The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘And when,’ she asked politely, ‘do you go to New York?’

  Henrietta looked back, with a frigid calm, beneath which lay a hesitation.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yes. I thought February.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz.

  ‘Perhaps we could talk some rime? . . . May I ring you? We could have lunch?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz. She had won, temporarily: she had managed to give the impression that she knew. Though what it was that she knew, she could not at that moment have said.

  The two women kissed, again, and drew apart.

  It was to be a long night. The hard core of party-goers stayed on until the small hours, drinking coffee, sprawled on settees, sinking into morose abuse and gloom, surfacing occasionally to laugh, to chatter, relapsing, rising, sinking again. Joseph O’Toole (always among the last to leave any party) sat in a corner with Anthony Keating talking of God. Kate Armstrong came in with another tray of coffee. The young people had gone upstairs, to bed, or not to bed: strains of music drifted from the upper regions plaintively. Charles reappeared, after half an hour’s absence, and threw himself into an armchair, where he lay back for some time with his eyes shut. Liz thought he looked appalling, and wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. Blotchy, middle aged, fat. She was frightened of him. She had always been frightened of him. That was why she had fallen in love with him. He had power over her. And now he was going to divorce her and marry Lady Henrietta Latchett. She knew it all, now: she had divined it all. Too late for self-respect, but not too late to exact a little vengeance. No wonder he looked so crumpled. He was about to embark on a new life in New York with the most boring woman in Britain. And she, at her age, what was she to do? A terrible, drunken tiredness filled her and she too sat back and shut her eyes. The room turned, as it had done in the parties of her youth.

  The sight of both host and hostess apparently sleeping rallied the laggards, eventually, and with apologies they began to stumble to their feet. Liz and Charles rose too. Little was said: it was too late. Only one interchange could Liz later remember: ‘A very good party, a better party than ever,’ said the recently felled historian Giles, now fully recovered, to which Liz heard herself reply, ‘Well, it’s as well you made the most of it, for it will be the last.’

  The announcement was greeted with mute and grave acceptance by the departing guests. Cold air drifted in through the front door. Liz shivered. The door shut. She and Charles returned to the drawing-room. They sat down. Ceremonially, as it were: to attention, as it were.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ said Charles, but did not move.

  Liz stared at him. She could see that he was frightened of her. He looked lamentable, disadvantaged, weak. His eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘You didn’t dare to tell me,’ said Liz.

  ‘I think we should get divorced,’ said Charles.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I’d try to stop you? Did you think I’d plead with you to stay?’

  ‘No,’ said Charles, dully. ‘It wasn’t that. Not that at all. Anyway, I thought you knew.’

  ‘If you thought I knew, why didn’t you tell me?’

  He laughed briefly.

  ‘This was a very expensive charade,’ she said, pursuing her advantage. She was beginning to think she knew where she was. He nodded agreement, muttered that he thought a grand finale would be her kind of thing, better to wrap it up in style, he said, echoing Ivan. And then he suddenly said, in a more natural tone, in an everyday tone that she rarely heard from him these days, ‘And anyway, I thought it wouldn’t matter to anyone, now the children are grown up.’

  ‘What?’

  Patiently, he repeated, as though perhaps she had not heard: ‘I thought it wouldn’t matter to anyone, now the children are grown up.’

  ‘What on earth has it got to do with the children?’

  ‘Oh well. You know. One wouldn’t have wanted to split up the family.’

  This banal observation astounded her, though she did not know why. It seemed to come from another world of reference, an older, ordinary world, of platitude and cliché, of pattern and familiar family ties, a world that she had thought they had never entered, for many good reasons never entered: and now here was Charles himself, invoking its terms, as though it had been there always, as though they had always inhabited its domain.

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ she ventured, disliking the silence, ‘that in your view we’ve only stuck it out together all these years because of the children? Because of the so-called children?’

  Charles shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I thought. I thought that was what you thought. I knew you’d rather have been off on your own, if it hadn’t been for the children. You’ve been very good with the children, I wouldn’t deny that. But I knew you were getting restless. Wanting to be off.’

  ‘Whatever made you think that?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘I made you think that?’

  ‘Yes, you,’ he said, patiently, irritably, still with that relentlessly everyday, normative tone, as though this whole discussion were the most ordinary event, the most expected of interchanges. ‘You’re not going to start pretending you want to move to New York, are you? You’ve always made it quite clear that you were staying here and that I could fuck off to the other end of the world for all you cared. You’re too busy to speak some days. You won’t even notice I’ve gone.’

  He spoke without embarrassment.

  ‘That’s not quite fair,’ she said cautiously. ‘It’s not as though you’re not quite busy yourself. You haven’t had much time for domestic life of late, have you? Or ever. Come to that.’

  ‘We’re not a domestic couple. Though I must say, you did a good job with the boys. Considering the problems.’

  The elegiac note sounded ominously, unanswerably, offering calm and collusion: as if aware of the risks, Charles struck suddenly out, moving out into dangerous white water, tipping over the edge into a new reach.

  ‘And anyway,’ said Charles, ‘then there was Henrietta.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Liz, feeling herself begin to glitter and crackle and spark, striking out herself, away from sadness and regret, ‘yes, of course, that’s a point. There was Henrietta. When was there Henrietta? When? Tell me when? How long has all this been going on, behind my back?’

  A new reach, but the words were banal here too: how could she be uttering them?

  ‘I’m not telling you,’ he said, in a manner that later she condemned as sheepish.

  ‘When? This month? This year? Last year? Go on, don’t just sit there, tell me,’ she demanded, in a manner that later she condemned as shrewish.

  He covered his eyes with his hand and moaned. ‘For God’s sake, sweetie. Let’s leave it till morning, shall we? I’m knackered. Let’s leave it till morning.’

  But she heard herself saying, still in shrewish style, that on the contrary there wasn’t any time in the morning, that she had to go to a psychoanalytical conference in the Metropole Hotel with a bunch of Japanese in the morning, that she wanted to talk now, that he couldn’t just announce that he wanted to get divorced and then decide he was too tired to talk about it. On and on she heard herself ranting (could it be that she heard echoes of her own past self, the speaking, ranting, resurrected ghost of that ephemeral figure Liz Lintot?) and heard his vague, evasive grunts and answers: yes, he said, he and Henrietta would marry as soon as possible, Henrietta wanted to go to New York with him, she’d had a thin time herself lately, he needed her in New York, Henrietta hadn’t been well, needed to settle . . . and as Liz spoke and listened she was aware of a simultaneous conviction that this was the most shocking, the most painful hour of her entire life, and also that it was profoundly dull, profoundly trivial, profoundly irrelevant, a mere routine, devoid of truth, devoid of meaning: nothing.

  ‘Honestly,’ Charles was saying, after more than an hour of beleaguered explanation, or semi-explanation, ‘I di
dn’t think you’d take it like this, old thing, I thought you’d – well, I thought you’d be relieved, to tell you the truth. Relieved to be rid of me. You know me. Worthless kind of chap, in my own way. What did you expect? Good of you to put up with me so long. You’ll have more scope on your own.’

  ‘You lying hypocrite,’ said Liz, exhausted, without rancour. ‘You feeble, contemptible, cowardly two-faced cheat.’

  ‘There, there,’ said Charles.

  ‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘Why not?’ said Charles, with admirable, with deadly equanimity. ‘I’ve always forgiven you.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ she heard herself cry, ‘but then I never went away, did I? I stayed, I stayed with you. I never went away!’ And suddenly, astonishingly, astonished, she began to weep, great sobs bursting out of her, tears leaping from her eyes, a kind of howling noise in her nose and throat, and Charles got up and came and sat by her and took her in his arms as she howled like a six-year-old. ‘There, there,’ he kept saying, until she lay calm against his shoulder, calm and sodden: ‘Come to bed,’ he said, and pulled her to her feet, and supported her up the stairs, past the paintings and the roses, and into her bedroom, where she lay motionless as he began to take off her sandals, her tights, her dress. He found her new white Christmas-present nightdress hanging on the back of the dressing room door, and heaved her into it, then opened the bed, and pushed her between the sheets. He found a sleeping pill, a glass of water, and put them on the table by her side. Then he undressed and lay down beside her and took her in his arms. They had not slept in the same bed for nearly two years. ‘There, there,’ he said, soothingly, ‘hold on to me, hold on.’ She held on to him, because he was there, because he had been there. He was very solid. She held on to twenty years of him. Heavy, solid, smooth, adult. Safe. The man who had never been safe became, upon leaving her, safe to her. So it was. The death of danger. No harm to come, no more harm to come. Calm shore. He rocked her in his arms. They slept.

  London nights. Aaron lay awake at the top of the house. He had overseen, foreseen, overheard. The night was still. The party was over. London, West One. He made himself levitate over the capital. Dark street. Would they have switched off the cold fountains in Trafalgar Square? The owls hooted in Highgate, in Wimbledon, in Dulwich. Drinking men lay huddled in newspaper on benches, on railways stations, beneath the arches, beneath the Festival Hall. Aaron listened to the silence, and to the faint music of a cassette: the fifth symphony of Sibelius. Where the swan drifts upon the darkening flood. He communed with his mother, he implored her to drift with him. Was she there, was it she that was with him? Two floors below, his stepmother lay in his father’s arms, for the last time. Sweet Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off. The party was over. Where would he drift now? The soft cool currents of the air lifted him above the sleeping city, swirled him gently. The music gathered its strength. He lay in its arms. It was the first morning of 1980.

  Meanwhile, up in Northam, that figurative Northern city, the New Year had also advanced, ignored by some, welcomed by others, bringing surprises to some, and a deadly, continuing tedium to others. The Other Nation, less than two hundred miles away, celebrated in its own style. In a renovated Georgian terrace house less than a quarter of a mile from the Civic Centre, actors, actresses, arts officers, leisure officers, artists-in-residence, playwright-in-residence, and a visiting jazz musician gathered together to laugh, to sing, to eat spinach salad and green bean salad and mackerel pâté and wholemeal bread and curried brown rice: they played games, word games, charades, quotation games. Northam’s poet sat glumly in a corner with a plateful and a pint and watched with silent outrage, as was his way. Next door, an old woman in her seventies read aloud to her ninety-two-year-old mother, as she had read aloud of an evening for decades; their house had not been renovated, it belonged to another age. Solid provincial comfort, a little shabby now, but solid. They had stuck it out, as the area stormed around them: they had stood their ground, resisting all offers of rehousing, uprooting. They would die in their own beds. Their high-smelling dog lay on the hairy ancient rug before the smokeless fuel fire. Round the corner another old woman in her seventies awaited the departure of the year, huddled in bed for warmth, clad in layer upon layer of old nylon nightdress, woolly cardigan, matted flannel dressing-gown, gazing at an unsatisfactory black and white television flickering at her from a chair by the bed. She could see nothing, could make out nothing, but it was a comfort, it was company, she heard its voices, they spoke to her. In the flat below, a teenage couple quarrelled about whether it was safe to leave the baby and go down to the pub. The baby cried, as babies do. The more it cried, the more they wanted to leave it, and the less safe it seemed to leave it. The girl began to cry, as girls do, and the teenage father went out on his own, slamming the door behind him. The girl shouted abuse after him, then picked up her baby for comfort, and settled down to watch telly with the remains of a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

  Further out, in the fashionable village-suburb of Breasbrough, civic spirits were high at a New Year’s Eve party, where left-wing councillors, left-wing teachers, left-wing journalists, left-wing social workers and a few agnostic entrepreneurs raised their glasses and looked forward to the exhilarating confrontation of the approaching steel strike: they were high on a recent freak by-election in the neighbourhood which had reversed the national trend to the Right and given, in their own view, a renewed popular blessing to their defiant, daring programme of high social expenditure. Socialism begins at home, they told one another as they filled their glasses with Oake and Nephews’ Special Christmas Offer Beaujolais. Northam’s elderly historian and honorary ideologue sat glumly in a corner with a plateful and a pint, and watched with silent outrage, as was his way. He did not trust this new wave of optimism. He had seen too many waves fall harmlessly upon the shore. He did not approve of wine drinking. He was going deaf: on purpose, he sometimes thought.

  Half a mile up the hill, spirits were also high in the home of Eddie Duckworth, that plump, much-loved, avuncular manager of Pitts and Harley, newly elected President of the Chamber of Commerce, who had faith that at last a government had been elected that would put a stop to inflation, high interest rates, rocketing domestic and industrial rates, shameful capitulation to the unions, centralized bureaucratic planning, and the consequent decay of the manufacturing industries: the writing is on the wall at the Town Hall, he told his guests, as their glasses were refilled with Oake and Nephews’ Beaujolais. Eddie Duckworth smiled and sparkled and shone. There was much laughter in both Breasbrough houses. There were one or two guests that had been invited to both Breasbrough parties. Northam is a small city, a parochial city. Mrs Eddie Duckworth did not laugh, although she tried to smile. She was not very good at smiling these days, and the unease disseminated by her unconvincing efforts led Eddie Duckworth to mutter to her in a corner, with a mixture of sharpness and sorrow, that perhaps she’d better go to bed. He didn’t know what had come over her, of late.

  Shirley Harper, Liz Headleand’s younger sister, was at none of these parties, and had been invited to none. She had been expected to invite people in. This was now, at forty-three, her lot. Though in the old days it had been she who had braved her mother’s disapprobation and slipped out to enjoy herself, while her sister stuck grimly to her books and her duty and her long-term plans. Shirley had been the rebel, the self-willed, the unappeasing. She had lied and deceived, she had painted her lips with toxic red paint from a box of water colours or with the less toxic red dye of rationed Smarties, she had darkened her lashes with shoe polish and perfumed herself with sample offers of cheap perfume solicited through sycophantic correspondence with cosmetic manufacturers. She had visited coffee bars with boys. She had been to the cinema with boys. She had left school against her mother’s wishes, had married against her mother’s wishes.

  Yet while Liz, the good daughter, the dutiful daughter, was taking a deep hot bath on New Year’s Eve be
fore changing for her party, Shirley the rebel was serving up a hot meal for her mother in the old house in Abercorn Avenue before rushing back (without appearing to rush) to see what was happening in her own oven at home, where she was cooking a goose for her husband Cliff, his brother Steve and his wife Dora, her own mother- and father-in-law, and Dora’s Uncle Fred. While Liz was nibbling pistachio nuts, surveying dominions, Shirley, hot, red and angry (but not appearing to be angry) was listening yet once more to her mother-in-law’s description of her digestive system and what the doctor had said about the swelling of her legs, a commentary which followed closely upon her complaints about the absence of her two older grandchildren who had (in Shirley’s view very wisely) buggered off to a disco at Maid Marian’s Nitespot. ‘In my day,’ she was saying, ‘New Year’s Eve was a family evening, young people didn’t just suit themselves. We all used to be together on New Year’s Eve, didn’t we, Dad?’

  Her husband, thus addressed, did not reply: he rarely did. Since his second stroke he had found the effort of conversation hardly worth the meagre rewards. Whatever he said was always ignored: for years, even when in health, he had been used by his wife as a ventriloquist’s dummy, in support of an endless succession of mutually contradictory banalities, and whenever he had risked an original or even a conciliatory remark he would be firmly rebuffed. So now he sat there, his napkin tucked around his chin, smiling gently: a mild-natured, weak, weakened old man, loyal to his bully of a wife, glad to be included, glad Shirley hadn’t found it all too much for her, grateful to sit there in the warmth of the nice oil-fired 1970s central heating. It made a change. He didn’t get out much.

  Steve replied for him. ‘Well, we’re all together still, aren’t we?’ said Cliff’s brother Steve, with some asperity: he could have thought of better ways of spending the evening, given the choice.