‘Hardly. They’re bulging. But she doesn’t seem to notice, she just lets them gape, and puts on another layer.’ Shirley too began to laugh, also a little wildly. ‘She’s an amazing sight, you ought to come up and have a look at her, just out of curiosity. A freak, that’s what she is, a freak.’ Shirley hiccupped, and blew her nose on her immaculate handkerchief, and wiped away a tear.
‘You know,’ said Liz, who had rallied, who had remembered, at last, the position that she believed herself to occupy, ‘there’s no need for you to take her meals. There’s no need for you to see her at all. You have a right to cut yourself off. She has no right to coerce you. You must do it only because you choose to do it. If you choose to do it.’
‘It doesn’t seem to be a question of rights any more,’ said Shirley. ‘It’s just a question of what I do. I don’t know why I do it. I know I don’t have to, yet I do have to. I don’t know how you manage to keep your distance. I feel sucked back into it, all the time.’
‘It’s because you live so near,’ said Liz. ‘You should have moved. It’s not natural, to stay put. All one’s life.’
‘You say it’s not natural,’ said Shirley, ‘but a lot of people think it is natural. Have you forgotten what people are like, in Northam? Probably you have. But believe me, it’s normal to stay put, it’s natural to stay put. It’s you and Brian and Alix that are the exceptions, you know. And anyway, I have moved. From Abercorn Avenue to Greystone Edge. Upward social mobility, I think it’s called.’
‘You’re not telling me Abercorn Avenue is in any way normal,’ said Liz. ‘Or ever was. Well,’ she said, striking a more discursive tone, ‘no, perhaps that’s not quite true, perhaps there was a very short patch of time, in the 1930s, when it was normal. When our mother behaved like other people and ate what other people ate and wore what other people wore and had chairs like other people’s chairs and opinions like other people’s opinions. I sometimes think that. But I don’t know, I can’t know, because I wasn’t old enough to make comparisons. But since then – since 1939, anyway – it’s been utterly, utterly abnormal. Frozen. Fossilized. Stuck. Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Shirley. ‘How would I know? I don’t think about it, I just get on with it. And to tell you the truth, thinking of abnormality, I’m not so sure that our mother is all that much more abnormal than everyone else. You should meet Brian’s Auntie Yvonne. She used to work on the trams. She’s barmy. And Cliff’s mother is pretty mad too, now I think about it. But I don’t know why I’m telling you about it, you’re meant to specialize in madness, aren’t you? You see mad people all day long.’
‘Yes,’ said Liz, unthinkingly, incautiously, ‘but they’re a different class of mad people.’ Luckily Alix Bowen was not there to pick her up on this, but Liz, who had been well trained by Alix, picked it up herself: in silence, and stored it away for future reference. Shirley did not notice the terminology, and returned, after another comment or two on the high proportion of elderly in Northam and the inevitably rising rates, to their mother’s eating habits and growing weight problem, and to the even more unsavoury and perplexing matter of the way in which she now appeared to wish to discuss her own bowel movement and body fluids with Shirley in the most embarrassing and uncalled-for detail.
‘I really do draw the line,’ said Shirley, ‘at having to gaze at her knickers: I mean, what next?’ And indeed, indeed, what next: Liz, before they finally went off to bed, repeated her view that Shirley need not feel obligation, had brought the sense of obligation upon herself, and could chuck the whole business without a word of reproach from Liz at any moment: Shirley again pointed out that this was not practical advice, in the situation that in fact existed, and that while she, for her part, did not reproach Liz for keeping her distance, she did wish she would telephone her mother slightly more regularly, and would much appreciate it if Liz could find her way to finding her way up North to visit before too long.
‘After all, you are a doctor,’ said Shirley, slightly aggressively, as they paused together on their way up the stairs, on the half-landing, beneath the portrait of the fake ancestor. ‘You ought to be able to make a professional diagnosis.’
‘It’s notoriously difficult to diagnose illnesses within one’s own family,’ said Liz, defensively, but promised, nevertheless, that sometime soon, when she had a free moment, she would make her way North and brave her mother, her gross mother, swelling and ageing in her traumatic den.
But it was three and a half years before Liz Headleand found a free moment to make her way to Northam. The time did not pass idly: she managed to visit, in these three and a half years, Japan, the Dordogne, New York, Brussels, Hull, Stuttgart, Inverness and Newcastle-upon Tyne, to name but a few of the places that solicited her presence or attracted her attention: all of them somewhat further away than Northam, some of them considerably further. She also, in these years, was party to the sale of the house in Harley Street, became the independent purchaser of a house in St John’s Wood, exchanged correspondence and had dinner several times with Stephen Cox, broke her ankle while sledging with her stepson Aaron on Parliament Hill, attended the wedding of Charles Headleand and Henrietta Latchett, gave up smoking, contributed a paper to a book on the extended family, resigned from one committee and joined another, lunched with Ivan Warner, took up smoking again, spent a number of evenings with Esther and Alix, contributed to their old college’s Building Fund by Deed of Covenant, was more than rationally pleased when her daughter Stella obtained a place to read Modern Languages at this college, wrote a letter to The Times (prompted by Alix) about conditions in the psychiatric wing of a well-known women’s prison, and acquired, perhaps most improbably, a small tabby kitten, which was to prove a conversational rival to Esther’s potted palm and which was, in Liz’s view, much more fun.
The potted palm hung on, through these years. It did not look very well, but it hung on, turning crisply, fiercely beige at its sharp extremities, but preserving its deep green inner upward heart, its growing core.
These were the years of inner city riots, of race riots in Brixton and Toxteth, of rising unemployment and riotless gloom: these were the years of a small war in the Falklands (rather a lot of people dead), and of the Falklands Factor in politics: these were the years when a new political party boldly declared that it would attempt to find a way out of the impasse of class conflict: these were the years when strange tattered, vulture-like grey and black false plastic creatures began to perch and cluster in the trees of Britain: these were the years when cast-away fast-food cartons of indeterminate texture and substance proliferated in the streets and front gardens and underpasses and hedgerows of Britain. Some began to claim that the toxic ingredients contained in the fast food were driving the nation mad: others blamed the consequent litter. A slightly more serious epidemic called AIDS gripped the nation with panic, paranoia, and timor mortis. Television, like grey vultures, fast food and AIDS, also spread inexorably. A fourth television channel opened, with a powerful and eloquent drama bravely portraying Britain (at least in the recollection of some) as a mental hospital peopled by malevolent dwarves, ravening pigeons, shit-strewn corpses, geriatric patients, inadequate warders and innocent lunatics. Television at breakfast time was launched, with a cast of frogs and rats and astrologers and acrobats and pretty, litigious, wide-eyed, bright-complexioned front women.
Alix Bowen has still not managed to watch any television at breakfast time, ever, or so she says. She simply cannot believe that there is such a thing. Once, greatly daring, with a sense of cultural empires crashing, of millennial confrontation, she approached the television set in the front room while tidying away the glasses and coffee cups of the night before: eight fifteen it was, by her watch and by the oven clock in the kitchen: dared she push the button? Would she thereby have crossed a Rubicon? Would she slump, instantly gaga, and never get to work again? She pushed the button, and there, to her amazement, to her horror, bouncing about on a big comfy highly coloure
d settee, wearing a highly coloured, mother-knitted, robin-emblazoned pullover, was her irrepressible old friend from Cambridge, bald Pett Petrie, talking about birds: she only let him get out a couple of words – ‘Wimbledon Common’ said Pett, harmlessly, as Alix switched him off – but it was too late, her innocence was destroyed, she had henceforth to believe the implausible, to accept that all over Britain people were watching television at eight fifteen a.m. and that people like Pett, normal, civilized, cultured, harmless people, were prepared to get up in the small hours to appear on it. When she recounted this alarming experiment to Liz, Liz responded with various anecdotes about Pett Petrie, and about a patient of hers who had done herself an injury trying to follow the Janice Jackson Work-Out Seven A.M. Special: and then suddenly went serious and said that the latest news from Charles was that he was thinking of giving up his New York post and setting up his own production company again, and what did that, could that, signify? Was he resigning, or was he being pushed? Would he come home and, if he did, what would that mean to Liz?
During these years, war continued to rage between Iraq and Iran, but the West did not pay much attention. (Kate Armstrong’s one-time lodger, Mujid, was injured by a shell, but not seriously.) Every week seemed to carry a headline which read, ‘FIGHTING BREAKS OUT AGAIN IN BEIRUT’. Famine swept the Sahel. Aeroplanes crashed from the skies. Superpowers smouldered. Soldiers in Afghanistan killed guerillas in Afghanistan, and guerillas in Afghanistan killed soldiers in Afghanistan. An ageing film star became President of the United States of America and his wife bought a lot of new clothes. The heir to the throne of England married a kindergarten assistant and she bought a lot of new clothes. Much attention was paid to these new clothes by the media of the Western world, to the derision, bewilderment, envy, curiosity or ignorance of various non-Western nations. It was stated on a fairly level-headed BBC radio programme that the wife of the President of the United States ‘must be an important person, because she had her picture on the front cover of Time magazine’.
Meanwhile, on the home front, the new political party, which is called the Social Democratic Party, forged an Alliance with the Liberal Party and spent a great deal of time studying opinion polls. It also attracted the support of a good many of the characters in, and potential readers of this novel, who had been alienated by the New Right but perhaps even more by the New-Old Left. A plague on both your houses, they said, and tried to build their own, amidst the cries of Hypocrisy and Treachery that filled the democratically elected playground of the House of Commons, cries which now, perhaps unwisely, reached the ears of the listening electors through the medium of BBC Radio.
Otto Werner, one-time tutor of Alan Headleand, and old friend of Brian Bowen, was a founder member of the new political party. Alan Headleand, who was still doing research and teaching in Manchester, was shocked by this declaration of intent on Otto’s part, for was it not from Otto that he had imbibed much of his own left-of-centre political theory? But the shock was intellectual only, and proved in fact the source of much interesting political discussion. Otto sent Alan photocopies of articles from the Economist, the Financial Times, the Alliance, the Social Democrat: even, occasionally, from The Times. Alan retaliated with bits out of New Society, the New Statesman, the New Socialist, the Aylesbury Anarchist and the neo-Cobbetian, reformist, anti-EEC, agricultural curiosity Red Rag to a Bull.
They both read the Guardian, so they didn’t bother to plunder the Guardian.
They would decipher one another’s scribbled notes, then get on the phone for further elucidation: Otto went up to Manchester once or twice to lecture and sat up for hours in Alan’s shabby flat, Alan in London had lunch with Otto once or twice at the LSE. They talked and talked. The debate consolidated their mutual respect. Alan continued to think Otto a traitor, but not, at least, a dishonest traitor, and anyway he pardoned him on grounds of age: Otto continued to think Alan a self-deceiver, but not, at least, a cynical or self-serving self-deceiver, and anyway he pardoned him on grounds of age.
With Brian Bowen, the difference of opinion was not so comfortable. Otto knew Brian too well to expect Brian to share his own modest hopes for the future and sensed that Brian would find Otto’s commitment distressing: Otto therefore tried to keep away from the subject of politics when he met Brian, but of course it was impossible. Politics could not be avoided. Brian was, and for many years had been, a rather inert member of the Labour Party; he would rouse himself at election time and do a little canvassing and fund-raising. Alix (whose parents, it has to be said, had, like Otto, joined the SDP) occupied a similar position, though more doubtfully. Brian was distressed by some of the vote-losing tactics of the militant left, but he thought the militant left was ideologically correct, and therefore he had to give it his support. Brian wanted to see socialism in his lifetime. So did Alix. So they said, and they thought they meant it. Otto’s new discovery of the Middle Ground disturbed and distressed them both: it distressed them more than the unlovable excesses of the government, which were so easy to deplore. Nobody in their right mind, Brian, Alix and Otto all agreed, could listen to the Prime Minister saying Rejoice over the death of hundreds without wincing, could hear a Secretary of State for Employment tell people to get on their bikes without groaning: yes, they were agreed on that. But when it came to the employment figures, to public spending, to the unions, to postal ballots, to the steel strike, to the decline of the manufacturing industries, to privatization, it was another matter.
Otto felt at a disadvantage when arguing with Brian. As Otto was far more interested in ideas than in personalities, in theory than in psychological history, in large thoughts than in local thoughts, he could not really place the reasons for his own sense of disadvantage, though they were obvious enough to Alix, as, from time to time, she witnessed or joined in their discussions over supper and a glass of wine. To Alix, it was clear that Otto felt uncomfortable in the face of Brian’s first-hand (if outdated) knowledge of some of their subjects of debate. Otto’s personal history was of rigorous, undiluted intellectual discipline: an academic from his schooldays on, he had never worked outside an institution, and was not entirely sure (as his wife Caroline remarked) of many of the common facts of daily life. Classically, he could hardly boil an egg, and frequently forgot where he had parked his car: he could rarely remember the age of his children, and was often to be observed wearing odd socks, a matter to which he attached little importance. There was something in Brian’s easy handling of a carving knife that subdued Otto. Otto was keen on the new technology: he loved computer games, word processors, calculating machines. Brian, on the other hand, was not at ease with these things. The old order changeth, yielding place to new. Was Brian the old order? Did Otto feel guilt, as he discussed with Brian the closure of Brian’s old firm, Pitts and Harley, with the loss of six hundred jobs? If he did, he felt it unknowingly, Alix suspected: but some unease there was between them.
And Alix, for her part, did not like to think of Brian as belonging to the old order. She preferred to think of him as a symbol of the new, the classless society of which she had dreamed. But was it so? Could it be so? Grey haired, Brian was now, and suffering, in the winter, from arthritis: too old for the new dawn. Was he not rather a refugee, an ageing refugee, escaped just in time from the crumbling streets of Northam? The Coalbright council estate, where Brian had spent his childhood, was in a sad way now: its inter-war-built, patterned ribbons of semis were shabby, its little front gardens a little neglected, its corner shops oddly forlorn in their attempts to turn themselves into Mini-markets and Self-service Super-Savastores. Uncertain, old fashioned, quietly decaying, like old Mrs Orme who had once been Brian’s family’s next-door neighbour: she still hung on there in her council house on the old estate, creaky, slow of step, too old now to bake the fairy cakes with which she had once treated Kathie, Brian and Barbara (and now, alone, widowed, what, she asked herself and others, was the point of baking?), living, Brian and Alix suspected, on sliced white bread
and bits of cheese and biscuits and fierce cups of tea; a relic of a bygone age; her house as clean as she could keep it, but she could not see very well or move very fast, and the cosiness that Brian remembered from childhood, would attempt to evoke in descriptions to Alix – sitting at her kitchen table, being allowed to play with the nest of painted eggs from the mantelpiece, helping to cut up bits of glace cherry for the buns, buttering a pikelet, looking at a collection of Brooke Bond cards of Birds from Many Lands or Famous Aviators, admiring with reverence the matchstick models of a Mississippi paddle steamer and an old hay wain made by her grandfather, timing an egg with the hand-painted egg-timer with its softly running everlastingly renewed sand – all this warmth, all this cosiness had faded, had dwindled into a lapsed evening melancholy, a cooling, an irreversible, dim decline. The sand had run low, and Mrs Orme no longer had time for such amusements, now that all of time stretched before here. When they called on her for their yearly visit, Brian and Alix would take her pikelets from the market, and toast them, and butter them, and sit and listen to her reminiscences of the crowded past: of the Blitz; of Kathie (‘eh, a lovely girl, your Kathie’); of her long-dead dog Lucky; of her nieces and nephews; of the pantomimes at the Lyceum; of the decline of fish and chips; of diphtheria epidemics; tedious, repetitive, mournful, nostalgic; occasionally spiteful as she remembered old grudges, more often sentimental: and Alix, bored despite herself, bored despite her good intentions, bored despite the fact that she listened to Mrs Orme for only one afternoon a year, would watch Brian’s face as he listened, intent, puzzled, courteous, responsive, and could see that he was trying to capture from Mrs Orme the essence of the past, the distillation of childhood, the images of a way of life that was fading for ever. Precious, priceless, a delicate, tenuous, flickering, fading coal. Brian would ask to look at the egg-timer, and Mrs Orme would laugh as Brian turned it over in its little wooden stand: ‘I can’t think why he sets such store by it,’ she would say to Alix, ‘I never use it now.’
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