The entertainment reminded Alix of the end-of-term pantomime at school, a regular feature of her own girlhood. The same rows of uncomfortable chairs, the same improvised curtains, the same primitive lighting effects, the same take-off versions of popular songs, the same in-jokes, the same attempts at topicality, the same satirical renderings of figures of authority. One girl produced a more than passable imitation of Hannah Glover’s dress and mannerisms, in a sketch in which the pseudo-Hannah reprimanded a contrite inmate for ‘smoking in the bog’: the shapeless woolly cardigan over the wrongly buttoned blouse, the broad-seated tweed skirt, the slipping petticoat, the spectacles constantly removed and polished on the slipping petticoat and replaced, the sensible shoes, one with a trailing shoelace, the repeated exhortation to ‘help us to help you’, the earnest smiling and the short-sighted blinking, the flat Midlands accent. Cruel, a little, but not savage: Alix could see Hannah smiling gamely, taking it in good part, and wondered if she was also taking in the rather subtle sub-text of allusions to drugs other than nicotine. One could never tell how blind Hannah’s blind eye really was. It was Eric’s turn next: his presenter appeared in jogging track suit, and false beard, and needed to do little more than puff heavily round the stage several times intoning ‘no, not on the roof, no, not on the roof’, to bring the house down, rousing laughter even from those who did not know that these were the mysterious words that the Warden had uttered in a loud cry when abruptly roused from slumber during a session of group therapy. One of two of the visiting psychiatrists were brought forth in a psychiatric chorus, singing in psychobabble: Bob Saxby was presented giving a learned discourse on the nature of the pot, insisting reassuringly in a phrase that needed no exaggeration, so frequently was it heard from him in real life, that ‘a few irregularities add charm to a pot’. An example of a charming pot was produced, to much mirth. Alix herself was not mimicked, or not that she could see: she did not know whether this was a sign of affection, contempt, or indifference. Jilly Fox did a rather well-informed feminist sketch comparing the chaplain’s sexist attitudes to those of the Ayatollah: it wasn’t very funny and the chaplain was not amused, although he wisely pretended to be. Then Jilly cast off her chadour and sang, a plaintive rendering of ‘The Winter of Seventy-Nine’, and suddenly, as happens on these occasions, the knockabout mood changed, people stopped laughing, tears stood in eyes, as Jilly’s harsh, grating flat voice lamented the year and deplored the future, as her white, beaky, angry face gazed fiercely at the audience, as the confined energy of months swelled up in self-pity around the room, orchestrated by Jilly’s incantation:
All you kids that just sit in line,
You should have been there back in seventy-nine.
sang Jilly:
In the winter of seventy-nine,
When all the gay geezers got put inside,
The coloured kids were getting crucified,
A few fought back and a few folks died,
Yes, a few of us fought, and a few of us died,
In the winter of seventy-nine,
Back in seventy-nine,
sang, angrily, menacingly, Jilly Fox.
Jilly Fox had been educated at an expensive boarding-school. She was doing time for several rather serious drug-related offences. She was having an affair with Toni Hutchinson of the blonde braids, who was the daughter of a pharmacist in Hendon. Jilly had passed her A level in English Literature the summer before, having notably failed to acquire any qualifications except a pass in O level Divinity at her expensive school: now she was hoping to qualify for a course at the Open University. Jilly Fox had once said bleakly to Alix Bowen on a bad evening that her release would be the death of her. Alix feared this might be true.
Alix, driving home, thought that Hannah Glover probably had been rather hurt, despite her appearance of good humour. She was vulnerable, still, after years of inevitable disappointments, years of failure. She said she liked to think that the younger women looked on her as a mother, but of course they didn’t: they found her faintly ridiculous, old-fashioned, gullible, naïve. She would never have been able to operate without her husband Eric, who for all his bluff and jolly manner was in practice a hard man, a no-nonsense man, who sent trouble-makers back where they came from, into the main prison system, without any heart-searchings or regrets. Maybe, thought Alix, that mild, concerned approach of Hannah’s is all a front, devised between them over the years, consciously or unconsciously, to mediate, to palliate, to distract attention? Her own parents had played such a game, but in their case it was her father who had played the mild, the foolish role. God, what a fool he had been, was. Many times during the past evening he had returned to her, in ludicrous, colourful, brightly painted effigy, all his embarrassments clustered and clanging round him, all his mannerisms protruding, projected, enhanced: the sharp red nose, the usually broken bifocal spectacles, the striped woolly lunch-spattered waistcoats, the bald shining brown freckled Professor Branestawm brow, the pockets full of string, the green socks and brown sandals, the little pedantries, the favourite quotations, the antiquarian commentary, the hydrometer, the tufts of hair in his ears, the batty, potty, dotty, hurt, persistent grin. Dotty Doddridge, Deputy Head, French teacher. What a buffoon, what a butt, what a caricature. How she had suffered for him, for her poor pitiable ridiculous father, how she had hated her cruel peers for their relentless mocking, how she had dreaded each Christmas pantomime, each school-leavers’ farewell, each assembly that she knew her father was due to conduct, each occasion on which she heard him open his mouth in public. The disorder, the whisperings, the giggles, the open contempt! And her mother, in revenge, in reaction, brusque, tart, offhand, cutting, feared, fearing and avoided, uneasily detached, dismissively remote. Large conspicuous wooden figures, Dotty and Dolly, and beneath their knees skulked little Alix Doddridge, creeping quietly, smiling obsequiously, keeping a low profile, longing to be ordinary, longing with such passion to be unnoticed, to be accepted, to be one of the crowd, not Dotty’s Daughter, with all that that implied.
Ah well, her parents were old now, and retired, and nobody thought them funny any more: indeed, it was only the intensely conventional world of a Yorkshire boarding-school that had made them seem so eccentric in the first place. They were now revealed as what they had always been, not figures of fun, not left-wing political extremists, not loony vegetarians (though they were vegetarians), but harmless, mild, Labour-voting, CND-supporting, Fabian pamphlet-reading intellectuals, of a species that Alix now knew to be far from extinct. Odd, though, that they had once seemed so odd, so isolated, for the school at which Dotty Doddridge vainly endeavoured to teach French had been nonconformist, faintly progressive, certainly egalitarian in its religious and social complexion: it had offered a liberal, secularized, healthy coeducation, and had on its foundation in the 1860s set out to attract the children of vegetarians, Quakers, freethinkers, pacifists, Unitarians, reformers. Its academic success had been such that it had become progressively less progressive, its original zeal swamped by the fee-paying prosperous solid Northern conservatism of parents and offspring: it had become a bastion of respectability, its one-time principles upheld by stray survivors like Doddridge, who appeared blithely not to notice that at election time the entire school, with one or two flamboyant exceptions, howled its enthusiasm for the Tory Party. A rum evolution, Alix had often thought, though it had not seemed strange at the time: what had then seemed strange, in her girlhood, had been her parents’ quaint socialist ideals, which had caused her such embarrassment, and, partly because of that embarrassment, had inspired in her such undeviating loyalty. ‘I say, does your Dad really vote Labour?’ had been one of the politer questions addressed to her at elections and other periods of heightened political interest. ‘My Dad’s a Socialist,’ Alix would mumble in reply, aged eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, thinking that the word ‘Socialist’ sounded somehow more acceptable, more intellectual, than the dreadful word ‘Labour’, with its connotations of manual toil and p
rison routine. From the age of fifteen onwards she became more defiant, and would sometimes even attempt a half-baked account of some of the notions she had heard discussed at home, in the Deputy Master’s Lodge. She began to affect, in History lessons, an interest in the Soviet Union: such was the climate of opinion in this progressive boarding school in the north of England in the early 1950s, amongst the sons and daughters of tradesmen and doctors, industrialists and university lecturers, dentists and estate agents, lawyers and farmers, that her interest was regarded with awe and alarm or with frank disbelief, by those who did not dismiss it as the affectation which, in fact, at this stage it was. Nobody, during the Cold War, was interested in the Soviet Union, not even Alix herself, not even her parents, who never mentioned the place. It was taboo. Indeed, her father had shocked her by breaking this silence and by advising her, when she went up to Cambridge, not to join the Communist Party: a joke’s a joke, he told her but you don’t want trouble with visas if ever you want to go to America. A surprisingly worldly comment, from so innocent a man, she had thought this.
Cambridge had been different. There had been Communists there. There had been the lot, or so it had seemed, at Cambridge: socialists, communists, socialites, die-hard dinner-jacketed Pitt Club Tories, Bohemians, Christians, lacrosse and rugger players, sloggers, poets, actors, Leavisites, wits, bores, eccentrics, homosexuals; to Cambridge they flocked, from ancient grammar-schools, upstart grammar-schools, progressive schools, public schools, private schools, even from private tutors in the South of France. God’s plenty. Looking back from the eclectic seventies, the essentially post-sixties seventies, these youngsters of the fifties might well appear a deeply conventional, timid, duffle-jacketed wasp-waisted narrow-based crew, but to Alix, newly emerging from the all-too-personal matrix or patrix of The Heights, they had seemed richly various. Her own college, at first encounter, struck her as somewhat dimly conformist, with long brown corridors and an unexpectedly high proportion of young women apparently wrapped up in the triumphs of yesteryear on the hockey field or in the prefects’ Common Room, but even there she had discovered part of what she was looking for: in the persons of Liz Ablewhite (now Headleand) and Esther Breuer (still Breuer) she had discovered it, and rediscovered it there each time she met them, which was, these days, on average once a fortnight. She had found it in them perhaps more securely than in the friends she had made in other colleges, with whom her relationships had been complicated by sex. She had married one of these complications, for that is what young women did in those days: educated young women married, straight out of college, as she and Liz had done. Liz’s first marriage had lasted all of ten months: Alix’s had lasted slightly longer, and had been terminated not by divorce but by death.
And now she is married to Brian Bowen, towards whom she drives home through the January night. It is a happy marriage. They have one son, Sam. He is eleven. Alix also has a son by her first husband. He is twenty-four, and his name is Nicholas. Liz Headleand suspects that Alix Bowen is in love with Nicholas Manning, and wonders if she knows it. Brian Bowen suspects that Alix Bowen is in love with Nicholas Manning, and wonders if she knows it. Alix Bowen, for her part, has strong suspicions about Liz’s relationship with her three stepsons, but considers her own feelings for Nicholas entirely natural. Esther Breuer is not much interested in the distinction between the natural and the unnatural. Both Alix and Liz are of the opinion that Esther’s relationship with her niece, with whom she shares her flat, is very odd indeed, but it is not to their advantage to discuss this with one another, or with Esther herself, and they never mention it.
When Alix arrived home in Wandsworth, she found Brian and Sam sitting comfortably in front of the television on the ancient sofa with their socked and shoeless feet up watching a Len Deighton movie. She told Sam it was time he was in bed, but without conviction. She sat down with them. Brian told her that Esther had phoned and wanted her to ring back. Alix said it is too late. She started to watch the movie.
In the morning Alix was about to apply herself to a file of Home Office statistics when the phone rang. It was Esther, with the news that their friend Liz had rung her the night before to tell her that she and Charles were getting divorced, and that Charles intended to marry Henrietta Latchett. I thought something was going on, said Esther, and it appears I was right. Good God, said Alix. I had absolutely no idea, said Alix, however did you guess? I saw Charles and Henrietta at a Private View in the National Portrait Gallery, said Esther. Last month. That’s no evidence, said Alix. Well, you know how fond Charles is of painting, said Esther. And evidence or not, I was right, said Esther. Good God, said Alix, what a surprise. She tried to ring you but you weren’t in, said Esther. Well, I don’t know what to say, said Alix, I thought they’d stuck it out so long they’d stay stuck, didn’t you? I mean to say, Charles is an absolute prick, but he’s been a prick for twenty years, why divorce him now?
Esther pointed out that Charles was the one who wanted the divorce.
‘To marry Henrietta?’ asked Alix, in a tone of incredulity. ‘How could he? I mean, he may be a prick, but he’s not an absolute fool.’
And they continued to discuss the personality of Lady Henrietta, or rather her apparent lack of personality, for some time, until Alix, almost as an afterthought, got round to enquiring how Liz was taking it. ‘She sounded fine to me,’ said Esther. ‘Well, of course, she would be,’ said Alix. ‘But why didn’t she tell us earlier?’
‘Apparently she didn’t know earlier. He sprang it on her.’
‘Good God. What a bastard. I’d better give her a ring, I suppose.’
‘I asked her to supper on Friday. Can you make it?’
‘Of course,’ said Alix. ‘I’ll see you then.’
Esther, having thus fulfilled her obligations to her friends, forgot them both instantly, and returned her attention to a volume called The Vegetation of Medieval Europe and a German monograph on Sodoma; works which she was reading and annotating by her own interleaved system, a system which had evolved from her inability to concentrate fully on any one topic for more than ten minutes. It had thrown up some very challenging cross references in its time, and she was at the moment pursuing a connection between the nature of quattrocento pigmentation, and lichenology as a method of dating the antiquity of landscape: a gratifyingly pointless and therefore pure pursuit, which enabled her mind to wander in the direction of Italy and to hover about the abstraction of a particular shade of green-blue which she had noted in many a painted Italian scene as well as in the lichens of ancient English woodland. A pale, delicate, hard, metallic, heavenly, shocking, suggestive green-blue. It tinted dry artistic Italian cypress trees and the undersides of vine leaves, it lived on the damp bark of English oaks and thorns. It expressed both distance and presence: it was both of the background and of the sharpest proximity. An enigmatic colour, speaking of metaphysical correspondences. Signifying nothing but the search for itself. But an essential shade. Italian farmers claimed that some of its modern manifestations were inspired by pesticide, but pesticide would not account for the hue of those ravishing little sprigged seaweed trees on the Tuscan hillsides in the frescoes at Monte Oliveto. Sodoma and Signorelli. Badgers and magpies featured also in those frescoes, and frequented the hillsides to this day. So that vegetable blue also must then as now have had a natural home? Esther Breuer made a note to order Oxenholme’s monograph on Signorelli, and read on, waiting for some little current to leap from one open page to the other, from one lobe of the brain to the other, and to ignite a new twig of meaning, to fill a small new cell of the storehouse of her erudition. She was content with twigs and cells, or so it seemed. Sometimes, when accused of eccentricity or indeed perversity of vision, she would claim that all knowledge must always be omnipresent in all things, and that one could startle oneself into seeing the whole by tweaking unexpectedly at a surprised corner of the great mantle. At other times she conceded that her interests were pointless but harmless. I am not ambitious, I do not
seek answers to large questions, she would say. This would baffle her friends and her students who had the impression that she was engaged in some vas if imprecise enterprise. No, I prefer precision, Esther would say. They did not know how to take it.
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