The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘I think a lot of people are selective. Most. Most people have their own worst consonants. And find foreign languages easier. Do people stammer in all languages?’

  ‘In Japanese, for example? I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Somebody must know.’

  ‘I can ask when I’m there.’

  ‘Do, do ask.’ Stephen hesitates, pursues.

  ‘I think the consonants were something to do with embarrassment. Embarrassing words always seemed to begin with P or B. Bum, balls, bollocks, bugger, prick, penis, piss.’

  Stephen recites the list, enunciating politely, delicately, carefully.

  ‘Bosom, breast, belly,’ says Liz, and laughs.

  ‘Very selective,’ says Stephen. ‘Of course, the other words, the Lady Chatterley words, I didn’t learn till I was much older, past the formative stage. I had a very sheltered childhood.’

  ‘What was the formative stage?’

  ‘My mother says I began to stammer when I fell off a pony when I was three. I fell on my head. So it was alleged.’

  ‘And got up stammering?’

  ‘So she says. Not a very likely story, I imagine.’ He begins to roll another cigarette. ‘But it is true that I’m afraid of horses. There could be a connection?’

  ‘Were you afraid of your father?’

  ‘I can’t remember. How would I know?’

  ‘And when did you get over it? Did you really never stammer in French?’

  ‘Only very occasionally. And then only if it was a word I’d been working up to for a long time. Like asking for a ticket to Passy, or Palais-Royale, or Pigalle. If it came out suddenly, I could do it. It was the nervous apprehension that made it happen. So I’d pretend to myself that I was going to say something quite different, and then at the last moment I’d change my mind and say Passy, or Palais-Royale, or p-p-p-Pigalle. Like a horse with blinkers.’

  ‘How do you mean, a horse with blinkers?’

  ‘I was afraid of refusing, like a horse at a fence. So I wouldn’t let myself see the fence. Till the last moment.’

  ‘Fascinating. But you were the horse? Do you see your psyche as a horse?’

  And on they went, engaged, rapid, backwards and forwards, Liz quoting papers, asking questions, promising to look up statistics, suggesting parallels; her mind whizzing and whirring, humming and singing, the machine running fast, smooth, efficient, functioning perfectly, sweeping up notions, quick, quick, excited, gathering momentum, cruising; and undetectable, that smell of burning rubber, or is it still there, hanging, haunting, burning rubber, the wrong engine note? Stephen is less rapid, more enigmatic, more tentative, but he too gathers speed under Liz’s acceleration, and Alix sits back and listens to them run along together: they speak of Freud and Little Hans and fear of horses, they speak of Plato’s metaphor of the harnessed horses of the self. It is going so well, this modest supper party, that Alix is simultaneously exhilarated, exhausted, jealous, delighted. It is one in the morning, it is time for bed, but they still gallop along, in step, Liz and Stephen. Well, it is done, they will have to arrange the next outing themselves, thinks Alix. She wonders if Brian is annoyed. She has never quite known what Brian thinks of Liz. Maybe there will be no more outings. Stephen is elusive, he vanishes, frequently. He is faithful only to Brian in, perhaps, the world.

  National Service was said to offer young men an opportunity of meeting other men from other walks of life. And indeed, it did so. (Women were not offered this enforced opportunity.) Most reminiscences about National Service include a tribute to the educational benefits of mixing with others. Few maintained their friendships over the years, as Brian and Stephen did: in fact few made what could even be called friendships. But some did: some did. And young men did learn something of the realities of other classes, other ranks. Some look back with a real nostalgia to this mixing. Some do not like the divisions that constitute what is called society, do not like the fear and mutual suspicion that reinforces these divisions, the arrogant assumptions of privilege, the grumbling quiescence or reductive, aggressive envy of want, the constant maintenance of distinctions. Some would like to get to know their fellow-men. They are too frightened to attempt to do so. What are they afraid of? Of the hatred on that other, alien face? Or the hatred reflected from their own? Or of fear, fear itself?

  The only other form of service which brings people – men and women alike in this instance – into such enforced proximity is jury service. It is commonplace to hear middle-class people declare that they enjoy their jury service because it gives them an insight into how other people think and live. As though there were no other way of discovering these things. They enjoy the brief illusion of community, the sense of joint purpose.

  Alix Bowen is a sentimentalist about class, it has been alleged. This is why she found herself teaching working-class children in Newham, and prisoners in Garfield; why she talks to drinking men on park benches; why she married Brian Bowen. And Alix herself would be the first to admit to herself – although she can never quite find the words to explain it – that Brian’s attraction for her was massively, deeply connected with his class origins. Brian, for her, represented – well what? Not exactly the working class, for Brian, by the time she met him, was a published novelist and a teacher in an Adult Education College: hardly a representative working man. Yet he brought with him – well, what? A sense of not being afraid. Brian was neither suspicious, nor afraid. Lying in your arms, Alix said once, not very seriously, to Brian, I am in the process of healing the wounds in my own body and in the body politic.

  Brian laughed, as she meant him to; but she meant it.

  The first time Brian put his arms around Alix one night after a plate of spaghetti bolognese at the Trattoria Primavera, she was aware not so much of sexual attraction as of a deep suffusion of warmth which filled, without any particular erotic effect, her entire body. It was an extraordinary, an unprecedented sensation, flowing from him to her and through her, through the centre of herself, through the small of her back and her shoulders and her chest, and spreading, glowing, to the more differentiated, less serious edges and surfaces and extremities. It filled her and consumed her, she felt that she was thawing at last, after years, after a lifetime of separation, of chill. Making love with Brian seemed to have a basic, reassuring, comforting continuity, a timeless, all-inclusive warmth which made nonsense of such modern notions as arousal, excitement, orgasm. The weight of him anchored her. She had observed, from a distance, across the canteen, across the staff room, in corridors, his delicacy, his easy familiarity, his sense of being at home in his own body, his comfortable communications with the bodies of others. He radiated presence, immediacy. He touched people easily – took old ladies by the elbow gently on stairs or at corners, put his arm in comfort or congratulation or communion round the shoulders of friends of either sex, touched the back of her hand as they talked, for emphasis or in appreciation, long before they thought of becoming lovers. People loved Brian, warmed to Brian. Or did she imagine that, because she loved him? No, it was not imagination, it was so. He was alive in his body, and that was a rare thing.

  And she connected this living self with his past, with his sister Kathie of course, but also with his familiarity with objects, with his knowledge of the tension of circular saws. At one point, as she watched Brian repotting a geranium, it occurred to her that it was not so much a question of what was remarkable about Brian: it was more a question of what had gone wrong with everybody else. His grace seemed natural, normal. But in fact was rare. Brian was the normal man, but there was only one of him. As she watched him one evening as he replaced the vandalized car aerial with a bent coathanger, she knew that Brian was in tune with messages, could pick up sounds from the air, as well as through the earth. Fanciful, fanciful. When she saw him in the company of big straight dull heavy self-important British meat-faced men in striped dark suits – as she did, occasionally, at meetings, even socially – she would stare at his open-necked shirt, his open smile, his
throat, his hands, and wonder how they could not envy him. Perhaps they did. Coats on coathangers, stiffly packed and padded, to shut out the messages. Did they hate him, because he smiled?

  Fear had become normal, clumsiness of various sorts had become normal. Men wore dark suits and ties and were solemn inside them, or they shouted on picket lines. None of them made love, much, to their wives, the faces of their wives as well as the enquiries of sociological research suggested. Women were afraid to stand at bus stops after dark, to catch the last tube home, to walk down an underpass. Girls formed themselves into gangs and terrorized other girls with coshes made of billiard balls stuffed in the ends of old socks. Men talked about cars and video machines and cameras and the money supply and the base lending rate. Women talked of biological washing powders and the price of beef and television commercials and operations on the gall bladder and the Royal Family.

  And Brian, who was so good with his hands, taught classes in English Literature to middle-class housewives, because that was the nature of Adult Education. He also tried to write the great pedestrian realistic working-class novel of the 1970s and 1980s, but he had moved to London, married a middle-class wife, and acquired too good an education to write what he wanted, as he wanted.

  Alix, lying in bed after her middle-class dinner party, her successful dinner party: warm, wakeful, herself safe from the storms of fear, wrapped up, protected, listening to Brian’s even breathing, feeling the warmth of his sleeping arm around her breasts: Alix, lying there, thought of all these things. All of them. She put them one beside another, like building blocks: National Service, Jury Service, Men, Women, Manual Work, Fear, Picket Lines, the Royal Family, Social Class, Adult Education. Patiently she lined them up. Unlike Liz, she was patient. They made no sense, these blocks, they did not make a building, but she would continue, patiently, persistently, to line them up and to look at them. To rearrange them. She would compel them: or if she failed to compel them, it would not be through want of effort.

  Liz, in bed that night, had forgotten Stephen, had leaped on from thoughts of Stephen, had left him far behind, as she thought of her mother, lying there in Abercorn Avenue, blocked not by a stammer, in speech alone, but in the centre of herself, in all things. A fall from a horse, a sexual misadventure; a dead husband, a faithless husband. Trauma. Shock. Permanent shock. What had happened to her father? Where was her father, who was her father? Had he left her mother and vanished, as she sometimes suspected? Her mother claimed that he was dead. But maybe he was not dead. Maybe he was still alive. Maybe he had merely left her mother, as Charles was leaving her. The possible parallel appalled her. She had not consciously made it before. How could she not have done, she asked herself. She got up and made herself a cup of tea. Unable to sleep, thinking of Charles and her father, and abandoned wives. Abbandonata, abbandonata. Music plays in her head, women lament in Palladian palaces. She lies in bed, she switches on her radio cassette to drown their cries. She is listening to Sibelius’s fifth symphony. She has taken to playing it, as though she could thereby invoke Naomi’s help from the past. Benevolent ghost. A kind of madness.

  She knows that she should track down her absent father. Thus she had decided, at lunch time, over her cottage cheese. Her position is false, false, false. Essentially false. She knows that she dares not. She knows that she will not. She stares at this knowledge, and is deeply, deeply, in the small hours, afraid.

  A few families in a Country Village. A few families in a small, densely populated, parochial, insecure country. Mothers, fathers, aunts, stepchildren, cousins. Where does the story begin and where does it end? Even Charles Headleand has an aunt, though you would not think it to look at him across a board-room table, across an editorial desk, to watch him address a meeting. He is ashamed of his aunt. She is a sub-postmistress in a small village in Norfolk. She is a woman of the greatest, the most unself-conscious eccentricity. She runs the village shop. He would not like Lady Henrietta to meet his aunt. His aunt, however, expects to meet Lady Henrietta. I wonder what Jane Austen would say. Alix Bowen would find the existence of Charles’s aunt interesting, but she does not know of it. Liz Headleand has not thought her worth mentioning. Meanwhile, in another part of the country, Nicholas Manning, Alix Bowen’s son, has taken to visiting his grandmother, Deborah, his father’s now widowed mother in Sussex. He likes the house, he likes the life there. Alix finds this connection disquieting, but is not quite sure why.

  On a more public level 1980 continues. The steel strike continues, a bitter prelude to the miners’ strike that will follow. Class rhetoric flourishes. Long-cherished notions of progress are inspected, exposed, left out to die in the cold. Survival of the fittest seems to be the new-old doctrine. Unemployment rises steadily, but the Tory Party is not yet often reminded of its election poster which portrayed a long dole queue with the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’. People have short memories, many of them are carried along with the new tide. They are fit. The less fit get less and less fit, and are washed up on the shore. Some of the fit, it is true, begin to get a little breathless, at times. Cliff Harper, for example, is in trouble. Cliff Harper’s business flourishes, in theory at least, but the steel strike hits his haulage contractors, his suppliers, his distributors and the loyalty of some of his workforce: the edges begin to crumble. Tory voter, small businessman, entrepreneur, he looks for help but none is forthcoming. He continues to praise the government and to deride the left-wing Council which takes Meals On Wheels to his mother-in-law. He believes in the glamour, the logic, of the hard line. He is a desperately worried man. His children are costing him a fortune at their private schools. Occasionally, in moments of gloom, it occurs to Cliff that he may not, after all, be one of the fit. He is not as young as he was.

  Doubts also creep up on Charles Headleand from time to time. He too is not as young as he was, and New York is a fast city, a breathless city. He has noticed an unpleasant tendency to breathlessness. Luckily there are not many stairs in New York. He has taken up jogging, and jogs round the upper West Side at seven in the morning. Diet, luckily, is a fashionable topic, and he cuts out (well, almost cuts out) butter, salt, milk, eggs, fat: he is told to eat raw fish. Raw fish is fashionable. He thinks he is enjoying his work, his new importance, his power, his eminence: he enjoys the deference accorded to him.

  He is the ambassador of a large section of Independent Broadcasting, he is a public person, he has a vast salary, a vast and luxurious apartment, he negotiates from a semi-governmental position, the future is partly in his hands: he is a spy for his country, keeping track of cable television, satellites, video equipment, teletext systems, the ever-increasing dissemination of images, of news, of horrors. He is here to read the writing on the wall, the writing that flickers on the screen. He is here to nudge on the debate, the power struggle between public service and independent broadcasting, to monitor the collapse of empires. Well, that is how he sees it, for he has little doubt that the empires will collapse, and that the old BBC and IBA will, in twenty years, have vanished. Which shall he do, support the old régime, as he is paid to do, or tell the truth about the future and thereby precipitate collapse? A moral dilemma.

  Sometimes he wonders what on earth he is doing. Negotiations, conventions, congresses, committees: policy decisions, diplomatic manoeuvres, budget forecasts, legal investigations, public enquiries. Once he made films. Once, in the late fifties, in the early sixties, he made films. He sometimes allows himself to remember those days; but not often, for he despises nostalgia. But occasionally, despite himself, as he lies in the bath or jogs in Central Park, he recalls the old days of Focus on Britain. He was assistant producer, then producer: he made of it what he wanted. A weekly programme: a good pattern to the week: an end product to celebrate. They would go off for a Chinese meal, all the crew, colleagues together: they would sit happily, triumphantly, and order huge platters of crudely spiced pork and chicken and duck and abalone and crab claws and greasy translucent bean sprouts and fried rice and
prawn crackers and soft and crispy noodles: Ben Feather always insisted on having a fried egg on top of his. Drenched in soy sauce, thoroughly anglicized, cheap, delicious, washed down with lager or gin and tonic. They would eat and eat and talk and talk, on Friday nights, when the programme was safely finished, safely in the can. They would discuss what went wrong, which contributors had lied or muffed it, which had spoken out boldly: which shots had worked, which might have worked with more time, more money: they would laugh and talk and crack jokes and plan future programmes. They were young and keen and full of ideas, Charles had ideas, and he received ideas: he was one of a team. And he kept some of the team when he went on to make his series on education, the series that decisively established him: it was shown in 1965, by a brilliant mixture of guesswork and timing, just as the Labour Government issued its Circular 10/65, designed to end selection at eleven-plus and introduce comprehensive education. Charles’s programme became a talking point, it was quoted in Parliament, in academic studies, at educational gatherings throughout Europe. A series that demonstrated, eloquently, movingly, the evils that flow from a divisive class system, from early selection, from Britain’s unfortunate heritage of public schools and philistinism. The Radiant Way was its ironic title, taken from the primer from which Charles had learned at the age of four to read at his mother’s knee. The nation wept as little Olive Peters, twelve years old in Barrow, revealed her humble expectations from life; as Johnny Maher, son of a driving instructor, seventeen years old in Liverpool, discovered he’d got a State Scholarship; as twenty-four-year-old Barry Furbank, from a London children’s home, was shown clocking eagerly in for night school after a long day working on the buses. The nation smiled as the camera elicited words, accents, attitudes of extraordinary, outmoded quaintness and patronage from Oxford dons, from headmasters and pupils from public schools, from prep-school boys in short trousers; then frowned thoughtfully as the camera showed these attitudes to be entrenched within the educational structure itself, and within the very fabric of British society. It was great: television: Charles let his people speak for themselves, they condemned themselves in their own words from their own mouths, they won sympathy by the way they stood at a bus stop or fed their rabbits or bought a copy of Exchange and Mart at the corner shop: or so, at least, it seemed to the British public, which was still innocent in its response to the television documentary. Charles reinforced his programme’s impact by commissioning campaigning articles in conjunction with The Times Educational Supplement, by arranging discussions on BBC Television’s Late Night Line-Up with eminent educationalists and sociologists, by persuading the independent television company for which he worked to publish back-up material with charts and statistics. Charles put everything he had into this series, he pulled together everything and everyone he knew: he filmed one of Alix Manning’s Further Education students from Newham, an Asian girl who spoke of the arranged marriage of her sister as she herself tried to learn to use an electric sewing machine: he filmed Ben Feather’s nephew at a village primary school in Norfolk: he filmed his own sister’s son trotting off to prep school in Sevenoaks in blazer and cap (regretting that the peculiarly unfortunate shade of dusky pink would not emerge from his black and white images): he filmed a niece of his dead wife Naomi as she sat her Cambridge entrance: he filmed the by now elderly but still distinguished economist who had once taught Brian Bowen in Blandford Forum, teaching the very same evening class (the same nun still attending) and floating, subtly, charmingly, almost unnoticeably, the notion of an Open University. (Neither he nor Alix had at this stage met Brian Bowen, so Charles could not film him although he would have been highly suitable material.) He filmed his wife Liz’s sister Shirley’s little boys and tried to use them to comment on attitudes on pre-school education, but for some reason the sequence didn’t work and he never used it: the little brats simply wouldn’t look innocent enough, unspoiled enough, as they played half-heartedly with their wholesome toys, and Shirley, although a strong advocate of nursery schooling (so strong that she and a group of other mothers had founded their own playgroup), refused to cooperate by letting the crew bribe the kids with sweeties. The infants sulked, hotly, under the cameras. The truth and not the truth. Liz had laughed as Charles reported this defeat, and said that it was Charles’s fault for being unable to understand the social niceties of Shirley and Cliff Harper’s circle. She had refused to lend their own children to the enterprise, and Charles had conceded that it would not be proper to use them. But in every other way she had backed him: she had admired the films greatly, had talked about them ceaselessly, had encouraged and suggested and cross-questioned with exemplary loyalty. Heady days. They had all enjoyed it. They had believed in it, all of them. Team work. Ben Feather, Dirk Davis, Lindsay Potter, Sally Hewett, Peter Canning. They had won awards. Charles had made speeches. And over the chop suey and sweet and sour they had put the nation to rights: Charles Headleand, Ben Feather, Dirk Davis, Lindsay Potter. . . .