The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Shifting terrain. Sometimes, over the next few months, the next year, Liz wondered whether it would ever settle again. The ironies of her position (or lack of position) did not escape her: she had observed enough of this kind of thing in others to find her own response unsurprising, but her lack of surprise proved not in itself wholly therapeutic. After all, everybody knows that the loss of a partner, be it by bereavement or by infidelity, is one of the worst traumas of modern life, but the knowledge does not in itself bring peace of mind.

  It would be wrong to suggest that Liz Headleand in any way revealed, professionally or in public or social life, any sense of misgiving, of uncertainty, of disorientation. Her professional life she pursued with customary diligence. She had long accepted that she herself, like many therapists and analysts, like many working in the field of mental health, had originally been motivated by her own needs, her own problems. The wounded healer. The fact that she had herself received another, recent, unexpected wound ought not to diminish her professional competence: might even (looking on the bright side) augment it. This way the kind of thing she said to herself, as everything in her recoiled from letters from her solicitor, phone calls from her solicitor, talk about money, talk about divorce. The recoil was inevitable, irrelevant, instinctive, to be discounted. This she said to herself. And continued to see her patients, to attend meetings, to sit on committees, never missing an appointment, rarely failing to give her full attention.

  In public and social terms, those who did not know her well tended to think that she had taken on a new lease of life, that she looked better, brighter than before. She laughed more and had her hair cut, she bought a new coat. They assumed (as she intended them to assume) that all had gone according to plan. As news of the Charles–Henrietta liaison became official, Rumour on the whole supported the view that Liz had helped to engineer the relationship, and that her New Year’s Eve party had been by way of celebration. Liz encouraged Rumour, when she could without dishonesty do so. Rumour reported that Liz and Henrietta were seen lunching together in that new restaurant in Marylebone High Street, drinking Perrier water and chatting civilly to one another of this and that. (Rumour’s imagination boggled slightly at the content of their conversation, and Rumour had to admit to having been unable to overhear much.) Rumour reported that Charles, Liz and Henrietta were all seen leaving a party together in the same car. Rumour reported (accurately) that Liz was making every effort to speed through the divorce, so that Charles and Henrietta could become legal as soon as possible. Rumour speculated that Liz was playing some deep game of her own; but was not very inventive when it came to suggesting its nature.

  But Liz, as those who knew her well could see all too clearly, wasn’t playing any kind of game. Even Charles recognized that she had in fact been taken totally by surprise by his new amour, and her children and stepchildren were in varying degrees disturbed and shocked by her (to them) evident vulnerability, by her at times evident distress. As none of them except Stella was living at home, they didn’t have to do anything about it, and most of them didn’t think about it very much, being too busy with their own lives. Sally, an emotional and embattled girl, took the strongest line, and refused to speak to her father: she consented to see him, once, before he flew off to New York, but gave him an uncomfortable evening of feminist diatribe as a parting gift. It must be said that Liz, although she disapproved intellectually of much of the content of Sally’s attack, was weakly touched by its loyalty.

  It might have been expected that in this crisis Liz Headleand would draw much support from her two oldest and closest women friends, Esther and Alix. Yet, as she rightly suspected, they observed its evolution with as much interest as sympathy, with a critical curiosity that was not entirely comfortable or comforting. This did not surprise her at all. She knew that despite their fondness for her, they were sure to find something almost satisfactory in watching her plunge and flounder and skitter off course – a plunging and floundering and skittering that their sharp, informed eyes could clearly detect, behind the confident public progress, the illusion of purpose, of direction. They knew quite well that Liz had lost purpose (momentarily, permanently, who could tell) and they were not wholly displeased. She had been too confident, too knowing, too rich: she had assumed privileges, she lived in her own charmed world, had despised those who had been less certain, less secure. Let her taste confusion. Had there not been something two-faced, double-valued, hypocritical, about her use of Charles as a husband? Had she not exploited him when it suited her, ignored him when it suited her, used him arbitrarily, selfishly, as shield, as butt, as banker, as status symbol, as scapegoat, as excuse? And he had rebelled, at last, he had stood up and declared himself, had taken her manifesto of independence at its face value and had walked away. No, they could not blame Charles, thought Esther and Alix, said Esther and Alix to one another, behind Liz’s back, occasionally to her face. Job’s comforters. So much for feminist solidarity. Esther, when Liz rang her as she did from time to time to complain about Charles’s solicitor’s letters or her own solicitor’s fees, or about the stupidity of the law, or the malice of her friends and enemies, would reply enigmatically, tangentially, and would divert the conversation as quickly as possible to the health of her potted palm. Esther’s interest in her potted palm, in the spring of 1980, was obsessive. She would talk of little else. She would listen to Liz impatiently for ten minutes or so, and then begin to describe her palm’s symptoms. A brittleness of the extremities of the upper leaves, a slight paleness of the lower ones, an irregular drinking pattern: such things Esther described in exhaustive detail. Liz was much intrigued by this tactic, but not wholly satisfied. She knew that it was not intended that she should be satisfied.

  She might have expected more obvious sympathy from the more obviously tender-hearted Alix, but did not get it. Alix’s response to Liz’s new situation was complex, and she questioned herself about it, deciding that it was probably determined at least in part by her envy of Liz and Charles’s wealth. She herself had had a hard time, had chosen, perhaps, a hard time, and was still not exactly affluent: she still had to count the change, to stand at bus stops in the rain, the worry about the mortgage, the gas bill. And, moreover, and more importantly, from her various part-time careers she knew those and knew of those who had much, much less, those to whom a mortgage would be a luxury. So it was not surprising that she should occasionally have widened her eyes at some of Liz Headleand’s extravagances, assumptions. For Liz Headleand, after all, was only a reincarnation of Liz Ablewhite of Abercorn Avenue, daughter of a mad woman and a missing engineer, and she ought, therefore, to remember: she ought to be tactful and considerate of the carefulnesses, the economies, of others. And Liz had not always been tactful, had not always been considerate. She had sometimes appeared to believe that with a little effort, a little will-power, a little of the spirit of self-help, any woman could acquire a house in Harley Street, a top executive for a husband, a dozen children and a brilliant career. It would do her good, to be reminded of what life could be like without these props. Expose thyself to what the wretches feel.

  Though as a matter of fact, as Alix knew quite well, Liz was constantly, daily, professionally exposed to what wretches feel. It was her job. It was just a question of what kind of wretchedness one took most seriously. It was a matter that they had frequently discussed. Liz maintained that psychiatric problems observed no class or economic frontiers, that most forms of disturbance manifest themselves equally among the rich and the poor, that the dynamics of family abuse, the incidence of senile dementia or Down’s syndrome, the distribution of drug addiction or schizophrenia were largely unaffected by income, by environment. Alix maintained that this was rubbish. Both of them were quite well informed on the subject and read widely, pooling their findings over the years, each tending to find what each, separately, sought, rejoicing when each discovered a paper, a statistic, an article in a leading journal, an intelligent colleague to support her own view. It was
a useful, a stimulating, a continuing, a rarely acrimonious interchange. And yet, Alix said to herself, it remained a fact that Liz Headleand occupied a house in Harley Street worth a million pounds, and that inevitably she tended to see patients both from the public and private sector who in some way corresponded to that simple geographical and economic proposition. Liz very rarely saw the poor, the dull and the subnormal.

  Whereas Alix Bowen saw quite a lot of them.

  If you’re talking about suffering, Liz had been known to say when the subject was broached, the rich suffer as much as the poor. In my terms, in the terms of my trade. They suffer from paranoia, from hypochondria, from endogenous depression, from frigidity, from hallucinations, from claustrophobia. When their children die or their wives are unfaithful, they suffer: when they are filled with the fear of death, they suffer. Mythology, literature, are full of stories of the equalizing power of suffering, of the reductive power of loss and death and fear. The king willing to exchange all earthly riches for a living child, for an hour of life, for freedom from pain.

  And yet, and yet, Alix would stubbornly insist. You choose the glamorous illnesses. As did Freud.

  Some of your murderers are quite glamorous, Liz would reply.

  The point was sometimes taken, sometimes not.

  And now Liz herself was suffering, and finding her glamour transformed into humiliation, if not in the public eye, then in her own. And it was true that all her riches, all her past investments, appeared not to avail her now: indeed, it appeared that some of them were not as solid as they had seemed, and might prove, like her marriage, illusory. The threat of a little house in Kentish Town continued to hover, although on the sale of the house Charles appeared willing to suspend decision for a year or two. But who was to pay for it? If Liz was to keep it, who was to pay its outgoings? What, in these rather unusual circumstances, were Liz’s rights?

  Alix, when consulted on this point by Liz, was particularly useless. She didn’t even know what she ought to think. She in turn consulted Brian, who spoke up for Liz better than she could herself. ‘Twenty years,’ he said. ‘Twenty years, she stuck it out with him, she brought up his children, she had two children with him, and she says she paid the grocery bills. Of course he ought to make her a decent settlement. What if she falls ill? What if she can’t work?’

  ‘I suppose she pays her National Insurance contributions like everybody else,’ said Alix.

  ‘You’re a hard one,’ said Brian.

  ‘No I’m not,’ said Alix. ‘I just don’t know how it works, that’s all. Why we all expect so much. And I expect, too. Oh yes I do,’ she insisted, as he shook his head. ‘I expect. And I get. So do you. On a different scale, but we expect.’

  ‘It’s natural.’

  ‘But is it? Is it?’ She knew he shared her doubts.

  ‘Think of Nicholas,’ she said, in the shorthand of marriage. Her son Nicholas, aged twenty-five, was unemployed. An art-school drop-out. He did not seem to wish to work. He drew the dole. He lived in a council flat with a couple of friends, also on the dole. Nicholas was charming, talkative, sunny of nature. He painted both pictures and houses. He did not seem to want a ‘proper’ job.

  ‘I may be out of work soon myself,’ said Brian. ‘If they make many more cuts. Then you can support me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alix. She shook her head, fretting, frowning, over her knitting.

  ‘But what worries me most,’ she pursued, ‘is that maybe, perhaps, they might be right?’ (By ‘they’ in such a sentence, of late, as 1980 moved onwards, Alix had tended to mean the Tory Party.) ‘I don’t mean about the Health Service, or Garfield, or Adult Education, or the Open University, but about social security. People getting used to not working.’

  ‘They’ve no intention of reducing unemployment,’ said Brian. ‘None at all. Nicholas is working for the nation by being unemployed. It suits them very well.’

  ‘I don’t follow it,’ said Alix.

  ‘Who does?’ said Brian.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Alix, ‘Liz may begin to feel better now Charles and Henrietta have actually cleared off. It was rather awful when they were hanging around with everyone being so polite and civilized. Gruesome, really.’

  Brian cleared his throat. Delicately, he observed, ‘Liz seems . . . unattached, herself, at the moment?’

  Alix made a dismissive, small, snorting sound. ‘Unattached, yes. Not so long ago she was singing the praises of the unattached life. Sexual equilibrium, and all that. That was before Charles said he was on the way out. Just shows how deep it went.’

  ‘We could . . . ask her round to dinner?’

  ‘You mean with a man? Liz knows dozens of men.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Dozens,’ Alix repeated, more faintly. Then, brightening, mocking, ‘And anyway, what do women need with men? All that’s gone out of fashion.’

  ‘Still,’ said Brian. ‘We could ask her.’

  Alix reflected. ‘I don’t think we know any men. As such.’

  Brian waited long enough for it to appear that he might have changed the subject.

  ‘We haven’t seen Stephen for a long time,’ he said, speculatively.

  Alix put down her knitting and stared. Took off her glasses, and stared. Slowly, she smiled. Brian smiled back, more broadly.

  ‘I thought Stephen was away? I thought he was in America?’

  ‘He’s back.’

  ‘But Liz must have met Stephen?’

  ‘Yes, but that was a long time ago. They could always meet again.’

  ‘Will you ring him?’

  ‘Why don’t you ring him? He’d like you to ring him.’

  ‘Would he?’ She picked up her knitting again. ‘Would he really?’

  ‘You know he would.’

  Alix sighed, nodded, agreed. She would ring Stephen that very evening, if Brian thought she should. She thought it might be true that Stephen would like it if she made the phone call. For years, she had been cautious with Stephen, one of the most evasive, the most disappearing, though at times the most sociable of men: she had feared, diffidently, to interrupt his long, intimate and mutually formative friendship with Brian, had kept out of their way, had left them time together, had absented herself from their conversations, had made herself scarce. Stephen and Brian had, she knew, altered each other’s lives incalculably, and the nature of their friendship had to her a fine exclusive quality that she did not wish to penetrate or to dilute. At times, over the years of their marriage, Brian had half jokingly suggested that they might invite this woman, that woman, to meet Stephen, in many ways a highly eligible bachelor, and she had done so, each time a little surprised that Brian should view Stephen in such mundane, such normative terms, but also pleased, each time, to find a partner for one or another of their single women friends – for Stephen was unfailingly polite, more than polite, pleasant, attentive, morale-raising, entertaining, a good companion, in need a loyal friend. But his relations with women had been odd. Brittle, inconclusive. He appeared to favour either very good-looking stupid women or disastrously neurotic, self-destructive, hard-drinking, exhibitionist women. Sometimes he was seen with a woman who united – usually horribly – these qualities. But none of his affairs – if this is what they were, and Alix was not sure – lasted long. And meanwhile he remained, to Alix and Brian and to others, a good companion, a loyal friend, an eminently reasonable, civilized kind of chap, mildly distinguished, wholly presentable. No harm could come from asking him to dinner with Liz. So Alix reasoned with herself, as she counted her row of dove-grey purl.

  Liz Headleand did not tell her mother that she was, once more, to be divorced. She did not see the point. She had succeeded in avoiding going to Northam for two years, on one pretext or another, and had managed to justify herself to herself, after a manner. She was, after all, very busy. She spoke to her mother on the telephone, but not often. The truth was, as she quite well knew, that she could not bear to see her mother. She hoped her mothe
r would die, soon. She tried to put her out of her mind, and almost succeeded.

  She told her sister Shirley in March, but told Shirley not to tell their mother. ‘Charles and I have decided to get divorced,’ she said, casually, in the middle of one of their rare conversations. ‘So I hear,’ said Shirley, in reply. Shirley was not very interested in Liz’s life. She was far too worried about her own.

  But as she put the telephone down from this interchange, Liz had a moment of apprehension, of half recognition of something that she did not wish to know, something she needed to know. She beckoned it, bravely, but it averted its face. It was to do with her mother. What was it? It had gone. Her mother, Shirley had told her, was getting deafer, and needed a hearing aid to listen to the radio. Rita Ablewhite listened to the radio day and night, though what she thought she was hearing who could tell.

  ‘And these voices,’ Liz asked of the patient sitting before her, ‘what do they sound like? Is it a man’s voice or a woman’s voice? Or both?’

  Silence. Liz scribbled on her pad, auditory hallucinations, bifocal glasses, poor teeth (NB – needs to see a dentist), says he can’t drink milk or eat cheese but offers no reason, do the voices tell him this? Very insistent about it. Broad face, pleasant. Looks middle European to me but says he’s Welsh. Grey hair. Roll-neck sweater, jacket. Off-duty look.

  ‘Sometimes,’ the patient tentatively volunteers, at last, leaning forward confidentially, speaking in a low, soft voice, ‘they are music.’ And he smiles, as though imparting something precious.

  ‘What kind of music?’