What became of her was Sebastian Manning and his friends and relations. She met Sebastian at a political rally. Alix continued to attend such things, in unbroken allegiance to her upbringing. Sebastian was there in allegiance to his upbringing, too. She knew who he was, for she had observed him at lectures and had been informed of his parentage. The names meant nothing to her, as her own family austerity eschewed, in characteristic northern professional manner, any interest in the visual arts, but she picked up what they were meant to mean. Of more interest to her was Sebastian’s appearance, which was delightful – wide eyed, golden-red haired, sunny, surprised – and his manner, which, as they fell into chat, was even more attractive. Never had she met anyone of such mildness, such ease, such openness of heart, such certainty of pleasing. Sebastian liked everybody. He said so. He certainly liked Alix, and after the demo he took her off for lunch in a pub and then for a walk to his room in King’s, where he showed her his pots and his paintings. He also made her a piece of toast. People dropped in and more toast was eaten. In no time at all Alix became his intimate friend. Sebastian appeared to believe that the world was a place full of sunshine and enjoyment. He had been educated at a progressive, artistic school in the south, with a radical tradition very different (despite its ostensible similarities) from the one in which Alix had been reared. She loved this new climate. She basked in it, she took off her clothes and browned herself in it. It was so easy to be with Sebastian. He never called upon one to doubt one’s welcome. Nervous Alix, sycophantic Alix, diffident Alix found in his undemanding ease the simplicity of Paradise. He had, in fact, had something of a Rousseauesque upbringing, much of it in Provence: his parents too liked the sun, and had defected from St Ives at an early stage. Ripe tomatoes, red, green and yellow peppers, artichokes, olives, courgettes. These vegetables were not then, in the 1950s, part of the staple British diet. They were symbols, glowing, of plenty, of the plenty that Sebastian’s uncle (a Labour MP, no less) believed and somehow expected could and should belong to all, regardless of the rigours of a northern European climate and a war-crippled economy. They featured in still lives on Sebastian’s walls. Alix began to think that perhaps, after all, it was not wrong to be happy. In her heart of hearts she still suspected that it was, but the charmed garden of Sebastian and his friends opened to her so easily, so seductively, that what could she do but step inside? It was not as though there was anything wrong with Sebastian’s ideas. He was a child of nature, a romantic, not an élitist. His happiness made others happy. What could be wrong with that?
Esther led a slightly less straightforward social life. Much of it was conducted from her own room, which soon acquired a shrine-like notoriety, both on account of its furnishings and its occupant. Young men and women, not so young men and women, wended their way across Cambridge to sit for an hour with Esther Breuer, sipping coffee, tea, or, if they were favoured, vermouth or wine, as they gazed at the red-draped walls, the crowded bookshelves, the umbrella stand, the hatstand, the cabin trunk, the medley of different-patterned fabrics, the little figurines that marched along the shelves in front of the books, the carefully assembled strip of photographed Roman frieze, the little glass doves in front of the tiny mosaic fountain. (The fountain did not play: Esther was not a magician, and college rooms did not rise to running water for people, let alone fountains.) Outside college, Esther’s life was eclectic, fragmented, secretive. The American art historian whom she had met in Perugia reappeared as professor on a sabbatical from his East Coast university, and was to be seen dining with Esther in restaurants beyond the reach of the undergraduate purse: the Arts Theatre Restaurant, Miller’s, the Garden House Hotel. She went out with other, older, even weightier men. But she also had alliances with people nearer her own age, notably with a wild young postgraduate architect, a hard-drinking, reckless, one-off character called Colin Lindsey, who was already provided with a wife and a baby, but who would nevertheless take his turn to sit on Esther’s beaded rug. Throughout this, Esther maintained the fiction that she was in love with her older brother Saul, and maintained it so well that not even Alix and Liz knew the truth of the matter. The brother existed, for they saw him once: he was an unlikely object of incestuous passion, a small, dark, worried-looking lawyer, with a curiously compelling speech defect. Esther hinted that it was the grim circumstances of their childhood that had drawn them together with a love that dared not speak its name. Saul had been born in Vienna, in 1931: Esther in Berlin, in 1935. They were both lucky to be alive. They had huddled together, small exiles, refugees, in a boarding-house in Manchester, while their mother looked for work and their father hung on in Berlin trying to assemble his papers. He assembled them: he got out just in time, he joined his wife and children: he re-established himself as a manufacturer of optical devices: but those early years left their mark. Or so Esther said.
It took Liz over two decades to read the signals of Esther’s room, and to recognize the affinities of its décor. Through her Cambridge years and long afterwards she simply accepted them as evidence of Esther’s eccentricity and originality – and it was not, after all, difficult to be original in a period when most female undergraduates, fresh from school and far from well off, ventured little further in terms of home-making than a cushion or a chianti bottle, a photograph or a teddy bear, a gingham frill round an orange box or a postcard collage on the wall, a modernist paper mobile or an arrangement of seaside pebbles. But, years later, Liz found herself visiting the Freud museum in Berggasse in Vienna, and there she suddenly saw it all – the red walls, the figurines, and, perhaps most distinctively, the predominance of red carpet-cushions, the characteristic mixture of Persian geometric patterns on floor and couch – a Jewish mixture, a Viennese mixture, a Freudian mixture? Liz did not know, and doubted if Esther knew. She had noticed earlier, of course, Esther’s particular liking for red. The walls of Freud’s consulting room were red also. Liz found this very interesting, but did not comment on it to Esther. Esther claimed not to be interested in Freud.
And so these three densely packed, formative years passed, preparing these three highly selected young women for their respective careers. Liz’s education was to take more than three years: she had already decided to specialize in psychiatry, and knew she still had a long journey ahead of her. This did not prevent her from becoming engaged, in 1956, to Edgar Lintot, who was about to leave Cambridge to take up a pre-registration post at St Michael’s Hospital in Lewisham. He had decided to opt for medicine rather than the stage, and had felt virtuous, mildly sacrificial, a little self-important while making this choice. His rejection of the overtures of a smooth-faced, smooth-tongued, camp, high-powered theatrical agent coincided with his offer of marriage to Liz. The high-minded, the dedicated, the serious path. They joked about this, but so it was. He bought her a ring, with little seed pearls and a sapphire. The world lay all before them and, from Liz’s point of view most importantly, its roads did not lead back, to Northam. She would never go home again. (And who is to say that she was not a little piqued that her younger sister Shirley was already planning marriage?)
In the same month, in what was for her the last term of her formal education, Alix became engaged to Sebastian Manning. It seems odd, now, but so it was: this is what young people did in those days. Sebastian was not quite clear about his own job intentions at this stage, nor did he have to be so. There were plenty of jobs. His family did not take jobs seriously. None of them had ever had one, except for his MP uncle, who had once been a journalist. Sebastian thought he might be a journalist. Or go into the BBC. Or something like that. Anybody, he knew, would be glad to have him. For Alix, marrying Sebastian was an alternative to a job. She did not feel entirely at ease about this, and even went to consult the Careers Adviser in Cambridge, who gave her various leaflets, told her about trainee courses at the BBC, and sent her off for a two-day inspection of the Civil Service. Alix, I regret to say, did not take the Civil Service seriously as a prospect. She looked at the sample examination
papers with alarm and concluded that she was lamentably ignorant about the way the world worked. Wordsworth, Blake, Chaucer, George Eliot, she knew well, but not the name of the capital of Chad or the number of trade union-sponsored MPs in the House of Commons. She did not care for the serious young men who toured the Home Office and the Treasury with her. In their early twenties, before taking their Finals, they were already worried about their pensions, and their wife’s pension. ‘Have you got a wife?’ Alix wished to ask, of one particularly baby-faced, prematurely anxious candidate, who was contemplating the allowance that he might leave to his wife should he predecease her: but did not dare. It would have been impolite. Grasshoppers three a-fiddling went, Alix hummed to herself, as she ran down Whitehall for the bus, swinging her shoulder bag in the cold, bright, showery, uncertain sun of late April. She was happy. She would marry Sebastian, she would never have to go back to cold and sooty Leeds to drink brown soup and eat gristle stew with dark greens and mashed potatoes. Sebastian bought her a ring, with a little gold heart and an inscription. ‘Forever,’ it said, in Victorian script.
Esther had elected to take a higher degree, in the History of Art. Art History as a subject was not yet available at Cambridge: she would attach herself to the Courtauld Institute. There was plenty of money around to finance such choices. Esther was encouraged to continue her studies. She would return to Perugia for the summer, to learn more Italian.
Both Liz and Esther went to Alix and Sebastian’s wedding, in early July, in Leeds. It was a sunny day, and the garden party in the grounds of the school was a success, for Deborah and Stephen Manning, alerted by Sebastian and Alix, had insisted on presenting champagne (you won’t get anything to drink otherwise, they had been warned) and it went quickly to the heads of those unaccustomed to drinking at all, while Sebastian’s contingent had primed themselves at their hotel before arriving, in double defence. Laughter and a smell of cut grass rose from the lawns, and in the distance children played tennis. High seriousness mingled with amiable Bohemianism, provincial spoke to cosmopolitan, Fabian joked with hedonist, and teachers of mathematics admired the hats of potters from Cornwall. Alix wore a white dress bought ready-made from a department store, her younger sister was a sort of bridesmaid in a flowered print, and her little brother wore a grey suit with short trousers and a pale blue tie, on which he spilt some strawberry ice-cream. The headmaster, who had offered for the occasion his own private stretch of garden, was unusually gracious. The ceremony had taken place in a register office as both families were agnostic. Photographs were taken. Everybody said that Alix looked lovely. Sebastian smiled at everybody, and the Doddridges thought he was wonderful. Not a cloud, not a shiver of cold air, though Liz for one could have done with a little less heat, as she wiped the sweat from her brow and sought the shade of a chestnut tree. Her turn next, people said to her in a slightly menacing manner, but she protested she and Edgar would wait until he had qualified. They were the sensible couple, the forward planners: Alix and Sebastian the children of the hour.
Alix smiled and thanked people for saucepans and toast-racks and ironing boards. She and Sebastian were off on a long honeymoon, to spend two months in Tuscany in an old farmhouse belonging to friends of Deborah and Stephen: it was temporarily in need of a caretaker. They did not intend to take the saucepans and toast-racks and ironing boards to Tuscany. Esther planned to visit them there, on her way to Perugia. The thought of a visit from Esther slightly cheered Alix, who was feeling, despite her smiles, extremely unhappy, extremely apprehensive. In the garden in her white dress, she knew she had done the wrong thing. She should not have married Sebastian. She doubted Sebastian. She had betrayed herself and Sebastian by marrying Sebastian.
Deborah Manning liked Alix very much. She hoped she would be good for Sebastian. Alix seemed to her to be both practical and highly intelligent. Deborah also doubted Sebastian, although she never let it show, or hoped she did not let it show.
Alix went upstairs to her old bedroom to take off her white dress and to put on her pale-blue linen Jaeger going-away dress. The white dress lay on the bed. Alix was a virgin. She had tried to disembarrass herself of her virginity, and had been certain, once she started ‘going steady’ with Sebastian, that this would be accomplished. But Sebastian had not seemed eager to take the final step. She had suggested to him, although of course not in words, that it would be a good idea to alter their pattern of lovemaking to something a little more adult, but he had moved away: shrunk, dwindled, and moved away. And since that movement, that rejection, Alix had felt her own desire diminish. So here she was, married to a man she no longer wanted, at the age of twenty-one.
She put on her pale-blue linen Jaeger dress and, believe it or not, a little hat. Yes, a little hat. She stared at herself. Then she went to look for Esther to make plans, for at least there would be Esther in these appalling two months of honeymoon ahead.
When Esther visited Alix and Sebastian, they had been married for three weeks, and the marriage had been consummated. Alix, although she did not know it, was pregnant. They did not seem entirely happy, to Esther, but Esther put her suspicions down to jealousy. But they made Esther very welcome, and they passed pleasant afternoons by the swimming pool and pleasant evenings on the terrace eating salami, cheese, sausage and salad. One did not have to cook, in Tuscany. Back in England, in the autumn, the saucepans came into their own, as Alix, in a small basement flat in Islington, struggled to learn the rudiments of domesticity. Sebastian got a job, as easily as he had said he would, working for an intellectual left-wing magazine. Alix applied for jobs until she found she was pregnant, then gave up and sat at home. She was deeply depressed, and felt guilty about her depression. Sebastian seemed as cheerful as ever, but what she now saw as the unthinking, meaningless nature of his good nature irritated her almost beyond bearing. She contemplated suicide. She told herself she was suffering from hormones, that she would cheer up soon. She did not want a baby. She never wanted to sleep with Sebastian again.
She played house, with her saucepans. Loyalty sealed her lips, even with Liz and Esther, whom she at this period rarely saw. Sebastian dropped his clothes on the floor, she picked them up and washed them. She cooked meals, they both ate them, though often the meals were not very nice.
The baby, Nicholas, was born in April. Alix fell helplessly, hopelessly, recklessly in love with the baby. He was all the world to her. She no longer knew if she was happy or unhappy, cheerful or depressed, as she gazed at the infant lying in his pram, asleep in his cot, kicking on a rug before the fire. She was obsessed, in love. Sebastian spent more time out of the house. Alix did not care.
They went to Tuscany to the same house again, that summer. They invited friends to stay, to alleviate their couple-loneliness. Liz came, briefly, with Edgar, whom she had just married: Esther for a night, alone: then a couple of Canadians, who stayed for weeks. They were painters, perhaps, or poets, perhaps, casual acquaintances picked up by friendly Sebastian at a publisher’s party in Bedford Square. They had long hair and said they knew Jack Kerouac. They thought that life was holy. They also smoked dope. Sebastian was not used to dope and one night he drowned in the swimming-pool. Nobody was quite sure how it happened, but there he was, suddenly, dead. Alix was asleep upstairs at the time, with Nicholas.
Everybody was very sorry for Alix. Widowed at twenty-two, left with a small baby. Sebastian cut off in the glory and promise of his youth, with all the world before him.
Alix, naturally, was almost (but not quite) overwhelmed with guilt, at not grieving enough, at not having been the perfect wife, at having ceased to love Sebastian. Maybe her love would have kept him alive. Maybe she had killed him. The sympathy of others was hard to bear. She felt a fraud, as the letters poured in. She hugged Nicholas in her arms and rocked him backwards and forwards in the basket-backed rocking chair, in the damp Islington basement, night after night, morning after morning, holding on to him in his little cream Viyella nightdress and blue sleeping bag. Her tea
rs flowed onto him. He was all she had. Little mother, little widow. Everybody had loved Sebastian. Alix felt herself growing mean and spiteful.
Sebastian’s mother, Deborah, was the only person who seemed to suspect the disarray of Alix’s emotions. She made friendly overtures, invited her to stay in their large, warm, scenic, colourful, untidy house in Sussex, told Alix to live for herself and look to the future, offered to look after the baby whenever Alix needed a break. She would willingly have engulfed the baby. Alix suspected this, and clung on to him the more tightly, rejecting Deborah’s support, rejecting everything except a little money ‘to see her through’. She was too fragile to form an alliance with large, strong, fully made Deborah. She had to find her own way, in the damp, in the shadows, by the light of forty-watt bulbs, in the solitary evenings. She would not visit her own family, except as a formality, and then as briefly as decency permitted. Their pity, their concern, rubbed her raw.
She pushed the pram round Islington, speaking to shopkeepers and other mothers on street corners and in playgrounds. She had tried to enter the world of light, but it was not for her.
She saw even less of Liz and Esther. Liz was at this stage engrossed by the dramatic, blinding, smoky disaster of her own marriage, which after only six weeks managed to transform herself and Edgar into mockeries of their former selves, loud puppets mouthing insults on an unreal battlefield. Later, she could hardly remember what the issues were that had so roused them to mutual abuse. Her own domestic incompetence (which was indeed extreme, but what had Edgar expected from a wife with an upbringing like hers?), Edgar’s male chauvinism (though this was a phrase not yet current) and his expectation that his work was always, would always be of greater importance, than her own – these were aspects of their mutual dissatisfaction, no doubt, although both were, decades later, to concede that Edgar at this time was paying a high psychological price for having renounced his theatrical ambitions (old Cambridge friends of his already had their names in lights in the West End, while he was a mere house officer) and that Liz was still suffering from the trauma of confronting her mother with her total, final defection.
The Radiant Way Page 12