The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘I don’t read the popular press,’ said Esther defiantly.

  ‘It was in The Times,’ said Liz.

  ‘I don’t read The Times,’ said Esther. ‘I don’t read newspapers at all. I listen to the radio. Selectively.’

  ‘Then you must,’ said Liz, ‘have glimpsed subliminally the headline of last night’s Standard. On a placard. Under the arches, at Ladbroke Grove Station. Or at Latimer Road. On your way home from the Warburg, or the Courtauld, or the Feldmann, or wherever you spent your scholarly day. . . .’

  A small silence followed.

  ‘And what did the Standard headline say?’ asked Esther, cautiously.

  ‘HARROW HORROR’S HEADLESS HOAX,’ said Liz, and was relieved to hear Esther laugh.

  ‘I wonder if they consult Roget? Or is there a new headline dictionary?’ asked Esther, reverting to the potted-palm tactic, which for once Liz was glad to hear: it seemed in this context a sign of normality. But Esther quickly lapsed into fact. ‘Did it really say that, or have you made it up?’ she fairly earnestly enquired.

  ‘I think it said that. And if it didn’t, I could certainly apply for a job on the Standard, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose I may have seen it. I don’t remember seeing it, but I may have seen it.’ And, again cautiously, ‘And how long have these – these alleged decapitations been taking place?’ Her ignorance was, Liz could tell, unfeigned, and therefore Liz proceeded to enlighten her: recounting the gruesome story, or as much of it as she could recollect – the eight (or possibly nine?) victims over the past eighteen months, all in the Harrow Road area, all of them female, most of them black, and the last three ostentatiously decapitated: one found in the service lift of the Bellenden flats, one on the canal bank, one in Kensal Green cemetery, one in a derelict house under the motorway arch, one in a Carnival float, one on a dumped car . . . a dismal catalogue, which Liz attempted to lighten in the telling for Esther’s sake, but she could hear Esther’s silence intensifying, and at the end of it Esther merely echoed, a little faintly, ‘One on the canal bank, you say? I often walk on the canal bank.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake stop,’ said Liz. ‘I was telling Ivan only today at lunch time that I’d tell you to stop. And warn that niece of yours, won’t you?’

  ‘Ursula’s not here, she’s gone to Ireland for her holidays. Term’s just over.’

  ‘Well, at least you don’t have to worry about her. But Esther, seriously, you’re not seriously telling me that you didn’t know all this? How can you not have done?’

  ‘Easily, it seems,’ said Esther, who was wondering whether or not to tell Liz more of her dream, or whether it would somehow be bad luck to evoke it now. ‘We don’t talk about that kind of thing in Art History. Well, I suppose I knew there’d been some murders, but there are always murders, aren’t there? I’ve never found such things very interesting. I never read about them.’

  ‘Well, you’re quite right, of course, but perhaps you’ve been a bit too right this time. Your dream was a subconscious warning, a subliminal warning.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Esther decided to divulge details, after all, but without mentioning the Claudio element of her own interpretation. Liz in turn was satisfactorily astonished. ‘On the towpath?’ she repeated. ‘On the canal bank?’ Liz couldn’t remember whether the towpath victim had been a headless one or not: but anyway, Esther pointed out, her severed head had been the head of a bearded young man. John the Baptist, in fact. ‘Well, I think that’s very very interesting,’ said Liz, several times over, with much emphasis. Esther was quite cheered by her enthusiastic response. They fixed a date for supper the following week and Esther agreed to try to get hold of Alix to join them at Liz’s. ‘And by the way,’ said Liz, casually, ‘I’ve decided that perhaps it would be best if Charles and I sold the house. So you can come armed with your recommendations. Of desirable residences off the Harrow Road.’

  And they both laughed, reassured.

  Alix Bowen was out when Esther rang to invite her to Liz’s for supper. It was her Garfield night, as Brian politely reminded her. Brian found it slightly puzzling that Esther and Liz seemed quite incapable of remembering which night – which more-or-less regular, weekly night – Alix worked at Garfield, but it did not seem to puzzle either of them or to offend Alix, so he supposed it was none of his business. He said he would pass the message on, exchanged a little mild gossip, and returned to marking a pile of essays on Hard Times, his mind wandering from the texts before him to the hard times of Northam in 1980, and the hard line being taken by BSC and the unions. He supposed he was well out of it, but it was uncomfortable, sitting on the sidelines, while other men marched and picketed. His friend Otto Werner now tended to blame the unions, for intransigence, for unrealistic demands, for failing to understand the true and inevitable economic shift away from the manufacturing industries, for exacerbating the conflict, but Brian argued that Otto himself failed to understand the government’s intentions, which were neither realistic nor benevolent: they want conflict as much as the unions, he would argue. It was a stalemate argument. Brian had himself had an unpleasant confrontation with the boss of his own college that morning, who had summoned Brian to his office to report that next term Brian would be required to teach an extra hour on a Thursday evening, a request (demand?) that Brian would find inconvenient to meet, as Thursdays were Alix’s Garfield days, his baby-sitting-with-Sam days. You can cancel your lunch-time class on Wednesday, Dr Streeter had offered: Brian had explained that that was not the point, he didn’t mind the extra hour, it was the timing of it that was tricky. He said he would go away and think about it. But he feared he would give in. He was too affable, was Brian. He needed a firm negotiator to stand up for his rights. He sighed, and returned his attention to the world of Gradgrind and Bounderby. What a crude job Dickens had made of Stephen Blackpool, his student Rosemary Lawson was claiming: the blameless, gullible, implausible artisan. Brian nodded, as he read her argument, and placed a red tick of approval in the margin, not noticing that the argument she had reproduced (though with subtly different illustrations) was his own.

  Alix, in Garfield, was teaching a couple of poems by Blake, worrying about what would happen when Brian (inevitably) capitulated and agreed to teach on Thursday evenings (when would Sam be old enough to sit on his own? Thirteen? Fourteen?), reminding herself that she must send her ex-mother-in-law Deborah a birthday card, and trying to keep her students off the subject of the new Harrow Road murder. It was a bad evening, and everyone was in a bad temper. It had begun badly, with a long, unprovoked, abusive, psychotic diatribe from Sandra Parker about conditions in Holloway, where she’d been (she alleged) locked into a cell for hours on end, for weeks on end, without a word of explanation, with no plug for the wash bowl, with bugs in the mattress and vomit on the blankets, drugged up to the eyeballs with Valium: ‘I’d be there now,’ said Sandra, staring angrily from her square, scrubbed, plain red face, ‘if I hadn’t gone on hunger strike and tried to kill myself, that put the wind up them, that did, and I complained to my solicitor, I wrote a letter to my solicitor, but they wouldn’t post it, they wouldn’t let me communicate with my solicitor, it’s an offence, that’s what I told them, not to post that letter to my solicitor. . . .’ On and on she went: this is meant to be an English class, Alix repeated, patiently, mildly, until Sandra wore herself out into mumbling: dangerous to interrupt Sandra too abruptly, she was only just on the borders of reasonable behaviour at the best of times, it was good to let her rage a little, but it annoyed the others, who were getting restless, whispering, yawning, on the verge of revolt. With a sudden, well-timed flourish, Alix rose from her chair and distributed her xerox copies of ‘A Poison Tree’ and ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, and called on Toni Hutchinson to read the first aloud. They listened: Blake was at least a change from Sandra Parker.

  I was angry with my friend:

  I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

  I was angry with my foe:
r />   I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  And I water’d it in fears,

  Night and morning with my tears;

  And I sunned it with smiles,

  And with soft deceitful wiles.

  And it grew both day and night,

  Till it bore an apple bright. . .

  Alix had found Blake, on many previous occasions, a useful poet for generating exchange of ideas, for getting people harmlessly to tell a little wrath: she wondered whether or not to point out the connection between Sandra’s outburst and the poem they were reading, whether they would discover it for themselves, whether it would be dangerous to stir Sandra up again. Sandra had lapsed into a sullen, heaving silence: her lips moved in private invective. Alix asked the class what they thought the apple was. Nobody answered. She asked Miriam Jarry to read ‘The Clod and the Pebble’: ‘Love seeketh only Self to please, to bind another to Its delight’ – and asked them what they thought of that. Did it mean the same as the other poem? What was the clod, what was the pebble, did it matter? Were both views of love right, or only one? Stubbornly, cloddishly, they sat silent, punishing her, punishing Sandra, punishing one another. Frustrated, impatient, Alix asked Sandra if she thought there was any connection between what Blake was saying about anger and her own feelings about describing the way she’d been treated in Holloway? Sandra was miles away, locked in her inner prison, munching and mumbling over the angry apple of discord, she was not listening, but newcomer Marilyn spoke up: ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but the poem says it all a damn sight quicker, don’t it? It don’t go on and on, do it? That Sandra, she never stops, all night long, on and on and on, she’s a real pain, they ought to give her something. . . .’ and Alix, jumping on to this small raft, managed to steer towards five quiet minutes of sensible discussion about diction, about short words and long words, about words that they themselves might call ‘poetic’ and words they wouldn’t expect to find in a poem. But the atmosphere was too bad for this happy calm to prevail: the conversation was rapidly transformed into an exchange of bad language and unmentionable phrases (Alix valiantly attempting to fish from her memory soothing examples of poetic usage of four-letter words, and coming up with Philip Larkin’s classic ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad’, which gave momentary respite), and then plunging, inevitably, inexorably, as she had always feared it must, into the subject of the latest Harrow Road murder, brought in rather ingeniously by Jilly Fox, who wanted to know whether it was Blake who had said that it was better to murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse unsatisfied desires, and if so, whether Blake would have thought that this also applied to the perverted desires of the Harrow Road murderer? Alix, while admiring the intellectual sophistication of this intervention, could have kicked Jilly, for there in that very class there was, as Jilly quite well knew, a mother who had murdered her own not-quite-infant toddler, a woman deeply unpopular with the rest of the class: luckily nobody seemed to make any connection (odd how some of them never suspected poetry could mean anything about anything real, and just as well in this context), but the subject of murder proved, as Jilly had quite well known it would, irresistible, and it put paid to any serious literary discussion for the rest of the evening. Anxieties broke forth, great flares of passion exploded, insults were exchanged, horror stories were narrated, appalling prejudices aired. Violence filled the air: anti-man, anti-woman, anti-prostitute, anti-police, anti-press, and, most dangerously, anti-black violence: what would Blake indeed have said of this unleashing? Taunts of voodoo, of savagery, were hurled, contemptibly, at the class’s two black members, Miriam and Tessa: at Miriam because she alleged that the killer was obviously a mad white racist, at Tessa because she dared say nothing at all. Hubbub reigned, as Miriam sat in her corner yelling ‘Pigs! Pigs! Stinking fucking stupid ignorant pigs!’ in a loud, persistent monotone, as Tessa cowered and clutched at her crumpled xerox, as Sandra Parker in her private nightmare began to sob, as an unidentified voice cried ‘You should hear her, all night long she’s at it, all fucking night long – ’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, shut up,’ shouted Alix, above the noise, angrily banging on her desk with her fist, ‘shut up, or I’ll go and get Dr Glover – ’, a fairly empty threat, by this stage, but luckily they seemed to have shouted themselves out, their wrath began to subside, the tide of fury ebbed. ‘Sandra,’ said Alix, ‘you’d better go to the cloakroom and get yourself a drink of water – Tessa, could you help Sandra?’ – and the storm was over. Only five minutes to go, to the end of the so-called class. Alix gazed at her students, as they sat slumped in their chairs. She read them ‘Tyger! Tyger!’ to fill in the time. She could see that Jilly Fox had buried her head in her hands, that Toni Hutchinson of the blonde braids was whispering ostentatiously, intimately, to newcomer Marilyn. Schoolgirl passions? Well, not really. Jilly Fox looked up at the end of the poem, and wearily, mockingly, like a schoolgirl, raised her hand. ‘Yes, Jilly?’ said Alix, forbiddingly, coolly. ‘Why do you only read us the songs of experience?’ said Jilly. ‘Why don’t you try us with the songs of innocence?’

  ‘Because they are too subtle for you,’ said Alix, tartly, after giving the matter a little thought. Jilly smiled, sourly. The hour was over. Alix collected her papers, shut her books, stacked her briefcase. Jilly was waiting for her, at the door. ‘What do you mean, too subtle?’ she asked, as Alix set off down the corridor. ‘Oh, I don’t mean anything.’ said Alix, ‘I was just trying to think of something to say that would shut you up. You shouldn’t come to that class, you know, Jilly, it’s far too elementary for you. It’s not fair on the others. It’s not fair on me. You should be getting on with the Open University stuff.’

  ‘I like your class,’ said Jilly, stubbornly.

  ‘Well, try to keep the temperature down next week, or I’ll make you all read Cranford. Or do punctuation exercises.’

  Jilly laughed. She padded along the corridor by Alix’s side.

  ‘Alix,’ she said, as Alix reached the Pass Door, and paused, key in hand.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m going to murder Toni Hutchinson. I’m going to cut off her head with an electric carving knife.’

  ‘Oh, Jilly, Jilly,’ said Alix, helplessly. Moved, helpless. She put her hand on Jilly’s arm. They stood there, immobile, for a moment or two. Jilly shrugged her thin shoulders, twitched at her long cardigan, stared crossly back at Alix, ‘Alix,’ said Jilly. ‘Do you ever ask yourself about yourself? And why you come here?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Alix.

  ‘And what’s the answer?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not what you think, I don’t think.’ She hesitated. ‘I think it’s because I feel – at home, here. After all, I was brought up in an institution.’

  Jilly gestured, hopelessly. ‘I don’t like institutions,’ she said. ‘And I haven’t got an electric carving knife. And if I had, I bet it wouldn’t go through that thick neck.’

  ‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ said Alix. ‘ “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”.’

  ‘A quotation for every occasion,’ said Jilly.

  ‘Well, that’s my job,’ said Alix. ‘I spent three whole years studying English Literature, so it’s a good thing something stuck. Jilly, I’ve got to go, let me go.’

  Jilly stood aside. ‘Sorry,’ she said ironically, without apology.

  ‘I’ll see you next week,’ said Alix.

  ‘Yes, oh yes,’ said Jilly. ‘You’ll see me next week. I’ll be here.’ And she stood and watched, mockingly, accusingly, appreciatively, as Alix let herself out and relocked the door from the other side.

  Alix, walking to the car, getting in the car, driving home through the light summer evening, down the pink ornamental cherry avenues of suburban respectability, worried, pointlessly, pointlessly, about Jilly, about her own intimacy with Jilly, about her own slightly dangerous, slightly irregular sympathy with Jilly: based on what? On (well, perhaps) a shared class background? Middle-class girls, from nice middle-class homes: i
nnocence and experience. Jilly Fox, teacher’s pet. Was it wrong, was it unprofessional, to speak subversively in a corridor to Jilly Fox? Jilly Fox had said, one evening in class, that she loved crime. Just like that, she had said it. Normal life doesn’t attract me, said Jilly. It’s dull. Alix had shut her up quickly (they were not meant to discuss such matters), had reprimanded her later in private, had told her she was irresponsible, intelligent enough to know better, that she would be expelled from the group if she didn’t observe the rules: and Jilly had stared at Alix with a sultry, intimate, colluding intensity. Alix understood Jilly. She understood what it was that Jilly found dull. Bourgeois life. Dull, dull, dull. Jilly had broken out of it by violence, by crime, by extremity: she had by a short cut, by a short circuit, attempted thus to join the human race. She had found herself a new society in which (as she had just very aptly pointed out) Alix had chosen to join her, of her own free will.

  Jilly’s father was a prosperous solicitor. Jilly hated him, and when Alix would permit her, would speak of him with extreme rancour: prim, priggish, pompous, snobbish, tedious, hypocritical, devious, sexually abnormal or subnormal: an impossible man. I have made him suffer, Jilly would say, with bitter satisfaction. I have got through to him, I have made him pay.

  Yes, Alix could understand this. She knew that Jilly knew she understood, and that somewhere here, for some reason she could not understand, danger lay.

  ‘Esther?’

  ‘Alix?’

  ‘Hello, how are you?’

  ‘Fine, and you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’m seeing you at Liz’s, tomorrow, is that right?’

  ‘Well, yes, but that’s why I am ringing, Liz asked me to ring to warn you.’