The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Impossible to tell, however, despite this openness, what Alix and Esther really made of Charles. They teased him, tolerated him, avoided him. Women were easily captivated by Charles, when he bothered to make any effort to captivate: they humbly smiled when he turned his head to pay them attention. But not Esther and Alix. They were impervious both to his charm and to his aggression: they had neutralized him. And so he sat there, a tame lion, drumming his fingers, while Esther and Alix and Liz his wife chattered on, about scandals and liaisons, about breaking marriages and delinquent children, about Ivan the terrible, about the Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy, about the Arts Council, about the Beaubourg, about modernism in architecture, about Brian Bowen’s views on his reactionary boss at the Adult Education Institute, about what the word quango might be said to mean, about Kate Armstrong’s latest article on the single-parent family and child benefits: chatter, chatter, female chatter, unstructured, shimmering, malicious, appreciative, acute, indulgent, shifting, rapid, unpunctuated, glancing, a light bright surface ripple on a deeper current, and Charles sat on, biting his inner lip. ‘You don’t mean to say that this chap Edward Lazenby we keep reading about and hearing on the radio is the same chap as that persistent creep Teddy who used to edit Focus when we were at Cambridge?’ Esther was saying, returning to the guest list, recalling scores not settled a quarter of a century ago: ‘Yes, the very man, he’s a something or other in the DES, he’s a very important chap now, you ought to have a go at him,’ Liz replied, and as she spoke the doorbell rang, and there was the first guest, on the dot of two minutes past nine o’clock, tall, thin, grey, anxious, clutching a bunch of yellow roses, ex-priest turned analyst Joseph O’Toole, standing stranded on the black and white marble tiles, not knowing where to turn, how to divest himself of his coat, to whom to deliver his roses, a lost man, gazing mildly at the unexpected butler, waiting for the arrival of familiar Liz Headleand, who advanced upon him, took the roses, embraced him, restored him, and led him in to Charles, Alix and Esther: a quarter of an hour earlier she had predicted the time of his arrival accurately, to the minute, and now smiled triumphantly as she effected the introductions, a smile of complicity in which Joseph O’Toole, who was acutely aware of his own punctuality problem, was able with a pleasant relief to share. Here he was, safely: the party could begin.

  By half past ten, Deirdre (Molloy) Kavanagh had parted with all her little triangles of tricoloured pastry, taken off her apron, drunk a few glasses of champagne, told several guests that broccoli was out of fashion, and was busily engaged in conversation with a television journalist who had just returned from making a programme for Charles in Iran. He was telling her about the Ayatollah, and she was telling him about her convent days. Their words fluttered between them like lubricious little doves. At Deirdre’s elbow stood the faithless Jonathan Headleand, who was trying to explain to his stepmother’s first husband Edgar why he’d decided, after all his protests, to follow in his father’s footsteps, while simultaneously trying to keep one eye on Deirdre (for whom he felt responsible) and the other on his girlfriend Kate Williams who was being harangued by a Tory backbencher about Marxist infiltration of the Open University. The Open University was also the subject of debate between Alix Bowen and Teddy Lazenby of the Department of Education and Science: Alix’s face was expressing a most delicate mixture of disbelief, disapprobation and polite attention as Teddy, somewhat indiscreetly presuming on their long, if long-interrupted, acquaintance, revealed what were clearly his own opinions on the inadvisability of wasting money on the education of housewives and taxi drivers. In other corners and other rooms, dozens of other topics floated gaily on the lively, slightly choppy waters, their pennants bobbing and fluttering in the end-of-year, the terminal breeze: the approaching steel strike, the brave new era of threatened privatization, the abuse of North Sea oil resources, the situation in Afghanistan, the Annan report, the prospect of a fourth television channel, the viability of Charles’s attempt to conquer the United States, the Cambridge Apostles, the disarray of the Labour Party, the deplorable vogue for Buck’s Fizz as a party drink, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Harrow Road murderer, the Prince of Wales. In a doorway, wedged between a Guardian leader writer and a Kleinian analyst, Alan Headleand and his ex-tutor Otto Werner from the LSE were debating with a fine abstraction and a noble disregard of interruption the question as to whether or not a television programme was a primary product or a service, and whether, by implication or extension, Charles’s production company, Global Information Network (Telex GIN) was allied in ideological terms with the manufacturing or the service industries: with equal commitment Esther Breuer and Jules Griffin (colleague of Liz Headleand) were discussing the nature of ancestral voices in schizophrenic patients and in the Homeric and Biblical epic, and the portrayal of the Holy Ghost in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

  Liz, moving from group to group, surveying from the stairway, engaging and disengaging, tacking and occasionally swooping, was pleased with what she saw. They were mixing and mingling, her guests; the young were speaking to the old, men were speaking to women, Left was speaking to Right, art unto science, and only a few impossible old dullards of the financial world had drifted together to talk about pay comparability and public sector borrowing and the GNP. She left them to it: interventionist though she was, she knew the limits of her power. Nothing would stop them, nothing would prise them apart, and she was glad to have them there: she liked to think that she and Charles had a comprehensive acquaintance, that in one house they could assemble representatives of most of the intersecting circles that make up society. One needed a little dullness, to set off the buoyancy, the festivity, the movement.

  And there, at last, was Alix’s husband Brian: she was glad he had turned up, had not spurned her party, had paid her this respect. Brian came from her own home town, though she had not known him there: this had some significance, both acknowledged, though Liz could not have said what it was. Brian did not like parties, according to Alix, and had expressed fears that he would know nobody at the Headleands’, but this was not so, for he had already engaged himself with his habitual courtesy with old Sir Anthony. She saw him as he listened attentively to Sir Anthony; she caught his eye, waved at him across the sea of heads, abandoned him to the tide: he was an old friend of Otto Werner’s, whom he could seek out if in need of relief. The tide was flowing to the Right, according to Charles: could one feel, here, now, its tug, its undertow? She paused, wondered. Brian was a gentle-man of the Left; what of this new breed of non-gentlemen of the Right? She moved on, overhearing talk of broccoli, of death in Kabul, of the phenomenal transatlantic success of Pett Petrie’s new novel, and there was Petrie himself, talking to that little monster Ivan about his meeting with Norman Mailer, whooping with laughter, and hitting his own bald head with emphatic glee. There was Charles, talking to the new proprietor of the Informer (plotting no doubt) and there was her daughter Sally arm in arm with Nat Higsby from the Tavistock: they seemed to be singing a duet. There was Roy Strangeways, who was now, implausibly, surely prematurely, a High Court judge, talking to – no, it couldn’t be, but it was. Liz fell silent in mid-word of a vague murmured greeting to stare. Yes, it was, how extraordinary, it was her own ex-patient Hilda Stark, disease, comedienne and would-be infanticide, whose career had been violently interrupted when in a fit of madness (to put it nontechnically) she had nearly strangled her baby in its cradle: and here she was, laughing and drinking champagne, a guest; how improper, how indiscreet; was she married to somebody, had she come as somebody’s wife? How brave of her, how bold of her, was she perhaps even now reciting to Roy the interesting medical and legal details of her case? There she stood, in a dove-grey suede dress, looped and hung with a dozen necklaces of amethyst and rock crystal and pearl, her thick black-grey hair piled heavily, pinned with silver, attending a party in the very house where as patient she once in many hour-long sessions had disclosed to Liz on the ground floor the very secrets of her murderous mother’s
heart. How could she have come here, who could have brought her, and would Roy feel compelled to divulge his and Liz’s own smaller, milder secrets in return? Should she intervene, should she break them up, or should she ignore her uninvited guest, pretend, professionally, never to have set eyes on her before? As she considered this, Hilda intercepted her gaze, saluted her, and majestically, graciously, demonstratively, voluptuously blew a kiss across the room: Liz waved back, less flamboyantly but with equal composure, for what did it matter, after all, that Hilda Stark was there, was it not a tribute to them both, to the efficacy of the cure? Hilda brought no shadows with her, she smiled innocently in her dove grey; the scandalous rumours had been, as Liz had predicted, forgotten. It was a credit to them all. And the nearly murdered baby, how was it, where was it, Liz wondered, and found herself involuntarily doing a head count of her own stepchildren and children: she could see Jonathan, Alan and Sally; her younger daughter Stella was away in Florence studying Italian, for her A levels, and staying safely and respectably as paying guest with art-historical friends of Esther; but where was her middle stepson, Aaron? She had not seen him for an hour or more, he had been here earlier, had he left in a fit of boredom, was he sulking in his bedroom, she asked herself, and on cue, he appeared, at the bend of the hall stairs, beneath the fake ancestor, waving down and shouting at her: ‘Liz, Liz,’ he called, ‘it’s the telephone, it’s Stella, she wants to wish you a Happy New Year, she’s on the upstairs line.’

  The energy generated from running upstairs and laughing with Stella in distant Florence flowed over into the impulse to ring, in turn, her own mother: a pointless act, but one that nevertheless in the context seemed pious, necessary, propitiatory, and a gesture at least towards her sister, who bore so much heavier a filial burden, who would (in theory at least) be pleased to know that Liz had remembered. When Liz came downstairs again to her party, after a ritual exchange (how could her sister bear such intercourse? how could it go on?) she found that she had lost her velocity. The brisk social wind that had driven her lightly from guest to guest had dropped, stilled by telephonic contact with the tiny scratching clicking silence of the voiceless house of the long ordeal of her childhood: she found herself becalmed, for a whole dull stretch, talking to old Peter Binns, a charming old boy, but a bore, and so slow of speech that Liz could hardly restrain herself from finishing all his ponderous sentences. When she finally shook herself away, she found herself sailing into yet more stagnant waters, for there, directly in her way, unavoidable, smiling passively, uncomfortably, yet unavoidably, was Lady Henrietta, dutifully offering herself for an exchange with her hostess. Lady Henrietta knew what was right: everything about her was right, from her tightly bound dark hair to her dark-blue satin slippers. The sight of her filled Liz with a subdued and dreary panic. Henrietta (Hetty to her friends, of whom Liz was not one) embarrassed her, she could never say why: she represented pain, failure, tedium, though not in her own person: somehow, magically, she managed to transfer these attributes to those with whom she conversed, while herself remaining poised and indeed complacent, secure of admiration. Liz had never admired, and had at times expressed somewhat freely (and in her own view wittily) her lack of response to Henrietta’s frigid style and vapid conversation, but nevertheless felt herself, in Henrietta’s presence, rendered almost as dull as Henrietta, and moreover uneasily aware that in other houses, in other milieux, at a distance, in other circles, she had seen Henrietta sparkling, laughing, surrounded by life – vacuous life, feverish small talk, no doubt, but life – a life that froze in Liz as she contemplated her guest’s stiff blue taffeta gown (this was surely a gown, not a dress, and, not even English, probably French), her exposed white bosom, her diamond necklace (well, probably diamonds, why not?), her high white forehead, her thin dark-red lips. Henrietta’s brow was high, and her hair was scraped back from it and secured by an intricate velvet ribbon in a smooth, elaborate chignon: a Bambi head, a skull head, a too, too thin head, an over-bred head, a painful head. Liz’s own forehead was villainously low, coarsely low. She did not know how to address Henrietta, she felt the fault her own, she knew herself to be disadvantaged. A chill, heavy waste of water lay between them, and in it floated the drowned empty skins of past attempts at rapport. Across this, the neat Henrietta politely presented a hand and a cheek. Cheek brushed against cheek. Each muttered some conventional phrase. It appeared that more was required and Liz, resenting the inanity thus forced upon her even as it passed her lips, found herself saying ‘And how are you looking forward to the 1980s?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Henrietta, smiling meaninglessly, confirming Liz’s view that she never listened to a word that Liz said to her. Silence fell, during which Liz inspected Henrietta’s blue dress: it was poutily, boldly cut, made of the kind of shot, stiff, shiny non-absorbent kind of fabric that Liz herself avoided, for it made her sweat; indeed it made her sweat to look at it. She was given to sweat: Henrietta, clearly, not. Perhaps the upper classes did not sweat? She was herself, biologically, a peasant, but was rarely made to feel this to be an eccentricity as she now felt. Gazing at the blue fabric, she noted that Ivan, ever present when least wanted, was intently watching this less than interesting encounter from a position just behind and below Henrietta’s left shoulder. His frankly delighted countenance spurred her on to effort: ‘I myself,’ she heard herself saying, ‘am very much looking forward to going to Japan for the first time. Have you ever been to Japan?’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Henrietta, unhelpfully. Ivan laughed.

  ‘I am attending,’ continued Liz, ‘a conference.’

  ‘Really?’ said Lady Henrietta. ‘How long do you go for?’

  This seemingly innocuous question acted upon Liz with the effect of an instant anaesthetic: as she began to answer, she could feel her jaw growing rigid in mid-word. ‘Two weeks,’ she managed to articulate, and then stood there, mouth clamped, feet rooted, as though turned to a pillar of salt, as though the deep deep boredom of childhood had reclaimed her, had rendered her helpless and speechless and powerless, the child in the attic, praying for time to pass and blood to flow. Which, of course, momentarily, it did: ‘Two weeks,’ she boldly and brightly continued, breaking the trancelike stillness with a frisky movement of her head and braceleted right arm, ‘yes, two weeks, in Kyoto and Osaka, it should be quite fascinating, quite an opportunity to see a completely different culture, of course it relates to our own work at the Institute in a very particular way, it seems that there has been a considerable amount of research done in the department we are visiting on the problems of adoption and stepparents. . . .’ And on she prattled, watching with some satisfaction the slight tightening professional impatience of Lady Henrietta’s lip and the altering glaze of her china-blue eye. Honour was satisfied, the courtesies had been observed, they could smile and part. Though I really cannot imagine, thought Liz, as she turned away, rubbing her hands together as though the cold had truly bitten her, as though the Ice Queen had truly touched her, why we continue to ask her round. Is it just because everyone else does, because she is the kind of person that people ask to parties, because her name inscribes itself by automatic writing on guest lists? Are Charles and I really so susceptible to propriety, to the conventional? Do we like to have people with titles at our parties? What on earth is her title? Who is she? What a mystery it is, the way we carry on, thought Liz, as she moved on to more congenial entertainment: remembering, suddenly, the oft-repeated claim of an Austrian refugee analyst of her acquaintance, who frequently and unashamedly rejoiced in having had in his house at one time no less than five Nobel Prize winners, a claim which she had always found endearing, ridiculous, foolish, alarming, comic, in its naïveté, its precision, its ruthlessness: remembering the alarms and excitement of her own early encounters with the famous, the great, the titled, the rich: remembering the ancient yearning to crowd her life with people, with voices, with telephone calls, invitations, children, friends of children: remembering, in short the dread of solitude, t
he dread of reliving her mother’s unending, inexplicable, still-enduring loneliness: and across these memories, flitting in a half second, as she made her way, for light relief, towards Kate Armstrong, fortifying Kate, came the question – why did Henrietta Latchett, who must have been invited to a hundred parties tonight, who could never have known a lonely evening, why did she choose to come to us? Liz smiled to herself, triumphant, and ploughed on towards Kate.

  Conventional, unconventional: in the last half-hour of 1979 several of Liz and Charles Headleand’s guests attempted to formulate what, for them, had seemed to be the conventions of an eclectic, fragmented, purposeless decade; some attempted to prophesy for the next. The house was full of trend-spotters, from gossip columnist Ivan Warner and irritable feminist Kate Armstrong to Treasury adviser Philip, worried about pension projections in an increasingly elderly society: from information vendor Charles Headleand to epidemiologist Ted Stennett, across whose horizon the science-fiction disease of AIDS was already casting a faint red ominous glow: from forensic psychiatrist Edgar Lintot (who had not yet heard of AIDS, but who had heard rumours about changing views in high places on the sentencing of the criminally insane) to Alix Bowen, worried on a mundane level about the future funding of her own job and on a less selfish level about the implications for the rehabilitation of female offenders of cuts in that funding: from theatre director Alison Peacock, anxious about her Arts Council subsidy, to Representative Public Figure, Sir Anthony Bland, the aptly named Chairman (or so Ivan alleged) of the Royal Commission on Royal Commissions, who was thinking that for various reasons he might have to resign, and from more bodies than one, before the jostling and the hinting pushed him into an undignified retreat.

  Not all were anxious, apprehensive, ill at ease. Many congratulated themselves on having found a new sense of purpose, a new realism: after years of drifting, of idle ebb and flow, there seemed to be a current. Tentatively, some dipped their toes to test the water. Others had already leaped boldly in the expectation that others would follow, that it would prove wise to have been seen to take the plunge first. Old opinions were shed, stuffy woolly shabby old liberal vests and comforters were left piled on the shore. Some shivered in the cold breeze of change: others struck out boldly, with a sense of freedom, glad to be unencumbered by out-of-date gear and padding, glad to cast off notions that had never seemed to themselves to be smart or necessary: naked into the stream, exhilarated, the new emerging race. Cutting, paring, slimming, reducing, rationalizing: out swam the slim hard new streamlined man, in the emperor’s new clothes, out of the gritty carapace, the muddy camouflaged swoon, casting off the old ways, the old crawling, sinking ways. The conventions were changing, assumptions were changing, though not everybody was to enjoy or to survive the metamorphosis, the plunge, the leap into water or air; change is painful, transition is painful, and the social world had not yet reached a stage which could have greeted as conventional, precisely, even at a much-mixed, smart, Bohemian-flavoured cosmopolitan New Year’s Eve party, the excessively raised voices of two journalist-historians, once friends and allies and fellow-contributors to the current of immortal truth and to the New Statesman, now locked in bitter dispute about that ghastly, trailing decaying albatross-corpse of the Left, Public Ownership and Clause 4: ‘You squint-eyed git, you treacherous, turncoat, lying, statistic-faking git,’ shouted Giles, the man of the Left, who appeared to be losing the argument, his voice rising above the more amiable party hubbub in a shriek of despair, a shriek that summoned to his side Liz Headleand, with Kate Armstrong and Ivan Warner in quick attendance. Giles’s straw-yellow hair was fierce above his veined brick-red face, his grey eyes glittered with truculent frustrated aggression, the rage of a thousand ideologically committed drinking sessions in dirty pubs surged in his weeping Camden-Lock-shirted chest. ‘Giles, Giles,’ cried Liz, ‘don’t shout so, it’s nearly the New Year, we can’t bring in the New Year howling like wolves.’ ‘Giles, Giles,’ echoed Kate, throwing restraining arms around him. ‘Wolves!’ shouted Giles drunkenly, ‘wolves, that’s what they are, the pack of them, they’re traitors to the human race, scavengers, look at them, look at them, wolves is too good a word for them, jackals, hyenas, that’s what they are, hyenas!’