The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Music I heard as a child.’

  ‘Pleasant music?’

  Silence. Liz scribbles again. Schizophrenia, onset age forty, he says.

  ‘At other times,’ continues the patient, ‘they speak Welsh.’

  ‘You were brought up in a Welsh-speaking family?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, no, I don’t speak Welsh.’

  ‘But it is Welsh they speak?’

  ‘Oh yes. And what worries me is this.’ He leans forward, emphatic. ‘The advice they give me, I have to do it, but it is bad. Bad things. That is what worries me.’

  ‘What sort of bad things?’

  He smiles, mysteriously, and will not say. Silence.

  ‘Is that why you went to see your doctor, because of the bad things?’

  Silence. She writes on her pad, refer to Heber?

  ‘Do you do what they say, the voices? Even when you think it is bad?’

  A pause. ‘The voices are good. It is me that is bad.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘They do. They make me say that.’

  She scribbles, ascertain religious background?

  ‘Tell me again about the music,’ she asks. And so they go on.

  ‘You see,’ says the patient, a long-term patient, ‘it was all in the bus ticket. It was written there, in the bus ticket.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  The patient looks suddenly coy, tugs at her fringe in a habitual, not unendearing mannerism, smiles, and says, ‘I don’t know if I should tell you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ says Liz, who has no pad before her this time, who is merely listening.

  ‘Well, I always read the numbers on bus tickets, and on this one it said 6969.’ She pauses, dramatically. Liz allows herself to smile. The patient laughs.

  ‘I took it as an omen,’ she says.

  ‘Of course,’ says Liz.

  ‘What do you mean, of course?’ says the patient.

  ‘Haven’t we agreed, time and again,’ says Liz, ‘that we’re all superstitious? All of us?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the patient. ‘But I’m really superstitious.’

  ‘And what did the omen mean?’ asks Liz. And the patient proceeds to recount, in vivid detail, her latest sexual adventure, which had taken place, she claimed, in a bathroom in a hotel in Warwickshire. The number seven is also woven into this period of narrative, with considerable ingenuity. The young woman enjoys her own story. When she is with Liz Headleand, she is quite happy. For an hour.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what to do.’ She has her arms round herself, a middle-aged woman, is holding herself tight and rocking herself slightly, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what to do. It is legal now, I know it’s legal.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Liz. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘But how would I do it? How would I set about it?’

  Liz is silent.

  ‘And maybe it’s better not? Better not to try? Or is that cowardly? What do you think? Dr Headleand, what do you think?’

  ‘You mean, you might not like what you might discover?’

  The woman sits upright, to attention.

  ‘I know I might not like it. I probably wouldn’t like it, would I? How could I like it? How could it be good?’

  ‘Then why do you think of trying it at all?’

  ‘I’ve told you about that. The uncertainty. The fear of worse.’

  She looks at Liz, sharply. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You think it may be worse. May be the worst. Incest. Rape. Are those things the worst?’

  ‘They’re not uncommon. But then there are other reasons. Good reasons. Reasonable reasons. Some of these stories have perfectly good endings.’

  ‘What do you mean by good?’ Again, sharply.

  ‘Endings in reconciliation. Forgiveness. Friendship. I would call that good, I think. Would you call that good?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She begins to rock again.

  ‘I do know people,’ says Liz, tentatively, ‘who have found out what you call the worst, and who have been quite able to accept it. For what that’s worth.’

  ‘Truly? Truly?’

  ‘Yes, truly.’ Liz hesitates, decides to proceed. She likes this woman, respects her, wishes to share her thoughts with her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘For example, I know of a case in which a man of about your age – a little older, perhaps – became anxious, as you have, about the identity of his natural parents. Unlike you, he didn’t know he’d been adopted until he was quite old. Until he married in fact. His adoptive parents didn’t tell him until he got married. He didn’t worry about it for some time, but then his third child was discovered, in his teens, to have a heart lesion. And he took it into his head that this was his fault, that it was a hereditary disorder. He blamed himself. And, like you, he became obsessed by the idea of tracing his real parents. This was nearly ten years ago, just after the law was changed. Everybody discouraged him, but he persisted. And discovered what you call the worst.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Incest. Father and daughter. The daughter had subsequently committed suicide, after giving birth.’

  ‘And he took this well, you say?’

  ‘Yes. It was established that there had been no family history of heart lesion or heart abnormality of any kind.’

  ‘So he was worried only about his own culpability?’

  ‘So it would appear.’

  ‘And what happened to the child with the heart lesion?’

  ‘That is not part of the case history. But as it happens, as you happen to ask, I can tell you that he was all right, when last heard of. It wasn’t very serious.’

  ‘Sometimes I think,’ said Mrs Hood, ‘that it’s just because my own children have grown up now, have left home. That I’ve started to worry. Suddenly I have time. To worry.’

  ‘Time?’ Mrs Hood works full-time as a personnel manager with a large multinational electrical company. She visits Liz at eight thirty in the morning, before her day’s work begins. Her two children are now at university. She is divorced.

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. More time.’

  Liz smiles. She knows what Mrs Hood means.

  ‘Worry fills the vacuum?’

  ‘Yes, it slips in. Leave it five idle minutes, and it slips in. Just when you think you’ve earned an evening off in front of the television.’

  ‘It’s not uncommon, for people of your age to adopt this particular worry,’ says Liz, a little vaguely, then suddenly jumps to attention, interested, surprised, amused, noticing her own curious turn of phrase. ‘The adopted adopt worry. They start to ask questions.’

  ‘When it’s too late,’ says Mrs Hood.

  ‘Too late for what?’ asks Liz.

  Mrs Hood smiles, shakes her head. She is more relaxed now, has stopped rocking.

  ‘Too late not to have children oneself.’

  ‘Would there have been a question of that?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘You wanted children very badly, you say.’

  ‘I always had this picture of myself, as a little mother. I used to play at mothers and babies. Used to dream about what a wonderful mother I’d be. Patient, understanding. I had these fantasies. Even when I was tiny. I had these dolls. I played for hours.’

  ‘You planned to be a different kind of mother from your adoptive mother?’

  ‘She was quick tempered, my mother. Unpredictable. Moody. Sometimes she’d let you do things, sometimes she wouldn’t. My real mother, I used to tell myself, wouldn’t have been like that at all. She’d have been smooth. Even. She’d never have been cross. She’d always have known that I hadn’t meant any harm.’

  ‘And did you never mean any harm?’

  ‘I don’t think I did. I honestly don’t think I did. I tried all the time to please. I just wanted to please. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t understand it was an accident. Whe
n I broke something, or lost something.’

  ‘You never annoyed her on purpose?’

  ‘Not knowingly. Not that I can remember.’

  ‘And your own children? Did they ever annoy you on purpose?’

  ‘Of course they did. Children do, don’t they?’

  Silence. They look at one another, knowingly.

  ‘And your adoptive mother is still much the same?’

  ‘Much the same.’ Mrs Hood’s arms go round her tightly again, she begins to rock again, a look of deeply pained perplexity creases her face. ‘Much the same. Sometimes she knows me, sometimes she doesn’t. When I saw her on Saturday she didn’t know me. She kept asking for someone called Monica. I don’t know anyone called Monica. The nurses say she’s getting more confused. I don’t think she wants to see me.’

  ‘If she doesn’t recognize you, how can she want not to see you?’

  ‘If she doesn’t recognize me, who am I?’

  Liz does not answer. She does not know.

  It’s not that I don’t find them as interesting as I always did, thinks Liz, as she eats her lunch of cottage cheese, anticipating a better meal that evening with Alix and Brian. I do. And I don’t think I say the wrong things. I don’t think I mislead. I don’t think the quality of my attention has altered. In other words, I am as serviceable as I ever was. But how can I be, when I know that I do not understand my own problems, when I know that I do not know, when I have been obliged to admit that I do not stand on solid ground, when my own patterns are obscure to me?

  The wounded healer. But that is another concept: that is the concept of the healer whose knowledge of the malady springs from a fellow sickness, from a diagnosed fellow-sickness.

  Is there, perhaps, an analogy with the faithless priest? Liz, a child of the North of England and daughter of an irreligious house, does not know much about Catholicism, but has read her Graham Greene, and dimly recalls the notion that even the unworthy vessel, the doubting vessel, can minister the true sacrament. Her rational self accepts this as rational: it is the nature of the healing, not the spirit of the healer, that is of value both to rational and to religious man. The right words may be said by the wrong, the unworthy priest. And it is not as though I had lost my faith in the healing process. That is not it. It is more subtle than that, this nagging, this anxiety, this sense of falseness, of faithlessness. Is it merely self-importance? Is it merely a temporary, an irrelevant loss of self-esteem, a minor personal neurosis, not worthy to be dignified by adult attention, a neurosis like anxiety about hair loss or a double chin or receding gums? She suspects that this is how Alix and Esther see her current uncertainty, and in part she admires their robust dismissal, their refusal to take too seriously her panics, her complaints, her dismays.

  But nevertheless, something continues to nag, something irresolute, unresolved, undiagnosed. Something suppurates, something stinks in her own nostrils, if not in those of others. A spiritual body odour. It is offensive to her, but she cannot locate its source. Is it merely fastidiousness that wishes to trace it and remove it? She does not know. She truly does not know. She even thinks of returning to her one-time analyst in St John’s Wood, but does not do so. She knows it would be a useless exercise. There is nothing Karl can now tell her. She has outgrown Karl. She is too astute for Karl, she can deceive Karl, she can read the tenor of Karl’s questions before he has even himself formulated them, she can dodge him and run ahead of him into never-ending open space, she is faster by far than he.

  So what does it matter what she does, out here in this grassy space, alone? On this high, solitary upland? Who cares? What harm does she do, up here? Who cares? She contaminates no one, she endangers no person.

  Her mind returns to Mrs Hood. The case of Mrs Hood interests her, for obvious reasons. Mrs Hood, as far as Liz can tell, never fantasized about her real father. Had no interest in her real father, until she was adult, and then her interest was only academic, it seemed. Mrs Hood admits that she had always imagined herself to be the offspring of a woman alone. Her real mother had preoccupied her, haunted her, exercised her imagination, woven herself into her most infantile dreams. With Liz herself, it had been otherwise. The real mother had been there, solidly absent, a constant and insoluble distress, a damaged being, a victim, a mystery. Too painful, too inexplicable to contemplate. So Liz, as a child, had contemplated her missing father instead. She could not remember him at all, although she must have been nearly four when he vanished. She had been free to invent. She had invented wonders. Wealth, gold braid, uniforms, power, magnificence. A commander. When the War was over, he would return gloriously, he would rescue his daughter Elizabeth (but probably not Shirley) and remove her to a fitting place, which, in her imagination, somewhat resembled the Alhambra Cinema on Jubilee Road. Marble and red carpet with a minaret. Her mother would at this point die, conveniently. Maybe her mother would be revealed, after her convenient death, to have been a princess in disguise, under a spell, bewitched. Or maybe she would be revealed not to have been Liz’s mother at all, but a serving maid, charged with the care of the royal baby by a wicked thief. Anyway, she would die, and Elizabeth would be free. Lady Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth, her adoring subjects would cry, as they reached out to touch her hem and be healed.

  She played variations of this drama to herself until she was quite old, long after more realistic escape routes had begun more profitably to occupy her waking, working mind. She had learned that such fantasies were normal, part of a normal pattern, and had long since ceased to find them embarrassing.

  And yet, and yet. During the terrible transformations of puberty, she had sat and brooded on her father. Shaming fantasies. Sexual fantasies. She had masturbated while brooding on her father, not knowing what she was doing, but knowing it was wrong. She set herself penances, but they did not help. A dark cluster gathered, inexorably, in her spirit. Increasingly masochistic grew its manifestations, its yearnings. Steel knitting needles featured. She dreamed of tortures, imprisonments, knives, daggers, dark towers. Wounds, blows, penetrations. Even now, she does not like to look back on them. They continue to shame, these fantasies.

  Her mother being mad, and madly fastidious, there was nobody to warn her about the onset of adult life, of bodily changes. She knew about menstruation from school friends, from advertisements in magazines, from labels on discreet packets of sanitary towels read sideways in the chemist’s. But nobody thought to warn her of the changes that precede menstruation, and she had thought herself uniquely diseased. She convinced herself at the age of eleven, twelve, that she was suffering from venereal disease. She had only the dimmest notions of what this was, notions gleaned from small-type-faced notices on the doors of public lavatories and from consulting the dictionary and Pears Cyclopedia, but she knew that it was shameful, too shameful ever to mention to another human being. And she believed it had afflicted her, as a vengeance for her wicked imaginings (though how she managed to make quite such an accurate connection between such imaginings and such a disease was, in later years, to puzzle her, for her imaginings had been of an extraordinary anatomical naïveté). Miserably she had stared at the stains in her bottle-green regulation school knickers. She would try to wash them, surreptitiously, before putting them in the laundry basket for her mother to inspect. She would crouch drying them before the bar of an electric fire, guiltily, dreading that Shirley would catch her at it, braving the strange, disturbing, wet, woolly, scorching sexual smell. She knew that if her mother knew that these issues came from her daughter’s body, she would be angry.

  And, in a sense, of course, as Liz years later was to attempt to explain to her analyst, her mother was angry. Not about the condition of her daughter’s underwear (although that did not please her, as the soiled napkins of infancy had not pleased her) but more generally, more profoundly, she was angry about her daughter’s existence, about her daughter’s growing, her daughter’s threatening, burgeoning flesh.

  Guilt, furtiveness, shame, concealment. Li
z had experienced more of these in her girlhood than might, she later discovered, be considered normal. She had known early that sex was wicked, that the changes in her own body augured delinquency, that the satisfying of its urges would bring disaster. She could never discover the roots of her knowledge and was disappointed (lastingly) in Karl her analyst because he could suggest no acceptable explanation: he continued, apparently, to believe that Liz had merely been struggling against a strong parental prohibition against masturbation in early infancy. Liz knew there was more to it than that. She could not recall any mention of masturbation, ever (and however patiently Karl explained to her the irrelevance of her own conscious memories, they continued to interest her) and sometimes wished she had indeed suffered from the violence of a convent upbringing, from a dose of hell-fire threats, rather than from the blank, dark, backward nothingness of her own unknowing, from the sinister connections of her own guilt. A broken command from a parent, from a teacher, from a priest, would have been simplicity itself compared with the self-torment of conscious but inexplicable sin she had at times endured.

  She had abandoned her fantasies and her self-abuse and with them her self-torment in her early teens, had forced herself to ‘give them up’, as she put it to herself, and then devoted all her energy to success at school, to escape through university, an outlet that had received her mother’s formal approval. All her sexual yearning was perversely poured into the State examination system, and the transference was so successful that by the time Liz got to Cambridge she had forced herself to forget the dark brooding, had become a daylight creature full of superficial vanity and worldly, skin-deep cravings. Banished was her father’s image and its potent demands for pain, for sacrifice, for abasement: instead she herself received tribute, more innocent tribute, invitations, billet-doux, kisses, flowers, longings, declarations. The surface of her sparkled, attracted. The surface of her attracted Edgar Lintot, and, superficially, they married, and quarrelled, and parted, while the dark depths of both lay dormant, unstirred, impenetrable.

  But Charles had stirred them. Liz, sitting there with her cottage cheese, made herself remember. Charles had called to the forbidden in her, demons had answered, from the place where they had been waiting. His mixture of brutality and desire had matched something in herself. He was cruel but enslaved. He came to her as a man acquainted with grief, a widower expected to run wild, an excessive man seeking comfort in dissolution and promiscuity: a romantic figure. She had fallen in love with it. Love? Well, she had thought it was love, but lust might have been a more fitting word for whatever it was that bound them together, in those early days – were lust not a word that suggests simplicity and brevity rather than obsession. Their lust had certainly not been brief, simple or easily satisfied. It fed on his mild sadism, her mild desire for punishment, a desire that in no way reflected their social relations. The first time that he said to her, in the taxi, on the way back to her flat, that he would punish her in bed for speaking to another man at the party they had just attended, she was so overcome with sexual longing that she felt her body blaze, and he, hearing her catch her breath and feeling her loosen her knees, thought that he had found the key to her for ever, and had told her so, that night in bed in language and in action that had roused in her an intensity, a violence, that had seemed to purge and to purify all things. And so it had continued: if not for ever, for the best part of a decade. Rituals, repetitions. The demons had become the kindly ones, the terrors of the darkness of her body became physical delight, pleasure, rapture. She and Charles connived with one another in the satisfaction of the body, they understood one another well. It had seemed a harnessing of perversion, a permitted exploration of the psyche and the flesh, an odyssey of the 1960s. Marriage and children merely brought to their liaison an added piquancy. In bed, in long drives in the car, in respectable restaurants, in corners at parties, in darkened studios watching rushes of Charles’s early socially conscious documentaries, they manifested their shadow selves, their sexual selves, and in the daylight their fortified solid beings conducted negotiations in another style on quite other matters: they made money, ran a house, quarrelled with cameramen and the IBA, bore and brought up children, sacked staff, took on staff, entertained friends, quarrelled with colleagues.