The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Three floors up, on the top floor of the large house, Sally Headleand sat on her bedroom floor painting her toe-nails a pale silvery green and listening to her stepbrother Alan trying to explain about inflation and unemployment and monetarism and the economic implications of the new rhetoric praising the Victorian values of family life. In the background, Tom Robinson on a new Christmas cassette sang ‘The Winter of Seventy-Nine’. Sally liked listening to Alan, though she understood only one word in a hundred. He was loyal to the old Left, was Alan, unlike their turncoat father who had in recent years been wooed by, and had, it seemed, espoused, the radical Right. The unions had driven him to infidelity. Alan reassured her. Her father upset her. Her mother said it was stimulating to be upset, and maybe it was, but that didn’t prevent her from preferring the solace of the old wisdom. It had surrounded her at her progressive private school, it surrounded her still at her fashionable newish university, but she herself lacked economic grasp and was uncomfortably aware of having lost, of late, a few arguments with outsiders, of having been thrown back on arguments about personalities. She was too intelligent to enjoy this position, and too much of a feminist not to be made uncomfortable by its sexist implications. So it comforted her to see Alan lying there on her bed, his huge ancient unpolished cracked shoes nestling comfortably in the tangled mess of her grey sheets and leaking duvet and discarded purple socks, his eager owl face shining with enlightenment as he spoke abstractly of public spending projects and the American New Deal and tight fiscal policy. One could never tell when or whether Alan was wholly serious, for he found ideas exciting in themselves, too exciting, perhaps, ever to be put into practice: there he lay, smoking, waving, occasionally running his fingers through his thick black curly hair, and dropping cigarette ash through the slit into an old Coca-Cola tin. He spoke of the state as mother, of the history of those who clung to the state as mother, of the psychology of those who wished to orphan themselves from the mother, of the novel oddity of a woman prime minister who was in fact a mother but was not nevertheless thereby motherly. Sally listened, entranced. She didn’t see enough of Alan, now he had moved to Manchester. She needed a regular fix from Alan, to reassure her that the world was still familiar, manageable, subject to known laws.

  Alan himself had never known his mother. His mother had died in a car crash when he was three months old. He, with his two elder brothers, had been brought up by a nanny, until, three years later, his father married Liz. Liz had taken on Alan and his brothers. The three boys had always assumed, as soon as they reached the age for such assumptions, that Charles had married Liz in order to provide the three motherless babes with a proper family life. Sally, of course, had never assumed anything of the sort.

  It was shortly after Sally’s birth, in 1960, that Charles had purchased this large house. It had seemed, at the time, a daring gesture. Forty thousand pounds he had paid for it, a sum which now seemed laughably small, but which in those days had been a vast amount to pay for a private house, even in such a prime position. It had been financed by blood money, blood money from the wealthy parents of Charles’s dead wife. Liz had been keen on the transaction. The house had been in an appalling condition, full of junk and rubbish, its elegant lines unreadable through years of accretions and demolitions. It had been used for many years as a staff hostel for an Oxford Street department store. Five floors, and broad, with an eighteenth-century spaciousness. A challenge. They needed a large house, with four children already, possibly more to come, with a housekeeper and an au pair girl: impossible to survive much longer in their cramped, narrow, bijou terrace in Fulham. From Fulham to Harley Street was an extravagant removal, not the kind of move that young professional couples made, in those days, but the Headleands, ambitious, imaginative, self-appointed pioneers of they knew not what, had done it, and with aplomb. The house, in 1980, would be worth, their friends enviously muttered, perhaps a million, perhaps more. True, the rates had soared, but so had the Headleands’ incomes. It now lodged not only what was left of the Headleand family, but also the private part of Liz’s practice, and the practices of two of her colleagues: a shared secretary had taken over what had once been the au pair girl’s flat. A going concern, a successful enterprise.

  Liz loved the house, she loved the neighbourhood. It gave her great delight, to see her children and Charles’s, here, thus, in the centre. Her own childhood had been lived on the margins: she had wanted theirs to be calm, to be spared the indignities of fighting unnecessary territorial and social wars. They would have greater freedom thus, she argued. Charles shared this faith. His own childhood, though markedly less strenuous, less arduous than Liz’s, had not been without its privations, its humiliations. He liked the centre as much as Liz herself.

  Liz still, after all these years, found satisfaction in giving her address. Each time a shop assistant or a clerk or a tradesman wrote down Dr E. Headleand, Harley Street, the same thrill of self-affirmation, of self-definition would be re-enacted. Liz Ablewhite of Abercorn Avenue had become Liz Headleand of Harley Street, London W1. Nobody could argue with that, nobody could question it, it was so. Her largest dreams, her most foolish fantasies, had been enacted in bricks and mortar and mantelshelves and tiled floors and plaster ceilings. It seemed improbable, but it was so. The Headleands of Harley Street. Resonant, exemplary. A myriad uncertainties and hesitations were buried beneath that solid pile, banished by the invocation of a street name. Vanished suburbia, vanished the provinces, vanished forever solitude and insignificance and social fear. No wonder that she and Charles felt that they led a charmed life, that the times were on their side.

  It was not fairy gold that had fallen into their open laps: the first Mrs Headleand, it was true, had conveniently died, but Charles and Liz thereafter had worked for their position. They had studied long hours, both of them, they had burned the midnight oil while munching their way through textbooks and qualifications, through overtime and late-night meetings. They had taken professional risks, had survived personal disasters. And now they inhabited their house.

  It had taken some labour to restore: a gang of builders had spent months ripping down hardboard partitions, taking out gas meters, attempting to rescue old parquet flooring, refitting windows, stripping paint from tiles. The most unpleasant discoveries were made during the process of clearance: cupboards full of urine-encrusted chamber pots, of ancient patent medicine, of dead mice, of moth-infested garments, of fossilized scraps of nineteenth-century food: Hogarthian, Dickensian relics of an oppressed and squalid past. In one room there was a plastic sack full of used sanitary towels. Liz had joked that they were sure, in the rafters, to discover a dead baby, and indeed they did find there a mummified cat, which a pathologist friend hazarded to be at least a hundred years old. Uncertain, profoundly and with reason uncertain of her own taste, she had entrusted redecoration to a professional, then an acquaintance of Esther’s, now Liz’s friend, who had transformed the glum greens and browns into white and cream and yellow and gold. This vision she had adopted, cultivated, and now it seemed her own, although she would never have conceived of it herself. She sometimes remembered this and gave it thought.

  Others sometimes pondered it too. White and cream and yellow and gold did not to everyone seem entirely appropriate shades to represent the Headleands, whose natural colouring, as in a party game, might have been supposed to be more primary, more violent, more extreme, more robust.

  The untransformed house had contained treasures as well as horrors, including the portrait on the stairs, and the restored chandelier which now hung, glittering and refracting, from the centre of the ornate ceiling, above the heads of Charles and Alix, who sat disposed, glass in hand, at either end of one of the long settees, and above Esther, who stood by the fireplace reading the Headleand invitations to parties and lectures and public meetings.

  ‘Esther,’ said Liz, in the doorway. ‘Alix. I didn’t know you were here. You should have called me.’

  ‘You said to be early, and w
e were,’ said Alix. She did not rise, nor did Liz cross to greet her: they were the oldest of old friends, and did not kiss on meeting. Esther put down the Venables’ invitation, and turned into the room.

  ‘You were talking to Charles,’ said Liz, accusing, as she crossed to the sideboard to pour herself a drink.

  ‘We don’t often get the chance,’ said Alix. ‘The opportunity, I mean.’

  All four of them laughed, for no very evident reason, and Charles shifted his weight on the settee.

  ‘We were saying,’ said Charles, ‘that it must be over a year since I last saw Esther. And six months since I saw Alix.’

  ‘And now Charles is off to New York,’ said Esther, crossing the room to perch on a low stool by Alix’s knee. ‘In a couple of months. Or less, possibly. So he says.’

  ‘So he says,’ echoed Liz, with a note of mild surprise. They spoke of Charles as though he were not there, as though he belonged to another world of logic from their own, as though he belonged, almost, to another species. It was an affectation that had developed over the years. It appeared that Charles did not find it offensive.

  ‘Men,’ said Esther, ‘are an unpredictable lot. One has no way of knowing how their minds work.’

  ‘If they have minds,’ said Charles, who knew the rules of the game.

  ‘Well,’ said Esther, changing tack abruptly, as was her way, ‘what do we think we are going to think of the 1980s? I think I might go to live in the country, in the 1980s. I’ve had enough of the town.’

  ‘You’ve said that before,’ said Liz. ‘You probably said it at the end of the 1960s.’

  ‘Yes, I probably did. But I didn’t mean it then, and who knows, I may mean it now. I could go and live in the country. Or I could go and live in Italy.’

  ‘You could, but you won’t,’ said Liz, comfortably.

  ‘One can live very cheaply in Italy,’ said Esther.

  ‘One can live very cheaply in London,’ said Liz.

  ‘Yes,’ said Esther. ‘Some do. I do, for one.’ And she looked round, ostentatiously, at the large drawing-room, the heavy tasselled curtains, the pale shining cushions, the cut glass, the silver trays, the paintings, the flowers, the deep white rugs. Alix’s eyes followed Esther’s. They enjoyed teasing Liz about her pretensions, and rarely had an opportunity to tease her in the presence of Charles.

  ‘This evening,’ said Liz, leaning forward, lowering her voice confidentially with mock importance across the yards of space, ‘we have butlers. And what I think is called catering. And vintage – I think it’s vintage – champagne. Is that right, Charles, is there such a thing as vintage champagne?’

  Esther laughed. Charles, who appeared momentarily not to have been listening, laughed absently.

  ‘In fact,’ said Liz, ‘I’d better go and see what the butlers are up to. They are foreigners and they appear to be drinking. I’ve a feeling that they might be the same lot that I saw at Geraldine’s party last month. One of them fell over a coffee table and threw a whole trayful of bits and pieces on Carrie Donovan and Harry Pritchett. Crudités and avocado dip. Quite messy. We don’t want too much of that. Or not too early in the evening. No, you both stay here and talk to Charles. Esther can tell him what paintings to look at in New York. Charles is not as indifferent to paintings as he pretends. Are you, Charles?’

  And she made her exit, to the kitchen, where her real worry was not so much the butlers as the cook, Deirdre Kavanagh, ex-girlfriend of her eldest stepson Jonathan, a mad and dreadful girl with a talent for puff pastry and a conviction that she was a femme fatale, a conviction alas supported by her authentic Irish beauty and her seductive Irish brogue. Deirdre was not her real name, but her billowing copper-red hair was real enough, and so was her solid, even, dun-cream skin and her lavishly presented bosom. She was somewhere in her thirties: Jonathan had been nineteen when she had seduced him. They would never, as a family, be rid of her now, for she had now fallen in love with Liz and moped sadly and dangerously when excluded from Harley Street for too long. Now she stood there, one hand on her hip, the other holding a knife dramatically poised over an oblong platter of an anchovy- and pepper-covered layered confection, watched by an admiring audience of Mediterraneans. She was wearing a low-cut green silk dress, partially covered by a charming little white broderie anglaise nonsense of an apron, the sort of apron that features in blue movies. Really, thought Liz, really: Deirdre was exactly the kind of neurotic that she did her best, professionally, to avoid – narcissistic, exhibitionistic, selfish, manipulative, childish, unreliable, unpunctual, self-satisfied even in the depths of self-reproach, and yet there she somehow managed to stand, in the middle of Liz’s own kitchen, brandishing a pie knife. She had not yet noticed Liz’s arrival. ‘One, two, three,’ said Deirdre, and the knife descended. The inner layers were perfect. One white, one green, one red. ‘Now look at that now,’ exclaimed Deirdre triumphantly, ‘now look at that, isn’t it a darling?’ The audience nodded, and Liz from the doorway nodded, for she had to admit that for the moment at least everything looked under control: pretty parsley-sprigged snacks awaited distribution, bottles of wine stood in attentive ranks, glasses were lined up, wiped and polished, piles of white napkins lay neatly folded in readiness. Deirdre had a sprig of parsley tucked jauntily behind one ear. Her real name was Nora Molloy. She had confided this to Liz in a tearful moment, not long after Jonathan had run off with the Williams girl. Now, seeing Liz on the threshold, she waved her knife in greeting: ‘So there you are, Liz darling,’ she cried, ‘and a Happy New Year to you, and I’ll be telling you something about 1980, you mark my words, you mark my words, all of you – broccoli will go out of fashion, that’s what will happen in 1980, and no mistaking!’

  And she proceeded to press upon Liz various samples of her skill, but Liz was unable to eat, nervous, wishing that it would all begin, that the curtain would rise, that the house would fill and the thick conversation rise like smoke through the thin, empty air.

  When she returned to the drawing-room, she found that Charles, Alix and Esther were discussing, with much animation, the Italian economy. They did not pause on her arrival, though Alix, ever polite, waved obliquely to welcome her back: watching them, it occurred to Liz that perhaps in all the years they had all known one another, this was one of the very few occasions on which they had all been in the same room. She, Esther and Alix had known one another since their Cambridge days, and often met, but an evening with them necessarily excluded Charles: Esther and Alix did not much care for the world that Charles represented, and his presence inhibited all three of them. Did they despise Charles’s world? She did not know. But suspected that they enjoyed their glimpses of it, on occasions such as this. A male world, a world of suits and ties and speeches, of meetings and money. Charles had conquered it. First he had mocked it, then he had joined it, and now he represented it. A normal progression. Whereas Esther, intellectually more gifted than Charles, chose to live in a small flat just off the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, earning a pittance from odd lectures, odd articles, a little teaching. Perversity, purity, cowardice, dedication: no, none of these. There she sat, in her familiar party outfit, an eccentric, much-worn, embroidered Chinese garment, her neat, solidly cut, smartly sloping black hair as tidy as a doll’s, looking perhaps faintly Chinese rather than Jewish, diminutive as she was, and with those high cheek-bones: and there sat Alix, also by Charles’s standards impoverished, though not by her own, which were more austere. Alix was wearing a deep bright blue Indian dress with smocking. She looked exceptionally well, glowing with health, almost as though she had been on holiday, which Liz knew she had not. Liz wondered if Brian would come later.

  None of us, thought Liz, is wearing a dress made in England. Moroccan, Chinese, Indian. I wonder what that means, thought Liz. It was the kind of thought that Alix might have been more likely to articulate. She quite often found herself thinking Alix’s thoughts. Esther’s more rarely.

  And Esther, now, suddenly tired of the Ital
ian economy, dismissed it and Charles (‘You don’t seem to realize, Charles, that I live below the reach of the economy, as an economic unit I simply don’t exist’), and peremptorily turned on Liz, demanding to know details of the guest list. Esther’s mind moved quickly, apparently at random; she had a habit of introducing subjects and growing bored, within minutes, of the interchanges she had herself provoked. Abruptness was her most familiar mode, and Liz sometimes fancied that she practised it with peculiar pleasure on Charles, whenever she got the chance: and Charles, accustomed to being listened to with reverence, took it in good part. Though now, as Liz recited names of guests, she saw Charles drift away into what she took to be some private realm of financial speculation and morose managerial debate: he started to bite the inside of his lip, as he did when preoccupied, and to drum his fingers on the silvery-yellow brocade of the settee. These tics, these traits, had become more pronounced since he had given up smoking. Was it a freak of physiognomy, that even in such off-moments he looked so pugnacious, so determined? The square set of his British jaw was hardly disturbed by the neurotic chewing. A gift from nature, such a countenance. It expressed resolution. She could not read it: what was he turning over in there, on the eve of their party? The social life of New York? The restrictions on independent broadcasting? The possibilities of cable television? Or whether or not to have another gin and tonic? Who could tell? The faces of Esther and Alix were mobile, expressive, changeable; they were open to the weather, responsive, at least superficially, even if their darker motives remained obscure. Her own face was also open, she fancied. They had no public faces, the three of them, no public talk. So she fancied.