‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Giles, calm down, calm down, come and have a nice Perrier water,’ said Liz, taking his other arm, and, with Kate, attempting to lead him away from the fracas, as one would a child in a playground from its tormentor (for Giles’s antagonist Paul Hargreaves, pale faced, dark suited, silver-grey tied, was smiling calmly with a horrible amusement at this distressing scene): but the desperate Giles was beyond leading, and fell back heavily as he attempted to disengage himself from his two intercessors, crashing into a large fern and some pots of bulbs and sending earth and splashes of champagne over the carpet.
‘There go the 1970s,’ commented Hargreaves, ‘there go the drinking seventies,’ a comment which earned him a slap in the eye from Giles’s girlfriend Venetia: ‘Drunkard yourself!’ she shouted, ‘drunkard yourself!’ Whereupon Hargreaves threw his arms around Venetia and kissed her violently, pausing for breath only to make some comment about Public Ownership, as Giles sprawled upon the floor. Ivan Warner was delighted. He looked as though he had stage-managed the whole incident. Liz Headleand stared at the scene with a marked lack of dismay, as Kate Armstrong knelt down and started to dust the earth off Giles, looking up to ask anyone who might be interested about the little blobs of white polystyrene that always seem to come mixed with bulb fibre: ‘What is this stuff?’ asked Kate, ‘I’ve often wondered,’ as she proceeded to re-pot a hyacinth with one hand while stroking Giles’s shoulder with the other. Giles’s girlfriend Venetia, meanwhile, encircled by the arms of Hargreaves, had started to laugh, and Giles began to laugh too: ‘Oh Christ, sorry, Liz, sorry, Kate,’ he declared, as he organized himself into a sitting position, his arms around his knees, ‘I should never have had those two whiskies at the Venables’.’
‘Breathe deeply,’ said Liz, ‘breathe deeply and relax, and I’ll get you a Perrier to drink in the New Year.’
‘Calm down, calm down, Giles,’ said Hargreaves. ‘Calm down, young chap.’
‘Now you keep out of this,’ said Liz and Venetia simultaneously to Hargreaves, while, in another corner of the room, Deirdre Molloy lifted her voice in an Irish lament. ‘Mother, it’s ten to midnight!’ called Sally from the doorway, and Liz, looking around the confusion she had summoned into being, the scattered earth, the scattered people, the murmuring, the singing, the clustering, thought yes, this was a party, yes, this was living rather than not living, this was permitted, this was planned disorder, this was cathartic, this was therapeutic, this was admired misrule. ‘Piano, Aaron, piano!’ she called, and her middle stepson, with his mobile thin white clown’s face, emerged from the crowd and seated himself at the instrument, as Liz called to Deirdre and the butlers to fill glasses and then join the guests for a toast: Jonathan turned on the radio, the eagle-crowned clock over the marble mantelshelf struck, some joined hands and some did not, Aaron struck up Auld Lang Syne, Big Ben struck, some sang and some did not, voices rose straggling, pure and impure, strong and weak, tuneful and tuneless, there were cries and embraces. Two hundred people, solitude and self dispelled. Liz, at the magic moment, found herself unexpectedly clutching the hot hand of Ivan Warner, which seemed wrong but ordained: she looked for Charles, and saw that the poor man had managed to find himself in the icy palm of Lady Henrietta. Such were the random dispositions of fate. But Alix and Brian had found one another, and so had Otto and Caroline Werner: Esther was caught between lofty Edgar and little Pett Petrie, herself the smallest of all. Should old acquaintance be forgot, they sang, bravely, recklessly, tunelessly, and as the singing stopped, Ivan kissed Liz’s hand. ‘Liz,’ he said, ‘Liz, I’ve always admired your style, but this was something else.’
She took it, for the moment, as a tribute, beneath the chandelier.
Beneath the chandelier. From it fell refracted light, on balding heads and shaven heads, on Mohican plumes and gelled spikes, on neatly barbered and dressed locks, on neglected middle-aged wispy bobs, on plaits and loops and layered body waves. The plural, the eclectic seventies. Dark suits, pale blue shirts, Indian kurtahs worn not exclusively by Indians, Viyella shirts, striped mother-knitted pullovers, designer-monogrammed pullovers, cheap ethnic dresses, expensive ethnic dresses, long skirts, short skirts, exclusive French dresses, hand-stitched English dresses, Oxfam thirties dresses, prim high mandarin collars, plunging necklines, slit skirts, glimpses of suspender belts, clown pantaloons, dungarees, studded belts, limp leather belts, crackling metal belts, belts slung round waists, hips, bellies. Disparate, disparate, a hundred opinions, a hundred cross currents, in this blond Georgian drawing-room: ancestral echoes of ancient Victorian philanthropy of the Clapham school mingled with louche ghosts of Bloomsbury, public-school public servants held hands with hybrid tieless entrepreneurs of the television aristocracy, new modes of moneyed brutality addressed old shrinking brutality, the educated sons (well, let us not exaggerate, one educated son) of one skilled manual worker maintained an exchange with one exhausted feudal Northumbrian homosexual neurosurgeon, and the accents of North London raised themselves melodiously, classlessly, incomprehensibly, from the throats of the variously reared young, from the singing birds of the future, in their indeterminate, as yet unidentifiable plumage. There they gathered, the employee who lacks employment, the faithless priest, the investor about to hang himself in the expectation of plenty, the physician who will not be able to heal herself, the director who lacks all direction, the historian who denies the existence of history, the Jewish scholar of early Renaissance Christian iconography, the deaf man who hears voices, the woman about to be taken in adultery. A mingling, of a sort, in this exclusive, this eclectic room, this room full of riddles.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sally to Alan ten minutes after midnight in the kitchen, amidst the empty bottles and the crumpled napkins. ‘How could they? I don’t believe it.’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Alan, and bravely, coolly drank a glass of water from the tap. ‘I’ve never known what they were up to. And anyway, it’s nothing to do with us. Not now.’
‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’
But panic filled Sally’s twenty-year-old heart, for it was, she thought, something to do with her. Now, and always.
Aaron sat on the roof and stared at the sky. Five floors up. The London skyline, the Post Office Tower, the sounds of distant merriment. He lit a cigarette. He had seen what he should not have seen. He was sitting, moreover, where he had often been told not to sit. As children, they had not been allowed on the roof. And were not now. Aaron brooded. He had been in the habit of brooding, up here, as a child. It had frightened Liz. Understandably. He remembered when she once had to beg him to come down. He could see her now, in the room below, under the skylight, gazing up. Imploring. Sweetie, come down, she had begged ridiculously. He had felt power in his distress. He had backed away, had stood perilously on the parapet. Her face had been distorted, ugly, foreshortened, all teeth and mouth. He had been frightened of himself, of her, of the height, of the sky, of the necessity of daring.
He had brooded over his dead mother. Jonathan and Alan never mentioned her. He had meditated upon her, up here. He could not remember her, of course.
The London streets stretched away. As a small child, he had been taken to see Peter Pan. The old-fashioned backdrop painted with its winking windows had been remarkably similar to this view, his view. He had thought he could fly, if he willed it enough.
Sweet Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off.
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
‘Sweetie, please come down. Come down and we’ll all have supper. It’s on the table. It’s going cold. Come down, sweetie.’
Poor Liz. He had teased her. The others would not: they were good, compliant. Somebody had to tease, to sit on dangerous edges, to affect melancholia.
The dark night surrounded him. He had seen what he should not have seen. But would not speak. Therefore, having played the piano for the people, he sat in the dark.
In the early hours, in the first hours of
1980, gossip spread. Some did not want to listen. Alix, who had no idea of what the gossip was to be about, but who could sense its ominous crackling in the distance, wanted to go home, but tiresomely Brian, the party-hater, had managed to find his old friend Otto Werner and was deep in conversation about English social class, European intellectuals, the German education system, public schools, and the appointing of JPs and magistrates, a rich vein which they might have been able to explore for another hour at least, had Alix not been at their elbow, murmuring of departure. In other circumstances she would have been more than willing to engage in this conversation herself, for it was one she had frequently enjoyed; she liked Otto, she had always mildly fancied that he liked her, she was amused by the offhand continental gallantries with which he interspersed, absent-mindedly, the rigour of his argument; but tonight she was tired, her eyes were closing, she had had four hours of party already, had not enjoyed the Hargreaves drama, had not enjoyed her talks with Ivan Warner and Teddy Lazenby, had been polite enough for long enough, and wanted to go home; so stood at Brian’s elbow, dully, a reproachful wife, slightly annoyed that neither of them took much notice of her, as Otto invoked the name of Max Weber, a name which meant nothing to her at all, a name which excluded her, exhausted her, and provoked her into prodding, yet again, but this time successfully, Brian’s arm, and murmuring of babysitter Sharon, who was only sixteen.
Esther also left not long after midnight. Esther knew what she knew, had seen what she had seen, but like Aaron chose to say nothing. She rather thought that Charles knew what she knew, and it was this suspicion that prompted what was, for her, an early departure. She had planned to walk home, but accepted, on the front steps, an offer of a lift from Teddy Lazenby and his wife Delia, who lived in Campden Square and could easily drop her off. Esther had not seen either of them since her days at Cambridge, and listened with a connoisseur’s ear to Delia’s laments about time passing, times changing, the difficulties of keeping in touch. Esther, who had always been deeply bored with Delia and had no wish whatsoever to keep in touch with her, sat quietly in the smooth, upholstered, comfortable, large toffee-brown Volvo, which smelled of dog. She said nothing, except to give directions. She got home quickly, smoothly, easily, said good night politely, and went in and firmly shut the door.
In their wake, the party in Harley Street continued and rumours thickened. Looking back, Liz would try to remember the moment at which she had known rather than not known: she would have liked to have thought that she had known always, that there was no moment of shock, that knowledge had lain within her (the all-knowing), that she had never truly been deceived, that at the very worst she had connived at her own deceit. Surely Ivan’s first sentence of the New Year had alerted her? (Though that would have been late, late, late.) Surely she had taken it as an ill omen? But no, she had taken it at its face value: from Ivan, of all people, who spread malice as his trade. She had thought herself exempt. Slow she had been, unbearably slow, she who could hear many strands of speech at once: trusting she had been, she who had been reared in the bosom of suspicion. She had thought herself invulnerable. She had been possessed by pride.
Hints, glances, sliding words, oblique smiles, incomprehensible references. Why had she not received them earlier? Had she been too preoccupied with butlers, with introductions, with orchestration, with champagne? Or had the guests waited until midnight, the witching hour, before turning into swine? Pig-faced, snub-nosed, bristling broad-jowled Ivan, snouting disaster. That ominous expression of sympathy from pebbled-glassed Jules, who took her hand and asked her meaningfully how she was? Esther’s strange allusion to a hornet’s nest? That look of frank dislike and satisfaction from Antonia Haycock? That uncharacteristically and overly broad anecdote from Pett Petrie? Hilda Stark’s excessively theatrical departing conspiratorial embrace? That odd, bitter, comradely crack about men from Kate Armstrong? That glance of panic from her daughter Sally? All these messages had been sent forth, and she had received none of them, had continued to consider herself in charge, in control, the prime mover. Until, under the mirror, after many a circle and feint, after many a playful retreat and renewed approach, Ivan at last cornered her, and even before he opened his mouth she felt the smell of fear from herself: her pores broke open, she stood there panting slightly, her hair rising on the back of her neck in terror, her heated skin covered in icy sweat: ‘And when,’ asked Ivan pleasantly, ‘are you two going to make the announcement? Is it to be tonight, or do we wait?’
The words meant nothing, or should have meant nothing. She smiled foolishly. Her mind leaped. It ran, it leaped, it scrambled for cover. It turned.
‘And why not tonight?’ she said.
‘You’ve kept your own plans very dark,’ said Ivan.
‘Ah well, you know me,’ she said, knowing nothing.
‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ said Ivan. ‘I think you two stuck it out pretty well, in the circumstances. How long has it been? Twenty years?’
The utterly expected, the utterly unexpected, can they be the same thing, she wondered.
‘Your name,’ Ivan continued, ‘has been linked with Gabriel Denham’s, but I don’t even see him here tonight.’
She stood there: he stared at her. She could say nothing. A pillar of salt. She was dependent on him. She could not move until he released her.
‘Whereas Henrietta, I see,’ Ivan continued with a remorseless pity, ‘is very much at home here.’
‘Henrietta?’ Liz echoed. It was the moment she was most to regret. It betrayed ignorance. Only a second’s ignorance, but ignorance. Had Ivan noticed? Desperate, she found again the faculty of speech, heard her own voice, familiar, natural, even powerful: ‘Ah yes, Henrietta. Yes, we see a good deal of Henrietta.’ She had no notion of what her words meant, but they sounded good, they fortified her, and she continued bravely, ‘But as for Gabriel, whose name has not been linked with Gabriel’s? I think you must find a more interesting candidate than Gabriel. What about, for example – ’ and she cast her eyes around her assembly, seeing reprieve, in the approaching form of Edgar Lintot, her first husband, ‘what about Edgar? Now that would be an interesting plot, for us at least. I see a great deal of Edgar these days, you know. We often lunch together. Well,’ (and the plausibility of her own tone, at the moment, amazed her) ‘sometimes.’
‘What’s all this?’ said tall, beaky, dedicated Edgar. ‘Gossip, is it? I’ve come to say good night, Lizzie. I’ve got a long drive tomorrow. Very nice party, very nice. See you at the meeting.’
‘Yes, gossip,’ said Ivan tenaciously. ‘We were talking about Charles and Henrietta. I wonder what New York will make of Henrietta.’
Edgar was not listening. Ivan did not interest him, gossip did not interest him, he had given up the personal life. He kissed Liz on the cheek. ‘I think it’s on the thirtieth, isn’t it? Have a good time with the Japanese tomorrow. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Give my love to your mother,’ said Liz. She managed to edge herself out of her corner, away from Ivan, back into the current. She followed Edgar a few paces across the room. Ivan, behind her, was accosted by a fellow-journalist. He wanted to retain her, to keep her, to tease her, to worry her, to kill her, but he could not: she escaped. Escaped to a comforting, numbing succession of thanks and farewells, for the party was beginning to break up: ‘Happy New Year,’ echoed again and again, as Liz searched vaguely for Charles but could not find him, Happy New Year, see you soon, goodbye, say goodbye to Charles for me, goodbye. And there, in a conspicuous lull, was Lady Henrietta herself, extending her hand and cheek. Seeing her, Liz saw it all. The certainty inspired her. She drew breath.
The Radiant Way Page 5