible presences would become real presences, and here, under this roof, at her command, patterns would form and dissolve and form again, dramas would be enacted, hard and soft words exchanged, friendships formed, acquaintances renewed. The dance would be to her tune. A pity, in a way, that the dancing would be merely metaphorical: this was a house large enough to accommodate dancing, but their friends were not of the dancing classes, would gaze in astonishment, alarm, sophisticated horror, intellectual condemnation, at dancing in a private house . . . another year, perhaps, for the dancing. This year, the dying year, the social dance would suffice.
It would be a large assembly: some two hundred had accepted, and more would come. She had encouraged her stepchildren and her daughter Sally to invite their friends: they would add colour, diversion, eccentricity, noise. She liked the mixing of ages, she even liked a little friction, and friction there would be: Ivan Warner alone was usually enough to raise the temperature of any social gathering to conflagration point, and Ivan in conjunction with Charles’s Fleet Street friends and television moguls, with a few publishers and poets and novelists, with an actress or two, with a clutch of psychologists and psychotherapists and art historians and civil servants and lawyers and extremely quarrelsome politicians, would surely manage to set the place on fire? Surely this night the unexpected would happen, surely she had summoned up the unexpected. She had, of late, felt herself uncannily able to predict the next word, the next move, in any dialogue: she could hear and take in three conversations at once: she could see remotely as through a two-way mirror the private lives of her patients, sometimes of her friends: she had felt reality to be revealed to her at times in flashes beyond even the possibility of rational calculation: had felt in danger (why danger?) of too much knowledge, of a kind of powerlessness and sadness that is born of knowledge: for these reasons, perhaps, was it that she had decided to multiply the possibilities so recklessly, to construct a situation beyond her own grasping? A situation of which not even she could guess the outcome? Had she wished to test her powers, or, a little, to lose control and stand aside? To be defeated, honourably, by the multiplicity of the unpredictable, instead of living with the power of her knowingness? With the limits of the known?
She had thought, back in November, that the party was merely a celebration, a celebration of having survived, so long, with Charles: twenty-one years, unique in the circle of their acquaintance. Battle and bloodshed and betrayal lay behind them, and now they met peacefully in this large house, and slept peacefully in their separate rooms, and met at weekends over the marmalade, and would continue to do so until Charles’s new appointment took him, in a couple of months, to New York. He would return to visit her, she would fly out to visit him, they would speak on the telephone, they would not miss one another. This was understood. Nobody expected Liz to uproot herself, like a woman, like a wife, and follow her husband to America: she was expected to stay where she was, pursuing her own career and pursuing her own inner life, whatever that might be. A modern marriage. Charles and Liz Headleand. Liz knew how they were regarded: as a powerful couple who, by breaking the rules, had become representative. They represented a solidity, a security, a stamp of survival on the unquiet experiments of two decades, a proof that two disparate spirits can wrestle and diverge and mingle and separate and remain distinct, without a loss of brightness, without a loss of self, without emasculation, submission, obligation. And the image, the public image, is not wholly false, although naturally its firm talismanic outlines conceal a great deal of past pain and confusion, of dirty bargaining, of occasional childishnesses, of outright disagreements: and the present is not wholly peaceful. If it were, it would be dead, Liz tells herself. Conflict is invigorating, it renews energy. So she tells herself. She disapproves of a great deal of Charles’s life, these days; she thinks his ambitions misplaced, his goals suspect, his methods dangerous, his new political alignments deplorable: but she is loyal to Charles, to Charles himself, to the man that these manifestations in her view misrepresent. She believes in Charles, in her own fashion, and believes that he believes in her. Their past, with all its secrets, is solid behind them, and cannot be disowned. Their union has a high, embattled, ideological glamour; their dissent is a bond. Her loyalty, she believes, is worth a great deal to Charles: it gives him plausibility.
Or is this line of thought simply a rationalization of the truth, which is that these days she and Charles disagree about almost everything?
A celebration, a farewell party. Charles will be away for at least a year. She is glad he is going, she thinks. The strain of living up to the lofty concept of marriage that they have invented is tiring, at times, and she is a busy woman. A year off will not come amiss. It will give her peace, privacy
She eats another nut, and needlessly, absently, combs her hair. She finds it hard to think clearly about Charles. The time span of the thinking is too long, it makes the present moment arbitrary, a point on a graph that is in itself meaningless. She looks down at her shopping-and-memo list, to find a nearer focus. Perrier water, it says. Poinsettia. Prunes. Remind Deirdre about tabasco. Japanese seminar, Metropole Hotel. Ask Ivan about R. P. R. P.? Who or what was R. P.? She must have known last night, while constructing this list. Maybe it will come back to her, when she sees Ivan. She suspects that Charles suspects that she had once had an affair with Ivan, but of course she had not, though she concedes that Ivan is so unpleasant that only a degree of past sexual intimacy could plausibly explain the kind of relationship that he and Liz have over the years established. Charles had not wished to invite Ivan to the party. Wherever that man goes, there is trouble, he said. But that is the point of him, Liz had replied. Liz prided herself on her tolerance of Ivan’s appalling behaviour. Anyway, she said, we’ll have to ask him, or he’ll be even ruder about us in his next article. I don’t give a damn about Ivan’s ridiculous rag, said Charles, but of course he did, he cared much more than she did, and with reason, for Ivan usually managed to deliver her some backhanded compliment, whereas Charles always got it in the neck: ‘HEADLEAND CRASHES HEADLONG’ had been the headline of Ivan’s latest piece of gossip, which had consisted of a dangerous account of Charles’s behaviour at a meeting of a board of directors, laced with unfounded but inventive innuendo about a country house which he and Liz were said to be purchasing as a tax dodge. There had also been offensive remarks about Charles’s ageing toothless bite. Charles had been particularly annoyed about the toothlessness, she could tell, although he tried to conceal it: he had in fact been without his two front teeth that week, while having their thirty-year-old caps replaced, caps that marked a heroic accident long ago in a swimming pool in Sevenoaks. He had proved remarkably (to her, touchingly) sensitive about their temporary absence. Losing two front teeth, even two false front teeth, at the age of fifty, even if only for a week, had distressed him: he had sat opposite her at the breakfast table with a napkin over his mouth, and she knew that it had taken some courage to go to the board meeting at all. No, Charles certainly did object to Ivan’s insults, and Ivan’s divination of Charles’s weak spots was uncannily accurate.
She, for her part, was of the opinion that she did not object to Ivan’s insults at all. She saw them as emanations of his own tormented, neurotic, anally fixated personality, and nothing to do with herself. She was convinced that he was in reality quite fond of them both. Particularly of herself. He was grateful to her for her power of fo
rgiveness, she suspected, for the absolution she continued to extend. Such an ugly, red-faced, no, worse, blue-faced little man. Small, squashed, snub, stout. She had known him for many years. One would have thought that the principle of people living in glasshouses not throwing stones would have warned Ivan off a career as a journalist, gossip, and so-called satirist, but it did not seem to occur to him that he was asking for trouble of a kind that she knew would cause him the most intimate anguish: but in fact, so appalling were Ivan’s features and physique that comment on them was rare, even his worst enemies (and he had hundreds) not considering them fair game. Comment on his dreadful behaviour, by contrast, flourished. Maybe, she idly wondered, as she drew a red biro daisy by the Metropole Hotel, maybe he chooses to be so offensive verbally in order to divert attention from his appearance? An interesting conjecture. Though Ivan claimed success with women, despite or because of his natural handicaps, and Liz herself, though she had not slept with him, had on one occasion in the early years of her marriage to Charles found herself, to her own surprise, sitting on a table in a flat in Belsize Park Gardens with Ivan’s hand inside her bra. She could remember the incident quite clearly, although the circumstances surrounding it had vanished into oblivion, beyond recall of any form of analysis: it had been early afternoon, so clearly not a party incident – maybe they had had lunch together? – and she had been anxious about picking up children from school. She kept telling Ivan that she had to leave, and he kept telling her that he was a great lover although his prick was only six inches long. Or something to that effect. And all the time his hand had been inside her bra. She could remember the bra, it had been rather a good black lace wired Kayser Bondor, of a line that appeared to have been discontinued, as she’d never been able to find another. But why had they been sitting on a table? And in whose flat? These were mysteries now known only to God.
She had not slept with Ivan, nor ever would, but was deriving a secret satisfaction from the knowledge that present at her party that night would be all the men with whom she had ever slept: or all save one, and he had been from another country, and she had not known his name. There were not so many of them: five, to be precise, and one of those was Charles, and another her first husband Edgar Lintot, to whom she had remained married for less than a year. Of the other three, one had been revenge, one an escapade, and one half serious, but all had now merged into a sentimental distance, an affectionate presence. She had set much store by retaining or restoring her relations with these men, and thought she knew why. After the sickening shock of the rapid deterioration of her first childish marriage, she had been so afraid of ever again being engulfed by hatred and violence that she had maintained a resolute pleasantness even through the worst of times, even with Charles, who was not an easy man. She had called it maturity, this pleasantness. She was determined never again to be a party to the hideous transformation which overcomes the partners of a bad marriage, who grow fangs and horns and sprout black monstrous wolfish hair, who claw and cling and bite and suck. There would be no more of that: she would see the person as he was, and see him steadily, setting aside her own long shadow as it fell. Her success in this enterprise had fortified her in her career as psychotherapist, had given her confidence in her right to pursue it, in the rightness of her pursuing it. Even her first husband she had regained from that dreadful hinterland of marsh and bog and storm cloud: and now they were good friends, she and Edgar, in the sunlight, harmlessly friends, and on some subjects (the National Health Service, the pathology of multiple murderers, the ethics of reporting violent crime) had struck up alliances that excluded, that increasingly and dramatically excluded, her husband Charles.
So there they would be, all friends together. Edgar, Roy, Charles, Philip and Jules. A pity about that Dutchman: their union had taken place in a narrow cabin on the North Sea, crossing from The Hague to Harwich in a Force Nine gale, and they had omitted to exchange names and addresses. Would he have enjoyed her party? Would he have raised a knowing glass? They had rolled around in the narrow berth on the unanchored sheet, slipping on the shiny much-worn cheap leatherette surface of the bunk, lurching in and out of one another in a determined kind of way, the only passengers on the boat not to be paralysed with seasickness. The selection of the fittest. The crossing had lasted eighteen hours instead of eight. An epic. Did he remember, where was he, who was he? Too late to recall him now, he was one ghost who could not obey her summons.
Edgar, Roy, Charles, Philip and Jules. She had finished with them all. Maybe she had finished with sexual intercourse for ever, maybe it was this possibility that gave her this peculiar conviction of strength, this sense of invulnerability, of certainty, of power. They would attack her no more, weaken her no more. She had closed the gates. This was not orthodox, but then, although a Freudian, she was not an orthodox Freudian, and her vision of futurity did not exclude celibacy. From within herself, she would survey. An observer, a non-combatant. As a child, reading her mother’s collection of Victorian novels, Edwardian novels, she had wondered how women could bear to renounce their position in the centre of the matrimonial stage, the sexual arena, how they could bring themselves to consent to adopt the role of chaperon, to sit at the edge of the dance on little gilt-legged chairs gossiping and watching, spectators, as the younger ones innocently paired, as the older ones not so innocently paired, in the ever-changing formations of the floor. How could one bear to be on the sidelines? Not to be invited to the waltz? Not ever again to be invited to the waltz? But now she could see the charm, could read the meaning, of the observer’s role, a meaning inaccessible to a sixteen-year-old, to a thirty-year-old – for the observer was not, as she had from the vantage, the disadvantage of childhood supposed, charged with an envious and impotent malice, and consumed with a fear of imminent death: no, the observer was filled and informed with a quick and lively and long-established interest in all those that passed before, in all those that moved and circled and wheeled around, was filled with intimate connections and loving memories and hopes and concerns and prospects. Nor was the observer impotent, for it was through the potency of the observer that these children took their being and took the floor. Actual children, children of the heart and the imagination, old friends, new friends, the children of friends, they circle, they weave, and the pattern is both one’s own and not one’s own, it is of the making of generations. One is no longer the hopeful or the despairing guest: one is host in the house of oneself.
So thought Liz Headleand, as she sat at her dressing-table, in her yellow-walled, her yellow marble-veined dressing-room, eating nuts. She put her glasses on to peer once more at the vanished smear of mascara, and was amused to see the print of her face leap into sharp relief: a new trick, for her glasses are quite new. She dabbed again with the tissue. Her glasses amused her. So did the amusing little sag of her incipient double chin, the veining on her cheeks (which, unlike Alix, she does not think to cover with Liquid Foundation), the slight plump soft dimpling of her upper arm, the raised veins in the backs of her hands, the broadening of her hips, the decreasing flexibility of her joints. These signs of age, of the ageing process, she greeted and greets with curiosity, with a resolute welcome. One might as well welcome them, after all: there is not much point in rejecting them. It is all intended, it is all part of the plan. There is a goal to this journey, there will be an arrival, Liz Headleand believes. It is only by refusing to move onwards that we truly die. She truly believes this. She has good reason to believe it.
Her mother sits in Northam, listening to what?
Liz stands up, regards herself, inspects her hemline, adjusts the safety pin fastening her gold leather belt, admires her gold sandals, pats her silver locket, and smooths the limp, cross-cut, loose-woven cream Moroccan cotton over her broadening hips. She looks upon her broadening hips as an affirmation of life. (Her mother is a scraggy old thing, starved and skinny.) She pulls in her stomach, smartly, as she will remember to do, episodically, throughout the evening, when not too deepl
y engaged in other pursuits.
Now Charles, he is a different case, she acknowledges. For him, weight is no longer perhaps a laughing matter. He ought to take more care. He is getting solid, even fat, and that reddish tinge to his face has become permanent rather than intermittent. Too many lunches, too many dinners, too many glasses of port at the club beam betrayal from Charles’s complexion, bulge from his shirt front. His hair is receding, too. She wonders where he is. She has not seen him since half past six, when they met in the kitchen over a salami sandwich. He was preoccupied, and spoke of trouble with the Home Office and a documentary on prison conditions. The fatter and balder Charles becomes, the more formidable he looks. She supposes that this is only natural. He is probably downstairs, knocking back a stiff gin and tonic before submitting himself to the milder offering of champagne.
20.35 says the little red clock. She has lost five minutes, somewhere. It is time to go downstairs, to see how Deirdre is getting on in the kitchen, to make sure the butlers are not drinking too much.
So down the wide staircase she goes, past the oak chest with its bowl of white roses on the half-landing, past the Albers squares, past the dim varnished portrait of a full-bosomed crimson-gowned pearl-decked eighteenth-century woman who some take to be an ancestor, though she had in fact come with the house, down through the black and white tiled hall with its marble and gilt claw-legged table strewn with Christmas cards, gloves, and glossy free advertising magazines, and into the broad high first-floor drawing-room, where sat Charles, drinking a gin and tonic, which she had expected, and talking to Esther and Alix, which she had not.
The Radiant Way Page 2