The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Esther sits on the train as it makes it way through the wide plain. White gravel, dry white river beds, deep purple irises on the banks. She thinks of bygone days, wondering what became of the young man who gave her the painted bird, reflecting on the number of American vagrants which now infest the Ponte Vecchio and Florence railway station with their rucksacks and their trannies and their syringes, wondering if Bologna is also thus infested; recalling Alix’s views on tourism and the paradox of its diminishing returns when too many people have the money and/or the education and the wish to travel (you can’t blame the people, says Alix, why shouldn’t they sit on Florence station in a sleeping bag if they want to?): thinking of her middle-aged and elderly students and their wish to have nice holidays: thinking of Hubert Swann in Urbino, or Harold Acton at La Pietra; thinking of her satanic anthropologist Claudio, who is perhaps a little less manageable than Hubert Swann’, and wondering what Claudio’s sister and her apartment will be like, and whether she was wise to accept an invitation to sleep there. She has never met Claudio’s sister, and was flattered to receive a card from her, but worried also by the possibility that this might mean that Claudio might wish to make himself, at last, in some other way, ‘real’ to her – whatever, in relation to a person as outré as Claudio, the word ‘real’ might mean. ‘You will like her,’ Claudio had threatened. What could that imply?

  A mile from the station, just as Esther has her thoughts and expectations marshalled, the train grinds to a halt, by a bank of irises and a cabin called Jollybox. It sits, a mile from the station, for an hour and a half. Esther conjures up the red arcades. Bolognese red. She compares this colour with Tuscan pink, with what she calls Bloomsbury pink. She wonders what she would do if she were to go blind. Would she bother to learn Braille? Would she be able to remember colour? Was there a real blind man who said that the colour red was like the sound of trumpets, or was he merely a philosophical figment? She thinks of the red earth of Somerset, where she will go to stay shortly for a weekend with her friends Peggy and Humphrey, painter and blacksmith. It is the most beautiful place in England. It is as beautiful as Italy. Peggy and Humphrey are trying to persuade Esther to take a cottage on the estate. At times she almost thinks she might seriously be about to consider the suggestion.

  London has become difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. Even Esther, who likes urban life, is becoming slightly distressed by the visual impact of some stretches of Ladbroke Grove, by the apartment blocks of the Harrow Road, by the strange surreal landscape under the arches of the motorway. Her niece Ursula, who has a taste for the louche, likes it immensely, strikes up terrible friendships in public houses and on street corners, sits drinking cans of beer with impossible people in condemned and boarded cottages in the middle of rubble wastes. The Apocalypse Hotel is her favoured rendezvous. Esther, who once liked the louche herself, feels a little old for that kind of thing. She could sublet her rented flat for a while to Ursula, and try a few months in Somerset on the estate. Would she be bored, in the countryside? Would she miss Alix and Liz? She could live on next to nothing, in the countryside, Peggy and Humphrey assure her. She could write the book for which she was advanced some £250 five years ago. She could live rent-free, in a cottage standing empty, she could keep at bay the nettles and the ivy.

  She knows the cottage has grave disadvantages, and knows that Peggy and Humphrey think she does not care about that kind of thing. Comfort, warmth. She is not sure whether she cares or not. The Ladbroke Grove flat is quite damp, at times.

  The cottage is very beautiful. Why does nobody else want to live in it? Because most people want to buy, and it is not and never will be For Sale. So say Peggy and Humphrey, who do not own their own larger house, in which they have lived solidly for twenty years. It is something to do with property and capitalism. We are artists, vagrants, grasshoppers, say Peggy and Humphrey, aproned, calmed, settled; come and join us in the deep insecurity of nature.

  Ladbroke Grove, the wrong end, is really remarkably ugly, by any normal urban standards. Somerset is remarkably beautiful. Bologna also. Beautiful, ugly. Dangerous, safe. I wonder, ponders Esther, is it from Alix that I have caught this extraordinary notion, so alien surely to me myself, that there is something immoral about living in a beautiful place? If so, Alix has a lot to answer for. And yet it is true, thinks Esther, that I think Liz is mad, to want to hang on to that vast house in Harley Street. In that, Alix and I are of one accord.

  Artists, vagrants, grasshoppers. Esther reflects on the reasons why she is so little attracted to the notion of owning property, when she is so interested in the visual aspects of the material world, so attached to the details of her own immediate environment. Maybe it is merely a continental aberration, a Viennese inheritance, an unsettled, refugee spirit, an un-English spirit. Alix and Brian, good socialists though they try to be, own or at least are paying a mortgage on their house in Wandsworth. It is, of course, a fairly horrible house, which mitigates in their favour, morally.

  The train lurches forward. She rearranges her baggage.

  Later, over dinner, in Claudio’s sister’s apartment, she only intermittently remembers these thoughts. Claudio’s sister’s apartment is of a dusty, antique, grand, gilt, high-ceilinged, baroque grandeur: it is a corner of a baroque palace, overlooking the via Santo Stefano. A canary hops and sings in a high white wicker cage. Statues stand on marble tables. Claudio’s sister is wearing a severely cut grey flannel skirt with a grey English woollen twin set: the effect is exotic. She is an archaeologist. She studies the Etruscans. They speak of Perugia, of Volterra, as they loop up their pasta al pesto. Claudio’s sister is excavating, intermittently, a dig in Tuscany, on a high Little hillside crowned by an ancient wood. Esther enquires about the lichens. They talk of pigmentation, of the possible Crivelli, of dating techniques, of restoration, of government grants. Claudio’s sister is a civil servant, paid by the state. The bird sings. They drink grappa, after their meal, and Elena puts her feet up on the rickety chaise longue and smokes a cigarette. She has a low, hoarse, husky voice, a seductive voice. Her skin is dark, her slightly prominent, slightly irregular teeth are white, firm, precise, she has a necklace of red glass beads around her neck. She and Esther have not met before. They like one another very much. They speak, briefly, familiarly, of Claudio and his eccentricities. Elena laughs a guttural laugh, raises her glass and gazes at the light of the red-shaded lamp, reflectively, through the pale, pale gold of her grappa. She sighs ominously. She invites Esther to visit her Etruscan dig, to see the toad that lives in the tomb, the old Etruscan toad. Elena asks how things are in England. Esther says, which England?

  Esther finds herself perlexed, the next day, by the alleged Crivelli. She stares at it for hour after hour, intermittently consulting her notes from London, her own Crivelli catalogue, Pritajoli’s Proposta. She ponders the story of the painting’s discovery. It is implausible: but so are all such stories. It was found, she is told, by an eccentric Marxist monk from Bologna on a walking tour in Dalmatia. He spotted it in the woodshed of a small derelict monastery, while sheltering from the rain and chatting about the cultivation of broad beans to an aged farmer. It was leaning against a pile of firewood and some broken furniture. He had surreptitiously rescued it, and slipped it under his habit, and brought it home to Bologna.

  Now the monk-thief has vanished into silence. Esther is not allowed to cross-question him. The monk is not allowed to speak to women. Or so she is told.

  It is all very fishy. She suspects the hand of Claudio Volpe, for no good reason. Claudio is Bologna-born, though now attached to the University of Turin: he may well have wished to magic a Crivelli into his home city, to please Esther, to please the citizens. But even Claudio could not have forged this quattrocento little panel. It is surely authentically of its period? Perhaps it is, as Esther had hoped before she saw it, part of the lost but documented Zara polyptych, known variously as the Madonna Della Pesca or the Madonna Del Pesce: an old textual crux. Esther had
so longed for the more surprising fish. But all she has before her here, at the most, at the least, is one of the panels from the predella. St John the Baptist, 37 centimetres by 11. An elongated San Giovanni Battista, standing on a flat spiked cracked rock, with a thin blue film of baptismal water washing over his bony ankles. Sitting on the rock is a duck, by a dry twig nest. John is wearing one of those decorative reversible hair shirts with which Crivelli liked to clothe the wilderness saint: the outer skin, delicately girdled, reveals soft curling wisps of hair from within, suggesting more delicacy than penance, more refinement than martyrdom, more style than asceticism. But a hint of the werewolf, nevertheless: he could turn inside out in a trice, this locust-eating prophet.

  The treatment is Crivelli, the subject Crivelli, the signature Crivelli. OPUS KAROLI CRIVELLI VENETI. No date. If the Yugoslav period, then from the 1460s? She suspects the signature. There is something wrong with the signature. It looks somehow superimposed, post-dated. If there had been no signature, she would have been less suspicious.

  Carlo Crivelli’s brother Vittore had also painted in Dalmatia.

  Esther is perplexed, but entirely absorbed. Time passes without reckoning. She would like to think that this is a true work by Carlo, her friend and ally, her doctorate-bestower, for that would justify her (very modest) expenses for this visit, but if it is by another hand, well, that is equally interesting. And if it is an immensely subtle forgery, a jeu d’esprit from a mad monk, well, she supposes, that is even more interesting, although not quite in her own line of interest.

  Maybe the facts will never be established. What is history? What is History? She is haunted by Ranke’s now apparently scorned ideal, to tell things ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’. To tell things as they really were.

  If the Crivelli authentication were to run and run, Esther could be the beneficiary of many free trips to Bologna. But Esther’s mind does not work in this way. Esther is a scholar. If there is such a thing. Esther wonders if there is such a thing, as she walks back towards Elena, tempted, through the mild spring evening light.

  Shirley Harper’s youngest child and only daughter Celia sits in her bedroom at her desk and breathes heavily over her homework. She is thirteen, the baby of the family, the child born to fill the gaping time that Shirley knew would approach when the boys grew up: not consciously planned, of course, for consciously Shirley was angry to find herself pregnant yet again, after a gap of several years. She has made Celia aware of her anger, rather than of her delight.

  Celia’s homework is a project on the Brigantes, the association of tribes which dominated northern Britain at the time of the Roman invasion. She has drawn a map of Iron Age hill forts: there is one just north of Northam, to the right of the motorway to Leeds. Now she is drawing a cross-section of a typical fort, copied from a book she found in the Public Library which she competitively hoped nobody else has discovered. She is using red, blue, green and brown pencils, nicely sharpened. She is engrossed. Her mouth is open, for she has trouble with her sinuses; the doctor says it is caused by a deviated septum but nobody knows what that means. It is inoperable, he says.

  Celia attends an expensive, conventional, highly regarded private day-school in a northern suburb of Northam. Most of the city’s professional families who do not opt for boarding-school send their daughters there. It is said to have high academic standards. Celia is happy there and enjoys her work, perhaps rather more than she should: she is in danger of becoming teacher’s pet. Teacher is Miss Grigson, a bright young woman with an interest in local history which she has successfully communicated to some of her nice, polite, well-mannered, uniformed flock. Miss Grigson is a romantic. She is engaged to be married and will sometimes, eccentrically, interrupt a class on igneous rocks or the stucture of the flowering plant to speak of a May Ball she attended with her fiancé, or of her fiancé’s dislike of aubergines.

  Celia Harper is devoted to Miss Grigson, and her imagination has been captured by the Brigantes. She takes Miss Grigson’s point that most schoolchildren know about Boadicea, very few about Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes, and that therefore to know about Cartimandua is special. Cartimandua, says Miss Grigson, appears to have been something of a rotter, but there may have been reasons. Why did Cartimandua betray Caractacus to the Romans? Miss Grigson’s eyes flash as she speculates. Was it because of a private dispute with her consort, Venutius? Miss Grigson is no feminist; she lives too far north for that; she is simply the sort of woman who always takes the woman’s side. She is a romantic, she wishes to exonerate Cartimandua from the reproaches of history. She plans to take her form, Form 4B, on an outing in the summer term to visit Ian Kettle’s dig in North Yorkshire. Celia is excited by the prospect. She colours in her cross section. She murmurs to herself:

  My name is Cartimandua, Queen of Queens,

  Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.

  Shirley, sorting the sheets on the landing by the airing cupboard, hears this murmuring, stops sorting, listens. Celia can remember only these two lines, so she intones them again and again, with varying emphases, as she colours. Shirley listens. What does this chant recall to her? Of course, it recalls her sister Liz, under the bedclothes, thirty years ago. Shirley shivers, begins to fold, diverts her irritation to the non-folding qualities of fitted bottom sheets. Every improvement creates a new problem, she reflects. But Liz chants on, in the back of her mind. Is there something odd, formidable, about Celia’s concentration? Why should one feel uneasy about such a model schoolgirl? She knows that Cliff worries about her too, takes every opportunity to encourage her to go out to play, to have friends to tea, to join in the game of rounders on Blackridge Green. She and Cliff are guilty, responsible. They chose for their daughter this education, these enthusiasms, they sometimes think. The boys are not academic, they rebel, they are tiresome in a conventional way with hairstyles and drink, a way that Cliff understands, although he complains, conventionally. But Celia: she is another matter. She is only a girl, so it is not so important, Shirley can see Cliff thinking; but it is a worry. This intensity perturbs him. On an impulse, Shirley strides towards her daughter’s door, flings it open, presenting a dark green towel. Celia looks round, startled, sees it is only her mother, puts on a blank, deceitful, expressionless face, expecting reproach. Her mother looks around for something to reproach her with, stalling slightly by offering the clean towel, then says ‘And what’s that heap of clothes doing on the floor?’ She points at a pile of socks, pants, shorts, aertex shirts.

  ‘I was just going to take them to the laundry basket,’ says Celia, without a pretence at plausibility.

  ‘So I see,’ says Shirley. The lines she has to utter tire Shirley. She has built round herself this wall of words, of lies, of actions. A fortress. ‘I’ve just put another load in the washing machine, they’ll have to wait till next time.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Celia, patiently.

  ‘What are you working on?’ asks Shirley, relenting.

  ‘My Ancient History project,’ says Celia, protectively, reluctantly. She does not want to talk about it with her mother. Her mother, unlike Miss Grigson, has no interest in such matters.

  ‘Very nice,’ says Shirley, flatly, looking at her daughter’s closed face, her neat brown bunches, her freckled nose, her braced teeth. A very promising pupil, all her teachers say. Promising for what? Shirley bends down and picks up a bus ticket and a piece of KitKat wrapper off the floor. ‘This place is a pigsty,’ she murmurs, almost politely. ‘Now you put your clothes away before you come downstairs,’ she says, and backs out. Celia is breathing hard over her project before Shirley even shuts the door.

  Shirley goes down to the kitchen. She puts the kettle on, for something to do. She wipes a Formica surface. Cliff tells her she should have domestic help, more domestic help than that provided by Mrs Rathbone who comes twice a week, but Shirley resists. She is afraid of domestic help and anyway what would she do with the extra time? Some of her so-called friends have domestic help an
d fill in their time with coffee mornings, good works, discussion groups, even a little part-time real work. Shirley wishes she could work but Cliff would not like it, and anyway she is good for nothing, trained for nothing. She thinks of her sister Liz, and her frenetic, over-active social life, her stepchildren and her children, her vanishing husbands. She thinks of Celia, intent up there, sucking her pencil, in her nice bright room with its old nursery frieze of Noah’s Ark still marching round the walls, with its snowflake mobile. She thinks of her mother. She has usually assumed that Liz’s manifest intellectual superiority must have been inherited from the unknown father, for she believes in heredity, in genetics, but of late she has begun to regard her mother in a new light. That strange, cracked, singleminded persistence, that fanatical bleakness, is it perhaps a sign of intelligence gone wrong?

  And Celia, perhaps, has inherited this? Liz’s daughters Sally and Stella do not seem to suffer from morbid intensity. They dissipate their energies in a hundred directions, they are always out and about, rushing and restless. London life. The street life of the 1970s, the 1980s, with its affectation of working-class manners and speech, its toughness, its colour. Celia leads a protected, quiet, refined life, in Northam. A provincial life, a middle-class life, an old-fashioned life. Shirley makes a cup of instant coffee that she does not want, that she would in fact rather not drink.