The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  For her predecessor, Naomi, she had felt none. It had not been required. Naomi Headleand, who had been killed so tragically, so tragically young, when driving herself quietly and soberly home from Glyndebourne one night. Young, beautiful, innocent, rich, she had, it was claimed, been killed instantly when an oncoming overtaking car had lost control and collided, head-on, with hers. She had died instantly, of internal, invisible injuries. When the police arrived, ten minutes later, her car was still singing: from the radio swelled the fifth symphony of Sibelius, representing eternity. Where could jealousy enter here? A young, a beautiful, a fairy-story mother, dying with the greatest of grace, as immortality asserted itself and pledged its reassurance in the night air of her departure. A potent myth, but a friendly one. Liz had felt herself to be close to Naomi, as she nursed Naomi’s children, slept with Naomi’s husband, took tea or sherry with Naomi’s parents, helped to form the childish letters which her stepchildren wrote to Naomi’s parents thanking them for presents, for outings. She had never met Naomi in her life, but in death she grew to love her: she had taken her into herself, had learned her likings, had read her books and tried (although not herself musical) to listen to her music, she had spoken much of her to the children, had insisted upon treating her as an ally, as a friend beyond the grave, had reinvented her and kept her close to them – oh, not without awareness of the dangers, of the necessary distortions and consolations, but then all life is danger, and Liz had embarked willingly upon its full tide with those three small boys, with that ambitious, importunate widower and that friendly ghost. A great adventure, a fitting enterprise for one who had known herself from infancy to be set apart for some rare destiny, and one that she had thought herself to have pursued courageously, successfully, with a redeeming love that had rescued even the anguished, complex, hostile Aaron, and had saved him from his wilder flights. How magically her love for the boys had developed into, contrasted with, reinforced her different but equally powerful passion for her daughters: how strange but inevitable had appeared the five-pointed constellation of their heroic family.

  Accomplished. Yes, well, perhaps that was the point. She collected glasses on a tray. She picked a dying leaf from a branchy green-pink flecked begonia. She answered the telephone, thanked the Martellis for thanking her for the party. She would look for their gloves, would ring back if she found them. She restacked the dishwasher. The whole house was still sleeping, although it was half past nine. She read the paper. She was not due at the Metropole until twelve. She would walk there. The morning gaped, endless. She switched on the radio and switched it off again. She heard Charles move across the landing to his own room and run a bath. Of course they should divorce. She had often thought of it herself, had once or twice in low or high moments suggested it. But was nevertheless outraged, outraged, that the suggestion should have come from Charles. Had he meant it? Yes, he had meant it, she had no doubt. It was up to her, quickly, to forge herself a manner that would give her an advantage in whatever negotiations were to come: and she had done so, by the time he came down for his breakfast. She greeted him with a pot of coffee and a brisk, slightly mocking, offhand smile. She would treat him as a delinquent, a time-waster, a bad child, whose offences could only be petty. She would refuse to allow that the matter was serious, or that its consequences could affect her profoundly. A minor irritation. Yes, that was the line.

  But it did not, she found, come very naturally to her. Breakfast was not pleasant. They spoke of indifferent things, but her mind, resenting too tight a control, kept whining away with its own questions. What would happen to the house? Whose house was it, anyway? Legally, morally? What would the children think? What would Edgar think? What would the world think? What was it like, life in the 1980s for a woman on her own? How much would it devalue her? Whatever could a man like Charles see in Henrietta? What had been lacking in her that he had found in Henrietta? What had she done wrong? Should she feel guilt? Should she feel shame? What would her solicitor say? Was it true that she had neglected Charles, as he sometimes claimed? She had always thought he was joking. How could one neglect a man who was never there? Was he never there because she had neglected him?

  And these questions pursued her, buzzing like mosquitoes, as she walked up Marylebone High Street with her briefcase, as she crossed the Edgware Road, as she joined the conference group for sherry in the Westminster Suite, as she discovered that Edgar had rightly warned her that conversing with Japanese was not easy, as she ate her indifferent luncheon of Maryland chicken, as she listened to Professor Yamamoto speak on Spenser’s reinterpretation of Freud’s interpretation of folie à deux in the classic case of Orphan Eva and her mother, as she delivered her own paper, as she attempted desperately to follow the ensuing discussion, of which she could grasp only one word in ten: all through this crazy jumble of non-language and misunderstanding, of erudition and impenetrable obscurity, of meaningless signs and uninterpretable eye contact, the mosquitoes buzzed and nipped and drew blood. By six, at the end of the session, she was exhausted, demoralized. She took a taxi home. She felt herself, beneath the pricks and stings, to be growing ill. Charles had made her ill. She needed comfort, reassurance. She would ring Alix. She would tell Alix. She knew that in speaking to Alix her voice would find its normal level, her mind would return to its normal tuning. She could rely on Alix. But when she got back and dialled Alix’s number, Alix was out. Liz replaced the receiver and tried to keep calm, but she could feel panic, fever, tears approaching. Charles had gone out. To see Henrietta, to his club? He had left no word. She sat in her study and stared at the telephone. If I were my patient, she asked herself, would I prescribe myself a tranquillizer? Is this what people feel like when they request tranquillizers? She rang Esther. Esther too was out. She went back into the drawing room and poured herself a whisky and soda. She switched on the television.

  Alix Bowen was out because for her, too, New Year’s Day was a working day, of sorts. She had to go to the Garfield Centre, where she taught one day a week, to see the inmates perform their Christmas entertainment. She had promised to go. They would be angry with her if she did not go. But when she got into the car at five, ready for the fifteen-mile drive across London, it wouldn’t start. The battery felt flat. It clicked and died on her. No life in it at all. It hadn’t been such a cold night, what had happened? She did not understand cars. She sat there crossly. There was absolutely no way of getting from Wandsworth to Wanley except by car, or none that did not involve at least four methods of public transport. It was not easy even by car. In fact, it was a ridiculous journey, and one that annoyed her regularly once a week. The car had been behaving all right the night before, when Brian had driven them back from Liz’s. It always behaved for Brian. She switched it on again. A faint but more hopeful splutter, this time. She switched off, quickly. She would have to get Brian. Brian wouldn’t mind being got, but he would laugh. Her feet were cold. Perhaps she would put on another pair of socks. But it was always so hot, in the Centre.

  Brian did laugh. He patted her on the shoulder, then he hugged her, and laughed.

  ‘You look so miserable,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderful. It’s only a car.’

  ‘I know it’s only a car,’ she said, peevishly, shifting from one foot to another on the damp pavement. ‘And it won’t bloody well start. What’s the point of a car that won’t start?’

  It started at once, for Brian. They listened to it. It sounded perfectly well, for Brian.

  ‘There you go,’ he said, getting out, putting his arm round her.

  ‘I’m a fool,’ she said.

  ‘We’re all fools,’ said Brian. ‘It’s a foolish world.’

  ‘You’re not a fool,’ said Alix. ‘You’re a saint.’

  ‘No, you’re the saint,’ he said. ‘And you look very nice in your new woolly hat. Off you go, they’ll be howling for you.’

  ‘Don’t forget about the boiled potatoes.’

  ‘I’ve got plans for those potatoes.’

/>   ‘Fry-up plans?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Drive carefully.’

  And off she went, driving carefully, through South London, and east, and under the river, and north, and up the A113, towards the Garfield Centre, thinking of Brian frying up the cold boiled potatoes for himself and their son Sam, chopping parsley, frying eggs and bacon, delicious; Brian handled the frying pan as confidently as he handled the car, eggs never broke for Brian, he had a firm grasp of the material world, of pan handles and gear levers and of her own warm body, of garden spades and wayward boilers, of carving knives and power drills and saws and scissors and invisible screws; he treated all these things as his friends and allies, an Ideal Husband, she sometimes teased him: and yet, and yet, he spent his days and his nights teaching abstractions, he spent his time with words, words, words. To this he had aspired. How could it be otherwise? From paradox to paradox we travel, onwards, from ourselves. And what on earth was she herself playing at, crossing the urban wastes so regularly to teach a bunch of delinquent girls, a bunch of criminals, for £15.60 a night? It hardly covered the petrol. It probably didn’t cover the petrol, if she sat down to work it out, which she didn’t. What an ill-organized, hotchpotch, casually assembled, patchwork life. Everything seemed to have happened by accident, even the things that lasted. Her job at Garfield, her three days a week in Whitehall, the house in Wandsworth, her furniture, Sam’s school, a series of accidents. None of it had been intended. She could have done such things. But she had always been, it seemed, too busy to stop and take stock, too busy to plan, too busy to rationalize. However did people manage to discipline themselves and stick to a single line for long enough to gain control, to come out on top, to become the boss instead of the employee? At Liz’s party, last night, there had been bosses: Charles himself was an archetypal boss, and if one didn’t know Liz so well one might think she was one too. That chap Lazenby appeared, improbably, to be a boss, despite his glaring character defects. Of course, Brian himself was a boss, if one counted being Head of Humanities in a poorly funded and now much-threatened Adult Education Institute as being a boss. One couldn’t so count it, in her view. He employed nobody, he was employed, and precariously employed at that. Not even his so-called students thought of him as a figure of authority. But at least Brian had a job with a name. Whereas I scurry aimlessly from this to that, thought Alix, as she drove through the dark evening: they block one path, I try another, and so it goes on, thought Alix, who at times thought no such thing, and was not thinking it now with much conviction. It was the car that had annoyed her.

  But the car now proved obedient, and the north-east London suburbs received her, soothing her as they usually but not invariably did with their eloquent monotony, their repetitive regularities, street after street of semi-detached houses, their lights lit, their curtains drawn, their television sets humming, their inhabitants safe within. An orderly life on either side of the dual carriageway, the illusion of an orderly life. In spring there would be pink blossom at regular intervals. Nice, quiet, safe, dull, desirable. Desirable residences. How the owners of these desirable residences had complained ten years ago when they found that the Garfield Centre was going to be built in their neighbourhood. Nobody wants prisoners or lunatics on their doorstep, and there had been a well-fought campaign to demonstrate that the women of Garfield would be both prisoners and lunatics. Even an optimist like Alix found people depressing when they revealed themselves in this manner. She made excuses for them, but she found them depressing.

  Mile after mile, ribbons of roads. What was going on, behind those closed curtains? Were people peacefully frying up potatoes, or were they hitting one another on the head with their frying pans? Alix liked to let her mind wander over the map of Britain, asking herself which interiors she could visualize, which not. She aspired to a more comprehensive vision. She aspired to make connections. She and Liz, over supper together, often spoke of such things. Their own stories had strangely interlocked, and sometimes she had a sense that such interlockings were part of a vaster network, that there was a pattern, if only one could discern it, a pattern that linked these semi-detached houses of Wanley with those in Leeds and Northam, a pattern that linked Liz’s vast house in Harley Street with the Garfield Centre towards which she herself now drove. The social structure greatly interested Alix. She had once thought of herself as unique, had been encouraged (in theory at least) by her education and by her reading to believe in the individual self, the individual soul, but as she grew older she increasingly questioned these concepts: seeing people perhaps more as flickering impermanent points of light irradiating stretches, intersections, threads, of a vast web, a vast network, which was humanity itself: a web of which much remained dark, apparently but not necessarily unpeopled: peopled by the dark, the unlit, the dim spirits, as yet unknown, the past and the future, the dead, the unborn: and herself, and Brian, and Liz, and Charles, and Esther, and Teddy Lazenby, and Otto and Caroline Werner, and all the rest of them at that bright party, and in these discreet anonymous dark curtained avenues and crescents were but chance and fitful illuminations, chance meetings, chance and unchosen representatives of the thing itself. We are all but a part of a whole which has its own, its distinct, its other meaning: we are not ourselves, we are crossroads, meeting places, points on a curve, we cannot exist independently for we are nothing but signs, conjunctions, aggregations.

  Liz and Alix sometimes talked of this vision. Liz had a more robust notion of the self, and took another line on the individual’s place in the structure. Each suspected the other (each suspected) of personal, biographical reasons for arguing the case that each, by and large, argued: and the difference between them was in itself odd, as in the great graph of time and place their paths had oddly crossed and oddly coincided. How strange it was, after all, that Alix out of the whole of Britain should have married Brian Bowen whose father was the uncle of Liz’s sister-in-law. Or was this perhaps not odd at all? Alix was not sufficiently numerate to be able to calculate the odds against such an apparently odd relationship, though she could not help but feel that its component, accidental parts were startlingly combined. Was there, could there be, a computer that could work out these things? That could prove, perhaps, that it was yet more odd that Liz’s sister’s sister-in-law had not met and married, for instance, Teddy Lazenby? She must ask Otto Werner of this one day: Otto had a new passion for computers, and loved to speculate on their possibilities.

  Otto’s wife Caroline, for instance, was alleged to be Edgar Lintot’s cousin, though this had not emerged in the days when Liz Ablewhite had been briefly married to Edgar Lintot. At the thought of Caroline Werner, a small shadow of anxiety crossed over Alix’s party recollections: the Werners were coming to dinner with the Bowens the following week, and what should she give them to eat? Otto did not care, did not notice what he ate, which was rather a waste, really, as Caroline Werner was a first-class cook, and wrote cookery books. Alix found this daunting, although Caroline took great pains not to daunt, and was on other, non-culinary matters, a perfectly acceptable noncompetitive person. But the knowledge of Caroline’s expertise hung heavily, at times, on Alix: heavily, too, hung the knowledge that Caroline was such an unpretentious, agreeable woman that she would be quite happy to eat a plateful of fried-up boiled potatoes, parsley, bacon and scrambled eggs.

  Liz had sidestepped the problem, last night, with caterers, and with Deirdre Kavanagh. Alix could not have afforded this solution, and would have thought it cheating had she been able to afford it, although she thoroughly despised herself for these scruples.

  Female roles, female inadequacies, parties, social life. Liz’s chandelier had glittered bravely. Gatherings, glitterings, a faint perfume. How had Liz managed it, this assembly? It was against the laws of nature, unnatural. Alix arrived at the gates, at the high wall, with its discreetly disguised barbed wire, at the porter’s lodge. There was Stanley, one-handed St
anley, hook-handed Stanley, listening in his little hut to his radio. Stanley loves music, as he often says. A Viennese waltz drifted into the January night. Stanley greeted her, wished her a Happy New Year, glanced perfunctorily at her pass, admitted her. Alix drove on to the staff car park, as Technicolor Viennese figures in ball gowns, wearing ruby pendants, flowered corsages, turned in her mind, in a scene that derived less from Vienna (where she had never been) than from Tolstoy’s descriptions of balls in War and Peace. Once long ago, Otto Werner’s father had danced with Esther Breuer’s mother, on New Year’s Eve, in Vienna, in 1925: but neither of them remembers the incident, and therefore, perhaps, it does not exist? What computer, what analysis, could ever retrieve it? Alix’s godmother, also named Alix, had once been to a ball in Vienna. Alix herself had been to a May Ball or two in Cambridge, in her dancing days. These are now over, thank God, she thinks, as she makes her way towards the discreetly locked, discreetly monitored side gate.

  The temperature is high in Garfield on Tuesday, 1 January 1980. Here it is party time, here also there is glitter. Alix could feel the heat at once, embodied in more than the pink and green balloons, the paper chains, the tinsel. Garfield, of all the institutions in which she had ever worked, was most responsive to mood, to atmosphere; it shifted and changed from day to day, from week to week, for it had, like the larger society of her larger imagining, its own corporate, its own embodied spirit, all the more powerful for its caging, its high barbed wire, its high walls. On some evenings, the place was dull, impassive, stifled, solid with boredom: on some evenings it grumbled ominously, with violence, waiting for Lights Out; on some evenings it was studious, attentive, solemn; and on other evenings, like this, it sang with a high, sweet, feverish erotic intensity, a claustrophobic glamour, an emotional throb. This was a sweet evening. Alix found herself embraced, caressed, her hand held, her hair stroked, her new striped woolly hat with its purple bobble extravagantly admired. These liberties were permitted. This was a liberal régime, the only régime of its kind in the country. Sometimes Alix shook off the liberties irritably, but tonight she submitted, responding to the petting, intimate, female warmth; she kissed and was kissed, she thanked them for their Christmas cards, she wished them a Happy New Year, she shook hands with the older women, she laughed and felt safe with her friends, she made no effort to repel their eager affection. (It did not always go this way: sometimes they sulked and abused her, sometimes they threatened her and one another, sometimes they would not attend class.) The wardens, Eric and Hannah Glover, welcomed her with more restraint but equal friendliness and introduced her to a man from the Home Office who had come to visit – well, to inspect, in effect, but the mood was holiday, informal, and the man from the Home Office smiled with the rest of them. There were sandwiches and cups of coffee. The half-hour’s entertainment was due to begin at eight thirty: some relatives, waiting now patiently in the hall, had been admitted, but were not allowed backstage to mingle. Freedom, but not too much freedom. Some of those taking part were already in costume: Jilly Fox was wearing what looked like an Iranian chadour, contrived from a sheet, Karen Gray was dressed up as a nurse, and Bob Saxby who taught pottery was encased in a Michelin-man spacesuit which he claimed was an Arctic explorer’s sleeping bag. ‘Imagine, man, trying to kip in this,’ he kept asking, to anyone who would listen, as he demonstrated the inconvenience of his garb. Innocent, innocent, like schoolchildren, the thieves and murderers. Toni Hutchinson stroked Alix’s arm, possessively, affectionately, wheedling out of her the story of the party of the night before: ‘So you wore your blue dress? And did you put your hair up? Did it stay up?’ She liked to tease Alix about her hair, which was forever wispily descending from its large wooden slide: Toni’s own curled neatly in angelic dyed blonde braids, and sometimes on request she had given Alix lessons in hair management, but Alix could not, would not learn.