The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘An ark,’ said Brian, ‘floating above the rubble.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ilse, ‘we shall unhitch it one day, we shall weigh anchor, we shall sail off into the storm,’ and she turned to Alix, her huge loose-stitched red shawl flapping, her very hair vibrant, and folded Alix in her arms. Alix returned the embrace: a great warmth filled her, a deep emotion. They stood together, the two women, on the pavement, in one another’s arms. Nicholas the angel serenely smiled.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Alix, ‘a wonderful evening.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ echoed Brian.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Sam, ‘and remember the kitten.’ Dark silver-edged clouds scudded and swirled in revelatory swags and swathes past the silver moon: a night of splendour, as the Beautiful People waved goodbye.

  Brian squeezed Alix’s hand as they settled in the car: ‘They’re all right,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alix, and they drove back through the dismal small cramped mean terraces, on to the main six-lane through-road, along a bit of motorway, under a tunnel and over a tunnel, in the harsh, ugly yellow light of the neon lamps, and along more back streets to their own home, in front of which stood, in what they considered their own parking space, a dumped car.

  ‘I wish somebody would move that thing,’ said Brian, patiently, without irritation, as he had said a dozen times in the past fortnight.

  ‘I’ll ring up the Council,’ said Alix, as she had said a dozen times. But they both knew she wouldn’t: she was too depressed by her own foreknowledge that nothing would happen, even if the Council eventually answered its telephone.

  During these years, one more supposed victim of the Horror of Harrow Road was discovered, in the autumn of 1980, in a dumped van in a little road linking the Harrow Road and Kilburn Lane: an unpretentious, shabby little street called Fifth Avenue. The victim was white, female, and headless. The head was never discovered, and the identity of the murderer, like that of Jack the Ripper, was not established. Prisons grew more and more crowded as judges and magistrates declined to listen to arguments in favour of shorter sentences and continued to impose the longest sentences in Europe, as government ministers failed to respond to not-very-popular, non-vote-catching pleas from within and without the Home Office for more spending on prison building. But the Horror did not swell the ranks of the imprisoned. There were cuts in some areas of prison spending, and the tablecloths of Garfield vanished, as Alix had known they would, while the central heating continued inexorably to overheat its inmates despite frequent requests for a lowering of the temperature. Alix hung on to her job, although there were murmurs about cutting the educational services: Hannah and Eric Glover would shortly be retiring, a prospect which Alix viewed with apprehension. Jilly Fox was, at last, about to be released, a prospect which Jilly Fox viewed with apprehension.

  As the Harrow Road murders receded slightly in folk memory, Esther Breuer resumed her patrolling of the streets of West and North-West London, reflecting as she did so from time to time on the pastoral beauties of Somerset and the hill towns of Tuscany, and wondering why she stayed where she was. Was it for her friends, or from habit, or from some more mysterious compulsion? She sat in the bar of the Metropole Hotel, sipping a Strega, watching the curiously aimless international clientele, trying to remember what the décor had been like before it had had this strange pale-green plastic wickerwork chintzy-cushioned face-lift, noting that the tender blue hydrangeas were of plausible plastic, but that the drooping tiger lily, with its backward-curving spotted petals and its powdery stamen was real: she walked beneath the great strutting legs and curved segmented underbelly of the Westway, where a little herd of horses stood sadly in a dry ring of sand, like an abandoned circus: she wandered over waste grass near Wormwood Scrubs and found a woman’s glove and a pair of shoes: she gazed at the bizarre, paint-dripping, surreal façade of the condemned house that called itself the Apocalypse Hotel: she bought prawns from the barrow, and peered through corrugated iron walls at building sites. Once she saw, swinging high from a crane above a yard of scrap vehicles, a hanged man: a lifesize dummy, in workman’s green overalls, dangling against the sky. Alsatians roamed, cats scavenged, buddleias grew from abandoned rooftops. She walked past the Car Breaker Art Gallery, past a house that described itself as Interesting Books, past the Embassy Café. Once a small boy in a van drove past her, crazily, red-bristle-haired, white-faced, hardly able to reach the wheel, but driving: he scraped along a row of parked vehicles, ripping from them expensive trim, dinting and bashing and banging, and disappeared around the corrugated-iron corner of dead-end Bard Road in a clatter of midget fury. Giant graffiti marched and sprawled, machinery rusted, padlocked gates labelled ‘Reception’ and ‘Welcome’ led to nowhere, and in the midst of it a man sold lawnmowers from a tin hut, and a couple of girls were to be seen playing tennis in the rain.

  Esther sat by the canal, reading Dante’s Purgatory, and thinking of Hugh Capet, who became king of France: Figlio fu’io d’un beccaio di Parigi. Son was I of a butcher of Paris. A good man, the father of evil. From good sprang forth evil. She sat in Kensal Green Cemetery and read Zola’s La Bête Humaine. She dreamed, twice more, of the severed head. Io fui radice della mala pianta. I was the root of the evil tree. North Pole Road. Little Wormwood Scrubs. Droop Street. Warlock Road. Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue. She discovered a new café on the corner of Lykewake Gardens and Mortuary Road down by the gas station, wittily entitled The New Caprice, where she would sit with a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich, perched on a high uncomfortable stool at a narrow, smeared, Formica ledge, watching the world go by, in the company of one or two old men, persistent regulars, and a shifting company of builders and roadworkers from nearby acres of demolition. One day they would rebuild, she supposed, but when? There was a lot to flatten first. Through the glass she stared at shabby grey old women with prams full of shopping or rubbish, and stylish young black men, with huge transistors, wearing dashing woollen hats, at the occasional pony and cart with a pale raw-nosed lank-haired driver and a load of scrap. A landscape of nightmare, an extreme, end-of-the-world, dreamlike parody of urban nemesis.

  One Sunday in the late spring of 1983 she tempted Liz out for an afternoon walk: they lunched together in Esther’s flat, on prawns and crab sticks from the barrow, with brown bread and butter and a little mayonnaise, then they set off down the towpath by the canal, on the far side from the green cemetery. Weeds grew tall from cracks between bricks and slabs of concrete: obelisks reared to their right, a gasometer loomed before them. Old men and young boys took dogs for walks, but nobody, unusually, was fishing, and after a while they could see why: the green still water was full of dead fishes, thousands of small dead fishes, belly-upward in the sun. They stopped, gazed, pondered: a chemical disaster, they concluded, pollution, an overflowing factory, a catastrophe upstream? Maybe it’s a sign of the end of the world, said Liz, staring at the poor innocent fish in the hot afternoon: this is where the apocalypse would announce itself. That’s what I’ve always thought, said Esther. Perhaps that’s why I stay here. To be in on the act. Il trionfo della morte. The final scene.

  They wandered on, chatting idly, then paused as they saw in the far distance approaching them a strange, a disturbing group of walkers: two men, and between them, struggling, and (they could dimly hear) moaning, a youngish woman. She stumbled and protested, one man gripped each arm. Liz and Esther slowed their already slow pace; the towpath was narrow, they were directly in line, they would have to pass within feet, intervention was, it would seem, forced upon them. The woman’s legs were buckling and wandering, splayed at angles, ungainly as she tried to free herself: ‘Christ,’ said Esther. There was nobody else within yards. The three advanced. Esther and Liz hesitated, then moved forward, and as the trinity of figures came into focus, so the little narrative of their lives composed itself – a father, a brother, taking for a walk, kindly, familiarly, a mentally, a physically handicapped young woman, who was struggling against their benevolence, wanting
to walk freely, wanting to turn back, wanting she knew not what, wanting to kneel by the water and scoop up dead fishes: as they passed Liz and Esther she lunged yet again for the water, mumbling about the fishes: and the two patient men held her and soothed her as they would a frightened horse, calming her: Come along now, Nelly, they said, there, there, Nelly, carefully does it, Nelly. Her arms were everywhere, every now and then she gave at the knees and sank in a heap of sullen protest: firmly, not very gently, they would drag her up again and drag her on. The men looked exhausted: their faces were red and streaming with sweat. They did not look at Liz and Esther as they passed, and went their painful, struggling, desperate way.

  Liz and Esther walked on. ‘We should have said good afternoon,’ said Liz.

  ‘Yes, we should,’ said Esther.

  ‘She probably sits in all week, with the mother,’ said Liz, sighing. ‘This is mother’s afternoon off.’

  Sombre, subdued, they wandered on, reaching after a while the source of the poisoned water: an ancient dirty dark brick hospital, from which belched terrible steam and a white, dangerous seeping flood. They sat on a bench, and asked one another whether they should report it.

  ‘Alix would,’ said Esther.

  ‘No, she wouldn’t,’ said Liz. ‘Alix has given up hope of ever getting anyone to do anything. She thinks it’s all hopeless. Alix told me that she herself threw a crisp packet out of the car window on the way to Wanley the other night. Littering the A10. The lovely, scenic A10. She said she thought it would never come to that.’

  They spoke of Alix and Brian, of Nicholas and Ilse; Nicholas and Ilse were well, they had acquired a tabby kitten from Liz and a gallery was to exhibit some of their work in the autumn in a new Arts Council-sponsored show, but Alix and Brian, they thought were not so well. Brian’s Adult Education College was to close. It was to be amalgamated with another institution, and Brian was not sure whether he would be kept on, or whether he would be offered redundancy payment. He had become militant, and spoke of taking a more active interest in politics: ‘A disastrous idea, at his age,’ said Liz, ‘and disastrous in this political climate wouldn’t you agree?’ Esther agreed. The Falklands business had unsettled Brian: he had become violently, irrationally anti-government, in Alix’s view, was obsessed with thinking the worst of it and the best of any militant opposition. A patient, reasonable, gentle man, gone a little wild. And Alix, as a result of this and other things, was depressed.

  They rose from their bench, and wandered on.

  ‘Men are a strange lot,’ said Esther, meditatively: ‘they are so inflexible. So extreme. They have to take sides. Now me, I don’t know what I think, on almost any public issue you may happen to name. But men have to have an opinion. I only have opinions on things I know something about. Men aren’t like that at all. They have opinions. And speaking of men, Liz, how is your errant ex-husband, dear Charles? I have always thought of Charles as an archetypal man. I rather miss Charles.’

  ‘Charles?’ said Liz. ‘Yes, Charles. Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t think things are going too well for Charles, and I don’t know whether to be pleased or sorry. I think there’s been some monumental cock-up. Some sort of almighty boob. I think he’s fallen out with the company over something to do with cable television, whatever that is, and that he’s about to be given the chop. Last time I spoke to him he was raving on about dish receivers, whatever they are, the weak-kneed lily-livered IBA and the dim-witted governors and the dirty dealings of various directors and the Monopolies Commission and American law and English law and getting a barrister’s opinion. All of which made me think he was about to quit, either voluntarily or because they’ve had enough of him. And I think he’s probably had enough of New York. He’s never forgiven the Americans for what he called their two-faced attitude to the Falklands. Charles thought the Falklands was Britain’s finest hour.’

  ‘So will he come home?’

  ‘I think so.’ She paused, stopped, stared at the water: upstream there were no dead fish, but a pleasant healthy life-supporting life-concealing green scum. ‘I wonder if London is big enough for Henrietta, Charles and me,’ said Liz.

  ‘What news of Henrietta?’

  ‘None, directly. I never speak to her. I hear gossip, sometimes. It filters through.’

  They began to stroll back, retracing their steps.

  ‘I heard some gossip about Henrietta the other day,’ said Esther.

  ‘Really? Do tell,’ said Liz, lightly, attempting to disguise even to Esther her disproportionate, unhealthy interest in the subject, an interest which she did her best to control: it slightly surprised her that it should linger on, after all these years.

  ‘I met this chap called Oxenholme,’ said Esther. ‘He claimed to be some kind of cousin of hers. Youngish chap. Some kind of lord, or viscount, or something like that.’

  Liz did not wish to reveal her intimate, her excessive knowledge of the Oxenholme lineage, so merely prompted, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Robert. Robert Oxenholme. That was his name.’

  ‘And why did he come up with Lady Henrietta?’

  ‘Because we were standing in front of a portrait of her as a girl. “Oh look,” he said, “there’s Hetty, do you know her, everyone knows Hetty.” I said I did.’

  ‘Where was this portrait?’

  ‘At the Caspar exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Funny, when you think of it. I first saw Henrietta and Charles together at the National Portrait Gallery. At some other exhibition. I can’t remember what. Years ago now.’

  ‘And what did he have to say about Henrietta?’

  ‘Nothing much. That he used to play tennis with her. That her mother committed suicide. That kind of thing. Just gossip. It must have been one of Caspar’s last portraits. She was sitting on a window seat, against a red velvet curtain, holding a rag doll. It wasn’t very good. We agreed it wasn’t very good. Tired stuff. There was a much better one of her father, done in the twenties. Very savage. A dreadful man, but a genius, the viscount said. I can’t remember what he said he was a genius at.’

  ‘And what did the viscount himself do?’

  Esther began to laugh. ‘Oh lord,’ she said, ‘it really is too absurd. He told me all about it, He’s some kind of Arts Sponsorship Coordination Executive. Or something like that.’

  ‘Whatever does that mean?’

  ‘It means he goes round persuading Industry to sponsor the Arts. The Knight of Arts and Industry. He spends his entire life persuading other people to part with their money. To Covent Garden, and the Hayward, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and literary prizes, and things like that. He told me that he knew of an Italian bank that would be only too delighted to sponsor my unwritten masterpiece on Crivelli. He said that in Italy all art books are sponsored by banks.’

  ‘You liked him,’ said Liz, accusingly.

  ‘I thought he was absurd, and it was absurd. But yes, I liked him. He is rather good looking. He has curly hair.’

  They passed an old man sitting on a bollard, with a small mongrel dog. The dead fish floated eerily.

  ‘Absurd,’ said Esther. ‘Tax incentives, he spoke of. But he knew quite a lot about Crivelli.’ The still hot air mocked. ‘He wrote a book on Signorelli,’ said Esther.

  ‘KILL THE MOZART’, declared a large scrawled notice on the canal bridge.

  ‘Is that advertising? Or sponsorship? Or GLC popularist anti-élitism? Or what?’ asked Liz, as they paused to stare at it. They had not noticed it, walking the other way.

  ‘The use of the definite article intrigues,’ said Esther, as they progressed. They were approaching the scene of Esther’s dream-severed head, of (as she had surreptitiously, with some shame, established) the real, live, actual, dead, historical corpse of 1979. Esther Breuer was attempting to summon up the courage to ask her friend Liz Headleand about the latest problems with Claudio, whose death-in-life was strongly suggested to her by this locale: it was to ask Liz about Claudio that she had suggested this
lunch, this walk. She found it difficult to speak. She prevaricated, meandered, played for time.

  ‘The word monomania,’ she said, suddenly (so wrapped up in her own thought sequence that she did not notice Liz’s guilty start of recognition) ‘ – the word monomania, is it still used? Whence does it date?’ And they discussed, circuitously, fashions in psychiatric language, changes in meaning in psychiatric terminology: Liz guessed that the term monomania was certainly pre-Freudian, perhaps late nineteenth century, then recalled that it had been used by Dickens apropos of Mr Dick’s King Charles’s Head in David Copperfield – therefore mid-nineteenth century or earlier? They spoke of obsessional neuroses in art and life, of Freud’s view that the Gorgon’s head represented the castrating vision of female genitals; they spoke of the eighteenth-century concept of the ‘Ruling Passion’, of Jonsonian humours, of the extraordinary persistent popular after-life of astrology and horoscopes in a post-superstitious, post Christian era: they spoke of Freemasons and Rosicrucians: and eventually, at last, as they climbed up the steps from the canal bank on to the pavement of the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, Esther spoke of Claudio. Casually, lightly, pleasantly.