Well, all that was over, over for ever since the revelations of New Year’s Eve. No more quarrelling with Liz about the ethics of public and private broadcasting, no more ill-informed unnerving jokes about the tedium of news about news, no more cracks about the likely effect of breakfast television on the early-rising lifestyle of psychoanalysts. The battle was over, though who had won it, he could not say. His children were grown, his wife could have her freedom, her independence, and he could start a new life, with Henrietta Latchett. Henrietta would entertain him and entertain for him. (Liz, obtusely, seemed never to have considered that a man in Charles’s new position would need a wife.) Charles admired Henrietta’s social style greatly. She understood the art of conversation, she did not leap or grasp obsessively or take too great, too sudden, too idiosyncratic an interest in a subject, she understood the importance of a bright, smooth, easy, transitional manner, she soothed and obscurely flattered, she impressed the powerful.
Charles had noticed that Liz and Henrietta tended to bring out the worst in one another. They diminished one another.
It must be admitted that Charles had had enough of Liz’s eccentricities. As she grew into middle age, he had noted in her stubbornnesses, oddities, resistances that perturbed him, and he sometimes found himself asking who she was. Well, who was she? Where did she come from? These were questions that had not troubled him when he had first encountered her: she had been simply Liz Lintot, an aspiring doctor of sorts, ex-wife of the entirely respectable well-authenticated Edgar Lintot, ex-belle of Cambridge, ex-Battersby Grammar School. He knew that she’d had an odd, an unfortunate childhood, but had never thought much about it. His own hadn’t been much fun either. The longer perspectives had not interested him. But now, looking at her, looking at Sally and Stella, he sometimes wondered. Who were they? Liz’s mother, of course, was barmy. Mad, quite mad. Why hadn’t he found that at all worrying, all those years ago? Had he really believed that one could make oneself, make one’s own life, ignore genetics, ignore history, make a fresh start?
If one asked who Henrietta Latchett was and where she came from, there were highly satisfactory if complex and lengthy answers. Her entries in reference books were dense with cross-references, dense with a tangled web of titles and a maze of mysteriously transforming family names. Earls, barons, marquesses, dukes, viscounts, baronets mingled in her ancestry, providing trip wires for the unwary. Lady Henrietta was herself the daughter of a marquess: she had married the younger son of an earl, thereby creating confusion as to whether she should properly be addressed on envelopes as The Hon. Mrs Peter Latchett, The Lady Henrietta Latchett, or by some other nicety of designation. Peter Latchett had vanished from the scene long ago, which had somehow made it easier for people to get it right. He had been a racing man, a drinking man, an old-fashioned Trollope-style younger son, or so Charles had been led to believe.
It would not be slandering Charles to say that he was greatly interested in this aspect of the configuration of qualities that was Henrietta. Charles Headleand, who had been president of a left-wing political discussion group at Cambridge, who had triumphantly won at the Cambridge Union the motion ‘This house believes that the abolition of private education is necessary for the nation’s survival’ in 1953, who had reeled out of his National Service with his head full of the brotherhood of man and the saving of mass culture, who had married the gentle, cultured, generous, sweet-voiced (albeit wealthy) Naomi, who had subsequently married the ill-born, ill-bred, brilliant Liz Ablewhite, who had made himself famous through the late 1950s and 1960s with his punchy social-conscience documentaries, who had pursued his triumphs through managerial and executive posts through the 1970s, who now was preparing himself to conquer the great democratic meritocracy of New York, would sometimes comfort himself for a few moments in his glassy Hockneyesque office by glancing at the pages of Debrett. Did he himself detect a paradox in this? Did it ever occur to him that in some respects Lady Henrietta closely resembled the dead wood to which, as a younger man, he had taken the axe? Did it occur to him that the post he had accepted, with all its dignities, all its trappings, was precisely the kind of post that was designed to arrest the activities of the kind of young man that he himself had been?
Lady Henrietta went down very well with Americans, and, moreover, she herself liked Americans and liked Ajnerica. She loved New York. She said she thought New York was very amusing.
Lady Henrietta neatly laid her knife and fork together on her plate, as she had been taught to do thirty years before by a dragon of a nanny, who had terrorized Henrietta and her sister almost out of their wits. Her feelings about England were mixed. Her feelings about leaving it were mixed. Her feelings about Charles were mixed. But he had asked her to marry him, and marry him she would. There was risk in it, but she did not dislike risk. She sipped her wine. Whatever Charles Headleand did to her, he could not turn out worse than The Hon. Peter Latchett. And if he did turn out badly, she could always leave him. Meanwhile, she would do her best to keep him. Most of her education had been devoted to the art of getting and keeping a man. She resented this. And resented the fact that she had failed so early with The Hon. Peter Latchett. She would like to make a success of things with Charles. So thought Lady Henrietta, amorously, as she watched her white octagonal plate disappear, watched a pale blue hexagonal plate materialize before her, on which reposed a small piece of pink fish in a flat green sorrel sea.
‘Pretty,’ said Henrietta, of the fish.
‘Yes,’ said Charles.
And they proceeded to discuss the culinary possibilities of New York and the odd eating habits of Americans. Lady Henrietta did not cook, herself. But she was good at telling other people how to do it. When alone, Lady Henrietta would boil an egg or eat a piece of cheese or forget to eat at all. She felt self-conscious, eating alone. She liked company. Charles had led her to believe that there would be company in New York, some of it of a sort familiar to her from previous forays – the cultured international exhibition-visitors and opera enthusiasts, the wealthy dilettantes, the party-goers and party-givers of her own set – and that the less familiar types would prove, at worst, amusing. Henrietta had a considerable capacity for amusement, and was herself, by her own set, considered witty. As she and Charles spoke of restaurants and receptions in New York, of diet crazes and drinking patterns, of contrasting styles of entertainment practised in Buckingham Palace, in Number 10 Downing Street, in the British Embassy in Paris and in The White House (to which, one might remind oneself, the Reagans had not yet brought their New Look), Henrietta’s mind wandered pleasantly from food to dress, from plates to fabric, from wine glasses to jewellery, pausing to reflect idly on Liz Headleand’s strange, apparently uncharacteristic, (vulgar?) obsession with cut glass, moving on to construct a dark-green (yes, dark-green, with perhaps a little touch of blue?) formal evening dress: the skirt thus, the neckline thus, with a blue underskirt and perhaps a slightly lower waist, a waist resting just below the actual waist . . . yes, she would speak to Angela, she would have a day with Angela, planning her wardrobe. For contrary to Liz Headleand’s speculations, most of Lady Henrietta’s clothes were not French, they did not even come from an English fashion house, they were designed and ‘run up’ by a clever young woman called Angela Bryant from Dorking. Angela and Henrietta considered themselves the best of friends, and would laugh and gossip a great deal during Henrietta’s fittings. Angela would be startled, delighted, amused, by the news of Henrietta’s impending departure, of her eventually impending marriage: news which, Charles had this evening implied, need no longer, could no longer be kept a semi-secret. Liz, Charles had said, knew all about everything and thought it was all absolutely splendid. Absolutely splendid. No problems there at all, of course not, Charles had said, stoutly. Hearing this, Henrietta had remembered with some misgivings that she had offered to meet Liz one day for lunch. For some reason she did not look forward to this occasion. Or not nearly as much as she looked forward to startling, delighti
ng and amusing the nimble-fingered, inventive, good-natured, light-hearted, undemanding, ill-paid Angela. Angela, thought Henrietta happily, as she pushed a flake or two of fish around the sorrel sauce, really is very very cheap. A treasure. Yes, a dark wintery evergreen green, with a touch of blue. Of tender blue. Of love-in-the-mist, of forget-me-not blue. A vision of her garden in Gloucestershire swam into her mind. Love-in-the-mist, forget-me-not blue. A mist of tears trembled behind her eyes. She ate her fish.
Liz was late back that Friday night from Esther’s. She parked the car in the mews garage and walked round to her front door, and stood there for a moment in the street. An almost full moon hung over Regent’s Park. The familiar façades walked away towards the soft rising mound of green. Town houses, with that strange visionary little female gleam of grass at the end. The Post Office Tower rose amidst scudding clouds. Dutch gables, Adam pediments, Queen Anne windows, art nouveau cornices, blue plaques to dead statesmen and poets, brass plates to living consultants and royal institutions. This was her London, she felt at home here, its layers reassured her, confirmed her. How would she be if transplanted, when transplanted? She was shocked by the strength of her attachment to the house. Surely it was middle aged, timid, wrong, ridiculous, neurotic, to cling so to bricks and mortar, even to so handsome a pile of bricks and mortar? Esther and Alix were right, of course, it was a big house, an extravagant house, for a dispersing family. She looked up. The house was dark except for the window of Sally’s room, which glowed yellow, and the hallway. Light streamed through the handsome semi-circle with its repoussé wrought-iron pattern, and fell at her feet on the pavement. She had never deserved it. She had reached too high, travelled too far, from Abercorn Avenue, and the house in which her mother had walled herself up: a semi-detached house, a twenties’ house, a frozen house, a house held in a time warp, stuffed with her dead father’s suits and shoes, stuffed with ancient magazines and medicine bottles. A pupa, a chrysalis, it had been to her and to Shirley, but to her mother a tomb. Her mother would never emerge again. I should not cling to my house, said Liz to herself, but she shivered as she stood there in the cold night. What if I do not survive this? she asked herself, under the lopsided, waning moon. She was afraid. And as she stood, semi-paralysed, transfixed, as the furies circled closer, smelling their destined prey, a taxi drew up at the door.
It was Charles. She stood and waited for him to open the door. He did not seem surprised to find her standing there, irresolute. With no more than a murmured greeting, they went indoors together, and would have gone perhaps silently to their separate rooms, had there not been a call from the kitchen region: it was Aaron, who emerged in a black dressing gown, and seemed in his turn extremely surprised to see them standing there together in the hallway, divesting themselves of hats, scarves, overcoats. ‘Hi,’ he said, somewhat at a loss, ‘I didn’t think – I didn’t realize – I’ve got messages, for both of you, as it happens.’
‘At this time of night?’ said Charles. Liz, for her part, felt oddly furtive, felt compelled to explain that she had not been out for the evening with Charles, had merely been to Esther’s, had merely been spending an evening with Alix and Esther, had arrived home with her own husband coincidentally. Charles offered no such explanation, listened to her floundering self-incriminations, and then commented, She’s been to one of her witches’ covens. A women’s evening. Yes, said Liz, sticking pins. That’s how we spend our time. Sticking pins until the blood runs.
‘I wrote them down,’ said Aaron. ‘The messages. I was just making a cup of tea. Would either of you like a cup?’
Meekly they followed him into the kitchen, read the messages he had taken down for them in the course of the evening: Ring Tuohy, Ring Bechoffer, Cancel Gaskell at 9. There was some discussion as to who had switched off the answerphone and why. Aaron poured tea, they sat and drank it. So when is it to be, said Aaron. What, said Charles and Liz simultaneously. You know what I mean, said Aaron.
A silence ensued. ‘All in due course, son,’ said Charles, at the end of it. ‘Why not now?’ said Aaron. ‘Why not what now?’ said Liz. ‘Oh God,’ said Charles, glumly. ‘I know everything already,’ said Aaron, ‘so you might as well tell me.’
‘There are no hard feelings between your mother and me,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve always thought that a most unfortunate expression,’ said Liz. ‘She’s not my mother,’ said Aaron.
All three of them laughed.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t know why Charles doesn’t move out, until he goes to New York. Wouldn’t that be more orthodox, Charles?’
‘I think I’ve lost my grip of orthodoxy. It’s too late to be orthodox now,’ said Charles: not quite believing his own words.
‘Has Henrietta got any children?’ asked Aaron. ‘Are we about to acquire some new stepbrothers and stepsisters?’
His curiosity seemed genuine. Charles said, neutrally, dispassionately: Henrietta had two children from her previous marriage, now aged twenty and twenty-two.
‘Very suitable,’ said Aaron. ‘May we be introduced? Are they nice? Do they like you? Do you like them? Shall I marry one of them? Would I be allowed to marry one of them?’
‘One of them is in Rhodesia,’ said Charles.
‘I don’t think that would be a legal obstacle,’ said Aaron. ‘Not like that chap who wanted to marry his mother-in-law. He had to get a special dispensation from the House of Lords.’
‘I must go to bed,’ said Charles, but did not move. ‘So must I,’ said Liz. And did not move. Liz looked from the one to the other: Aaron, of all Charles’s five children, least resembled him, resembled him physically not at all, had inherited the pale skin and dark curly hair of his mother, her slightness, her delicacy, her long fingers, her expressive features: had been for some six months, at seventeen, of a great but ephemeral beauty: and was now, in his early twenties, in the process of becoming something different, something not yet clear, not yet fully manifested, but with little relation to the solid, square, commanding presence of his father – a commanding presence which both Jonathan and Alan had, in variant versions, inherited, which Sally had cultivated bizarrely in a baroque feminist manner, and which Stella, the absent Stella, threatened to bring to an almost alarmingly weighty fulfilment. (Stella at seventeen, weighed eleven stone and had been captain of her school’s hockey and netball teams.) Aaron had no command in him: he was a jester, artist, dreamer, fool. He sat there in his black dressing-gown, holding a mug of tea. ‘Or maybe,’ said Aaron, ‘maybe, now, I could marry Liz? Would that be permitted?’
‘A very interesting point,’ said Liz, quickly, into the strange tremor that followed his words, as all three again laughed; all three of them conscious, though none could then have voiced it (for Aaron had spoken without premeditation), of a shaking, a shifting, a resettling in the relations, in the pattern, in the configuration that held the three of them. A shifting that moved an unknown twenty-two-year-old in Rhodesia into a new connection, that replaced Aaron and Liz at different angles to one another, that obliged Aaron to consider his father at yet one more remove. Beneath the surface, plates shifted, and familiar solid continents stretched and cracked, buckled and heaved. Charles was responsible for this movement: he sat there, guilty. It is not of my doing, thought Liz, invoking the memory of Aaron as a small child throwing crumbs for sparrows in the rose garden of Regent’s Park. Twenty-four-year-old Aaron looked at her darkly over his mug of tea. ‘A very interesting point,’ said Liz, brightly, quickly, disliking the silence, the laughter, the triangle of them as they sat there: ‘very interesting,’ she continued, disastrously, her mind moving, unable to help her mind’s movement. ‘I’ve often wondered about Phèdre and all the fuss there is about incest in Phèdre, after all, it’s not as though there’s any blood relationship between Phèdre and Hippolytus, is there? Ray Spenser wrote a very odd paper on Phèdre and the Minotaur and Hippolytus’s horse. . . .’ and on she went, disastrously, dangerously, as Aaron’s eyes darkened
and widened at her until, through sheer persistence, she emerged in the innocent safety of the other side of knowledge, and laughed, and made Aaron laugh, and they were safe again despite Charles’s guilt, Charles’s treachery, Charles’s monstrous defection: even Charles the monster laughed, and Liz got to her feet, and declared that this time she really was going to bed, it was far too late to be talking of incest and tables of consanguinity and such foolish matters. Aaron rose, and put his arms around her, and kissed her on her forehead, as was his way: Charles patted her vaguely, in what had lately become his way, and, like a normal family, like a normal affectionate family, they mumbled good night to one another and went to their separate rooms. Liz, lying in bed, for twenty minutes pursued the offered clue, the false trail, the cancelled plot of illicit passion, suppressed illicit passion: Phèdre/Hippolytus, Oedipus/Jocasta: (not thinking, oddly, of Gertrude/Hamlet, who had been uppermost in Aaron’s mind): and knew that it would not be so, because Aaron had bravely voiced it, that she and her stepsons at least would continue to try to stand towards one another in the clear light of their own selves, though the earth might shift beneath their feet. Aaron was a brave boy, a brave and wise boy. Her admiration for him was great. He had spoken the unspeakable and survived. He was her baby, her little boy, she had rocked him in her arms, had bandaged his knees, had cajoled him from roof tops. Thinking of Aaron, she fell asleep.
The Radiant Way Page 15