The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Not a happy marriage, and not one that could take on the extra burden of a weeping widowed friend. It could not bear the bright inspection of another’s sorrow. So Alix and Liz kept their distance.

  Esther, unmarried, appeared happy. She pursued her studies. She planned a thesis on the works of Carlo Crivelli, so briefly mentioned in 1894 by Berenson, so little mentioned since. She did not expect to see much of Liz and Alix, who had married and made their own lives after another pattern. She had a flat in Camden Town. She continued to go out to dinner with academics, to receive the hard-drinking architect. She embarked on a new and even more enigmatic liaison with an Italian anthropologist of satanic reputation who in the fullness of time turned out to be – indeed, for some time, unrecognized by the British, had been – a structuralist. He too was a married man. His interest in witchcraft was said to be more than scholarly. He instructed Esther in the interpretation of medieval Italian iconography.

  Liz’s marriage broke up after eight months. Edgar, chivalrously, moved out of the flat they rented in New Cross, though he could hardly afford to do so, and into a large shabby house in Greenwich which he shared with several old Cambridge friends. He was much happier there. He paid her a small allowance, as she, as a married woman, was no longer eligible for the grant that had supported her at university. Liz was humiliated by this, rather than enraged, but she knew that she had to qualify in order ever to be free and accepted the conditions. She did not tell her mother that she and Edgar had separated. She continued her clinical training at St Michael’s and qualified in 1959. In 1960, while she was doing six pre-registration months as house physician at St Michael’s, she met Charles Headleand. Seven months later, after divorcing Edgar, she married Charles, a widower with three small boys. She was twenty-five, he thirty. She informed her mother after the event.

  Her second marriage somewhat disrupted her postgraduate career. It also renewed her interrupted friendship with Alix. She sought out Alix, to tell her of her plans to remarry, and they spent a long evening, over spaghetti and Hirondelle, talking of what already seemed to them the distant past. Alix admitted what Liz already knew, that she and Sebastian had been less than happy, that the idyll had been less golden than it looked. Liz deplored her own appalling behaviour towards Edgar, confided his towards her. Why ever did we marry so young, they asked one another. And why are you doing it again, asked Alix. Oh, this is different, said Liz. At twenty-five, she felt mature. She had seen people die, she had seen them give birth, she had chopped them into little pieces: more significantly, with Charles she had achieved orgasm, which she had never managed with Edgar. She knew it was all right, this time. So she told Alix. I will never marry again, said Alix. But how do you manage, said Liz. Oh, I teach a little, I mark exam papers, I scrape by, said Alix. Liz was embarking on a world of wealth, with Charles Headleand. Naomi’s parents, in grief and regret, had been generous to their grandchildren. Liz, whom they liked, whom they wished to like, whom they were obliged to like, would profit, although she would work hard for her rewards. So it was calculated, so it was arranged.

  Liz had pulled herself together, on the domestic front, she told Alix, as she looked around Alix’s brass-railed, shabby, cluttered, plastic-toy-littered flat, where clothes hung drying on an ancient fireguard. Some of the things Edgar had said had struck home. I’m going to be efficient, this time, she said. But three babies, said Alix, it’s impossible. No, it’s not, said Liz, a manic glitter in her eyes. One is exhausting, said Alix. I shall come to you for advice, said Liz.

  And so Liz Headleand was born, out of guilt, out of chance, out of sexual felicity and complicity, out of ambition, and Liz Lintot passed away, as Sebastian Manning and Naomi Headleand had passed away.

  Alix Bowen was slower in the making. She put together slowly the bricks of her new self. She reconsidered, slowly, the privileges and disadvantages of her childhood, of the three years of Cambridge, of the brief interlude of her marriage, of the streets of Islington where she pushed her pram. She dismantled, she rebuilt.

  In the streets of Islington, she observed poverty. She experienced it, also. A one-parent family, living on scraps from the educational world, too proud to seek refuge and warm her hands on the tepid thickly painted radiators of Leeds, to cast off her jerseys and socks on the radiant central heating of Sussex, to lie half-naked in that ill-starred farmhouse in Tuscany. Fifties’ pride possessed her. She had read her Henry James. She made no appeals. She renounced the role of tragic widow with an austerity that irritated her would-be saviours. She would not go out, though she occasionally made a martyr of herself by pointing out that because of the price of baby-sitting, she could not afford to go out: this was as far as she went towards self-pity.

  Leeds, Sussex, Cambridge, Provence, Tuscany, Islington. There was a lesson in it somewhere, if she had eyes to see, ears to hear. Semi-chosen austerity: a rich cultural life in green pastures with fruit: unchosen semi-hardship. Ugliness: beauty: ugliness. Alix turned these things over in her mind. Admired discomfort: cultivated ease: semi-comfortable squalor.

  Alix had been told about poverty, in Leeds, at school and at home. (In her case school and home were not easily separable.) She had knitted woollen squares to raise money to sink wells in India (and had knitted them very badly too). She had donated pittances of pocket money to buy tractors for India. She had attended slide-illustrated talks on the agricultural problems of vast and distant continents. Poverty nearer home had been less vividly presented to her, and indeed it had been less colourful, less extreme. It was grey, shabby, and somehow infectious: to be avoided. It was also rough and noisy and unmannerly. It lived in back streets of terrace houses and on sprawling housing estates. It wasted what money it had on drinking and it spoke with rough accents. It was feckless, unthrifty, sluttish, violent, loud mouthed, and materialistic. Its children taunted nice little middle-class children in school uniform who strayed into its terrain. It did not need wells dug or tractors purchased. Poverty was an attribute of the working classes in England. Those who worked, were poor. Those who did not work were better off, therefore? No, it was not quite like that. The equation, to Alix’s schoolgirl mind, had already proved confusing. Her father worked hard, for example, but was not a worker. Nor was he poor, in terms of the poverty portrayed in the colourful slides, where black children with hunger-distended bellies stared at the camera, where lepers crouched by begging bowls. But he was poor when compared with the parents of many of the children who attended his school, even when compared with some of the other teachers. Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

  This puzzled Alix. She was hungry for absolutes. The question which had most intrigued her in her childhood – where does space end? – was joined by another unanswerable question. What happens if people go on demanding pay rises and getting them? (This was the 1950s, the early 1960s.) Do they get richer, or do they merely appear to get richer? Do others get poorer, if some get richer? Do the rich need the poor? Will the poor be always with us?

  And if so, Alix thought sometimes, have I joined them?

  Alix was, at this stage, perhaps perversely, perhaps naturally, attracted by poverty. It seemed to her less alarming than it had seemed to her parents. She got on speaking terms with it. She discovered the art of sinking. She sank. Not very deep, but she sank. She and Nicholas, in Clissold Park, eating crisps on a bench, feeding the ducks with crusts. Indistinguishable from her neighbours. Unrecognizable to her Cambridge friends. She walked for miles with Nicholas round North London tiring herself and him so that they would both sleep in the long nights.

  Gradually her fears of the rough and the unmannerly faded, her expectations of the world adjusted. As a child, she had always had a secret yearning to enter the other city, the unknown city beyond and within the suburbs, where nobody, middle-class folklore declared, read books or washed or cooked proper meals. She had sometimes, even as a child, wondered if it co
uld be as fearful as its reputation. She disliked fear. Particularly she disliked being made to feel fear of her fellow men and women. Now she lived with these people, and was no longer afraid, for they were like herself in more ways than they were unlike herself. She faded into the background.

  Inconspicuous, accepted, she discovered new talents. She found she could teach. At first she took a few private students, through Gabbitas and Thring (her first-class Cambridge degree came in handy at last) and found that she enjoyed coaching them for their English O levels and A levels. She understood so well what it was that they did not understand. Then she taught one or two illiterates on an illiteracy scheme. Then she started to teach two classes a week at a College of Further Education: aspiring caterers on Day Release. Cambridge visitors, visitors from outer space, childless visitors, asked her how she could bear to teach such stupid, such dull, such unambitious, such ill-read folk. She did not answer that intelligence is relative, like poverty. She did not think her students stupid, just different. She herself was stupid. She had been stupid to marry Sebastian and to drown him in the swimming-pool.

  Little Nicholas was minded, during Alix’s working hours, by a woman whom her visitors did not consider acceptable: they were familiar with the shortcomings of Swiss and French and Swedish au pair girls, but drew the line at Mrs Parfitt, a grey-haired, bedroom-slippered, floral-aproned, skinny, ill-spoken old grandma with sunken cheeks, a rasping smoker’s cough, stick-like legs and an agile mind.

  At the end of Alix’s road was a little patch of grass, on the corner in front of the launderette and the pub. A small patch, smelling of dog shit, in a heavily built-up area. On it was a bench, and on the bench sat, in fair weather and sometimes in foul, a row of strange-complexioned men, not all of them old though most of them looked it, with bottles of wine, cider and beer, sometimes with a half bottle of spirits. They accosted Alix as she passed, not for money – she no longer looked as though she had any money – but for company. ‘Come and sit down for a minute, darling,’ they would wheedle. And sometimes Alix sat down with them, in the feeble London sunshine, to pass the time of day. To pass the time of day. ‘It’s a grand day,’ they would say, when it was. She would agree. Idle, derelict, washed-up, full, as often as not, with a deep, deep sentimentality, a strange despairing optimistic emotion, which would flow from them in praise of young Nicholas, in praise of Alix, in praise of the goodness of the Lord, in praise of the odd flower that managed to bloom in the much-trampled flower-bed. They rarely seemed drunk to Alix. They were past drunkenness, washed up on some far beach of harmless universal being, ground down to the bedrock of being, unstruggling, undemanding, unresentful. Dirty, ragged, high-smelling, communing with the Lord. They told her not to worry, the worst would never happen.

  She made more acceptable friends among her colleagues at the College of Further Education.

  She tried a job in a comprehensive school in Holloway, but the hours were too long and she abandoned it after a year. She started to teach a course at the polytechnic. She taught an evening class. She taught a class in a women’s prison. After a few years, she began to see Liz and Esther again, regularly, and they resumed their conversations: they talked a good deal, in the 1960s, about psychotic art, a subject which combined several aspects of their three separate interests. They talked of writing a book together, but did not.

  In 1968, Alix married Brian Bowen, one-time beater of circular saws in Northam, now lecturer in Adult Education and novelist. They met at a meeting in the Conway Hall. Alix went to live in Wandsworth. She continued to see Liz and Esther regularly, having recognized the importance of friendship. Brian encouraged this: it would not have crossed his mind to do anything other. Unlike Charles Headleand, Brian was a good man, and instantly recognizable as a good man.

  Esther Breuer continued unmarried. She completed her thesis. She wrote the catalogue for an exhibition of the works of Crivelli which was shown in Paris and New York. She declined to pursue a proper academic career, for it would have meant, initially, leaving London, where she preferred to live. Instead, not unlike Alix, she picked up bits and pieces. She taught a course at the Courtauld, and another at the City Lit. She wrote an introduction or two here, contributed a chapter or two there, reviewed for learned journals and even for some paying periodicals. She toyed with various ideas for various original full-length books but did not commit herself to any of them. She lectured at the National Gallery, at the Tate. She gained a reputation, as a lecturer, for making startling, brilliant connections, for illuminating odd corners, for introducing implausible snippets of erudition. When invited to deliver slightly grander lectures, which she occasionally was, she declined, and thus, as the years went by, was no longer invited. She lived very modestly, never taking a taxi, never eating an expensive meal out, yet nevertheless maintaining the halo of mysterious privilege that she had worn at university: unlike Alix, who had made herself ordinary by hard work, Esther made herself extraordinary by hard work, with the result that her friends and students continued to consider her attention a favour not universally granted. The married satanic anthropologist and the married architect (now an even more hard-drinking architectural journalist) continued to pay court to her. Long evenings of great intensity would be spent with each, separately: the two suitors never met. Esther talked of them to Liz and Alix, even joked about them, relaying titbits of eccentricity and horror from their domestic and professional lives: Liz and Esther got to know Claudio’s hypochondriac wife Roberta quite well by repute, were well versed in Claudio’s obsession with lift doors, grilles, grids and railings, and spent many an hour trying to analyze Colin Lindsey’s drinking habits and bouts of amnesia, one of which landed him one night, to his own perpetual bewilderment, in a police cell in Dorking, where he claimed he had never been in his life, and whither he had no reason to go. They laughed a good deal, Esther, Liz and Alix, about the odd behaviour of Claudio Volpe and Colin Lindsey, yet Liz and Alix, despite this, felt that beyond the oddity some serious drama was being enacted from which they themselves were excluded, debarred, but which might in time perhaps be played in public instead of in that red room, behind those thick drapes.

  In 1978 Esther’s niece Ursula arrived in London from Manchester to study, and took up residence in Esther’s small spare dark-blue room. Esther said she needed the rent. Esther and Ursula became the best of friends, and spent much time visiting galleries, parks and parties together, and talking in the red room.

  Liz, Alix, Eisther. No, it was not an unbroken friendship, they did not become inseparable; they had distant patches, patches of estrangement that lasted for years at times, when they met rarely, or distantly. Alix and Esther did not care to see much of Charles, nor he of them, as we have seen, and there were periods when the Liz–Charles alliance was dominant in Liz’s life and excluded other interests. Alix sometimes removed herself into her work, sometimes simply went silent, and answered the telephone forbiddingly. Esther went abroad for months at a time, or took up a new acolyte who absorbed her attention for a while. But by the end of 1979, when this account opens, they had settled down into what looked like being a semi-permanent pattern. They would meet for an evening meal, once a week, once a fortnight, once a month – if a monthly gap occurred, each would feel the need for apology, explanation. They met alone, without their men, as over the years they more often than not had done: a pattern of relationship that was considered mildly eccentric by some, mildly avant-garde by others, but to themselves was natural.

  They would eat, drink and talk. They exchanged ideas. Sometimes they exchanged them so successfully that a year later Alix would be putting forward a proposition that she had energetically refuted when Liz had proposed it a year earlier: only to find that Liz, influenced by Alix, had subsequently shifted her ground and herself rejected it. It can only have been through Esther that Liz and Alix began to look at paintings at all, that the Albers’ squares hung on the Harley Street stairs. Some of their notions swam, unallocated, in the space bet
ween them. The origins of some of their running jokes had been forgotten.

  Their professional worlds overlapped and, between them, their frame of reference was quite wide, although they had been educated at the same college of the same university.

  Liz’s patients were, largely, middle class or upper middle class (for she had become fashionable): they included, as we have seen, lawyers, priests, politicians. But she also saw a random selection of first referrals, from the public sector, to keep her on guard. (This was one explanation she gave for her mixture of private and public practice, but Alix found it suspect. Alix likes to raise with Liz the question of the class content of psychological disorder and fantasy. Do princesses dream that they are princesses, for example, or that the queen is coming to tea? Liz is not much interested in this line of thought. Alix sometimes accuses Liz of believing in universal human nature.)

  The objects of Alix’s concern are less advantaged, although by and large less neurotic. They include law-abiding young Asian girls seeking a few qualifications: middle-class women attending evening classes in order to get away from their children or their husbands or the emptiness of their homes: elderly autodidacts of both sexes and all classes: an illiterate, handsome, paranoid building-site manager; a refuse collector; and, of late, the criminal inmates of Garfield – heroin addicts, thieves, prostitutes, muggers, infanticides, a couple of forgers – all of them selected because they are considered suitable for the experimental psychiatric approach of Garfield unit. Alix teaches all these people English Language and Literature.