The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Sighing, Shirley wiped the imitation marble tiles, wiped the stainless-steel sink, hung up her dishcloth. She was bored. Underemployed, bored. She herself no longer read books. Books seemed irrelevant to her life. They portrayed other people, other lives, other worlds. They bored her. She wished she had not eaten the slice of cake. She opened the tin, to see how much was left, and found herself cutting another tiny slice. Appalled, she ate it.

  Cliff Harper for his lunch had a large plate of roast pork, crackling, apple sauce, mashed potato, roast potato, gravy, boiled cabbage and bright green frozen peas, followed by treacle tart with cream and white coffee. He ate this at the local pub, which did lunches in an upstairs room. He considered this a light lunch, in comparison with the smarter one he would be obliged to buy for a client at the Post House Hotel the following day. He was on good terms with the waitress, who teased him and his partner Jim about the cream. Always the same jokes. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be having cream, will you? Or perhaps just a little? Whoops, sorry, the jug slipped.’ She enjoyed a laugh, did Lilian.

  There was still a fair number of people eating lunch, in the spring of 1980, in the Old Forge in Northam, on the Lower Valley Road. But business was slacker than it had been: For Sale notices were going up on long-familiar premises, on old-established businesses, and men were being laid off by the hundred. The steel strike wasn’t doing anybody much good, and Northam, although not exclusively a steel city, experienced ripples of rumour and dismay as small businesses collapsed, suppliers failed, distributors went bankrupt around it. The knock-on effect, it was called. Demand had slumped: nothing much was moving. The old manufacturing neighbourhood had begun to take on a new kind of grimness: it had never been pretty, but it had possessed a certain dignity, to some a homely dignity, and the extraordinary jumble of architectural styles – nineteenth-century factories, tall chimneys, huge buttressed walls, small squeezed lingering eighteenth-century domestic dwellings and public houses, cheap post-war ad hoc factories and offices, railway bridges, gas cylinders, weed-blooming canal banks, the odd cosmetic 1970s face-lift – offered a variety, a visual and human richness, a weathered and seasoned history of the city’s prosperous past and present. But now there was an ominous slowing of the pulse: the age of the buildings and the neighbourhood was beginning to tell, a forlorn gust blew coldly down the empty streets, rust ate quietly at machinery, brick dust sifted from crumbling ledges, dirty glass panes slowly splintered as window frames rotted. The poetry of neglect. Jokes were cracked, these days, in Northam, about the newly and expensively restored industrial hamlet and museum up the Valley: why not turn the whole dump, the whole East End, into one blooming big museum and charge Japanese tourists to come and gawp? You could pay old men in overalls to stand around and dress the show. Take them out of the unemployment figures. Give them a sense of purpose. Back to the good old days.

  Cliff Harper and Jim Bakewell, in this accelerating slump, found themselves in an anomalous, an unlikely, a potentially worrying position. Demand for their product was too high. They were doing well. Wing mirrors were selling better than they had ever anticipated, owing partly to a rumour that legislation was being drawn up to make provision of an offside wing mirror on all vehicles compulsory. Driving instructors had taken to recommending them, Ministry of Transport inspectors recommended them, new cars were built with them as an obligatory rather than an optional feature. Cliff and Jim were not interested in the new car market: they assembled an Attach-It-Yourself model for older cars, to replace damaged mirrors on newer cars. The parts came from Taiwan, as did the parts of their other, less briskly selling line of knife-spoon-corkscrew-bottle-opener picnic kit. What to do? To discontinue picnic kits, to concentrate on wing mirrors, to take on new staff, to borrow money to expand, to rent new premises? Cliff was conservative, Jim expansionist in spirit, but the truth was that neither of them knew what to do, which way to move, which way to jump. They talked knowledgeably of the government’s anti-state-regulation stance (an anti-compulsory-wing-mirror stance, presumably), of the increasing leisure-product market (a pro-picnic argument, presumably), of the laws regulating employment in small businesses, of the advisability of taking on a cheap youngster or two through YOPS; but they did not know what to do for the best, they could not read the future, they could not trust the future. They comforted themselves with treacle tart and cream.

  Alix Bowen spent most of her lunch hour shopping for the dinner she was to present to Liz Headleand and Stephen Cox. It was one of what she called her Home Office Think Tank days, though it wasn’t the Home Office itself that she worked in, but a corner of a dusty, gracious, apparently forgotten building in Nightingale Terrace off Pall Mall, a building under the shifting shades of demolition or refurbishment, within easy walk of the cheese and ham shop in Jermyn Street where camp young men and small old-fashioned old men were sometimes charming, sometimes rudely dismissive, according to a plan, a rhythm that Alix had never been able to predict. Today was a charming day and after she had effected her purchases they pressed on her a sample piece of an unfamiliar cheese called Vignotte. Weakly, she ate it and bought some, and bought herself a piece of pie to eat in her office. She then ran back through the March wind and was devouring the pie when her boss, Polly Piper, came in. Alix looked up and continued to devour her pie. ‘Hi, Poll,’ said Alix.

  Polly sat down on the spare chair, and put her feet on the desk amid the heaped files.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘If you want some coffee,’ said Alix, ‘you could put the kettle on.’

  Polly Piper did not move.

  ‘Where did you get that pie?’ she asked, hungrily.

  ‘Paxton and Whitfield. Jolly good. Have a corner?’

  Alix parted with a few small crumbs.

  ‘I’ve been looking at that report from Kendall, Illinois. Reading between the lines, I think they’ve had a lot of trouble there.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to write to the Governor, Alix, and find out what’s really going on?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it come better from you?’

  ‘I always put people’s backs up. You write so politely.’

  ‘I’ll draft it and you sign it. I think it would come better from you.’

  ‘No, I think not.’

  Polly Piper glared authoritatively at Alix, who said, ungraciously, ‘Oh, okay. If you insist. What else?’

  And Polly proceeded to outline what else, in her strange, abrupt, elliptical manner, while admiring her own boots, which lay neatly crossed on Alix’s blotting pad. They were high heeled, highly polished, burgundy red, with gold buckles. She spoke of a survey issuing from Leicester University on the correlation between accidents and pre-menstrual tension. She spoke of the correspondence between the defence offered in crimes of infanticide in the courts and the defence now beginning to surface in the cases of disturbance due to pre-menstrual tension. She asked Alix what she thought of the judge’s summing up in the case of the housekeeper who had shot her widower employer while allegedly suffering from pre-menstrual tension. Two years younger than Alix, she had read Moral Sciences at Cambridge and devoted herself to Wittgenstein: she had then worked for an advertising agency, writing copy on anything that came her way, but with a marked flair for selling women’s products: had then become Public Relations Officer, then a chief executive, in a firm manufacturing tampons. Thence she had been drawn to the Home Office, where she now headed a research unit into the care and control of women offenders. The unit consisted largely if not wholly of Alix. Alix did not know what to make of the concept of pre-menstrual tension. She had never knowingly suffered from it in her life. Did this mean that it did not exist, that it was a ghostly excuse, a medieval demon waiting to be cast out not by pills but by common sense? Or that she herself was merely lucky? She did not know. She and Polly Piper would talk for hours of these matters. Polly Piper did suffer from pre-menstrual tension, but then, she belonged to a slightly, significantly, younger generation
of women for whom the rights rather than the opportunities of women were in sharper focus. Alix, old fashioned, had been hopelessly, conventionally punctual and conscientious throughout her not very distinguished career, never staying off sick, never taking a day off when Nicholas had been ill, attempting to prove single-handed that women were as reliable, more reliable, than men. Polly, erratic, high powered, high mannered, had taken another line, and was now Alix’s boss. Polly had long, dark, curling, greying hair, which she would shake like a mane when moved, and a handsome hawk-like nose, and a flashing, frequently contemptuous eye. Men were frightened of Polly, in a titillated sort of way that had not hindered her promotion. She and Alix got on, by and large, very well.

  Alix was, almost despite herself, interested in the pre-menstrual tension business. She had discussed it with her class at Garfield, had read them some Sylvia Plath poems and some Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle. Moons and tides, sanity and lunacy. She was also anxious to promote a campaign to remove VAT from sanitary towels. Polly had become predictably excited by this proposal and had thought of standing for Parliament on the issue. Both Alix and Polly agreed that the poor representation of women in the House of Commons in Britain in the last decades of the twentieth century was a deplorable manifestation of – well, of what? This too they would discuss.

  Alix, on the bus on the way home with her loaded shopping bag, worried about whether to make onion or spinach sauce with the gammon, and read her horoscope in the Evening Standard to help her make up her mind. It informed her that she would have to abandon her present romantic intentions, but that these would shortly be replaced by new and better prospects. Which was more romantic, onion or spinach? It was not clear. She leafed through the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ and saw there a picture of Lady Henrietta Latchett and a young Royal at a charity ball at the Dorchester. Tickets had cost £50 a head. Champagne and imported delicacies had featured, dancing to the free services of The Wanderers had occurred, all in aid of research into a not-so-rare illness, research which in Alix’s view was already quite well funded by the government. Millions a year were spent on research into this not-so-rare illness. The problem was not lack of money, but lack of discoveries, lack of progress. The not-so-rare illness, for all the money it absorbed, refused, like death, to go away. It fed on money. And there was Lady Henrietta, patron, with a young Royal. Alix had read somewhere the week before that a sum equal to half the defence budget is contributed annually to charities in Britain. What an extraordinary statistic, if true. She did not believe it. But an odd system, just the same. She peered at Lady Henrietta’s grey, diminutive, pinched, grainy features, at the jewels around her neck, at her low-necked gown. What an odd country. Did Lady Henrietta feel the illusion of virtue when attending such functions? Alix thought of her friend Liz Headleand, and was quite indignant for a few minutes on her behalf as the bus ground to a halt in the rush hour on Wandsworth Bridge: but perhaps it was Liz Headleand’s own fault, for mixing in such circles? Spinach sauce, perhaps, would be more entertaining. Brian would have to go to the off-licence for the tonic, for if the bus stuck here much longer she certainly wouldn’t have time to go herself.

  Charles Headleand in New York lunched (GMT 6 p.m.) on iced water, a salt beef sandwich on rye with dill pickle, and the telephone. He rang Bud Castellano in Los Angeles, Ricky Dupont in Detroit, Sir William Salmon in Washington, Dickie Fisher in Bogotá (where his reliable secretary reliably informed him it was also GMT 6 p.m.) and then he dismissed his secretary to fetch him a cup of coffee and rang Henrietta Latchett in London, hoping to catch her before she went out to whichever party she had chosen to grace that evening. She was in the bath, she told him, getting ready to go to the Venables’. He commiserated. And how was the ball the night before, he asked her. Too too too, she said. Really too. She fluted, to amuse. What did He talk about? enquired Charles. Reindeer and elk, said Henrietta. He’s the wildlife one, you know. Well, they have to take up something, poor things, said Charles. Moose, fluted Henrietta. He spoke of moose. Henrietta turned on the hot tap, and held the telephone receiver intimately for a moment to the sound of running water. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, I’ll see you next week, she said. She forgot to ask him how he was or what he was doing, but he didn’t notice. She lay in her hot bath. Charles rang Bill Ryan in Toronto.

  ‘Delicious,’ said Stephen Cox, holding out his plate for a second helping of gammon and onion sauce. Alix smiled at him benignly. Stephen, himself an excellent cook, always ate up and asked for more, which always pleased her. The onion sauce had turned out rather well. So had the conversation. Liz, occasionally overbearing in company, had been mild, attentive, responsive. She had arrived in mild mood, early, bearing a belated birthday present for Sam and a small plant in a pot for Alix. The present for Sam was a square perspex box with a complicated silver tubular maze inside it: ‘I think it’s an executive toy,’ said Liz, sitting down with Sam on the settee to play with it, ‘but we mustn’t let that put us off, it’s quite nice, isn’t it?’ Sam agreed that it was nice. They sat together intently, as Sam shook it about to discover its secrets: Alix, chopping parsley watching them, was pleased. Liz always took trouble with Sam, as she had in earlier years with Nicholas: she had once confessed to Alix that she did not find other people’s children easy, envied the warmth of those who could open their arms confidently to all children, was still retrospectively surprised by the ease with which she had taken to her own three stepsons. ‘I suppose it’s because I had to,’ she had once said: ‘I had to be intimate. And once I was over that, it was simple. They belonged to me, I had to open my arms, there was no choice. But it’s odd that I knew how to, isn’t it?’ Alix, who had put her own passion for Nicholas down to biology, had agreed that it was odd. She doubted if she herself could have taken to a stranger’s children so readily. It was odd that Liz, who had never received, as far as one could tell, a motherly kiss or hug in her life, should have achieved such kissing and hugging with her stepsons, with her daughters. Alix liked Liz’s children, though she found them easier now they were older. And she liked to see Sam and Liz sitting together, puzzling.

  The pot plant was small and green and mossy and covered in tiny orange-red berries. ‘I hope it won’t be a bore,’ said Liz, when offering it, ‘I hope you won’t let it dominate your life.’ And they had proceeded to discuss, for a while, Esther’s ludicrous obsession with her potted palm. ‘She talks of nothing else,’ said Liz, ‘it’s bizarre, she ticked me off the other evening when I was speaking to her on the phone for failing to ask after it.’ And they both laughed, for they did not think Esther bizarre at all, or even eccentric. ‘And how was it?’ asked Alix. ‘Turning a bit grey and stiff at its lower extremities, she said. I recommended soaking it, like an azalea, but she wouldn’t have that, she spoke of the desert. So I said was she over-watering it, and she said how would she ever know?’ ‘Oh dear, what a problem,’ said Alix. They were both in fact quite interested in Esther’s palm. ‘Anyway,’ said Liz, ‘if this little thing dies, I won’t blame you.’ ‘I like it very much,’ said Alix. ‘It’s a very pretty little plant.’ ‘I thought it was rather you,’ said Liz, ‘but now I’m beginning to wish I’d got one for myself too. I got it at the garage on the way here. Funny, the things they sell in garages these days, isn’t it?’

  Idle chatter: soothing, reassuring. Small things. When Stephen arrived, they continued to talk idly, for a while, of plants and eccentricities: Stephen described a peculiar array of knitted pot plants which an aunt of his had created – you mean knitted? Yes, I do mean knitted, green leaves, white-edged purple flowers, sort of knitted begonias in little pots with real earth, quite realistic from a couple of yards away – and Brian contributed a plastic cyclamen which for some reason had been given pride of place in his father’s flat, although his father had green fingers and had surrounded it with some perfectly good real plants. It must have been a present, they concluded. Like the ominous palm, the gift of that sinister wizard, Claudio Volpe.
/>   Over dinner they moved on: Liz listened mildly, attentively, as Stephen gave an account of his recent visit to America, where he had been delivering a lecture: he recalled other lecture tours, speaking of pink buses with ears and tails in Dallas, of thick snow and meals of sunflower seeds in Vermont, of English muffins in Philadelphia, of mystic matrons in Albuquerque. Stephen’s narrative style was hesitant, oblique, slightly stammering, whimsically sharp: as a young man, as Brian could well recall, he had stammered atrociously, paralysingly, disablingly, but he had learned to turn his impediment to advantage, had become an accomplished raconteur in person as well as on the page. Now he embarked upon an anecdote about his return flight from Boston, sitting next to a young American academic who was attending a conference in Monte Carlo on intertextuality in the works of James Joyce. They had fallen into conversation because both were reading a novel by David Lodge, a coincidence that in itself amounted to a form of intertextuality. This young man had also written a play which nobody would stage. Was it about intertextuality, Stephen had politely enquired, high above the clouds. No, the young man had replied (excited by a gin and tonic), it was about his mother. She was – had been – an Irish-American soprano. And it was about his father, an Irish peasant who practised as a hypnotist. O’Neill and Du Maurier were mentioned, in deference to intertextuality. Stephen had been enthralled. He had not revealed that he was himself a published writer, had affected ignorant, innocent sympathy, had nodded and smiled and prompted further confessions.

  Brian listened, now, to his friend’s familiar voice, which had tempted from Brian himself many a confession, in years gone by, and pondered on Stephen’s success as a writer, his own relative failure as a writer, and the dilemma of an itinerant academic from New England torn between a longing for tenure and an excessive, inconvenient, unaccommodated love for his mother. Inassimilable material, perhaps? Like his own?