Cliff and Steve both fancied Shirley. They watched her switch from the attic Shirley to the downstairs Shirley with appalled, enthralled admiration. Her inventiveness astounded them. She was the spirit of subversion. Mr and Mrs Harper thought she was a very nice girl.
Sometimes, after acquisition of a television set in Coronation year, they would all watch television together. Shirley had enjoyed that. Mr and Mrs Harper had sat in their respective armchairs, Marge had sat on a red leather pouffe and she, Steve and Cliff had occupied the two-seater settee of the three-piece suite. Cliff liked to get her in a corner but she liked to sit in the middle. There, by small wrigglings and the exercise of will, she could encourage them both to insert their hands into different parts of her clothing, her body, sometimes simultaneously. Steve’s hand would cup her breast inside her blouse, while Cliff’s would explore her suspenders, her knickers. She learned to control these manoeuvres with great expertise. The Harper parents never noticed, but continued to watch the programmes: What’s My Line, Down You Go, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, Twenty Questions, Science Review. Shirley watched the programmes too, but was occasionally distracted by an intensity of experience that sometimes approached orgasm. A communal event.
And her sister Liz sat at home, missing all the fun, deaf to the call of the flesh, with her Alternative Mathematics, her Chemistry and her Biology, wasting her youth, wasting her opportunities, obeying the will of their mother, programmed, docile, chaste, pale. One autumn night, when Liz was preparing for Oxford and Cambridge entrance, Shirley had come home at ten from the Harpers’, flushed from sexual excitement and from running through the cold streets under the yellowing smoke-scented suburban trees, her body on fire, and had found Liz still sitting where she had left her, two hours earlier, at the kitchen table, staring at the pale-green wall, as though in a catatonic trance. Shirley had clattered noisily on the linoleum, had huffed and puffed and banged about, and finally had said with some passion, ‘You’re barmy.’
And Liz had slowly swivelled her head round, and stared at her as though from a great way off, and had said dreamily, ‘If you really want something badly enough, do you think you get it?’
‘I haven’t the faintest,’ said Shirley, taking off her outdoor shoes and putting them on the rack, putting on her indoor slippers, and guiltily, belatedly, bending down to wipe the shoe marks off the linoleum with spit and hanky. She assumed her sister was referring to getting into Cambridge, which she herself considered a poisonous, disreputable fantasy, and one unlikely ever to be fulfilled: the number of girls who had achieved Cambridge places from Battersby Girls’ Grammar in the last ten years could be counted on the fingers of one hand. She sat back on her haunches, as the smear dried. ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, more solemnly, ‘I don’t know if the amount of wanting has anything to do with the getting.’
‘It must have,’ said Liz, who sat there, burning, burning, eaten up with longing for worlds beyond her sister’s guessing: a pale effigy, locked up in imaginings. ‘It must have,’ she sighed. The imaginings were so potent that they took wing and rustled round the room, little winged souls, small bird-faced holy ghosts, emanations: the whole room was suddenly dense with the vibration of their rustling, the old-fashioned white tiles with their rounded edges glinted with their reflections, the linoleum shimmered, the kitchen cupboards shook, the morbid whiteness and greenness of the paintwork quivered, the exposed pipes trembled and knocked. The two girls held their breath, Liz sitting there with her mock examination papers, Shirley crouching by the shoe rack: their prison kitchen filled with presences. These moments carne, but they came rarely.
‘I think,’ Shirley said, softly, catching her sister’s low, dreamy, drugged tone, ‘I think it has. Yes, I think it has. What we want, we do get.’
‘If we want, for example, eternity, we get it,’ said Liz.
‘Yes. Or if we want this world, we get it.’
‘But we have to suffer for our wanting,’ said Liz.
‘Ah, that’s what I can’t stand, the suffering,’ said Shirley, jumping to her feet, her fifteen-year-old voice reasserting, boldly, frailly, the tones of elsewhere, of normality and new Bird’s Eye peas and modern kitchenettes, of television and hands fumbling inside brassières: ‘I can’t stand the suffering, I won’t suffer, I’ve had enough of suffering.’
Liz stared at her, coldly.
‘Then you won’t get,’ she said. ‘You won’t get.’
At this moment they heard their mother turn off the radio in the other room. They looked at one another.
‘What if one suffers, and suffers, and suffers,’ said Shirley, deliberately, vengefully, ‘and doesn’t get? What then?’
And Liz had shaken her head in pain at the mystery in the next room.
And still that mystery in the front room continued, reflected Shirley on New Year’s Eve 1979, as she examined the handsome features of the dangerous Queen of Spades, and wondered if the King had come out in the deal. It was a little deaf, and a little blind, the mystery, and its only friend Miss Mynors was dead, but it continued. On and on it went. There was no mercy. Whereas Liz, by some immense, visionary effort had invented her own mercy, under cover of obedience, had drawn up a secret map of escape, and had departed, and was now at this instant giving a party for hundreds of guests where champagne flowed. How could these things be? How could it be that Liz, so young, had known her way out of the maze? Was it true that the mind was wiser than the body? Shirley took a risk and played her Queen, but Cliff had the King, and she lost the trick.
She must forgive Liz. Liz was right to vanish, as the boys were right to congregate at the Maid Marian and avoid their grandmothers. It was by her own choice that she sat here. It was by her own choice that she had married Cliff, not Steve: it was she herself that had seduced Cliff, in a field of cow parsley on a May evening. She had obeyed her body, she had opened her legs, had pulled him into her and said, Now, come, now. What was, what could have been wrong about that? She had thought to free herself, through nature, through the violence of nature. But nature was cunning and had kept her trapped. What did it want her for? She had obeyed sex, she had trusted sex, she had loved sex, and it had betrayed her, had deceived her, had left her sitting here, a middle-aged housewife, mother of three, playing cards, with nothing before her but old age. Was it so? Could it be so? How had it happened? Was there maybe some other event, some other metamorphosis awaiting her? Or was this it? Shirley, sitting there mildly, the downstairs Shirley, thinking these thoughts, remembering the peremptory demands of the old, the attic Shirley, felt trembling in her, deep deep buried in her sitting-room centrally heated flesh, a wild improper memory, an admissible echo, the faintest thrill of a shudder of remembered desire: Shirley Ablewhite, the bad-good girl, called to her through the knot of her body, painfully, angrily, buried, buried alive, and Shirley Harper half heard her, bent her head, and acknowledged with mixed fear and relief the stirring, the tremor, the sulking, menacing, sweet and half despairing plea.
Cliff was winning. His pile of matchsticks was considerable. He had had a succession of good hands and won the kitty twice. Now he was playing recklessly, sportingly, trying to let the others in, but he couldn’t help winning, it seemed. His mind wasn’t on the game at all: it was on balance sheets and interest rates and VAT and cash flow and overdraft facilities. Overextended, that’s what they were, too many orders and not enough money to buy the gear. Borrow, said his partner Jim, borrow, but look at the price of borrowing. Sums flitted through his head as he won another unlikely trick with a paltry Knave. Jim was all for going on, for expanding, for advancing rather than retreating, but Cliff was beginning to think that after all he hadn’t the temperament for it, he couldn’t stand the anxiety, he didn’t enjoy the suspense: all he wanted was security, independence, freedom from worry, being his own man. That was all. Nothing too extravagant. But it was true, what Jim said, in business you can’t stand still, you go up or you go down, you can’t just sit comfortably in your
own 1972 executive four-bedroomed plate-glass-windowed centrally heated wall-to-wall-carpeted gadget-equipped house, with your Rover and your wife’s Mini in the two-car garage, and your pot plants in your loggia, and your electric lawn mower in the shed: you can’t sit still and enjoy it, you can’t call it a day and call a halt when you own it all and don’t owe anyone a penny, you have to go on and on, relentlessly onwards, juggling with larger and larger sums, owing more, paying out more, until finally perhaps the whole thing comes tumbling round your head like a pack of cards. Jim was right: you had to go on. Risks were part of the game. He’d enjoyed them himself when he was younger. Always ready to accept a challenge, his school reports had said. It wasn’t the hard work he minded, he liked work, he liked long hours, he didn’t want to slack off: it was the anxiety he couldn’t stand. Where was it going to end? Inflation made one run to stand still. What if one ran and slipped backwards? A nightmare world. Maybe after all he’d have been better off like his Dad, quietly pushing papers round a desk in an office at the Gas Board for nine hours a day for nearly fifty years. A living death, it had seemed to him and Jim, but maybe it hadn’t been so bad. It had been safe, at least.
They were still talking about Australia, the land of opportunity. Fred’s Barbara had gone out there with her bricklayer husband and now he had a building firm and employed ten men. Cliff and Jim employed twenty, making screw-on wing-mirror attachments and assembling picnic sets.
‘It’s coming up for midnight,’ said Shirley, with some relief, pointing at the quartz carriage clock on the mantelpiece. They consulted watches, nodded agreement. ‘Somebody ought to go out and come in again with a lump of coal,’ said Dora. ‘Isn’t that what we usually do?’
‘We didn’t last year,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘We forgot. We were watching that Scottish comedian in Trafalgar Square on telly.’
‘A dark-haired man, it has to be,’ said Dora. ‘That’s you, Steve.’
Cliff looked at Steve, ran his hands through his own hair, and said, ‘That’s right, Steve. I’ve got plenty left, but it’s the wrong colour. Yours is bearing up well. Touch it up, do you? What’s that stuff called? Grecian?’
Steve hit his brother playfully but rather hard on the shoulder.
‘Where’s the coal, Shirley?’
‘We haven’t got any coal. Oil-fired, we are.’
‘What’s the next best thing?’
‘Some people,’ said Shirley, ‘have those fake gas fires now, you know, they look like real coal fires, with lumps of stuff like real coal, and real ashes. But it’s all fake. They’re quite nice. Something to look at.’
‘Go on, out you go, Steve,’ said Dora. ‘Take something black. It’s for luck. You’re to bring it in in a shovel.’
‘We never used to do this when I was a girl,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘Did they in your family, Dad?’
Her husband nodded and smiled, but whether he had heard the question or not, who could say.
‘What does it mean?’ said Shirley.
‘It’s for luck,’ said Dora. ‘First footing. It’s for luck.’
‘They do it up in Newcastle,’ volunteered Fred. ‘It’s a Geordie custom, I’ve heard say. Go on, Steve, we could all do with a bit of luck. Out you go.’
And Steve obediently went off, taking with him a jar of Marmite in a garden trowel as a substitute for coal in a shovel, and he stood out there on the front porch in the cold listening to the silence and looking at the stars, waiting for them to let him in on the last stroke of Big Ben on the radio: a faint, feeble echo of some once meaningful ritual, though what it had meant or now could mean nobody there knew or had ever known. And thus, all over Northam, all over Britain, ill-remembered, confused, shadowy vestigial rites were performed, rites with origins lost in antiquity; Celtic, Pict, Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Elizabethan, Hanoverian, Judaic rites: mistletoe dangled from drawing-pins and picture rails, golden stars shone on the Christmas Trees of Prince Albert and geese and haggis and hams lay heavy on the digestion of some, while others laughed themselves silly or sick on rum and coke at the Maid Marian New Year’s Superdisco. Steve Harper, haulage contractor, stood outside alone for a grateful crisp smokeless moment of silence, and when they opened the door to him a strange shadow of the night sidled in with him from prehistory. Shirley Harper touched the locket at her throat, for luck, a superstition she had had since childhood. ‘Happy New Year,’ they said to one another, inadequately, shivering a little. Something was absent, yet something was present. The shadow filled the corners of the broad bright hallway. A pitiful exhalation, an obscurity, a memory. A homeless ghost. The eight-year-old house perched precariously on the raw earth, amongst other isolated, precarious, detached houses, their lights shining on the dark hillside. No one had lived on that hillside for nineteen centuries. The Brigantes had held it once, against the Romans, but they had retreated to the mountains and left it to gorse and the bracken. And so it had remained until the scoops and cranes and bulldozers of 1970s Post-Industrial Man had moved in to uproot the scrub and to build the suburb known as Greystone Edge. A few Bronze Age artifacts were turned up in the dark soil, but they had meant nothing to those who had seen them, and they had been turned back into the earth. Here Venutius, leader of the Brigantes, had crouched in the night by his camp fire dwelling on the treachery of his faithless queen Cartimandua, who had sold her people to the Romans. A tragic theme. Here the Harper clan gather, a small tribe, frail, ageing, on the threshold of 1980, in the presence of the sky: here thirteen-year-old Celia, young, aspiring, judgemental, reflects upon the past, as, long after her usual bedtime, she looks up at the stars and plots her own future. On the threshold of Brock Bank the Harpers gather, bidding one another good night beneath the moon. What obscure blood runs in their veins? Who could have drawn the roots, the branches, the fibres, the tendrils that have fed them and bound them? Ancestral voices whisper from the young dry garden hedge, as Steve starts up his Ford Cortina. Shirley keeps her finger on her locket which rests on her throat like a warm stethoscope. She thinks of her mother. She thinks of her father, whom she has never known, of whom she knows nothing, almost nothing, but whose image, it is alleged, is in that locket: an image which also hangs in an identical locket at this moment around her sister’s neck. A prized possession. Shirley is tired, fatigue has overwhelmed anxiety and desire: she hopes her two boys will come home soon, and go to bed quietly. She waves goodbye.
In 8, Abercorn Avenue, Rita Ablewhite lies in bed in the dark. She is not asleep. She is waiting for the clock downstairs to strike twelve. When it strikes, she will shut her eyes. When she was a girl, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, she could hear the steam trains’ celebratory whistle beyond the crossing down Station Road. Now she hears nothing but the sounds of her own house. When she was a girl, she could lie in bed and hear her mother and father talking in the next room. When she was a young woman, she could hear distant laughter down long corridors, as she lay in her bed. Now she hears nothing but the sounds of her own house. And she does not hear them as well as she did once. She lies there in the dark, with her eyes open, keeping watch.
When Liz Headleand woke on the first day of 1980 and found herself in bed with her husband, she remembered instantly the scene of the night before, and wondered how she could ever have been so upset by it. Lying there at seven o’clock in the morning, suddenly wide awake, as was her manner, it seemed to her quite obvious that she and Charles should get divorced: it had surely long been inevitable, and if Charles really wanted to marry that woman (or had he perhaps been joking? – no, perhaps not), well then, let him. She had plenty to get on with meanwhile. Why ever had she taken it so badly? She had an embarrassed recollection of having burst into tears, of demanding to know how long the affair with Henrietta had been going on. I must have been tired, she said to herself reasonably. Tired and a little drunk. All those people in the house. That’s what it was.
Charles was still heavily asleep. Unlike her, he was not good in the mornings. He lay sol
idly. She left him there, and went to have a bath: dressed briskly, went downstairs to inspect the damage, had a coffee, looked at her list for the day. It was New Year’s Day, Bank Holiday, but, bizarrely, for her a working day. She had to attend a conference at the Metropole Hotel organized by a group of Japanese psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. They did not recognize the British calendar, or, indeed, she was later to discover, their own: their first choice of conference date had been Boxing Day, but from this they had been dissuaded. The group were admirers of the dissident English Freudian, Jay Spenser, who was unaccountably famous in Japan: they had invited Liz to give a paper on Theseus and the Minotaur: Spenser’s Version of the Family Romance. She wondered what they would make of it as she got out the vacuum cleaner and started to run it over the drawing-room carpet. Would they understand her? Would she understand them? Foster children, stepchildren, institution children. She had no idea of how these patterns were formed in Japan, nor why the Japanese should have any interest in her paper, or in Karl Auerbach’s, or Gertrude Feinstein’s. Stepchildren. What would her own stepchildren say to her divorce from their father? The vacuum cleaner ran smoothly, efficiently over the rich dark-yellow pile, collecting cigarette ash, canapé crumbs, scattered bulb fibre; her mind sang with a faint clear high-pitched hum like a well-serviced machine. She listened to it with an expert ear. It sounded all right, but was there something slightly odd about the tuning, some as yet almost imperceptible new thin whine? She tested it with the concept of Henrietta, and yes, undoubtedly it responded, changing its frequency to an angry buzz before returning to its smooth hum. Henrietta. Zezeee, zezeeee. Henrietta. Zezeeee, zezeeee. Like stepping on an accelerator. The buzz of jealousy. But how could one be jealous of a stick, a statue? The vacuum cleaner, sensing her lack of concentration, took advantage of it to munch and slaver up a long strand of rug fringe: there was a smell of burning rubber. Shit, said Liz, she knelt down to unwind it. She had learned bad language from her stepsons. She struggled with the string of rug. Would they continue to be her stepsons, if she and Charles were to divorce? Would they become the stepsons of Henrietta? Of course they would. Rage possessed her and her mind zinged furiously, smelling of burning rubber. She did not worry about Sally and Stella: they were hers, her blood and body, for ever. But Jonathan, but Aaron, but Alan. Her boys, and not her boys. What was her claim to them now? What sudden right had Henrietta Latchett to her three boys? Calm down, calm down, she told herself, they are all grown up, they need neither of you, this has nothing to do with them, they will not even notice. But rage continued. The buzz of jealousy. So this was it. She had seen something of it professionally, and had thought herself exempt.
The Radiant Way Page 8