The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Rita Ablewhite hoarded everything: but then, so did most people in those days. Paper bags, rubber bands, silver foil, jam jars, the humble paraphernalia of depression and war. Hoarding was not then neurotic, obsessional, eccentric.

  Well, nobody in her right mind would want to go back to that. Cold, darkness, and the smell of boot polish. No, let the lights of Harley Street blaze, let the central heating waste its beneficence on empty rooms, let bottles be hurled into the bottle bank, let the garbage men collect the affluent rubbish of an affluent house. Aristocratic largesse: fin-de-siècle waste: warmth, life, light. Projects of thrift do not attract Liz Headleand, as they attract, in different ways, her friends Alix and Esther. She does not wish to turn back, to cut back, to live in a reduced style as a divorced woman, although she has in her time bracingly recommended this course to others. She wishes to keep the lights on. She feels justified in this, up to a point. And it is not only the comfort that she needs, though that is a part of it. She is afraid that if she takes a step back, all her worldly riches will crumble, like Cinderella’s at midnight, and that she will find herself once more polishing the boots. Well, of course she is afraid of this, we are all afraid of this, if we have any imagination. But she is more afraid of this than most. She knows she is not the true princess, but only a fake princess, a scullery maid dressed up by a Cambridge scholarship and her own wits, and rescued by a dubious prince. Henrietta Latchett is the true princess. Blue blood flows in her veins. It is embarrassing to have to admit this, but Liz Headleand, who knows she should know better, has taken to trying to work out Henrietta Latchett’s pedigree from Who’s Who.

  Charles Headleand, as we have seen, also spends some little time at this pursuit, but he uses Debrett, of which he happens to have a copy in the office for other purposes. Liz does not have a Debrett and would not know how to use it if she had. Who’s Who is not entirely helpful, for it records achievements, not mere existence. Charles himself is in it (and Liz is not quite looking forward to that ‘marr. diss. 1980’ which will make its way into his biography), but Henrietta Latchett is not. Nor are any other Latchetts, for none of them have ever done anything of either influence or interest. But various of Henrietta’s relatives have been more forthcoming, more public-spirited, and they provide points of reference, connections, bits of plot. Liz weaves her way from Air Commodores to Deputy Acting High Commissioners, from Presidents of Learned Associations to Governors of Merchant Banks, from Directors of Trusts to Members of the Royal Aeronautical Society. An uncle has written a monograph: a distant cousin has won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. And back, beyond each of them, beyond each name, stretches a long line of precedent. Of the named and the known. She traces the family name, Oxenholme, and its delicate interweaving with the Hestercombes and Stocklinches. Debrett, were she to sink so low, would tell her more. Her own name, in Charles’s entry, stands bleakly: m., 2nd, Elizabeth Ablewhite, MB, B.Chir., MA, FRCP. When Charles divorces her, will she be excised? She checks precedents. They seem irregular. Maybe it depends on Charles? The possibility of this irritates her. In fact, Liz, though not a pompous woman, has sometimes considered that she is worthy of a Who’s Who entry in her own right: if she had published more, surely she would by now be registered? After all, she has sat on public enquiries, has contributed to her profession, is held in high esteem by her colleagues. . . .

  It is ridiculous, Liz knows it is ridiculous, but she feels that Charles’s abandoning of her for a more ancient lineage threatens her solidity, her survival. He has withdrawn his approval, and she has become nobody. People will laugh at her behind her back, they will not want to come to her parties any more, they will all want to go and have dinner with Charles and Henrietta. She voices these absurd thoughts to Esther and Alix, and they all laugh: but the thoughts are not entirely dispersed by the laughter. Liz is, on one level, amused, dispassionately interested, by these comic vagaries of her middle-aged psyche. Who would have thought it? How odd people are. What odd things they worry about. What irrelevancies exercise them. So, to herself, thinks Liz Headleand, as she firmly congratulates herself on her sound financial position, her impregnable social position – for surely, surely, people will still want to come and have dinner with her; or would: if she ever had time to invite them? Surely?

  Alix, Brian and Esther are less immune to the spirit of 1980, to the policies of the new government, for which none of them voted. It does not suit them as it suits Liz. Alix’s research unit is precisely the kind of outfit that could be disposed of without any trouble or outcry, a mini-quango of questionable purpose and absolutely no productivity: she and Polly Piper, who find their work intellectually interesting as well as remunerative and believe it is socially useful, hope that they are so cheap, so insignificant, that nobody will notice they are there at all. Garfield, more seriously, is also at risk. It is expensive to run, with a high staff ratio. Luckily, not many people outside the Home Office know much about Garfield, but if they did, they would certainly consider its régime too liberal, its buildings too comfortable, its faith in psychiatry and psychotherapy absurd. (An accusation not levelled by sons of cabinet ministers against Liz Headleand.) It would be easy to whip up public feeling against Garfield. It would be a prime target in any law-and-order, longer-deterrent-sentence, short-sharp-shock campaign. Women prisoners have traditionally been treated differently from male offenders, but Alix can see the possibility of a backlash of anti-feminism, a new harshness, a new ‘equality’ on the horizon. Garfield, the pride of the prison service, the showplace, may not survive. It faces cuts in staffing, in medical expenses, in laundry bills, in catering. The Warden has always maintained his faith in the civilizing influence of tablecloths and reasonably leisurely meals. Tablecloths do more to rehabilitate than drugs, or mailbags, Eric Glover, the Warden, has been heard to declare. The tablecloths at Garfield are red-and-white check, blue-and-white check. Alix, who rarely gets round to using a tablecloth in her own home, who tends to serve meals on a bare unpolished ancient Habitat table, marked by saucepan rings, embedded Guardian print, and much wear, has faith in the tablecloths of Garfield. But they will vanish, within the next two years, she suspects. And she herself may vanish with them, for the civilizing effect of classes in English Language and Literature is also open to dispute. A luxury. It occurs to Alix that if she loses her various part-time jobs, she will be eligible for next to nothing in the way of redundancy payment, having worked, as women do, so episodically, in so piecemeal if persistent a manner. And where, at her age, would she find another job?

  Brian’s College of Adult Education also suffers cuts. It is forced to amalgamate with various other South London institutes. Brian’s boss asks Brian if he would like to run courses in Commercial English for foreign business students. Brian says he would not know how to. He likes to teach D. H. Lawrence, and Blake, Bunyan and George Eliot. He starts as a sideline to teach a course for the Open University. The New Right continues to complain that the Open University is wasting taxpayers’ money on Marxist propaganda.

  Meanwhile, Pitts and Harley, where Brian once hammered circular saws, is picketed by striking BSC workers. There are ugly scenes on the picket line, as most Pitts and Harley men continue to go to work. Brian and his father support the strikers: verbally, of course. In two years’ time, Pitts and Harley, like the tablecloths of Garfield, will be no more. A hundred and twenty years of manufacture will come to an end. Six hundred men will lose their jobs. Eddie Duckworth, manager, and President of the Chamber of Commerce, will sell his house. His wife, who was always a little unbalanced, will commit suicide.

  Esther Breuer’s connection with market forces has always been tenuous, but even she is a little affected by the magnetic shift. The series of public lectures in one of our great public galleries which she has intermittently graced with her erudition is discontinued. As she was only paid £12.50 a lecture this ought not to make much of a hole in her budget, but as her budget is rather small, it does. Her course at the Feldmann Institute is
also threatened. English students are failing to get grants. Luckily there seems to be a supply of wealthy young foreigners who like to while away a year or two studying art history. For the moment, they fill up places. As Esther has no social conscience at all, in her own view, she is quite happy to teach Americans and Jews and Arabs, Japanese and Italians, Germans and Persians. Many of them are very bright, very sophisticated, very well connected. They like Esther. They consider her smart.

  Her WEA evening class on the Italian quattrocento is axed. Its members, mostly middle aged or retired, who had been looking forward to an Italian holiday, are annoyed, they protest, they offer to pay more. They are told it does not work like that. They are given a speech (not by Esther) about the allocation of resources. Esther feels sorry for them. As she says to Alix one evening, what could be milder, more harmless, more inoffensive, than the study of Italian art? She cannot see why harmless leisure activities, in a society of increasingly high levels of unemployment, should not be more encouraged. But she does not worry about it very much. There are plenty of other people to worry about it for her. She is more curious, as she tells Alix, about her own response to the articles that now frequently appear in the press mocking the abstruseness of higher education and the subjects selected for research. Whenever the Spectator or the Guardian (says Esther, with studied political neutrality, knowing that Alix out of deep fairness will disqualify any too evidently biased comment) picks out any particular topic – or they may even invent them, for all I know – such as ‘Lesbianism in Lesotho’, or ‘The Voting Habits of Publicans in the 1920s’, I always think it sounds particularly fascinating and immediately want to know all about it. I mean, after all, what is knowledge but a sum of its parts? Why not know about Lesbianism in Lesotho or the politics of publicans? Who knows where they may lead?

  It’s all to do with money, says Alix, vaguely. It seems there isn’t enough to go round and we ought to be training people to make microchips.

  We’re bound to get it wrong, and have far too many people making microchips and not enough people making wire netting, says Esther, and proceeds to describe to Alix her new project; she plans to set up an exhibition, preferably at the Hayward Gallery, of scarecrows. I don’t think it’s ever been done, says Esther. International scarecrows. The scarecrow in art and mythology. All I need is an anthropologist, to go round the world collecting scarecrows. I’m sure I could get a grant from the GLC, or do you think it’s a bit too folk-arty for them? Nor quite urban enough? The global scarecrow. What do you think?

  Alix thinks it is a great idea, and offers as her contribution the opening passages of Jude the Obscure where, as far as she can remember, Jude is employed by a local farmer to scare the crows from his corn, but is sorry for the poor birds and encourages them to eat. A bit literary, says Esther dismissively. This is an exhibition, not an anthology.

  In the summer of 1985, a Midlands farmer who lives not far from the Army camp where Brian and Stephen first met, will offer unemployed school-leavers a wage of £50 a week and free self-catering lodging to scare the birds from his fields of cherries. I feel sorry for youngsters today, with no hope of a job, they could have a bit of fun on the farm, he says. Human scarecrows, the headline in a progressive paper will read.

  Meanwhile, and very much meanwhile, monetarist theories did not prevent Esther from going to Bologna to look at the possible Crivelli. Red Bologna. Red politics, red arcades. Esther travelled by train. She preferred to travel by train. Aeroplanes were more expensive and less enjoyable. A journey by train was full of adventure, of calm; of tension, of tranquillity; from the moment of departure from Victoria Station to the moment of arrival at Bologna Station (which some months later in this year will be the scene of a particularly successful terrorist bomb explosion, which will kill eighty-five). Esther, however, had a peaceful journey, and a peaceful arrival. She read her books (La Chartreuse de Parme, which she had begun several times but never managed to finish: E. H. Carr’s What is History?, pressed upon her by Alix as the result of a dispute about terminology: and Pett Petrie’s latest novel Ziggurat): she studied her periodicals (the recently-founded London Review of Books, the Spectator and Clique); did The Times crossword; and wrote various lists of things she would like to see in Bologna. She also gazed out of the window and enjoyed her recollections of previous journeys, as they mingled with the spring hedges and oast houses of Kent, the grey sea, the pursuing gulls, the smoky bar, anarchic stewards and drunken school parties of Sealink, the oak trees and mistletoe of northern France, the disputed couchettes of middle France, the glimpsed nocturnal Alpine snows, and the glorious emerging morning of the falling, spreading, tumbling spill of the South. There they still were, the vineyards and the oxen, the steep descending slopes, and then the plain. Reassured, she drank some coffee from a plastic cup. At the age of seventeen, she had first made this journey, at the same time of year, or perhaps a little later: she had been on her way to Perugia, her head full of expectations, but of she knew not what, for she had never knowingly been abroad (although born in Berlin) and Berlin and Bologna, Venice and Vienna, Munich and Marseilles were then but names to her. She was acquainted only with rainy Manchester, with a smart girls’ boarding-school in Shropshire, with the Cheshire homes of friends, with London (a little), and, yet more fleetingly, the Oxford and Cambridge of her interviews. Italy had been a revelation, a deliverance, a new birth.

  She had stopped, then, in Florence, where her parents had arranged for her to spend the night, before catching the morning train to Perugia. She had been timid but reckless, exhilarated by freedom, unable to believe that she could go where she wished: that she was, at last, unobserved. She was booked into a small, safe, respectable hotel on the banks of the Arno, with a view of the Ponte Vecchio. She had left her luggage at the hotel, and had taken to the streets. She had wandered, past façades and windows, past shops selling marbled paper and tooled leather purses. She drank a small green drink in one bar and a small red drink in another bar. She had a conversation with a nun and was followed by a soldier. She sat on a bridge and watched the river. She walked through narrow streets, and saw a woman from an upper window lean over an array of geraniums and drying stockings and call ‘Mario! Mario! Ho buttato giù la pasta! Mario!’ and knew that she was listening to the tongue of angels. She ended the evening sitting in a café in the Piazza della Signoria with an American student from Iowa who said that he also was on his way to Perugia, though his way was not as direct as her own. He was reading a novel by Dostoevsky and wrote out for her from memory a short poem by William Carlos Williams, of whom she had never heard. These seemed good credentials, though Esther was past caution. They drank a bottle of wine and ate pizza. She had never eaten or even seen a pizza. They gazed at people, at the fountain, at Giambologna’s statue of Cosimo I, at Michelangelo’s David, at the Loggia, at the pigeons, at a man selling little painted mechanical flying birds. The American, who was gaunt and livid of aspect, with a long thin melancholy quixotic face, bought her a little bird. (She has it still.) The American persuaded her to accompany him back to his pensione, where he attempted to seduce her, but she told him, primly summoning her meandering resources, that she was only seventeen and therefore legally beneath the age of consent. He received this information solemnly with some relief, and desisted. Nevertheless in the morning, after collecting her suitcase from her small hotel overlooking the Arno, she agreed to alter her plans and to hitchhike with him to Siena and Arezzo.

  And so she made her acquaintance with Tuscany, with Umbria. And now was on her way to Bologna, which she had first visited in the company of her middle-aged American art historian, who had in Perugia displaced the innocent student in the inner circle of her affections.

  Bologna is famed for its food, which had pleased the American art historian, who (unlike Esther) took food seriously. The American art historian had talked to her of mannerism and the baroque, attempting to distract her from the obviousness of the over-postcarded, over-fashionable trecen
to and quattrocento, from what he called the schoolgirl and schoolmistress raptures aroused by Botticelli and Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Fra Lippo Lippi. Esther, at seventeen, had been torn between a desire to please him by cultivating a taste for swirling gloomy grandeur, for unlikely colour schemes and over-sophisticated elongations, and a desire to point out that at seventeen she had a right to enjoy, for a while, her first meetings with the obvious.

  She had compromised, in the long run, with Crivelli, an unfashionable artist of the quattrocento, little admired by schoolgirls and schoolmistresses, and sometimes wonders whether this is the responsibility of the American art historian.

  The American art historian was called – and indeed is called – Hubert Swann. Hubert Swann, like the American student from Iowa, made only the most half-hearted attempt to seduce Esther. It was somehow obvious that this was not what Esther was for. Hubert readily settled for a platonic passion, which has now lasted for more than a quarter of a century. In 1969, when their relationship had settled into what each rightly took to be its lasting form, they went together to Urbino on what they admitted, a little guiltily, could only be described as a holiday: they visited together the Palazzo Ducale, wandering from room to room, past paintings and hangings and marble fireplaces, past spiral staircases, gilt-touched cherubs and inlaid marquetry squirrels and mandolins, gazing at framed views of green hills, and discoursing elegantly and allusively of their enduring affection for one another, and of Castiglione and Isabella d’Este. No reference was made by either to wilder nights endured or enjoyed in other cities, in other company. Esther knew nothing of Hubert Swann’s other life: he knew nothing of Esther’s affairs. A satisfactory arrangement. An innocent relationship.